Halfway to Hell

Johnny Park is a hundred miles from Phoenix... and

Halfway to Hell

Following a botched heist, professional thief Johnny Park and a small crew of mismatched miscreants rendezvous in the small desert town of Halfway, Arizona. Things go from bad to worse when their fence is found murdered, and it soon becomes clear that someone has followed them to this dusty speck on the map with the intention of killing each member of this disparate group.

Unable to cut his losses and run, Johnny must deal with a suspicious sheriff, a knockout redhead, and a gang where the only person he trusts is himself. Are the killings related to the heist, or has a phantom from the past come to Halfway to enact a bloody reckoning?

Hard boiled violence and mystery collide with desert noir as Johnny realises he's stuck in the desert with a killer and he's out of bullets... and friends.

* * *

Halfway to Hell is the first mystery in the Johnny Park series; a neo-noir action thriller drawing on influences such as Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, John D. Macdonald, Ian Rankin, Lee Child, Quentin Tarantino and Stephen King.

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1




1:50pm



HALFWAY, AZ

5 MILES



I GLANCED AT the worn metal sign, shimmering green in the desert heat, as it flashed by at a shade over seventy. For the first time, I found myself thinking about the name of the town. Where I come from, the place names are generally obscure, antique, hard to pronounce, but usually interesting. What the hell kind of a name for a town was Halfway?

No doubt it had come by the name because of its location, planted as it was almost exactly halfway between Gila Bend; which we had just blown through on the way from Phoenix; and Lukeville, at the Mexican border. Or perhaps it was halfway between two places that no longer existed on the map. Perhaps there was some other, more esoteric reason for the town’s name. But Halfway? Might as well just call it Nowhere. A town with a name like that had no identity.

Still, that’s what made it an ideal place for a quiet rendezvous.

Wiping a small waterfall of sweat from my brow, I glanced at my two passengers, neither of whom I had known twenty four hours before, and neither of whom would be alive twenty four hours from now, although neither they nor I knew it at the time.

My passengers were both LA natives, but there the similarities ended. Tony was a big black guy: six three, shaven-headed and built like a bad dream. Despite the day’s events, his charcoal Brooks Brothers two-piece was immaculate and uncreased. Tony seemed to avoid speaking when at all possible, limiting his occasional vocalisations to half a dozen words at most.

Travis, in contrast, was a skinny white prick in a blood-and-sweat stained vest, and he seemed to avoid silence when at all possible. He was curled up in the back seat of the convertible, his skin tone not far off the green of the road sign. I glanced over my shoulder at him.

“How you holding up, Trav?” I was asking less out of genuine concern and more because I wanted to gauge our chances of making town before we had to take another vomit break. We’d already had to make two pit stops to let Travis review his breakfast since changing cars in Gila Bend.

Travis clutched his wounded shoulder, which was wrapped in a strip of his discarded blue shirt, and winced. “How the hell do you think I’m holding up? I’m getting lead poisoning here.”

I grinned at Tony, in the passenger seat. “What did I tell you about staying out of the way of those things?”

“Go to hell.”

I decided to change the subject. Travis’s gun, as far as I knew, was still loaded, and he was probably both vicious enough and stupid enough to shoot the driver for pissing him off.

“Tony, whereabouts in this town do we meet Frank and…?” I left it hanging, struggling to remember the name of the young guy, the one who looked like he was on work experience.

“Stan,” he replied. “Frank said they’d find us.” Practically a dissertation, by Tony’s standards.

“Don’t suppose there are many places to get lost in a town this size,” I said. “We can check into a motel and wait for them.”

Tony nodded in agreement. Not wasting a breath, or unnecessary words. Not a problem that Travis shared.   

“He better ‘find us. That son of a bitch has got half the take, and it’s the half you can actually spend.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. Calming Travis down was a futile hope, but I gave it a shot. “I’ve worked with Frank before, he’s a pro.”

In the rear-view, I saw Travis giving me what he probably thought of as a knowing smile. It didn’t go with his pallor. As a matter of fact, Frank was the only member of this team I had worked with before, and although he was certainly a professional, I had my doubts in other areas. Usually I prefer to operate solo, or with one partner, max. It widens the profit margin and I know I can count on at least fifty percent of the team. Since arriving in the States, I’d had to compromise that rule as I settled in, running a couple of jobs in Los Angeles with different crowds. I’d been trying hard as hell not to think about that last LA job, but it was never far beneath the surface of my thoughts, like a dumped car that won’t sink in the swamp.

Frank had managed to twist my arm into joining this five-man team as a late addition, recruiting me for a breakdown job just outside Phoenix. It involved a good payoff for minimum effort: almost three hundred grand cash, more in diamonds. Five men was a crowd plus two, to my sensibilities, but I needed a quick hundred Gs badly, and beggars can’t be choosers.

A breakdown job involves a mix of careful planning and brute force. Frank needed me for the planning. Tony backed up Frank on the brute force. Better: he made it unnecessary, like a one-man nuclear deterrent. Stan was the wheelman. I’m not exactly sure what Travis’s role was. Comic relief, maybe.

Things hadn’t gone entirely to plan, but I thought we’d handled the situation not too badly, all things considered.

The target had been a jewellery salesman on a sales trip. Robbing a salesman isn’t as immediately risky as robbing a bank, but LA had reinforced in me the importance of better safe than sorry. Bearing this in mind, I’d helped to finesse Frank’s original plan, building in as many precautions as possible, before and after the gig.

My first precaution post-heist: split up to make pursuit more difficult. Frank and Stan took the cash, we took the ice. My second precaution: avoid the interstate and go nowhere in particular, which was why we’d taken the smaller highways and the long way round. My third precaution: ditch the cars in Gila Bend and pick up new ones for the home stretch.

Problem was, when it comes to this kind of job, you can plan for before, and you can plan for after, but something can always go wrong while.

After seemed to be following the script, so far. I find that a quick turnaround is desirable when you’re working with other people, so we’d arranged to meet the others in Halfway, where we were going to hook up with a flying fence of Frank’s acquaintance named Mitch, or Rich, or something. Mitch or Rich would give us forty percent of retail for the diamonds, hop on the first flight back to Florida, and make them disappear like teardrops in a rain storm.

Travis getting winged had been a setback, nearly fucking up the whole deal. It could still prove to be a problem, but for now we were more or less on track. We had all got out alive with exactly what we expected to, and we didn’t have to kill anyone, which is the way I prefer it. Travis’s shoulder was a mess, but I reckoned he’d live; the bullet appeared to have passed through the meat cleanly.

A low groan from the back seat made me wonder if I’d counted that particular chicken a little early.

“Pull over?” I couldn’t keep the resignation out of my voice, but Travis was too sick to notice.

“Pull over,” he agreed.

Tony looked back at Travis, looked at me, then let his brown eyes roam over the Mustang’s upholstery, his mouth twitching at one side as if to say Told you you shouldn’t have picked a car you liked.

He was probably right, but I hadn’t been able to resist when I saw her parked in Eduardo’s lot back in Gila Bend: black metallic paint glinting in the sun, standing out from the other secondhand heaps like a precious stone in a gumball machine. A Mustang convertible, one of the new ones from two or three years back. Real connoisseurs would sniff, of course, but for our purposes a genuine classic would be much too noticeable. There were enough nouveaux Mustangs on the roads that mine wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Anyway, to me it barely mattered. New or old, they don’t make them like that where I’m from.

Eduardo owned the used car dealership, and he owed Frank. I wasn’t privy to the details, but he paid his debt by giving us a pretty sweet deal: a few hundred bills and Eduardo agreed not to report the cars stolen until next week, by which time we’d all be in separate states.

I liked the Mustang a lot: the way it looked, the way it sounded, the way it felt. About the only thing I didn’t like about it was that it was an automatic, and I was accustomed to a manual transmission. A year and a half in the US and I still couldn’t get used to automatic. I reminded my right hand to stay on the wheel and leaned into the brake, pulling over and coming to a stop in a cloud of dust. Travis staggered out of the car and heaved a multicoloured torrent of vomit onto the blacktop.

Under my breath: “Jesus, three times, where’s it coming from?”

Tony shrugged as he watched Travis puke, almost impressed. An ageing pickup truck with an ageing male driver passed by, slowing enough to shake his head in disapproval. I flashed him a polite smile and looked back at Travis to see if he’d finished.

There was no blood in the mix, which was a good sign. It meant that the sickness was most likely a result of shock coupled with the travelling and the heat. Travis needed a bed and some air conditioning, but the wound itself looked like it would be okay once we could clean it and get a real bandage to replace the ripped shirt.

Watching Travis wipe bile from his lips, something occurred to me. Something that should have occurred to me hours ago, at Eduardo’s. “Tony, did you check the diamonds? When we switched cars, I mean.”

Tony nodded slowly. “Both cases.”

“‘Cases’?” I repeated. There had been only one case. I’d broken it, taken the contents and dumped it at the scene. We were carrying all of the goods in a single black canvas holdall. Or at least we had been when we left Phoenix. “I put everything in the bag,” I said.

Tony turned around and looked in the direction of the trunk, as though he could use his X-Ray vision. “There was another case. Stan busted it open while you were patching Travis.”

I remembered Stan leaning into the back seat of the salesman’s car, his floppy black hair dangling over his face. I hadn’t had time to wonder what the hell he was doing.

“Let’s take a look.”

Tony and I got out of the car, walking round our respective sides and meeting at the trunk. I opened it. The holdall was there. There was also a large, black briefcase, similar to the one that had carried the diamonds, but cheaper-looking. It had settled against the back of the interior. I pulled it forward and played my fingers over the broken lock. My own words echoed in the back of my head: I’ve worked with Frank before. He’s a pro.

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Travis had perked up, and was coming over to find out why Tony and I were staring so intently into the trunk.

“This shouldn’t be here,” I said, to myself as much as anyone.

I lifted the lid of the briefcase back on its hinges. The sunlight danced on a heap of loose stones, heliographing pinpoints of light against the black felt interior of the case, tossing miniature rainbows in the afternoon sun. My sinuses cleared and the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.

Travis had joined us on my left side. Tony was on my right. Both were looking back and forth from the diamonds to me, waiting for an expert to interpret what they saw.

When I didn’t speak for a minute, Travis prompted me: “That’s good… right?”

I blinked, just to make sure it wasn’t an optical illusion of the heat. 

I spoke slowly and deliberately. “There’s got to be at least three million dollars worth of diamonds in this case.”

No one said anything for a moment.

Tony took a deep breath which made a whistling sound between his lips. Unsurprisingly, Travis was the one who spoke first.

“We… are… fucking… rich.”

He punctuated this by slapping Tony hard on the shoulder, wincing as the impact travelled back to his momentarily forgotten gunshot wound.

The slap seemed to jog Tony out of a trance. He broke into a smile that exposed two rows of gleaming white teeth, and repeated the last word of Travis’s mission statement.

As the other two fell back celebrating, I ran a palm back over my forehead, pushing my hair back, and kept looking at the pile of stones. Added to what we had in the holdall, that made three and a half million at a conservative estimate. Three point five mil when by rights there should have been five hundred grand. That was more than a slight discrepancy. It was like paying for a six pack and getting the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

I mean, wouldn’t you be suspicious?










2




2:10pm



“…EVER HEAR THE expression ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’?”

I looked up at Travis. His choice of homily immediately brought to mind Trojan horses: not all gifts are worth it. I’d scoured the second briefcase and found no tracking device. That eased my primary concern, but in the process gave birth to a whole new set of questions. Now I was sitting on the hood of the car gathering my thoughts and wishing I smoked. Tony and Travis had partied for a good couple of minutes before they realised I wasn’t joining in. They were standing in front of me, neither one wanting me to rain on their parade.

“I’m serious, we can retire on this,” Travis said, almost pleadingly. The unexpected bonus had worked like a shot of morphine. If he was still feeling the hole in his shoulder, he wasn’t letting on.

I looked back down at the dirt. “Nobody retires,” I said quietly.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

It was true. One of the great truths I’d manage to divine in this line of work, maybe the only one. ‘One last big job’ is the great enduring myth of our profession. Nobody ever pulls one last big job and quits. Nobody takes early retirement and moves to Florida. Nobody I know, at least. Because there’s always another job on the horizon, and one after that. And the money from the last job is never what you thought it was, or it runs out, or somehow you get in deep to someone else. After all, if we were good with money, we’d be accountants.

Nobody retires.

“I’m just saying, let’s ask a few questions before we pop the champagne corks,” I said. “There is no way in hell a mid-level salesman in a mid-level firm like that should have been carrying around that kind of capital.”

“Maybe the deal we gatecrashed was bigger than we thought.”

“Maybe.” I wasn’t convinced.

“Maybe he stole it,” Tony said. That was more plausible, more along the lines I’d been thinking. The only problem was, that scenario introduced a whole raft of unknowable factors to our situation, and I don’t like unknowable factors. They have a way of rendering the best-laid plans redundant.

The sky was light blue, not a cloud in sight. The sun was so hot it felt like it should evaporate my sweat. For some reason I thought of a colder, greyer place, and about the string of happenings that had led me to this time and this place. Things had really started back there in Boston, with Zane’s problem. My skin prickled, remembering the February wind-chill and the snow, and I marvelled that that place and this could be in the same world, let alone the same country.

I snapped out of it: the past was a foreign country, wasn’t it? Here and now, we were less than five miles away from town, and the clock was still ticking.

“Come on,” I said, hopping off the hood and opening the driver’s door. “Let’s find Frank.”



*                       *                       *



WELCOME TO HALFWAY AZ, FOUNDED 1888

POP. 336

 “PLEASE DRIVE CAREFUL”



I eased off the gas and slowed to a crawl as we passed the sign you could read as a welcome or a warning. The needle on the fuel gauge was starting to nose the red, so I was glad to see there was a gas station right on the edge of town. If you could really call it a town, that was; the place looked as though somebody had started to build a set for a western, then not bothered to finish. Halfway was barely more than a main street with a few ancillary streets leading off of it. There was no one on the street, but in the hundred degree heat that didn’t exactly surprise me. We passed some quiet-looking stores, a hotel, and a church that was shuttered and dark; maybe because it was a Monday, maybe not. A worn sign above the door quoted from Romans in loud capitals: EVERY ONE OF US SHALL GIVE ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF TO GOD. I turned us around at the far end of the main street and headed back to the gas station.

I parked alongside the pumps and killed the engine. We all settled back in our seats for a second, grateful to have reached a point where we could stop. Travis was surveying the main street with distaste.

“He better find us,” he said, echoing his own comment from earlier. When no one said anything for a minute, he spoke again, his voice losing a little of the hardness: “You think they made it out all right? I mean, the Lincoln wasn’t shot up too bad. And they had time to change the tyre, right?”

I nodded. “Stan said he could handle it.”

“Maybe we should have…”

“They told us to get going,” I said, cutting him off. “We didn’t have room for all five of us, and anyway the plan was two cars.”

“A lot of things didn’t go according to plan,” Tony said. No one argued.

“The deal with Frank’s guy, the fence…” Travis began.

“Mitch,” Tony said. I hadn’t known Tony long, but he was a man with a good memory for details. A listener.

“That his name? Mitch,” Travis said, nodding. “The deal with Mitch, is it still gonna be the same?”

I shrugged, “I don’t see why not. We still have a product that he wants.”

“You think we could up the percentage a little?”

I craned round and looked at Travis over my sunglasses. “Up from forty percent?”

“Yeah,” he said, a defensive note creeping into his voice. “I didn’t want to say anything to Frank but forty seems like a real good deal for the middle man, considering we’re doing all the work.”

“You haven’t done this before, have you?” It was just an observation, I wasn’t trying to show him up, or question his professional abilities, but Travis wasn’t giving me the benefit of the doubt.

“What the hell? I’ve been doing it for twenty years you…”

“Calm down, all I meant by that was, you’re obviously new to this, specifically fencing precious stones in quantity, am I right?”

Travis paused a second, still reading my face to see if I was intentionally disrespecting him. “Yeah,” he allowed, finally.

“That’s fine, no reason you should know about how it works. Believe it or not, forty percent of retail on stolen diamonds is excellent. It’s the reason I said yes to this job. Either Frank has a great relationship with this guy, or he has some compromising pictures of his wife.”

Travis looked at Tony for verification. Tony nodded. I wondered what the big man’s background was, doubted I’d ever get a good enough conversation going to find out.

“Think about it, we’re talking about…” I looked around. The forecourt was deserted. I lowered the volume right down anyway. “…we’re talking about stolen goods. What are you going to do with them? Walk into a pawnbroker with three million bucks worth of rocks? Go to a hundred pawnbrokers in a hundred towns with smaller amounts? Sooner or later you’re going to get busted, and even if you didn’t, best case scenario, you’d be lucky to get a tenth of what they’re worth.

“This way we get to offload the whole bundle in one go, to someone who’ll take all that hassle away from us. The way you have to think right now is that what’s in the trunk isn’t money, not yet. What it is right now is a problem. As soon as Frank gets here, we hook up with Mitch. As soon as we make the handover, the diamonds are Mitch’s problem, and he’s far better equipped to deal with that problem than you or I will ever be.”

Travis didn’t say anything. I popped the lever for the fuel cover and thought about that problem in the trunk, about how it had somehow grown into a bigger problem in the last half hour.

I tried to put it out of my mind as I got out of the car, gratefully stretching my legs after the drive. It had already been a long day, one way and another, and I was looking forward to checking into the hotel. A thirty or forty minute nap and a shower, then I’d be ready to think about the next step. We’d almost certainly beaten Frank to town, which was good. It gave me a little time to unwind before we had to post-mortem the job itself. I yawned and asked Tony if he wanted anything from the store.

“Beer.”

“Like I hadn’t thought of that. Trav, you need anything?”

Maybe it was the pain in his shoulder returning with a bump, or maybe I’d just comprehensively killed his buzz earlier, but Travis was back to his old self: “Well let me think… oh yeah, how about some real goddamn bandages?”

“No problem, Trav.”

“I told you, it’s Travis,” he spat out the last syllable like someone had just told him he’d taken a bite out of an arsenic donut.

“Whatever you say.” I was starting to hate this guy, however you said his name. I headed to the store, removing my sunglasses as I got to the door.

My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the gloom after the unrelenting sun of the last few hours. I was utterly unsurprised by the lack of air conditioning within. The only relief from the heat was a small fan pointing at the acne-afflicted teenage clerk at the other side of the store. The fan had obviously been working overtime; the motor let out a soft but persistent screech every few seconds. I wandered around the store, collecting a case of Heineken and a few snacks, then walked up to the counter. The clerk was wearing a turquoise T-shirt and a nametag identifying him as Pete.

“Got any bandages?”

Pete looked up from a Spider-Man comic book, plucking one earphone out of the side of his head. A tinny mix of drums and guitar accompanied the fan screech now. “Huh?”

“Bandages,” I repeated. I realised I was unconsciously tapping my shoulder as if this was universal sign language. Pete nodded at a section of shelves. I picked up a couple of packs and paid for them together with the beer, the snacks, a tank of gas, and a sky blue t-shirt that declared ‘My Heart Belongs to Arizona’. As I handed over the bills, I realised we’d need disinfectant too, and glanced back at the shelf where I’d found the bandages. Bandages, band aids and aspirin was about all they had. In marked contrast, the liquor selection on the rack behind the counter was comprehensive.

“I’ll take a fifth of your cheapest whiskey too,” I smiled.

I stepped out of the store and my breath stalled in my throat as I saw red and blue lights reflected in the glass door. A police car was parked outside a storefront a hundred yards down the street from us, the door hanging open like the driver had been in a hurry.

I reminded myself that we were perfectly safe here. We’d dumped the getaway cars, and nobody was looking for the new ones. Hell, we’d kept the radio on the whole way down and hadn’t featured on any of the news reports, so it could be we hadn’t even been reported yet. Still, in my line of work it becomes a habit to be cautious of any police presence. I walked back to the Mustang. Tony had finished filling the tank and was sitting against the passenger door, arms folded across his chest like intertwined branches, and Travis was still in the back. It didn’t look like his mood had improved any. I waved the bandages at him, hoping they might cheer him up.

“We’ll change that dressing as soon as we get a room…” I tailed off as I noticed for the first time the state of the upholstery in the back. Luckily it was black leather, so the wet, tacky patches wouldn’t be visible from, say, across the main street of a small Arizona town. “Shit, I hope you’re going to clean that blood off Trav.” I guess it was a rhetorical hope, and that’s exactly how Travis treated it. I turned to Tony, nodded discreetly in the direction of the patrol car: “How long have they been there?”

“Showed up while you were in the store. They’re in there right now,” he said, indicating the storefront, which was identified as a barber’s by a metal sign hanging over the sidewalk. “Didn’t look twice at us though.”

The town seemed like it was coming to life, waking from a siesta. Small groups of people were assembling on the street, peering out of doors, twitching at venetian blinds. Among the crowd was the man I took to be the owner: a heavyset guy in a black apron, who was wringing his hands and throwing anguished glances at the storefront. I put my sunglasses back on, got back in the car and didn’t pull out onto the road too fast. Tony’s assurances had done nothing to dampen my apprehension. In my experience, some cops only need to look at you once to get suspicious.












3




BOSTON

Eighteen Months Previously



I HAD LEFT the United Kingdom under something of a cloud, so I suppose it was fitting that the New England sky was dark and overcast as my plane touched down at Logan International. I passed the interminable wait to disembark by gazing out of my window at the airport’s distinctive control tower: two twelve story pillars joined halfway up by a squat midsection. In the fading light, it looked like some robot behemoth from a fifties sci fi movie.

I was in luck at the carousel: my one piece of hold luggage was second out of the hatch. I heaved the backpack over one shoulder, reflecting that I now had all of my worldly belongings on my person, and yet I was still travelling light. I made my way to arrivals, keeping my eyes peeled for Zane. I’d told him not to bother coming to the airport, he was doing me enough of a favour by giving me bed for the next couple of weeks, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

Arrivals was chaotic. I couldn’t see any sign of Zane, so I let the coffee fumes from Starbucks tempt me off to one side. It was after midnight UK time, and the flight had been five scheduled hours that ended up more like eight including delays. I ordered an espresso to keep me going. The male barista, a skinny teenager with jet-black hair that hung down over one eye, told me to take a seat and someone would bring it out to me.

I took one of the tables outside so I could be seen, and watched the various reunions: husbands with wives, daughters with parents, friends with friends.

“Double espresso?”

I looked up and Lucy Watson was standing in front of me, smiling and placing an espresso cup with a biscotti on the side on my table. When she saw my expression, her smile stayed but her brow creased: “Is something the matter sir?”

I blinked and saw that it wasn’t Lucy Watson after all. The dark brown hair and the light brown eyes made her a dead ringer, but Lucy was three thousand miles away, and unlikely to be bringing me coffee ever again.

“Sorry, you look a lot like someone I used to know.”

Not-Lucy smiled politely and told me to enjoy.

“Still got an eye for the ladies, I see?”

I turned around and saw a friendly face: Zane was in his late fifties and had the wrinkled seen-it-all features of a bartender you wanted to tell all your problems to. As always, he wore a flat cap and a crumpled corduroy coat. Looking at him, you’d never guess how much he was worth, or how he came by the money.

Thoughts of jetlag and Lucy dropped off my radar. I grinned and said his name, grabbing his hand for a shake that turned into a hug.

“How was the flight?”

“Terrible.”

“You hate to fly though, right?”

I shrugged. “It’s not the flying I mind, it’s the waiting around.”

Zane looked disdainfully at my espresso. “Come on, I’ll buy you a real drink.”



*                       *                       *



A couple of hours later we were in a basement bar a block away from Zane’s place in the Back Bay area. It was a real old Boston bar: small windows, lots of dark wood and brass. It was a Tuesday night, and the place was half-full. Incongruously, Neil Young’s ‘Southern Man’ played on the jukebox. On the drive from the airport we’d reminisced about Zane’s time in Scotland; he’d come over to conduct some business a year previously and, introduced by a mutual friend, we’d immediately hit it off. We’d made each other a standing offer of accommodation whenever we were in each other’s country, and Zane had been as good as his word when I’d called him up the previous Saturday saying I needed a change of scene.

The bartender flipped two napkins on the bar like he was dealing cards and rested a pair of longnecks on top of them. Zane waved my money away and gave the man a ten dollar bill, telling him to keep the change.

“So enough about back home, what do you think of Boston? First time here, right?”

“Yeah. Liking it so far. Everybody talks like JFK.”

He chuckled. “Give it a couple of weeks and you’ll be doing it too.”

“You going to introduce me to the wife?”

“All in good time. Elsie doesn’t like me drinking on a week night, so I thought it was better to come here first, then home.”

“Forgiveness is easier to get than permission, huh?”

He laughed again, a warm, generous sound. “In this case, yeah. You’re pretty on the ball for a young fella.”

I took a long drink, thinking that I didn’t feel like I was either, lately.

“Speaking of the fairer sex, what happened with you and that little firecracker you were seeing when I was over there?”

I winced. “It was going pretty well… really well, until a couple of months ago.”

Zane was looking at me critically. “You never did tell her what you did for a living, did you?”

“Sure I did,” I said, faux-defensive. Zane stared me out until I surrendered. “…a couple of months ago.”

He shook his head. “Half-measures don’t work when you’re serious about a lady, trust me, I know. What happened?”

“We got robbed, ironically enough. A friend of my brother broke into my flat when we were out for dinner. We came back home and he was in the middle of ransacking the place. I gave him a talking to, but he’d found where I kept my cash. Once everything had calmed down, Lucy wanted to know why I had a suitcase full of fifty pound notes stashed in the loft.”

“That was the first time she was suspicious?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think part of her was always a little suspicious, but she could fool herself up until that point, you know? Anyway, she packed up and left that night. I think it was the break-in and the fight, more than the money.”

“You try to call her?”

I shook my head as I finished the beer. “I screwed it up, fair and square. I thought it was up to her to call. She never did.”

“I guess forgiveness was harder to get than permission in your case.”

“Honestly, I don’t really think I could have got either. She was too good a person. It was nice while it lasted, though.”



*                       *                       *



We kept it to two drinks and walked the short distance to Zane’s place. The dark clouds had given birth to a litter of snow and the night felt like the inside of a deep freeze, a shock to the system after the relatively mild winter we’d been having back home. The beers took the edge off a little, but we turned up our collars and hurried to the warmth and security of indoors.

Zane lived in a big old Victorian brownstone off Newbury Street. The street was lined with trees and similar buildings, and it reminded me of the nicer parts of home. As we climbed the curving staircase inside, he explained that they’d bought it twenty years ago, before the neighbourhood was fully gentrified, and that if he had to sell it, he’d make out pretty well. Something in the way he said if I had to sell it made me take notice, but I didn’t say anything for the moment.

Elsie was in the kitchen pulling something amazing-smelling out of the oven. I suddenly realised I’d had a Starbucks biscotti and nothing else since the borderline inedible inflight meal. She was a full-figured woman, a few years younger than Zane, with greying hair and laughter lines around her green eyes. She beamed at me as we entered.

“Pleased to meet you, Johnny.”

“Great to meet you too,” I said, proffering a hand which was ignored in favour of another hug.

She jerked a thumb at Zane, “I hope he brought you straight here from the airport,” she said reprovingly.

“Of course,” Zane said with a mostly straight face.

“I bet,” she said. “Well, I hope you two are hungry.”

“I think I could manage something,” I said, gazing longingly at the pasta bake resting on the cooker top. 

Dinner was great, the conversation was better. Zane and Elsie had a well-honed double act, her dry wit undercutting his natural enthusiasm and verbosity. They were utterly at ease with each other, and that made you at ease in their company. They were one of those married couples that make you think settling down might not be so bad after all. That was a long time in my future, of course, if it was there at all. If the Lucy episode had proved nothing else, it was that being a career criminal; even a successful and, to date non-incarcerated one; was incompatible with a long-term relationship.

And yet somehow Zane had managed it. From the stories he told, I thought I could understand why: he’d made out well in his early days, only being caught once. Since then he’d built up a nest egg and only took on the occasional job when he knew the risk was minimal. He was like a mature entrepreneur who’s stepped back from the nine-to-five grind, but who still keeps his hand in. Elsie knew the gist of it, but she never asked questions, and Zane never went into the details.

After dinner, I helped Elsie clear the plates and stack the dishwasher as Zane brewed coffee. Elsie, an early riser, bid us goodnight and padded off to bed, pausing to give Zane a peck on the cheek and warn him not to keep his poor jetlagged friend up too late. I’d almost forgotten about the time difference. Dinner had given me a second wind, although I was sure I’d be asleep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow.

As I drank my coffee, I inspected Zane’s CD collection. It was fairly small, and almost entirely outwith my tastes: there was no rock whatsoever, mostly show-tune compilations and original cast recordings.

“Never would have picked you for a musical lover,” I said.

“You kidding? Can’t beat a good show. Elsie and me try to make it down to New York once a year to see Cats.”

“Any Hendrix?”

He snorted. “Noise. Perhaps with age you’ll learn to appreciate the craft that goes into songwriting.”

I smiled and tilted my head, signalling ‘let’s agree to differ’. I walked over to the window and looked down in the street at the cars going by and the snowflakes flying, enjoying a minute of comfortable silence. When Zane broke it, he sounded hesitant.

“Johnny.”

“Yes?”

“This thing with the girl, was that the reason you came over? You said you were thinking of staying out here a while.”

I paused for a second, realising I hadn’t given much conscious thought to the question. Zane was smiling, but it was a concerned smile.

“Partially, maybe. I’m not on the run, if that’s what you’re asking. Haven’t pulled a job since last year in fact.”

“Last year? I thought you had a reputation as a workaholic.”

“Don’t you mean kleptomaniac? Just thought I might take a break for a while.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It seems to work out okay for you,” I said.

Zane didn’t respond to that, he just stared past me out of the window.

“Doesn’t it?” I prompted him after a minute.

He transferred his gaze to me, then came right out with it: “It’s all gone, Johnny. Everything. We might lose the house.”

I was taken aback. I’d sensed that there was something he’d been holding back on, but I was surprised it was money trouble. Zane seemed too in control to fritter his assets away or get into trouble with the ponies.

“What happened?”

He sighed and shook his head slowly, visibly sick of thinking about it. “Elsie was married before. She had a kid when she was seventeen: Sam. He was eleven and she was long divorced by the time I met her. Sam and I never exactly saw eye to eye, but he was a good enough kid. He lived with his dad in Seattle, so we only really saw him on the holidays.

“We barely heard from him once he went to college. Elsie was heartbroken. She never talked about it or made a big thing of it, but you could tell. He visited less and less and then it was the occasional phone call, and finally not even that.

“Then last summer, he shows up at the door out of the blue. I almost didn’t recognise him at first. He’d lost forty pounds, had his arm in a sling. He just looked… sick.”

“Yeah, you’ve got it,” he said, seeing the understanding in my eyes. “Drugs. Only the horse wasn’t his only problem. He’d made some bad decisions, taken out loans from some sharks, missed a couple of payments.”

“How much?”

Zane summoned up the words. The memory made him look pretty sick himself. “Two hundred grand. He needed it within the week or they were going to kill him. I thought I could handle it; I mean you know what it’s like, I’m not exactly a pillar of the community myself, but these guys… bad people, Johnny.” He spread his hands out helplessly. “If he’d have come to me in the first place I would have told him to stay away from those bastards, could have given him the money myself.

“We went to meet them in a wrecking yard down in Jersey. I had the money in a bag. There were three of them; the boss was called Abraham. He was Mike Tyson big. He laughed when he saw us, asked why Sam had brought his grandpa along. I shut him up by opening the bag. I don’t think he could believe we’d come up with the dough. I think a part of him was pissed too, because it meant he didn’t have the excuse to kill Sam. Not that he really needed one, I suppose.

“I dropped the bag in the dirt and said ‘You’re done with Sam now,’ and we walked away.” Zane stopped and shook his head at his own naivety. “Needless to say, it wasn’t done.”

Zane slumped back in his chair. Reliving the story had utterly drained him. I didn’t need him to continue, I knew how the tale panned out from here.

“They knew how to get hold of Sam, and they squeezed him to get to you?”

He nodded. “What else could I do? They took everything. It was all I could do to convince them it was all I had. Elsie doesn’t know.”

“About the money? Or…”

“About any of it. I can’t tell her we’ve lost everything, because I’d have to tell her why. Meanwhile, she’s still using the MasterCard like old times.”

I nodded, thinking. It was useless to suggest cooking up a story to explain the lost money, so I didn’t bother. Elsie was too sharp, and she knew Zane too well.

“So you need a way to make some fast cash.”

Zane was looking at me now, unblinking. His face was tense, a mix of shame and desperate hope.

I grinned to show him that it was all right, that perhaps I’d never been that serious about my break anyway. “Have you got anything in mind?”

Slowly, Zane’s face relaxed into a reciprocal grin. “Funny you should ask.”












4




2:27pm



IF APPEARANCES WERE anything to go by, the Halfway Hotel was the oldest thing in town. Most of the motels I’d seen in the western states dated from the fifties and sixties: ugly, squat one or two story boxes designed around the convenience of driving right up to your room. The Halfway Hotel predated the ubiquity of the automobile. It was four stories, taller than it was wide, dignified and imposing. A long vertical sign hung from the façade, the name of the hotel tastefully picked out in copper, rather than the typical neon, and the date stone above the entrance was engraved ‘1902’. Unlike the modern motels, you had to go through the main entrance to get to the rooms. That made Travis’s condition more of an issue.

There were spaces out front, but I drove around the building to the lot at the back, parking the Mustang so that it couldn’t be seen from the road. The hotel was west-facing, so we got the cooling benefit of the building’s shadow. I looked at my watch: two twenty-seven. The plan had been to meet in town at around two o’ clock, and there was still no sign of Frank. I realised I didn’t know what sort of car he’d be in, assuming he’d made the switch, and that we still didn’t know where we were supposed to meet. The rendezvous hadn’t been my department. Another reason I like to work with as few people as possible: less departments.

I turned to face Travis in the back seat. He didn’t look as sick, but he was sweating a little more than the heat warranted. I twisted the cap off a bottle of water and handed it to him. He took a long gulp and then dribbled some over his forehead.

“Why here?” I asked him.

He took another drink and looked up at the windows on the back of the hotel. They were less ornate than those round the front. “Because it’s nowhere,” he answered, unconsciously chiming with my earlier thought. “It was nowhere and it was in the right place.”

“Ever been here before?”

He looked puzzled. “Why would I?”

He winced at a wave of pain and clutched a hand to his shot shoulder, teeth gritted. I wasn’t going to find out any more about the town, or about our arrangements for meeting Frank or the fence from this source.

“I’ll go in ahead and get a room organised,” I said. “We’ll need to cover you up and get you through reception fast. You’ll be fine when we get inside.”

“Yeah, just fine,” he said, glaring at me like the pain was somehow my fault. His words hissed through clenched teeth, and at once he sounded almost on the verge of tears. “Why the fuck did that asshole have a gun? Frank said it’d be a breeze. He always says that.”

Always’. It crossed my mind that I didn’t know how well acquainted the others were with one another. I’d been a late addition, and if there had been a team-building trip to a bowling alley, I’d missed it.

I turned back to Tony. “Have you two worked together before?”

Tony nodded.

“With Frank?”

He nodded again.

Travis laughed humourlessly from the back. “Yeah, we’ve worked a few jobs together. They always run this smoothly.”

I was still looking at Tony, who was looking up at the windows on the top floor. I thought I detected a flinch as Travis spoke about previous jobs.

“Working with Frank’s like seeing Dylan in concert,” Travis continued. “It’s either great or it’s fucking terrible.”

“Why, what happened before?” I prompted.

Travis looked back at me, like he’d been having a pleasant conversation with himself that I was interrupting. “What is this, fuckin’ This is Your Life?”

I shrugged, indicating that I was just making conversation. “Just trying to get up to speed, seeing as I’m the new guy.”

Tony said, “Stan’s new too.”

“Stanley the kid,” Travis snorted. “I don’t like that guy.”

I doubted that Travis particularly liked anybody, and his new body-piercing probably didn’t help with that. I was interested, though, interested enough to risk his ire by asking what made him say that.

“He’s too quiet,” was the dismissive answer.

“So? Tony’s quiet.”

Tony smiled.

“That’s different. Tony doesn’t have anything to say. Stan just seems like he’s always watching, listening, trying to figure people out, you know?”

I’d only met Stan briefly, before the job. Like me he was new, but he’d obviously spent enough time with them for Travis to form a dislike of Stan. I’d be surprised if the feeling wasn’t mutual. It was true though, about him being quiet. I couldn’t recall Stan saying more than five words in a row, to me or to anyone else.

“Fair enough,” I said, turning back to survey the area again. The lot was all but empty, just three cars besides ours. No others had arrived since we’d been talking. The sooner we got a room, the sooner we could discuss what to do if Frank and Stan failed to show. I told Travis and Tony I’d be five minutes and got out of the car, walking around the building to the main entrance.

A few hundred yards down the street, the crowd across from the barber’s had swelled, and an ambulance had joined the police car. A cop was standing by the open doors at the back of the ambulance. I wondered where the nearest hospital was, and figured it would have to be a good distance. Whatever else it might be, Halfway was not a good town in which to have a heart attack.

As I watched, two paramedics emerged from the barber’s bearing a stretcher. It bumped against the narrow doorframe on the way out and a slender, tanned arm rolled out and swung lazily. Maybe somebody had had a heart attack, maybe something else. Either way, the guy on that stretcher wasn’t going to a hospital. Not with a sheet over his face.









5




2:40pm



BING.

The little brass bell on the Halfway Hotel’s reception desk was louder than it looked, the sound filling the quiet like a cough during a minute’s silence. When there was no response after a few seconds, I craned over the desk and peered through the open door beyond that led into the office. There didn’t seem to be anyone in there, so I turned around and leant back on the desk to have a look around. The foyer was high-ceilinged and roomy; the Art Nouveau decor lending the place a preserved turn of the century feeling. Judging by the yellowing wallpaper and well-worn carpeting, that was the last time it had been decorated. Three ceiling fans hung thirty feet up, but only one was working. There was a curving staircase that led up to a mezzanine, where there was an archway with a neatly painted sign that read To All Rooms. The handmade sign fit in with the overall ambience of the hotel. As an entity, it seemed somehow out of place; not just in the present day, but in the town. Even in mild neglect, the building was too grand, too distinguished for its setting. It felt like it had been built for a more consequential place. Perhaps Halfway had been a more populous settlement in 1902.

Across the tiled centre of the foyer, adjacent to the main entrance, was a small bar. I hadn’t noticed it, or the fact that I wasn’t quite alone, when I’d walked through the double doors. A redhead in a light blue sundress was perched on a stool, looking right at me, inspecting me as I surveyed the foyer. I looked away instinctively, the way people do when they’re gazing around aimlessly and happen to make eye contact, but when I glanced back again, she was still looking. The redhead took a sip from whatever she was drinking and her eyes smiled.

I heard an impatient throat-clearing from behind me. Turning around, I found myself facing a short, slight man in his late fifties. What was left of his hair was greying, and he sported a creased blue short sleeved shirt tucked into too-tight chinos. A grimy name tag was pinned to his breast pocket. It said Bill, Manager. Going by his expression, it might as well have said Don’t Ask.

He snapped open a black leather-bound reservation book, and I noticed that there was only one other entry on the page, even though there was space to take bookings for the whole week. Idly I wondered if the other guest could be our fence, here already. In any case, it looked as though there wouldn’t be too many other guests to witness our stay, which suited me fine. 

“You want a room?”

“Good guess.” I smiled amiably. No reaction from Bill. “Yeah, I want a room. One with a bathroom, if possible.”

The manager began to write in his reservation book and then paused: “You’re English, right?”

“Something like that.”

He nodded, as if this explained everything and looked back down at his book: “Name?”

“Morricone.”

“How long’ll you be staying?”

“Just tonight.”

“Just you?”

“I’m with two friends, they’ll be along in a minute.”

“You’ll need two rooms, then.” His tone indicated that I’d tried to put one over on him, but he’d been too smart for me. He stuck the pen between his teeth and punched a few digits into a chunky Casio desktop calculator that looked around a 1982 vintage.

“That’ll be a sixty six dollars apiece for the rooms, plus tax comes to a hundred and forty two fifty six.” He turned to take a key from the board on the wall. “Upfront.”

I slid my wallet out of my back pocket and paid him. He took the money, made change and handed over the key, eyeing me with an equal mix of suspicion and distaste. I couldn’t help but smile: real keys instead of keycards, a leather book instead of a PC, this guy instead of polished American customer service; it was all refreshingly old-fashioned. I didn’t think they made places like this anymore. I asked Bill if he knew anything about the cops down the road, trying to sound like I was just making conversation.

“Don’t know nothin’ about that.”

Immediately, a lighter and more pleasant voice piped in: “I heard somebody got killed.”

I turned around to check that the girl in the blue sundress was talking to me.

“Yeah? You’re kidding,” I said, walking over to the bar and pocketing my room key. The manager shuffled back into his office, muttering. Up close she looked younger than I’d thought at first; she was in her late twenties at most.

“A friend of mine was in here a couple of minutes ago, she said somebody just got shot over at Jake’s… that’s the barber’s.”

“What happened?” I asked, marvelling at the speed information can travel through a small-town grapevine. It brought to mind another consideration: perhaps we were actually fortunate to have shown up coincident with the shooting. It meant our arrival was probably only the second most interesting thing to happen to Halfway this month.

The girl finished her drink before answering my question, sucking on the straw until it made a loud, unabashed slurp at the bottom of the glass. “I don’t know. Nadine – the girl I was talking to – just ran like hell and called the cops when she heard the shots.”

I looked towards the double doors at the entrance. Twin sunbeams burned through the narrow panes of glass on each door, spearing a cloud of dust motes. “Looks like there’s quite a crowd down there.”

She glanced over at the sunbeams dismissively. “Not a lot of entertainment in this town.”

“Maybe somebody didn’t like their haircut,” I suggested. I thought about going back to the car. Then I reminded myself how much better Travis had looked a few minutes ago. He had water and shade, he’d be fine for another ten minutes. Twenty, even. “Can I get you another drink?”

“Sure,” she said. “But just a grape juice, I’m on my way to work. I’m Midnight, by the way.”

“Midnight?”

She made a good-natured grimace. “Yeah, I know. If I ever meet my mom we’re going to have words about that. I sound like I should be a porn star.”

“I was going to say superhero,” I said, reaching a hand out. “John. John Park.” I don’t know why I gave her my real name. I suppose I thought it was safe enough, since she wasn’t going to be writing it down in a logbook. Maybe it was more than just that.

I nodded at the bartender, who had sauntered over at the sound of a fresh customer.

“Another of these and a beer?”

He gave me a bottle of a brand I’d never heard of. ‘Simarro’ or something. It wasn’t the best beer I’d ever had, but it was cold at least, and in this heat I wasn’t complaining.

“This guy bothering you, Middy?” the bartender said with a mock-suspicious look at me.

Midnight kept a straight face “I’ll let you know when you can toss him out, Tom.”

“Just gimmie a shout then.” He winked at her and disappeared into the back.

The fresh drink didn’t come with a straw, so Midnight shook off the old one and deposited it in the new glass. She took a quarter-glass sip right away. She nodded at me. “Nice accent. Where are you from?”

Scotland,” I replied, getting ready to elaborate.

Midnight giggled. “I know that. I meant which part?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, grinning sheepishly. “Glasgow.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Scotland. It looks like a beautiful country. So green.”

“It’s green for a reason; you’d get pretty tired of the rain after a couple of weeks. That’s why I came over here.”

She rolled her eyes and turned her face to the ceiling. I liked how animated she was with her body language. “Ugh, I’d kill for rain. I mean, you’ll get a real monsoon out here every so often, but you can’t rely on it anymore. They tell me it used to pour down every afternoon like clockwork, this time of year. Now it can be a week or two in between, and the rain just comes when it wants. It feels like an eternity since it came.” She paused and took long sip of her drink, as though just talking about it had parched her throat. “I always liked the heat before I lived here, but now… it’s just day after day after day.”

“You’re not from here?”

“Nope.” She smiled and blinked twice, playfully withholding further information.

I sighed. “It is hot,” I agreed. “I just love this kind of country, though. I watched too many westerns at an impressionable age, I suppose.”

“Ah, a John Wayne fan?”

“He’s okay. I always preferred spaghetti westerns though. Fistful of Dollars, Once Upon a Time in the West…”

Midnight shook her head. “I’m afraid we can’t be friends.”

“No?”

“No. I’m a John Ford girl. Rio Grande, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. John Ford made real westerns, everything else is superfluous.”

“All right, you’re a romantic, I like blood and violence. Can we agree to love the scenery?”

She laughed. “So. Besides scenery, what really brought you over here?”

I thought for a second. No reason to lie, exactly. Vague would suffice. “I came over a couple of years ago to visit a friend. We did some work together, a couple of opportunities opened up, and I’m still here.”

“And what kind of work do you do?” She looked from side to side and dropped her voice, conspiratorially. “That is, if you’re allowed to tell me.”

I sighed, as though I was so bored with my job I could barely summon the energy to speak about it. “I’m in finance.”

“Good with money, huh?”

“I wish.”

“Do you like it?”

“Money?”

“The job.”

I shrugged. “Not the work itself. I like the travelling. Seeing new places. Meeting new people.”

Midnight raised her eyebrows and nodded, signalling that she got it. In her own way, she was as out of place in this town as the hotel. Next to Pete the gas station guy and Bill the manager, she stuck out like a great song on daytime radio. I decided that the conversation was getting a little too focused on me and steered it back towards her.

“How about you? Do you live in Halfway?”

“Just on the outskirts of town,” she answered, gazing back at the door. “It’s a pretty quiet place. A little boring, actually, if you want the truth.”

“Yeah, I can see that, I mean it’s nearly three o’ clock and you’ve only had the one homicide.”

Midnight laughed guiltily, giving me a mild punch on the arm as I finished my beer. I thought about getting another one. The sound of somebody leaning on the horn outside reminded me that Tony and Travis were still waiting in the car. Regretfully, I got up from my bar stool.

“Anyway, I better go get my friends. They’re not too patient,” I said, envisioning Travis kneecapping me for keeping him waiting.

“I have to go too, actually. It was nice talking to you,” she smiled. “Maybe I’ll see you around town.”

“That would be nice. Good afternoon Midnight.”
I turned and walked over to the entrance doors, wishing wholeheartedly that I had left Travis and his shot shoulder in Phoenix.




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