Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
I
t was cold in the backseat of the taxi, but Vince didn’t ask the driver to turn up the heat. A little chill in the air would keep him alert.
It was important to be alert around guns.
Vince had lied to Jack about going down to dinner. Food was the furthest thing from his mind. He was singularly focused on the e-mail message that had landed in his work mailbox, and which his screen reader had converted from text to mechanical audio. “
Are you afraid of the Dark? Admit it. You are. You shouldn’t have come to London. May the best blind man win.”
The city streets were wet, and the
whump-whump o
f the windshield wipers gave rhythm to his ruminations.
The Dark.
He imagined the words were capitalized in the e-mail, and the significance wasn’t lost on him. He’d heard about the signature before—scrawled on the cocktail napkin in a message to Jack at the Lincoln Road café; on the napkin from Club Inversion that police had found in Jamal’s back pocket after he was killed. In is own mind, Vince had already made the connection between McKenna’s killer and this man who called himself the Dark. But the reference in this e-mail to “the best blind man” was confusing. Was he blind, too? Was he talking about blindness in some other sense? Was it just more taunting? Vince wasn’t sure. Nor had he determined how the Dark knew he was in London. But he recognized fighting words when he heard them. If it was a showdown he wanted, then yes, by all means: Let the better man win.
“Right turn at White Chapel High Street in twenty-five meters.”
It was the computerized voice of his GPS navigator. He didn’t trust taxi drivers, who had been known to rob blind people . . . well, blind.
The driver turned right, and Vince was glad to have kept him honest. They were headed for Brick Lane, an East End area once prowled by Jack the Ripper, now famous for curry houses and everything Bangladeshi. Streets were narrow and the one-way traffic was slow, so Vince used the travel time to phone his wife. The call went straight to voice mail. At the tone, he left a simple message.
“I love you.”
The taxi stopped. “I love you, too,” said the driver. “Four pounds fifty.”
The GPS navigator announced,
“You have arrived at your destination.”
It was nice to have the reassurance of technology that he wasn’t being dropped off just anywhere, even if the satellite was a few seconds late.
“Which way is the Kushiara ATM?” asked Vince.
“Get out and you’ll be standing right in front of it.”
That was exactly where Vince wanted to be—the corner of Brick Lane and Fashion Street, south of the old Truman Brewery. He paid the fare, stepped out to the sidewalk, and closed the door. The taxi pulled away, and even though he was alone, his old friend was with him. Rain. It was abundant in London, creating a world that didn’t depend on sight. Vince popped his umbrella and listened. He could hear footsteps around him, easily differentiating between the heavy plod of a passing jogger and the lighter step of a woman walking in high heels. He could feel the breeze on his face and smell the curry from the restaurant down the street. He heard a flag flapping in the breeze overhead, the clang of a bicycle bell. With a little extra concentration he could distinguish buses from trucks, trucks from cars, little cars from motor scooters. Nearby, a pigeon cooed, then another, and it sounded as though they were scrapping over a piece of bread or perhaps a muffin that someone had dropped on the sidewalk. A car door slammed. Men were talking in the distance. In some ways, he was more aware of his surroundings, or at least of certain details of his surroundings, than many sighted persons.
Are you afraid of The Dark?
The question had been poignant. Yes, sometimes he was—when he used his mind’s eye to step outside of himself, and he remembered a world that was so much more than sound, smell, taste, and touch. The fearful Vince was all too aware that he lived his life largely in a reactive posture—that things still existed even if they concealed themselves and did not call out to him for recognition. He wondered what lay hidden on these old streets, how close he really was to danger—to the Dark.
“Are you Vince?”
He turned at the sound of the man’s voice. “Who’s asking?”
“Prince Charles.”
The guy was every bit the smart-ass in person that he had been on the phone, and the Bangladeshi accent was just as prominent. Vince took the envelope from his pocket and handed it over. He could hear the man open it, presumably counting out the two hundred pounds in cash.
“You sure you don’t want the submachine gun?” the man said. “It’s only another hundred pounds.”
The U.K. had some of the toughest gun laws in the world, but the guy was only half joking. Even semiautomatic weapons could be had for as little as three hundred pounds, and bootleg DVDs and black-market tobacco weren’t the only illegal trade in Banglatown. It was all a matter of knowing the right person, and Chuck Mays had assured Vince that if he needed anything—
anything
—in the East End, an ex-pat from Dhaka named Sanu Reza was the go-to guy.
“The Glock will do,” said Vince.
“We have to walk about two blocks,” Reza said.
Vince unfolded his walking stick, asked the man for his arm, and placed his hand in the crook of the man’s elbow. “You lead,” said Vince.
“I’ve never brokered a sale to a blind guy before,” he said as they started down the sidewalk.
Vince smiled to himself, mildly amused that both Reza and the Dark were under the same misapprehension.
“No worries,” he said, thinking of the precious time he’d logged at the shooting range with Brainport back in Miami—and of the prototype of the device that his friend Chuck had shipped to the hotel. “This blind man isn’t as blind as some people think he is.”
I
t was well beyond nightfall, and the Dark walked down the alley with purpose.
Part of him had wanted to go straight from his computer to the cellar, but he kept his urge under control. The self-storage unit for his equipment was eight blocks from his flat, and it had taken almost forty minutes to walk there. It was a discipline he’d learned with al-Shabaab: Never go directly from point A to point B. Take the long route, then go around the block again, until you’re absolutely sure that no one is following. Everything he needed from storage fit into his backpack, and in minutes he was on his way. The diversion had fueled his intensity, however, and he took a less circuitous route to the cellar.
He checked over his shoulder once, then put down his backpack and aimed the key at the door lock. The tumblers clicked as the lock received the key, and the feel of a perfect fit was a sensual rush—a sign of what was to come.
The Dark had waited a very long time for this, having resisted the temptation to take her so many times in the past, before the moment was exactly right. It had been six months since she had fallen into his trap. The first four had been the usual conditioning: sixteen weeks of confinement and total isolation in the cellar. She ate, slept, and bathed only when he allowed it. She wore the clothes he gave her. The lights went on or off when he said so. She had no television, no radio, no iPod, no CDs, no computer. Then, at week seventeen, he started leaving magazines for her. Soft-core things at first, partially clothed young girls in provocative poses. At first she ignored them, but eventually boredom or curiosity got the best of her. She bit. He’d changed the material daily, each magazine a little more explicit than the one before it. The conditioning had gone much better than with her underage predecessors. She’d soaked it up, thumbing through even the images of old men having the time of their life with the oral-sex-is-not-sex generation. It had gone so well, in fact, that at week twenty he’d started letting her venture out for an hour each day with an ankle bracelet. The plan was to turn her into a recruiter, his link to more teenage girls—the way he’d trained Shada to be his link to other women.
You’re next, kitty8.
The deadbolt turned. The Dark pushed the door open, locked it behind him, and started down the concrete staircase. He was just ten steps away from the secure metal door that he had installed at the lower entrance to the cellar apartment. His pack of tools was starting to feel heavy. He’d taken only the bare essentials from the warehouse, but filming without a crew wasn’t easy. He needed two cameras with tripods and remote-controlled zooms for wide shots, and a handheld for close-ups. He would cut and mix later. One shotgun microphone would catch the audio. A Paglight would eliminate the grainy amateur look, even if his hypersensitive eyes did force him to wear dark glasses suitable for the snow-blind. No glasses for her. Just gold stiletto heels, a black lace thong, rope, and handcuffs.
A rush of adrenaline coursed through him as he fumbled for the second key. He was already thinking of camera angles and positioning. First-class footage was not required, but material on the P2P networks did need to be trade-worthy. The quality of some downloads he’d watched was abysmal, and once upon a time, quality hadn’t mattered. His earliest ventures into P2P weren’t about titillation. He was studying the ways of encryption and secret communications among pedophiles, seeing how those methods could be applied to al-Shabaab’s communications. Sometimes it angered him the way this dark world had sucked him in. Sometimes.
He turned the knob and pushed open the door.
“Is that you?” she asked.
She always asked that same question, but he knew what she was really asking:
What do you want from me?
That fear in her voice was a good thing; he wished the camera were already running. He adjusted the dimmer switch on the wall to bring a little light to the room, then started toward her. She lay on the mattress in the corner, which was a good place for them to start. She’d end up on the floor. There was no written script, but as he drew closer, he could hear the first take in his head.
“Who did this to you, huh?”
“You did.”
“No! Tell me who it was.”
“Me.”
“Who made you into such a little slut?”
“I did.”
“No!” he shouted, emerging from his thoughts. “That’s the wrong answer!”
The outburst made him stop, and he worried that his voice might have been heard outside the cellar. The girl looked up from the bed, her eyes wide with fear.
“I didn’t say anything,” she said.
He knew she hadn’t, but the anger inside him was uncontrollable. Girls blaming themselves used to work for him, but not anymore. Not after what had happened in Mogadishu.
A scream—not the girl’s—cut through the silence as the closet door flew open. It was as if the Dark had been hit by a charging rhinoceros. He was suddenly on the floor, flat on his back. The weight of his attacker was on his chest, and a pair of very strong hands was at his throat. He gasped for air, but his windpipe was closed.
There was another scream—it was the girl this time—and the Dark had just enough oxygen flowing to his brain to process what was happening to him. His eyes were bulging, his head was on the verge of exploding, and the man with his hands around his throat was obviously not taking prisoners. The Dark hadn’t come this far to die on the cellar floor. His backpack was within reach, right where it had fallen. Even though it had seemed heavy a minute earlier, he found the strength to grab it by one strap and launch it from the floor with the force of a catapult.
Something cracked inside the backpack—or maybe it was the attacker’s skull. The grip on his throat eased for an instant, as if the blow had dazed his attacker, and the Dark seized the moment. He pushed with all his strength and sent the man flying across the room. But he came right back at the Dark, and the momentum sent them both crashing into the wall. A hot wet spray slapped the Dark across the face.
Am I bleeding?
The man grabbed the Dark by the hair and slammed his head against the floor—once, twice, a third time. Each time, the Dark felt that hot spray on his face, but each blow was weaker than the last. With the fourth, his attacker fell backward, a battered heap.
It’s not my blood!
The Dark tried to push himself up from the floor, but the cellar was awhirl, and he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even turn his head. He thought he saw the girl standing over him, but he was barely able to focus. She stepped past him. The Dark heard her voice, but she wasn’t speaking to him. The words didn’t register, but her tone was one of concern. She wasn’t talking to a stranger.
She knows the guy.
It was his last conscious thought before the dimly lit room turned completely dark.
J
ack went out looking—for what, he wasn’t sure. For Vince. For Shada. For answers. He was finding none of them.
His coat was barely warm enough for a Miami winter, and his new leather gloves were touring around London in the backseat of the cab that he and Vince had grabbed at the airport. But he braved the chill, needing to get out of the hotel room and clear his head. Walking certain areas of the East End after dark was not a good idea, so Jack stuck to the route suggested by the concierge. London’s streets were laid out long before surveyors with precision instruments platted the emerging cities of the New World into grid systems. Jack soon learned that it was not unusual for London streets to change names three times in the space of three blocks.
How the heck is Vince getting around here?
He stopped at the corner to check his map, but the one he’d picked up from the hotel was essentially a walking tour of World War II memorials. The East End was especially hard hit by Hitler’s air raids, partly because of its proximity to the docks, partly because the attack on its heavily Jewish population fit nicely with the Nazi agenda. The dates on the memorial plaques along the route—the bombing of the Great Synagogue, Duke’s Place, May 1942; the Bethnal Green Tube Station disaster, March 1943—were right around the time period that Jack’s grandfather had been talking about. It got Jack to thinking about Grandpa and General Swyteck. Petrak. Whoever. Maybe he could stop by the Czech Centre in the morning and straighten it out:
Excuse me, my eighty-seven-year-old grandfather, who talks to a dead pope and who suddenly thinks our family is Jewish, says we’re related to an ex-pat Czech general from World War II. Can you help me? Oh, and did I mention he has Alzheimer’s?
“Come with me!”
Jack resisted the strange woman pulling on his arm, and when she tugged harder, he swung in self-defense, forcing her to duck out of the way.
“It’s me, Shada Mays!”
Jack froze, but her grip tightened around his forearm as she led him into the pub at the corner. They settled into the darkest booth available, where Jack stared at her from across the table, too stunned to talk. She seemed out of breath, and for a moment Jack wondered if Shada had been running one continuous marathon since they’d bumped into each other outside the Carpenter’s Arms.
“Where’s Vince?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Tell me what’s going on.”
She glanced nervously over her shoulder, and in the dim glow of a neon sign in the window, Jack noticed the abrasions and swelling on the side of her face.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
“I thought he was going to kill me.”
“Vince?”
“No. This guy who . . . it’s a long story.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No, I’m fine. Just a little sore.”
“Tell me who did this to you.”
“His name’s Habib. He fooled me for a long time, but I’m starting to think he killed my daughter.”
Jack was speechless for a second. “Okay, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
Even the short version took several minutes. She covered everything from her infidelity before McKenna’s death to the recent blows that marked her face. Jack leaned close as he listened, arms resting atop the table, trying to absorb the enormity of what she was saying.
“When I ran from you today,” she continued, “I went over to his flat. After we were together, Habib went out, but he wouldn’t tell me where he was going. I had a bad vibe, like something was about to snap. Sure enough, he came back a couple hours later looking like he’d been fighting. He started shouting, accusing me of double-crossing him and setting him up. Crazy stuff about how I’d blown six months of work.”
“What kind of work?”
“I have no idea.”
Jack retrieved his cell phone from his coat.
“Who are you calling?” she asked.
“I agreed to keep the police out of this until Vince and I were able to talk to you. Now I’m hearing that the man who beat you up may also have killed your daughter, but clearly you’re not telling me everything. So I’m calling the police.”
She grabbed his phone. “I’m not ready to go to the police.”
“You mean Chuck’s not ready to go to the police.”
Her mouth fell open, and the reaction confirmed Jack’s suspicion: Coordination of some sort was stretching across the ocean. “What kind of weird thing do you and Chuck have going on?”
Again, she had no answer. Jack snatched his phone back from her. Lawyer’s instinct told him to make the phone call and turn this over to the police—to let Scotland Yard find McKenna’s killer, perhaps Neil’s killer, too. But tonight might be his only chance to find out what Shada knew. Neil would have run with an opportunity like this—and that was a good enough barometer for Jack.
“He’s tracking me, isn’t he? Chuck has GPS spyware tied to my cell phone, and that’s how you found me on the street.”
“Well . . . that may be.”
“I’m giving you five minutes to make sense of this,” said Jack.
“I hardly know where to start.”
“Start by telling me why you think this man may be your daughter’s killer.”
“Habib told me he was there—in the house—when she was killed.”
“He told you that today?”
“No. We talked the day after McKenna died. That was when he told me.”
Jack paused, not comprehending, not sure what to ask next. One question loomed largest. “How in the world could you run off to London with the man who murdered your daughter?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “In fact, a big part of the reason I left Chuck—left the country—was to get away from the reminders of what had happened to McKenna. I didn’t think I was running off with her killer. I was sure Jamal did it.”
“Because McKenna named him?”
“Not just that. Habib told me what happened.”
“His version of what happened, you mean. What was his story?”
She winced with pain, not from his question but from the bruises. Jack slid out of the booth, quickly got some ice from the bartender, and wrapped it in a napkin for her. She pressed it to her face as she spoke.
“That day McKenna died, Chuck was out of the country. Habib came over to see me. I wasn’t there, but as he was walking back to his car, he heard a scream from inside the house. He knew where we hid the house key—under the pot on the porch—and when he opened the door he saw Jamal running down the stairs. Habib chased him through the kitchen and into the garage, and Jamal hit him over the head with a rake or something. Habib came to after a few minutes and heard another noise. He tried to get up but was so shaky he knocked over the garbage can. Next thing he knew, the door flew open and Vince Paulo shot at him. The bullet hit the propane tank on our barbecue. You know the rest.”
It was barely plausible, and Jack called it what it was. “Everything he told you is a crock. Jamal wasn’t even in the country when McKenna was killed.”
“I didn’t know that at the time. I kept getting threatening e-mails from Jamal all the way up until Habib and I came up with our plan—until I became Maysoon and went to live with him here in London.”
“Jamal was in Gitmo when you were getting those messages.”
“How was I supposed to know that? I wanted to believe what Habib was telling me. It wasn’t Chuck’s fault—the way he took McKenna’s death so hard and blamed himself for being out of the country. But honestly, if I had stayed around Chuck another day, I probably would have ended up committing suicide for real. I thought I could start over with Habib. I thought I knew him.” She moved the ice to the darkening bruise on her cheekbone. “Until today.”
“You need to tell me how it got to this point.”
“I told you: This is the first I’ve seen this side of him.”
“Really?”
“Do you think I would have given up my life in Miami and moved to London for this?”
“Do you think I came all the way from Miami to get half the story? Talk to me, Shada.
Now.
”
She looked away, ashamed, then spoke in a soft voice of resignation. “My relationship with Habib had its kinky side, I guess you’d say. Never anything illegal, but he was after me to find women and set up a threesome for him. But is that so bad? Isn’t that every man’s fantasy?”
Jack let that one go. The walls had ears, and Andie’s middle name was Walls.
“Anyway,” she said, “Something set him off today.”
“
What
set him off? That’s the thing I’m trying to understand.”
“I really don’t know. He’s been edgy lately, and when he came back from wherever he went tonight, it was like a bomb exploding. I had to fight my way out of the apartment. Thankfully, I can outrun just about anyone.”
Jack could attest to that.
“Anyway,” said Shada, “I started this conversation by asking you where Vince is.”
“Chuck doesn’t know?” asked Jack. “Why doesn’t he just track him down with his cell phone spyware the same way you found me?”
“We tried,” said Shada. “But the spyware doesn’t work if you remove the battery from the cell. Vince knows that, and that’s what has Chuck a little worried.”
“Maybe I should check in with his wife.”
“Chuck did already. If you call, she’ll just worry even more.”
The only other option was to call the police, but he knew the cops wouldn’t help find someone who’d been missing for just two hours.
“Let’s go to the hotel and wait for him,” said Shada. “I need your computer.”
“To find Vince?”
“No.” Shada put down the ice. “I’ve been getting more and more suspicious since I heard Jamal was dead. Once I get a bad feeling about someone, I don’t just sit around and play victim.”
“Meaning what?” said Jack.
Shada dug into her pocket and pulled out a handful of USB flash drives. “While Habib was out today, I copied some files from his laptop.”
“Does Chuck know about this?”
“Why do you think we tracked you down so fast when we couldn’t find Vince?”
Jack was suddenly feeling better about the trust issue. “Can I see those files?”
“Not without Chuck.”
“Naturally,” said Jack, wondering how the world had turned before Web conferences. “Let’s patch him in.”