JJ glanced back at the phone and then stared at the door, listening; quiet footsteps outside. He moved his hand inside his jacket but let it fall away again as whoever it was knocked tentatively. It was instinct, a sense that the person on the other side of that knock wouldn’t know where to begin being a threat to him.
Things were getting interesting though. And it was like it was nothing to do with him, like he was just a spectator, cut off from the whole little drama by the stench rising off Viner’s body. He was on the edge of it, more a part of evening in the city than a part of what was happening in front of him. Because of the telephone. The telephone had cut him loose, and as long as he spoke to no one he’d stay that way.
There was another knock, and a few seconds later the door opened, hesitantly, almost apologetically. Battered red Converse, that’s what Viner would have seen from down there under his chair, and maybe that would have been enough to recognize him. He certainly had the look of one of Viner’s boys—jeans, T-shirt, scruffy black hair, young face, lean.
The only thing that didn’t fit was his nationality. He looked like a French kid, but as he bridled against the smell in the room he muttered some curse or other. An American. That was wrong. French and Arab boys JJ had seen there plenty of times but never American, and not just because of supply. It was a language thing; Viner had never liked sex with boys who spoke his own language.
The kid was carrying a sports bag and reached into it now, holding his breath, and pulled out what was inside. Then for the first time he saw JJ sitting there and stood frozen for a second, not breathing, his face straining at the building up of pressure.
A police siren sifted toward them, a few blocks away or even farther on calm streets, homing in on some accident or domestic somewhere. And the two of them stared at each other and then the American looked at the machete in his own hand and laughed, the breath bursting out of him. “Jesus, this must look weird, but then you must know about it, right? I was told to leave it here, or give it to you I guess.”
“Not me. Him maybe.”
The kid looked confused, then stared at the mess of furniture for a while before making out the body. The machete fell to the floor with a muffled clunk. The police siren hovered in the middle distance, apparently going nowhere. The kid had doubled over and looked set to empty his stomach.
JJ lumped out of the chair toward him. “Don’t be sick. Stand up.” He lifted the kid by the shoulders so they were face-to-face, the kid’s suddenly like a drunk’s, pasty and unfocused. “Don’t be sick, okay? Control it, just control it. Breathe.” He nodded like he understood, made a conscious effort to get his lungs working. “Did you know Viner?” He shook his head, still fighting the need to vomit. Now that JJ looked at him, he could see the kid was older, nineteen or twenty, much too old to have been one of Viner’s boys. “Have you been here before?”
Again, no, and this time he spoke, his voice high and shaky. “Two guys paid me a thousand francs to deliver the blade, no questions asked. They gave me the address, told me what to do.”
“What were they like? The two guys, what were they like?” He was shaking his head as if to everything. “I don’t know. They were just ... they were your guys, you know.”
“What do you mean, mine?”
“They were British. You’re English, right?”
Like his ears were stacking it up for him, JJ became aware of the siren again. It had jumped closer, much closer, turning the corner maybe, the end of the street. “You’ve been set up! Get the machete and the bag—follow me.”
“What? What’s happening?” The kid was still dazed, but he too could hear the siren now, his eyes darting to the windows and back.
“Do you want to end up like him?” JJ pointed at the naked body, lacerated and stained. “Then get the machete and the bag and follow me.” This time the American moved, urgency taking him over, and with the siren’s wail increasingly smothered, JJ was leading him out the back way and through the broken pathways he’d mapped a few years before, an escape route, one which would give him some distance in the event of something like this happening.
Not that he knew what had happened. The kid quickly getting out of breath behind him, his lungs beginning to rasp like they were bleeding, he was the one who’d been set up. JJ had just stumbled in there by mistake. But he’d stumbled in on something; it was just a question of finding out how big and how he stood in the middle of it.
For one thing, Viner had clearly been hit after all, and dressed up like voodoo for whatever reason. They’d set the kid up, British guys, probably arranged it with the police. And then there was that failed number. If the two were connected it was about as big as things could get. If they were connected then perhaps JJ really was cut loose.