Gone by Dawn Read online

  Also by Tom Wood

  The Killer

  Bad Luck in Berlin

  (A Penguin Special)

  The Enemy

  The Game

  No Tomorrow

  The Darkest Day

  A Time to Die

  The Final Hour

  Kill For Me

  Gone By Dawn

  Tom Wood

  BERKLEY

  NEW YORK

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2018 by Tom Hinshelwood

  Excerpt from Kill For Me copyright © 2018 by Tom Hinshelwood

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781984806291

  Berkley eBook edition / December 2018

  Sphere UK eBook edition / November 2018

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach

  Cover image of man holding a gun by Barock / Shutterstock

  Cover image of factory by Damian Pankowiec / Shutterstock

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Also by Tom Wood

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Excerpt from Kill For Me

  About the Author

  One

  He didn’t dream. He never dreamed. A survival mechanism, maybe. Dreams were the memory of thought, of silence. He had no time to remember. When he awoke, he had to be aware of the quietest sound, of the slightest oddity. He had to begin surviving. His conscious mind allowed no opportunity to consider the prior dalliances of his subconscious. There could be no interpretation of symbolism, no attempt to piece together disjointed images and nonsensical occurrences. Whatever had taken place within the confines of his mind between the time he fell asleep and the time his eyes opened was an alternate universe he was incapable of accessing, and—even if he could—would not. Nothing positive could dwell there.

  Air brakes roused him. The soft hiss of mechanical engineering followed by the rock of the bus shook him from a brief but deep slumber to memories of darkness, of pain, of death. No dream, though, but the realities of the night, the night in which he still lingered. The night he had to escape.

  It wasn’t like him to sleep in public, but Victor had let himself have this small luxury. Exhaustion could not be fought indefinitely. He had slept here to have more energy later, for the next attack.

  He had been asleep longer than he should, he realized, needing effort to break the bond of dried blood and peel his head away from the window glass.

  That blood had crusted thanks to the makeshift tourniquet the stinking beanie provided and the pressure of his skull propped against the window. There had been neither the time nor the opportunity to prepare a better dressing, but the bleeding from his semi-severed ear and the ruptured superficial temporal artery had slowed to a trickle. He used a sleeve to wipe the windowpane until only a semi-opaque smear remained.

  With a tentative touch Victor explored the wound, compressing the beanie to test the healing process. There was no danger of the cut killing him, save for an infection spiraling out of control. Unlikely, but possible given the hat had belonged to a homeless man and smelled awful. That man had been paid well for the hat because Victor always overpaid in such instances. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps some last semblance of decency in the indecent.

  He looked out into the darkness and the rain. He checked his watch. He knew the timings of sunrise and sunset like civilians knew when they had to be at work and when they could go home.

  There was plenty of night left in which to hide, but to escape he had to be out of Bulgaria before the sun rose.

  Gone by dawn, whatever happened.

  There had been few passengers aboard when Victor had taken his seat and now there were fewer. He knew how to read a person’s clothes, their posture, even the way they held a newspaper—although the latter was rare and becoming rarer—to know there were no threats. A pointless check; no killers had boarded while he slept else he would not have awakened.

  Only one new person was present. That one gave off plenty of the signs of danger without being dangerous.

  She sat on the bench across the aisle from his own. Unlike every other passenger, himself included, she was not tired. Not even close. She sat sideways with her feet up on the seat, her pupils so big and black there was no room left for color. She was looking straight at him. He saw that she had been looking at him for a long time.

  Noticing this gave her license to say, “What’s your name?”

  Victor remained silent.

  She was undeterred. “Why’s your head bleeding?”

  His wound was on the right side of his head and she sat to his left, but she must have seen the blood on the window.

  She asked the question loud enough for others to hear, for suspicions to be aroused, for further questions to be asked and their answers paid attention to, so Victor said, “I have a cut.”

  She was chewing gum. Her jaw was working fast, faster than a jaw needed to work. It would ache the next day, he was sure.

  “Wow, you must be a doctor,” she said with sarcasm. “How’d it happen? What happened? Did you fall? Did someone mug you? Does it hurt? It must do. My pain tolerance is zero. Want me to take a look at it? Do you need—?”

  “A shard of broken glass,” Victor answered so she stopped talking. “Someone cut me with it.”

  She shuffled forward on the seat, closer to the aisle, closer to him. She was slim and tall, with long limbs that seemed awkward to control. The boots looked too big for her, but he supposed that was the point.

  “Did you start it? The fight?”

  Her tone was hopeful. She was hoping he was interesting. The huge pupils were hungry for stimulation. He ignored her for a moment, concerned that all of her attention was so focussed on him, a curiosity when he spent so much effort encouraging indifference.

  “In a way,” he answered with a degree of honesty when he saw her mouth open to say something else.

  Victor was never comfortable with attention. People interested in him typically wanted to kill him. Such people had tried a matter of hours before, after tracking him for weeks. A relentless pursuit for justice, for revenge.

  He didn’t blame them. He deserved it.

  She seemed pleased with herself. “That’s what I guessed. That’s what I said to myself when I first sat down. I said that man has a story to tell.”

  She was a native Bulgarian, although she sounded a little American in the way that
many people did when speaking English as a second language. She had jet-black hair made darker from the rain and slicked back into a ponytail held in place with a silvery clip. Her skin was halfway between pale and olive, even if the makeup lightened her face to an unnatural shade. Blue lipstick was smudged from all the chewing. Bulgarians weren’t the most outgoing of people in Victor’s experience—not the kind to start conversations with strangers on buses in the middle of the night—but there were always exceptions to any rule.

  “How long have you been watching me?”

  “Since I got on.”

  “Which was when?”

  She shrugged. She didn’t try and check her watch or phone. Time had ceased to have any meaning for her. It mattered as much to her as dreams did to him.

  Victor said, “Where are we?”

  “Near Kyustendil.”

  He accessed the map in his head, plotting the route the bus must have taken from Sofia. Kyustendil was near the border with Macedonia. Maybe twenty-five kilometers. That was good. He would be out of the country soon with dawn still hours away.

  Victor sat straighter. “How near is near?”

  She chewed harder. “Ten minutes, I think.”

  “You think or you know?”

  She shrugged. She didn’t know the difference with eyes like that.

  Something occurred to him.

  “How did you know I spoke English?”

  The eyes remained wide. She fidgeted with studs glittering on her earlobes. “You talk in your sleep.”

  He was surprised, but intrigued. Also displeased. To his knowledge, he had never done so before. But would he know if he had? Would the scant few people who had witnessed him sleep tell him what they heard? Had he left threats out there he didn’t know about?

  “What did I say?”

  He almost didn’t want the answer.

  “I couldn’t make out all of it, but there was something about limits. ‘People like us . . .’ or whatever.”

  He searched the huge pupils for any untruth, any deception, and found none. Perhaps he had said more than this but she hadn’t heard it or hadn’t understood what she had heard. That was good. He didn’t want to have to start deciding how much of a problem she was, how useful she could be to those that wanted him dead, that had come an eyelash’s distance from killing him. He could still taste cartilage in his mouth. He could still feel flesh in his teeth.

  “Did you have a good night?” she asked. “Before you got glassed, I mean.”

  Yes, he thought, he did have a good night. At first. A show. Dinner. Exquisite company he would never have again.

  Who are you? his date had asked with fear in her eyes.

  Someone you don’t want to know, had been his answer.

  He gazed out of the window, skyward, seeing only the night but trying to picture a plane, a passenger. He turned away because he pictured tears too.

  Better tears than blood.

  The girl with the huge pupils wasn’t going to leave him alone, he saw. With the cut, with the sleep talk, he was too interesting, too stimulating to her hyper-alert brain. It would be impossible to convince her that he was boring, that there was nothing beyond the façade of curiosity to linger upon.

  “Where are you heading?” he asked her, because the more she talked about herself the fewer questions she could ask him in return.

  She took a long time to answer. She stared at him with the huge, unblinking eyes. The sound of relentless, machine-gun chewing filled the silence.

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  Victor said, “I asked where are you going?”

  “Where does this bus go?”

  He didn’t know. He had boarded the first bus he had seen, taking the first opportunity to put distance between himself and his enemies that he could, the first that presented itself. There had been no luxury of choosing the route to his salvation. He hadn’t cared where.

  He shrugged.

  She shrugged.

  She smiled.

  He smiled too, which was a rare enough occurrence to make each genuine instance valuable to him. He wasn’t sure why he found humor here, but he knew it had something to do with post-battle elation. The organism in which he resided was thankful to be alive, was grateful even, and had released serotonin to ensure he understood the value of the life he almost lost.

  She shuffled along the bench until bony knees protruded into the aisle. She leaned forward. When he didn’t come closer she gestured for him to do so by curling her index finger.

  He relented.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she whispered, “but I’m really high right now.”

  Victor raised an eyebrow. “No kidding.”

  “When I’m high I do crazy shit like get on night buses to nowhere and talk to strangers.” The chewing was louder than her words. “Do you do crazy shit when you’re high?”

  “I don’t get high any more,” Victor said with a moment’s regret. “And would you mind not swearing?”

  “Shit isn’t swearing, is it?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Then I’m sorry for offending you. Are you one of those weird puritanical people?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Then I won’t swear,” she said with a shake of her head because that meant ‘yes’ for Bulgarians, who nodded for ‘no.’

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Would you like to know my name?”

  “Sure.”

  She didn’t tell him because her insatiable need for stimulation was distracted by a passing truck, huge and loud, with a trailer that seemed to go on forever. She watched it with sudden awe at the flicker of light through raindrops. Maybe she mistook it for a dragon.

  He felt the bus slowing. There was no traffic to explain this and his first thought was that his pursuers were forcing the vehicle off the road. It wasn’t that either, nor was there any upcoming intersection or crossing.

  The bus continued to slow. A man in overalls stood up and started for the front of the vehicle. A stop was coming up. Of course.

  “This is me,” he said. “It was nice talking to you.”

  He didn’t know where the bus was stopping. He didn’t know how he was going to cross the border or where he would go from there. That was a help instead of hindrance. If he didn’t know his next move then neither could his pursuers.

  The girl wasn’t paying attention. She was staring at her own reflection in the window glass. What was so interesting about it, he didn’t know, but he was glad the reflection had kept her attention away from him.

  He passed along the aisle and offered a polite nod to the driver. Nothing more, because he didn’t want to do or say anything that made him linger in the driver’s memory.

  Victor stepped off the bus and felt the rush of night air envelop him. His ear throbbed worse in the cool breeze.

  A featureless expanse of civilization stretched in all directions. Lights. Concrete buildings, old and dirty. Wet with rain. Quiet, but populated. The street was too open to steal any of the cars parked along it, but he envisioned side streets and shadows, old vehicles and no car alarms. Then he could gather his bearings, maybe get a moment more of rest while he worked out a course of action. He had no weapon, limited funds and a bad cut running almost half the circumference of his skull. There were many steps he needed to take before he could consider his escape complete, the danger over.

  The bus rumbled into motion.

  “Where to now?”

  She was standing behind him in the space he had occupied moments before. He turned around to face her as the bus pulled away into the night.

  The huge pupils were locked onto him.

  Victor frowned. “What are you doing?”

  “I told you I’m high, right?”

/>   He shook his head for ‘yes.’

  “Did I tell you that I do crazy shit when I’m high?”

  “It rings a bell.”

  She smiled and held out her arms. “Ta-da.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she explained without explaining.

  “Why?”

  “There is no why,” was her gleeful answer. “It’s more of a why not?”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “That’s what we’re going to change.”

  Victor said, “You need to leave me alone.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “Why?”

  She looked around. “Because I don’t know where this is. I don’t know where I am.” She frowned, confused, surprised to find herself troubled and starting to become afraid. “You’re not going to leave me by myself, are you?”

  Yes, should have been his answer, Victor knew, but the words wouldn’t manifest themselves no matter how hard he willed them to leave his lips.

  A wide road cut between industrial buildings with high walls and fences. A curious place for a stop, he thought, but perhaps it had something to do with night shifts in nearby factories. No one climbed aboard and only that one man in overalls had alighted. That man was walking fast, shoulders hunched against the weather, the night already swallowing him into darkness.

  Victor and the girl stood in the wash of the tail lights, rain pattering their heads, Victor looking at the girl for answers and she looking back at him for the same.

  He was pretty sure they would have remained like that all night had he not said:

  “This way.”

  She smiled and walked at his side.

  Two

  He chose the direction at random. There were only two options—left or right—and they went right because she had a pinprick scar on that cheek. He hadn’t noticed it on the bus but the bright tail light of the bus bathing one side of her face created a tiny shadow. She walked alongside him, happy enough to trust his judgment because whatever she was on left her own judgment a skewed remnant of its whole. There was no other reason she should take any notice of him, have any interest in him, want to walk where he walked.