With a start of realization, she recalled that Tom’s parents had passed away a few years previously. An only child, he had literally lost the only family he had left.
She reached into the pocket of her jacket and lifted out a brass key. Gently, she reached across to Tom and took his hand. Tom looked down vacantly as she opened his hand and pushed the key into his palm.
‘My apartment,’ she said. ‘Use it. Doesn’t matter how upset you feel or what time of the day or night it is, you go there and you find me, okay?’ Tom stared down at the key. ‘Okay?’ Karina pressed him.
Tom looked slowly up at her and gave her a barely perceptible nod.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Do you have a spare key for here?’
Tom’s head turned and he looked at a clear plastic bag lying on a table top a few feet away. With a sickening feeling, Karina realized that it must have been the possessions of his wife and daughter, recovered from their bodies or from the wrecked Prius.
Slowly, Karina got up and walked across to the bag. Inside was a purse, some credit cards, a set of keys on a ring and, to her dismay, a small doll dressed in pink clothes, its blonde hair carefully platted.
‘Jesus.’
Tears drenched her cheeks as she opened the bag and unclipped the apartment key from the ring.
Karina slipped the key into her pocket and walked back to Tom, who was staring now at the bag on the table. Karina belatedly spotted pictures hanging on the opposite wall of the lounge, images of Tom with Donna and Sarah and others of Sarah as a tiny baby and toddler. She struggled to keep her own emotions in check as she knelt down before Tom and grasped both of his hands in hers. She desperately wanted to insist that she stay the night, to keep him company, to prevent him from doing something that he might regret, but she somehow knew that right now all Tom wanted to be was alone. She would have felt the same.
‘Keep in touch,’ she insisted. ‘Don’t let go, Tom, okay?’ Tom stared at her for a long beat before offering her another silent nod.
Karina stood and walked to the apartment door, glancing back as she left to see Tom still sitting in the darkness and staring at the plastic bag on the table nearby.
9
‘Shut up and keep moving!’
The whispered voice was harsh in the night, as was the calloused hand that cracked across the back of Wesley Hicks’s head. The impact echoed across the docks and out over the glistening black surface of the East River. Wesley ducked and his gloved hand flew to his head as Connor Reece, his older and altogether more unstable partner, rested a pair of bolt croppers alongside an old chain-link fence.
‘I don’t like it out here, is all,’ Wesley complained.
Reece, his shaven head covered by a black cap, did not reply as he hefted the croppers to waist height and settled them around a thick chain padlocking a set of gates together. With a groan of effort that puffed clouds of his breath onto the cold air, the croppers bit through the steel chain and it clattered down onto the asphalt. Wesley winced at the noise and glanced furtively back up the road. There were no cars and certainly no pedestrians out here at night, but he could both see and hear the traffic flowing over the Robert F Kennedy Bridge just a couple of hundred yards to the north, its lights twinkling in the chill misty air.
‘This way,’ Reece snapped.
The older man yanked back the rolling gate by a couple of feet, just enough for them to slip through. Wesley followed him and then pulled the gate loosely back into position before looping the heavy chain back into position. If any security guards or cops did patrol down here, they would have to look closely before realizing that the chain was severed.
Reece led the way across an old disused parking lot to a large building, its loading bays all boarded up. A handful of scattered Dumpster bins lined one wall, some of them overturned, probably by vagrants searching for an easy, if unpleasant, meal.
A set of rusting iron steps led up to a solid-looking door. Reece reached into his pocket and produced a thick key, cast from what looked to Wesley like solid iron. In the darkness, the key looked unusual, old-fashioned.
‘Where did you get that from?’ he whispered.
Reece did not reply. Instead, he shoved the key into the lock and turned it. Wesley heard a heavy revolving sound as the key turned, as though the big old door had stood here for centuries, its mechanisms forged in another age. The lock clicked and Reece turned the handle and pushed. The door swung smoothly open, no sound emanating from its aged hinges.
Reece moved inside, Wesley following and trying to control his grating nerves as he was swallowed by the absolute darkness within the old warehouse.
‘Push the door shut,’ Reece ordered.
Wesley obeyed, leaning against the door behind him until the locking mechanism clicked. Satisfied, Wesley heard Reece searching through the pockets of his jacket. Then a bright beam of light burst into life as he turned on a small but powerful flashlight.
‘This way.’
The flashlight beam illuminated a cavernous warehouse that was largely empty. Lines of racking stood against the opposing walls, scattered bits of old paper and wrapping littered the floor and the light from the nearby bridge glimmered faintly through dirty windows caked with the filth of decades.
Wesley followed Reece closely, the building’s abandoned, sombre atmosphere chilling his bones as they crept through the darkness, the flashlight scything a path toward the very rear of the building.
‘Do we have to go right back there?’ Wesley asked.
‘You don’t shut up, you’ll be staying here for a very long time, you feel me?’
‘I feel you,’ Wesley replied quickly, not wanting to upset his volatile companion any further. ‘Just feels like we’re not on our own in here.’
‘I fuckin’ wish I was,’ Reece muttered.
Wesley said nothing more as they walked, looking up instead at the soaring ceiling above them and wondering what this building had been used for. Maybe the docks when they were busy back in the day, storage for the big old ships that used to unload here. Now the docks were mostly silent and filled with the rusting hulks of shipping containers and parked haulage wagons.
‘Here.’
Reece’s voice snapped Wesley out of his reverie as the older man peered into the gloom at the very rearmost corner of the warehouse. There, tucked in behind the rickety old shelves and racking, was a canvass sheet draped over something on the ground. Wesley watched as Reece bit the flashlight between his teeth to free his hands and then yanked the sheet aside with a flourish.
A cloud of dust particles spiralled up through the flash-light beam as Wesley stared down at three heavy-looking metal containers, each about the size of a large suitcase. Reece flashed him a wicked grin as he yanked the flashlight from his mouth.
‘Pay dirt,’ he said.
Wesley smiled back and was about to reply when a faint whisper of movement somewhere behind him raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He whirled and peered into the gloomy darkness. He saw the flashlight beam flick around to point past him into the warehouse as Reece searched for the source of the sound.
‘Man,’ Wesley whispered, ‘I tol’ you there was someone else in here.’
Reece reached out and grabbed Wesley’s collar in one chunky fist, yanking his face to within inches of the older man’s grizzled, pockmarked features. In the harsh light from the beam, he looked even more demonic than normal.
‘Only thing in this building you need to fear is me, you got that?’