The Choice: An absolutely gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

by Jake Cross

  And then he found a story about a Danish pre-teen who had been resuscitated after sixty-one minutes. She had floated above her own dead body on the operating table, and then she was snatched away by talented surgeons. One hour! By that time, Mick and Grafton had been dancing again. What might Grafton have seen and felt while Mick chopped and scooped and swiped with his Bosch AKE 30?

  He was sitting low in the car and watching Sunrise Electronics from the road running past the entrance to the lock-ups. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled low, and had his jacket zipped up high. He put his phone away, and that was when sweet memories were swapped for a bad one: something Król had said on the drive over here. You’re not the only one with evidence of stuff, you know. Mick had replied: What’s that supposed to mean? Król had said: I got webcam, ain’t I?

  Some weird shit from Król’s foreign mouth, that was all. Just bluster. And it had been left at that. But it was back, having marinated in Mick’s maelstrom of a mind, and it wasn’t bluster now. Now it was an admission: Król had recorded Mick in the flat at some point. Mick had made five or six visits to Król and had spouted all sorts of things within those walls; if Król had recorded him on webcam at any time, he would have evidence of Mick saying or doing something that Mick didn’t want immortalised. Something had to be done about that. But what?

  He froze as he caught sight of something. Stark against the pale white clouds clogging the lightening sky, two figures had emerged onto the sloping roof of the building on the left side of the road. Seabury’s side. One in shirt and trousers, the other in a dress.

  ‘No fucking way,’ he said. He had come here hoping to learn the bitch’s location from Seabury, but it had been a long shot because there was no proof the guy had even picked her up. So, the chances that he’d hidden her here, at his shop, were… But even from 300 feet away, he recognised that dress. The bitch had been wearing it for Grafton’s final appearance in court.

  Mick thumped the steering wheel and laughed. Impossible, implausible, illogical, but real nonetheless: Seabury and the bitch together, right before his eyes, and nary a witness about. He got a whiff of Fate.

  The news wasn’t all sweet, though, because the pair were escaping across the roof. She’d slipped his clutches once before and was on the verge of doing so again.

  Król emerged from the shop, staggering backwards, staring up. He was stupid enough to think they would try to climb down right where they’d escaped. But Mick knew their plan was to drop down into the land beyond the graffiti-covered wall at the end of the road. And sure enough the two figures, moving slowly, started towards the far end of the building, away from Mick.

  He wound down his window and screamed at Król: ‘Go the way they went! Inside!’

  Król turned his head Mick’s way, gave a thumbs up, and vanished back inside the shop.

  Mick hit the gas. Beside the street containing the lock-ups was a fenced building site, and he looked for a way in. The site was vast and contained stacks of bricks and building materials, but no workers. And no fucking gate. So, Mick waited for a shallow segment of kerb and then turned right, hard, and hit the chain-link fence with enough force to wrench a section from one post and open it like a door. It rasped along the side of his car and snatched his wing mirror.

  He twisted the rear-view mirror so that it showed his face. ‘Ya fucking dead now,’ he yelled, right into his own eyes.

  The car bounced where the earth was packed hard from the trundling of heavy machinery, and slipped where the soil was loose and wet from yesterday’s rain. He had to slow to a crawl, but even so the wheel struggled in his hands.

  Towards two o’clock was the graffitied wall, the two roofs of the long buildings poking above. And the two escaping bastards, right there. He cut towards them.

  He had to slew around a dumped mass of concrete pipe sections – if only he could roll one across the bitch and flatten her like dough – and that needed his eyes. When he found the roof again, Seabury and the woman, small at this distance of 300 feet, had already climbed off the end of the building and onto the wall. Below them was a skip full of rubbish, no more than a ten-foot drop. Mick thought it would be too scary for a prim bitch like Liz Grafton, but she amazed him by being the first to leap. He wound down his window as she dropped, hoping to hear a scream as something hard and sharp tore her open.

  ‘Save some for me, bitch,’ he yelled into the rear-view.

  She vanished into the trash, then resurfaced, apparently unharmed. She started waving at Seabury who paced at the roof’s edge.

  Mick stared at himself and shouted: ‘Just waiting to die, Seabury.’

  More movement caught his eye. Król, emerging onto the roof. Mick lost sight of all three of them as he was forced to flick left to pass a shipping container that had been converted into an office.

  Once past the office, Mick saw that Seabury had already leaped. He and the bitch were clambering out of the skip. Król was at the edge of the roof and displaying the same damn fear Seabury had shown. Mick glared into his own eyes again.

  ‘Król, you fucki— Jesus!’

  He hit the brake, hard. Barely in time. Dried mud was churned into dust beneath the wheels and launched around the car as the vehicle skidded to a halt. Some kind of concrete-lined trench ahead – for sewage or water – blocking his path, whatever the hell it was for. Mick backed up, turned, and powered up again, now driving parallel to the trench. Two hundred feet to his right, the three on foot ran alongside. Seabury and the bitch were making good speed because she had lost her shoes somewhere along the way. Król, although skinny and younger, just couldn’t close the distance.

  ‘I’m gonna crush you,’ he screamed at his reflection.

  Like a fucking scene from a comedy sketch, Seabury and the woman veered to pass a long stack of wooden planks, but Król clearly liked the hurdle analogy and tried to leap it. His foot caught the top, and after that his face caught the ground.

  Mick looked away, searched ahead, seeking an end to the concrete trench. But on it ran, for ever. Then he saw a makeshift bridge some way ahead, nothing more than a rusty metal sheet laid across it: constructed for the passage of heavy machinery, which meant his car would have no problem. To get the angle, he turned left, then carved a large semicircle to the right, and came dead-on towards the bridge. Ahead, Seabury and the woman raced past. Król was 130 feet behind them.

  ‘Here we go, fuckers,’ Mick bellowed.

  The metal bridge held. Rumbled like thunder, but held. On the other side, Mick tugged down hard on the left side of the wheel. Soon he was hot on their tail. A clear run at them now. One hundred and sixty feet to Król, maybe 200 to Seabury and the woman. Nothing beyond them for another 300 feet, until the fence. He would crush them long before they got there.

  Król filled the windscreen.

  I got webcam, ain’t I?

  He was stumbling along, giving Mick his back. No meth junkie going cold turkey ever wanted a hit as much as Mick wanted to ram that fool’s ass with his Nissan badge and fold him up into a wet red mess between soil and steel. But he skipped alongside at the last minute because he needed to know more about this webcam threat, and he needed an extra pair of hands to deal with dead bodies.

  Król slapped the side of the car as it raced by, like a good buddy saying well done. Did he think this was a fucking game?

  ‘This is real shit!’ Mick roared.

  One hundred and thirty feet between the car and the fleeing pair. Ahead of them, Mick saw a torn-up area of concrete and earth, surrounded by traffic cones with yellow tape strung between them. Next to it was a sign:

  DANGER HOLE BELOW

  The mirror got, ‘That’s your fucking grave!’

  Sixty feet, and then fifteen. They grew in his windscreen as if it was a camera zooming in. He wanted to ram them, but also didn’t. Just like with that bastard Grafton before he blasted him into oblivion, Mick wanted to utter some gem of a final line, and give him a deathbed memory. His foot shook on the
accelerator as his brain fought itself, both trying and refusing to stamp down hard and send them soaring.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he yelled, and crushed the accelerator.

  Thirty feet. And then fifteen. And there the choice was taken out of his hands as he realised that the churned area had raised foundations. He stamped the brake and twisted the wheel.

  The Almera slewed around, and Seabury and the woman filled his side window, their heads turned to watch him. Just as it seemed he was about to bowl them over, they leaped and cut through the yellow tape like marathon winners, and then the wheels slammed into the raised edge of the foundations and the car stopped dead. The sudden check of momentum sent Mick’s right arm and shoulder hard into the door, and his head hard into the part-open window.

  As pain and lights flashed through his head, he had a funny thought: if the window was down, I could have grabbed the bitch. Instead, he watched Seabury and the woman run across the torn-up concrete. In the centre of the area was a hole surrounded by more cones and tape, like the bullseye on a target. A short way beyond was the perimeter fence, and past that a road, and a thousand escape routes thereafter. But they stopped by the bullseye as if having hit a dead end. Both were panting, exhausted: Seabury more so than the woman, surprisingly. Survivors, like Mick, would have run until there was nothing left in the body, but this pair had given up.

  And that suited him just fine.

  Mick tried to open his door, but the car was pressed up against the foundations, and it was jammed shut. He scrambled out of the passenger side. But he needn’t have panicked because Seabury and the woman were still there. The street was only a hundred or so feet behind them, within shouting distance, but the fence had debris netting and no one would see a thing. They were his for the taking.

  Watched by his prey, Mick stepped up onto the smashed raised area. Casually. Calmly. One step, just to say he was here. His eyes were locked on the bitch, and he itched to get at her, but she was the last piece of Grafton to wipe out and he didn’t want to rush things.

  He realised that this was the first time he’d ever seen her in the flesh, without a window in the way or bodyguards surrounding her. Her skin was dirty, hair a mess, dress tatty, feet shoeless and bloody – but she was a pretty thing. It was pleasing to know that Grafton had lost his most beautiful asset, but also cause for regret: if only he could have stripped her naked and violated her in front of Grafton, that would have topped the cake with a big fat cherry. Revenge would have been sweet. But he would get the next best thing: to wring the blood from her like water from a sponge, and know that Grafton was watching from his place in Hell.

  He didn’t get to stare for long because she stepped backwards, behind Seabury, using him as a shield.

  Król had arrived to spoil a thoughtful moment. ‘Got the fuckers,’ he said. He tried to step up onto the foundations, but Mick grabbed an arm to pull him back. Said nothing, but Król got the message because he stayed where he was after that. Mick didn’t want anyone to ruin this moment.

  ‘We’ve done nothing. What do you want with us?’ Seabury said.

  A pleading tone, which Mick liked. But his face wasn’t contorted with shock, and Mick didn’t like that part at all. Usually that sort of neutral expression was worn by the likes of Mick himself: men who’d faced danger, lived through it, realised that they were tough to put down. Or people with a trick up their sleeve. Seabury didn’t strike him as the sort who was accustomed to trouble. He didn’t have the scars, or the worry lines, or that look in the eyes that came from constantly facing the edge of the abyss. He was nondescript. Which pointed to the latter: a trick up the sleeve. A little caution wouldn’t go amiss. So, he stayed right where he was. For now. Besides, he had an idea: let’s see if he could convince Seabury to betray the bitch.

  ‘I’m going to give you a chance I never expected to offer, so you should take it. Turn around, run away, forget all about this morning. I just want her.’

  ‘He can’t stop us, so let’s just grab them,’ Król said. He was almost dancing with anticipation, but Mick’s mind was a tranquil lake. No, Seabury could not stop them, but there was no urgency. She could not escape again. You sipped fine wine instead of gulping it.

  ‘Where’s my husband, you bastard?’ the bitch shouted, poking out her head from behind Seabury’s shoulder.

  So, she didn’t know. The story was in the headlines, but she had missed it. Also realising this, Król started laughing. Mick held up a finger. Król clicked on and locked up, which saved him some pain because Mick would have crushed his head to avoid letting someone else tell her the big news. She needed to hear it from him. But not yet. Not until his eyes were inches from hers, his big, coarse hands around her small, porcelain throat. And not until her mind was already in pieces from the knowledge that the only man in the world working her corner had just abandoned her.

  ‘So here it is, Seabury. Give her up. Don’t make me come take her.’

  Using the guy’s name got the response he wanted: shock. Mick pulled a knife from his pocket and held it up. No words. Just a visual message. In his jacket was a pistol, but for this occasion he preferred the knife, and not just because the sound of a gunshot would roll away across the land.

  Now there was fear on the man’s face as he said: ‘What do you want her for? We’ve done nothing.’

  ‘Never you mind that, Seabury. Step away, live another day.’

  No response. Mick took a single step, and stopped as Seabury yanked something from his pocket. Something that looked like a squat green aerosol can. Mick thought he knew what it was.

  ‘Don’t come closer. One more step forward, you’ll take a hundred back.’

  A bold remark, with, surprisingly, the tone to back it up. And Mick knew why. You needed skill and composure to put down an enemy with a knife or a gun, but even an imbecile could cause serious damage with a—

  ‘Grenade?’ Król blurted. ‘No way that’s a fucking grenade.’

  Mick disagreed. He knew the type of shop Seabury ran, and a grenade was a piece of kit that fitted right in there. But there was a vast chasm between being able to wave a grenade about and actually using one.

  ‘Kill four people? I don’t think so, Seabury. Karl. This is your last chance to step away.’

  The urge to get at her was rising, unstoppable. He wanted to throw her down and smash her apart on the ground. He wanted Grafton, down there in Hell, to stare up and see everything. To try to claw his way to her as Mick’s anvil fists ground her up. He imagined the earth as a sheet of glass, Grafton floating just below like a swimmer caught under ice. She was on her front, so their eyes were locked in pain and fear, their scrabbling fingers just inches apart but for ever denied. Mick stared over her shoulder and soaked up Grafton’s distress as he broke her open like an Easter egg.

  He was grinding his teeth in anticipation. He dragged his eyes away from her and onto Seabury so he could concentrate.

  ‘Think hard, Karl. Step away and go and live your life and forget today. You’ve got a wife, and a nice job, and you’d be silly to toss all that away. Remember that you’re in the shit because of her. So, put that grenade down.’

  No response to that. He took a step. It put him just twenty inches closer, still a good distance between them; but it felt like he had moved into their personal space, and Seabury obviously felt it, too, because he waved the grenade.

  ‘This is a momentum device,’ Seabury said. ‘Explodes in the direction it’s moving. I throw it at you, the blast is all yours.’

  Brave words, but a flicker in the voice. Clearly Seabury was putting up a front, and that meant he was bluffing. Besides, Mick had never heard of such a device. He took another step forward. One step. Just to prove a point. Just for the fun of the game.

  ‘Let’s just stop fucking around and rush them,’ Król said.

  But that wasn’t what Mick wanted. That wasn’t a show of power. He wanted to come out top. He wanted to convince Seabury to turn against the woman, even tho
ugh Seabury knew Mick meant her harm. This was wasting time, yet he wanted to see it through. She’d be his in thirty seconds either way, and thirty seconds he could spare.

  ‘I’ll count to three,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t do this to us,’ Liz moaned. ‘Where’s my husband? He’ll kill you for this.’

  From behind him, Król said: ‘Let’s jump them, now.’

  Mick ignored him. ‘Karl, well done for being the good Samaritan, but now it’s time to think about your wife. Your future. Don’t fuck it up just because the woman behind you fluttered her eyelashes at you.’

  For a moment it looked as if Seabury was considering it. Walking away and forgetting about her. People got hurt every day, wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t help them all. The guy was, in Mick’s opinion, two seconds from making the right choice, and then Król and his big mouth fucked it up.

  ‘Here we come, fuckwits,’ he yelled.

  Mick turned, pointed his knife right at Król’s disgusting face, said: ‘Shut the fuck—’

  Król threw up a defending arm, turned his face away with a yell. But the action was too much, too overdone for just a pointing knife, and Mick realised the truth a half second before he heard the bang. Loud, monstrous. His arms went up around his head and he dropped onto his knees, expecting a rain of lethal debris to fragment his flesh, a supersonic wave of fiery air to crush his bones. He had turned away from Seabury, and the man had snatched the moment to try a daring escape that was about to kill everyone with shrapnel.

  Instead, yellow smoke washed over him. It swallowed the world around him. Not a weapon of murder, then. Just a smoke bomb; although it must have been adapted because they didn’t usually create an explosive noise.

  Mick stood and turned, but he could see nothing. Król was laughing, and it was the only sound out there. The smoke made Mick cough, but it wasn’t vicious on his lungs, so it hadn’t been adapted to contain CS gas. Designed only to shock and disorient so the user could escape. Some silly ninja trick by a guy with a shop full of such, and he’d been caught out by it.