‘I think only my pride is hurt,’ she said.
Marion beamed at her.
Jones was still laughing when the black Chevy pick-up truck appeared out of nowhere.
First she heard the noise, a powerful engine roaring loud and angry above the sound of the weather. Then she saw the front of the vehicle, its metal radiator grid and fender resembling the mouth and teeth of some terrible monster, stretched into a hideous threatening grin. The truck was heading straight for Marion. At speed. And Marion was looking at Sandy Jones, still smiling, still unaware of any danger.
Jones screamed her name at the top of her voice, whilst struggling to scramble to her feet.
‘Marion! Marion! Look out!’
She pointed towards the fast approaching vehicle. Marion’s smile faded. Her eyes followed the line of Jones’s outstretched arm. She tried to leap out of the way, half throwing herself further into the road.
It was hopeless. Marion didn’t stand a chance. The black truck hammered into her, sending her flying into the air like a rag doll. She was propelled forwards several feet, then crashed to the ground directly beneath the truck’s front wheels. She didn’t utter a sound. At first it seemed that all Jones could hear was a dull sickening thud as a couple of tons of hard metal slammed into the soft compliant flesh of Marion’s body.
It happened so quickly, and yet, to Jones, as if in slow motion. Marion’s arms and legs stretched and curved almost balletically. Her head bounced as it met the road’s unyielding resistance, and then Jones heard the crunching sound of breaking bone.
The black truck had run right over Marion’s lower body. Jones could see that her left leg now protruded at an impossible angle, and blood was seeping through her jeans, trickling into the river of water in the gutter, turning it pink. Jones could hear the screech of the pick-up’s tyres on the wet cobbles as it continued, at speed, in her direction. With what felt like the last vestige of her strength, she hurled herself sideways, rolling across the pavement. The truck roared past, missing her extended feet by a whisker.
Jones turned to look at Marion again. A dreadful realization hit her. Marion’s left leg looked to have been almost completely severed above the knee. She could see bits of white bone sticking through the blue denim of her jeans, those same jeans that had had such neat creases down the front, and the blood oozing from her terrible wounds had turned almost black in colour.
Jones felt perilously nauseous. Yet she was curiously mesmerized. For a moment she lay still on the pavement, staring at the dreadful tableau which had unfolded itself before her.
Meanwhile the red brake lights of the Chevy flashed as the truck squealed to a halt just fifty yards or so up the road, then began to reverse, accelerating towards Jones, each wheel kicking up a fine spray of rain water.
She realized that she was the target now, but she was totally unable to do anything about it. She certainly couldn’t move. Both her brain and her body had ceased to function.
She could smell the truck’s diesel fumes. She fancied she could feel the heat from its engine. She prepared herself for the inevitable.
But the blow, when it came, was not at all what she had expected. Her upper body was lifted off the ground and she was propelled into the air so that she almost completed a somersault, landing face down, sprawled in the doorway of the liquor store on the corner. Her entire being felt like one huge bruise. There was a crushing weight on top of her. But it sure as heck wasn’t a Chevy truck. And she was still alive.
‘Right, let’s get the hell out of here, lady,’ said a low growling voice in her ear. The weight lifted from her body. One strong hand grabbed her under one arm, another slotted itself beneath the other arm. She was hauled to her feet, and found herself looking into the eyes of a man-mountain with a Mohican haircut. It was Dom.
‘Can you walk?’ he asked.
Jones was hurting all over. Her left leg, the knee already damaged at Princeton, was sending shooting pains through her whole body. But she could stand on it, just about. At least nothing was broken, it seemed.
‘Yes,’ she said, although she wasn’t entirely sure. ‘I-I think so …’
‘Come on then, the cab’s round the corner.’
Jones grabbed Dom’s arm.
‘But Marion?’ she queried. ‘What about Marion?’
‘There’s nothing we can do for her.’
Dom’s voice was strangely calm. Jones glanced up at him. An isolated tear rolled down the big man’s cheek, but his mouth was set in a hard line and his eyes were expressionless.
Jones looked back. Marion still lay in a crumpled heap in the road. She couldn’t tell whether or not the wheels of the truck had passed over her a second time. But Marion seemed to be in a different place. Jones glanced at Dom again, in amazement. She suddenly realized what must have happened. The big man had either pulled or pushed poor Marion, as much as he could, out of the truck’s path, while, at virtually the same time, cannoning into Jones and almost certainly saving her life. Only someone with rare strength and speed could have achieved it.
‘Come on, before the goddamn cops arrive,’ said Dom.
A small crowd was gathering around Marion. People were speaking into their mobile phones. Probably calling the emergency services.
Jones hesitated. Suddenly a concerned young woman appeared at her side.
‘Weren’t you hurt too?’ she asked in the nasal twang of the Bronx. ‘Are you all right?’
‘She’s fine,’ said Dom.
‘I’m fine,’ Jones repeated, surprised she could even get the words out. The shock was setting in now. Her whole body was trembling. She was controlling her nausea only with great difficulty. And she knew she must look far from fine.
However, the young woman’s attention had been diverted by the wail of the siren of an approaching police car.
‘C’mon,’ said Dom again. ‘You’re still in danger, Dr Jones. And Connie. I’m gonna find a way to keep you both safe, that’s what Marion would want.’
Dom hooked an arm around the small of Jones’s back, propelling her forwards. She leaned against him. He half-carried her along the street. By the time they reached the cab Jones could contain her nausea no longer. She bent over and emptied the contents of her stomach, partly in the gutter and partly down the side of the vehicle.
‘Oh shit!’ said Dom. ‘Just get in.’
He unceremoniously pushed her into the back of the cab before virtually jumping into the driver’s seat.
The tyres screeched on the wet cobbles, just as the tyres of the fearsome Chevy had done, and the cab catapulted forwards as Dom slammed his foot on the accelerator. Jones, still barely in control of her limbs, nearly bounced off the rear seat and was then flung backwards so that her head rocked on her shoulders.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Anywhere that’s the fuck out of here,’ replied Dom.
The cab swung from side to side as they hurtled through the Meatpacking District as if it were Monte Carlo and Dom was determined to win the annual rally.
Jones’s stomach seemed to have transported itself upwards to somewhere around chest level. She feared she was going to be sick again. And this time she would have little choice except to throw up inside the cab.
But thankfully, after just a few minutes, Dom slowed down to a more or less normal speed, presumably confident that he had put enough distance between them and the scene of the incident, and Jones’s stomach descended to very nearly its normal position within her abdomen.
With the release from extreme discomfort, came the full awful realization of what had just occurred. If Dom had not arrived on the scene and manhandled her so dramatically out of the way of the charging truck she would be dead. She had no doubt of it. And she had no idea whether he had managed to save Marion, who, at the very least, had been dreadfully mutilated.
Christ, she thought. How was she going to tell Connie?
Suddenly Dom’s deep voice filled the rear of the cab, the
speaker system amplifying its Willard White resonance.
‘Right Dr Jones, what we gotta do first is get Connie to safety. But we can’t just go back to my place and get her. Not if we want to live. Have you got a safe way of contacting her?’
Jones slipped her hand inside her raincoat pocket. Miraculously the burner phone was still there, and, even more miraculously, it did not appear to be damaged.
She opened her mouth to tell Dom. Then shut it again. Her head was beginning to clear. And she didn’t like the thoughts that were filling it. Jones put the phone back in her pocket, and pressed her hands tightly together in a bid to stop them trembling.
‘Did you hear me, lady?’ Dom’s voice boomed.
‘How could I not?’
‘Well, we gotta move. We gotta get Connie outta my place. She’s the target. She gotta be the target. Do you see?’
Jones saw. Connie had almost certainly been right all along. The RECAP lab had been deliberately blown up, just as she’d always believed. And Connie had indeed been the target back there on that street corner. The driver of the Chevy had made a mistake. He’d mown down the wrong woman.
The would-be assassin must have been waiting and watching outside Dom’s apartment. And when Jones had emerged with Marion wearing Connie’s cover-all oilskin, the assumption had been instantly made that she was Connie. Marion was slightly shorter than Connie, but about the same build. She had been bent into the weather, and had pulled the hood of her cape up and forwards over her forehead. The little of her face that could have been seen had been further concealed by the umbrella she’d been holding in front of them both. In addition, the assassin may not even have known that there was a second woman in the apartment along with Connie and Jones.
So persons unknown must already have been aware that Connie had not been killed in the Princeton blast, that she was alive and in hiding in New York. They had then tracked her down and attempted, yet again, to kill her. Or so they had thought.
And who the hell were they, anyway, these murderous bastards? Connie suspected the establishment. The government even. Or at least a government affiliated body. But did the American government really go around arranging for its citizens to be mown down on the streets of New York?
The sequence of events had been such that the attack had to have been orchestrated by someone in a position of considerable authority and power, that was for sure.
Jones studied the back of Dom’s head. Dom, as Marion had said, was a man capable of summoning all manner of unknown resources, and Jones had just seen him act in a way that would have been far beyond the capabilities of most human beings. It seemed bizarre that she was so suspicious of a man who had almost certainly saved her life. And it was highly unlikely that Dom would ever be involved in anything that might harm Marion, whom he adored. But Marion had not been the target. Dom himself had said that. Certainly Jones considered Dom to be too much of an unknown quantity to unreservedly trust. For a start, how exactly had he contrived to arrive so conveniently on the scene right after Marion had been mown down?
No way was she going to hand over her burner phone to him, nor use it herself to contact Connie. Not for as long as she was with him.
‘Come on, ma’am, I need your help,’ boomed Dom from the front.
‘Sure, sure,’ muttered Jones.
Dom eased the cab to a halt at a set of lights. The traffic was a little heavier now. There were vehicles queued in front of them, and behind.
‘I’m just trying to think, that’s all …’ Jones continued.
The lights changed. The line of traffic approaching from the other side of the road junction began to move slowly forwards.
The vehicles in front of Dom’s cab also began to move. Jones yanked at the handle on the roadside door of the cab. She wrenched it open, and leapt, as best her battered body could manage, out into the street. Thankfully Dom had not locked her in this time. Presumably he had either not considered it necessary. or merely been in too much of a hurry to even think about it.
Somehow or other, Jones managed to land on her feet. Or very nearly. She took off at a run, ignoring the shooting pains in her leg. She heard the cab squealing to a halt again, and the big man yelling after her. She didn’t look back. She’d noticed an empty yellow cab in the line of slowly approaching traffic. She hailed it as she ran across the road, and somehow or other managed to open a door and throw herself inside while the cab was still crawling along. Dom moved fast. He came running across the road, still yelling, right on Jones’s heels. There was a lot of hooting going on from the line of vehicles trapped behind his abandoned vehicle.
Jones slammed the cab door shut and flipped down the lock.
‘Grand Central Station,’ she told the driver, not because she wanted to go there but because it was the first place that came into her head, and one of the few that even a New York cabby could find without a full address including cross streets.
Suddenly Dom’s face loomed alarmingly at the window, just as Jones’s new driver accelerated away. Mercifully the traffic had begun to flow quite freely. Equally suddenly the face was gone.
Jones looked back over her shoulder as an irate Dom disappeared into the distance.
The best news was that there was absolutely no chance of Dom getting back into his cab and swinging it around in time to follow Jones and her driver, who thankfully seemed quite oblivious to the fact that anything untoward was happening. He had barely even looked at Jones, which was all for the best, or he might not be driving her anywhere. She breathed a huge sigh of relief and leaned back in her seat.
But she couldn’t believe what she had just done, and her heart was racing. She had to contact Connie. And fast. She had to get her to safety. And if she was right in her suspicions of Dom, then the former wrestler could well be already on his way to the loft apartment.
Jones used her burner to dial the one she’d already given Connie, who answered quite cheerily. Jones steeled herself.
‘It’s me,’ she began lamely, keeping her voice low so that the driver wouldn’t hear.
‘I know it’s you, woman, who else has this number anyway …’
Connie stopped.
Jones’s voice had sounded strange even to her. Connie had picked up on that. As she would.
‘What’s wrong?’ Connie asked sharply.
‘There’s been an accident—’
‘Marion,’ Connie interrupted at once. ‘Oh my God. It’s Marion, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Jones could still see that broken and bloodied body lying in the street. And she didn’t know how to tell Connie what had happened to the woman she clearly loved so much. But Connie didn’t even give her a chance to start to explain before firing questions at her.
‘What happened? Where is she? What have they done to her? Tell me where Marion is? I must go to her—’
‘No, Connie, no—’
‘What do you mean, no? Is she dead? Is Marion dead? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
‘I don’t know, Connie. The truth is I don’t know whether she’s dead or alive. I really don’t. I had to get away. I was going to be next. Marion’s injured. But I don’t know how badly.’
The last sentence was a total lie, of course. If Marion had survived, if she was alive, Jones knew only too well that she had suffered the most terrible injuries. But she didn’t want Connie to totally fall apart.
‘You’ve left her?’ Connie barked.
‘No. Well … yes. It w-wasn’t like that …’
‘Never mind, just tell me where she,’ Connie repeated, still shouting. ‘I must go to her. What happened? What the hell happened?’
‘Look Connie, you have to listen. And do as I say. Marion was hit by a truck. It wasn’t an accident. T-the thing is, I think she was mistaken for you …’
‘Oh my God.’
Connie spoke flatly, not shouting any more.
‘Somebody knew you were alive, Connie, and that somebody wanted you dead,
really dead,’ Jones continued. ‘Right now they may still think they’ve got you, and they may not be watching Dom’s place. But they’ll know they failed soon enough. Leave the loft, straight away. Get out. Just get out …’
‘Yes, yes. But I must go to Marion. Where’ve they taken her? Which hospital?’
‘I don’t know. And even if I did you mustn’t go to her. Not yet. That would be suicide.’
‘Dom could fix it. Dom would know what to do—’
‘No,’ Jones interrupted sharply. ‘I think he might be involved. He was there. When it happened.’
‘Dom would never hurt Marion.’
‘Connie, it was you they were after. Not Marion. Look, will you just go along with me on this for now. Put on a scarf or a hat or something, hide that hair of yours, and get a cab to Grand Central. I’ll meet you by the gate to platform one. OK? Platform one.’
‘OK.’
The shock was strong in Connie’s voice, but Jones also detected resignation. Thankfully, it seemed that she was going to do what Jones said.
‘Good. Now, I need you to bring my bag with you. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. It’s got my laptop in it, my personal mobile, and another burner phone. Can you do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Connie, remember what I said, avoid Dom, do you hear me? He may even be on his way to you. I reckon you could have …’
She checked her watch, trying to visualize the place where she had abandoned Dom’s cab and its proximity to the loft apartment.
‘Ten minutes max before he could be there …’
‘But Sandy, Dom is Marion’s closest, dearest friend, her surrogate son. He’d never hurt either of us, I just can’t believe …’
‘Connie!’
Jones realized she had shouted at her. Aware of the presence of the cab driver, albeit behind a glass screen, she lowered her voice to a kind of urgent hiss.
‘Connie, you’re wasting time. Please, do as I tell you. Get the fuck out of there and come to me. I’ll explain then.’
Connie murmured something indecipherable, which Jones hoped to God was agreement, and ended the call. Jones leaned wearily back in her seat and closed her eyes. She was living a nightmare.
Cry Darkness Page 15
