paid them enough.
The revolving door spun them gently into the night and the smell of rain on concrete rinsed through her travel-numbed senses. It was the freshest thing she’d encountered in more than twelve hours, but in the twisted world of the nicotine addict all it did was remind her how much she needed a cigarette. She stopped just outside and opened her bag. ‘Where’re you parked?’
The man turned and watched her fishing through the jumbled contents of her holdall. ‘Right there.’ He nodded towards the short-stay car park across the road.
Liv glanced out into the rain-whipped night. ‘I packed in kind of a hurry,’ she said. ‘Don’t. . think. . I’ve got a coat in here.’
The man held up his umbrella but Liv ignored it. She only had eyes for the crumpled pack of Luckies she’d finally managed to find. She tapped one out and plucked it from the packet with her mouth.
‘Bit windy,’ she said, hunching up her shoulders against the cold. ‘Don’t want you to bust your umbrella on my account. Tell you what. . why don’t you go get the car? I’ll stay here and have one of these, then I won’t get drenched and you won’t have to sue me for passive smoking.’
The man hesitated, looked out at the sheets of rain gusting across the drop-off zone. ‘OK. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.’
She watched him stride away, the wind grabbing the tails of his coat. She cupped her hand around the end of her cigarette, lit up and pulled nicotine and night air deep into her lungs. She breathed out, feeling the tension of the flight begin to melt and float away with the smoke. She stuffed the pack back into her bag, dug around until she found her cell phone and powered it up.
A van swished by in the rain, passing a bus shelter across the way where a security guard appeared to be rousting three young people who’d tried to bed down for the night. They looked like students who’d been partying too hard, or just regular vagrants who spent their life being moved on from one place to the next.
The phone buzzed in Liv’s hand as it caught a signal. There were three missed calls and two new messages. She was shifting her thumb across the keypad to dial her voicemail when a nondescript Renault saloon pulled up in front of her. The window slid down and the well-dressed cop smiled at her from behind the wheel. He leaned across and popped open the back door.
Liv took a final hungry drag on her cigarette, buried it in the sand-filled ashtray by the revolving door, then grabbed her bag and dashed across the wet sidewalk into the warm, dry comfort of the car.
‘What’s your name?’ she said, pulling the door closed and reaching for the safety belt.
He put the car in gear and fell in line behind the cars and taxis pressing slowly towards the exit signs. ‘Gabriel,’ he said.
‘Like the angel?’
She saw his eyes crinkle in the rear-view mirror. ‘Like the angel.’
She leaned against the door and felt the weariness settle on her like a blanket. She was about to close her eyes when she remembered her messages. She dialled her voicemail and lifted the cell to her ear.
‘Who are you calling?’ the driver asked.
‘Just getting my messages.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Where we headed exactly?’
‘Ruin,’ he said, steering away from the traffic and down a service road. ‘Where else?’
Then, through the crackle of storm static, her first message started to play.
Chapter 47
‘Hello. . er. . Miss Adamsen. This is Inspector Arkadian. I just wanted to say again how sorry. . for your loss. . e-mailed some photos to a Detective Berringer. . Newark PD. .’
Liv pressed the phone hard against her ear as the static rose, swamping parts of the message.
The message ended and her eyes jerked to the man sitting behind the wheel. If Arkadian had sent pictures for her to ID, it meant he didn’t think she was coming. So why would he send someone to collect her? The second message started to play.
She didn’t wait to hear the rest.
He’d said his name was Gabriel. He’d said he was a cop.
He’d never said he was a cop. He hadn’t shown her his badge when he’d introduced himself. He just said Arkadian sent him and she had assumed the rest.
‘Everything OK?’
She looked up and met his eyes in the mirror.
‘Yeah,’ she said, suddenly aware that her face must look a picture of concern. ‘Just work. I hopped the flight here in a bit of a hurry. Didn’t have time to finish off a few things before I left. My boss is real pissed at me.’
His eyes flicked back to the road as a van hissed past in a cloud of spray. A squeal of tyres and the interior flooded with red. The van in front had braked hard. Too hard.
Gabriel followed suit. The Renault’s wheels squealed across the greasy surface of the road. There was a violent jolt as its front bumper smashed into the back of the van. Liv was thrown forward hard against her belt. There was a sharp crack and for the briefest of moments, before the airbags deployed, she thought she’d been shot.
Then everything went into slow motion.
Chapter 48
Before the driver’s airbag even started to deflate Gabriel was beating it down, unclasping his seat belt and reaching for the door. He kicked it open as hard as he could, rolling into the rain before it had time to swing shut again. It happened so fast that Liv was still looking at the empty driver’s seat when her own door opened.
She turned, and came face to face with the muzzle of a gun.
‘Out!’ a voice shouted from somewhere behind it.
She looked past the black hole of the barrel at the young man holding it. He wasn’t much more than a boy. Acne scars showed through the fuzz of a sparse blonde beard and rain poured from the peak of a baseball cap pulled low over pale blue eyes.
‘Out!’ he shouted again.
He leaned forward and grabbed her with his free hand just as the glass behind her exploded, showering the interior with tiny, glittering shards. The boy jerked backwards, pirouetting as if someone had yanked hard on a rope attached to his left shoulder. Liv glanced back to see Gabriel framed in the jagged remains of the window.
‘Run!’ he shouted, then in a flash of movement he was swept from view.
Liv whipped her head back and stared through the open door at the pale-eyed boy lying where he had fallen, staring up at the stinging rain. A shower of glass jewels fell to the floor as she fumbled for the release button and her seat belt slid across her body. She splashed past the corpse towards the shadows on the far side of the street. She expected to hear the crack of a gunshot behind her at any moment and feel the thump of a bullet punching her in the back and spinning her to the ground.
She made it to the sidewalk and skidded across it to a verge of low bushes and grass. Given two years’ growth and kind winters the wiry shrubs might have offered some sort of cover, but in their current state they served as little more than obstacles. She zigzagged between them, slithering over ground so saturated it was like
