Skypoint

FOUR

The crisp white linen shirt that Besnik Lucca had been wearing earlier that evening when he had left SkyPoint was no longer white.

No amount of laundering was going to fix it.

Arterial blood didn’t come out. He supposed that was in the nature of it. Arterial blood wasn’t supposed to come out. But the edge of a razor blade sliced across each thigh of a double-crossing kid hung upside down like a pig on a hook will bring it out, all right. Especially on the first cut, when the blood pressure is still high. That was the gush that had caught him on the chest – and Lucca hadn’t been the one doing the cutting. Lucca had a man who was good with blades to slice flesh for him. It was he who appreciated that hanging a man upside down before you cut the femoral artery meant that death took that much longer. And Lucca appreciated that kind of expertise, especially when it came to dealing with low-life scum at the bottom end of his organisation who entertained dreams of ripping off their boss. The exsanguinated eighteen-year-old’s corpse would serve as a reminder to those other foot soldiers of their position in life. It was worth one spoiled shirt. Lucca was only thankful that he had removed his Armani jacket to personally soften the kid up a little before the blade man had practised his craft.

Lucca left the kid strung up, sobbing and dying, and wishing to God that he had never even thought of cutting flour into his boss’s coke and cutting him out of the extra profit. As he left, despite the ruined shirt, Lucca was smiling.

Fifteen minutes later, Lucca had crossed the city and was sliding his black Porsche into the underground parking bay reserved for him beneath SkyPoint. He had listened to Wagner as he drove. Lucca loved Wagner and, almost 200 years apart, they had both had their reasons for going under the wire to escape Latvia so he felt they shared a kindredship.

The parking bay was alongside the apartment block’s service elevator that would take Lucca directly to his floor. No one would see the blood on his shirt. It was the very reason he had specified this parking bay as his own when he put money into the SkyPoint project.

By the time he had tapped the entrance code into the security keypad and stepped into the elevator, he had forgotten the name of the kid he had left bleeding to death on the other side of town.

As the heavy steel doors of the service elevator closed on Lucca, the only witness to his arrival was a hidden security camera, but that didn’t worry him. The only place those pictures were going was a panel of monitors in his own apartment. Besnik Lucca was forty-two years old, and he planned to see at least as many years again – and he knew the only way to do that was to be tough, and to be careful. And that was why he had invested so much money into SkyPoint: it wasn’t just an apartment block rising like any other on Cardiff’s crowded skyline – it was Besnik Lucca’s fortress.

Lucca left the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor and keyed another code into another security pad, then pushed the door open into his penthouse. Lights automatically activated as he stepped across the threshold. That meant that no one had been moving around in there, and that meant that Carmen was still on the bed where he had left her. There was no chance that she had dressed and gone out; he hadn’t given her the code that would allow her through the door. She didn’t go anywhere unless he said so. And in the two weeks since he had brought her back to the apartment, the thought of going anywhere had never seemed to cross her mind. But heroin was like that. You could get a taste for it pretty fast.

He didn’t bother to look in on the girl. He walked straight past her door and into his own bedroom. The city and the Bay lay at his feet, dark now but sparkling with the lights of bars and restaurants, and other apartments. He stripped off and enjoyed the reflected image of himself, a naked god astride the city below, then stepped into the shower and purged himself of the stink of the young drug dealer’s death.

There was a TV screen built into the marble of the shower wall and a waterproof remote hung alongside the soaps and lotions Lucca kept beside the shower controls. He used it as the shower water beat down on him like a warm tropical storm, and the screen lit up with footage from the SkyPoint lobby.

A time code at the bottom of the screen told him he was watching something from mid-afternoon when nothing was really happening down there, apart from the blonde girl from the estate agency admiring her reflection in one of the smoked windows. He smiled as she adjusted her neckline for a fraction more exposure. The girl had no idea about Lucca’s hidden surveillance network. No one but Lucca and the people who had installed it did. If anyone ever came to get him – some other company intent on his turf, or someone from the old country that was still looking for his head; maybe even the cops – then Lucca would see them coming, and he’d be ready. And he was prepared, even if they were clever and struck from within. It wasn’t just the public areas that he’d had rigged; the apartments were all wired, too. Which offered the kind of specialised programming you didn’t get with conventional cable, even premium rate.

Lucca toggled through the cameras. A lot of the apartments were still empty, but he knew they would fill up and generally the people who took them were young and attractive.

He remembered the couple that had been in the lobby when as he’d left that evening. They were the kind of people he liked to see moving in.

Well, she had been.

On the television screen he was looking at a bedroom on the thirteenth floor. Beside the time code at the bottom of the screen another graphic identified the apartment: this was number forty-four. The Lloyd family. Lucca didn’t know the names of everyone that had moved into the lower levels of his fortress, but Ewan Lloyd worked for him. He was an accountant, and a good one. He wasn’t crooked, but he didn’t ask questions.

When Lucca had first met him a year earlier, Ewan Lloyd was a man with a drink problem who could barely afford his next bottle of malt, never mind ask questions. There had been some sort of family trouble that had got him hitting the bottle; Lucca guessed it was something to do with the guy’s wife.

Wendy Lloyd was hot. Way too hot for someone like her husband, who was not only a pen-pushing number jockey, but was going bald before he hit forty and carried a belly like a beer keg. Whatever had possessed a woman like her to marry a man like that, it was never going to be long before she strayed. Lucca promised himself a piece of her one day, too, but not until her husband had in some way outlived his usefulness. There were some people that you didn’t give a reason to betray you – a good accountant was one of them.

Lloyd had pretty much dried out over the last six months; Lucca guessed that he and Wendy had patched up their marital rift for the sake of their little girl.

Lucca was about to move on from the image of the empty bedroom (as Wendy wasn’t slipping out of her clothes in there – and he knew that was a sight not to be missed) when the little girl walked in.

He wasn’t much of an expert on kids, but Lucca guessed she was five or six. They called her Alison. She had golden hair like her mum. Lots of it. She’d been lucky, Lucca thought as he watched her climb onto her parents’ bed with some kind of big rag doll bundled in her arms. As the cells that had made her had collided inside Wendy Lloyd they had sucked the best part out of her mum’s genes and given the finger to the fat, ugly drunk half of the conception. Maybe that kind of genetic deal meant Alison didn’t get her dad’s brains, either, but Lucca didn’t see how that mattered: his interest in women didn’t extend to their intellectual abilities. Lucca just hoped Alison’s parents stuck around at SkyPoint for another ten years or so.

Alison was sitting on the Lloyds’ bed now, cross-legged. She had placed the rag doll opposite her. It looked like it was supposed to be some sort of elf, or goblin or something. It wore a green cap with a bell on the end of it, and there were cloth shoes at the end of its long candy-striped legs that turned up at the toes. It was battered and faded, as if it had been the little girl’s companion and confidante her whole life, their only separation being periodic rides in the washing machine.

It sat on the bed with its legs splayed out, its torso bent forward a little to give it some stability. It looked like it was leaning forward, intent on her kiddie conversation. Lucca could see that Alison was filling the doll in on something of vital importance.

Lucca felt something inside him tremble: there was something heartbreaking about the innocence of a child. Deep down, in a part of him that he rarely visited, Lucca ached. Innocence wouldn’t last. The world would see to that.

Lucca switched channels.

He almost missed the guy in the long overcoat.