Kiss of Death

by Paul Finch

  There was a shriek of rage from somewhere behind; no doubt someone had just discovered Flat-Top. Taylor needed no second telling. Heck released him, and he climbed out through the casement, grabbing an overhead bar and hauling himself athletically upward.

  Heck slid the hammer into the belt at his back, and followed, the pair of them ascending side-by-side. Of course, it wasn’t easy. The scaffolding poles were spaced far apart and were cold and slippery. It was rickety too; though clamped to the keep wall, the skeletal structure shuddered and shook. Below them, an abyss yawned.

  ‘Jesus!’ Taylor squawked as both feet lost their purchase at the same time. He whimpered hysterically as he hung by two hands. Heck hooked an arm around his waist, allowing him to find his footing again.

  ‘Fuck … Oh, fuck … ’ The kid’s eyes were like moons in a face more strained and drawn than Heck had ever seen in a person under twenty years old.

  ‘Just keep going. You’re younger than me … probably fitter.’

  Taylor climbed on, hand over hand, foot over foot. Heck matched him, and the next thing, they were clambering onto the gantry. Taylor lay full-length, fingers gripping the wood, his body shuddering. Heck crouched, breathing hard. On their left, lit by occasional suspended bulbs, the gantry ran alongside the building for sixty or seventy yards, before terminating at a hanging tarp. On their right, it was more promising, running thirty yards to the foot of an upright ladder.

  Heck tapped Taylor’s shoulder and indicated the way they should go.

  ‘No way!’ the kid moaned. ‘If more cops are coming, why don’t we just lay low and wait?’

  ‘Because these nutjobs’ll search everywhere … you know why? Because they’ve got to.’

  Wearily, Taylor swayed to his feet.

  They went single file along the gantry, until they reached the ladder. Heck looked up: it ascended another thirty feet, braced by a single steel pole at its back.

  He tested it with both hands, and it felt secure. But this would be an even more nerve-racking climb than the scaffold, especially as at the top it disappeared through a square hatch in a ceiling made from sheets of opaque plastic.

  ‘Follow me up, Spence,’ Heck said.

  ‘You serious, man … you think this’ll hold?’

  ‘It’s designed for hairy-arsed brickies carrying hods. Course it’ll hold.’

  Heck commenced the climb, face upturned. As the ladder was narrow, he could only ascend with hands and feet close together, which felt clumsy and unnatural. In addition, the ladder shivered and rattled in the spiralling wind, which came straight off the Atlantic and was surprisingly cold.

  He halted halfway up and glanced back down.

  It was a dizzying sight: Taylor’s face written with terror, the vertical drop below him so sheer that it tilted all perspective. Heck hung there desperately, feeling as if he, the ladder, and the keep of Trevallick Hall itself, were toppling.

  ‘You all right?’ he shouted, clinging on tight to stabilise himself.

  ‘Yeah, man, yeah … just go, yeah? Go!’

  Heck continued up, trusting that the kid was too adrenalised to feel the bite of the wind. He was about ten feet below the hatch when he heard voices above it. He froze, signalling with his hand that Taylor should do the same. The voices were foreign, presumably Armenian, and were accompanied by several pairs of feet thundering by overhead. Heck hung there with eyes clenched shut. Any second, it seemed that one of them would simply glance down through the opening and spot him. They were all likely armed by now, so he and Taylor would be fish in a barrel.

  But it didn’t happen.

  The footfalls dwindled, the voices fading.

  Heck recommenced climbing. When he poked his head through, he saw another timber walkway, this also running alongside the keep’s outer wall, though it was broader than the one below. That had been two planks in breadth, whereas this one was five. It had been laid over the top of the sheeting, which extended further out by ten feet or so, and banged and bellied in the breeze.

  Heck heaved himself up and knelt on the planks. There were apertures in the wall along this section – more windows with the glass missing – each one spaced about ten yards from the next. As the gantry walkway lay only a few inches below each, and they were all a good seven feet in height, it was simply a matter of choosing one and stepping through it to get back inside. Heck waited until Taylor was alongside him.

  ‘How you doing?’ he asked.

  The kid hung his head, wheezing for breath. ‘Yeah, man … I’m good. Cold though.’

  Heck was in a similar position, his jeans and polo shirt damp with sweat, the chill cutting into him. He pivoted round to get his bearings.

  The left-hand route was partially blocked by a cement mixer and several bags of cement powder, so they went right. As they did, Heck peered upward. Thirty feet above, a battlemented parapet was defined against the star-speckled sky and rendered even more visible by electric lighting suffused over the top.

  He remembered being told about the helipad.

  Was this it then? Were they almost at the hall’s highest point?

  Not that it mattered. The first aperture approached. He flattened himself against the wall, waiting until Taylor had fallen in behind him, and then risked a peek. It was an embrasure rather than a proper window, tall but very narrow – so much so that only one man could climb into it at a time – with a stone floor sloping sharply down to what looked like another sheer drop, this one inside the building. Heck sidled in, ventured a short way and found himself looking forty feet down a plunging stairwell.

  He shuffled back and re-emerged onto the walkway, already in the process of telling Taylor that they needed to find another route – only to discover the kid in the grasp of a guy in overalls, who must have stepped out from one of the apertures behind them.

  The guy wasn’t especially big or brawny; like the one Heck had knocked out in the changing room, a head of ash-grey hair complemented his dark, leather-skinned features. But his teeth were locked, and he tightened his thick-sinewed right arm around Taylor’s throat, gleefully squeezing the life out of him.

  Taylor glugged like a man drowning as he rent at the locked forearm. But the hellish grip weakened when the assailant saw Heck appear.

  Not having expected two of them, he tried to shout to whichever of his confederates were close by, only for Heck’s right fist to fly into his left eye with crunching force. The guy’s head jerked backward and blood spattered down his left cheek, but he clung on, using Taylor as a shield – in response to which, the kid rammed his elbows backward, both times finding rib-bones. The hold was broken, and the Armenian staggered away.

  Heck slid past Taylor, advancing on their opponent – who continued to back off, though on reaching the cement mixer, he used it to stabilise himself, and a six-inch blade flicked open in his right hand. Despite his left eye streaming blood, his grimace of pain curved into a sickle grin.

  ‘Spence, get out of here!’ Heck shouted over his shoulder.

  ‘The fuck, man! Which way?’

  Heck risked a glance. Two more of them had appeared some distance to their rear.

  ‘The sky’s the limit, pal!’ he shouted.

  Taylor looked around, and seeing that they’d already reached the top of the ladder, leapt up and caught the bar over his head, swinging himself back onto the scaffolding.

  The knifeman, meanwhile, came at Heck slowly, passing the blade from hand to hand. He looked confident, but his injured left eye had virtually closed. A vicious backhand slash, aimed at the belly, drove Heck into retreat – at which point his right heel connected with the cement bags and he stumbled down onto his haunches.

  The knifeman came on faster.

  But Heck jumped back up, his right hand full of cement powder, which he flung in the guy’s face, primarily at his one good eye. With gasps of angry pain, the Armenian tottered to a halt. Heck launched a heavy foot into his groin and caught him under the chin with two fists clamp
ed together, the SMACK! of which echoed even over the sea wind.

  The guy hurtled sideways, landing full-length on the plastic sheeting, which, by a miracle, held. Heck ran past him, no longer sure which way he was going. A glance backward showed the newly arrived Armenians close behind. But when he looked to the front, several more were emerging from yet another of those unglazed apertures.

  Heck stopped running and commenced climbing.

  As he ascended through the framework, he looked down and saw, rather to his surprise, that no one was following. A couple of them were leaning out from the walkway, trying to bring their unconscious mate back to safety. Two others were engaged in frantic conversation, which he could make neither head nor tail of, though it seemed curious that they weren’t at least staring up after him.

  Either way, it was an advantage Heck had no hesitation in taking, clambering all the way to the top. When he got there, the first thing he saw as he stepped through a gap in the crenellations was that he was now on the roof of the keep, as he’d suspected, the highest point of Trevallick Hall. It was a flat, square area, perhaps ninety yards by ninety, surrounded completely by battlements, though such ancient fixtures were rendered anachronistic by the new layer of tarmac that covered the roof, and, in the very middle of it, the helipad, a wide-open area surrounded by floodlights, marked with a bright yellow letter H. Currently, on top of this sat an Augusta Westland Koala helicopter, headlights on full blast, rotor blades turning lazily.

  But this caught Heck’s attention only fleetingly. Because some forty yards to his right, Spencer Taylor knelt in what looked like abject defeat, his head drooped.

  ‘Hey … cop!’ a voice shouted.

  Heck spun around, and the reason for Taylor’s capitulation became obvious.

  A squat figure approached. It was Rodent, now wielding an automatic weapon, the same type of FN SCAR battle rifle that Narek Sarafian had used. Clearly, he’d been awaiting them, first intercepting Taylor, who’d known better than to argue. Now the weapon was trained muzzle-first on Heck.

  Wearily, he raised his hands.

  Rodent didn’t lower the rifle, but flicked it right, signalling that Heck should cross the roof and kneel alongside his compatriot.

  As Heck went, his eyes roved their surroundings – and other things came to his attention. Immediately, he understood the lack of pursuit pressed by Milena Misanyan’s men stationed below.

  The woman herself, now wearing a long crimson overcoat, stood on the landward parapet, alongside Ray Marciano. They were conversing animatedly, their attention riveted on the mainland, which at this time of night should be all but indistinguishable, yet now was a scurrying mass of twinkling blue lights. Certain of these had even set off across the water.

  Little wonder the twosome now came quickly back across the roof, though as they passed the helicopter, they separated, Misanyan climbing into the cockpit on the passenger side. An interior light came on briefly and Heck saw her settle alongside the pilot, who was already in harness. She fitted on a pair of headphones, while he manipulated the controls, and the blades swirled more vigorously. Marciano, meanwhile, diverted towards the prisoners. As he did, he reached under his jacket and drew out his Beretta.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Heck muttered, but it wasn’t a blasphemy, it was a prayer that he could manage to make good use of the one chance he was likely to get here.

  Rodent backed away until he was ten yards off. Marciano stopped alongside him.

  ‘Sorry about this, Heck,’ the ex-cop said. ‘But my orders are that we finish what we started.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Heck nodded.

  Side by side, Marciano and his man took aim, one weapon for each of the two prisoners.

  And Heck took his chance, hurling the claw hammer he’d filched from behind his back. It spun through the air, a blur, travelling so fast that Marciano barely glimpsed it before it smacked him on the top right corner of his head, cavorting away as it dropped him into a crumpled heap.

  Fleetingly stunned, Rodent turned his scrutiny first on his fallen ally and then on Heck, who had now jumped to his feet. In what seemed like slow motion, he brought his weapon around to lock it on the new target – and never saw Spencer Taylor come gambolling forward, dive and hit him in the midriff with his shoulder. Rodent rocked with the force of it, but didn’t fall; he swivelled back round, raised his weapon and clubbed the back of Taylor’s head.

  As the kid sank down, Heck also crossed the space between them. Rodent saw him in his side-vision. He swung the SCAR like a bat, but Heck caught it in both hands and kicked the guy in his left knee. The Armenian grunted and tried to hop backward, the SCAR coming loose in his grip. As Heck tried to yank it away, Rodent clawed at his face, gouging the flesh, but Heck deflected the blow, slamming his left fist into the guy’s jaw. The firearm went spinning away as Rodent staggered sideways, Heck following, bludgeoning him with a right and another left. Dazed though he was, the tough Armenian stayed upright. In fact, he barrelled forward, head lowered, wrapping his brawny arms around Heck’s waist. Heck, briefly off-balance, smashed an elbow down into his spine, dropping him to his knees, and another into the back of his neck.

  ‘The fuck … ’ the shrill voice of Spencer Taylor called somewhere to the right.

  Heck had no time to look. He grappled with Rodent’s hands, which had hooked onto the belt of his jeans, threw them off, and with another well-aimed kick, this time to the guy’s right temple, knocked him out cold.

  ‘Fucking stop, man, yeah? D’you hear me?’

  Heck whirled, to see that Taylor had retrieved the SCAR and was advancing on the copter, which, from the down-blast of its spinning blades, was about to ascend.

  ‘Spencer!’ Heck shouted.

  ‘I said stop … you fucking hear!’

  The copter ascended.

  ‘You fucks!’ He hefted the SCAR to his shoulder. ‘You’re taking me out of here!’

  ‘Spencer!’ Heck bellowed.

  The craft was thirty feet above the helipad when the kid opened fire, a hail of high-velocity rounds hammering first into its underside, then cross-stitching the cockpit canopy.

  ‘Shit!’ Heck tottered to a halt. ‘Oh … shit!’

  Taylor fired relentlessly as the copter tried to loft itself away northward, fragmenting its rotor blades, splinters of which whirled in every direction. It rapidly lost power and balance. Heck could imagine the pilot slumped dead over his controls, Milena Misanyan rigid alongside him, screaming …

  Before his eyes, the heavy craft tilted over until it lay sideways in mid-air – and then dropped abruptly from sight, turning end-over-end down the exterior wall of the keep, caroming off and through the scaffolding, bent and broken poles deluging alongside it. The final explosion on the rocks far below shook the venerable building to its foundations, a great mushroom of smoke and flame erupting upward past the top of the battlements, the searing heat and light of it swamping the entire roof. Heck stood helpless, his sweat briefly drying, his hair stiffening.

  A few yards away, Taylor’s head slumped backward, his confused gaze lingering on what was nothing more now than a roiling pillar of smoke. The SCAR hung limply by his side.

  A second passed before Heck moved warily towards him.

  ‘Spence,’ he said, ‘put that bloody thing down, eh? Before anyone else gets hurt.’

  ‘The fuck!’ Taylor shouted, jolted out of his trance. He spun around and trained the weapon on Heck. ‘There’re more of ’em, loads more … we know, we’ve seen ’em.’

  ‘Hey, hey … whoa!’ Heck raised his hands but couldn’t help retreating – the kid limped towards him with a manic expression, the gun still levelled.

  Heck pointed southward. ‘Look at the mainland. That’s the law and his big brother, pal. These guys have already seen it … what’s left of them. They’re probably getting into boats as we speak. But even then, they won’t get far. So, it’s over … yeah?’

  ‘Nah, man. Nah … no way.’ Taylor’s finger l
ocked on the trigger. ‘You’re a cop too …’

  ‘I am, mate, yeah.’

  ‘Then you’re not my fucking mate! You say you’re here to help, but really you’re here to pinch me!’

  ‘You saying I didn’t help you, Spence?’ Heck was aware of the south battlements approaching behind. At this rate, he’d pass clean through them. So, he halted, lowering his hands but keeping the palms upright, showing that they were empty. ‘Spence … let’s just cool it, yeah?’

  ‘Stop telling me what to do! You fucking pig! You think you and your bluds are going to send me down?’

  ‘What’s the other option? You going to shoot it out with the whole of the Devon and Cornwall Police? How many rounds you got left?’

  ‘Hey, man, don’t be fucking changing the subject!’

  ‘Spence, whatever you’re accused of …’

  ‘And don’t be calling me Spence! It’s not my fucking name, all right?’

  ‘Spencer! … whatever you’re accused of, I’m sure we can sort it. That chopper that went down … you didn’t do that, it just crashed. Pilot panicked and pressed the wrong button.’ He shrugged. ‘Simple as, yeah?’

  But Taylor raised the SCAR to his shoulder and aimed it at Heck’s face. ‘You gotta get me off this island!’

  ‘And how can I do that? You hear that sound?’ Heck made as if to listen, and if Taylor had bothered doing the same, he’d have heard the distant but fast-approaching whirr of additional sets of rotor blades. ‘You think that’s the ghost of the one you just shot down?’

  ‘Man, I didn’t shoot it … you just said so!’

  ‘All right, fine, listen …’

  ‘Don’t be telling me to listen!’ Taylor’s red-rimmed eyes strained in their sockets, sweat again beading his near-naked body. ‘I’m the one giving the orders, you’re the one following ’em! So shut your pig mouth, and just do what I tell …’

  He never saw the clenched fist that rammed upward into his groin.

  Taylor hadn’t realised that he was standing directly alongside Ray Marciano’s unconscious form, or that the ex-cop wasn’t unconscious any more. The kid slumped to his knees, face written with unbelievable pain – and was completely unprepared for the expert karate chop aimed at his throat.