Authors: Michael Kerr
HE
had lied to Jerry and Penny. As dawn broke, he casually put a bullet in each of their heads. But he had given them a quick and merciful exit from all further consternation. They had not been targets, just a means to an end that had become of no further use to him. He pointed the gun at the sleeping baby’s forehead. Hesitated. No. It couldn’t identify him. He chose to let it live, because he had the power to be merciful if it suited him to be.
Outside, the two cops in the van gave him only a cursory glance as he closed the gate and walked along the pavement in their direction. They were programmed to seeing Jerry in his red blouson, I ♥ NY baseball cap, and with the pup on a leash nipping playfully at his Nikes.
It was so easy. As he drew level with the surveillance van, one of the cops flicked a cigarette end out of the open window, and even nodded in greeting, his attention mainly on Becks.
The street was clear. He drew the silenced Glock, stepped forward and shot the two men at point blank range; the first through the left eye, the second in his temple. Poetry in flowing motion. The game was now in play. He gave himself two minutes to take care of business and quit the scene. Without pause, he walked down the driveway and around the side of the garage, jemmied open the door with its cheap Mickey Mouse lock and stepped inside, leaving the pup to its own devices.
As the kitchen door to the integral garage flew back, Donny was raising a mug of coffee to his lips. He dropped it and reached for his pistol. But the initiative was wholly with the intruder, who had the advantage of surprise on his side, plus a gun already in hand and pointing rock steady at Donny.
Two bullets crashed into Donny’s chest, knocking him backwards out of the chair. It was as if he’d been jerked by an invisible wire: a stuntman being pulled from his horse in an old western movie.
Donny tried to sit up, to call out a warning, but his body would not respond. All that came out of his mouth was a gout of poppy-red blood and a final whistling exhalation of breath. The few seconds it took him to lose consciousness seemed to last forever. Knowing that you are about to die is something you only get to experience once, and for Donny it was a real attention-getter. For some reason he focused his clouding vision on a crack that ran across the ceiling above, until it opened up and swallowed him.
From where he lay on the settee in the small lounge, Bernie opened his eyes in time to see Donny hit the floor. He saw the slim figure, gun in hand, and shouted, “Matt,” a split second before a slug hit him in the neck, sentencing him to a comparatively quick death as the bullet ruptured his right carotid artery, to continue on through his vertebrae and the upper part of his spinal cord, effectively turning him into a quadriplegic even as he bled out.
In a heartbeat, Matt reacted without thought and just let his instincts take over. He saw a flash of red material; a narrow face below a long-billed cap, and the gun being brought round to target him. He threw himself sideways, out of the short hall and into a bedroom. Thank God the door was ajar. He almost made it. Drawing his pistol as he hit the floor and rolled, he cried out against the fiery pain that flared in both his leg and side.
Coming up into a sitting position with his back against the bed, and his Browning Hi-Power held two-handed and pointing at the open doorway, Matt readied himself to empty the clip into whoever had made the assault on the safe house.
Seconds passed. He felt dizzy, sick to the stomach. Glanced down to see blood bubbling through the denim of his jeans. An artery. Jesus! He needed help, and fast. If he passed out, he knew that he would not wake up again.
“No...Please!” Lester Little’s voice. An hysterical and terror-filled plea for mercy, followed by three sounds that could have been polite coughs, had Matt not known that it was the muffled explosions of bullets being spat out through the baffles of a suppressor.
His leg was now numb. No pain. And he was cold to the bone. He somehow found the strength of will to reach into a pocket, withdraw his cell and hit stored memory and 2, which connected him with the SCU.
“Serious Crimes
¯”
“This is Barnes,” he interrupted. There was no time to waste words. “We’ve been hit. There are officers down,” he managed to say before dropping the phone. Survival depends on making the right decisions quickly and acting on them. Too many people die because they freeze and let life-threatening events unfurl without trying to save themselves. Matt did not for one second contemplate death. He unbuckled the belt from his jeans and pulled it from the loops to employ as a makeshift tourniquet. Wrapped it around his thigh as tightly as he could and refastened the buckle. Seconds later he sank into the black.
Linda shivered. Slabs of charcoal cloud swept in from the west to block out the rising sun, darkening and chilling the air of what had promised to be a fine day. There was a stillness; a pregnant silence devoid of even birdsong, followed by heavy, driving rain. Cold nails hammered against her skin as she gathered up the washing basket and ran from the garden into the kitchen. Dumping the basket on a work surface, she pulled a towel from where it hung from a hook below the wall-mounted spice rack. She rubbed her short blond hair, and then patted at her tanned face, shoulders and arms.
The doorbell rang. Call it a presentiment, but she was immediately consumed by a sudden dread that made her heart double its rate. The bell rang twice more before she found the resolve to walk woodenly out into the hall.
It was Matt’s boss, DCI Tom Bartlett, standing on the step. There was bad news written all over his face.
“Tell me,” Linda demanded, backing up as he stepped forward.
“Inside,” Tom replied, entering the hallway to take her by the arm and lead her through to the lounge, where he motioned for her to sit down.
She sank into a chair, clasped her hands tightly together on her lap and closed her eyes. This was one of the reasons she had decided to walk away. She still loved Matt, but not enough – or too much – to share him with his job. He lived in a world of murder and mayhem; a life comprising sudden death in many guises. She hardly saw him. He came and went like a lodger, or a ghost, and was almost a stranger these days.
They had met two years ago. She had been on a girls’ night out, and he had been on his own, propping up the bar in the Half Moon pub. One thing quickly led to another. That he was a cop intrigued her, initially. Love conquers all, they say, whoever
they
are. Wrong! Matt could not give her enough of himself. She wanted more from the relationship, but had come to know that time was a commodity Matt rationed unfairly, in her estimation. And even when he was supposedly off duty there was a tension as she waited for the call that would instigate his apologising for cancelling another night out, weekend away, or just the pleasure of them being together.
Linda believed that through Matt’s eyes her personal world was mundane. She was a freelance journalist, now working wholly from home via computer. And the cesspool that Matt steeped himself in was too deep and stagnant; not something that she could come to terms with. A year living under the same roof with a murder cop had in some way depleted her lust for life and jaded her outlook. She had learned that loving someone till it hurts and becomes a vexation to the spirit, was not sustainable. They both knew each other’s feelings. Their shelf life had expired, and all that remained was for one of them, her, to make the break and move on.
“Matt was shot this morning,” Tom said, his voice a controlled monotone. “He’s alive, but in a serious...critical condition. You need to come to the hospital, Linda.”
Wings of fear flapped in her stomach and tried to take flight. “Is he going to make it?” she asked, forcing the words through what felt like a rock tightly wedged in her throat.
Tom ran his fingers through thinning, sandy hair, hiked his broad shoulders and narrowed his eyes. His expression was pained. “It’s touch and go, love. He lost a lot of blood. They’re operating on him now.”
Sitting in the Cosworth next to the DCI, Linda silently prayed that Matt would pull through. When she felt she could talk, she turned to the burly cop. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “I need to know.”
Tom bit his bottom lip. By the book, he shouldn’t discuss what had gone down. But what the hell. He didn’t have to go into specifics. “Matt and four other officers were at a safe house, looking after a witness,” he said. “They got hit.”
“Meaning?”
“That Matt was the only one to come out alive.”
“Dear God!”
“He’ll get past this, Linda. He’s like that town Tombstone in Arizona; too tough to die,” Tom said with more conviction than he felt.
Matt was still in surgery at the Middlesex Hospital when Linda and Tom arrived at a little after ten. They were shown into a small waiting room. Linda went over to the window, stared out through it, but saw nothing. Her thoughts were focused inward.
Tom sank into one of the easy chairs that were crowded arm-to-arm against two of the walls. The terracotta-coloured fabric was almost identical to that of the old three piece suite in the lounge of his semi in Wood Green. Time to get rid of it, he thought. His wife had been bitching for a new one for almost three years. He would tell her to go ahead. As long as it wasn’t fucking terracotta she could get whatever the hell she wanted. The walls of the room were a soft hue, maybe coral pink. And the framed prints on them were all by the painter who was into ponds and lilies: Monet? Tom wasn’t sure. The whole ambience of the decor was an attempt to calm and comfort. It didn’t work, even though it was an antithesis to the disease, illness and death that was all around them, out of sight in wards and operating theatres. He felt like shit. Just being in a hospital brought on phantom pains. He had suffered a mild heart attack almost four years back. Now, he took his beta blockers and aspirin every day like he should, but had drifted back to smoking, and was living on a diet of fried food and stress. His chest hurt. Imagination? Think about something else.
“You want a coffee or anything?” he asked Linda, standing, needing to move.
Linda was in a world of her own, still facing the window, her forehead now resting against the cold glass, hugging herself, even though the warm air was stifling and stale in the small room. She hadn’t spoken to Tom since they’d arrived, but then, neither had he to her. Walking across the room, he put his hand on her shoulder. She jumped, startled out of dark thoughts.
“Sorry. Do you want a drink?”
Her cheeks were wet. “Uh, yes. Something cold. And will you
please
talk to somebody? Find out how he is.”
Tom nodded. Turned and made his way out into the corridor. Headed for the vending machine he had seen next to the nurses’ station.
Matt Barnes wasn’t just one of his DIs. He was a friend. They had been in CID together. Spent a lot of time in pubs, talking about football, women, villains...and more women. He also needed Matt to give them something. He was the only survivor, and had surely seen the perp who’d shot him. The brass was going apeshit. Lester Little had been Tom’s responsibility. The buck stopped on his desk. That’s why they’d been sitting on Little instead of handing him over to Witness Protection. But he didn’t give a flying fuck what the suits on the top floor thought. He had no answers, only questions of his own. Someone had given Frank Santini the nod, and the result was a massacre on a quiet middle-class street in Finchley. Only he and the two teams concerned had known the locations that Little was being ferried between. It didn’t take an Einstein to work out the implication. What a fucking mess. The conversation between himself and Lester Little several weeks previously came back to haunt him:
“You’re looking at double figures, Lester. We caught you cold, setting up the importation and distribution of enough H to fill a supermarket. You’re a front for Santini, and unless you serve him up on a plate, you’ll do the bird for him.”
“I got nothin’ to say,” Lester had said.
Tom had shaken his head. “You’re fifty-four. Do you see yourself in Belmarsh till you’re old enough to apply for a bus pass?”
Lester’s smile was sardonic. “If I grass, I’ll get my throat cut and my tongue pulled out through it. You can’t offer me enough to say jack shit about anythin’.”
“What if we spring you, lift Santini, and let it be known that you’re helping us with our inquiries?”
Lester’s face went bone white. The smile disappeared. “You can’t do that, Bartlett. You’d be signin’ my fuckin ’death warrant.”
“I can and will do whatever it takes to get to your boss. Talk to me, and I’ll guarantee you immunity, with the paperwork to catch a silver bird and start over in Spain or somewhere.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You get up in the witness box and spill your guts. You’ll be under twenty-four-hour protection until then.”
“And you really think I’d be safe?”
“I guarantee it.”
Lester shook his head. “I’m between the proverbial rock and hard place, Bartlett. I reckon I get to be chopped liver whichever way I jump. Santini will have someone in Witness Protection.”
“I’m the only game in town and you know it, Lester. You made your bed, now you get to lie on it. My team will look after you.”
“Okay, but my money says I get capped, and that Frank stays on the street.”
“Trust me, Lester. You’ll get to play golf in the sun, screw dusky senoritas, and drink sangria till it comes out of your ears.”