by Jo Bannister
It was gone ten o’clock. He took overtime when he could get it, to make up for the times when he’d had to leave a good job without collecting his pay because the look on a stranger’s face said he’d been recognized. More than once, he was sure, he’d read too much into an everyday exchange of glances and fled his latest job and his latest bed because someone had nothing better to do than idly watch the passersby. It couldn’t be helped. He had to act on instinct. If he waited for proof it would be too late.
And then, he thought his face was more famous than it was. Because he remembered what happened as if it were yesterday, he thought everyone else did too.
There was a grainy television in his room but he didn’t turn it on. He watched when there was something to watch, but background noise was never a good idea. He needed to hear the unexpected footstep, the soft hand trying the door. He dropped his tools in a corner, hung his jacket on the nail, eased his feet out of his boots and lay down on top of the bed with his eyes closed. It was a comfortable bed, the best he’d had for more than a year. He’d miss it when he left.
The sharp silhouettes of mountains appeared on the inside of his eyelids. But he couldn’t afford the distraction of a flashback. He sat up abruptly, reached out and turned on the TV. There was nothing worth watching, but anything was better than the memories. Tonight he’d take the risk of numbing his senses.
Talking heads came on the screen. Horn tried to concentrate, but it was politics or economics or international trade, one of those subjects that he knew affected him but failed to engage his interest. Slumped on his comfortable bed, bone tired, lulled by knowledgeable voices using words he didn’t understand when he was awake, still fully dressed he slid sideways into sleep.
Sometime later—he couldn’t judge how long: the economists on the TV had given way to a cartoon dog with subtitles but nothing else appeared to have changed—something woke him. He sat up with a guilty start, as if he were being paid to stay awake. While his senses were still working out where in his brain they belonged, his well-trained body had already moved into self-preservation mode, rolling silently off the bed, padding sock-footed into the corner beside the door and away from the window.
He wished he’d turned the TV off earlier. He couldn’t do it now without advertising the fact that he was awake. He sipped shallow breaths and listened with all his being.
He heard nothing. With his ear against the door he still heard nothing. He reached down carefully and slipped the special hammer out of its pocket in his bag. Successive colleagues laughed when he said it was a present from a girlfriend and he wanted to keep it nice, and anyway it was a lie. The point of the thick sock he kept wrapped around its head was that he didn’t want to be responsible for another death.
The fingers of his left hand rested butterfly-light on the door handle. Half a second before it turned he’d feel if someone grasped the other side. He felt nothing. He went on waiting, and still nothing happened, nothing changed. Which left him with a choice: to open the door and look, to go back to bed, or to sit up all night in the fireside chair with his hammer on his lap, waiting for someone to storm in here. Aware that what disturbed him just might have been the old lady from downstairs looking for her cat, he held the hammer behind him and opened the door with his left hand.
A weak yellow light burned on the landing all night. There was no furniture to cast shadows or conceal an intruder, just the stairs that went up and the stairs that went down. No one was there. A couple of swift steps took him to the stairwell and he looked up and down, and still he saw no one.
He emptied his lungs in a soft, ragged sigh and drew a proper breath for the first time in five minutes. A false alarm. Another one.
He didn’t have a clock. He put the hammer down on the bed, parted the curtains and angled his watch to the streetlamp outside. A little before three o’clock. The sandwich bar had closed and no one was on the street. Finally he turned off the TV.
But he’d forgotten something. Something so basic it took him a moment to remember what it was. He’d listened at the door, he’d checked the landing, up the stairs and down, come back inside, checked the time …
He hadn’t locked the door behind him.
Even as he reached for it, it opened and there was a man in the room with him. As quickly as that. He must have taken at least a couple of steps but Horn didn’t see them. Lacking only the puff of smoke, he arrived like the evil magician on a pantomime stage—not there one second, there the next. The room was still dark—darker, now, without the television—so Horn couldn’t see the face, only the silhouette against the weak light from the landing. Even so, he knew two things about him. This wasn’t one of Hanratty’s in-house heavies, he was too good. And although Horn couldn’t see it, he had a gun in his hand. Not in a pocket, not under his arm—in his hand, ready for immediate use. Eighteen months ago the old thug had grown tired of failure, put the contract out to tender and started employing professionals.
Horn had run out of luck at last. Being strong, fit and fast isn’t enough against a professional killer. A bullet traveling at twice the speed of sound is always going to be faster.
“Nicholas Horn?” The voice told him nothing. No regional accent, no indication of age, no patois of class—all the tags that might help identify him had been rigorously schooled out of it. Early in his career this man had spent hours talking to a tape recorder and playing it back, listening acutely and analyzing what he heard; and he hadn’t felt even slightly foolish doing it. A pro. A genuine, twenty-four-karat, blink-and-you’ll-miss-him hit man.
Horn had got a bit of a shock the first time he realized the all-purpose muscle Hanratty used to police his narcotics empire and operate his protection rackets had been superseded by someone with real skill and finesse. Someone expert, and expensive. Hanratty had decided that nothing mattered to him—not the Bentley, not the yacht, not the family acres in Ireland or the house in Bloomsbury or the contents of all those numbered bank accounts, nothing—so much as repaying the man who killed his son. Though a combination of good luck and good reactions allowed him to escape even as the net closed, Horn knew he’d never be as lucky again. That now he had a pro on his case, he was as good as dead. That this moment would come, when he was face-to-face with the man who’d taken Hanratty’s contract, and this time running would not be an option.
Only basic survival instinct, the absolute determination of living things to keep living as long as possible, kept him from making a bad mistake. He was not entirely unarmed. His penknife was where it always was, in the back pocket of the jeans he hadn’t got round to climbing out of. It wasn’t designed as a weapon, mostly he used it for marking cuts in timber, but it was strong and it was sharp, and producing it would have made a casual mugger pause for thought. This man was not a casual mugger. If Horn dived for his back pocket, he’d kill him. Even if he managed to get it out, he’d have to open it before it would be any use; and when he did, it was still only a penknife. If he somehow managed to get it out and open and offer to fight with it, this man—this professional assassin—would laugh at him and then kill him.
He left the knife where it was. It couldn’t help him. Probably nothing would help him, but it was worth trying a lie. He’d got good at lying these last four years. “No,” he said, trying for the urgent cooperation of someone with nothing to hide. “He did a runner last night. I’m just minding—”
He never got the sentence finished. He’d been right about the gun. The outline of the man against the landing light, which had barely moved in the long seconds since it appeared in the doorway, moved now: not extravagantly, not flashily, but with an incisive speed that was awe-inspiring. Horn gasped and recoiled.
There wasn’t much he was too slow for, but he was too slow now. The intruder had chosen to use his weapon in a manner for which it had not been designed but was nonetheless highly effective—cripplingly effective, and all but silent. He palmed the ugly weapon and slapped Horn across the jaw with it.
CHAPTER 2
BUT HE WASN’T unconscious long. Pain drilling every tooth in his left jaw yanked him back. He lay in a fetal curl under the window, arms cradling his raging head. He heard himself whine like a kicked puppy, but his vision was worse than useless—a dark mist laced with shooting stars. He’d always thought that was a comic-strip invention, but like most clichés it was an accurate observation first.
He didn’t know which way was up, he hardly knew what had happened, but he knew he had to get back on his feet. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to move, for fear of making the pain worse, for fear of being hit again. But primordial instinct wanted him to live even more than it wanted to spare him pain, and it drove him back ruthlessly to the reality of that cold, unlit room and the killer he shared it with. If he went on lying here he was going to die on this square of grubby carpet, adding his blood to the sum of its uncertain stains. That was going to be his obituary: a packet of Shake ‘n’ Vac in his landlord’s shopping cart.
Probably he was going to die anyway, but he had an element of choice about how. Nicky Horn had faced death many times, much more often than was reasonable for an otherwise rational man in peacetime. But he’d never faced it groveling on the floor, whining about being hurt. He put out a hand, groping for something he could use to pull himself up.
To his muddled surprise, someone helped. He still couldn’t see anything but stars, but only the two of them were here, so it had to be the man who’d hit him. His reeling brain wasn’t up to working out why: he let the strong hands gripping his shoulders lift him to his feet, and was too groggy to note that someone holding him with both hands must have put his gun away.
The man propped Horn against the wall and held him there, quite gently, with one hand in the middle of his chest. It wouldn’t have stopped him from throwing a punch, but then it wasn’t meant to. It was to stop him from sliding back down the wall. After a short contemplation the man leaned forward, peering into Horn’s face. “Can you walk?”
Even Horn knew it wasn’t solicitude. The man wanted to take him away from here, a house he shared with a dozen other people, to somewhere he could finish his job without fear of interruption, somewhere he could leave the detritus that it mightn’t be found for weeks; and he wanted Horn to leave under his own steam in case someone saw them. The assault was carefully calculated to knock all the fight out of him without leaving him so incapable he’d need to be dragged, with the attendant risk—even at this time of night—of attracting attention. Horn went to shake his head, thought better of it, carefully mumbled, “No.”
The man smiled. Horn couldn’t see the smile but he could hear it in his voice. “I’m sure you can. I’ll help.” He draped Horn’s arm over his shoulder, and that was how they went down the stairs, out into the dark street, and round the first corner to where an unremarkable navy blue saloon car was waiting. It might have taken a minute, no more. Anyone seeing them would have thought Horn was drunk, his killer a helpful friend.
Horn spent the time thinking—almost expecting—that something would happen. Someone would stop them, or a police patrol would swing by, or Horn would recover just enough of his strength to knee his assailant in the groin and leg it, trusting he could get back round the corner faster than a man nursing that most personal of hurts could draw his gun.
But none of those things happened. They reached the car. The man opened the back door. Horn planted an unsteady hand against the frame, as sure as death and taxes that if he allowed himself to be forced inside the game was over. “You don’t have to do this,” he mumbled, steering the words carefully past his throbbing teeth. “Tell him you couldn’t find me.”
“And what? You think he’ll pay me anyway? You think my employer will worry if my children don’t get their ski trip this year? I’m sorry. But this is how I make my living.”
“I don’t deserve this,” insisted Horn weakly. “I haven’t done anything to deserve it.”
“No? But you see, I don’t care.” Quite calmly the man exchanged his grip on Horn’s arm for a handful of his hair and banged his forehead smartly on the top of the car. The shooting stars took flight again like a flock of startled starlings, the pain in his face exploded like fireworks, and as Horn’s knees buckled the man folded him expertly onto the backseat.
Then something unexpected happened.
Because in all honesty, nothing that had happened up to this point had been in any way unpredictable. It had only been a matter of time. Horn had run as long as he could, laid up as carefully as he could; but he’d always known that one of Hanratty’s dogs, faster or keener or more persistent than the others, would find him one day. Today was that day. He couldn’t honestly claim to be surprised.
But the smooth inevitability of it seemed now to meet an obstacle. The car door that should have closed with the crisp snap of a hangman’s trapdoor remained open, the engine silent. Instead, after a moment, he heard voices.
“The sensible thing,” said the one he hadn’t heard before, “would be to leave him here and drive away.”
There was a brief pause in which Horn almost heard the sound of mental cogs changing gear. Then Hanratty’s man said mildly, “I don’t know what you mean. There’s no problem here.”
“No? Let’s ask him.”
The man with the gun hadn’t forgotten he had it. He just wasn’t ready to draw it in front of someone he hadn’t come here to kill. He moved proprietorially between Horn and the new arrival. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s not.”
“It doesn’t look to me as if he wants to come with you.”
“He doesn’t.” A light, inconsequential laugh. “But his wife wants him home just the same.”
“He isn’t married.”
Horn heard the elevated eyebrow. “You know him?”
“Never met him in my life. But I know a lie when I hear one.”
When his lie has been rumbled, a wise man stops lying. This wise man’s voice dropped a couple of tones. He wasn’t trying to sound menacing. He didn’t have to, any more than a tiger has to try. “You don’t know what you’re getting involved in. So I’ll tell you what you need to do. Turn round and walk away.”
The other man laughed. There was gravel in it. “Oh, I’ve a pretty good idea what’s going on. If I walk away, he’s going to end up dead.”
“If you don’t, maybe you will.”
“Or maybe he survives, and I survive, and you die in prison for all the times you did this and got away with it.”
A longer silence this time. When Hanratty’s man spoke again, for the first time Horn heard a fractional uncertainty. “You know me?”
“Not your name. Not where to find you—though I know where to find people like you. But I know what you do, and how you do it. What’s the preferred term these days? You’re a mechanic—a hit man, a professional killer. You aren’t going to compromise your own safety doing your job. Martyrdom is for people who espouse causes, and you don’t believe in causes. You’re a practical man. If you let him go tonight, you can find him again tomorrow. If you don’t, things are going to get messy, and noisy, right now. You’ll have gone to a lot of trouble to keep them clean and quiet, so I’m pretty sure you won’t want that. But whether I start shouting or you start shooting, you’re going to have an audience in just a few seconds from now. Unless you leave.”
Incredulously, Horn began to realize that it could actually happen. That an assassin hard enough to appear on Tommy Hanratty’s radar just might back down before the extraordinary courage of a passerby. Not because he couldn’t take him too—of course he could. But he was a professional, he had to think about the next job and the one after that, and to do them he had to keep a low profile. He didn’t have to let Horn go—he just had to let him go for now. In all proba
bility Horn was still going to die. But there was now a chance that he wasn’t going to die tonight.
The pause could only have been a few seconds. It wrung Horn like the rack. Finally the man said, faintly aggrieved, “Bloody amateurs!”
The other man, the passerby, said softly, “You don’t know that. You don’t know who I am or what I can do. You can gamble everything on a guess. Or you can do the sensible thing, which is haul him out of there and drive away. That way there’s always another day, another chance.”
A few seconds more and it happened. A yank on his ankle landed Horn on his back in the wet road. For the first time he could see the two figures, dark against the rain-reflected glitter of the streetlights. They were about three meters apart. Far enough that the only weapons that would reach were bullets and words. Still he could see no faces.
But the one nearest to him got back in his car and shut the door. Horn heard the quiet electric whir of the window. “I won’t forget this.”
“I don’t imagine any of us will,” said the other man calmly. “But I’ll keep quiet about it if you will.”
The engine started and the car moved off, slowly at first, then gaining speed. Then there were just the two of them—Horn too weak with concussion and relief to clamber to his feet, and the man to whom he owed his life.
Who now turned back toward the main street and said casually over his shoulder, “Good luck, then.”
“W-w-w-?” It wasn’t just the concussion making Horn’s head spin. “Where are you going? Who are you? Why…?”
The man looked down at him with the same admixture of indulgence and exasperation he’d have worn if his puppy had fallen down the coalhole. “Do you want to pick one?”
The other man had been bad news—the worst—but his appearance had not come as a surprise. Horn had known he, or someone like him, would turn up sometime. He’d known why, and he’d known what to expect of him. What was he to make of a complete stranger risking his own neck to offer him protection?
