Breaking Bad: 14 Tales of Lawless Love

by Koko Brown

  Lonán stumbled and Atarah rushed to hold him in her arms. “We’ll go across the road to get your things, but we can’t stay here. They’ll know. They will find us if we stay here like we’re under a spotlight.”

  “I can’t… We were safe!”

  Tears prickled at Atarah’s eyes. “I know, I know. You can find that safety again. But not here and not with me.”

  Lonán looked torn. He eased himself away from her and said, “I understand. I’ll get the car ready.”

  “I’m done here,” she announced, turning back to shove her phones and iPad into the bag. “I’ll follow you in a second.”

  As Lonán left the house, she filled the sink with hot water and dropped both phones unceremoniously into it. Adding bleach and washing-up liquid, then bicarbonate of soda ensured the phones were burned. On the table, she left a message for Xiu and dropped her key on top of it.

  Closing the door behind her she cleared her throat and loped over the road. Saoirse sat in her father’s lap, crying bitterly. As soon as she saw Atarah, she leapt on her, howling even harder.

  “It’s okay, sweetness,” Atarah soothed, stroking her hair. “It’s okay. Listen, listen to me.” She put her down and cupped her face. “We are going on a trip. So you need to get everything you want to take with you. Get a case and put everything you want inside.”

  “Are you coming, too?” Saoirse asked, a small frown between her brows. “You have to come, too.”

  Lonán’s face was expressionless.

  “Of course I’ll come with you. Now go and get your things together, okay?”

  She nodded and rushed up the stairs. Atarah peeked through the curtains and satisfied herself that no one else knew of her presence in the countryside.

  “Where do you keep your needle and thread?” Atarah asked.

  “Are you a needlewoman as well as a copper?” he replied. She lifted her jaw and repeated her query. He waved his uninjured arm towards the desk drawers. Rifling through them, she found needle and thread in a pinkish tone that would blend well with Lonán’s Celtic skin. Her hand brushed the same bottle of whisky that led to one of her better decisions in recent times and she grabbed it, too. She doused the needle into the whisky and straddled Lonán’s lap. “Okay there, leprechaun, shirt off, please.”

  He glared at her. “That’s pretty racist.”

  “Xenophobic, but okay.”

  He leaned forward slightly and removed his T-shirt, groaning when he lifted his shoulder. The flesh, swollen and inflamed, greeted her vision. It sent a shudder of horror through her and she touched her fingertips to his lips. “Brace yourself.”

  “For… Jesus!” he roared as she poured the whisky over his wound. Immediately she began to sew, in quick small stitches. “There’s fucking antiseptic in the bathroom!”

  She shrugged. “Ah well, we can use it later.” She dismissed his complaint with a smirk.

  “Where did you learn how to shoot,” he demanded, glaring at her.

  “Clay pigeon,” she explained, focusing in the flesh pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “Used to be every Saturday morning.”

  He sighed. “If you want to carry on lying, that’s okay. It’s not as if I have a leg to stand on, but I’ve trusted you. You could trust me to not give you away.”

  She leaned down to kiss him. “There’s nothing more to tell. I’m a woman who lost her way and I’m struggling to get back on the path of goodness and righteousness. Sleeping with you put me on the right path. It was a godly experience.”

  Lonán snorted. “You know how to flatter a man.” He winced as she tied off the stitches. “The first-aid box really is in the bathroom. Can you grab it and I’ll load up.”

  He nodded to the open underfloor safe.

  She removed herself from his lap and went upstairs to collect the box. Then in Lonán’s bedroom, she found a clean T-shirt for him and left it on the side. When she returned to the kitchen, the pancake batter in its bowl made her long for what would have been a perfect morning with a lovely man and his sweetheart of a daughter. What was she supposed to do?

  “Lonán!” she called. He returned into the cottage. She beckoned to him and patted a large bandage over his stitches, before tugging the T-shirt over his head. “Why don’t you pack? I’m sure you’ve got things hidden that I can’t help you with.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. I do. Can you do me a favour and clean up? I don’t want it to look like we ran. Give them—” he jerked a thumb in the direction of Xiu’s cottage, “—the idea that I had to run.”

  Fair enough. “Okay. I’ll get to it.”

  She washed up the bowls and emptied the fridge, conscious of how long they were taking to go. But Lonán had the right idea of making sure that no one even considered that they had legged it. Atarah, yes. Lonán and Saoirse, different story. The little girl came skipping down the stairs, struggling with her suitcase.

  “I’m all done!” she announced. “Where’s Dada?”

  “He’s packing, too. Shall we put everything in the car?”

  Saoirse nodded and rushed out to the car to throw her bag in the backseat. Lonán came down the stairs with a larger case, but everything immediately seemed bare. “Are you sure you have everything?”

  “Yeah, the landlord will ship anything else out to a storage box I’ve rented. It’s in the middle of nowhere and under a fake company name.”

  Smart man.

  He carried the case out to the car and grabbed his coat. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Where are we going, Dada?” Saoirse asked, climbing into the car and putting on her seatbelt.

  “Good question,” Atarah asked, getting into the passenger seat and securing her own belt.

  “London,” Lonán answered.

  Atarah gawped at him. “We’re doing what? I’m sorry, I actually beg your pardon, because what in the hell?”

  Lonán started the car and eased it into the main road. “I’ll quote Saoirse’s favourite film. The closer we are to danger, the further we are from harm. Will anyone think we’ll go into London?”

  Atarah exhaled. “Probably not. But it has cameras everywhere.”

  “But will anyone think we’ll be in the city? In one of the largest cities in the world?” He lifted his eyebrows as he briefly took his eyes off the road. “Exactly. Where does your allegiance lie? North, south, east or west?”

  “South, obviously,” she said with a frown of distaste. “But again, that’s too close to Sybilla. I’d say north. Just because no one will think I’d go there.”

  Lonán shuddered. “Ugh, nah. Let’s go west. Busy amongst the posh folks who won’t care who we are as long as we’ve got the cash to back it up. I’ve got the cash to back it up,” he assured her. “And that’s more important than anything. I need my daughter to be comfortable as much as she needs to be safe.”

  She couldn’t and didn’t want to argue with him, certainly not in front of Saoirse who seemed simply excited to be out of the cottage for good.

  She clearly didn’t miss being in the isolation of the countryside and to be fair, Atarah had been losing her damn mind. There was only so much she could do without black hair products and she could not straighten her hair any more. It was outrageous what she was doing to the strands. At least in London she could find herself a wig to cover up and blend in.

  Regardless of Sybilla’s contacts, she would not have the manpower to be searching through hours and hours of CCTV footage for the entirety of London. The woman wouldn’t have a clue. Moreover, because Xiu didn’t have a clue. It disappointed her that she’d let him down all over again, but she had to keep Lonán and Saoirse safe. That was more important and as Xiu had been desperate to save Wen, he’d understand, too.

  She slipped a SIM card into her phone and called 999. “What’s your emergency?”

  “I’m calling from Briar Cottages and I think the one across the road is being burgled.”

  “What’s the address, please?”

  Atarah ga
ve it.

  “Madam, can you hold on the line for a moment?”

  “I would but I’m taking my daughter to school, so I may be cut—”

  She pressed the end call button and removed the SIM card throwing it out of the window.

  “Why’d you do that?” Lonán asked, glancing at her briefly.

  “I owe someone a clean-up and an explanation as to what the hell I’ve done to their home,” she said.

  As much as I’m able to…

  SIXTEEN

  Lonán wrapped the fluffy blanket around Rae’s shoulders and pulled her tightly against him. Saoirse was asleep in the large double bed in their new Airbnb flat overlooking Shoreditch’s party central. It had been a struggle to find somewhere immediately available, but they locked the flat down by paying a premium. The car would be tucked into a garage within a few days. It did make him wary that all of his weaponry sat in the boot, but there was nowhere for him to store them. He felt unprotected. Exposed in a way he hadn’t felt since Saoirse’s kidnapping.

  He couldn’t hold back the groan that rumbled through his chest as his shoulder stung. It wasn’t the first time he’d been shot, but it had been a while since his flesh had felt the hot kiss of lead. It never stopped being as painful as hell.

  Rae seemed to have her own bullet wounds, and not for a second did he buy the I used to clay pigeon shoot bullshit. He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before. Maybe because he’d been preoccupied with both protecting Saoirse and fighting his attraction to a woman who opened the door to everything he’d been hiding from for the past year, inviting it in to torch his carefully arranged life to dust.

  “Can I ask you something?” he ventured into the quiet.

  “Hmm. Depends.”

  Always the caution. “What’s your real name?”

  She turned to gaze at him, her liquid dark eyes curious. “What makes you think I haven’t given you my real name?”

  “You’re not dealing with an amateur. And my hard-on has gone away sufficiently for me to think straight,” he added, much to her amusement. “When Saoirse asked your name, you hesitated. Just the briefest of pauses, but I used to do that when I gave a fake name. That second breath you take, just to gather your thoughts, to weigh up if you’re doing the right thing or not.” He brushed the tip of his nose over her cheek. “You’ve let me inside you, I can take a name.”

  “Atarah,” she answered. “Rae is a nickname.”

  He exhaled, somewhat in relief that the truth came without a war. “Are you going to tell me how you got mixed up with this? I mean, where’s your handler?”

  She rested her head on his shoulder. “You really want to know?”

  “Don’t you have a code? That you can’t lie to someone when it becomes more intimate?”

  “You’re talking about a Greenpeace infiltration twenty-odd years ago, and having children with the targets being spied on. Having sex once isn’t quite up there.”

  He lost his breath. “So you are? A copper.”

  “The filth, bacon sarnie, Miss Piggy… Yeah. Betrayal of the peoples.” She groaned and moved away from him. He let her have the space to formulate her thoughts. His heart, for unknown reasons, raced in his chest.

  “Long story short… My handler had an idea that the trafficking came from the inside. It was too convenient. Some things that happened, how easily they disappeared, some exchanges happening right under our noses. We had two DCs and a DS transfer to Sybilla’s nearest station. Where Xiu works now…”

  Lonán’s throat tightened with jealousy. He’d hear about Atarah’s relationship with Xiu Jiang later. He probably wouldn’t like it and he didn’t have the right to feel aggrieved, not when the man had more than likely saved her skin. Logic and his heart at the present moment could not agree.

  “…and they were all killed. Remember? About two years ago? It was labelled as a gang war that sucked in three coppers, who suffered the ultimate price for trying to protect the neighbourhood.”

  He recalled the murders and remembered thinking at the time that the killings rang to him like executions. Gang wars didn’t end with shots to the back of the head. They were messy, haphazard, random. For all three to be the victims of clean bullets—and he’d logged into the coroner’s report to read the post-mortem—blazed a cover-up. Why else would there be a cover-up unless coppers were involved?

  “Me and another DS were pulled in to cover as negotiators. People who would code switch. You know? You’ve got your black in public and black in private? Well, that’s how it was, and I could speak four languages. I was an asset. Invaluable.

  “It took me eight months to even know the name of who ran the trafficking out of North London. Sybilla and her handsome Sierra Leonian husband. A gentleman who golfs while his wife works. Everything was simple. You got the e-mail. You turned up. What I’d do is make sure that a beat was in the area at the same time. Or if I couldn’t forward the information to my handler, then I’d anonymously call. I’d use a voice changer, so I never even sounded like a human being.”

  She leaned her head back, shaking her head. “I mean… It worked most of the time. But she didn’t include me on everything. So I cloned Nicodeme’s phone. Pushed as much of the suspicion onto him. And he still had more leeway.”

  “Did he suspect you?”

  “He didn’t trust me because I was a fully formed woman.” She clapped her hands over her face. “Sorry, Lonán that was horribly thoughtless, I’m so sorry.”

  He touched her on the knee. “Don’t be silly. Carry on.”

  “I even set it up so the only way the police could have had the information was via an e-mail from Nicodeme he hadn’t deleted. He got a slap on the wrist for being careless. Can you imagine? Three good people lost their lives, and Paedo Deme gets a chuck on the cheek.”

  Lonán squeezed his hands together until the knuckles turned white. “They knew what he was?”

  Atarah nodded, looking away at the black screen of the big-screen television. “They knew. And it wasn’t as important as bringing Sybilla and Gael down.”

  “Who knew?”

  She slowly turned her head to look at him. “Really? For you to do what? Go on a killing spree? Isn’t there enough death? Aren’t you tired of it?”

  “No. Because you satisfied yourself with the death of a sick, sick fucker.”

  Atarah burst out, “I didn’t have any satisfaction in it! I was defending myself! And a little boy he was going to beat to death. There wasn’t a single second I took pleasure in it.” She surged to her feet. “Here’s where he nearly disembowelled me.” She lifted her jumper and showed him the thin scar he’d traced with his lips all of twenty-four hours ago.

  “You saw the bruises on my neck where he choked me. Here, this is where my hand was cut from grabbing the knife by the blade because it was so far out of reach. He broke a rib when he stamped on my back from having the audacity to interrupt him. Nothing about it was satisfying.”

  “Then why did you cut his dick off.”

  She sat back down abruptly, wrapping herself back in the blanket. “It’s what paedos deserve.”

  “That doesn’t sound like copper talk.”

  He should have been lasered by the rage in the stare she sent him. “It’s what he deserved. I don’t even know where I found the energy to do it. But you need to put it out of your head that I enjoyed any part of it. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never been responsible for the death of a single human being. And I don’t sleep because it’s haunting me. That I did that.”

  “To save your life…”

  “There’s a reason you’re not supposed to,” she said with a shrug, not looking at him again. “Take another life. Because it burns into your soul. It’s absolutely the worst thing you can do and don’t take it as a judgement against you because it’s not. It’s just the way I feel about it, personally.”

  Lonán couldn’t help, but take it personally. The underlying judgement went both ways.

  “I
remember all of them.”

  He said it so quietly, Atarah asked him to repeat it. “Each face, each person, why I had to do it. Although the whys weren’t forthcoming from our favourite duo.”

  “No, they never do. And now they know that I killed Nicodeme.”

  “How?”

  “Logic. I called Gael and asked for Nicodeme’s address. Because I couldn’t remember it and I was desperate for that poor boy not to be trapped in a room with him. The damage he would have done… For not being a little girl. I couldn’t bear it. And it makes me feel awful for you, because you weren’t there for Saoirse. I understand, Lonán, I really do. There are so many things I wish I could have done to change. So many times I wish I could have stopped someone from being hurt because of what I was involved in.”

  “Aren’t you taking it too far?” he asked gently. “It wasn’t your job. Your job was to prevent it…”

  “And sometimes I did an absolutely shitty job at it. I can’t think for the women who slipped through the cracks and ended up in sexual slavery. The little girls that ended up in Nicodeme’s flat. Or worse. It just terrifies me of everything I did wrong. And even now, I’m putting Xiu into so much trouble. Sybilla knows that he knows me. She doesn’t know that he knows who the fuck she is, but still. She knows there’s a connection and that I was his source.”

  “Then that’s on him. He’s as trained as you are and he has his own responsibility to keep his sources safe. And probably not to have a relationship with them.”

  “I’m glad for it. I’d be dead otherwise. After I killed Nicodeme, the only thing I could think of to do was to call him. He did everything. He got poor Wen to a hospital and he got me out. All those things I didn’t think about, that I didn’t have presence of mind to do… Taking Nicodeme’s phone, because I couldn’t tell him that I had a clone, getting my things from my flat, getting me out of London so fast, I barely knew what happened. I am grateful that I met him, so very grateful. I can’t take it back any more than you can for your wife.”