Dead North

by Joel Hames

  Me.

  I stood there and tried to remember what ridiculous steps had brought me here, between the flames on the one side and the bullets on the other, and each step taken with a blind and wilful stupidity that could only ever have led me here. I remembered what Claire had said, This is what Sam Williams does, and you’re Sam Williams, so off you trot. I remembered she’d told me I was wrong, I did have a say, there were still decisions to be made. I remembered I’d laughed, inside, at how wide of the mark she was. And then I remembered Sally Carson talking about her son, talking about her wedding, tricked into moments of forgetfulness and simple happiness, and I stopped thinking and decided.

  I crouched down lower, felt around and picked up a handful of gravel. I hadn’t thought it through, but some form of distraction seemed right. I drew back my left hand to throw it, upwards, towards the window on the first floor.

  “Got you,” said a voice, and I froze, but the voice wasn’t talking to me. The voice was Lyons’, he’d come outside without anyone noticing, which meant he’d come round the front door and I was lucky as all hell he’d decided to walk round the other side of the house. If he had done, if he’d chosen the shorter route, he’d probably have spotted the car, and even if he hadn’t spotted the car he’d have fallen over me on his way past.

  He’d come up behind Sally Carson and picked the cigarette lighter deftly out of her fingers before she’d even known he was there, and suddenly the balance was broken and even a tired, aching, terrified lawyer skulking in the shadows wasn’t going to be enough to bring it back. I watched her swing round to face him, watched him grab her wrists and laugh, watched her spit in his face, saw the smile slide right off it.

  “You have been a busy girl, Mrs Carson,” he said, and sniffed. “We’re going to have to torch this place anyway. Looks like you’ve done me a favour.”

  She was facing away from me, so I couldn’t see her expression. I didn’t want to, either. There’s nothing pretty about defeat. She didn’t speak. I couldn’t blame her.

  “Take her inside and tie her up,” he said, and released her wrists, and the others stepped forward. The torchlight wavered and then went out entirely, and even though the darkness I was hiding in was no less dark, the sudden absence of brightness elsewhere left me feeling uncomfortably exposed.

  Sally turned around to face them and held out her hands. She was standing in a patch of faint light cast from the upstairs room, still smiling, which was brave, but that was all it was. There was nothing behind that smile except the act of forcing it onto her face.

  One of the men grabbed her hands. The other moved to stand behind her, a gun pressed to her cheek, and when they started moving I realised they weren’t going for the back door. They were coming round the house, to the front, and unlike Lyons they were coming my way. They were going to walk right into me, or past me if I was lucky, and it was too late to do anything about it without making the kind of noise that would give me away as surely as standing up and introducing myself.

  I crouched lower and tried to make myself as small as possible. Lyons had re-entered the house through the back door – and now I saw why the others hadn’t, because it was narrow, two steep steps up to it and an awkward lip to get over, and then the body of the internal staircase in your way the moment you put your foot inside. They didn’t want to take any chances with their prisoner.

  They’d been walking towards me now for three, maybe four seconds, each of those seconds a million instants, each instant the possibility that one of them would glance in my direction. Then they were next to me, no more than two yards away, and I realised I was probably going to be OK, they weren’t going to see me, and they weren’t going to see the car either, because the one in front had to look where he was going and the one behind had to keep his eyes firmly on Sally Carson. The crouching position I’d been holding for what felt like an eternity was starting to give me cramp. The cramp wasn’t a normal cramp, though, it was something sentient, a bastard of a cramp that had made its home in my right calf and combined in some kind of pincer movement with the bastard of an ache in my right arm so it took everything I had not to cry out in pain.

  Instead I stretched out a leg against the gravel, which must have made just the faintest of sounds, because at that exact moment Sally Carson turned her head and saw me. She didn’t turn her head far, she couldn’t, what with the gun pressed into her cheek, and for much the same reason she couldn’t do much with her facial expression, but it was the eyes I was watching, and the instant I saw it I knew it was deliberate. Her eyes flicked up, and then to the right, for the briefest of moments.

  Behind me. Back where she’d been dragged from. Where the cigarette lighter lay. Where Derek Lyons had let it drop, beside a shallow pool of petrol. Sally Carson was beckoning back to what she’d started, and her message couldn’t have been clearer if she’d etched it on her forehead in blood.

  Finish it.

  27: Good Vibrations

  THE IMPLICATIONS FLASHED through my mind one after another, fast, solid, like carriages on a freight train. A moment. That’s all it would take. A moment, and they’d be dead, with luck, all three of the bastards, and Sally Carson along with them.

  I could do it, too. Probably. A click of a cigarette lighter. A snap of my fingers. Even I could manage that.

  There were shouts and grunts from the house, Sally fighting as she was dragged up the stairs, the light coming and going as Lyons and his friends passed in front of the window, tying her up, gagging her, no doubt, although what would be the point of that when as far as they were concerned no one knew where they were?

  The police would be here in, what, fifteen minutes? Sally Carson didn’t have fifteen minutes. If I did what she wanted me to, she didn’t have five.

  The window was still open. Lyons was talking.

  “Mike. Get out there and see what the bitch has done.”

  A grunt of acknowledgement.

  “Then get the gate open and get the car ready. If she found us the police won’t be far behind. I want to be out by morning.”

  Footsteps outside. Open the gate. I wondered, foolishly, whether I’d shut the gate when I’d come through, whether it had been open already, and realised I didn’t remember a gate at all. A moment later it hit me that it didn’t matter, anyway, because Sally Carson had been through before me, and if I had left it open they’d assume it was her, and I was standing there wasting seconds while a man with a gun was heading my way.

  And if, by some miracle, he didn’t see me, he could hardly miss the Fiat. He’d have to walk right past it to get to the track.

  I was back at the car ten seconds later, door open and in, thanking all the gods I could remember that I’d bought myself an old-fashioned manual so all I had to do was slip off the handbrake and roll back the way I’d come. If I managed not to roll into the stone walls six inches either side of the car, sliding backwards in the dark, and if Mike started off round the back dealing with Sally Carson’s mess before he came round to sort out the gate, then with luck he wouldn’t hear me.

  I was due a little luck, I thought.

  I’d managed all of four or five yards – there were probably two hundred to the gate, I reckoned, because now I did remember it, glimpsed in the dark, wide open and about halfway down the track – when a there was a burst of noise from outside the car. I hit the brake. The police, I thought, for a moment, relief coursing through me like a well-earned whisky. And then I realised the sound was coming from the house so it couldn’t be the police, and it wasn’t an engine or a siren or a loud-hailer or anything the police would use anyway.

  It was the Beach Boys singing “Good Vibrations”.

  There was my luck. I didn’t know where Mike was, he could be standing right in front of me, but I had to take a chance and hope he wasn’t, and if that chance paid off then the music would mask the sound of me starting the engine.

  I started the engine.

  Thirty seconds later I felt rather th
an saw the track begin to open out to the right, and realised there was another track joining the main one. Before I knew what I was doing I was twisting the wheel, hitting the brake, killing the engine and waiting in what would have been silence if it weren’t for the distant sound of the Beach Boys.

  I sat and waited and wondered whether Mike had already been down, seen the open gate, come back up and spotted me. It was dark enough that I might not have noticed. He could be standing next to the window pointing a gun at my head.

  Except he wasn’t, because now I could hear the crunch and slide of his footsteps on gravel and mud. A beam of light shone against the wall right in front of me, and then down onto the ground. Mike had a torch.

  The ground was uneven. There were rocks and puddles, you could twist an ankle if you weren’t watching your step. If Mike kept that torch down and concentrated on his feet, I might be OK. If he happened to swing it round to his left, I was a dead man.

  The footsteps drew closer and suddenly I could see his outline moving past, treading slowly and carefully, a splash of light on the ground and a shadow behind it.

  The light stayed on the ground.

  Then he was gone, and the footsteps were fading to nothing. He hadn’t seen me. Yet.

  Because he’d be coming back up, of course.

  So I sat there a little longer and waited for Mike’s return and the path the torchlight took, the next toss of the coin that would decide whether I lived or died. The gate wasn’t as far off as I’d thought, either that or Mike was quick on his feet, because it didn’t seem more than a minute before I heard those footsteps returning and saw the torchlight tracing drunken arcs in the darkness.

  I didn’t like the way that torch was swinging. Mike was obviously feeling a little more sure of himself, and there was less light on the ground than there was above it and on either side. The footsteps were closing in. The coin was back in the air, and once again I was waiting for it to fall. Waiting for someone else. Waiting to get shot or hit or told something that probably wasn’t true anyway.

  I could see the source of the light now, the torch itself, a moment of infinite black against the beam in front, and the outline of the man behind it. The torch was moving up, then down, then up again, then to the left.

  One swing. That was all it would take. An idle flick of the hand to the right, and suddenly there would be a car where there wasn’t supposed to be a car.

  I’d had enough of the coin. I’d have enough of chance and inevitability and steps I’d taken without even knowing they were there. I closed my eyes and saw Fiona Milton and Naz Ahmet gunned down on a cold dead street in a cold dead November. I opened them again and waited until the outline was right in front of me and clear enough to be a human figure, and then I started the engine and brought the full beam right up on the bastard. He was still raising his hand to shield his eyes by the time I’d started moving, and when I hit him maybe two seconds later he hadn’t taken more than a step.

  I reversed a couple of feet and watched the heap on the ground in front of me.

  It moved.

  I couldn’t tell which bits were limbs and which were just flaps of coat or trouser, but it was moving, and I thought maybe the part of it that was moving was a hand.

  I released the brake and drove forward again until I hit the wall. I jerked up and then down into the seat, and let the car roll its way back.

  Mike wouldn’t be moving now.

  I killed the engine and found myself considering how much damage I’d done to the car. “Good Vibrations” floated through the air. The headlights were still on, the heap on the ground motionless. I wondered what Mike had been thinking before he heard the engine, and after, whether he’d figured out what was about to happen, whether he’d been calculating his chances as he raised his hand to his face, whether he’d imagined a coin spinning down through the darkness, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, alive.

  Dead.

  “Good Vibrations” came to an end and started up again. Derek Lyons was either a big fan or a man with a limited music collection. I turned off the lights and looked back up at the house.

  Fifteen minutes. Probably closer to ten, now. I sat in my car, a dead bundle of flesh and clothes in front of me, and went through all the options, all the different things that the different people I was might do, burn, run, stay, come up with something clever, and ten minutes was nine and if Sally Carson wasn’t already dead then surely she’d last the next nine minutes, wouldn’t she?

  Sally Carson screamed.

  I was at the front door a minute later with Mike’s torch in my left hand and his gun in a right that could barely handle the weight of it, and each individual Sam Williams shouting in my ear that what I was doing was stupid and unnecessary and was probably going to get me killed.

  The door was open.

  As I stepped inside a voice called out, “Took your time, Mike.” The staircase was right in front of me, with a corner at the top, and there he was, turning the corner, the other one, the one with the nervous voice, the one who hadn’t punched me in the head.

  The one who wasn’t lying dead in the track outside the house.

  He saw me and started to back away, and entirely without thinking I raised the gun and pointed it at him and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a vicious crack, and then, for maybe half a second, an even nastier silence, broken by my own howl of pain as the recoil sent another burst of agony up my arm. Ray, who had, I hoped, actually been shot, made a gentle, questioning noise that sounded a little like, “What?” and fell down the stairs, tumbling shoulder to shoulder all the way until he landed at my feet. A moment later he started to get up, so unless there was more going on here than I’d imagined I hadn’t shot him in the head or the heart. The pain in my arm wasn’t easing off at all, which would have worried me if I didn’t have more immediate things to worry about. I looked around frantically for something to hit him with. I couldn’t see anything obvious, and Ray was on his feet now with what looked like a nasty cut on his hand. A nasty cut from a bullet, so I’d as good as missed him entirely. I was holding a gun. Ray had no gun, I could see it lying there all alone halfway up the stairs. There was blood on his forehead too, from the fall, no doubt, underneath a mop of bushy blond hair I’d seen before. I saw him look at me and take in the torch and the gun, and he opened his mouth and said “What?” again, but by that time I’d realised what it meant that I had a gun and he didn’t, and I took it into my left hand, pointed it at his chest, no more than two feet away, and squeezed. There was the crack, again, which meant that this was a semi-automatic and I wasn’t necessarily about to die. I opened my eyes, which I didn’t remember closing, and Ray was back on the ground. I didn’t think he’d be getting up this time.

  The final “Good Vibrations” chorus started up, the one that builds and builds, layer on layer of voice and instrument, but even with the Beach Boys at full blast there was no way Lyons hadn’t heard those two shots. I stepped over Ray’s body – body, I thought, and marvelled briefly at what I’d done and that I was still functioning, still thinking and moving much as I had done a few minutes earlier – and sprinted up the stairs, trying not to think about the pain. There was a landing with four doors, and all of them were closed, but only one of them was on the same side of the house as the open window I’d seen from outside, the same direction the music was coming from, so I was counting on that being where Lyons was.

  I waited and listened for a moment outside the door, and that moment was my mistake, because it gave me time to think, again. I found myself backing slowly away. I could turn and run, I realised. Lyons might come after me, but he probably wouldn’t. The police would be here in six or seven minutes, and with his friends out of action, Lyons would want his hostage alive. I’d done my bit, I thought. The police could take it from here.

  I started to turn, and then I remembered that Lyons didn’t even know the police were coming, so as far as he was concerned he could kill Sally Carson and ta
ke out the intruder at his leisure. I stood there, frozen between two choices, and of all the things running through it, my brain chose to stop on the image of a child weeping at a funeral. Then Sally Carson screamed again, and I threw myself at the door, tucked into the shoulder roll I’d practiced with mixed results at the martial arts class, and prayed there weren’t any sharp objects or large items of furniture in the way.

  There weren’t. The floor was just rows of unvarnished wooden boards, so now my left arm was aching too, but some way to go before it could match the right. The roll had worked, though, and I hadn’t dropped the gun or accidentally shot myself in the head while I was doing it. I was up on one knee beside the open window, and I was looking into the face of Derek Lyons.

  Derek Lyons was in the far corner of the room. He was standing behind a wooden chair – apart from the wooden chair and a stool on which stood a small, now silent stereo, there was no furniture in the room at all. Sitting on the chair with an expression of pure terror on her face was Sally Carson. Derek Lyons held a knife to her cheek. He looked older than I’d expected, older than he’d seemed on the CCTV, but then I remembered he’d been running the show round here for decades. That much crime can put the years on a man.

  He was smiling at me.

  “Sam Williams,” he said, for all the world like an old friend he’d just run into in the pub. “This is most unexpected.”

  I kept the gun pointed at him, in a left hand that had never been my strong point, and tried not to shake or feel flattered that he knew who I was. I was James Bond, that was who I was, and he was Blofeld, only instead of a cat he had a woman with a knife jammed in her face and an expression of –

  I’d been wrong. It wasn’t pure terror. It wasn’t terror at all.

  It was fury.

  “You don’t scare easy, Mr Williams. We’ve been kind to you, as a favour, but I think the time for favours has gone.”