Solomon Creed. Simon Toyne

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      ‘It’s a Beechcraft,’ he said.

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘An old airplane, I guess.’

      ‘What, like a private jet?’

      ‘Propellers, I think.’

      Javier pursed his boxing-glove lips and nodded. ‘Still, sounds pretty cool. When I had to run, I sneaked across the river on some lame-assed boat in the middle of the night.’

      ‘You got here though, didn’t you?’

      ‘I guess.’

      ‘Well, that’s the main thing.’ Mulcahy leaned forward. A dark smudge had appeared in the sky above one of the larger spill piles on the far side of the airfield. ‘Doesn’t matter how you got here, just so long as you did.’

      The smudge darkened and became a column of black smoke rising fast and thick in the sky. He heard the faint sound of distant sirens. Then Mulcahy’s phone started to buzz in his pocket.

       6

      Movement rocked him awake.

      His eyes flickered open and he stared up at a low white ceiling, a drip bag hanging over him, a clear tube coiled round it like a translucent snake, moving gently in time with the ambulance.

      ‘Hey, welcome back.’ The female medic appeared over him and shone a bright light into his left eye. He felt a stab of pain and tried lifting his hand to shield his eyes but his arm wouldn’t move. He looked down and his head swam with a chemical wooziness. Thick blue nylon straps were wrapped round his arms and body, securing him tightly to the gurney.

      ‘For your protection while we’re on the move,’ she said, like it was no big deal. He knew the real reason. They’d had to sedate him to get him in the ambulance and the bindings were to make sure they wouldn’t need to do it again.

      He hated being bound like this. It pricked at some deep emotional memory, as if he’d known confinement and never wanted to know it again. He focused on the feeling, trying to remember where it came from, but his mind remained stubbornly blank.

      The movement of the ambulance was making him feel sick and so was the cocktail of smells trapped inside it – iodine, sodium bicarbonate, naloxone hydrochloride, all mixed in with sweat and smoke and sickly synthetic coconut air-freshener drifting in from the driver’s cab. He wanted to feel the ground beneath his feet again and the wind on his face. He wanted to be free to focus and think and remember what it was he had come here to do. The pain in his arm flared again at the thought and the bar rattled when he tried to reach for it.

      ‘Could you loosen the straps?’ He forced his voice to stay low and calm. ‘Just enough so I can move my arm.’

      The medic chewed her lip and fiddled with a thin necklace round her neck with ‘Gloria’ written on it in gold letters. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But you try anything and I’ll knock you straight out again, understand?’ She held up the penlight. ‘And you’ve got to let me do my job.’

      He nodded. She paused a little longer to let him know who was in charge, then reached down and tugged at a strap by the side of the gurney. The nylon band holding his hands came loose and he lifted his arm to rub at his shoulder.

      ‘Sorry about that,’ Gloria said, leaning in and flashing the light in his eye again. ‘Quickest way to calm you down before you injured someone.’ The light hurt but this time he put up with it.

      ‘What’s your name, sir?’ She switched the light to his other eye.

      She was so close he could feel her breath on his skin and it made him want to reach out and touch her to see what she felt like and make gentle rather than violent contact with someone. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

      ‘How about Solomon?’ a new voice answered for him, a man’s voice, high-pitched but with a touch of gravel in it. ‘Solomon Creed, that ring any bells?’

      Gloria leaned down to write some notes on a clipboard and he saw the cop who had nearly run him down perched on the gurney behind her.

      ‘Solomon,’ he repeated, and it felt comfortable, like boots he had walked long miles wearing. ‘Solomon Creed.’ He stared at the cop, hoping he might know more than his name. ‘Do you know me?’

      The cop shook his head and held up a small book. ‘Found this in your pocket, personally inscribed to a Solomon Creed, so I assume that’s you. Name’s in your jacket too.’ He nodded at the folded grey jacket lying on the gurney next to him. ‘Stitched right on the label in gold thread and written in French.’ He said French like he was spitting out something bitter.

      Solomon studied the book. There was a stern, sepia-tinted photograph of a man on the cover and old-fashioned block type that spelled out the title:

       RICHES AND REDEMPTION

       THE MAKING OF A TOWN

       A Memoir

       by the Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy

       Founder and first citizen

      He wanted to snatch the book away from the cop and see what else it contained. He didn’t recognize it. No memory of it at all. No memory of anything, but it had to be important. Frustrating. Maddening. And why had the cop been through his pockets? The thought of it made his hands clench into fists.

      ‘So, Mr Creed,’ the cop continued, ‘any idea why you were running away from that burning plane?’

      ‘I can’t remember,’ Solomon said. A badge on the cop’s shirt identified him as Chief Garth B. Morgan, hinting at Welsh ancestry and explaining why his skin was pink and freckled and clearly unsuited to this climate – like his own.

      What the hell was he doing here?

      ‘You think maybe you were a passenger?’ Morgan asked.

      ‘No.’

      Morgan frowned. ‘How can you be sure if you can’t remember?’

      Solomon looked out of the rear window at the burning plane and a fresh torrent of information cascaded through his head and crystallized into an explanation. ‘Because of the way the wings are folded.’

      Morgan followed Solomon’s gaze. One wing still stood at the centre of the blaze, folded up towards the sky. ‘What about it?’

      ‘They show that the aircraft flew straight into the ground. Any passengers would have been thrown downwards, not outwards – and with lethal force. A crash like that would also have caused СКАЧАТЬ