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

by Jake Cross

  * * *

  McDevitt was sitting on the stairs, near the top, where he’d been invisible until right about now. Waiting for his prey to step right into the trap.

  Spotting Mick, Karl tensed, ready to grab Liz and run back towards the kitchen. Half the hallway was a blind spot for the gun because of where Mick sat: three steps and he would have no angle to fire at them. It was the very reason they hadn’t seen him as they walked the hallway. But he could fire before they took one step.

  The gun moved back and forth between Karl and Liz. As if he was unsure of who to shoot first. But the giveaway was that his eyes didn’t move from Liz. Karl figured he would shoot him first, to rid himself of the bigger threat.

  But Mick didn’t fire, and he didn’t speak. Karl realised he was awaiting their move. He wanted to see how his trapped rats would react.

  So, Karl made a move, hoping to delay what now seemed inevitable. He said: ‘We can work this out, Mr McDevitt, sir. There’s no need to hurt Elizabeth or me. I just want to go home to my pregnant wife.’ A pleading tone, the use of an honorific, and an attempt to humanise Liz and himself, because he’d read about that tactic. All to appease the man.

  But Liz, clouded with sudden rage in the presence of her nemesis, wasn’t on the same page and cut him right off with: ‘You killed my husband, you pathetic animal’.

  Karl expected the gunshot and tensed; McDevitt’s response was a smile. Her outburst had broadcast her inner anguish, and he was clearly pleased by this. He shook his head slowly.

  ‘His bloody, chopped-up body was the last stop on a route of self-destruction. And his suffering isn’t done yet. When I go to Hell, he’s got more coming. You’ll be there to watch.’

  He stood up. While Mick was rising to his feet, Karl hissed run and jabbed his arms hard into Liz’s back, forcing her forwards. She was propelled along the corridor into Mick’s blind spot. He turned and grabbed the doorframe and hauled himself around it. The ploy worked: no gunshot; though Karl did hear footsteps thudding down the stairs as he slammed the door.

  Beyond the door: shouting… thudding… still no gunshot.

  He was trapped in the room. Some kind of macho thing he’d done there, splitting Liz from him so the lunatic would have to pick one to chase. Liz might escape if she was quick, but Karl had no way out.

  He turned to seek another door. What he found was a dead man in a chair. The window was to Karl’s left and the desk was facing it so Gold could enjoy a view his clients might never again see; he was turned so that he was facing the door. The desk lamp had been positioned so its meagre light bathed him, illuminating a ragged red slice right through his throat and blood all over him. Beyond him, a fireplace burned with real coals.

  A display, Karl realised, feeling his fear and revulsion peak. It was how McDevitt wanted it to go down – Liz and Karl in the doorway, frozen with shock; McDevitt, behind them on the stairs, watching their distress for a few seconds before he announced his presence.

  The door started to open. He turned, backed away. In his panic he forgot about the dead guy for a moment and backed right into the man’s legs. Liz entered, struggling against a hand clamped in her hair. Mick was right behind her with the gun resting on her shoulder, aiming at Karl. And now he had both of them right where he’d wanted them all along. All Karl had achieved with his macho deed was to save Mick the trouble of herding them into the office.

  Mick pushed her hard, right into Karl, slamming them into the dead guy. All three of them fell down: the fat solicitor came out of his chair and slumped on the bloody carpet. Karl and Liz scrambled to their feet and backed up against the far wall, right by the burning fire, with Gold lying near their feet. Mick kicked the door shut, and they saw his shoulders relax, much as a man might do when he’d finally got home after a long day. Their enemy, finally, had what he wanted, nicely packaged up in a box. He gave a laugh, and shook his head – what-a-day – and moved to the far side of the desk. He dropped his gun onto the oak.

  Their eyes followed the weapon: he’d released it. That was what he wanted, too, because now they couldn’t avoid seeing what lay on the desk.

  ‘I got a headache worrying about this,’ he said. ‘One chance, one dream, and how to live it to its fullest. A headache, I tell you.’

  The fingers of one hand slipped over the desk, and settled upon one of the three items.

  ‘Was it about pain and suffering? Or was it about making a statement with ingenuity and gruesomeness? Bones crushed, would that do it for me? A body like a bag of Lego?’

  The fingers moved away from the hammer, and touched the second item.

  ‘Skin and flesh sliced up a thousand times, would that do it for me? A body as a piece of kirigami?’

  Away from the razor blade slid his fingers, and onto the third item.

  ‘Maybe I would warm up that cold heart of yours instead,’ he said as he stroked the fire poker.

  Karl tensed. They were only six feet from Mick, who wasn’t holding a weapon or looking at them. With luck, he could be across the desk in half a second. It might be their only chance to— He felt Liz grab his hand and squeeze, but not because she was scared. He realised she was anchoring him, preventing him from making a move. He no longer saw Mick as a distracted man open to attack. He saw Mick’s proximity, his empty hands, his blind eyes as a test, as a taunt. He was trying to trick them into making a foolish move.

  Mick hung his head, eyes on the floor. But Karl’s body was locked into inaction by fear as well as by Liz’s firm grip. For seconds the scene was frozen: no movement except for the rapid rise and fall of Karl’s and Liz’s chests.

  And then Mick looked up.

  ‘Suicide,’ he said. ‘Suicide by someone who craves life; surely that kills not just the body but the soul as well, because that’s a place my weapons can’t reach. I could offer you the hammer and the blade and the poker, but no vital areas, of course. That game is too quick. No hammer to the skull. No blade to the carotid. No burning metal through the eye and into the brain. But suicide is a ticket to Hell, I thought, and I can’t have you reunited with him. No way. Not even in a boiling pit in Hades.’

  Liz said: ‘Hell? You foolish man. Whatever my husband did to a monster like you, you deserved it. He’ll be in Heaven, and I’ll be right by his side soon. Why don’t you just get it over with.’

  Karl’s legs almost buckled. But the strength quickly returned to them, and with it he did something even more shocking than Liz’s softly delivered words. He stepped in front of her.

  Mick picked up his gun, and he was smiling. Karl realised his little act of defiance had played right into his hands. With their deaths, Mick’s fun ended. So, he was delaying. This was foreplay. It could provide Karl with an advantage, but his mind was blank as to how to use it to get out alive.

  ‘Step aside, Seabury. If you want it to be quick.’

  He moved, but not by choice. Liz thumped him aside.

  He stepped in front of her again. Mick’s expression didn’t change, as if he hadn’t noticed, or had something on his mind. ‘“Whatever”,’ you said. ‘“Whatever he did to me.” So, you don’t know. You don’t know because he didn’t say, and he didn’t say because—’

  ‘I know everything he ever did, you bastard,’ Liz yelled, and thumped Karl aside again. This time she even stepped forward so that Mick’s gun was only feet away.

  ‘He did nothing to you. He told me everything he ever did. Everything.’

  Mick grabbed the collar of his sweater, two-handed, and for a split second the barrel of the gun was pointed right at his chin. Karl prayed the bastard would blow his own head off. He tugged the sweater down to expose the ugly wound on his upper chest.

  ‘He did this to me. He never told you about this, though, did he? And shall I tell you why?’ His eyes seemed to become slightly distant, as if his mind was racing back – a jagged shard of metal, forked, like a lightning bolt, pierces his flesh in two spots, one below and one above the collarbone – ‘Bec
ause he was ashamed?’ Mick continued.

  ‘No, please don’t!’ he screams, his right arm outstretched, reaching ahead, but short, too short by inches, or miles, because either way he can’t stop this.

  The pain in his chest is excruciating, and blood flows. His fingers fall short still.

  ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t!’

  His fingers continue forward.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Because he was ridden with guilt? No, no, no. You want to know why I killed that fucker?’

  …a pair of eyes stare blankly back at him, devoid of emotion. He grabs their jacket in desperation, takes a vice-like fistful.

  The bolt pushes deeper into his skin. An inch, and then another inch. The pain throbs throughout his chest like an electrical charge.

  ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t!’ he moans.

  Deeper still. The blood starts to flow, mixing with more blood on the floor. The metal between the jagged forks hits the flesh over his collarbone, and movement is checked.

  ‘Please, T—’

  ‘Fluoxymesterone and imipramine, that’s why. Mix them, add a hint of lemon, and you have a psychotropic drug. Cheap, dangerous. It’s called Buzz. It’s new and popular and your fucking husband sold it through a dealer in his club, a guy called Rapid. It can cause a serious paranoid reaction. It can turn a man into a raving lunatic.’

  … there is a massive jerk, all shoulder muscle, and Mick screams as the bolt pushes deeper, bending and then snapping his collarbone, and the prongs force themselves further in, and the blood gushes out of his chest and soaks his clothing.

  ‘Your husband never told you about this.’ He drew back his gun arm and slammed the butt of the weapon twice into his wound. ‘Because there was nothing to tell. It meant nothing to him. Like squashing flies against a car bumper. Not a minute of sleep lost.’

  Liz said nothing, and Karl couldn’t see her face, but he saw Mick’s expression, and the shock written all over it. A happy shock like you’d see on a man hearing against-the-odds cancer remission news. That look was on his face because of the one Karl knew was on hers: belief.

  ‘After all this fannying around, that was all I needed all along,’ he said, almost incredulous. ‘For you to know that bastard’s in Hell.’

  He took a deep, satisfied breath, lifted his gun, aimed it right at her face and pulled the trigger.

  Eighty-Seven

  Danny

  Danny opened his door again, and closed it again.

  He knew it was a bad idea to leave the van, but staying here, doing nothing, made him feel impotent. Action, that was what he needed. He had been threatened with knives and guns. He had taken beatings at the hands of vicious people. And he’d done all that in return. You could take the man out of the fire, but you couldn’t take the fire out of the man. And the fire had been reignited the moment he learned that Ron had been killed. Right then he knew heads had to roll. People would have to be put under pressure to give up what they knew, and others would have to be sent a stern message that Ron’s death didn’t mean his empire was ready to be sliced up like free cake. That was action he wanted in on. And this time Ron couldn’t stop him. His legs, though. They might.

  He cast his mind back to that day when Ron had forced him to leave. Just a few weeks after the bike crash. Somehow, the man had known. He’d been called into a quiet spot, where nobody could overhear, and hit with a line that changed everything: ‘I can’t have a man around who’s in love with my wife.’

  And that was that. No denial, because the boss was never wrong, even when he was. And no argument, because loving a man’s wife was a whole lot more than just being attracted to her, and he’d seen what happened to guys who didn’t hide the fact that they thought Liz was hot. He remembered a chap behind her in a post office queue. Ron had been waiting outside, and through the window he’d seen the guy’s eyes run up and down her body. That was all. Probably as much boredom as physical attraction. No move to chat to her, no step closer to smell her perfume. Just the eyes, up and down, taking her in. He probably would have forgot her within minutes. But Ron had sent a guy to follow him. Now the guy with the roving eyes would remember that day with his last old-man dying breath. So, friends or not, Danny had got off lightly. Liz, of course, never knew a thing about it, having been fed some bullshit about Ron taking Danny out of the game for his own good. Which meant she never learned of Danny’s true feelings for h––

  Lights hit his wing mirror. He was parked sixty feet from the path out of the cul-de-sac and now watched a vehicle coming along it. It was moving slowly, which was not a good sign, but then again the lane was thin and slow was the order of the day.

  The vehicle slipped out of the path and speeded up. It drove past the left side of Danny’s van, and he lifted an A–Z and lowered his head.

  He watched the van drive down the road with two people inside. The street led to a roundabout, and from there the roads went in every direction, so the guys could be going to Scotland, or to Dover to catch a ferry to France. But if he was wrong…

  Danny opened his door again, then slammed it. By the time he got his chair out and wheeled himself halfway to Gold’s house, it would all be over. And if he drove in pursuit of the van, he would alert the bad guys and lose the element of surprise.

  He cursed. Nothing he could do except what he’d promised Liz. So, angry, impotent, lost, Danny lay on the horn.

  Eighty-Eight

  Karl

  The timing was perfect. A horn, just as Mick fired. Distant, muted, so it wasn’t the volume that had made Mick shift his aim a fraction. At a hundred yards, the bullet might have missed Liz by ten feet, but here it ruffled her hair and blasted a hole in the wall two inches from Karl’s head. If she’d been a yard closer to Mick, the bullet wouldn’t have made the wall. She dropped to her knees in shock, which opened a space for Karl to see the suspicion on Mick’s face at the horn. Way out here in the quiet and the dark, all but this place closed for the night, someone had let off a long blast of their horn. Not one of those watch-where-you’re-going blasts a thousand motorists did every day. Longer, harder, something to get someone’s attention, or give a warning. It had put enough shock and suspicion in Mick’s mind to cause the gun to jerk and waste the bullet.

  Liz, seething with anger, said: ‘That noise means you’re in big trouble, McDevitt. Thought we came unprepared, did you?’

  He had, and he shouldn’t have, that’s what Mick’s face was saying. He backed off, still aiming the gun. Still watching them, except for a moment when, at the bay window, he turned away to haul open a curtain and peer out. Just one second. Not enough time for Karl to do anything.

  But in that second, Karl saw lights beyond the window. Headlights. A vehicle turning into the car park, towards the house. His hopes flared and died in the same moment, because it had to be Danny out there; what could he do apart from extend their lives for another few seconds before getting killed himself?

  Mick let the curtain drop. He stood with his back to it and grinned at them. ‘My friends are here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s good we didn’t have a quick kill. I couldn’t bring myself to touch that bitch, but my friends can have whatever they want from her. You and I will watch, Seabury.’

  Not Danny after all. The plan had been to honk the horn if he saw trouble, not honk to announce his arrival.

  ‘Sit down, backs against the wall,’ Mick ordered.

  Sitting made them more vulnerable, but they had no choice, sitting side by side against the wall behind the desk, with the fallen chair and the dead solicitor in front of them. This close, his lethal throat wound looked much worse. His open eyes seemed to be staring right at their feet, but that, Karl felt, was better than their faces.

  ‘How do you think you’ll sell this?’ Liz said, her composure on its way back. ‘Are you going to be the hero? You find us dead and claim the glory, maybe make superintendent, write your memoirs, play yourself in a film version?’

  Mick laughed. ‘Not thi
s time. I won’t make that mistake again. No bodies. You won’t get a funeral. You’ll get a yellowing missing persons poster.’

  Liz’s hand grabbed Karl’s for reassurance. They looked at each other, and in her eyes he read strength. That strong new persona of hers, arisen like a phoenix upon news of the death of her husband. She didn’t want reassurance: she was giving it.

  They heard two doors slam outside. Mick’s friends, about to join the party. Karl felt time slipping through his fingers. He shut down an image of Katie and their unborn baby, knowing his fear of losing her would only weaken him.

  He heard the front door open. Mick’s guys, just seconds away.

  And then the office door opened, and the man called Brad Smithfield entered. With him was another person. Karl had a dizzying sensation. He refused to believe his eyes, but it was real. There, with her arm clutched in Brad’s fist, was Katie.

  ‘Let her go!’ he yelled, and rose to his feet. Mick fired his gun into the air as a warning, but Karl kept rising. Only when the second bullet tore into the wall beside his head, causing plaster and paint chips to sting his face, did he stop. Or rather, Liz stopped him. She still had his hand, and she tugged him down with surprising ease.

  He clutched his stinging eye and felt his heart thudding. A foolish move, trying to save Katie like that. Mick would have blasted him into nothingness. Now, because of Liz, he still had a heartbeat.

  Then he saw that Mick’s gun was aiming at Brad.

  Brad was frozen. ‘Wow, pal, easy. I’m in your corner, remember.’

  The gun tracked back to Karl. But Mick seemed unsure, and the weapon wavered again and settled on a blank wall. Not Karl. Not Brad. Aimed at nothing but equidistant from both men. Half a second from targeting either one. As if he wasn’t sure who was the biggest threat.

  ‘Where’s the guys?’ Mick said, and his tone confirmed it: suspicion. There was something off-kilter between these two. Karl felt his hopes lifting.