All Our Darkest Secrets by Martyn Ford

Author:Martyn Ford [Ford, Martyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2021-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

I’m driving fast and—I shift gears, foot down—faster, my teeth clenched together. I hit the steering wheel. Punch it again and again, so hard the metal inside seems to bend.

“Fuck, fuck,” I say. “Fuck.”

I am pure rage. Blood hissing in my ears. Arms locked straight. I want to put my elbow through the glass. I want to inhale black smoke and taste raw flesh. I want to burn it all down.

“Fuck.”

I grab my gun from the passenger seat and lift it as I grip the wheel. Pushing myself back into my chair, teeth showing, shaking. I come to a hard stop at a red light.

The radio’s saying the news again. I turn it up, loud, louder, louder than the engine. Louder than my breathing. And I literally shout—as though part of me doesn’t want to hear the name.

The more the story progresses, the harder I squeeze the pistol in my right hand, the steering wheel in my left.

“Tributes have come pouring in this afternoon after the body was identified as officer Donnie Rhodes, thirty-eight,” the radio says. “Colleagues have described him as a kind, fun-loving man with a zest for life who dedicated his career to making the city a better place for all its residents.”

I groan as tendons tighten and stretch the skin on my neck into wafer-thin tents.

They killed him, I keep thinking. They fucking killed him. Donnie. Drunk Donnie who remembered too much. He figured out we were driving the wrong way.

And now he’s dead.

I slide between screaming fury and stomach-churning dread.

Turning slowly to my left, I see a woman in a car at my side. We make eye contact, and I lower my pistol and look straight ahead. She’s right to be concerned.

And the light turns green. A screech of rubber—steam wisps off the asphalt below, behind, spreading across the sidewalk in the afternoon sun.

I swing the car down the ramp and into the underground parking lot, sticking it between two spaces near the stairs. I’m up and out and striding and not even closing the door.

Then I’m yanking the handrail as I go inside, up the stairs, around the corner, into the Leyland & Lang lobby.

“Move,” I say to someone standing in front of the elevator.

A suited man turns, holding a folder, eyes me up and down. “Who are you?”

I snatch the folder from his hands and fling it across the marble floor. A few people nearby stop and stare. The man almost says something but chooses instead to step aside, allowing me to enter the elevator. I hit number six. Before the doors close, I glimpse two security guards coming across the lobby, one speaking into the radio on his shoulder.

And up it goes.

That blonde woman on the TV in the elevator wall. She’s back again. Smiling in her yard. Look. Look how happy these pills are making her. The oxy, the fucking benzos. I turn away and there’s a poster with an even happier woman—it says, “A life without pain.”

Spinning back to

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