Rider

by Merrigan, Peter J

  ‘They’ve gone into some gentleman’s club,’ he said without looking up. ‘We can’t get in without blowing cover. We’re watching the exits.’

  ‘Bernhard has a penchant for expensive brandy and upper crust politics?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ Wilson said, cracking hard on the keyboard.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ Clark asked.

  ‘You’ve got him in Six?’ Wilson asked of Kane.

  ‘Safe as houses,’ Clark said.

  Outside the office, Dixon was hovering in the corridor as though he intended to say something. He appeared out of breath from using the stairs. Wilson motioned for Clark to close the door and when she had done so, Dixon could be seen through the window mouthing his disgust at being excluded.

  ‘We’re going to have to make a move on Bernhard before he gets to our new best friend,’ Wilson said. ‘We let Ryan Cassidy down. We can’t lose another.’

  ‘Losing Ryan wasn’t our fault,’ Clark said.

  ‘You don’t believe that.’

  She frowned. ‘No.’

  * * *

  Jim Dixon hurried to his workstation cubicle, bypassing Lucy without comment. He’d say something later, something about that new top she was wearing. He could roll the quips off his tongue like a dog drools over a bitch in heat. He was that close to bagging Lucy at the Christmas party last year, if it hadn’t been for DCI Adams and his protective arm. Adams had to be pushing the limits of retirement and treated the girls on the force like each and every one of them was his favourite niece.

  Dixon had to watch what he said around Adams. Interpol detectives weren’t above the long arm of the law any more than were the criminals they pulled off the streets, and Adams was fit for slamming on someone most mornings. Dixon kept his kiss-and-tell dialogues until the old man was out of ear shot. He worked the basement for four months the last time Adams overheard him bragging about the fit bird that yanked him outside a pub.

  He settled at his desk, looked around, and woke his computer out of sleep with his control card. He phoned up to Biggs and asked for the file reference for their witness on the cut and shut case.

  ‘What for?’ Biggs asked.

  ‘Just give me the damn reference, Biggs, I don’t have all day.’

  He tapped the reference key into the computer and brought up a list of possible actions. He clicked ‘Protection State’ on the screen and then clicked ‘Property Locale’ He couldn’t access the safe house list without a case reference. The nature of the new data system meant that every click and keystroke was recorded with Central Data Housing on the top floor. If he was questioned about it, he’d allude to the possible need for protection status for their auto-theft witness following allegations of death threats, which wasn’t entirely unlikely.

  A list of safe house locations numbered one to eight filled his computer screen. The system was circumspect, offering only the information one was entitled to see. Dixon didn’t have the authorisation to release full house details but there was enough information on his screen for him to glean what he needed to know.

  Of the eight houses, only two were marked ‘In-Occ’, short for In Occupancy. Having heard Wilson mention House Six to Clark, and seeing its In-Occ status, he pulled up the details for the residence.

  The screen flashed ‘Case Specific Classified’, and below that were the words ‘Occupant Protection Detail’. At the bottom of the screen, the house’s address was listed along with Pat Wilson as the authorising signatory.

  Dixon glanced over his shoulder, caught sight of Lucy’s legs under her desk, and then turned back to the screen. He picked up his personal mobile phone and dialled a number from memory.

  When a man answered his call, Dixon said, ‘Got him.’

  Chapter 14

  Kane took a shower in the small bathroom in an attempt to clear his head. The world had gone fuzzy and he needed to scrub himself of recent revelations. As he stood in the bath, the shower curtain sweeping out and sticking to his legs, the hot water cascading over his face, he was reminded of standing in the rain one evening with Ryan and feeling as though all their cares were being washed away, as though they were being cleansed.

  They had been out for dinner that night, straight after work, still in their suits, and hadn’t had too much to drink. The weather had turned sour earlier that week and there was little sign of it ever letting up. In the back of the taxi on the way home, Ryan had loosened his tie and put a hand on Kane’s leg. The driver kept his eyes straight ahead. Full of dim sum, Kane felt content and at ease with the world.

  Outside, the rain was driving hard and the taxi’s wipers were on full power.

  As they turned a corner and drove alongside a dark and deserted park, Ryan cleared his throat and said, ‘Pull over here, mate, please.’

  ‘What?’ Kane asked. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Shortcut,’ was all Ryan said as the taxi pulled to a stop. The driver put his interior light on.

  ‘What are you talking about? It’s pissing down out there.’

  Ryan paid the fare on the meter and gave a generous tip. You always knew when it was Ryan’s payday.

  ‘I’m going to give you a sense of adventure if it kills me,’ he said.

  Kane looked out into the dark storm. ‘It’ll kill us both.’

  Ryan opened the door, took Kane’s hand and pulled him out into the cold rain. He pushed the door closed and waved the driver off.

  Kane hunched his shoulders and squinted against the sting of fat droplets on his face while Ryan spread his arms wide and lifted his face towards the sky.

  ‘It’s like heaven’s tears,’ he said.

  ‘It’s fucking freezing,’ Kane retorted.

  Ryan looked at him, grinned. ‘I’ll warm you up later. Come on.’

  He took Kane’s hand again, led him towards the park entrance. The gate was open but the park was empty. ‘No one in their right mind,’ Kane said.

  ‘Who wants a right mind? Live a little.’

  Stooped and chilled through, Kane allowed himself to be guided along the path. ‘You’d better not be taking me cruising.’

  Ryan laughed. He let go of Kane’s hand and ran out into the middle of the grass near a fountain. He threw his arms in the air and screamed with such delight that Kane could only smile and roll his eyes. The rain beat on him like nettles. ‘Come on,’ Ryan called to him above the din.

  ‘Never,’ Kane said.

  ‘Get your arse over here, now.’ It was a comic command, not meant harshly. ‘If you love me, you’ll join me.’

  ‘I have to get wet to prove I love you?’ Kane asked. He held a hand over his already soaked hair as though it might protect him.

  Ryan didn’t answer. He held his mouth open to catch the rain.

  ‘If that’s acid rain,’ Kane said, ‘it’ll kill your insides.’ He shook his head. ‘Fine. If getting wet shows you I have a sense of adventure, here I come.’

  He squelched out through the muddy grass and knew his shoes would be ruined. His suit jacket and trousers hugged him and his fingers were numb. Standing in front of Ryan, he said, ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Crazy in love,’ Ryan said.

  ‘No, just crazy.’

  Ryan took Kane’s hands again, held them aloft. ‘Taste it,’ he said, and he stuck his tongue out for the rain. ‘It’s like an ice cream sundae.’

  ‘It’s like copper,’ Kane said.

  Ryan held his face in his hands, stared deeply into his eyes. ‘It tastes like love. It tastes like you. It tastes like Saturday mornings and cold winter nights and hot chocolate and love songs.’

  Kane smiled, kissed him, lips already wet moistened more with tongues.

  ‘Can you taste it?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘I can,’ Kane said, and he really could. He pulled his tie loose, unbuttoned his jacket, turned his face to the thunderous clouds and opened his mouth. Ryan laughed and twirled on the spot and Kane threw his arms out at right angles from his body, fell backwards to the g
rass and thought fleetingly of how he’d explain the mud to the dry cleaner. But he pushed that from his mind and thought of nothing but the cold rain stinging his face and actually warming him. He could feel his face already flushed.

  Ryan dropped to his side, shoulder to shoulder, and held his hand between their bodies, the grass thick and claggy beneath them. And the world was put to rights. They lay there for twenty minutes, laughing under a canopy of rain needles and talking about nothing of great significance. But to Kane, the words they said that night had more importance than any softly spoken ‘I love you’ or any model show of affection. The meaningless words they said that night had meaning.

  And later that night, at home, they shared a bath and a bottle of wine and warmed their bodies like they warmed their souls.

  * * *

  Kane had stretched out on the sofa with a cushion behind his head and another between his arms. He was restless now, needed to be up and doing something but didn’t feel like he had the energy to do so. Clark’s story of how Ryan came to be a junkie was rolling around in his head like a caged animal. If David was truly behind that first injection, Ryan’s first taste of death, Kane vowed he would make him pay.

  Officer Burton sat in an armchair, reading a book, and the silence in the flat was penetrating Kane’s core, increasing the volume of his thoughts. When Kane’s phone vibrated on the coffee table between them, they both looked at it. Burton put his book aside and Kane sat up. They weren’t rigged for call monitoring, but when Burton saw the incoming phone number flashing on the screen, he said, ‘Must be Clark.’

  Kane smiled, picked the phone up and answered it.

  ‘Chinese or Indian?’ Clark asked.

  ‘Are you making or buying?’ Kane asked, nodding to Burton that his assumption was correct. Burton picked his book up again.

  ‘Please,’ Clark scoffed, ‘I’m a cop. When would I have the time to learn how to cook?’

  ‘They don’t have cooking classes at cop school?’ he asked. ‘I’ll eat anything right now, I’m starving.’

  ‘Chinese, then,’ Clark said. ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

  Looking at Burton, Kane said, ‘Chinese all right with you?’

  ‘You’re honoured,’ Burton said. ‘She only brings Chinese food for the fit lads.’

  Kane laughed and Clark said, ‘I heard that.’

  ‘Bring a bottle of something nice, yeah?’ Kane said.

  ‘Getting drunk is never the answer.’

  ‘I said a bottle, not a brewery. You can’t deny me a little drink.’

  ‘In that case,’ Clark said, ‘I’ll bring two bottles. How’re you holding up?’

  ‘Well, I’ve stayed in worse accommodation in my time. I think I’ll survive.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Clark said.

  They ended the call and Kane stood and stretched his limbs. ‘Don’t suppose you’d let me out for a jog,’ he said, only half joking.

  Nodding towards Kane’s phone, Burton said, ‘You’d be eating my entrails instead of noodles if I did that.’

  ‘She wouldn’t be that harsh,’ Kane said and he twisted a kink from his neck.

  When the front door was forced in without any warning, neither of them had any time to consider their options. Two burly men entered, guns raised, and Burton took a bullet in the face before he could move.

  Splashed in Burton’s blood, Kane threw himself backwards and flipped over the sofa out of the line of fire, but no more bullets were fired.

  The men advanced on him.

  Up on his feet, Kane backed away, picked up a footstool and pitched it at them. He quickly backed through the kitchen door and tried to slam it shut but they were right behind him, their guns hanging loosely in their hands.

  Reversing through the small kitchen, unwilling to take his eyes off them, Kane pulled a chair out from the table in front of him as though it could act as a barrier. He picked up an empty fruit bowl and threw it at them, an ancient Yellow Pages, the kettle, and kept backing up towards the rear door that serviced a small laundry room that bridged the flat from the world outside.

  Nothing unnerved the two men and they came on him with such force that he stumbled against the door and would have fallen to the floor if one of the men hadn’t gripped his shirt.

  Kane punched him in the stomach, ripped free of his grip, turned.

  The other man swung a fist. Kane ducked, punched back, reached for the door handle—

  They wrestled him to the ground. One of the men pinned him down and the other, the bigger of the two, raised a foot and brought it down on his chest, kicked him in the side, crouched and punched him square in the face.

  Kane spat blood and thrashed wildly with his legs. He clipped one of the men with the side of his foot but the force wasn’t enough and they dragged him to his feet, punched him again, and let him fall unconscious between them.

  * * *

  When Wilson called her to check in, Clark was less than a few minutes away from the safe house. She let the Bluetooth car stereo pick up the call and Wilson said, ‘When this is all over, I think I’m going to retire.’

  ‘Don’t you watch TV?’ Clark said. ‘The retired cops are always the ones that get caught up in a bank heist or a plot to blow up Parliament.’

  ‘I’ll stick to Internet banking and make sure I never have the urge to see Big Ben. I’ll see out my days in the garden, drinking homemade cider under the apple tree. Are you on route?’

  ‘I’m bringing him dinner. What’s the word on our criminal mastermind?’

  ‘Intel hasn’t checked in yet. I should be hearing from them any minute. I just got off the phone with Lyon.’

  She indicated to turn left, waiting for a gap in the traffic. ‘And what do the Frogs want? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  ‘They’re about to wrap up operations in Spain. They got a hit on the whereabouts of Ramirez and they’re just waiting for the nod.’

  ‘How’d they swing that?’ Clark asked, pulling off into another street. She drove randomly; years of training meant she often found herself on tail-shaking detours even when she was just driving to the supermarket.

  ‘I daren’t ask,’ Wilson said. ‘But you can guess how hard Lyon’s coming down on us right now.’

  She turned right, onto the street in which the safe house stood, and said, ‘We know where Bernhard is, all we have to do is nab him in the act.’

  ‘Fairytale endings and all, right?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘A girl can dream,’ Clark said. As she drove down the street, she suddenly slammed on the brakes and said, ‘Christ!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Front door’s open.’ She killed the engine, unfastened her seatbelt.

  ‘Can you see anything?’

  She knew Wilson would be on his feet already. She reached into her glove box and withdrew her Taser X26. The intelligent weapon had a range of thirty-five feet and a dataport that recorded device activation. It looked, Clark had commented when they were first issued to the department, like a space-age handgun.

  ‘Where the hell’s Burton?’ she asked.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Wilson said.

  ‘I’m going to check it out,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Clark, I’m telling you, wait for back up.’

  Clark ended the call and stepped out of the car.

  As she cautiously approached the house, she held her Taser in both hands, kept close to the wall. ‘Police!’ she announced as she stood in the open doorway. There was no response. She entered.

  Burton was dead in a chair, his face a bloody mess. A footstool that had lost a leg lay upturned in the middle of the room. And Kane was nowhere to be seen.

  She scouted the flat and found further evidence of a scuffle in the kitchen, a small amount of blood on the linoleum-covered floor, not enough to indicate that Kane might be dead. Returning to the living room and checking Burton’s neck for a pulse, knowing she wouldn’t find one, she drew her phone from her p
ocket and called Wilson back.

  ‘They’ve got him,’ she said. ‘They’ve fucking got him.’

  She stood outside until Wilson and the team arrived, sucking fresh air deep into her lungs. She’d seen enough dead bodies over the years for it not to affect her but she could never get used to the smell of spilled blood. PC Burton had been a young man, probably had a wife or a girlfriend. Maybe even a young kid. She didn’t notice if he’d been wearing a wedding ring or not.

  He had taken the bullet somewhere in the centre of his face and what was left was thankfully shielded in blood so that she couldn’t see the pulp. His shirt, and all the way down to his lap, was stained deep red and the smell of the blood was overpowering.

  When the team arrived, along with the coroner, and Burton was wheeled out of the flat on a gurney, Wilson oversaw the operation and then came to Clark.

  ‘I shouldn’t have left him,’ Clark said.

  Wilson pointed at the gurney as they lifted it into the back of the coroner’s van. ‘And trade places with Burton?’

  ‘Burton was unarmed.’

  ‘And whoever took Kane was armed. You’d have had no chance with a Taser. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back.’

  ‘Damn right we will,’ Clark said.

  ‘I’ll call Adams. Get a team together for a briefing. It’s time we put a stop to this.’

  ‘Did they follow us to the house?’ Clark wondered. ‘How else could they find out where he was?’

  ‘We can worry about that later. Right now we need to move and move fast.’

  ‘Bernhard’s a step ahead of us. How the hell are we supposed to play this?’

  Wilson turned and watched the coroner drive away. ‘I have an idea,’ he said.

  Chapter 15

  Margaret Bernhard was sitting up in her hospital bed, dark-framed glasses on, flicking through a magazine with her untouched dinner still on the tray in front of her. Since her surgery, she had been recovering well and the memory of Dawson’s bullet tearing into her flesh was the dull causality of a distant dream.