All You Leave Behind
Author: John Rickards
Date: 2018-04-12T23:00:00+00:00
Description: Chase is dead. The package he carried blew up to take out the guy he handed it to. Just a courier, a delivery mechanism for a hit. Collateral damage. That's how it should've gone. Chase is alive. A stranger got into the package and removed the bomb. She left him a loaded gun and a phone and called him up before he could deliver it to tell him what she'd saved him from. And to say she was giving him the chance for revenge and the tools to take it, if he wanted. But Chase is a regular guy with a wife and a young family and a livelihood, and while they'd have been left without him by the bomber,

Copyright & Credits

Copyright John Rickards 2011. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. You’re free to share this work with others however you want, and to remix or create derivative works from it. Just give an attribution to the author, and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Enjoy!

This book should be free. If the place you’re viewing this/that you got this from charges money for it, use whatever “report a lower price” link your retailer to tell them to drop the price, claim a refund if you can, and head to johnrickards.com, where you can at least get others for nothing.

Cover image:

Assets taken from Communication Disorder_05 by ajari and the RIC by Werwin15, both used under cc-by-2.0 license.

00. Back

There was a woman once. She wasn’t always good, but she certainly wasn’t evil. She did her job and she didn’t ask questions and she was killed and she didn’t deserve it. There are dozens like her get killed every day, and they don’t matter much more than she did.

Until she came back.

01. Never Even Tempted

The day Chase Harrell was supposed to die, he was taking a payload to one of the shacks on Candlemaker’s Row. It was a bright winter’s afternoon, glittering and bitter. Chase enjoyed weather like this. It meant wearing his heavy parka and hat, everyone out in as many layers as they could afford, not that this meant much in a place like the Levels, and it was impossible from the outside to tell he was carrying anything at all.

That was Rule Three: Don’t look like a runner.

Strictly speaking, ‘Booster’ Brookman’s third rule, drummed into all the runners who worked for him at the very start, was ‘Don’t get caught’ (or, if he was in the middle of one of his periodic attempts to quit smoking, ‘Don’t fuck up or I’ll kill you’), but Chase had found long ago that the best way not to get caught was not to look like you were anything worth catching in the first place. He knew guys who did it with speed — move fast, don’t stop for anything, ‘anticipate and innovate’, as Gordy Blazynski used to say. Gordy had broken a leg jumping off a fire escape and now he didn’t walk so good. Chase took it slow, perfected the art of becoming part of the background. Occasionally a bunch of gangbangers higher than most or a nutcase gone postal would make a move for him, just like they would for anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with them, and then Chase would have to run for real, or, though he much preferred to avoid it, fight. You couldn’t just give up your payload and head home.

That was Rule Two: Be ready to die for the job.

Mostly public relations; Brookman knew his business would only survive if people felt his people were going to be reliable. Best way to avoid having his couriers’ loads jacked was if would-be thieves knew he only employed people batshit crazy enough to fight to the death for what they were carrying; most of the time, no one would want that degree of hassle. Once you had a few deliveries under your belt and you knew the game, you realized he didn’t actually expect you to die, just to put up one hell of a fight. Chase was happy he’d only ever had to do so on a few occasions, and he’d worked for Booster for five years and change. He had his own sub-rule for such times: if a fight was going to happen, you fucked up the other guy fast and made sure he stayed fucked up, and if you got the chance, you ran. Survive and escape. Chase had a wife, kids, and no desire to wind up cut to pieces in some alleyway or to be found floating face-down in the Broad Street Canal.

The Row wasn’t a proper road, just a repurposed gap between a strip of grubby houses like nicotine-stained teeth and one of the short commercial zones that orbited Willoughby Street, glass splinters in the mesh of the Levels. Some of the candlemakers took animal fat from butchers and food vendors across the district, rendered it down and made genuine candles, others made lamps fuelled by melted plastic waste. People didn’t always have electricity; even Chase, when he was a kid, had endured regular blackouts when the unruly snarl of wiring at the base of their building blew out. He wondered, briefly, what the recipient wanted shipped this way; most businesses did their own fetching and delivering, and courier services like Booster’s weren’t especially cheap. It was probably something personal, or something illicit. He stopped there, and thought about something else, because that’s what you had to do.

That was Rule One, the great and golden Rule to reign above all other Rules: You NEVER look at the payload. You never took an interest in it. You never even thought about it if you could avoid it. Everyone who used the runners knew the external risks — the gangs and the crazies — and they accepted them, because they lived in the same spaces in the same environment. You wanted something delivered someplace, you were aware of the dangers. No one, however, would accept a runner helping themselves to their payload. Especially Booster, whose business would collapse like a cardboard hut in a thunderstorm if he acquired a rep for employing people with light fingers and enquiring minds. ‘You so much as peep at your load, I’ll hunt you down myself,’ he said to each new recruit at hiring time. ‘No excuses, no second chances. You’re dead, absolutely and without question. And don’t think I haven’t done it before. Clear?’

Chase had never even been tempted. In five years he’d never failed to make a delivery either. The pay wasn’t great, but it was steady, and until UPS or the Postal Service grew a pair and started working a slum where half the buildings were condemned and the other half should be, there’d always be a call for good runners. People didn’t have any choice.

Keating Levels was one of the most spectacularly failed housing experiments in America, a sprawling mess of Fifties urban planning stitched out on land reclaimed at great expense from the Tissky and Murdoch rivers. Sanctuary Tower was to be the glowing centerpiece to it, but when it nearly collapsed before completion, sinking one story down as its foundations dropped, the project’s developer went under in a storm of lawsuits. All other work ground to a halt, and with the Levels underfunded and under-supported, its mess of social problems and neglect worsened until its abandonment by Newport City’s authorities became complete. Nearly six decades on, its inhabitants, unofficially unwanted and ignored, were still outcasts forever looking in envy or spite at the glimmer of Newport downstream.

The guy blinked at him when ducked into the shack. An old man, face a black webwork of grime-lined wrinkles. But he broke into a broad cracked grin when Chase ascertained that he was, in fact, the intended recipient and told him he had a package for him.

‘Ah, great news, kiddo,’ he said, clutching at the thing. ‘Gotta girl near Foundry Park who never forgets my birthday. Ha! You did good.’

‘No problem,’ Chase told him, and it hadn’t been.

‘I could’ve been a runner. When I was young. Don’t have the eyes for it now.’

Small talk for a moment. Chase left. He had another drop to make eight blocks west. Booster’s scrawl on the wrapper, saying this one had to be there, three on the dot. The set-time arrangement happened only rarely, and cost a significant premium; mostly they were deliveries to ongoing business deals or meetings well away from each party’s turf. There for a brief moment of time, then gone again, and neither side willing to give away their home location to a runner like Chase.

He was five blocks into the walk when he heard the payload start to ring, like a phone.

02. Second Chance

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Chase, trying to ignore the sound coming from his coat, echoing in the crystalline air. Kept on walking, head down, hoping it’d stop. Less than three blocks to go now. Chase swallowed, embraced the silence as the phone in the package went to voicemail. Maybe he’d be OK.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

People were starting to stare. He knew they were wondering why he wasn’t answering his cell. Rule Three. Don’t look like a runner. Thinking, with every ring: shit. Two blocks from the target, the payload still chiming away, he ducked into an alleyway, carefully took out the bundle he was carrying. Rule One hammering away in his head, but what the hell was this shit? Five years and he’d never known anything like it. Carefully, quickly, he slipped a finger under the tape holding the plastic wrapping down, tried to open the package without making it look like he’d opened it. Found he was sweating hard as he did it, emotional disconnect as he went against everything he’d lived by since he started working with Booster. But this kind of thing didn’t happen. Ever. He was on time, it wasn’t three yet. The call had to be meant for him, not for the client, as crazy as that seemed. And each second he ignored it, he only drew more attention to himself.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

The wrapping came away. So did the top of the box inside. At the head end, a tight curl of wires running from a gutted cell phone to a pair of contacts bracketing mostly empty space in the central section of the payload. But the ringing wasn’t coming from that. It came from a second cell phone sitting, intact, in that space. Space it shared with a sleek black handgun and a duct-taped pair of spare clips.

The contact name on the phone’s screen read: ‘ANSWER ME’.

He hesitated, hand hovered over the cell. Then it was up and he’d accepted the call. ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘You’re the courier.’ A woman’s voice, curt and clipped. Local accent, though. Levels roughness. ‘About time you picked up.’

‘It’s the Rule,’ he said, brain locked. He’d broken it, good and hard, and was feeling strange, adrift. ‘You never open the payload.’

‘I know the rules. If it’s any consolation, I broke that one for you. Let’s make this quick. The package you were carrying was a bomb. When you reached the delivery point it was going to be blown up and you along with it, all to take out the guy who was supposed to receive it. You understand?’

He opened his mouth. Closed it again.

‘You were going to die. Except that I got into the delivery first, and I took out the explosives and replaced them with the phone you’re using and the gun you’re no doubt looking at and wondering about. Someone was willing to kill you just to get at someone else. They didn’t give a dried mouse shit about you; you were just a tool, something to be used and discarded. But now, that hasn’t happened. You’ve got the choice and the chance to make things right. If you want to. You understand that?’

Opened his mouth once more. Managed to say ‘sure’ even though that was one thing he wasn’t, not about anything.

‘Good. I’ve given you an opportunity. Use it, or don’t. Your call. Goodbye.’

‘Wait — who the hell are you?’

‘I’m your second chance.’

The phone bleeped. Connection closed.

He tried ringing the number back, but it cut straight to voicemail. It didn’t seem likely that he’d get an answer from it any time soon. Scant information, the voice of a stranger, and the weapon they’d left him, all he had to go on. On the other hand, second chances of any kind were few in the Levels. Some folks were lucky even to get their first. That was a rule as concrete and honest as any Chase lived by. He’d had his one chance, and now he was being told that someone had tried to take it from him.

I’ve given you an opportunity. Use it or don’t. She’d never explained how she knew so much about what he was supposedly carrying, or how come she’d been able, and willing, to switch it out to protect him. The swell of unseen forces battering against the small and narrow walls of the life he understood, and Chase, in an alleyway paved with caked filth somewhere near Rowan Avenue, suddenly cold in the lengthening winter shadows.

03. Sally Sneakers

‘You “lost” it? You’re “sorry”? Sit the fuck down, Chase.’ Booster ran his operation out of the top floor of what had once been a convenience store but was now an impromptu indoor market. There was a hydroponic pot farm on the level below them, something he always said was good for security. Plenty of routes out of the building, plenty of foot traffic. Rule Three. The offices themselves were little more than a sweaty cluster of small rooms, plastered with years of runners’ favourite flyers, stickers, graffiti, all feeding off a cracked linoleum hallway. A little staff kitchenette, rest rooms, the booking office where you signed your loads in and out, and the actual package storage room behind that. And Booster’s office, a boxy closet piled with stacks of notes in his arcane shorthand, reeking of coffee and the foul tobacco he insisted on chewing like a Texan cattle baron.

Chase shut the door behind him, sat in the moth-chewed swivel chair opposite his boss. Told himself this was just like work; that all you had to do was not look like you were trying to hide anything. He’d stashed the contents of the package two blocks away, wedging it beneath an overflowing dumpster at the back of a noodle bar, nowhere anyone would look.

Booster sighed and rattled around in one of his desk drawers until he came out with a can of some kind of Polish fruit soda. ‘So what happened?’ he said. ‘You don’t look mugged, so I guess no one jacked you.’

‘I’m not sure what happened, tell the truth. I’d made the drop to the Candlemakers and I was heading up Meade on the way to the second. You know there’s usually hawkers on the junction with Rowan? There was a guy with a grill, selling hot food. Crowd across the sidewalk; guess everyone wanted something for the cold, right? Best as I can guess, while I was cutting through all those people, one of them lifted the payload. I had it in my coat, so they probably thought they were snatching my wallet. Anyway, not far after that, I realized it was gone. Whoever it was did a damn fine job; I never felt a thing.’

‘You didn’t see who did it? No clue at all?’

‘Sorry, Booster. If it had been a snatch and run job, I’d have got him. If they’d tried to hold me up for what I was carrying… well, you know what I’d have done. Five years, I’ve never once failed to deliver. Whoever it was, they were good.’

Booster drained most of his can of tooth-rot. Grimaced. ‘I’m cutting you slack, Chase. Like you say, five years. That’s why I’m not yelling and cussing five fucking ways from Sunday at you right now. You know I had one guy, before your time, try taking his own load and offering me a percentage of what he’d taken, like we’d have a racket going? I stabbed him in the eye with a pencil, threatened to take the other one too, unless he gave up what he’d stolen. You’ve got to be hard, or the system falls apart. But you’re not some shitsucking fuck-up, Chase. You’re my best runner. If that’s what happened, that’s what happened. But don’t ever, ever, get taken like that again. You understand? I gotta talk to the client now, grovel and kiss ass, and I hate kissing ass.’

‘I know, Booster, and I’m sorry.’ Felt an involuntary jolt of adrenaline as he asked the next question. ‘Who was the client? I feel rough about losing their load. I’d like to apologize myself, you know?’

‘Forget it. I’ll do it. They don’t know you from a hole in the ground. It’s me makes the guarantees, especially when they specifically ask, and pay, for the best, most punctual service we can offer.’ He waved Chase away. ‘Go home. You’re all done for today anyway.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Tell Tara I said “hi”. Kiss the kids. Bring me some pie next time she bakes. Go.’

Sally Sneakers was sitting in the corridor outside the kitchenette when he left the office. She had a chipped mug of coffee resting between her thighs and was idly wrapping duct tape around a short length of rebar. She smiled at Chase, eyes creasing at the corners into grime-shaded lines. She handled most of the big loads, the type too large to drop in a pocket or a messenger bag. Hid them in a shopping cart full of empty cans and trash, shuffled along with it, muttering to herself like she was going to give anyone who came too close the Crazy.

‘Hey, Chase. Booster giving you a chewing-out? That’s not like you, Mr Dependable. What gives?’

‘I lost a load somewhere near Rowan Avenue. Someone lifted it off me in a crowd.’ He nodded when she pointed at her cup and she picked herself up, went to make him one too. Not that he really wanted to hang out — the only thing on his mind was collecting the package from where he’s stashed it and getting home without anyone noticing — but he knew he also had to act natural, bite down the guilt and the nerves and let them fester for later. Rule Three, or Two if having coffee with another runner counted as paying the price for protecting the package.

‘Booster give you a hard time?’ Sally was saying. ‘I couldn’t hear anything break from out here. Not that I was trying to listen; I just got done with two boxes for Bishopstone Walk, wanted a rest before home. Got to take a load to one of the Core towers tomorrow.’

Hence the rebar, he figured. The four high-rise blocks at the heart of the Levels were always a risk, made you twitchy, and Sally’s bag lady act didn’t work above ground level, not carrying something big. ‘I guess tomorrow’ll be a normal day for me,’ he said. Thanked her for the coffee and hunched down opposite as she took up her old position in the corridor. ‘Booster wasn’t happy, but it’s the first time, and I didn’t know anything about it. The client paid for timed delivery, so they’ll be extra pissed, but he says he’s going to try and square it.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘I got it from Gordy when I clocked in this morning. Someone else must’ve picked it up yesterday. You know who else was on shift then? If I knew who owned the thing, maybe I could make it up to them. Or at least have a clue where I might need to watch my back the next few weeks. Louisa’s got a play at school coming up and I don’t want to miss it because some angry customer’s planted a knife between my shoulders.’

She looked at him for what seemed like a very long time without saying anything, and Chase felt his heart race as he wondered if she suspected him, if she knew what had really happened. Forced himself to gulp down a mouthful of coffee, pretend it didn’t burn his tongue. ‘Not sure,’ she said. ‘I had a run over to the Yards, one of the kooks out there. I wasn’t around much. Sparks was working the office. I saw Automatic Jack and Malden around, so maybe one of them made the pick up.’

‘Maybe I’ll ask them. Thanks.’ He finished the coffee, feeling his face flush with the heat. He wanted out.

Sally was still looking at him. ‘Don’t fuck up, Chase. I’ve known you too long.’

‘Sure. I just thought maybe I could apologize.’

‘I’m serious. Don’t fuck up.’

A wave goodbye, and he left, down the stairs past the hash factory and out into the gathering dark of the street, sprinting in his head even as habit made him walk like a regular guy. The rules looking out for him even after he’d betrayed them.

04. The World’s Forgotten Places

Tara was making fajitas when he came home. She paused in dredging strips of beef in flour laced with spice long enough to kiss him, then the kids screamed through, Donnie chasing after some toy his big sister was waving in the air where he couldn’t reach it. A pair of yelled ‘Hey dad’s, and they were gone again. Chase slipped through the apartment, the front room crowded with debris and drying laundry, past the locked door that led out onto ‘the Wreck’, the busted-open room at the back, half demolished when the building behind was knocked down a few years before, and into the relative sanctity of the bedroom. Pressed his spine against the door and took the bundle out of his coat.

‘Sweetheart! Come help me with this!’ Tara’s voice from the kitchen, muffled.

‘In a minute,’ he yelled back. ‘Just need to get changed.’

‘Sorry. Forgot you needed to put your curlers in.’

‘Ha ha.’

Where the hell was he going to put the gun? Tara found it, she’d freak. ‘Guns attract violence,’ she always said. ‘I don’t want that around our kids.’ A neighbor had tried to sell her one once, suggesting she get it for home defence. Chase had to stop her demonstrating how little she needed one by hitting him with a table leg. There wasn’t space under the bed, barely any anywhere else. He settled for stuffing it into the bag that he kept his summer gear in over winter, buried at the bottom of the closet. Emerged, changed, and went to help his wife.

He’d met Tara just shy of ten years before, when they were both seventeen. The Sharp Riots had permanently shut down the last couple of schools in the Levels and those few, including her, who’d been planning on sticking it out until they graduated were suddenly left with no choice; it was over. Chase was, by this point, helping out an uncle of one of his friends from the block, chopping stolen cars in one of the industrial units by the river. He didn’t have the know-how for much more than fetching and carrying, but it paid. Mom was on welfare — had been for as long as he could remember — and dad was an unknown, a name without a face. His younger brother Adam was drifting, dealing small-time and hanging out with dopers by the Short Run Canal. Chase, already damned sure he was going to make a better go of life than his family, had been trying to get trainee work as a cabbie in the city. He figured he could stay in the Levels long enough to build up some savings, bus to and from work, then move out, break free.

It was bussing to yet another persuade-you-to-take-on-a-Levels-kid interview — the naive optimism of the first few long since burned away, and Chase already trying to cook up a backup plan — that he’d met Tara. This girl, hair extensions and too much makeup, waiting at the stop on the highway across the McCarthy Bridge, the closest public transport came to the Levels, then following him onto the bus and sitting directly behind him.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’

He’d looked round into brown eyes smudged with eyeliner. Gaze not on him, but on the book in his hands. ‘Manual for car engines,’ he’d said. He’d been loaned it by one of Uncle Stiel’s guys. Figured maybe he’d picked up enough motor skills to change tack, try for work as a mechanic. ‘It shows you how it all fits together. Like if you want to fix something.’

‘Huh. You understand all that?’

’No,’ he’d said, and it was true. He’d spent hours with the thing, and all he’d learned was that he probably wasn’t cut out for this sort of job. ‘No, I don’t really have a clue.’

They’d both laughed, and the rest was easy.

Nearly ten years now, and they’d never made it out of the Levels. Instead, they found an empty apartment that wasn’t in too bad shape and Chase had paid a friend of Stiel’s to hook it for power and water. He and Tara were married a couple of years after they’d met that morning on the bus, the bump that would be Louisa already swelling proudly out front. Chase’s family hadn’t shown at the courthouse; his mom saying the journey into the city was too much, just the latest in a long line of rebuffs that Chase would eventually learn, as she was dying, had come about because she blamed him for leaving her, just like his father had. Like he was too good for her. For them. Adam had shown for the party afterwards, and Tara’s dad and brother had thrown him out for being an asshole, wired to the eyeballs on some kind of speedball mix.

‘You took your time,’ she said as he came back into the kitchen. ‘I was going to send out a search party.’

Screaming and laughter from the smaller bedroom. ‘Sounds like the search party’s busy,’ he said. Concentrate on the ordinary and the mundane. Forget about the gun. ‘Help?’

‘Get the table ready, then come do the tortillas for me. How was work?’

‘Normal day. Only a couple of jobs.’ Thankful, as he said it, that the nature of his career meant that he never had to go into specifics. Tara knew Booster, had met a few times, but she also knew that Chase never thought about what he carried and only rarely about the people he carried it for. For her part, she’d demanded that he never do anything stupid; she worked damned hard, both with the two kids, escorting them to and from their school pickup over the river, and doing clothing repairs in the evenings. No way the latter would ever pay for her to cover the former if Chase got himself killed.

‘You finished early.’

‘Way it goes. Booster’s demanding something next time you bake in return for letting me out. All good at base?’ Dry-frying each rolled out disc of flour and water to make tortillas while Tara concentrated on everything else.

‘Booster’s got a damn cheek. School was fine, but Louisa needs you to help her tonight with her costume for the play. You really need to get it finished; they start dress rehearsals next week.’

Louisa was always in plays, musicals, anything that’d get her on a stage, and Chase and Tara were always having to help with her wardrobe. ‘I’m nearly there. It’s not easy making a rat outfit from scratch. I could always bake instead and we could tell Booster it had come from you. He’d never ask again.’

‘Not a bad idea. KIDS! Dinner.’

‘I still don’t get the whole “rats working with the piper all along” story.’

‘It’ll all make sense when we go see it. KIDS! Now, damn it!’

Later, much later, when they’d put Donnie and Louisa to bed and he’d told them how much he loved them, as he did every night, as his own dad, whoever he’d been, had never done once, never having so much as seen his son, Chase unlocked the door to the Wreck and went outside. The edge of the building ten feet away was a ragged fold in the concrete floor. Two one-time interior walls still standing, picked bare by the elements, one exterior one gone entirely, the other half there, torn and crumbling, tumbled into what was now a strip of rubble-strewn waste ground beyond where the kids played sometimes, carefully taught to be wary of hypodermics. The night was frozen, air like wafer sheets of glass eliding from some distant glacier. Dogs were howling, somewhere off in the tumbled concrete maze, and on the edge of sight, through gaps in the neighboring buildings, he could just about see the muddy orange fires near the pinnacle of Sanctuary Tower. He thought about the gun, about what he had right now, and what the woman’s voice had told him he’d very nearly lost. How close a stranger had come to taking him away from them. The kids and Tara, left alone with the long hard struggle to make it in one of the world’s forgotten places.

The door snicked open. ‘What’re you doing out here?’ Tara, walking up behind him, arms folded against the cold. ‘You’re a grown up now. If you’ve taken up smoking you don’t need to hide it.’

‘I was just thinking…’ he said. The truth close, but still trapped.

‘Yeah?’

‘We should really fix it up out here. It’d be nice so long as it’s safe. The kids can have some outside space without having to go all the way downstairs. Nice.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And in summer… you know, family stuff. I could build a grill. It’d be like living in the suburbs.’ He smiled, but knew his eyes weren’t joining in on the act.

‘We do, I guess. This isn’t central Newport, is it? You OK, sweetheart? You’re acting weird.’

‘Yeah. I just got to thinking is all.’

‘You’re going to think your way to a case of frostbite. Come on inside. I’ve got some things you could help me with.’

‘I want you and the kids to have the right life. I don’t want it to be like it was for us, when I grew up. Just me and Mom and Adam.’

Her hand on his shoulder. ‘I know, and so do the kids. Come on in, Chase. You do good, remember? And all three of us love you for it. Come on in.’

They went inside, out of the frozen night, and locked the door behind them.

05. Patron Saint

Friday. The sun peeking out from behind the distant black slab of the Tower at the far end of the Levels where the twin rivers that bordered it converged. The dark and twisted pin that held the wrecked housing project to the map. Chase was helping Big Eddie Manson push a large box payload hidden in a couple of stitched-together old mattresses on a wheeled cart to the Fording Building, most of the way across the Levels. The weather hadn’t warmed any, and the streets were deserted. Felt like being alone, hauling sledges across the Arctic, all the while with thousands of unseen eyes looking down at them from row after row of blank windows. Eddie had spent most of the journey repeatedly and colorfully cursing the client for not paying enough, or else for not shipping something so big that it would have left Booster no choice but to use ‘Henrietta’, the company van. Henrietta was kept carefully and securely in storage most of the time, brought out only when reward or necessity required it. Booster was ultra-cautious with her; delivery firms from the city with trucks taking goods to stores in the Levels — and there weren’t many of those, just non-corporate local operations unafraid of unionized drivers suing them for putting them in a war zone — always carried a crew of two. ‘Riding shotgun’ was, in such cases, literal. You got into a habit of leaving your vehicle alone on the street while it was being unloaded, and one day it’d be gone. And even if Newport City PD and the neighboring jurisdictions could decide whose job was, they wouldn’t come looking for it unless Satan skated directly out of Hell and demanded their attendance personally. No one reported crime because no one investigated crime.

Chase, tiring of Eddie moaning about how, if they were really unlucky, they’d run into some gang calling themselves ‘the Outsiders’ in the streets near the McEwan Bridge, and wouldn’t that just top off their day? He’d only volunteered to help because he felt like company after what had happened the day before and Eddie was the only one needing backup. Out of nothing much more than a desire to change the subject, he asked, ‘You think there’s a patron saint of runners?’

‘A saint? I ain’t religious, Chase.’

‘Maybe not a saint, then. Like, a guardian angel? Someone looking out for us, and maybe we don’t know about it?’

’We got the Rules. Best rely on them, not some bullshit.’

‘I heard one of the runners once, back when I started, talking about this time he’d been taking a load to the Mazarros and he got jacked by half a dozen guys in a tight street, nowhere to go. Then out of nowhere, this chick comes in, guns out and shooting. Those guys all ended up dead or rolling around on the concrete wishing they were, and then she was gone.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Don’t remember now. Before your time; I was just starting out then.’

‘Sounds like he walked into a turf fight and was too spaced out after to make sense of it. Get close to dying and it does weird things to your head, man. Why you asking me for, anyway? I’ve been a runner for coming on a year. Fuck do I know, y’know?’

‘Just got to wondering last night was all.’

‘You want to head to the Church, wondering like that. If you want an answer other than “I dunno”, anyway. Maybe someone else knows your old runner and what happened to him for sure.’

The Church was a bar on Rockwell. It had originally been a workshop of some sort, but its derelict shell had long ago been reclaimed and repurposed, turned into a drinking establishment for the regular workers of the Levels — and there were still plenty of those, even in a place like this. It had swapped owners a couple of times, but none of them had changed anything.

‘Seriously, I dunno nothing. You’re not hoping we’re gonna get rescued by this patron saint of yours if we run into any Outsiders with twitchy fingers now?’ Shook his head.

Another delivery, solo this time, and it was evening by the time Chase walked into the Church. It wasn’t packed yet, but pretty busy. A couple of women a shade short of forty and a bigger shade over a healthy weight, wearing blood-colored overalls, perched at a table by the counter, arguing about the cost of fuel. A trio of guys Chase’s age, hair specked with plaster dust. Four runners he half-knew, listening to one of their number animatedly recount something they’d seen that day over cold ones. And on. He tried the same story he’d told Big Eddie on a few of the regulars, one way or another, edging around the truth and the real reason for his curiosity. It was a lone runner for one of Booster’s rivals, a woman huddled in an oversized flight jacket covered in ripped patches and held together largely by duct tape, who said, ‘Sounds like the sort of trash Maxim Bishop used to come out with to me. You know him?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘He was a runner too, worked for a few different people. Quit a couple of years ago. Strange guy. He was a long-timer too, like you. Started to go funny in the head, y’know?’

‘Why?’

‘He saw a ghost. Some shit like that.’

‘A ghost.’

She shrugged. ‘The way he talked about it, that’s what it was like. See, Maxim nearly got whacked for his load midway up Block Four.’ One of the quartet of towers that made up the ‘Core’, the four massive high-rises at the centre of the Levels. Chase had been up it himself a couple of times. Nowhere much to go if something went bad up in the air. ‘Some junkie death cult or something, real nutbar, on PCP or lace or whatever, come out of the woodwork and jump him. He’s old, right, been around since the dinosaurs, and no way he can beat this. Staring the end hard in the face. They’re all set to cut out his heart for Kali or whatever the fuck, when he gets saved. See, they look in the load, don’t they? Might as well, before they carve up the sacrifice. And what’s in it I guess isn’t what was supposed to be, not unless someone was ordering a couple of flashbang grenades rigged to go off when it was opened.’

Chase could hear his heartbeat, loud in his ears. ‘Someone changed his load?’

‘I guess. Anyway, everyone’s a mess, and it gives Maxim, whose hearing’s not so great anyway, a chance to get out of Dodge. As he’s doing it, though, he swears blind there’s someone else there with him. Someone he sees in the smoke and the dust. A chick. Not only there, but there enough to kick one of these cult guys in the head when he thinks about stopping Maxim leaving the party. Then he’s gone, like you would be, and he doesn’t see her.’ She drained the last of her beer. ‘So Maxim comes back with what he thinks is a ghost story about some kind of guardian angel, and what everyone else thinks was that the flashbangs scrambled his brain and he just imagined what he saw. He went kinda funny after that.’

‘But no one doubts the grenade part? They were there, or else how did he get out?’

She grinned. Said, ‘Ain’t that just the thing?’

06. A Drift Of Stone Leaves

Maxim lived in a rotting rowhouse on the belt between the Golden Avenue Canal and the Murdoch River. The brickwork was noticeably splintered, slivers calving off in the frost, lying like a drift of stone leaves at the base of the walls. The street was deserted, air chilled and reeking faintly of the canal’s decay. Chase could hear late Eighties goth music echoing flatly from the surrounding buildings like a dance party at the end of the world. A torn strip of ‘BUILDING CONDEMNED’ tape fluttered from a front door whose catch and lock mechanism were long gone. He walked in.

Mold-ridden openings off the entrance hallway, doors kicked in and rooms trashed. The smell of old, faded rat urine. Footprints worn in the plastic that covered the stairs led him to the landing above. The upper floors looked to be in better shape, and from behind one of the apartment doors here he heard a TV playing. Knocked.

‘What the hell?’ The voice was scratchy, emphysemic. Weary. ‘Fuck off. I’m armed. Got God’s own revolver here and I can shoot you through the fucking walls if I want.’

‘Mr Bishop? Maxim?’ he said. ‘I’m a runner, just like you were. There’s something I want to ask you about.’

‘Something wrong with your hearing, boy?’

‘It’s about your guardian angel.’

Silence for a moment. Then Chase heard shuffling feet approach the door. Bolts ratcheting back. When it opened, Maxim immediately starting coughing, lungs trying to hack up rattling lumps and failing. He wasn’t as old as he sounded — Chase figured him for fifty, maybe a couple of years over — but he was underweight and unkempt. No sign of a gun either. He waved Chase in, then shut the door again. The apartment was almost empty. Bare wood, one man’s furniture, and neat stacks of newspapers waiting to be read, or else taken down and tossed in the trash. Boiled vegetable smell.

‘Runner?’ Maxim said, shuffling back to a lone dining chair facing the television. ‘Who’d you work for?’

‘Booster Brookman.’

‘Ah.’ A nod. Grey hair quivering. ‘Decent man, I heard. Never worked for him myself, but a decent man. Right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Long time?’

‘Five years.’

‘Long time. So.’

Chase looked around and found a second chair by the small table at the side of the room. He glanced at Maxim, who nodded, and pulled it over. Sat, uncomfortable. ‘They told me you’d seen something up Block Four, that time you had a payload turned out to be full of flashbangs.’

‘Told you I’d gone crazy too.’

‘Yeah.’

‘If you’re here just to find out, do it some other time. I’m missing my programs. But I don’t think you are.’

‘Something happened to me yesterday.’

‘You saw her.’

‘No, but I heard her.’ He told her about the package. About the bomb and the gun. About the call.

When Chase finished, Maxim looked at him, something sparking behind sallow eyes. ‘So she gives you the chance to get back, and instead you come see me? You decide you want to know who she is? That about right?’

‘I guess. I’m not one for guns.’

‘The people who were going to blow you up, they might not care about that.’ He stood, a slow process that brought on another bout of coughing. Said, ‘Come with me.’

He led Chase through the musty apartment to a locked door at the end of the connecting hall. Fumbled in his pocket for the key. ‘Maybe I did go a little crazy. But you understand what happened to me better than most. I was making a regular run when they jumped me. Talking about how I was going to be a sacrifice. No way for me to get out, not at all. I should’ve died. I tried to make sense of it.’

The door clicked open. Inside, a room as bare as the rest. But the walls, floor, even parts of the ceiling were covered in charcoal drawings, handwritten notes on yellowing paper, maps of the Levels, words and numbers. The drawings were rough, but they were all of a young woman with dark hair, face half-hidden, shadows behind her picking out the smudged halo above her head.

‘I tried to find her,’ Maxim said, stepping carefully into the room. ‘Spent more and more of my time doing it when I should’ve been working. I wasn’t well anyway. Not like I am now, but… You’re less use as a runner when your legs aren’t so good and your breath’s going. I thought I’d found her, but only ever as a shadow. The wake she’d left behind. I knew that was as close as I’d get.’

Chase reached out, running his fingertips over one of the tightly-written collections of notes. A list of names and places dotted across the Levels, all meticulously crossed through. ‘Where was she? Where is she?’

‘I don’t know now. Didn’t even know then. But I think I found her first work.’ The old man pointed to a bunch of papers pinned beneath one of the largest angel drawings. ‘Don’t know if you know of him or not, but there was a guy called Bradstadt. Morten Bradstadt. Worked a few runners out of a place on Shinn Avenue.’

Chase shook his head.

‘Small operation, so no reason you would. Dozens of them across the Levels. I didn’t know him, and I’ve been around longer than you. Supposedly he had a reputation for taking risky loads. High value gang stuff. Three years ago now, something happened — I never found out what, but something bad on one of his jobs — and shortly after that, him and his whole business burned to the ground.’

‘Revenge?’

‘Could be.’

‘She was one of his runners.’

‘That’s what I thought. Or knew someone who was. Bradstadt’s dead and no one’s gonna miss him, so no way to say. Either way, I found signs that it wasn’t just me been saved like that.’ He patted one of his pictures. ‘It’s her. She’s out there, looking out for runners like us. When someone turns on us, sells us out or betrays us, sometimes she steps in, saves us, flips the whole situation round. Like she did with me. Like she did with you.’

Chase stared at the sketches of Bradstadt’s former runner. ‘How’d she know?’

Maxim shrugged, patted him on the shoulder. Breath sounding wet in the pit of his chest. ‘Ain’t that the mystery? But it don’t matter much. She gave you a second chance.’

‘For revenge.’

‘She say that?’

‘She gave me that gun and said I could make things right. I figure that meant I could find the guy who made the bomb and kill him for doing it.’

‘Doesn’t mean it’s for revenge though, does it, boy?’

‘What, then?’

Maxim looked at him. ‘Finish the job she started. You stop to think that maybe whoever did it might want to know why you ain’t dead? That they might come to find out? You might not be one for guns, but if you want to protect what’s yours, you might have to deal with them before they deal with you.’

07. Crossing The T

His name was Rafi, and the way he saw it, he was a negotiator. Sometimes negotiation meant playing hardball, very hardball, and other times it didn’t. He was adept at the former, and he had Trent to deal with the latter. This, he thought as he made his way up the stairs to the runner’s office, was going to be a soft one. A light touch, at least until they had their information. It wouldn’t do to upset the delicate state of play with the Outsiders if it could be avoided. He just needed to know who exactly had failed to deliver their package and where he might be found, and without arousing unnecessary interest in why he wanted to know.

The reek of resin from the hash grower below. He remembered, dimly, visiting such places with his father. Carrying the small packages tucked in his jacket. Skirting more painful memories, and finally closing down this line of thought altogether. Who he’d been and where he’d come from had become irrelevant. Another country, sealed off behind walls constructed over a long time with cocaine and rigorous, disciplined disassociation. His life had begun anew since becoming part of the Castle Square outfit. It was cold and clean and empty, and nothing could touch him. He was Rafi, and he was a negotiator. The negotiator.

‘Quietly, Trent,’ he said. Not that it was needed; the big, morose man was always quiet. Even when doing the most terrible things.

One of the runner’s staff, seeming surprised to see visitors, pointed him to Brookman. Rafi thanked her, polite to a fault, even though she looked a wreck in her tattered coat and taped-up Chuck Taylors. He even knocked on Brookman’s door rather than just walk in. He felt Trent tense beside him as he did it, but the big guy just didn’t understand delicacies.

‘What?’

In. Brookman sat behind a chipped desk, looking pissed. He was stocky, grizzled, eyes wired with stress or nerves. Rafi smiled. ‘Mr Brookman,’ he said. ‘Thank you for seeing us.’

‘I didn’t know I was.’

‘Yet here we are. Can I sit?’

‘I assume if you do you’re gonna give me some reason why the fuck you’re in my office.’

Rafi nodded, took the proffered chair. ‘My name is Rafi. This here is Trent. You spoke with one of my associates yesterday. About a package we were having delivered. One that failed to arrive.’

‘I did, and I explained what happened to it. I don’t like it when a payload doesn’t make it, and believe you me every damn one of my runners knows how high the wire is that they walk, but it does happen. Very rarely, but no service is one hundred per cent perfect.’

‘We paid for the best.’

‘The runner who was carrying it is the best.’ Brookman leaned forward. ‘If it had been regular trouble, he’d have seen it coming and either avoided it or gone straight through it like biscuits through a goose. But it wasn’t. Freak chance, he ran into a pro-grade pickpocket, probably looking for his wallet. End of story.’

Rafi forced himself to look relaxed. ‘And I accept that. Nevertheless, this delivery was valuable, and time-sensitive. I’ve been told to make sure that all, uh, avenues are followed up, nothing missed. We want to recover it, after all.’

‘Like?’

‘Starting at the beginning, are you sure it arrived here? That the runner who collected it from us didn’t do anything with it themselves?’

‘Why would he?’

‘Crossing the “t”s, Mr Brookman. The package we handed over was a box about so big—‘ he held out his hands, mimicking its dimensions, ‘— contained within a white padded envelope, plain, unmarked. Was that what arrived here?’

Brookman shrugged. ‘I guess. I made sure the instructions were clear on it, but I didn’t pay much attention to what it was. I don’t often have anything to do with incoming goods.’

‘Who does?’

‘A couple of people. Sparks was on shift that day, but he’s not in now, otherwise you could ask him.’

‘What about the runner?’

‘Hal Miller’s a good enough guy.’

‘Is he at work now? Could we speak to him?’

‘No, he’s off sick today.’

‘Interesting. Fancy that. What about the delivery guy, the one who had his pockets picked?’

‘He’ll be in tomorrow.’

Rafi raised his eyebrows. ‘Another guy off work today, huh? What are the chances.’

‘Strange way to run a delivery business,’ Trent murmured. ‘No one’s ever here when you need them. Maybe they don’t exist at all. Maybe none of us do.’

Bookman, looking, Rafi thought, unsettled by his companion’s inherent strangeness. Bookman used one hand to rap out each point as he said, ‘Your people asked for reliable on-the-dot service. I gave it to my best guy. We don’t give guarantees, but we do give you a promise that we’ll do our best, and I got a reputation for making sure that happens. Someone fucks up on me, I fuck up on them, for good. That’s the first time my runner’s failed a delivery in five years, and that was only because he ran into someone so good they could lift the payload without him knowing. The odds of that are remote. Probably be another five years until it happens again. So I’ve spoken to your people and I’ve apologized for it, but my runners weren’t at fault; I train them for junkies and gangbangers, not street magician pickpockets. Sometimes rare shit just happens, and no one’s to blame. Life sucks. Sorry. I’ve answered your questions as much as I’m going to, so unless you’ve got any further business here, you gentlemen should get going so I can do my job.’

Trent’s gaze sharp on the side of Rafi’s head. He forced a thin smile. They had the name of the runner who’d collected, and he doubted any of Brookman’s other staff would hesitate to say who their best courier was. It was enough. For now. ‘Of course, Mr Brookman,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your plate right now.’

08. Believe

‘Why are we here again?’ Sally, unimpressed. Chase was ahead of her, picking his way through the weed-grown skeleton of blackened struts and rubble halfway down Shinn Avenue. The burnt husk of a grim two-story structure. A couple of soot-smeared walls still mostly upright and heavily tagged with graffiti. Piles of debris.

‘I want to see if there’s anything left from the old operation that was based out of here. What happened to it and the people.’

‘Really? That so? Well, that explains it. I thought we were just out for a walk and a — of course that’s not what I meant you goddamn idiot. I meant why are we doing this? What’s the big fucking interest? This place has been a wreck for years from the look of it. Why am I here at all?’

‘Something I heard about what happened here.’

‘OK, Mr Evasive. You “heard”.’

He looked back at her. ‘From Maxim Bishop.’

‘Isn’t he batshit?’

‘That’s what they say. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Not totally, anyway.’

She hauled a blackened sheet of particle board off a pile of rubble and frowned. ‘And you’re interested in his not-totally-batshit talk because…? Come on Chase, don’t make me beat the answers out of you. I once hit a guy so hard he shat his colon into his pants.’

‘That’s partly why I asked you here. Anyone takes an interest in us and you can hammer them into paste for me.’

‘Chase…’

‘OK. Do you believe there could be a kind of saint of runners? Like, someone who knows what we do and who’s taken it on themselves to watch our backs?’

‘No. That would be totally fucking—‘

‘Ridiculous, I agree. But something happened to me that makes me think maybe there is someone doing something like that. Maybe not for us, particularly, but for people they think are being screwed over.’ Digging, now, by his feet. There were traces of Bradstadt’s operation still here, fire-damaged and buried in the weeds and broken masonry, but nothing anyone would think to have stolen. Nothing valuable, except to someone wanting information. He wondered if Maxim had ever come here and done the same; and if he had, whether he’d kept what he’d found or left it be. He glanced back at Sally. Said, ‘And if what Maxim says is right, she’s not doing it because she’s a nice person, but because the same thing happened to her. She’s doing it as a way of getting revenge on the world. And it started here.’

Sally didn’t say anything else, but Chase was pretty sure she either thought he was lying, or that he was nuts. And maybe he was both. He carried on pulling through the detritus, arson archaeology. It wasn’t easy; part of the walls might still have been standing, but the fire had brought down the entire roof, dropping a thick belt of masonry right on top of anything that might have been useful. There were seams of paper fragments like minerals in rock, some charred to ash, some more or less intact. Customer records, probably. He knew Booster had similar files. Who ordered what taken and when. Very useful if someone claimed their load had been jacked. Good, too, to know who your regulars were and when you might want to call on them yourself. Business. Payroll.

Cut: 4/1-something burned and gone

$40 Aaron Ja-

$86 Alice L-

$53 An-

Ash. A corner strip from — what? A staffer list? Pay for the week?

Then Sally yelled behind him. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Chase! We got dead people!’

He spun, hurried over. She was kneeling next to a pile of stones she’d been excavating. There was a splintered square of blackened timber in it, six-feet-by-four chipboard. She was staring at it, twitchy.

‘Under that?’

‘Yeah. Sorry, just got me by surprise is all. Didn’t mean to freak out like that.’ Like just about everyone who grew up in the Levels, she would have seen her fair share of corpses, even before the Sharp Riots. Chase occasionally passed junkies in the street, slumped against the walls or in long-disused bus shelters, asleep or dead and no way to tell the difference. Most of the time there was no city cleanup either. People did it themselves: tossed them into the Murdoch and let them blend in with the hundreds of suicides that happened each year if they didn’t know them, burned them or buried them in Hungary Field if they did, before the rats or the dogs got to them. If they were lucky.

No need to worry about it with this guy. Beneath the board was a blackened skeleton, some of its bones cracked and splintered when the roof gave way. Nothing fleshy left years later, not, Chase figured, that there was likely to have been that much after the fire anyway. Soot-smeared jewellery, some of it looking like it had been warped by the heat.

‘What’s that?’ Sally said.

Lying between the skull and the busted jawbone, turned yellow and orange by either the fire or — Chase tried not to picture it wedged in the corpse’s mouth as the flames roared around it, sizzling and popping as the boiling fluid soaked it. Turned yellow and orange by one thing or another. A screwed-up ball of parchment-dry paper. He gently removed it, laid it on a flat concrete shard well out of any breeze and very carefully tried to open it out. It cracked, planing away at each crease and fold as soon as he tried, and some of the outermost layer was too heavily charred to read, but with Sally helping he was able to reconstitute most of what there was.

It was a handwritten letter. The same writing as on the records he’d found earlier. Scrunched up and shoved down the dead guy’s throat before the building was torched.

… so she’ll be coming along Saint Clair. I’ll tell her there’s a change in the details, that it’s got to be there for nine. I got you her picture. Name’s Mary-Alice, but everyone calls her Alice. Half Chink or something. You watch for her, take her someplace like the alleys out back of Bassler’s. You know how much what she’s carrying’s worth. Fifty-fifty, J. We each got it in writing now, so we both know neither one’s going to fuck the other. I’ve given you the info. You deal with the girl, we split it. So long as we got a corpse I can square it. Make it messy. Story’s an easier sell for me then. No guarantees in this business. You got the goods, we’ll arrange the split.

- Mort.

‘Alice,’ Chase said. ‘Her name was Alice.’

09. Worry Sometimes

‘What the ever living hell, Chase?’ Tara, freaking out at him as she had been since he walked through the front door and into a shitstorm. As she never had done before. Arms folded, eyes like pinholes. Furious, and, worse, afraid. ‘Two guys come here looking for you, looking for us, and you don’t say anything to me about trouble. What the goddamn hell?’

The way it happened, she told him, was that the kids had gone out back to play with the Sagans from down the block. The four of them, with a couple of other friends, had been trying to build some sort of fortress in the rubble for going on a year now without any sign that it was actually nearing completion.

She’d gone downstairs to see one of their neighbors about some work needed doing when she’d heard someone talking to Mrs Fiakolski, and the thing that stopped her dead was that they were asking her about Chase. Two guys, one doing most of the talking, the other sort of waiting there, like he was powered-down in place.

‘Just think for a moment, ma’am,’ the talker had said. ‘He works as a courier. He has a young family. His name’s Chase. It’s important that I get in touch with him; his sister’s real ill and I don’t know how long she’ll hold out.’

Mrs Fiakolski had been silent for a moment, then shook her head. ‘There was a man maybe like that,’ she’d told him. ‘Moved out a few months ago. I think he lives on Pick Row now. Somewhere near there. I have not seen him since, and I see everyone, you know? Now let me get back to my vegetables.’

Tara had watched the two men leave. Saw the quiet one pause, look along the gap at the back of the block, to where Donnie and Louisa were playing. Felt her heart hammer against her ribs as fear surged through her. Then the other guy, the talker, said something and shook his head, and they’d gone. Mrs Fiakolski had asked if she’d done right by lying, said that she hadn’t trusted the two men, that they smelled of trouble. Tara had thanked her by bursting into tears.

Now she was just pissed. ‘What the hell have you done, Chase?’

‘Nothing. I’ve done nothing.’ He started towards her, arms raised to comfort her, calm her down. Then he thought better of it and ended up just sort of rocking in place awkwardly.

‘Have you ripped something off from work? You swore Booster just ran a delivery outfit, nothing too bad. You take something that someone wants back?’

‘Don’t be crazy, sweetheart. I’m not an idiot. I’m not my brother.’

‘So why were they here? Why have I got to worry about whether our kids are safe?’

‘I don’t know.’ That, at least, was truth. More or less. ’Look, a couple of days ago…’

‘What? A couple of days ago, what?’

The lie battled the truth, and it had better weapons. This wasn’t a time when he could give her a simple explanation for what had happened, why he’d hidden the gun from her, and expect her to understand. And he realized that what he’d done — taking the pistol and keeping it — had nothing to do with these two men. They’d shown up because he was still alive and the bomb was gone, not because of anything he’d done. The woman, Alice, if it really was her, had chosen this. The guys who’d sent the bomb had chosen this. Not him. And he wasn’t going to make things worse by confusing the issue. ‘A couple of days ago,’ he said, edging close enough to the truth to give the lie substance, ‘one of my loads got lifted. I didn’t see who did it, but it was gone. Booster straightened it with the client, but maybe they’re still not happy. That’s all I can think it could be.’

‘Why in blue fuckery didn’t you tell me?’

‘Aside from it pissing me off as much as it pissed Booster off, it wasn’t a major deal. It happens. You got me too busy talking about other things.’

‘You should have said.’

‘And next time you can bet your ass I will.’ Starting to feel genuinely angry now, at her as well as the strangers.

Aware, then, of breathing behind the front room door. He closed his eyes for a moment, willed himself calm. Shook his head as she went to continue the argument, and said, ‘Come on in, kiddo.’

Donnie, clutching his big sister’s hand. Both of them with tired eyes and pinched, uncertain expressions. ‘Why are you shouting?’ he said, voice very small indeed.

‘We just do, sometimes. Grown-ups do.’ He wondered how much they’d heard, whether they knew Tara had been afraid they were in danger. ‘Your mom just gets worried sometimes.’

‘We both do.’ Tara, trying a reassuring smile.

‘And when people get worried, or they get worked up, they end up shouting. It’ll blow over, guys. See, now we’re all talking normally, right?’

‘Why were you worried, Mom?’

‘Just something that came up at your dad’s work, Donnie. It’ll get sorted soon. Won’t it, sweetheart?’

Chase, nodding, trying to look optimistic. But she was right; his own safety was one thing, but looking at the three of them right then, he knew there was no way he’d willingly put them at even the slightest risk. Tomorrow they’d have to go and stay with a friend somewhere, someplace out of reach. And he’d find out who’d been willing to kill him, and why.

10. The Traps

‘He’s dead.’ That’s what Sally muttered to him, passing in the corridor at Booster’s. If there were people after Chase, and his family, walking into the place they must know he worked was crazy. But it was also the only way he was going to be able to find out who those people might be. With that in mind, he’d snuck in through a side entrance that was ostensibly part of the building next door, but which in reality had been knocked through and rigged with a ladder so the pot growers had a panic exit. Nothing anyone would be watching if he was lucky. Word was, two guys had come to see Booster the day before, probably the same two guys who’d been looking for him near the apartment.

According to Gordy, it was Hal Miller who’d collected the package with the bomb in it, the one Chase had broken the rules for. Hal, who’d not shown for work in two days. The pickup point was one Chase knew for a blind, a dead property on Powder House Road used over the years solely for handovers of one sort or another. He’d made a delivery there himself once, shown up with a duct-taped box to find three guys in ski masks and a bound hostage in front of them. He’d handed over the payload to one of them, they’d thanked him and he’d left. He had no idea what had been in the box. Rule One.

Dead, Sally said. Maybe, maybe not. Hal, Chase knew, had a hideaway that he kept secret from most everyone. Only reason Chase knew was because he’d had to carry Hal back to it one night when he’d been hit by a truck he swore was driven by a vengeful ex-girlfriend.

Back out the side door, into the grey hard light of morning. A knot of alcoholics making their way along the far side of the street, shouting semi-coherently at one another. Bottles of unlabelled liquor. And, on the corner they’d just come from, three guys in mismatched black bomber jackets, hanging around like leg-breakers for the Mob. They spotted him about the same time he saw them. One of them reached into his coat.

Run.

Cut hard right, straight across them. Trusted his knowledge of the Levels against theirs, and the alley here would take him across Frost’s Culvert and into better country to lose them than the opposite direction and the wide, flat routes to the river’s foot. Heard a gunshot and the bullet crack as it hit the wall behind him. Feet hammering over flattened cardboard sheet, past ancient accretions of trash washed against the sides. Shouts behind him, the men, yelling at him to stop or they’d kill him. Chase ignored them, ducked left and found himself sprinting across the narrow plank bridge across the deep, narrow cleft of the culvert, a poured concrete sluiceway, dry, that ran between the Broad Street and Elliston canals.

The makeshift bridge shuddered and thrummed beneath him as he ran, but he made it to the far side as the first of his pursuers skidded around the corner, didn’t see the bridge in time to react and overshot out into nothing. The thud and crash as he smacked, broken, into the culvert’s floor, screaming.

Then Chase was away again, up a strip of chainlink and down the other side. Round two more turns, then he was running across the narrow paths and polework of the Traps. Here there was a confluence of old entryways to the old City Freight tunnels, with long-gone pump workings and run-off ducting leading to the river. It occupied a central square lined with tenements on one side, junk shanties on the other, and ruins of what had been commercial works all over. Some of the locals had taken to stringing out masses of animal traps, dangling down into the sunken central rail works from ground level walkways like fishing nets out for the rats and worse things that lived down in the dark. The floor of the Traps was a mess of things designed to snare and maim just about anything that trod on them; only the rickety woodwork used to service them and collect the kills was safe, and then only if you were lucky.

Chase danced over the web of pathways, need keeping his feet quick and steady. Partway across, he heard a yelp behind him. Risked a glance back to see one of the remaining men looking down into the pit. His colleague’s foot protruding up into free air, hopelessly entangled in snare lines. It was over. He skipped across the remaining planks and vanished into the shelter of the Levels’ concrete arteries.

Ten minutes later he was dropping into the disused flood channel where Hal Miller holed up. The pitted artificial gully was filmed with old frost and frozen drifts of flotsam and wind-tossed trash. Visible at the top of the biggest and thickest of these, wedged against the wreckage of a rusted footbridge that had fallen to the bottom, was the corroded roof of an old Airstream. Chase slipped through Hal’s carefully-arranged gaps and tunnels in the debris and knocked at a door hidden from the outside world by an overhang of packing waste and asbestos sheeting.

‘Hal, man. It’s Chase. If you’re home then we need to talk,’ he said. Added, after a moment’s thought, ‘I’m alone. No one tailing me.’

A long wait, and then something rattled and thunked inside. The door opened a crack and Hal was wedged in the opening, staring out with the barrel of a sawn-off for company.

‘No one with you?’ he said. ‘You sure about that?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure. Some guys tried it when I left Booster’s, but I got them stuck in the Traps. They’re long gone.’

‘Booster’s? Tsk. Mistake, Chase. You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘In, then.’ He opened the door long enough for Chase to slip through, then snicked it closed again and dropped a bar across to seal it. The funk inside the trailer wasn’t so bad, not by Levels standards anyway, but Chase figured it’d get worse. Wasn’t like this thing was plumbed into the sewage system. It was a hideout, not a second home. Furnishings amounted to a portable propane stove, a sofa bed someone must’ve tossed in the channel outside, and a mess of boxes and crates.

‘How’re you doing, Hal? When they said you hadn’t shown for work for a while, I was worrying.’

‘Doing better than I would be if I went to work, you see? People came looking for me at home. Word on the grapevine is that it’s that last pickup I made. Something went screwy with it, and someone’s gotta pay. Let them have some other dumb fuck, way I figure.’

Chase sat on a crate, hoping Hal’s crazy hadn’t gone so far as to make him want to buy land mines. ‘I’m the other dumb fuck, Hal,’ he said.

‘Wow, tough break.’

‘It was me had the delivery run on that payload. It got taken en route. The people who sent it have been to Booster’s, and they’ve been looking for me at home. I can’t have my family involved in this.’

‘What happened to the load?’

‘If I knew that for certain I might not be here. Someone got it without you, me or anyone else knowing. Thing is, what they were sending was a bomb.’

‘How’d you know?’

‘Doesn’t matter right now. They were sending a bomb so they could take out the receiver. Would’ve killed me too. Who were they? Who’d you make the pick up from?’

He shrugged. ‘Regular people.’ Which, in the Levels, could mean just about anything. ‘Thing is, I recognized one of them, maybe. Don’t think he knew me. Small time from Castle Square or Boothferry Pleasant.’

Chase knew both of them, neighboring housing developments, though he’d never had cause to visit. Nothing much places, the pair of them. ‘There’s a lot of small-timers round there, as I hear it.’

‘I guess. Helped my cousin score meth there once, a year or so back.’

‘Why would some local operation be building or shipping bombs? That’s got to be above their pay grade.’

‘Maybe they’re moving up. How do you know it was a bomb?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Could anything have happened to the package while you had it?’

‘Doubt it, but it’s possible, I guess. If something was going to happen to it, be more likely while it was sitting in the mail room at Booster’s. But what I mean is, how do you know? Like, if someone told you that’s what it was inside, or whatever, I guess it didn’t go off, right?’

‘Sure.’

‘So how do you know it was ever going to? Maybe someone just wanted you to think that’s what it was.’

A feeling like cold water on the back of Chase’s spine. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘Well that’s the question, ain’t it? I’m just saying, is all. Can’t trust anyone. Not at all.’

Hal flinched as Chase’s cell phone rang. Sally Sneakers. ‘You’ve got to come see this,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘It’s your girl.’

11. Every Time The Sun Sets

This was, exactly as Sally said, where it had happened. A service alley just like any other in the Levels, except for the huge mural plastered across one empty wall in multicolored spraybomb. It showed a girl in silhouette, hovering like a Passover angel above a trio of scenes: a burning building, a bleeding and injured figure hunched against a wall while wolves circled around her, and a motley and heavily stylized collection of individuals, almost all in silhouette themselves. Some of these looked fresher than others. There were other things as well — a flower in bloom, a bird, and a little girl dancing or spinning around. Nothing to indicate what, exactly, they’d meant to the artist.

‘This is it,’ Sally said. ‘The place it happened. This is where a gang called the Loco Norte ambushed your saint of runners and supposedly killed her.’

Chase, running his fingertips over the painting. Wondering how often she returned to it. Whether each silhouette figure represented an enemy, or a runner she’d helped. If there was one up there somewhere for him yet. There were dozens of them. ‘How’d you find out?’ he said.

‘Had a run for the Ghostwoods Boys near Bradstadt’s place. I mentioned it in passing, y’know, casual-like. Turned out they knew a guy knew a guy… someone knew that one of Bradstadt’s people got whacked on this block. Not like this thing’ — she waved at the mural — ‘is hard to miss.’

‘So this is it.’

‘That’s your Alice up there.’

‘Supposed to be dead.’

‘That’s what they said. One of them knew a guy in the Loco Norte, and apparently they hit a girl here for the payload she was carrying. Left her carved up in a pool of blood for people to find. Except — get this — no one ever did. Same gangbangers checked back a while after, and she’d vanished. What he said the Loco Norte guy told him was, she wasn’t in no state to breathe, let alone walk away, but she was still upped and gone. Now the gang’s all gone too; killed or run off. And there’s this on the wall. So I guess this is your Alice’s work, and she survived after all.’

‘I guess. Wonder who everyone else is. Bradstadt’s place. I guess that’s supposed to be her with those wolves, how they tried to kill her. Don’t know about the others. What about the little girl?’

‘Beats me. You’re the nut. So.’ She kicked a rusted Red Stripe can down the alley, perched herself on top of a corroded metal dumpster. ‘What the fuck?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean sneaking around the office, asking questions, going off the radar. I mean talking to Maxim Bishop. I mean, the fuck.’

‘Did you ever have a dream of what you wanted your life to be, Sal?’ Looking, still, at the spraypaint angel. ‘Like, what you hoped it would be, how you hoped it would be?’

’No.’ Tone clipped, final. A verbal wall thrown up to protect the deeper truth.

‘I did. When I was younger. Never knew who my dad was, and I could see, the same way we all do, how life here makes you. I even saw it in my kid brother, Adam, and I wasn’t going to have it happen to me. I was going to get out. Not to do anything special, just to do it someplace else.’

‘You and everyone else.’

‘I guess,’ he said. ‘My dream never worked out. But it changed. Tara and the kids — that’s the dream now. I work hard so they don’t have to have the same worries I did when I was a child, so that even in a place like this, they can have a stable life.’ He brushed his fingertips over the mural again. ’This girl, who I’ve never even met, some crazy with a guardian angel complex, stopped that dream from being taken away too. The guys who came to Booster’s, whoever they work for shipped a bomb because they wanted to kill the guy they sent it to. Would’ve killed me when I delivered it. Somehow she got it, either broke into Booster’s and swapped it out of the mail room, or else took it off Hal Miller after he picked it up without him noticing. So I’m still alive. Maxim might be crazy and the idea of all this is sure weird, but it’s real.’

Sally was quiet for a while. ‘When I was little, I just wanted my mom to be OK,’ she said. ‘We lived a block from Sanctuary Tower. It wasn’t a good neighborhood — you know it’s not now, sure, but it’s worse when you’re a kid. A lot of crazies round there, like they’re drawn to it, but they can only get so close before the fear of it balances out, and they get stuck. Like they’re in orbit, y’know? And on top of that, you always worry that people from the Tower are gonna come in the night and just snatch you. Like the boogeyman, except you know it’s real because it’s right there out the window, and every time the sun sets you’re in its shadow. Mom had something bad with her lungs, got so she could do less and less before she couldn’t breathe or passed out, coughing blood. I had to look after us both. So you grow up tough, extra-tough, because you gotta front it. Any time you’re out buying food, or cashing a disability check, or doing whatever you do, you’re on the whole time. Every rat-fuck’s out to get you, so you set your face like you’re gonna tear the balls off anyone so much as looks funny at you, and you never, ever give an inch to anyone. You never let it slip, not for an instant, until you’re just like that without thinking about it. But all the time, underneath, I just wanted Mom to be OK again. She died when I was eleven.’

Chase couldn’t think of anything to say. Sally wasn’t even looking at him, but up, away at the distant sky or something down the long road of memory.

Shadows, then, at the end of the alleyway. Three guys in Damn Nation gang colors. Way off turf, so he figured them for hired muscle. A wolf-whistle from behind them, and more of them back there. A couple more crowning the rooftops either side.

Surrounded. Just like Alice had been.

12. Adrenaline And Instinct

‘Chase Harrell!’ the apparent leader of the Damned — what everyone called the Nation guys — yelled, up on the rooftop to their right. ‘You’re coming with us!’

‘Ambush spot,’ Chase muttered. ‘Nice.’

‘Failed ambush spot,’ Sally said. ‘And there’s two of us. Group of three, ten o’clock. Get through and run like fuck.’

She didn’t wait for an answer, just took off, and Chase found himself haring along in pursuit without thinking about it. Sally dropped the length of taped rebar out of her sleeve and caught it in her hand, held hidden from the three men ahead of them. She split right, so Chase angled left. Wished he had a weapon too, but it was too late for that. No guns, at least on the trio ahead of them, just blades. Sally skidded as she reached them, slid under her target’s reach and cracked him between the legs with the length of steel with enough force to splinter his pelvis. Chase tried to turn his guy’s lunge, keep the knife away, but he felt the blade slide along his forearm, slashing through his coat and opening a gash along the bone. Hurt like a motherfucker, but so did the headbutt he landed on the bridge of the guy’s nose. Moving at a run, the crunch was very, very loud. Chase kneed the guy in the nuts on the follow-through, trying not to break stride. Turned to see Sally, back on her feet and bleeding from her back either from the slide or from a knife wound, land a finishing blow on the side of the third man’s head. The rest of the Damn Nation foot soldiers were closing, fast, behind her.

She bent and grabbed his knife, then tossed Chase the rebar like throwing a relay baton. Broke into a run, and shouted, ‘Like fuck, Chase. Go!’

Out of the alleyway, no time and too much adrenaline to think, and Sally behind him. A lone rake of gunfire and he ducked right, relying on instinct to steer him to safety. Little-used street with no one in sight. Pounding footsteps behind him, but it might’ve been an echo. Two guys, some other part of the ambush party, broke from the intersection ahead, and Chase snapped across the street, dived down a narrow gap between apartment blocks. Found the courtyard beyond was a dead end and he knew they were closing fast. He switched back against the wall, swung the rebar the moment the first Damn Nation guy reached the gap — just enough of a glimpse to be sure it wasn’t Sally; no idea what had happened to her — and the steel caught him right between the teeth. Enamel splinters in a bloody eruption around his face, and the momentary scream choked and died as momentum carried him further into the blow, dislocated his jaw and forced his tongue down the back of his throat.

The second guy circled out of the entry ready for a fight, giving his dying friend as wide a berth as he could. Chase, the pressure of limited time weighing on him, said, ‘You want to end up like him? You could get the fuck outta here.’

The Damned grinned and shook his head. Chase stepped in like he was going for a wild swing, but stopped suddenly, a shade out of the guy’s reach as he took the feint and lunged with the knife. Chase turned the rebar, switched to a backhand, and smashed it into his temple. He dropped, burbling involuntarily as his brain scrambled for a moment, and Chase hit him again, then again. You fucked the other guy up and made sure he stayed fucked up. That’s how it went.

Shouting, out in the street beyond. He didn’t have time to figure out what was going on, only enough to figure out a way to scramble over the courtyard wall and put some distance between himself and his pursuers before the adrenaline turned sour. Huddled out back of a burned-out convenience store, shaking as he tightened ripped strips of his shirt around the slash to his arm, he wondered if Sally had made it. Tried to call her on the number she’d rang him from earlier, but there was no answer.

He found her once he figured enough time had passed to be safe to return to the area where they’d been ambushed. Came at it warily, checking all the approaches, not wanting to be surprised again. They must have gotten separated when Chase made the turn away from the gunfire. She’d gone the other way, made it almost a block before, somehow, they’d got her. She was lying, cold blood pooled around her, her clothes sodden and red from more stab wounds and slashes than Chase could count. Drag marks, a little way away from her, meant she must’ve gotten a couple of them before the end. He’d pulled her into this by asking her along when he went to Bradstadt’s, and whatever madness had taken over his life had now taken hers.

Chase hunkered down next to the body of his friend, throat choked but no tears would come. Cold, knowing that what had happened here could just as easily happen to Tara, to the kids, if he couldn’t somehow end it. If it hadn’t already slipped far enough from his control to do so.

Ringing from the cell phone in his pocket. He didn’t recognize the number, but although it took a moment to place it, he knew the voice on the other end when it said, ‘Hey, brother.’

‘Adam?’

‘Lovely family you’ve got, Chase. Just lovely.’

13. Fragile

Tara, flinging her whole life into a suitcase. Not, she promised herself, that this was going to last more than a couple of days. Not if Chase wanted to keep all his body parts, anyway. She could hear the kids arguing between themselves about what they would and wouldn’t take in their bags.

A couple of days. No more than that.

‘Donnie, Louisa!’ she yelled. ‘Five more minutes, kids, then it’ll be time to get moving.’

‘Mom, I can’t fit my Monsterosaurus! Can we still take it?’

Chase had found it in the Aiken Field market a year ago, a slightly battered but still functional battery-powered toy dinosaur, a little over a foot high, wired to a control box with buttons to make it roar, walk, turn around or swoosh its tail. None of them knew what species it was, not being dinosaur experts, so it had come to be known as the Monsterosaurus. Donnie’s most precious possession.

‘Just what you can get in the bag, Donnie. Monsterosaurus will be perfectly safe here. We’re only going to be at Jenna’s for a day or two.’

Pictured the stupid plastic thing sitting in the deserted apartment and Donnie missing it while they were away, and Tara wanted to cry. They all worked to hack out a stable life from the wreck and poverty of a place like the Levels, but even then it was still so fragile. She blinked hard a few times, forced herself to breathe. Wedged some more clothes in her case and zipped it shut.

Donnie was sullenly holding his backpack. He’d made Monsterosaurus a nest out of discarded clothes and left him a small pile of action figures to eat. His big sister was still figuring out how to close her overfilled bag. ‘Why do we have to go to Jenna’s anyway, Mom?’ she said. ‘I can’t fit my school stuff in.’

‘You don’t need it; I can’t get you both to school while we’re away. Too difficult. I’ll phone the pair of you in sick.’

‘But why are we going?’

‘They need to do some work on the water pipes,’ Tara said. It was the best lie she’d been able to come up with. ‘We won’t have any water for a couple of days and I don’t want to have to deal with that. Jenna’s got enough space and we’ll be fine there.’

‘We had a couple of days last summer when the water didn’t work and we didn’t have to move out then.’

‘It wasn’t great, was it? You remember we had to keep making trips to the standpipe with those big plastic cans? It’s too cold to be doing that this time of year.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘Come on, sweetheart. Get your bag closed and let’s go.’

Out, into the stairwell. Tara closed and locked the door and tried not to fear that she was doing it for the last time. Jenna was a good friend, had a daughter of her own — originally two of them, but one had died four years before from TB. They’d be OK with her. It’d pass. Forced herself to believe that.

‘Is Dad coming with us too?’ Donnie said as they headed downstairs. ‘When’s he coming?’

‘After work.’

‘This isn’t because you were arguing, is it?’ Small face set hard with the effort of trying to look like the question didn’t matter much to him.

‘Don’t be crazy, kiddo,’ she said. ‘Dad’ll meet us at Jenna’s. He just has to work, that’s all.’

‘OK, I guess.’

She caught herself gnawing her lip as she led them downstairs and out to the front door. Trying not to make it look like they were sneaking away, like there was anything at all for the kids to be afraid of. In a way it was better they were worried about her and Chase — it kept them occupied, stopped them noticing any other strangeness in their mother.

‘Wait a second, kids.’ She opened the door a crack, stuck her head through. The street looked empty. Dozens of shadows, gaps, places you could hide if you were going to watch for someone leaving the building. But no one, at least, waiting for them on the sidewalk.

‘What’re you doing, Mom?’ Louisa said behind her.

‘Checking to see if it’s raining.’

‘We could see that upstairs.’

‘I don’t want our things to get wet,’ she said, hating herself for lying, knowing her own children didn’t trust her. ‘I’m just being careful. Let’s go.’

Jenna lived three blocks away in a small row house bordering the thorn-snarled stretch of dead grass that was Hartfield Park. Not a long walk, but it felt like it would take an age. Tara was kicking herself for not owning a good big backpack; the tail wheels on the suitcase made a rumbling noise as she pulled it down the street that she felt sure could be heard all the way down to the Tower.

A block gone. Out of sight of their home, and a twist in her gut, the fear that she’d never be going back. Past two dope heads swapping tourniquets on the curb who didn’t even register her presence.

Two blocks gone. A cold wind picking up, and Donnie talking about Monsterosaurus and how he hoped the big dinosaur was all right without him.

Three, and the turn onto Jenna’s street.

Two guys waiting there, and somehow she’d been tailed, or watched, and they’d picked this spot to intercept. The same two guys she’d seen talking to Mrs Fiakolski. One of them, the quiet one, slid his hand into his coat and left it there.

She didn’t tell the kids to run. She didn’t dare.

14. Six Hours

Castle Square was both a grubby cluster of four-story housing blocks and the namesake plaza of desolate empty concrete that they framed, one of dozens of such developments across the Levels. Chase had known of it, known plenty like it, but had never actually been there until now. To where his brother lived, and held court, in a garish two-bed apartment halfway down a hallway the color of bile.

‘Hey, brother.’ Adam, again, sitting sprawled on the couch in front of him like a king on his throne. Four guys with him, at least a couple of them looking like the ones who’d chased him to the Traps, and one more on the door outside. All of them dressed and geared like the dick-waving gangster wannabes Chase had spent half his working life steering clear of. He tried to reconcile what he saw now with his last memories of Adam. Trouble, but not like this. Angry at Chase for some imagined slight or insult towards Mom before she died. The same confused kid he’d always been, just taller and louder. ‘Long time no see.’

‘What the hell, Adam? Where are they?’

‘Dumb fucking luck, Chase. I just needed a courier to deliver a little surprise to some friends who wouldn’t have trusted none of my guys to come close with anything bigger than a box of matches. I didn’t know it was gonna be you. Guess I couldn’t have done. I stopped giving a shit what you do when you walked out on me and Mom, like you was too good for us.’ He ground out his cigarette. ‘They’re OK. So far. Safe someplace nice and close. Wouldn’t even have needed them, maybe, if you’d gone with the Damn Nation guys I had after you.’

‘So let them go. You don’t need them now. I don’t even know why you need me. I don’t have your bomb.’

‘Got it lifted out of your pocket, the way I hear it.’ He shook his head. ‘Sloppy, Chase.’

‘That’s the way it goes.’

‘Thing is, Chase, it ain’t the bomb I need. What I need is for the job I wanted done to be done. You fucked that up for me, bro. There I was, all set to meet with the Outsiders’ leadership, talk over some bullshit percentage deal. One little kaboom in the right place and I control everything coming in over the McEwan, and a lock on their turf. Dope trade’s picking up again, and I gotta expand to stay afloat, you understand? The Outsiders aren’t happy that I blew off the meet, and they’re paranoid sons of bitches most times anyway. I don’t get a second bite of that cherry. So now I need an alternative. Brother.’ A thin, cold smile.

‘Jesus, Adam. What the hell happened to you?’

His brother shrugged, settled back on the couch. ‘Made something of myself, just like you would’ve wanted. If you’d cared enough to stick around. Besides, you’re the one married a hooker.’

‘She was never a hooker.’

‘Not what I heard.’

Chase knew his brother wanted him to rise to it, but he couldn’t help it. ‘She danced for a few weeks at a place in Aspen Circle. Which doesn’t fucking matter; you’re trying to become a big-shot dope dealer and you’re taking your own fucking in-laws hostage to do it. Why the fuck should anyone justify anything to you?’

‘Easy there. You’ll give yourself a coronary, and wouldn’t that just be a pain in the ass. I need you to do what you should’ve done a couple of days ago. Can’t do that if you’re dead. Ain’t much good to your family either, that happens.’

‘I never walked out on you and Mom. She got it in her head I wanted to get away from her, like I was above where we’d came from. But it wasn’t ever true. Hurt me that she shut me out. You, you I didn’t have to walk out on. You were already gone, one way or another. I didn’t realize you were going to end up here, but you weren’t ever easy. So don’t give me that crap.’

‘You want to hear what you got to do? Because if you want to see that hooker wife of yours again, brother, you gotta do it.’ Tapping his finger on the top of his cigarette packet like it was a judge’s gavel.

Chase, afraid for his family before, now just good and angry. He said nothing. Allowed Adam to continue even though he wanted badly to punch him in the face.

‘The Outsiders hole up in the waste ground in Bridge Approach. Got a kind of camp behind the old chainlink. Pretty tight. Sentries all over, and they’ll kill what they don’t know. They’re led by a guy called Savage. Him and two others, Ralphie and Dyno, were the ones we was talking to. You get into the camp and take out Savage. The other two as well. Got to cut off the whole head or else they’ll just grow back. Kill them, then come back. And bring something with you so I know you’ve done it. Then you get your family back.’

‘How am I supposed to get to see them?’

‘You’re a courier, ain’t you?’ Adam said. ‘And you coulda mended things between you and Mom any time you wanted. She would’ve listened. Now you’d best be going, Mr Best Runner There Is, because you take too long and maybe something bad happens to that pretty hooker wife and them kids of yours. Give you six hours from now. Ten in the P M. Enough time to celebrate after. Tick tock, bro.’

‘All this talk of Mom, what would she think of you if she was here right now?’

‘Not my problem. Not now. Tick tock.’

15. Painting In The Dark

Six hours.

Chase walked out into the street, cold light spearing the back of his eyes like shards of frozen tears. He wasn’t thinking of his wife or kids, though part of him expected to be. He felt empty, hollow. Nothing inside to cling to any more but the steel hard knowledge that he was going to see his family again, whatever it took. Rule Two. He just had to figure out how, and do it.

Adam’s mission was suicide. He could probably get in to see the Outsiders’ leader Savage easily enough, maybe even smuggle a weapon in with him. But he’d be dead before he could get away. Chase was a runner, not a fighter. So that wasn’t an option. He considered, briefly, trying to involve the Tower. Go to Sanctuary Park and put a mark in what they called the ‘Death Book’, a litany of calls for justice and vengeance that the strange, terrifying denizens of the Tower itself would investigate and act upon. Closest the Levels came to law enforcement. But he’d never used it before, and from what he’d heard, it took days for the Tower to claim a victim. Too long. Anyway, the Tower was supposed to be in some kind of state of flux. He’d heard maybe there was going to be a change at the top, some kind of succession, an heir to Sorrow, its leader. Even less chance of help coming in time, if so.

Alternatives.

Five hours.

‘What you want, man?’ The run of rusty chainlink along the Bridge Approach waste ground. One of the construction sites left barely started when work on the Levels was abandoned after Sanctuary Tower’s foundations collapsed. The gate was gone, but in its place someone had erected a roadblock from oil cans and concrete blocks in years past, closed by a makeshift bar from a length of steel pipe. The man at the barrier was an Outsider, had a dye-job vulture plastered across the back of his coat, carrion charms strung from a leather thong around his neck. There was a second sentry, crouched on top of the heap, smoking.

‘I’m here to talk to Savage.’

‘Do you, uh, have an appointment, sir?’ Sniggering from both of them.

‘No,’ Chase said. ‘But he’s going to want to hear this.’

‘That so?’

‘Someone really wants him dead.’

A smile, then. ‘A lot of people want Savage dead. Some of us here would, but we’re afraid to. It’s natural order when you’re at the top. If he was afraid of that, he wouldn’t be top, see.’

Chase felt anger and frustration choking his throat. Every jumped-up Levels fuck, every little thug who thought that he was important because he held sway over half a block of ruined buildings no one else would ever give a rosy red shit about. Every living abortion whose pisswater ego was more important to them than Chase’s family. Weighing on him. Pushing back at him, as they always had. He didn’t need the Outsiders for this, but they’d sure help. ‘This one’s different,’ he said. ‘This one would’ve succeeded if I hadn’t stopped him. This one’s trying to make out he’s a friend when all he’s planning is wiping you guys out.’

Quiet for a second. ‘And?’

Chase had them and he knew it. ‘And I know where he lives and how you can take him.’

Four hours.

Down the hall at Booster’s for what felt like the last time. Found himself looking at the layers of stickers that coated the wall, thinking of them as tree rings, archaeology. How different they’d been when he’d first started here, the personal marks of runners long gone, some dead, most quit or moved on. Territorial tagging, something that they could only freely do here, away from the strictures of the Rules in the outside world. It occurred to him that he’d never left anything himself. Never had anything he identified with strongly enough to want to use as a mark. Now he wished he had a photo, a picture of his family, serving as both a good luck prayer scroll and an emblem of all he’d leave behind if he died tonight.

End of the working day. Runners signing off on their last drops. He felt their eyes on him as he knocked on Booster’s door and went in.

‘Chase? You’re not on today. We’re about to shut up for the night.’ There was a drift of empty soda bottles in the trash. Booster, chewing hard on a wad of his horrible tobacco. Looked paler than usual. Faded. ‘You hear about Sally Sneakers? Automatic Jack found her dead near Saint Clair, stabbed to shit and back. She made her delivery, never came back. Fucking fucked up.’

‘Yeah,’ Chase said. ‘Yeah.’

‘Hell of a fucking week. You got a face like a kicked ass, Chase. What is it?’

He sat. Said, ‘I’ve never asked you for anything much in the past, Booster, but now I’ve got something I want you to do for me. As a friend. There’s something I’ve got to do, and if I do it, and it works, but I don’t make it back out… I’m asking you to watch out for Tara and the kids. Don’t let anything bad happen to them in the future.’

Three hours.

The apartment felt cold and deserted. The lack of everything Chase normally associated with home, the noise of the kids, cooking and laundry smells, the warmth of his wife, so much more acute in their absence. He walked through the place in the dark, navigating by memory. Afraid that seeing it all clearly in the light would make it impossible not to see how empty it was, and how empty it would be if he couldn’t get them back.

In the bedroom, he found his summer bag in the closet. Took out the gun and the spare ammunition. Sat there for a long time, feeling the weight of it and trying not to think too hard about what had to be done.

Two hours.

The alleyway where it had all gone down three years before. He wasn’t sure why he’d made the detour on the way to his appointment with Adam, but it felt like something he should do. Painting, in the dark. Adding to Alice’s mural. Quick, simple representations in white: two small figures, and two larger, grown up, ones beside them. A prayer in visual form. And maybe that’s what all of the others here were.

One hour.

16. Rule One

Sodium glimmer on the streets leading to Castle Square. The bass thump of a party somewhere down the block rolled through the frozen air, but Chase was the only guy out. He hunkered in his parka, felt the weight of the payload under his coat. The cell phone in his pocket. He didn’t doubt that he was being watched from Adam’s part of the housing complex. Waiting to see if he’d pulled off the task they’d set for him, or if he was going to come back empty-handed to plead for his family’s lives. They’d see a lone man, no back up, no help, walking to meet his fate, just like they wanted.

That was Rule Three. Don’t look like a runner.

He thumbed the send key on his cell phone as he walked up the small flight of steps at the front of the building. Left it in his pocket, leaving it to trust that the message had reached Savage. Through the glass he could see that there were two guys on the other side of the door. One big and long-haired, the other shorter and leering. Members of Adam’s crew, keeping out of the cold as they watched for his return. He swallowed hard, steeled himself. Reminded himself what he was facing and what he might have to do. The risks he was running, to himself and to his wife and children, by doing it.

That was Rule Two. Be prepared to die.

‘Well what do you know, it’s our runner man,’ one of the guards said. ‘Trent and I were starting to think you weren’t going to be back, Chase.’

The big guy nodded slowly. ‘Amazed you didn’t get yourself killed. The man must have some talents, Rafi.’

Chase didn’t make eye contact. ‘I’m going to see my brother.’

‘Not too fast, my man. It’s our job here to make sure first that you’re not carrying any surprises for him. If you’ve genuinely done for the Outsiders, chances are you’ve gotta have something on you.’

‘You’d think,’ Chase said.

Trent came to frisk him while the smaller guy, Rafi, watched. Chase kept the package in one hand while he was patted down. Didn’t look at it.

‘Whats in there?’ Rafi asked. ‘I didn’t think you’d have time to shop for gifts.’

‘My brother wanted a trophy to show I’d done what I said I would. It’s not like I can drag body parts around the streets with me without making them look tidy. Not if he doesn’t want the Outsiders knowing who killed their top guy.’

‘Open it up.’

‘That’s for Adam to do when I see him.’

‘Open it, or I’ll ask Trent here to open you up.’

‘He’s not going to be happy.’ Chase started pulling at the tape that bound it.

‘Oh dear,’ Rafi said to his companion. ‘We’re going to make the boss unhappy because he won’t get to open his present.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Quite right, Trent. A mighty shame. There’ll be tears because we ruined his surprise.’ He looked back as the wrapping fell away and Chase’s hand emerged holding the gun.

That was Rule One. Never open the payload.

Chase shot him in the throat, turned and pulled the trigger again. Blood sprayed the back wall and Trent dropped with a hole in his chest. The gun felt heavy. If you had to fuck up a guy, you made sure he stayed fucked up. Neither of them moved, or looked like they were going to any time soon. Chase didn’t think he’d ever killed anyone before, but found it didn’t bother him much now. It was the only way it could have been.

There was a woomf behind him, then, out in the dark. A Molotov cocktail painting the street yellow and orange. A burst of automatic fire, the sound of splintering glass. He felt a surge of fear, a panic-spike of adrenaline. Savage and the Outsiders, here, as they’d arranged, but too close and too soon. They were supposed to give him time to get up to Adam’s apartment, not cut loose as soon as they got his message. Chase still didn’t know where his family were. If Adam thought this was a rescue attempt or that Chase had failed and brought his enemies to his door…

He broke into a jog as he made for the stairs.

17. Hard Rain

Upstairs. The emerald-green corridor running the length of the block. Dim and humming strip lighting in the ceiling. Chase didn’t know if Adam owned the whole floor, of if there were other people, innocent people, tucked behind each closed door. No one had come to see what the gunshots downstairs had been about, or what was going on in the street, but then no one ever did. Not straight away. You heard gunshots in the Levels, you damn well kept your head down and figured that so long as they were happening to someone else, you were OK. Only after, once everything had gone quiet again, did you come out, figure out what had just occurred, and collect the bodies of your neighbors if you had to.

There was no guard outside Adam’s door like there had been when they’d summoned him here before, but the door itself was open. Sick yellow light spilling into the hall. Chase could hear an argument as he slipped up to the doorway, shouted voices, at least one of them his brother’s. More gunfire from outside, more shattering glass. Adam yelling at his people to get on their phones, drag some reinforcements down here, anyone who owed them favors. Cursing Chase alternately for fucking up and for betraying him.

Then the barked order, ‘Get the fuck out and check what’s going on out front.’ A big guy in a cheap suit lurched out into the hall like he’d been pushed, right in front of Chase.

Mouth an ‘o’ of surprise. Eyes wide and white in the sallow light. A tiny sliver of time, an opportunity, and Chase took it. Stepped in close and spun the guy round with the barrel of his gun wedged in the back of his neck, free hand on his shoulder, steering.

Front it, he heard Sally tell him again. Hissed, ’So much as twitch and I’ll kill you.’

Walked him into the room. Five of Adam’s guys with his brother. Thick smell of pot smoke. Most of them, Adam included, holding phones or nothing, but not guns. Everyone shut up but good when Chase and his hostage stepped in. Most of them looked to their leader, waited for him to act.

‘Hey bro,’ Adam said. ‘What’s all this, huh?’

‘Where’s my family, Adam? I’m taking them and I’m going.’

‘Family? I’m right here, brother. What you think you’re gonna do with Larry here? Guy’s dumb enough to be grabbed by you, I dunno I want him part of my crew anymore.’

Gunfire outside. The Outsiders were raking the wrong side of the building, though. Another woomf of a Molotov. ‘My wife and kids, Adam. Then I’m gone. You got things you want to be dealing with more urgently than this.’

Telltale flicker of his eyes skyward, upstairs. Only for an instant, but it was there. Only one more floor in the building, so they had to be in the apartment above. ‘You’re right about that.’

Movement from the back of the room and a double gunshot. One bullet smashed overhead, the other blew through Larry’s head, spattering Chase with blood. He dropped the body as the rest of Adam’s guys drew weapons. Froze as they realized Chase was still unhurt, and now pointing his gun squarely at his brother.

Smoke in the air. Sound, now, of hollering, high whooping sounds like rebel yells, echoing around Castle Square. Hard to say how close they were.

‘Give it up, Chase. My boys could shoot you in a heartbeat.’

‘Haven’t, have they, though? All it takes is one round from me and you’re gone, brother.’ Chase took half a step back. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m going now. And I’m taking my family with me. You can deal with this mess you’ve started. It’s what you wanted.’

‘Can’t let you do that.’

Then Adam’s people were throwing themselves out of the way, their eyes, like his, on the space behind Chase. He turned and saw a line of fire spiralling past his face. Another Molotov. Outsiders rushing from the doors on the opposite side of the hallway having climbed up and through the windows they’d shot out earlier. One of them was raising an SMG in Chase’s direction, so he ran. Hit the ground as the cocktail burst, and felt heat and flames wash at his back. Shrugged out of his burning coat and let it drop, eyes stinging from the smoke. Gunfire noise like hard rain around him, and all he wanted to do was get out. He sprinted across the room, hunched, and vaulted over the couch. Saw, for a moment, Adam’s face, twisted with rage, beneath him where he’d taken cover. Felt a couple of stinging lines open across the back of his legs, bullet grazes. Then he smashed through the back windows and out onto the small concrete balcony at the rear of the building. Most of these housing clusters had them, plastering their outer facings like fish scales. He climbed onto the retaining wall, teetering for balance as he turned, stray bullets slapping into the masonry around him, making him wish he could move faster even as he forced himself not to.

The balcony of the apartment above was right on top of him. Jump out a little, up a lot, and grab the top, he’d be up. Get it wrong — too far one way or not far enough the other — and he’d fall two floors and be left crippled and broken on the frozen ground below.

He jumped.

18. Up

There were two guys in the apartment. Both dressed somewhere between boxers on their way back from the gym and guys selling crack on street corners. They were pressed to the wall either side of the front door, guns out, talking to each other as Chase hauled himself over the balcony wall and rolled onto the floor. The gunfire below was clear, but deeper. A staccato drumbeat growing less and less frequent as one side or another won out.

‘Smoke, man. What if the place burns down?’

‘We gotta stay here where the boss wants us.’

‘You hear all that? We should go help. You know what they say ‘bout Outsiders.’

Chase didn’t wait to find out what it was they said; he shot the first guy through the cheek, took the second smack in the middle of his chest as he turned. The apartment was two bedroom, same as Adam’s below, but was empty save for a bare minimum of reclaimed and scavenged furniture. Extra crash space, Chase figured. Wasn’t like there was a housing shortage in the Levels, so no one was going to demand Adam give it up.

The first bedroom had nothing in it but three bare mattresses and a small stack of magazines underneath the window. The second was locked. He went to the two dead guys and frisked them, found a key on one of them. Chanced a peek out the apartment door and saw air heavy with smoke and a dull orange glow at the end of the corridor. The stairwell, or something close to it, had to be on fire.

Key in the lock. ‘Tara honey, you in here?’

‘Chase? Chase?’

Unlocked. Open. Two more bare mattresses, one single bed by the wall. Tara, sitting on it, with Donnie and Louisa clasped at her sides. Alive, and as far as Chase could see, unhurt. He ran over, hugged them all as tightly as he could, like he could somehow absorb all the warmth he’d been afraid would be taken from him, making it so he’d never lose it again. ‘Tara, sweetheart! Kids… Jesus, guys. Are you OK? Are you all OK?’

‘We’re OK, Chase. We’re OK.’ She looked close to tears, one of the few times he’d ever seen it.

‘You’re all OK?’

‘Yeah, Dad. We’re OK. They just kept us shut up in here since we got here.’

‘I’m so glad. I’m so glad.’

‘We’re OK,’ Tara said again. Then she slapped him in the face, none too softly. ‘Owe you that much for getting us mixed up in this. Fucking Christ.’

‘At least. I’m so sorry. I came here to get you out of it again.’

‘Jesus, Chase, you’re covered in blood.’ She pulled away. The moment passed and time was pressing. ‘What’s going on?’

He shrugged. ‘A lot. Short of it is, we’ve got to get out of this building before it burns down or else someone shoots us.’

She looked like she wanted to ask a string of further questions, but allowed Chase to lead them back the way he’d come, out to the balcony. He knelt down in front of Donnie and Louisa, both kids firmly clasping hands, wide-eyed with old shock and new fear. Said, ‘Listen guys. I think the stairs are on fire, but it doesn’t matter if they’re not because the building’s not safe anyway. So we’re getting out of here over the roof, OK? I know the area and we can get onto the building next door, easy as pie. Then we’ll get down. So I need you to be brave and to trust me, OK?’

Both children nodded silently and for a second he was filled with the fear that he was about to get them both killed. Then he was helping Tara boost them up onto the flat roof of the housing block before the two grown ups hauled themselves up behind them.

The air was clearer up here. The noise from the square below echoed and turned to shreds of meaningless sound by the cold wind. They jogged along the rooftop, down a colonnade of long-dead air conditioning vents. At the far end of the building there was a four-foot service gap and a one-story drop down to the next roof, then they’d be away and clear.

Tara frowned. ‘We’ve got to jump?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s a risk.’ Meaning, like him, she was picturing one of the kids not making it, or hitting the other side with a broken leg.

‘Nothing else for it. It’ll be all right.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘Take Donnie. I’ll jump with Louisa. You and me can make it, easy. Take the worst of the landing.’

‘Sure.’ Not sounding it. Still, she picked up Donnie and cradled him tight in her arms. Checked to see Chase was watching after her, gave herself a short run up, and leapt. Sailed out and down, and hit the far side with a hell of a crunch, skidding and tumbling over, twisting herself so she didn’t fall on their son. Lay on her back while Donnie struggled off her, and then she gave Chase a shaky thumbs up. ‘Hurts like fuck,’ she said. ‘But I’m OK. Your turn.’

Chase scooped up his daughter and she wrapped her arms around his neck. As he tensed ready to begin his run, she gasped suddenly. Warm metal at the base of his skull, and the voice behind him spitting words through broken teeth: ‘Hey, brother.’

A single gunshot, then.

19. Angel In Darkness

Chase turned, fast, as he felt Louisa draw breath to scream. Adam was sprawled on the roof with a hole in the side of his head. Past him, back the way they’d come, the first flames were licking their way into the night. Silhouetted against them as she stepped out from behind one of the air con risers was a woman with a gun loose at her side. There was enough light to see that her hair was dark, but very little else. Exactly like the pictures Maxim had drawn on his wall. His angel. The saint of runners. And she was walking away.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey, Alice.’

She stopped, turned a little in his direction. ‘Yes?’

‘You saved my life. And you also almost got my family killed. I guess I should thank you but… I don’t know.’

‘It wasn’t me put your family at risk. You did that.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I gave you the choice. You must’ve known the people who’d tried to kill you would come to see why it hadn’t worked. You had the chance, and the tools, to deal with them before they could find you. You chose to go looking for me instead.’ Head cocked slightly. ‘It’s your life, Chase. Don’t let anyone else take it over for you.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Tonight? I saw you, at the wall. Saw what you left there. And before? I watch and listen for things like this. The people here, planning this, sending the package. I trailed it and let myself into your boss’s place to switch it. That’s what I do now. It was chance, that’s all.’

‘Second chance.’

Light on something bright. A flash of a grin in the dark. ‘Exactly. Make the most of it, or don’t — it’s up to you. That’s the point. Goodbye, Chase.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and the angel was swallowed by the darkness again.

A couple of weeks later, Chase sat in the gloom of Louisa’s school auditorium, watching her perform a version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story with her classmates. Louisa was Chief Rat. He’d have suspected one of the teachers of making a crack about Levels kids in the choice of part if Louisa hadn’t been the one to insist she got it. And, he had to admit, she made a good rat. Tara and Donnie were there with him. They might, in the past, have left Donnie with a neighbor to babysit, but even though Adam was gone and the danger had passed, they weren’t quite back at that level of ease and comfort. Not yet. The kids, to their credit, seemed to have come through without nightmares or serious trauma. Just let it roll off them, and life went on. But then they were Levels kids, and that’s what you had to do, because bad things happened a lot and no one would ever come to help. At least, not anyone you’d want.

Not usually, anyway.

He thought he’d seen Alice again, in the distance, a few days after Castle Square. A lone figure swinging up onto one of the rooftops overlooking Wilmar Gap while he was taking a package to one of the Core’s smaller outliers. He’d thought about waving, but hadn’t. Probably just his imagination, and even if it wasn’t, she’d no doubt made herself a part of someone else’s life by now, for better or for worse, or a little of both. Ultimately he was only alive because she’d intervened — twice — but that intervention had come at the cost of nearly killing those he loved. Chase was grateful to be alive, but he liked a stable existence. No desire at all to risk it by continuing to associate with her. He wondered if the others she’d helped in the past felt similarly, and if she felt the enforced solitude was a price worth paying for feeding her obsession.

Eventually, the play ended and it was time to go. Chase walked out of the school with his wife and his two children, heading for a late bus and a trip on foot back over the bridge and through the empty, shadow-haunted streets to where they lived. To one of thousands of flickering embers of peace and civilization in the Levels night. And in the morning, they’d wake up, the four of them, and the kids would go out and play with their friends, and Chase would hug his wife and tell her he loved her, and he’d mean it.

There was a woman once. She wasn’t always good, but she certainly wasn’t evil. She did her job and she didn’t ask questions and she was killed and she didn’t deserve it. There are dozens like her get killed every day, and they don’t matter much more than she did.

Until she came back.

By the Author

Find out more about these titles, get free downloads and more at johnrickards.com.

The Alex Rourke series

The Touch Of Ghosts

The Darkness Inside

Burial Ground

The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned

The Levels series

The Levels

The Razor Gate

Murder Park

All You Leave Behind

The Surge

Day Zero

Virginia Day Zero (short story)

Other Writing

Portal of the Gods

Hardboiled Jesus (short story)

Wishes (short stories)

Find me:

blog: namelesshorror.com
twitter: @nameless_horror
home: johnrickards.com

Table of Contents

- Copyright & Credits
- ALL YOU LEAVE BEHIND
- By the Author