Red Light

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Stay there, do not move!’ said the woman. ‘You move, I shoot him!’

  It was then that Katie saw that Mister Dessie was lying on the purple velveteen cover of the king-size bed, naked and white and fat, and smeared all over with blood. He was holding up both of his arms in the way that a drumming toy monkey holds up its arms, except that he couldn’t have held any drumsticks because he had no hands. He was mewling and sniffing and occasionally coughing.

  The woman had a black plastic bag tied to her belt. In her right hand, she was holding the small Heizer pistol that Colin Cleary had sold to her.

  Katie pointed her revolver at her and said, ‘Drop that weapon, please.’

  The woman leaned sideways a little so that she could see down the corridor. Detective Horgan had stopped outside the bathroom door and taken out his SIG Sauer automatic.

  ‘Has everybody else gone?’ the woman asked.

  ‘There’s nobody here but you and us,’ said Katie. ‘Please drop the weapon. I don’t want to have to shoot you.’

  ‘Tell those two men to go into that side room and close the door.’

  ‘I can’t do that. They’re Garda officers and they’re here to carry out their duty.’

  ‘If they come any closer, I will shoot Mister Dessie in the head and kill him. I think you understand that I will do that without any hesitation.’

  ‘You killed Mawakiya and Mânios Dumitrescu and Bula.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I have their hands to prove it. I intend to kill all of them.’

  ‘When you say “all of them” …?’

  The woman’s right arm didn’t waver. ‘Tell those two men to go into that side room and close the door. I will give them five seconds and then I will shoot.’

  ‘You realize that if you do that I will have to shoot you.’

  ‘That will not stop me from killing Mister Dessie, and then you will be responsible for his death.’

  Katie said nothing for a moment. She looked towards the window, but there was no sign of Detective Dooley out there on the fire escape.

  ‘One,’ said the woman. Then, ‘Two.’

  Without turning around, Katie called back to Detective Horgan, ‘Horgan? Can you two go into that bedroom, please, and close the door after you? I’ll give you a shout when I need you. But call a white van. Mister Dessie’s in here and he’s hurt.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘It’s all right. Nothing to worry about. We’re having a little negotiation here, that’s all.’

  Detective Horgan and Garda Kelly looked at each other and both pulled faces, but Detective Horgan shrugged as if to say, She’s the boss, and they both went into Lotus Blossom’s bedroom. As soon as she heard them door close the door behind them, Katie said, ‘Okay? What happens now?’

  ‘You explain to me why you did not punish these men for what they did to my sister.’

  ‘Well, I would if I could,’ said Katie. ‘But I have absolutely no idea at all who your sister is, or what these men are supposed to have done to her. I don’t know who you are, for that matter.’

  ‘My name is Obioma Oyinlola. My sister is dead. Her name was Nwaha, which in my language means “second-born girl”. She was very beautiful and she was a very talented artist. She was not political like me.’

  All the time she was talking, Mister Dessie was moaning, and gradually his moans were growing louder and longer and more agonized.

  ‘Love of God—’ he gasped. ‘Love of God, what have you done to me?’

  ‘We need to get this man to a hospital,’ said Katie. She reached into her pocket and took out her iPhone.

  ‘No!’ said Obioma. ‘If you so much as press one single number on that phone, I swear that I will shoot him with no hesitation.’

  ‘I’ve already asked my officers to call for an ambulance. I just wanted to make sure one was on its way. He could die from loss of blood and then you’d be charged with four murders. You’re looking at a life sentence as it is.’

  ‘What did they give to my sister? That was more than a life sentence. They took her life away from her – everything that made her feel proud of herself, and womanly, and talented, and pure.’

  ‘Tell me what happened then,’ said Katie, much more quietly, although she kept her revolver pointed at Obioma’s heart.

  ‘My family comes from Lagos. My father was an English teacher at Lagoon Secondary School. We were two sisters and a brother, but my brother died when he was only five years old and because of that my sister and I became very close.’

  ‘Love of God, help me!’ groaned Mister Dessie. Obioma glanced at him briefly but then turned back to Katie.

  ‘My sister and I loved each other, but we were always different. She was always sewing and painting while I was playing adventure games with boys. When I was seventeen I fell for a boy who was active with MEND, and that was when I became political.’

  ‘MEND? What’s MEND?’

  ‘It is the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. An armed force of activists, fighting against the government and greedy big oil companies. We believe they should be giving their profits to the poor and disadvantaged people of Nigeria instead of creaming them off for themselves. They have polluted our land and given us nothing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Katie. ‘Now you come to mention it, I’ve heard of them. But they’ve been responsible for all kinds of terrorist attacks, haven’t they? Shootings and kidnappings and piracy and bombings.’

  ‘It is the only way to make the government and those big monopolies listen to us. It was MEND who taught me to fight. But anyway, that is not why I am here. My sister is why I am here.’

  ‘Go on.’ Katie knew that the best chance of getting Obioma to give up her gun was to listen to this and then show understanding. She had once sat in Fitzgerald Park in a steady downpour for three and a half hours listening to a would-be building society robber with a sawn-off shotgun and an elderly woman hostage.

  Obioma said, ‘My sister showed some of her embroidery at an exhibition in Lagos and a man came up to her and said he ran a design studio in Italy and would she come to work with him? She would make very good money and might even become famous.

  ‘She went, and that was the last we heard from her for nearly a year. Then my mother and father received a long letter from her. She had managed to get a friend to send it for her. I suppose you could say it was a suicide note.’

  For the first time, Katie saw some emotion on the woman’s face. She tilted up her chin a little and breathed a little more deeply, but still her right arm remained steady. The muzzle of her pocket shotgun was only about three feet away from Mister Dessie’s head and from that range and that angle she would blow three quarters of his face off with one shot. It was possible that he would survive it, but who would want to spend the rest of their life with no hands and only a quarter of a face?

  ‘In this letter, my sister told us how she had been tricked and beaten and trafficked to Ireland. She listed everything that had been done to her, every act of rape and violence, and how her will had been broken. But she named every name. She named the man they called the Singer, Mawakiya. She named Mânios Dumitrescu. She named Bula. She named this man, Mister Dessie. She named them, and she described what they looked like, and she gave us the addresses where they lived.

  ‘Two months later we were told that Nwaha had drowned herself in the river. Actually, she had drowned herself on the day after writing that letter, but it took the Irish authorities a long time to discover who she was.

  ‘That was when I decided to come here and to be Rama Mala’ika, the Avenging Angel.’

  ‘Well, I can understand your anger and your bitterness,’ said Katie. ‘But why didn’t you simply bring your sister’s letter to the Garda? We would have taken action if we had been given evidence like that.’

  ‘Because I read everything I could find about those men, and the sex business they run in Cork, and I saw that time and time again they had been brought in front of the court
s and nothing had happened to them. Oh, they had sometimes been fined, or had some of their profits confiscated. But the men who drove my sister to kill herself deserved a much greater punishment than that. They deserved to suffer, and die, and then to go to hell.’

  Katie could faintly hear sirens outside. It would only be a few minutes before an armed back-up team would be storming in here. There was still no sign of Detective Dooley on the fire escape outside and she could see this ending badly.

  ‘Is Mister Dessie the last on your list?’ she asked Obioma.

  ‘Please,’ slurred Mister Dessie, at the sound of his name. ‘Love of God, help me. Please. I’m dying here. I can’t stand the pain.’

  ‘These four I have punished so far, they were only servants,’ said Obioma. ‘I have been saving the master until last. I wanted him to know dread! I wanted him to think, “When is this Avenging Angel coming to kill me?” Because he will know that I am after him. I will make sure of that.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Katie. ‘Who do you call “the master”?’

  ‘Michael Gerrety, of course. I do not know why you even had to ask me. It was Michael Gerrety who made my sister a slave and a prostitute. It was Michael Gerrety who was responsible for her suicide, more than anybody. And do you think that the courts will ever punish him for it?’

  Katie said, ‘I’m sorry, Obioma, but this is all over. You won’t be able to go after Michael Gerrety because I’m going to have to arrest you now on multiple charges of homicide. I can understand your motives, but nobody can take the law into their own hands, no matter what their victims might have done.’

  Obioma stared at Katie and Katie thought that she had never seen an expression like that on anybody’s face, ever in her life. It sent a crawling sensation down her back. Obioma had become Rama Mala’ika. She was the Avenging Angel. This was what implacable anger looked like in the flesh.

  ‘Please give me the weapon,’ said Katie, holding out her hand and taking a step forward.

  Obioma fired. The bang was so loud that it made Katie jump, and she almost fired herself as a spontaneous reaction. Mister Dessie’s face burst open and he was instantly turned into a bright scarlet Elephant Man, with his cheeks and his forehead in bloody lumps.

  He didn’t cry out, because his mouth had vanished, but the shot hadn’t killed him. He was bouncing from side to side on the bed and thrashing his arms around and making a gargling noise.

  ‘Drop the weapon and put up your hands!’ Katie told Obioma, and she was almost screaming with the shock.

  Detective Horgan and Garda Kelly came jostling out of Lotus Blossom’s bedroom and into the open doorway. Detective Horgan pointed his automatic at Obioma and cocked it.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, when he saw Mister Dessie. ‘We’ve called for a white van already. But Jesus.’

  Katie approached Obioma, pointing her revolver at her heart. Obioma kept her eyes on her, but at the same time she reached into the pocket of her leather waistcoat and took out a black shotgun shell. She broke open her pistol, eased out the spent cartridge, and slid in the new one.

  ‘I said drop the weapon,’ said Katie. ‘If I had followed my training, I would have shot you dead by now.’

  Obioma raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. ‘The choice is yours,’ she said calmly. She raised the pocket shotgun and pointed it against her own right temple. ‘I am going to walk away now. If you try to stop me, or shoot me, I will shoot myself. Then you will have to explain to your superiors and to your media how you allowed such a thing to happen. You shot a woman who was threatening not you, but herself? You will also lie awake at night and ask yourself the same question, over and over. You will never be able to forget me. I have killed men who had personally done me no harm, oil workers who were only doing their job, and I can still see them now.’

  ‘Put the weapon down,’ Katie repeated. ‘I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.’

  ‘No, you will not,’ said Obioma. ‘I can read it in your face. And your colleague will not shoot me, either, because he does not want all the complications that will go with his shooting me when you would not.’

  Katie said nothing, but she couldn’t help thinking, Whoever trained you in MEND, they trained you well. Not only do you know how to kill, but you know how to survive. She knew from her own experience that the best way to escape from a dangerous situation was to take the riskiest option open to you.

  Obioma took a step towards the door, and then another one, circling around Katie with the muzzle of the Heizer still pressed against her forehead. Detective Horgan looked at Katie as if to ask her if he should try to grab the gun and wrestle Obioma to the floor, but Katie shook her head. Obioma was right. If she blew her own brains out, the Garda would look reckless and incompetent – and unsympathetic, too, especially since she had been on a mission to avenge her dead sister and had killed only pimps and low life. It wouldn’t help, either, that she was beautiful. Gardaí Provoked ‘Avenging Angel’ To Shoot Herself.

  Obioma reached the door and Detective Horgan stood aside, while Garda Kelly retreated into the corridor.

  Katie said, ‘You are not going to get away with this, Obioma, I swear to God.’

  ‘We will see,’ said Obioma. ‘All I want to do is punish those men who deserve punishment. Then you will never see me again.’

  With that, she backed quickly along the corridor to the front door of the flat, opened it, and was gone.

  Katie said to Detective Horgan, ‘If any back-up’s arrived and they see her coming out of the building, tell them to let her go and not to follow her. The last thing we want is her shooting herself in the street.’

  She turned to Mister Dessie, who was lying still now and had stopped making guttural noises. His face was so hideously disfigured that she could hardly bear to look at it. There was nothing she could for him even if he wasn’t dead, but he certainly looked dead.

  ‘Mother of God, what a mess. Chase up that ambulance, can you? Jesus. I’ve made a bags of this, haven’t I? I should have shot first and thought about the moral issues afterwards.’

  ‘Back-up’s just arrived, ma’am,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘They haven’t reported anybody at all coming out of the building. The paramedics are here, too.’

  ‘What happened to Dooley? He was supposed to come up the fire escape.’

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am. I’ve lost contact with him for some reason.’ He looked at Katie seriously for a moment – very seriously for him – and then he said, ‘I think you did the right thing, myself. Mister Dessie’s nothing but a total shite and them other three shites were nothing but total shites. If you ask me, that girl has done us all a favour.’

  ‘She said she was after Michael Gerrety next.’

  ‘In that case, good luck to her. He’s the biggest shite of the lot of them.’

  There was knocking at the front door of the flat. Garda Kelly went to open it and two gardaí from the emergency response unit came in, wearing Kevlar vests and carrying Heckler & Koch assault rifles. They were followed by two cautious-looking paramedics.

  ‘Better call the Technical Bureau, too,’ Katie told Detective Horgan. ‘Can you stay here? I’d better get back to the station and report this mess to Molloy.’

  Detective Horgan was about to say something, but then he changed his mind. Katie laid a hand on his shoulder to show him that she understood.

  One of the armed gardaí came out of the kitchen holding up a tan leather briefcase. ‘I think I just won the lottery!’ he said. ‘There’s thousands in here!’

  Thirty-three

  Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy sat back in his chair with his fingers steepled and listened to Katie’s account of what had happened at Washington Street without interrupting her. When she had finished he said, ‘You should have shot her first. You know that. We had some trouble with armed gangs in Limerick and that was the only way to deal with them. At one time we had the ERU exchanging fire with them like the gunfight at the O.K. C
orral.’

  ‘I’m ninety-nine per cent sure that she still would have shot Dessie even if I had shot her first,’ said Katie. ‘She’s been trained by this organization called MEND, which is one of the most violent and well-armed groups of activists in the whole of Africa.’

  Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy screwed his finger into his ear and then took it out and examined it. ‘Under the circumstances, Katie, I have to admit that you probably followed the most sensible course of action. If that young woman had shot herself the PR complications would have been horrendous. As it is, we’ll have to be very discreet about Dessie’s death. I suggest we simply say to the media that he was discovered dead in a flat that he had been viewing, and that our perpetrator must have followed him there.’

  ‘It’s not just any old flat, Bryan,’ said Katie. ‘It’s one of Michael Gerrety’s brothels, and the media are certain to know that. They’ll also know that Dessie O’Leary was Michael Gerrety’s right-hand man and that there’s an obvious connection between all of these four homicides. We won’t be able to suppress that side of the story. There’s even some young trainee reporter on the Echo who’s hot on Gerrety’s trail. She never leaves me alone.’

  ‘All right. That’s as maybe. But I still want you to play this right down. Michael Gerrety is innocent until he’s proved guilty, and to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t believe he ever will be. I know that we’re guardians of the law, but Ireland isn’t a police state yet. There’s live and let live.’

  ‘Why don’t you make a statement to the media?’ said Katie. ‘There’s time to make it for the Six-One News.’

  ‘No, no, that’s all right, I have a meeting this evening. I’ll let you handle it. Just make sure that you collar this Avenging Angel woman before she gets anywhere close to Michael Gerrety. And don’t dilly-dally next time. You have every reason to suspect that she’s armed, even if you can’t actually see the gun. So shoot her on sight.’

  ‘I’ve put out some new CCTV pictures of her. Somebody must know where she is. She’s very distinctive-looking.’