Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. (24 page)

“Hurry up. Hurry up,” urges the old man as he nervously eyes the other tellers. But if anyone knows what's happening, they're not reacting. However, as Kim slowly fills the bag, in accordance with the bank's security policy a flurry of activity is taking place behind the scenes. The manager is on the phone to the police station, the safe is being locked, alarms are being rung at the bank's head office, and a supervisor is heading towards the front door to provide the assistant manager with backup.

“C'mon, luv. Get a move on,” pleads Joliffe, guessing that his time is running out, and Kim speeds up a fraction.

“Sorry,” she mutters, emptying her drawer and handing him the bag. But she hangs on as he starts to take it and steels herself to look into his tired grey eyes and question, “Are you really sure you want to do this?”

It's a question that Joliffe has asked himself time and again over the past few days, and as he takes the bag, he seeks to reassure her. “Don't worry. I'm going to bring it back, luv. I'm only borrowing it for a few days. And I'll pay the interest.” Then he shoves the gun back in his pocket, pushes himself upright against the desk and hobbles towards the front door.

Despite the bank's policy of not interfering with armed robbers, the sight of a dishevelled renegade, apparently on the loose from a nursing home, shuffling his way out of the building with a bag of loot is so
ludicrous that the two men at the door block Joliffe's path to freedom.

“Why don't you just put down the bag, sir?” suggests the supervisor gently, stepping forward as if to take it. Joliffe doesn't hesitate. He pulls the loaded pistol from his pocket and sticks it to his temple.

“Open the door or I'll kill myself.”

“Don't be silly, sir,” says the supervisor, uneasily backing off a notch.

“I mean it,” continues Joliffe, releasing the safety catch. “I've got nothing to lose.”

“Oh, come along, sir,” chides the assistant manager with a dry laugh, but Joliffe isn't joking.

“Open the door,” he shouts, cocking the trigger with a click that reverberates around the cavernous room with the force of a gunshot. Then he counts, “One… two…

“Okay — okay,” says the supervisor, opening the door. “You go ahead.”

“Armed robbery in progress” is the report that immediately electrifies the police airwaves, galvanizing every officer on duty into a state of alertness and sending a helicopter, six police cars and a vanload of heavies in body armour to the front line, while additional units are scrambling from across the city to provide backup.

The sound of sirens startles Joliffe as he hobbles down the bank's stone steps to his getaway bike. He hadn't anticipated such an immediate hue and cry and is rattled as he straps his bag of winnings to the carrier.

“C'mon, c'mon,” he mutters, angry with himself for his clumsiness. But he finally gets it attached, and lifts his leg over the crossbar to find the pedals. However, in his panic, he's overlooked two crucial elements: the gun
in his pocket is still cocked, and he's forgotten to put on his bicycle clips.

“Damn,” mumbles Joliffe, remembering the clips, but it's too late. A police car, screeching out of an intersection behind him and weaving quickly through the busy traffic, forces him to take flight. With adrenaline juicing life into his aged legs, he kicks off from the curb and spins the pedals with such vigour that, by the time the police car skids to a halt at the bank, he is pumping his way out of sight over the top of the hill. With rasping breaths and thudding heart, Joliffe fights to keep the pedals turning, but his break for freedom is short-lived. As he crests the rise and starts his descent, the flashing lights of police cars emerging from the murk at the bottom of the hill tell him he's trapped.

He hits the brakes, but the rain-slick rubber pads skid uselessly around the rim, so he decides to let go. The pedals of his ancient bicycle are exhilarated by the sudden freedom and take on their own life, spinning and shrieking like delighted kids on a merry-go-round. Joliffe, too, is elated, and despite his fear he drops fifty years as he looks to the bottom of the hill and plans to evade capture by leaping the curb and detouring through a pedestrian walkway. But fate takes a hand: Joliffe's flying chain grabs his flapping trouser leg and jams it into the cogwheel. The pedals stop with such jarring suddenness that he's almost overthrown, but he hangs on and flies headlong down the steep slope, wobbling erratically, while he frantically tugs at his wedged leg.

A couple of umbrella-wielding women step blindly onto a crosswalk in Joliffe's path and he frantically screeches, “Out of the way! Out of the way!” as he tugs furiously at his jammed leg.

The women leap back to the curb, but Joliffe has lost control and is heading into oncoming traffic, forcing
drivers and pedestrians to clear a path. A speeding courier skids on the soaked roadway, ricochets his van off a bus and swerves into the path of an oncoming lorry. A woman police driver, screaming through the traffic with her siren, slams on her brakes and watches in horror as the truck veers across the road ahead of her.

“Oh my God,” she breathes as the twenty-ton monster scythes through a central hurdle and barrels towards a crowded bus stop.

With only seconds to react and nowhere to run, a dozen startled pedestrians stand transfixed like store dummies.

Joliffe sees the disaster unfolding in front of him and gets a grip on his handlebars, but he's still flying, and he slews past the truck and flies into the path of the police car. Behind him, pedestrians wake up and start to scatter, but the trucker finally wrests control, stands on his brakes and sideswipes half a dozen parked cars before solidly coming to rest against a concrete lamp standard.

Meanwhile, the fleeing bank raider has crashed headlong onto the hood of the police car and is staring through the windshield at the astonished policewoman.

As Constable Wendy Martin leaps from her car and takes a step towards the stricken man, the cocked pistol slips from Joliffe's raincoat pocket and begins a slow glide down the hood. The
crack
of the shot when the gun hits the ground is smothered by the cacophony of sirens and the throb of the police helicopter hovering overhead, so much so that the woman police officer shares everyone's surprise when her right leg suddenly caves under her and she falls heavily to the ground.

David Bliss is pacing at Vancouver's downtown police station. He's anxious for members of the press to settle, and the conference to begin, when Peter Bryan gets through to him on Phillips's cell phone with news of Maurice Joliffe's escapade. It's still morning on the Pacific coast, and still raining, but it's six in the evening in soggy London, where the Friday rush hour is winding down and the snarl-up in Kensington High Road is gradually being straightened out.

Despite the continuing rain, a crowd of rubber-neckers hang around as a tow truck hooks up the last of the smashed vehicles; while accident investigators take measurements and insurance adjusters scour the area searching for loopholes amongst the wreckage.

Constable Wendy Martin is in the emergency room at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. She will recuperate, once the bullet has been removed from her thigh; however, the fate of Joliffe's vintage bicycle is less certain. The mangled machine will probably end up as a curio in the
force museum, though for now it sits in the evidence room at Kensington police station, together with the gun and the bag of stolen money.

Maurice Joliffe is also something of a curio, and a parade of amused officers take it in turn to gawk at the hapless, patched-up villain while he sits in the interview room, not knowing whether to chuckle or cry, as he waits for the legal-aid lawyer.

“Good news, Dave,” says Bryan, as Bliss prepares to support Trina's anxiety-drained husband at the press conference. “We may have a breakthrough in the suicide cases.”

“Oh. That's good,” says Bliss absently, without admitting that since Daphne's disappearance he has given little thought to the situation that had triggered the imbroglio.

“Yeah, some old geezer on a bike just pulled off a blagging at a bank in Kensington, then he plugged one of the uniformed grunts on his way out.”

“Okay, Peter, but that's armed robbery and assault on police,” replies Bliss tetchily. “What the hell has that got to do with a bunch of crumblies topping themselves?”

“I've no idea,” says Bryan, “but the robbery squad just called and they reckoned we'd be interested. Anyway, I'm going to interview him. I'll call you back.”

Bliss has a perplexed look as he hands the phone back to his Mountie friend, but the hubbub is dying down in the room — the press conference is about to get under way — and he switches his focus back to Trina's husband, who is being paraded in front of the cameras by a uniformed superintendent. Rick Button has the fearful look of a shell-shocked prisoner, and every flash of a camera makes him jump as he edges his way to his seat at the table.

“Take your time,” advises the superintendent as the wall of reporters seem to crowd in on Button, and the sleep-deprived man suddenly takes in the scene as if he has been caught in his bathtub by a party of visiting nuns.

“Umm… umm…” he stutters, his eyes darting back and forth, looking for somewhere to run.

“Just send a message to Trina,” suggests Bliss gently in Rick Button's ear, as he lays a hand on the distraught man's shoulder. “Let her know we've not given up.”

Button wipes his eyes with the flat of his hand, forces himself higher in the chair and focuses into the middle-distance, like a drunkard trying to see through the fog of inebriation. “I… I want whoever is holding my wife… to let her go,” he stumbles through his tears, and Bliss watches with growing irritation as media hangers-on and camera crews wander around in the background, nattering about baseball and laughing at corny jokes, in a world that is, for them, a playground of normality.

“Sir, why do you suspect that someone is holding the women?” queries a reporter, seizing on Rick's faltering diction to slip in an early question.

“I… I don't… know what to think anymore…” mumbles Button and, as the distressed man's voice gradually becomes incoherent, Bliss snatches the microphone from under his nose.

“Look, there are two women missing,” declares Bliss firmly, once he has introduced himself. “Two women who happen to mean a great deal to their friends and families — and to me personally. And while I realize it may be inconvenient for a certain government to acknowledge what's happened to them, it is time to let them go home.”

The immediate hush is palpable as another reporter begins to ask the obvious. “Are you suggesting —” she begins, but Bliss chimes in, “Yes. We have every reason
to believe they are being held against their will by the American authorities.”

“Where?”

“At a clandestine government establishment south of the border,” continues Bliss with such forthrightness that there is a collective intake of breath.

The chatting stops. Cameramen rush to finely refocus their lenses. Sound men check their audio levels. And in the so-called monastery, John Dawson smacks his head into his hands and mutters, “Oh, shit.”

“Fuck!” spits Bumface, alongside Dawson, as Bliss continues, straight to the camera. “… And I want to warn those people who are holding them, whoever they are: I've made it my mission to expose your activities to the world.”

“What activities?” is one question drowned out by a cacophony of scandal hungry pressmen.

“Those are mighty fighting words, Chief Inspector,” booms a baritone voice above the hullabaloo, and the burly Canadian reporter holds the floor as he continues. “Sounds like you're declaring war on someone.”

“Well, I'm not the first David to take on a Goliath,” concedes Bliss. “But if that's the way they want to play it…”

“Shuddup, you jerk,” mumbles Dawson at his television set. “You've got no idea what you're dealing with.”

“All I can say is that I suggest you look no further than the U.S. government if I have a nasty accident…” Bliss continues, but leaves the sentence hanging as a
Seattle Times
reporter challenges him.

“That's taking it a bit far, isn't it, sir?”

“Well, they've tried spiked belts and machine guns to keep me out so far,” carries on Bliss, leaving Dawson mumbling, “Jesus Christ! Will somebody please shut
him up.” But Bliss is on a roll. “Unless they release the women immediately, I will take whatever action I deem appropriate to rescue them.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that the government of the United States of America is responsible for abducting them?” asks an incredulous television newsman, and Bliss stares open-faced at the bank of cameras to reply: “And you, sir, are seriously suggesting that America doesn't have a history of kidnapping and holding people against their will?”

A titter of accord rings around the room, but in Washington state, John Dawson is not laughing as he downs a couple of painkillers for his burgeoning headache and turns to Bumface.

“You'd better shut down the funding operation immediately. Get the phones out and tell the guys to take a hike.”

“They'll want cash.”

“Give it to ‘em. Just remind ‘em that they're looking at ten to fifteen apiece if they ever blab.”

“Okay, John.”

“And tell Buzzer not to do any more collections.”

“He'd better pick up what's there already.”

“You're right. Just today, and I guess tomorrow. But that's it.”

“Sure,” says Bumface, then he looks to the wall of surveillance screens. “What about all of
them?
” he says, pointing to the numerous patients in various states of recovery following surgery.

“Hey, it's a charitable hospital if anyone comes asking. Of course we have sick people here.”