Whatever it takes. Paul Cleave

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      Whatever It Takes

      ISBN: 978-87-428-3101-4 Ebook

      Published in 2021 by Jentas A/S

      Text © Paul Cleave 2019

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

      Design and format © Jentas A/S 2021

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Ebook by Jentas A/S

      ALSO BY PAUL CLEAVE

      The Quiet People

      Whatever it Takes

      A Killer Harvest

      Trust No One

      Five Minutes Alone

      Joe Victim

      The Laughterhouse

      Collecting Cooper

      Blood Men

      Cemetery Lake

      The Killing Hour

      The Cleaner

      –––

      For my cousin, Katrina Cox — one of the strongest and most positive people I’ve been lucky enough to know.

      One

      “You’re going to kill him,” Drew says.

      I rest my forehead against the wall and stare at the floor. I try to get my breathing under control. There’s a half-flattened cockroach down there, along with a cigarette butt tossed at the garbage bin that’s missed. There’s something in my mind that hurts. I pinch the bridge of my nose and squeeze my eyes shut and will the pain away, but it holds on tight. It’s like a splinter buried deep that’s gotten infected, and the only way to dull the pain is by punching the guy tied up in the chair. Which is what I do. I hit him so hard I hear something crack and I don’t know if it’s one of my fingers or his cheek. I’ve hit him so many times already my fingers hurt bad, but his face has to hurt more. His left eye is swollen and purple, his nose is broke and his bottom lip split and there’s plenty of blood and torn skin. But despite all that the son of a bitch still looks up at me with a grin, the kind of grin anybody would want to wipe off his face, only so far nothing has worked. The only thing I can wipe are my knuckles on my shirt, which is already plenty messy.

      Drew puts a hand on my shoulder and I shrug it off.

      “Don’t,” I tell him.

      He puts his hand back on my shoulder and looks me right in the eye. Drew and me, we’ve been best friends since we were kids. Growing up, we chased girls across playgrounds and climbed trees and went fishing. When we were older we joined the police together and played the role of best man at the other’s wedding. If he doesn’t remove his hand in the next two seconds, I’m going to break it.

      “This isn’t you, Noah. This isn’t the way we do things.”

      He’s right. This isn’t me. Yet here we are. He takes his hand off my shoulder.

      “Goddamn it, Noah, I can’t let you beat him to death.”

      Drew has a look on his face that’s a mixture of confusion and panic, mixed in with an overwhelming look of wanting to pretend this isn’t happening. I feel the same way.

      “You should leave.”

      “I . . .”

      I take another swing at the guy in the chair before Drew can say whatever it is he thought he could say that would stop me. Blood and sweat mist the dry air and the punch echoes in the room. I can smell wood and blood and sweat. The guy spits a glob of blood on the floor and shakes his head. His smile comes back and I feel something in my stomach roll.

      “My dad is going to put you in a box,” he says. His name is Conrad, and the same way me and Drew grew up together, so did me and Conrad, only everything was opposite. We never hung out. Conrad isn’t a hanging out kind of guy. He’s a selfish son of a bitch. He’s a bully without an ounce of decency in him. The kind of guy women warn their friends about and cross the road to avoid.

      He’s also the sheriff’s son.

      “You should be spending time thinking about your future, not mine,” I tell him.

      He spits again. “I told you already,” he says. “I don’t know where she is.”

      I pace the office. The windows are closed and the air isn’t just hot, but sticky hot. My clothes are damp. They cling to my skin and stretch when I move. The wooden floors are worn smooth by the years of anxious foremen pacing them the same way I’m pacing them now, and they creak a little under my weight. Conrad is the current foreman. The furniture in here is so old everything could be a prototype. The first desk ever built, the first filing cabinet assembled — hell, even the computer is so big it looks like its first job was cracking the Enigma code. There’s a TV bolted on the wall with a screen as round as a fishbowl. The ceiling is pitted with fly crap and the in-out trays on the desk have paperwork spilling out of them. My headache is starting to rage and the thing turning in my stomach turns some more. I don’t like where this is going. I wish there were a way to take it all back.

      There isn’t.

      I have to carry on.

      For the girl. Alyssa.

      I stop pacing in front of him. “Where is she?”

      “I want my lawyer,” he says.

      Drew steps between us. He puts his hand on my chest and the other is on the butt of his gun that’s still holstered and I wonder whether he’d use it, whether he even knows if he would. I shouldn’t have gotten him mixed up in this. “Let’s have a word outside,” he says.

      I stare at him, unblinking. Then I relent. We head into the factory. I put my hands on the iron railing. A few lights are on, but they’re not doing a great job, the vastness of the factory is sucking the enthusiasm out of them. I can only see twenty yards in front of me. There are rows of lumber stretching out into the dark, long beams running as straight as train tracks. The night is pressing hard up against the dusty windows. I lean against the railing so I can face Drew as he closes the door. I can see Conrad through the window, looking out at us.

      Drew keeps his voice low when he says, “Even if he does have her, he’s not going to talk.”

      I undo the top button of my shirt. There are streaks of blood on it. The air in here is thick. The factory’s powered down for the night, which means no air conditioning.

      “He will,” I say, for Alyssa’s sake, and for mine too. There’s no going back from this. “He has to.”

      Drew shakes his head. “We can’t keep beating on him. Especially when we don’t know for a fact he has her.”

      “He has her,” I say. “I know he has her.”

      “You don’t. Not for a fact. You think he does, and you want to believe he does, because if you’re wrong, then we’ve messed up here big time.” He exhales loudly and looks up at the roof as if answers or escape are up there. “Ah, hell, Noah,” he says. “Even if we’re right we’re still in a world of trouble. Even if he confesses right now he’s going to walk away from this. You gotta know no attorney in the world would prosecute him after what we’ve done.”

      “We’ll deal with that later. Right now we have to find Alyssa. We’ve come this far. We can’t have done all this for nothing.”

      “I wish I could say I let you talk me into this, but that would be naïve.”

      “I can make him talk.”

      He shakes his head. “We’re done. We have to take him in. We have to do this properly. Best we can hope for is we don’t end up in jail alongside of him.”

      “If