by Jake Cross
Nate had expected the postcode Buzzcut had given him to belong to an empty building under construction, given the area. He had imagined the setting for this final showdown, and it had been something right out of an action film: an empty top floor, unfinished walls, cement dust on the floor, builders’ tools scattered everywhere, windowless frames letting in cold air, bullets flying as everyone ran around a maze created by pallets of bricks and giant coils of rubber piping and stacks of two-by-four.
But Google had corrected him. Eight Oaks, Nine Elms Lane, was a luxury riverside residential block with apartments selling around the £800,000 mark. And up ahead, there it was: three conjoined brown-brick towers of different heights, the centre one the tallest, making the building look like a giant winner’s podium. And then shock piled upon amazement when further Google interrogation coughed up the name of one of the apartments’ owners.
James Ryback.
Getting in seemed easy. Too easy. Suspiciously easy.
A steel fire exit of switchback stairs rose up a bare brick central section of the middle building, and at each floor a concrete balcony with a frameless glass balustrade ran the length of the building, with gates to provide apartment boundaries. Google had also given Nate a floor plan, so he knew that Ryback’s apartment was on the fourth floor, and he now stared at an open window beside a solid door on that level. No other window was open as wide as that one. Obviously Ryback’s. Clearly an invitation: come on in. Clearly a damn trap, too.
He was being led like a lamb to the chopping block and he knew it, yet here he was climbing the back wall of the block, now crossing a neat lawn with garden benches and coloured rockeries. Now mounting the stairs. Climbing. Baa.
He pulled Buzzcut’s snub-nosed pistol. He’d googled it and learned that it was a five-shot Ruger SP101.
He exited onto the balcony on floor four, passed through the first gate, ducked below the window of the apartment next to Ryback’s, and opened the next gate. Now he was just three feet from the window. No glass at all in the PVC door, so he put his ear to it, but heard nothing from within.
He gripped the Ruger, finger on the trigger. It was double-action, which meant a single pull of the trigger to fire, but more power would be needed, and that would affect accuracy. At least he probably wouldn’t shoot by accident if a noise startled him. He found this concern strange, given his time handling much more deadly weapons in the army. But, as Toni had said, these days he was a wet businessman. He certainly felt like one now.
Back to the window. Double-casement, only the farthest half open. Reaching it would mean exposing himself in front of the closed section, and that just wouldn’t do. However, he noticed that the open section was angled perfectly to allow him to see the room beyond reflected. No guys aiming guns at the open window as far as he could tell. So he did the exposure thing. And had a funny thought: if I get shot, try not to fall over the wall. Three bullets in the head is bad enough without a fifty-metre fall to boot.
No bullets. No Icarus impression. He climbed into a large living room with bamboo furniture, all of it. Table, chairs, sofa, although it had soft cushions. Tribal masks and paintings on the wall. A massive flat screen TV. Other items, some expensive, some just cheap trinkets to fill space. Just the kind of living room he’d expect in any house. But all of it was busted, as if a tornado had slipped in through the window. Everything breakable had suffered. Even the wallpaper had been torn.
Kitchen, the same. The vandals had even gone to the trouble of yanking off the oven and fridge doors.
Bedrooms, no different. The mattresses were slashed.
Complete destruction. Nate couldn’t put down a foot without crunching glass or bits of wood. Not a robbery. Someone had turned the place over, but not looking for something. Unless it was the size of a thimble. Unless they had gotten very angry at not being able to find it. Which he doubted. Too much carnage. No-one stayed that angry for that long. Any thirst for violence would have long dissipated before the place looked even as half as bad as it did. This destruction was to make a statement.
Nate got the impression that the chaos was meant to look like his work.
He went to the kitchen window, stepping over and around busted items. Across the road, past bushy trees lining the pavement, was New Covent Garden Market. He took in the London skyline beyond for a few seconds and then looked down, past a small balcony outside Ryback’s door, and onto Nine Elms Lane. Traffic moving slowly both ways. People going about their lives. He thought about his mother. He thought about Pete. Being this high, watching the tiny world moving, often made him think of his place in that world. He thought about all the exotic places, all the lives that were so vastly different from his own. He often envied people who never had to deal with the normal city things that people like him went through. Barmen on beaches in Hawaii. Builders in the forests of China. People who’d never heard of the term ‘rat race’.
Now, though, he envied every rat below him. The businessman rushing to the office. The postman finishing up his deliveries. The cops racing south – even the robber they might be chasing.
Double-take on the cop car. Lights flashing but no siren wailing, it was blasting southeast along Nine Elms Lane, headed this way. Not just this way, Nate knew. Here. He knew that even before it pulled in directly below him. The cops were coming for him, but he did not move.
Just like at the leisure park, someone had set-up a crime scene and then called the police to frame him, but he did not move.
Not until he saw the black van. A hundred metres behind the cop car. Now slowing as it neared its destination. Cops got out of the patrol car, but they didn’t rush anywhere. Instead, they watched the black van make a sharp turn and zip down the side of the Eight Oaks.
Nate rushed to the living room window and stuck his head out. The van had parked alongside the garden wall, right by a gate. The side door opened and men in black exploded out. Armed cops. They opened the gate and stormed through and split up. One rushed for the fire exit. There was always a chance that there was another dangerous fugitive in the building and that they were here for him. But taking that long-shot bet could win Nate twenty years in a cell if he was wrong. It wasn’t a bet he was willing to take.
Back to the kitchen window. The boys in blue had gone, no doubt now inside the building. Blue and black, all coming up for him. They would cover the lifts and the stairs, of course, which now meant no way out.
He opened the door that led onto the balcony. Unlike at the building’s rear, here each resident got their own little outdoor space, a balcony barely longer than a man. The neighbour’s was ten feet away. It had a bamboo privacy screen, a deck chair, a potted plant, a small table with a book under a paperweight, and a scuffed rug. A personal place where a person could sit and be left alone while feeling out in the world. Being left alone would have thrilled Nate no end right now.
He closed the door and leaned over the iron railing, trying to see the balcony below. He could see that people on the street had stopped to watch the action. They knew something was kicking off, but he couldn’t tell if anyone was looking at him. No pointing fingers at least.
He climbed over the railing and paused on the insane side. Heels over thin air, just ten little fingers keeping the ambulance crews at bay.
‘In what world is this a good idea, Nate?’ he said aloud.
He lowered himself into a squat and slid his hands down the bars. No screams from below. His fingers started to hurt from clutching the bars so tightly. But he didn’t move. He wasn’t at the point of no return yet. No way he was going to risk what he was risking unless he had absolutely no choice. The cops might yet kick in another door and arrest someone else.
‘Hurry the fuck up,’ he hissed.
A minute that felt like years later, he heard the front door go. ‘Go’ as in bashed open.
‘We’re coming for you, Barke,’ he heard someone shout. There it was, then: they were here for him. Then they were inside and everyone was shouting. I
n a roundabout way, the cops were suggesting that he should show himself with his hands up because they were armed police and they would shoot if he had a weapon.
Now, the point of no return. He tried to kick his feet off the balcony, but they wouldn’t move. He pictured himself frozen here as the cops opened the balcony door. Maybe they’d pause and try to talk him back to the sane side of the railing, or maybe they’d kick his fingers and tell their bosses he jumped.
Neither appealed. The shouting got closer, too close, seconds-from-being-caught-or-kicked-close. His feet slipped away from the concrete lip. The awkward horizontal grip he had on the bars wrenched his wrists as his arms were pulled vertical by his weight.
He swung forward and his wrists actually creaked like old hinges as they were torqued. His index fingers were tugged free, and the others didn’t have the strength to stay in place after that. A moment of sheer panic unlike any he’d ever felt before as his touch upon the world and everything in it was gone.
And then the panic was replaced with pain, a sharp blow across his buttocks. For a second he was balanced perfectly in a sitting position on the balcony railing below, his ass out over the dangerous side. But before he could wonder which way this pendulum would swing, he was toppling forward. He hit the deck hard, and the pain in his knees was glorious because it was there, because it beat eternal oblivion.
There was no time for enjoying his extended life, though. He heard the door on the balcony above open.
Nate got up and tried the balcony door of the flat under Ryback’s. Locked. He looked through the window and saw an old man in a dressing gown over pyjamas. They locked stares.
Nate could think of nothing else to do but wave. The guy was sitting at the kitchen table, but he got up, started a slow shuffle towards the door. Nate tensed, even held his breath in case the cops heard it. Above, the shouting had stopped. Having determined that no-one was going to jump out at them with a gun, the cops were probably doing a slow search to see if Nate had stuffed himself in a drawer. He could hear the murmur of the odd remark. He wondered if they’d assume they’d missed him.
‘What you doing? Maybe he flew, that it?’ he heard someone say just a few feet above him. Someone had stepped out onto the balcony.
The old guy appeared at the window in the upper half of the door, a puzzled look on his face. He reached for the handle. Behind Nate, he heard a scrape and saw the back half of a foot appear on the ledge. A guy climbing onto the insane side of the railing just as Nate had, he realised.
‘What you doing?’ the same cop said.
‘Piss off back inside and check under the bed, why doncha?’ came the reply.
Now two feet were on the balcony. Surely the cop wasn’t about to copy Nate’s lunatic move? He wondered if he could bring himself to push a guy sitting on the railing, if it was a choice between that and prison. Nate looked at the old guy, who seemed to have forgotten how the hell to open a door.
A black ass came into view behind the feet. Amazingly, the cop was squatting, just as Nate had.
The old guy opened the door. Nate pushed past him, moving him back. The guy said nothing. Didn’t look scared, as if his slow brain hadn’t yet determined a threat.
Nate shut the door quietly and bent down below the window and pulled the guy with him. Just in time. He saw an arm, then a shoulder, then a head, sideways on. Some daredevil cop leaning out, squatting, then bending to the side to create the angle to see the balcony below. Nate waited for a shout, because he had seen the cop’s head, and that meant the cop might have seen his. He gave it ten seconds, certain that the cop would not stay insane-side for that long. And when he poked his head up again, the guy had gone.
He stood and grabbed the old guy’s arm and led him into the living room. The old guy stared at him as they marched.
‘You locked out?’ he said.
The guy was surely eighty, thin, wrinkled like an old shirt left balled up in a bag for six months. Not all there in the brain department.
‘Yes,’ Nate said. He softly pushed the guy down into an armchair. ‘I live above. Couldn’t get out of the front door.’
The living room was modern, much smaller than Ryback’s, and there was an Xbox on a shelf near the flat screen TV, and a number of pictures on the wall that showed a young couple with a baby, all of which made Nate think the guy was someone’s visiting father. Maybe the old guy had gotten too senile for his own good and his son or daughter had invited him to stay. A quilt rumpled on the sofa gave this theory credence.
A noise from another room. A gruff male voice laughing.
Nate rushed for the front door, checked the peephole and then opened it slowly. A corridor, empty. Doors down both sides. That explained the size of the apartment. Top floor for the richer people. Four big apartments taking up the entire floor, while here there were twice as many. But that meant he had no access to the fire exit on the other side of the building.
Nate headed out and started walking fast along the corridor.
At the end, he froze at the door to the stairs as he heard footsteps. He ducked aside as he saw legs run into view, coming down.
He rushed back, his plan to knock on the guy’s door again. But as he passed the door before that one, he heard it start to unlock, and he stopped. It started to open and he helped with a slamming forearm. He heard a feminine yelp as the door crashed into someone behind it.
He rushed into a hallway just in time to see a black woman vanish through another door. He closed the front door and followed her.
He entered a living room with two occupants. The black woman was at a computer table, a phone already in her hand. There was a white woman sitting on a sofa, staring at her mumbling friend in shock. Before her on the coffee table was a purse with a bunch of keys hanging off the zip. Seeing him, the white woman jumped up and backed away to the big front window.
‘Put the phone down,’ he ordered. He heard footsteps go running past outside. The cops, deciding to check the downstairs flat, maybe. Or all of them, starting with that one.
But the black woman didn’t put the phone down. She jabbed numbers into it instead, while her awestruck friend just watched. He rushed over and grabbed the handset, and she screamed and backed away. A second later both women had their backs against the window, and they were shaking with fear.
‘Just shut up and you’ll be fine,’ he snapped. ‘You won’t get hurt.’ He looked around for something, anything, that could help him here. No Santa Claus disguise or invisibility spray. No zip line from the window to the ground or fireman’s pole descending through the flats below. The living room and kitchen were side by side and he was near enough to the doorway to consider going in for a knife. But he had a knife. And he didn’t want to let the women out of his sight.
‘Please,’ the black woman said. ‘She has a safe with jewels across the hall. Please. I have nothing.’
Her friend looked at her in shock.
Nate grabbed the purse off the coffee table and ran for the door.
He checked the peephole, saw no-one, and opened the door. And that was when he saw the cops just feet away.
Normal cops. Blue, not black. Unarmed, not carrying deadly machine guns. No way they’d checked the first two floors already, so the entire team was concentrating on the upper floors.
One cop was at the old man’s door, waiting. He must have knocked. The other was at the far end of the hallway, where there was an open utilities cupboard that he was peering into. Nate crossed the hall and held up the purse and stuck a key from the dangling bunch into the Yale lock.
‘Hey,’ said a voice. Nate rubbed his face as he turned that way. The cop at the door, staring at him. ‘You see anyone else here? You live here?’
Nate pushed open the door and held up the keys and waggled them. ‘Does it look like I just broke into this flat? Anyone else like who?’
The cop stared, and then the door he waited at was opened. He turned to the old man, and Nate quickly rushed inside the flat.
‘Hey, stop there!’ the cop called out. Nate shut the door. He heard hard knocking just seconds later. ‘Open this door, please. I need to speak to you about an urgent matter. Hey.’
He heard the guy get on his radio. Calling for a check on the flat owner, maybe. At least the cop hadn’t recognised him.
Nate moved through a living room he barely looked at, towards the window at the back.
He opened the window and peered out. The black van was still there at the gateway to the back garden, but now two armed cops stood by it. Their rifles hung limp from shoulder straps and they were chatting to the driver. Just killing time, seemingly unconcerned that their colleagues were inside and hunting a dangerous fugitive killer. He was thankful that the area wasn’t swarming with armed men. Maybe that was because they hadn’t yet received confirmation that Nate was here.
A scuffling sound from above. Movement. There was a cop on the upper balcony, eight feet above Nate. No other sounds. Just that one cop, then. Maybe he was too fat to get through the window, or had chosen to enjoy the view north of the river while his colleagues searched Ryback’s apartment for a guy hiding in a drawer.
Tense, expecting the cops to look up at any moment, Nate exited onto the balcony. He cursed the glass balustrade, but thankfully no-one looked up. He slowly walked towards the fire exit, fearing that fast movement would be more likely to register in the ground cops’ peripheral vision. He got there without being spotted.
Worse was to come, he knew. The stairs extended outwards, which meant descending them would put him far enough from the building to be exposed to the balcony cop as well as the crew below. But his choices were limited no none other. Down he went.
Balcony cop slid into view. He had his back to the world. Nate relaxed. He took the inward-facing stairs quickly, because they hid him from view of the ground cops. He paused on the next landing, his back against the cold wall. He had to do it all over again.
