Solomon Creed: The only thriller you need to read this year

Mulcahy sat back on his heels and glanced over at Carlos lying nearby, a surprised expression on his dead face. Ever since Carlos had appeared in the doorway with a gun in his hand he had suspected Papa Tío was not behind this. Tío would never trust a stranger over a blood relative for something like this.

He turned back to Luis to try a new name on him but saw it was already too late. The man’s eyes had rolled back into his head, his mouth opening and closing but the wound in his chest no longer sucking. He was drowning or suffocating, trying to breathe but getting nothing. He breathed out one last rattling breath and his mouth went slack. Mulcahy pressed two fingers into his neck and felt nothing.

He lifted Luis’s left arm and pulled the sleeve of his jacket back as far as it would go. His left forearm was almost entirely covered by a large, colourful tattoo of Santa Muerte – the saint of death – her grinning skeletal face framed by the hood of a long robe, her bony hands holding a globe and a scythe. This told him nothing; plenty of Mexican gang members had tattoos of Santa Muerte – but his right arm told a different story.

The wrist was encircled by a barbed-wire design, showing Luis had served jail time, and above it was a carefully inked column of Roman numerals – one to four – next to the outline of a gun with the barrel pointing down towards the hand. It showed that Luis was a shooter, a dedicated hit man for the cartels, and the numerals showed how many high-level hits he had carried out. There were notches on the barrel too: fifteen marks scratched into the skin with a needle and ink showing lesser kills, soldiers and civilians taken out in the usual course of business and recorded in a casual way that reflected their lesser importance. They reminded Mulcahy of the mission decals he’d seen on the planes earlier – same principle, different war. Only one gang used Roman numerals to record their high-level kills, a nod to the Catholic faith they professed to defend and honour: the Latin Saints – Papa Tío’s main rivals.

Mulcahy took his phone from his pocket to take a photo and saw he had one message – Pop: Missed Call.He breathed a little easier when he read it. Once he was clear of this mess he’d call him back, but first he had to clean up.

He took a picture of Luis’s forearm then checked to make sure it was in focus. The first three numerals were solid black but the fourth was only an outline, ready to be inked once the hit had been carried out. There was only one person who would warrant the high status of a numeral and it wasn’t him or Javier.

It all made sense now – Carlos being the insider instead of Javier. Carlos wasn’t the hit man, he was a plant, a human homing beacon with his phone transmitting their location to the real kill crew. That’s why he had been so edgy. He had known what was coming. He was probably only doing it to pay off some debt, betraying one set of killers to appease another and trading one shitty situation for a slightly less shitty one. Mulcahy knew all about that kind of deal. He slid his phone back into his pocket and rose to his feet.

He worked quickly by the flickering glow of the TV, pulled the duster from his back pocket and wiped down all the places he’d touched since entering the room. He took a few more pictures then grabbed Javier’s gold- and jewel-encrusted phone and a plastic laundry sack from the closet and started collecting the guns.

Luis and Tyson had both been carrying FN Five-sevens, known as Mata policiers or cop killers because of their ability to penetrate body-armour. They had two spare magazines each in their jacket pockets and almost a thousand dollars in cash. He found the keys to the other Jeep in Luis’s pocket and took those too. Javier had a knife tucked inside his boot. Mulcahy dropped it into the sack with the rest of the weapons, twisted it closed then pulled his phone from his pocket, found the missed call message and selected ‘recall’.

He stood by the door a moment, scanning the room and checking it over for anything he might have overlooked. His eyes settled on the TV screen where the desert still burned. A reporter was talking about the plane crash that had caused it. The strap beneath him said they were getting reports of a possible survivor. Mulcahy took an involuntary step forward, not quite believing what he was reading, then the phone clicked and someone picked up.

‘Hello,’ a voice said. It was not his father.

21 (#ulink_ba2d01be-9378-529e-bdaa-4ae9e7e74d38)

Solomon looked down at the burned man on the stretcher.

The medics were still trauma focused: elevating the blackened horror of his legs, taking his temperature with a non-contact digital thermometer, covering him with sterile sheets to prevent heat-loss and hypothermia, talking to him the whole time, telling him he was doing OK, telling him to hang in there, that they were going to airlift him to some specialist unit in Maricopa. They were too preoccupied to notice Solomon standing there, a stranger in their midst. But the burned man saw him. He stared directly up through milky eyes that might once have been pale blue.

The vitreous liquid in the human eye is protein, Solomon’s mind told him. When you heat it up it goes white like a boiled egg.

He surveyed the wreckage of the man, his blackened body curling into a foetal position, the result of muscle contraction caused by intense heat. The medics were cutting away what was left of his clothes before the cooked flesh beneath swelled too much and turned them into tourniquets.

Solomon held the man’s eyes and smiled. The smell of him was overpowering, an almost sweet, burnt barbecue smell of human flesh, so reminiscent of pork that in some cannibalistic tribes, humans were referred to as long pigs. He reached out and gently took one of the blackened stumps of the man’s hands, his own perfect white skin making the ruined claw seem all the more tragic in contrast.

‘Hey!’ the voice came sharp and angry. ‘Step away right now! Do not touch the patient.’

Solomon gripped the man’s hand more firmly, knowing it would cause him no pain. He could feel the splits in the baked skin and see distal phalanx bones poking out through the charred, dead flesh of his finger ends. Such acute damage would have destroyed all the nerve endings so he would never feel pain or indeed anything in this hand ever again. But he held it anyway in such a way that the burned man could see it, even if he couldn’t feel it.