Stolen Souls

91

THE DRIVER DID not speak when he took Strazdas’s case, nor on the journey toward the airport. The vehicle looked like the cabs that worked the streets of London, but he had seen many of them in Belfast from the window of his hotel room. A Perspex window separated him from the squat man with the pimpled neck who gripped the steering wheel.

As they travelled, Strazdas pondered what he might say to his mother. The very thought made his scrotum shrivel within his trousers and his bladder ache. Most likely he would say nothing, yet. When he landed in Brussels, he would immediately seek out a flight to some other destination. From there, he would begin tracing records of the girl, who had supplied her to Aleksander, where she came from, her family, anything that might help him track her down.

If he was lucky, she would return home, and there she would be vulnerable. And once her stain was wiped from his mind, he could return to his mother, an honorable son.

Daylight seemed to struggle for a way through the fog, but Strazdas could feel rather than see that the taxi had settled onto a long straight when the driver looked up at his mirror.

“Fuck,” he said.

Strazdas turned in his seat to look out of the rear window. He saw the flashing blue lights first, then the silhouette of the car solidifying in the murk. A siren whooped.

The driver flicked an indicator on and applied his foot to the brake.

“What are you doing?” Strazdas asked.

“I’m pulling in,” the driver said. “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

“No,” Strazdas said. “Keep going.”

“Your arse,” the driver said as the taxi mounted the hard shoulder and slowed to a halt.

The car eased up behind and its lights died. The driver’s door opened and a suited man climbed out. As he limped up alongside the taxi, the driver wound his window down. The suited man looked along the road in one direction, then the other.

The driver asked, “Jesus, Dan, what’s going on? You scared me there. I thought I was getting a ticket. I can’t afford any points on my—”

Hewitt pulled a pistol from his waistband, aimed at the driver’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

Strazdas moved before he heard the shot, grabbed the passenger-side door handle, and threw himself out of the taxi. He hit the ground shoulder-first, hauled himself up on his feet, and lurched up the grass embankment, his feet slipping on the snow.

A gunshot cracked through the cold air, and something slammed Strazdas’s leg from beneath him. He howled as he fell back and rolled down the slope toward the still idling taxi. The icy tarmac of the hard shoulder scraped at his hands and knees before he came to rest by the taxi’s rear wheel. He tried to squirm his way underneath the vehicle, but a hand grabbed his ankle and hauled him back.

Hewitt stood over Strazdas, the pistol staring at the point between the prone man’s eyes.

“I won’t send any letter,” Strazdas said. “It was only talk. I won’t, I swear on my mother’s life.”

“Too late for that,” Hewitt said.

Strazdas screamed.

Two hammer blows to his chest, and he could no longer beg, could no longer scream, only watch as Hewitt stepped closer and leaned in. He felt the heat of the muzzle against his forehead, smelled the cordite, and cursed his mother to hell.