Reaping the Dark Read online

  Still running in top gear, he leaves the room, leaps down the stairs, and jumps into the car. He heads back into town, to the east end, near the old dark railway arches. He hasn’t visited his lockup in months but now it’s time to lock it all up forever. He takes out his keys and opens the overhead metal door. The mechanism is smooth and soundless, despite its recent inactivity. Inside, the garage is dark. Dust swims in the air. The single window is covered by a steel shutter. He pulls the door closed and switches on the light. A single electric bulb throws down cold illumination, challenging the shadows.

  He doesn’t have much here, but there might be something incriminating in the old files, photos and paperwork. He pulls out the brazier he keeps here for exactly such an occasion, fills it with loose papers, and sets a small fire. He opens the door again, halfway this time, just to allow the smoke to get out. He looks through some old photographs from the orphanage: a juvenile Clarke standing in a row with friends whose names he can’t remember; playing football on the fields; sitting behind the wheel of a car owned by one of the staff; standing next to Oakes, the man who offered to be his legal guardian until he turned eighteen.

  These are the photographs he salvaged from the orphanage before it was demolished a few days after his twenty-first birthday. Oakes took him there and they broke into the building. The two men torched the records and Clarke insisted on saving these scant few memories, an effort to hang on to the child he used to be before he was transformed into Driver Z by the guiding hand of his guardian.

  He feeds the flames with each image. The shiny paper burns to ashes; all his salvaged memories are now nothing more than black dust.

  After putting out the fire, he heads back to the apartment and shoves a heavy cabinet up against the broken front door. Then he sits there and waits for the dark. It doesn’t take long. Not half as long as he expects. Tragedy, he thinks, always arrives in a headlong rush, as if it cannot wait to meet us.

  The note specified that he should not arrive at the meeting point early or late. There is a sense of theatrics at play here, as is often the case among career criminals. They have their own beats and rhythms, and if you are going to join in the dance, it’s always best to adapt to their moves rather than force your own.

  He should have driven far away much earlier to prevent this from happening, but instead he allowed his own foolish pride to delay him. He thought he was invincible. He was convinced that his careful planning and the distance he kept between himself and whomever he worked with would make him safe.

  He is, after all, just the driver; and who the hell ever bothers about the guy who drives the car?

  He was wrong; so very wrong. In this line of work, you are never safe. Danger is always lurking, waiting around the next corner to hit you when you least expect. Nobody is ever truly safe. When you work in the shadows, sometimes you have to reap the darkness too.

  Clarke drinks hot tea and thinks about what he needs to do. He’s never killed a man before, but he’s put plenty of them in the hospital. The act of violence is easy; it’s the aftereffects that make things difficult to live with. Eventually you become immune to the savagery, even coming to find it amusing. He didn’t even flinch when it came to smacking that ten-year-old boy. He thinks of the time a couple of years ago when he was forced to break a man’s wrist for a reason he now struggles to recall. But he remembers vividly the pleasure it gave him to hear the bastard scream.

  His head is full of screams now; it echoes with them. The same screams he always hears, but is usually able to ignore. Sometimes he thinks they’ll never stop.

  But he follows the rules of the game, and every once in a while he knows the game becomes real. It takes you over and hollows you out, making you into something that is both more than and less than a man.

  Time moves like a stream, and you either dive right in and start swimming or fight against the current. Whichever way you choose, the outcome is the same: bloodshed, a hardening of the spirit, and the sense that you exist just to the side of the shoal, swimming out of rhythm with the men and women who have proper jobs, raise families, make their money the hard way.

  He puts on some Beethoven and closes his eyes, watching the images play out across the back of his eyelids. Fiery scenes of murder and mayhem; his mother laughing, his father drinking heavily since Clarke was a baby, a car in flames, a beating from a man who would then go on to save him, a thin, empty road leading to somewhere that might be salvation or damnation if he could only read the signs.

  He wants to be a stunt driver in Hollywood. If he plays this right and comes out safe and sound on the other side, he might just achieve this dream. If things go wrong, and the black clouds start tumbling down, bringing hell with them, the only stunt he’ll ever pull will be the one that finally sends him to the grave.

  He doesn’t mind dying, as long as his family is safe: Martha and the unborn child—a son or daughter? They’d chosen not to know the gender until they met their baby. He wishes now that they’d asked the midwife to tell them. Then, if he dies, at least he’ll go out with that beloved knowledge in his head.

  These thoughts give Clarke a certain comfort. He has never been a man to complain. Every choice he’s made in life has been his choice; he has never allowed himself to be driven. He is always the one in the driver’s seat, steering the vehicle along a route he picked out himself. No regrets, no whining or self-pity.

  It was part of the rules.

  Never buy anything that you can’t afford to leave behind.

  But something has bought him. The child in Martha’s belly owns every fucking inch of him.

  Clarke is stuck in a high gear, unable to downshift. He’s really motoring now. He is racing ahead and into the long black night he holds deep inside him, taking all the tightest corners and keeping his foot off the brake.

  Hopefully he can control things enough to prevent a crash.

  PART TWO: REAPER

  Finally it’s time to go. He’s waited long enough, sitting in the empty apartment and pondering every possible outcome. He hasn’t dared leave too early because he knows that Martha will be harmed if he arrives before the appointed time, just as a show of power.

  McKenzie is clearly a psychopath. He sensed the man’s madness during the job last night; it seeped from his pores like sweat, stinking out the car and tainting everything in the vicinity.

  What he’s done to Oakes is unnecessary. This kind of brutality is only carried out by someone who enjoys inflicting pain, and who wants to leave a special message.

  But Clarke has often worked with madmen. It’s just part of his chosen profession, this mingling with killers and other undesirables. Three years ago he did a robbery with a serial rapist. The money was good and he couldn’t afford the luxury of taking a moral stance. It was none of his business. These people aren’t his friends or his peers. They are just the bastards he drives for.

  A driver, that’s all he is—all he’s ever been. Or is it? Can he even continue with this rationale, pretending that he isn’t complicit in the crimes carried out while he waits in the car for maniacs? No; he’s lied to himself for too long. This is a time for the truth.

  And the truth is that Clarke is just as bad as the rest of them. All those shitty little bad men with their dirty little deeds; he’s one of them, part of their clan.

  He leaves the suitcase full of clothes behind when he walks out on his old life forever. If he and Martha get through this alive, they can buy more stuff when they arrive somewhere and get settled. Spare clothes will be the least of their problems after this.

  Clarke feels at home on these dark streets as he drives towards the specified meeting point. He’s been here, in this town, for long enough to possess intimate knowledge of the secret routes that make up the place. There are roads and alleys that he knows are quiet and empty at certain parts of a busy day. At night and during the early hours of the morning, he knows exactly which streets will be least crowded.

  He heads north, away fro
m the center, taking the loneliest roads he knows. This is not a time to risk being seen by anyone, let alone a bored traffic cop sitting in a lay-by drinking coffee and wishing that something would happen to reduce the tedium of his shift.

  Within twenty minutes he can see the remains of the old travelers’ camp on the horizon, nestled comfortably between two jagged hills. A few years ago a bunch of local vigilantes burned the place down when there were rumors that one of the travelers on the site was seducing underage girls. The police pretended they hadn’t received a tipoff that things were about to get messy. The local council tidied everything up with a few solemn-faced interviews on the local news and some well-placed funds to set up the survivors elsewhere.

  It’s the way things go up here, in the northern hinterlands between Leeds and Middlesbrough. Life has its own rhythms; people still take care of things the old way, without involving the authorities until it’s all over and done with.

  The shapes of burned-out caravans look like the carcasses of gutted creatures, left belly-up between those hills. It’s an eerie place; people say it’s haunted. Urban myths have cropped up, ghosts are seen, and strange sounds are heard by lovers making out in steam-windowed cars after midnight on the nearby lanes. Before long, the site was known as a forbidden zone.

  Nobody wants to come here, especially after dark. It was the perfect place for them to meet up and split the money.

  McKenzie lived on the site for a while when he was a boy. He didn’t belong there, but he was hiding out with his father, who was killed during the fire. Maybe that’s what twisted him, turning the damaged boy into an unhinged man. Perhaps that’s why he likes to kill.

  Clarke takes a left off the motorway and slows as he follows the narrow road towards the camp’s entrance. He pulls up at the gate, switches off the engine, and stares beyond the feeble barrier. Nothing moves; there are no sounds outside the car.

  He stays there for a few moments, his internal gears grinding, and then he gets out of the car. He walks around to the back and opens the trunk. He takes out the leather case containing the money and slips the handgun into the waist of his jeans at the small of his back. He feels the cold barrel pressing against his bare spine. It doesn’t bother him. Then he opens the case to check the money. He transfers the case to the rear foot well of the Lexus and locks the car.

  He looks at his watch. He’s on time. Not early; not late. As requested, he is dead on time for the rendezvous. Only the meeting will not go as originally planned. Instead of sharing the money, they will spill each other’s blood. The spoils will go to one man, and Clarke intends that man to be him.

  He runs a hand along the side of the car and walks slowly towards the gate, stepping lightly. He has no real plan; he’ll play things by ear and react to the situation. This is not what he was born for. He was born to drive, not kill. So he has to learn the rules of this game as he goes along, playing blind, moving his pieces and trusting in luck and judgment rather than foresight.

  It hasn’t exactly worked for him so far.

  He tugs open the rusting gate and continues on foot. The gate creaks and slams shut behind him as his feet crunch on the gravel. The first set of blackened caravan shells is located up on the left, standing against the black night sky. He can almost smell the smoke, hear the screams, and see the travelers running from their flaming homes.

  Not long after the fire, it was proved that the traveler in question had not in fact been hassling underage girls. The reason he was seen hanging around outside schools and speaking to female pupils was completely innocent. The man was looking for his daughter, a child he’d never met and not even known about until he received a phone call from an old friend who also knew the child’s mother—who died of a crystal meth overdose a few months earlier. This man—this so-called child molester—was simply hunting her down so he could repair some damage, maybe even form a connection between them now that her mother was dead.

  For all his trouble, he got his family and friends killed. He was reduced to cinders in the caravan his parents had given him.

  Clarke thinks about all of this as he treads past the empty, splintered caravans, glancing inside at the piles of ash, the scorched, wrecked walls, the molten lumps that were once appliances and workbenches and furniture.

  For the first time since this whole thing began, Clarke is afraid. He can taste the fear at the back of his throat, feeling it working through his guts, and hear it in the slight breeze rustling through the empty spaces within the ruined caravans.

  “I’m here,” he whispers. “I’ve come for you.” He isn’t sure why he’s speaking out loud, apart from the fact that he is trying to keep the fear at bay. But he knows that words do that sometimes; they build walls around you, making you feel safe even if you aren’t.

  He carries on walking along the pathway through the middle of the caravan park. The wind moans and old charred timbers shift. The moon hides, peeking out from behind a low bank of gray clouds. The pathway twists, cutting a route through the debris. The grass at each side of the gravel path is knee-high, untended for years. He hears the sound of small animals moving through the weeds and the bushes, heading either towards or away from the line of trees to the west.

  “Stop right there.”

  The soft Scottish voice comes from up ahead of him, in the shadows of a group of caravans so blasted by heat that they’re fused together to form a hulking mass.

  He stops, focusing on the gun in his belt.

  “That’s good. I’m comin’ out now, and if you make any quick moves, I’ll take yer fuckin’ head off.”

  Clarke lets his shoulders slump. He doesn’t say a word, just waits.

  Up ahead, a compact figure steps out into the lesser darkness, holding a sawed-off shotgun at waist level. The barrel is cut off short to provide maximum spray. At this distance, if the trigger is pulled, it will probably cut him in half.

  “Good to see you again, Driver Z. Thanks for comin’.” McKenzie moves closer. He’s smiling. His grip on the shotgun is loose but it isn’t due to any lack of concentration. The slack grip is a sign of confidence. This is a man who is practiced in the handling of firearms.

  “It’s not like I had much of a choice.” Clarke smiles back at the approaching figure. His mind is racing; the mental gears are burning, smoking. He can almost smell the stench of burning rubber and hot metal.

  “Granted…but you could always have run. I mean, you’d meet someone else, fall in love again.” His tone is light and sarcastic; he’s treating the whole thing as a joke.

  “She’d better be safe.” Clarke wants to cut through the bullshit. This isn’t how it is going down—with humor. Things are serious now; a line has been crossed.

  “Oh, aye, she’s safe. She’s alive. I haven’t harmed a hair on her head…actually, that’s a lie. But her hair is the only thing I have harmed.”

  Again, he clearly loves the joke, performing to a captive audience.

  Clarke shoots a quick glance at the shotgun. McKenzie’s finger is resting on the trigger. No tension; just a loose touch.

  “Why did you do that to Oakes?”

  McKenzie stops moving. He adjusts his stance so that he is standing side-on to Clarke, providing a narrower target. “I had to do it…to teach him a lesson. Send a message. The man lied to me; he told me he’d never met yer. I knew he wasn’t tellin’ the truth, that he was protectin’ yer. If it’s worth anythin’, he took his beatin’ with dignity.”

  Jesus, is that how this maniac sees things, in terms of honor? He’s like a little boy pretending to be a warrior, spouting fictional codes of conduct learned from Western movies and comic books.

  “It’s worth nothing, McKenzie. His death was worth nothing. But his life was worth a hundred of you.”

  McKenzie shrugs. He lifts the gun an inch or two. “Death? Who said anythin’ about death? When I left him, he was in pain, but he was breathin’. He was alive, but with a few cuts and bruises. Maybe a broken bone or two…”
>
  Clarke feels giddy, his body as light as air. “You’re telling me that you didn’t kill him?”

  “Come on, let’s get this over with. D’yer have the money?”

  Clarke nods slowly. He’s losing his grip on the steering wheel that steers his life. “It’s in the car.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t planning to shoot me on sight.”

  McKenzie takes another step forward. His small blue eyes glitter. “Here’s the deal, Zeddy-boy: you give me the money an’ I hand over the wee girl.”

  “I don’t believe you. As soon as you know the money’s here, you’ll kill us both.”

  McKenzie sighs. “I don’t have time for this.” He lowers the shotgun’s barrel. “I don’t wanna kill yer. Too many people have died because of all this, and I’m tired. I just want the money, that’s all. Then you and yer woman can leave.”

  Clarke says nothing. He’s trying to judge the situation. Yes, the man killed Oakes—evidently out of sheer spite more than any other reason—but what would he gain from killing Clarke and Martha? It just means that there are two more bodies to add to the pile, and another possible way to trace it all back to him. Then again, there is always the madness locked behind his eyes. He can’t be trusted; he enjoys killing—that much is clear.

  “Listen, I’ll be straight with you. I don’t have all the money here.”

  The shotgun’s barrel inches upwards.

  “Call it a safety net. I put half of it back in the bag, and I’ve hidden the rest somewhere.”

  McKenzie begins to laugh. It’s a strange sound: high, lilting, and completely natural. “Okay,” he says, lowering the gun again. “That’s good. It’s exactly what I’d have done. So, how do I get the rest of the money?”

  Clarke raises his hands and displays his empty palms, to show that he isn’t planning anything stupid. “I’ll take you to the car. We get the bag. Then you take me to Martha, and we all leave together. The rest of the money’s hidden somewhere in plain view, where there’ll be people around. Witnesses. The three of us get out of the car at the location, and Martha and I walk away. You get the money. None of us has to see each other again.”