by Jake Cross
He felt the wind on him. Heard no sounds other than the men walking. He wasn’t in London, he was sure of that.
A doorway, and then some creaky wooden stairs going down. They laid him down on a cold but carpeted floor and he heard them going back up. He waited for a minute after they’d gone, and then scraped his head against the floor until he’d shifted the bag enough to uncover one eye.
He was in a dim room, lying next to a wooden chair. It was the only piece of furniture. The ceiling was low, the wall to his right bare house brick, the wall to his left lined with wine racks, easily half of them occupied. A wine cellar, some eight feet wide, twenty feet long.
And at the far wall was Toni.
She was sitting with her back against a rusty cast iron pipe as thick as his upper arm that ran from under the floor, up the wall and across the concrete ceiling, and disappeared through a ragged hole in the back wall. Her hands were above her head, tied by rope just above a split clamp.
She was grimy all over and naked from the neck down. He could see a dark patch under each arm, a few days’ worth of hair growth. Her head, though, was covered by a black mask. It seemed too big for her, making her head look larger than it was. He tried not to look at her female parts.
Nate called her name but got no response. He got to his knees and made a slow effort of walking on them, more like a shuffle, until he was right in front of her. He called again. Nothing. But her head did not hang forward, so he didn’t think she was dead. And he could see her chest rise and fall.
As he moved closer, his knee touched her foot and she gave a gasp and a jerk, and tried to shrink back from him.
‘It’s me,’ he said. Nothing. She was shaking. He knew someone had hurt her, and not just because she was covered in dirt.
He leaned forward and grasped her hood in his teeth, and pulled it free. She jerked and blinked, and turned her head away. She wore large ear defenders, which explained why she had not heard his shout. She had been left in the dark and the silence, not knowing who or how many might be in the room with her, unaware of when the torment would end, when the next strike might come.
And then she saw him.
Immediately she broke into tears, and he felt for her. Tough, but still weak in ways. Her arms jerked the pipe as if trying to embrace him. The pipe rattled against its split clamps. Rust flakes rained down into their hair from a flanged elbow joint that connected the vertical and horizontal sections of pipe. The look in her eyes was something he didn’t understand. Not relief that she might now be saved, but something else.
Her head dropped. He sensed that the other emotion she felt was embarrassment, maybe because of her nakedness. Her chest started to rise and fall faster, harder, and when she finally looked up again, her face was all rage and hate.
She shook her head and the ear defenders slipped off. ‘How did they catch you?’ she said.
He quickly explained: cops at the leisure park, Lazar on the phone, cops again at Ryback’s apartment block, and tranquilliser guns in the hands of Ryback’s kill crew. ‘Did they bring you straight here? Have you been here all night?’
‘They came into the caravan,’ she said, ignoring the question. ‘Lazar and another man. I watched the other man slit the hitman’s neck wide. They got me while I was unprepared.’
That explained the embarrassment: not her naked body, but the fact that she’d been caught. No damage done to her ego, then. Her nakedness bothered him more than it did her, it seemed.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘They got me, too, and there’s bloody loads of them.’
‘I’m sorry about your brother. He had some problem with his foot. They identified him.’
He was puzzled. She explained. Before they’d put the ear defenders on her, she had overheard a conversation. One of their captors had taken a phone call and announced the news to his cronies: the post-mortem had confirmed that the dead man in the fire was Pete Barke. But not through DNA. Something to do with an old surgery on one of his feet. This had made the kidnappers raucous with joy.
‘They must have someone in the know somehow,’ she said. ‘Because it’s not official yet. I heard them say that. Who do we think that could be?’
Nate had never doubted it was his brother’s body, but hearing it confirmed like that knocked the wind out of him. So much so that he barely registered that it might have been his phone call to the police that made it happen. It was a few seconds before he composed himself. Knowing he was suffering, Toni patiently waited.
‘Maybe a police officer,’ Nate said. ‘Lazar, he’s a police officer. He was involved in the investigation into the robbery at HyperX.’
‘I know. One of his men took great pride in telling me that, when my body was found, you’d be blamed for it. Lazar would influence the investigation somehow and cover the truth. He’s been working for Ryback for years.’
Nate paused. ‘Nothing yet helps me understand why they wanted to set me up. It can’t just be so that the cops don’t look elsewhere for a killer. They tried to give me to the cops at Ryback’s apartment, and that doesn’t make sense. The police already think I’m the killer, so why risk having me tell a different story? Why not do what they originally tried to do and bury me?’
‘You’re right. There’s more to this. You see the answers written on these walls?’
He actually looked. Damn drug addling his mind – yet again. ‘No. I don’t understand.’
‘So, the answers are outside this room. To get them, we need to be outside this room also.’
He understood. A convoluted way of saying they should escape. ‘How?’
‘Smash a bottle of wine and get a shard to my feet. I’ll hold it and saw through your ropes, and then you do mine.’
It seemed like a good plan, but they never got the chance to see if it would work. Because right then the cellar door opened.
Nate hopped back to where they’d dumped him and lay on his side near the chair, just as a man came down the stairs.
Yet another new face. This guy had dark olive skin, just like Damar. He had a face that looked fifty, shiny black hair that seemed twenty years younger, and so Nate put his age at right in the middle: forty. He also wore a monocle, as if he considered himself gentry. But that didn’t sit well with the tracksuit he wore. He thumped down the stairs with a clear plastic bag in one hand and in the other a rope tied in a noose at one end, which he swung like a pendulum.
‘Hey, killer,’ Monocle said to Nate. He got to the bottom of the stairs and held up the bag. Nate saw that the monocle was just a tattoo, even including a piece of string running down his face. Strangely, Nate wondered if the guy had a necktie tattooed under his shirt. ‘You ain’t done yet, killer,’ he said. ‘I need some prints on these babies. And then it’s dying time.’
Monocle stopped as he noticed that Toni’s mask was free. ‘Cheeky.’
He approached her and stroked her breast, then replaced the mask, but not the ear defenders, and she didn’t object, as if there was no fight remaining in her. He returned to Nate and shook out the items from the bag onto the carpet, ten inches from Nate’s eyes. A mobile phone and a kitchen knife. He picked both up and stepped over Nate, and then Nate felt him press the cold plastic of the phone into his hand, followed by the warm wooden handle of the knife.
‘Killing your own friends, eh? Bad boy.’
Friends? Plural? Achala Kaushal and Carl Webber, of course. And of course they would want to set Nate up for those killings as well. The knife put images of their cut throats in his mind.
Monocle held up the knife by using the bag like a glove, careful not to leave his own DNA on it. ‘And her over there. Now, since you’ll be blamed for her bloody death, I’ll give you a choice. You can do it, if you want. Slit her throat. At least then you won’t be blamed for a crime you didn’t commit. This one tried to kill you, remember. You want it?’
He saw a chance. If Monocle cut his bonds and handed him that knife…
Then Monocle laughed. J
ust a joke, then: he was aware of what thoughts his bogus offer would put in Nate’s head. ‘Nah, you don’t get to steal my thunder, killer.’
Next came the noose. Nate tried to avoid it, but there wasn’t much movement allowed by his condition, and Monocle easily slipped it over Nate’s head and pulled it tight around his neck. Nate felt his breath restrict.
‘Here, boy,’ Monocle said, laughing. And like a stubborn dog he pulled Nate closer to the chair. He threw the loose end of the rope over the ceiling pipe and yanked, hauling Nate to his knees. Nate struggled to his feet to relieve the pressure, but breath was still a chore.
‘Thanks for the help,’ Monocle said, and leaned back and pulled, like a guy in a tug of war, and Nate’s feet left the ground, and there was no breath at all.
Nate tried to shout for help, or mercy – he wasn’t sure which – but all that came out was a long, gurgling noise. Toni started yelling, asking what was going on.
With eyes that were staring to blur, Nate watched Toni force herself to her feet. She tried to yank the pipe away from its split clamps, but they refused to give it up. She couldn’t generate much power because turning towards the pipe had forced her forearms to cross.
Monocle pulled on the rope again, hauling Nate higher. Then he used a leg to pull the chair under Nate’s feet. Nate got his toes on it and managed to raise himself two inches, which allowed him to suck in a tiny portion of air. Monocle stepped closer, feeding the rope through his hands in order to keep it tight, and then used Nate’s weight to help pull himself up onto the chair. They stood side by side, their faces just inches apart.
‘Don’t piss yourself just yet, wait till I’m clear.’
He started wrapping the rope around the pipe until only two feet hung free, and then he tied it off. Toni, Nate could see, had freed the mask by dragging it against the wall. Seeing Nate, she yelled a promise: the guy was going to suffer unimaginably unless he let Nate go right now. Whether he laughed at the threat or the fear in Nate’s eyes, Nate didn’t know.
Nate’s consciousness was going. As if sensing this, Toni’s next words were delivered with low volume and pleading, and they stung Nate’s heart: ‘Please don’t kill him.’
‘I ain’t, he’s killed himself,’ Monocle replied. ‘Guilt, girl, guilt. All those killings, broke something inside him. He even wrote a sweet suicide note.’
Out came the note, a crumpled ball of paper. Monocle stuffed it into one of Nate’s jacket pockets. Toni abandoned the begging route and started fighting the pipe again, screaming at it while trying to wrench it right off the wall. But still it held.
Then, amazingly, Monocle reached behind Nate and snipped the ropes binding his wrists.
‘There. No-one’s going to believe you hung yourself if you’re tied, right?’
Up came Nate’s arms, and he wanted to fasten his hands around the guy’s throat, but something inside him that knew only survival instincts instead directed them to the pipe. At full stretch, he just managed to lock his fingers together on top of it, and raised himself from the chair like a man doing a pull-up. The crushing pressure on his throat was beautifully reduced, blood again able to flow freely to the brain.
‘Thanks again,’ Monocle said. As he stepped off the chair, he kicked his back foot and sent the chair bouncing away even before he’d landed. It looked like a move he’d done before. Nate hung there, already feeling the burn in his biceps. ‘Two minutes maximum, I say, then your arms will go.’
Without his legs to help, he could do nothing. Already his fingers were slipping apart and his body was lowering as the strength in his arms sapped. Two minutes was a wild fantasy: Nate knew he’d start strangling to death in a quarter of that time.
Monocle folded his arms, just watching the show now. ‘I’ll cut the feet ropes after you’re dead. Try not to get shit on them when you die because I forgot my gloves.’
Nate’s dead arms gave way. He dropped five inches and the jolt tore his fingers apart, and the crushing band of fire was back around his throat. His legs kicked uselessly and his body swayed and the pipe vibrated like a plucked guitar string, causing one of two clamps in front of him to shear its worn bolts. Rust rain pattered onto Toni’s upturned face.
Nate saw black dots dance across his cataract vision. The pain was horrible. Air was a distant childhood memory. A distorted Toni turned to the pipe, slid her hands up high, lifted a flexible leg, put a foot on the clamp, and launched herself towards the ceiling. She flipped her bonds over the elbow joint and grabbed the horizontal pipe. The last thing Nate saw before everything dissolved into a toddler’s experiment with coloured paints: she flipped up her legs and planted them on the ceiling, like an upside-down squat astride the pipe.
The next thing he knew, there was a screech of metal and the ground powered upwards into his feet. He threw his hands around the pipe to hold himself upright. The pressure on his neck was gone, and Monocle shouted, ‘What the fuck?’
His vision immediately started to clear as blood and air were returned to him. He saw that the pipe no longer ran along the ceiling, but angled down to the floor. The vertical section was still in place. He understood: the weak flange joint had been torn away. Toni.
She was on her knees where the ceiling pipe dove into the carpet. The big guy was rushing her. Nate watched her stand and turn towards him. In her hands was the cast iron elbow joint, and in his was the knife that had Nate’s prints on it.
Nate struggled to his feet, cracking his head on the angled pipe. Black dots again. He dropped again to his knees. His eyes found Toni, and for a second he didn’t understand what he was seeing.
She was piggybacking Monocle, legs locked around his waist, the rope between her wrists across his throat, and his nose was a bloody, ruined mess. He was making the same gurgling sounds that had leaked from Nate’s own restricted airway. He found himself liking that sound.
Monocle fell over backwards, hoping to dislodge her that way, but while the impact made her grunt as she hit the carpet and her head bounced off it, it served only to drive him into her harder, allowing her to strengthen her grip. Any Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner will tell you that falling onto your back is a mistake for this reason.
Still wobbly, Nate stood again, this time leaning against the pipe for support. He grabbed the knot in the rope and started to untie it. It was done in thirty seconds. He slipped back down to his knees, removed the noose from his neck, and clutched the rope tightly in both fists, as if it might all by itself try to snare him again.
Toni and the guy were still locked in that embrace, but unmoving. Monocle’s arms lay limp, eyes wide but unblinking, blood around his lips and chin. Toni’s face was a grimace as she continued to tug the rope hard into his throat. Nate could see he was dead already, but she couldn’t tell, or could and was just making damned sure. She held on for another minute and then shoved him off. Watching, getting his bearings back, Nate didn’t say a word as she got up, found the knife, and slit the guy’s throat. Nate looked away.
‘That’s for Damar,’ she said.
‘How do you know it was him?’ Nate said. His voice came out like a smoker’s rasp.
Her look said she didn’t. But he knew she would cut many a throat, just to be sure.
‘I’m guessing they touched you inappropriately,’ he said, because he could think of nothing better.
‘They did,’ she said. She approached Nate, and started rifling through his pockets. He was too disoriented still to work out why, until she extracted the note the guy had stuffed in there. ‘But he wasn’t even the one who did it. That guy’s upstairs.’
‘He better pray he has a fatal heart attack in the next two minutes.’
‘I pray he doesn’t.’ She unfolded the note and showed it to Nate, who read, in a script that was surprisingly like his own:
I am sorry for everyone I killed
That was it. Short and sweet. ‘At least they didn’t put that I was sorry for touching kids and robbing from charity collect
ion boxes, just to make me even more hated across the world.’
‘Just backup for the suicide story. No need to elaborate. Anyway, this is like a horoscope. Universal. They could mass-produce these.’ Toni laid the note on the dead man’s chest.
‘Not great for repeat custom. And that’s not going to fool anyone,’ Nate said.
‘Maybe his mother will be comforted to know her son wasn’t murdered.’ She checked the pockets of his tracksuit bottoms and found something, which a second later skidded across the floor and into Nate’s knee.
‘Half-witted bozo,’ he said as he lifted Buzzcut’s revolver and checked that it was still loaded.
‘Bozo? His mother?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Can we leave now, please?’
Holding Monocle’s knife, she climbed the stairs and opened the door, no pause, no concern for who might be just beyond. No-one was, of course, because she waved him on.
Nate struggled to his feet. He felt confidence returning. He knew it was because he had Toni by his side again, and he didn’t feel embarrassed by that. He could no longer deny that she was the tougher one. That he was a wet businessman and he needed her. As he joined her at the top of the stairs, he knew that, if he had to lose one, Toni or the gun, he’d toss the lump of metal and feel safer for it.
But he was the only safe one. ‘Any chance you can leave one of these guys breathing long enough to get some answers?’ he said.
‘I’ll think about it.’
They were in a short corridor that ran left and right. To the right was a porch and a front door of frosted glass that let in a lot of light – so, daytime still. To the left were a set of double doors in each wall and a set at the far end, open. A kitchen beyond. They could hear music from in there, and see the back of a guy in jeans and a T-shirt at the stove, cooking with two or three pans. He was wiggling his hips to the music. It was the guy from the van.
‘That’s not him, either,’ Toni whispered. ‘So this won’t take long.’
