Page 80 of One of Us Is Guilty

A tattoo of an inverted dagger surrounded by a laurel wreath. She snapped a picture on her phone. No point taking a photo of this guy’s face. He no longer had one.

‘Check their arms for tattoos,’ she said.

She checked the two bodies on the front porch. No IDs, and one of them had a tattoo on his right forearm of what looked like multiple stars from a compass laid on top of each other. She took a pic of this and their faces. These guys had MP5s, small military sub-machine guns. Bloch made her way to the Land Rovers, checked the glovebox. There was a single file in there, and in the trunk an extra bag of magazines for the MP5s, and nothing else.

She took the file, and together they left the same way they had come, through the field at the rear of Winchester’s property to Bloch’s Jeep. She used what was left of her water bottle to wash her hands, and within ten minutes they’d found the highway and were pointed in the direction of Manhattan.

‘Did the guy in the kitchen have any tattoos?’ asked Bloch.

‘None. How come you asked me to look?’

‘The way they moved. They were ex-military. Take a look,’ she said, and handed him her phone.

Lake examined the tattoos, took out his phone and began searching.

‘The inverted combat knife in the laurel wreath is a pretty generic special forces tattoo, but this one, the compass rose, this is more specific. Wait, here we go – it’s South African Special Forces.’

‘Dekker is South African. He was US military, but I’d bet in his merc days he made plenty of connections with his home military special forces,’ said Bloch.

Lake said, ‘Mind if I look in the file?’

Bloch nodded and he took it from the back seat.

There were only a few pages.

The first was an old photo of Paul Winchester, ten years and twenty pounds ago. It listed his current age and address and had a list of his weapon permits. The other two pages, Lake didn’t need to read too carefully.

‘It’s us,’ he said.

‘We’re targets too?’

‘Maybe,’ said Lake, ‘or maybe we’re just persons of interest. One thing is clear. Paul Winchester died because we went to see him and Captain Landry was responsible. He tipped off Dekker, or his boss, but Dekker is the one who arranged the hit team. He probably served with at least one of those men back there. At some point I should probably kill Dekker. Just to be on the safe side.’

‘I don’t think you should do that,’ said Bloch.

‘How come?’

She glanced at her hands on the steering wheel, dark ridges of dried blood still visible in the fine creases of her skin.

‘BecauseIwant to kill him,’ said Bloch.

32

Eddie

‘Flynn!’

My eyes opened and a wave of pain shot up my spine and into my neck. My suit jacket was a poor pillow and the wooden bench in the holding cell wasn’t doing my back any favors.

I dropped my legs to the floor and sat up, rubbing my neck. I hadn’t slept much. Maybe an hour or two. They’d brought in a tweaker at some point during the night and he bounced off the walls for another hour, screaming and crying and telling everyone else in the cell that there was a giant cockroach in his apartment who was eating all his breakfast cereal and hadn’t been paying rent. The other four guys in the cell were regulars. Even the gangster, who could have put the one-hundred-and-ten-pound tweaker in his shoe, knew there was no way to threaten the guy to get him to shut up. And beating the crap out of him would only make things worse. Only thing to do was sit quietly and wait for the meth in his system to dissipate.

‘Flynn! You want to stay here or what?’

The cop standing at the door to the holding cell had one hand on his equipment belt, his palm resting on his can of pepper spray, just in case anyone wanted to make a run for it when he opened the cage for me.

I stood and stretched my back. Grabbed my jacket and turned to my cell mates.

‘Darius, hope that thing works out with your sister,’ I said. ‘Andy, if your lawyer can’t figure out a way to plead your case down to one charge, call me. All the best to you guys. Stay lucky.’