Hung Out To Die: Lukas Boston - Private Investigator Book Two

by Logan May

  ‘Where’s Carrie?’

  Theresa gave him a mocking smile. ‘You tried to warn Carrie, but she doesn’t like you anymore. Instead of letting you be her knight in shining armour, she went and asked Sam to accompany her here.’ Theresa made a game-show gonging sound. ‘Wrong—we’ve had an agreement with Sam for a long time and he knows how to be loyal. He’s presently got Carrie waiting patiently while he arranges a much larger accident at the markets.’ She put on a long face. ‘It’s all going to be very sad, but these buildings are so prone to gas leaks and electrical faults. The good news is you’ll be able to see it all happen from up there,’ she pointed at the rafters.

  ‘No thanks, I don’t like heights,’ Lukas said.

  ‘Don’t be scared, there’ll be no risk of you falling. Like you said, Corrine’s very good with knots.’

  Lukas was frantically trying to understand how they were going to get the rope around his neck and hang him. He could only imagine that it hadn’t been so difficult with the elderly Edward Rewold. He noticed the Rewolds were looking uncertain as they began to circle him—this wasn’t turning out so easy as killing their father. Lukas knew he could draw his Glock, but then Job would surely pull his triggers first and worry about the consequences later.

  Another noise banged out of the shadows. Everyone was startled, glancing around.

  Lukas knew what it was—his new best friend, the loose piece of tin on the wall being lifted by the wind. In the instant that Job was distracted Lukas threw himself away from the barrels of Job’s shotgun and ran into the nearest gap in the boxes, drawing his Glock.

  He heard shouts of anger behind him.

  Things had suddenly improved, but it wasn’t perfect. Lukas was heading away from the door and freedom. No doubt Job would try to cover his escape and while he might not be Buffalo Bill with a gun, being in the confined spaces and using a shotgun still made Job a very dangerous man. The other problem was that Lukas wanted to get out fast and unscathed, then head for the Wharftown Markets and prevent whatever accident Sam the fish and chip man had planned. Lukas didn’t have time to deal with the Rewolds.

  Behind him, the Rewolds were still howling their dismay with Theresa shouting, ‘You useless prick! Get after him! Don’t let him get out the door.’

  Lukas grinned to himself. ‘You’re not going to get the drop on me again, you bitch.’

  In the gloom, looking over his shoulder, Lukas ran headlong into a very large, soft pillow that smelled of pizza and chocolate sauce. Blubbery arms crushed him against voluminous breasts, threatening to smother him.

  Agatha hissed into his ear, ‘Not so fast, Mr Boston. You’re not going to get away that easily.’ She raised her face shouting to the others, ‘I’ve got him. He’s over here.’

  Relief and frustration were in Theresa’s voice as she called back, ‘Thank God for that. Where the hell’s here, Agatha? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here, damn you!’

  ‘Where the bloody hell’s here?’

  ‘Here, you stupid tart!’

  Only seconds were left for Lukas to extract himself before Job with his shotgun found here. It called for desperate measures. With his free hand Lukas groped between Agatha’s legs and grabbed a handful of… something. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Oooh, lovely,’ Agatha said happily, loosening her grip. Lukas dropped to the floor and crawled past her legs—no small feat of its own. ‘Damn it, come back,’ she snarled. ‘You’re just like Ted, you can’t finish what you started.’

  ‘I don’t even know what I started,’ Lukas said, scuttling away.

  He got to his feet and dodged around several corners, working his way towards the way out. This time he blundered into Job, who was at the far end of an alley made from crates.

  ‘Stop where you are or I’ll shoot,’ Job cried, inexpertly putting the gun to his shoulder.

  Lukas took aim with his Glock and hoped that Job believed they were in some crazy television-world and Lukas might actually hit him from this range. ‘No, put down your gun or I’ll shoot.’

  ‘I said it first.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m a trained ex-police marksman and you’re an untrained dickhead. Who do you think’s going to win?’

  A taught silence followed.

  ‘Yep, good point. Fuck this,’ Job decided and let the shotgun go. Hitting the floor, both barrels discharged with a deafening roar as Job turned and fled. Seeing the gun fall, Lukas had flung his arms over his head. With his ears ringing he did a quick health check. Miraculously, he was unhurt.

  ‘Bloody amateurs,’ Lukas said, running after Job. He didn’t want to catch him—Lukas knew Job would be going for the door. As he passed, Lukas scooped up the shotgun and lobbed it high onto one of the crates where no one might reload it.

  Unexpectedly he ran back out into the clear space where it all started. Theresa, Corrine and Agatha were standing there, looking without a clue what to do next, their plan in tatters. There was no sign of Job.

  ‘Bloody hell, I hate puzzles,’ Lukas said, trying to remember which way was out.

  ‘Wait, we can cut a deal,’ Theresa said quickly. ‘We can make a fortune.’

  ‘I’ve already got a fortune,’ Lukas said.

  ‘Nothing like this—plus what we inherit from my father. You… you can blackmail us!’ Theresa was inspired.

  Unseen behind the Rewolds the spirit of Edward appeared up in the roof, twisting from his hangman’s rope. When his face turned towards Lukas the ghost’s contorted face seemed to be wearing a blue-lipped smile.

  Lukas smiled ruefully back and told the Rewolds, ‘I wouldn’t be putting too much trust into what you’ll get from your old man’s inheritance. I’m still not interested.’

  Theresa turned sly. ‘Then you’d better go and rescue your friend, the lovely Carrie. You’d better hurry. Things are about to go bang.’

  Lukas began running for the door, thinking, You mean I have to hurry and get myself killed, too. That’s what you’re all hoping.

  SIXTEEN

  As Lukas sprinted through the car park towards the Wharftown Markets he spotted another familiar face scurrying between the cars, unsuccessfully avoiding Lukas seeing him. Simon Madden from the Wharf Tourist Retail Corporation had been up to his tricks again playing public relations representative, property manager and part-time mechanic. Lukas told himself that whatever happened, he needed to take a taxi home.

  Through the market entrance Lukas looked around for a fire alarm or some kind of emergency button. There was nothing.

  ‘Fire!’ he yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Fire! Everybody out! The building is on fire! Run for your lives!’

  At first, nearby tourists looked at him in fright. Then it changed to curiosity and amusement. Some of them started filming Lukas with their cameras and phones.

  ‘There’s a fucking fire, you idiots. Get out!’

  ‘Where?’ someone asked calmly. ‘I don’t see any smoke anywhere.’

  ‘All right, change of plan,’ Lukas told him, annoyed. ‘There’s a crazed gunman running around. Get the hell out of here!’ Lukas pulled out his Glock and fired several shots in the air.

  People started screaming and fleeing for the exit, almost trampling Lukas.

  Lukas hurried towards Carrie’s stall. As he passed the Cat Art Gallery he called to Stuart, ‘Everything’s fine, Stu. You can leave it all where it is. Nothing will get damaged. Just you go outside.’

  Utterly confused, Stuart stared after him suspiciously.

  At the bookstore Lukas shouted in Roger’s face, ‘There’s a fire, Roger. You’ve got to get out.’

  ‘I can’t hear any alarms,’ Roger said, irritated his reading had been disturbed. ‘Just some banging noises.’

  ‘I am the fucking alarm.’

  Roger sighed and patiently marked his page in a paperback. He got up to leave, waving a finger at Lukas. ‘I know exactly what’s in that box of magazines. Don’t even think about it.’

 
‘You know, I really don’t know why I’m bothering,’ Lukas told the roof.

  It needed only a moment to check the back room of Carrie’s shop and see she wasn’t there. Lukas didn’t expect she would be.

  That left Sam And Ella’s Fish Shop and its turncoat proprietor, an evil man willing to blow up his own cooking fat to establish his innocence.

  The front of the shop was empty. Lukas jumped the counter and looked behind a partition. He found Carrie tied to a chair and gagged with a tea towel. He pulled the gag off and she spat out bits of grease and cloth.

  ‘That’s what happens when you don’t answer your phone,’ Lukas said, finding a knife and sawing through the duct tape on her wrists. As soon as her hands were free Carrie caught Lukas with a stinging, roundhouse slap on the face.

  ‘I suppose you’re filming this, too?’ she said.

  ‘For God’s sake, didn’t you read my damned text?’

  ‘Yes, but you should have made it clearer. I wouldn’t have ended up like this otherwise.’

  ‘Or you could have answered it and asked what I meant.’ Lukas cut her ankles loose and waited for a kick in the teeth.

  ‘It’s not up to me to sort out what the hell you’re saying. You’re a porn actor. Some sort of—of male slut. Who’s going to believe anything you say?’

  ‘I am not a porn actor— although I did get nearly half a million hits on the website, for your information.’ Lukas shook his head at Carrie’s logic and gave up. ‘Look, Sam’s going to stage some kind of serious accident to finish off these markets for good. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s out the back, outside,’ Carrie said, rubbing her wrists.

  ‘Stay here.’

  ‘Stay here,’ she mimicked him, then called after him, ‘I bet that thing wasn’t yours. I reckon they used a stand-in.’

  Lukas pulled a face she couldn’t see and with a deep breath he pushed through an outside door into the service area on the wharf. The sun had made a brief appearance and Lukas was dazzled for a moment. He saw Sam crouching next to the gas bottles, fiddling with something. Sam heard Lukas arrive.

  ‘You…’ Sam growled. ‘You still don’t know how to mind your own business.’ He stood and began advancing towards Lukas, who pulled out his Glock.

  ‘That’s close enough, stay right there.’

  Sam looked over his shoulder and showed Lukas he was right in line with the gas cylinders. ‘You’d better be a good shot, because if you miss and hit them instead we’ll both die along with our mutual friend on the chair inside. She’s so pretty and young, it would be a shame.’

  ‘I can’t miss from here.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ Sam said, producing the biggest and sharpest knife Lukas had ever seen. Sam swapped his grip, grasping the blade with his fingers in a throwing action. He stopped. ‘Are you sure that you can’t miss?’ he asked, smiling.

  The truth was Lukas feared something could go wrong. Even a through-and-through might still have enough impact to damage the gas tanks. He tried a bluff. ‘You’re a fat bastard. Like shooting a sandbag,’ he said confidently.

  ‘Not with this sticking out of your eye,’ Sam said, hurling the knife at Lukas.

  It didn’t come close, but the fright was enough for Lukas to put up a warding arm. Sam pounced like an overweight cat stinking of cooking oil and sent the both of them crashing to the ground. Lukas’ gun went skittering out of reach.

  ‘Jesus, why does it always do that?’ he snarled, reaching for it hopelessly as Sam’s bulk crushed the breath out of him. Lukas fought, squirmed and kicked—but Sam was a fat bastard and his bulk gave him an advantage. Nothing Lukas could do had any effect. It got worse as Sam’s oily hands wrapped themselves around Lukas’ throat and every attempt to pull them off only slipped on his greasy flesh.

  Sam grunted with a sour, vinegar stench into Lukas’ face, ‘This time, Mr Carrie’s Friend, you won’t be breathing before you hit the water.’

  ‘This time, I haven’t tried to swallow one of your so-called bloody fishcakes,’ Lukas choked back, scrabbling for Sam’s eyes.

  There was a loud bonk noise and Sam went rigid, his expression vacant as he rolled off Lukas and lay sprawled on his back.

  Carrie stood over them with a heavy frying pan in her hands.

  ‘Oh my God, have a killed him?’

  Lukas sat up, wheezing and clutching his throat. ‘It’s okay, I’m fine,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Have I killed him?’

  Lukas checked. ‘I don’t think so. Hit him again.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Lukas.’

  ‘Shit, don’t worry about him. We’ve got more important things to care about.’

  Lukas staggered over to the gas tanks and looked at what Sam had been doing. A compact package with protruding wires and a red digital readout was taped to the cylinders. It looked crude, but it was working. The timer said there were less than three minutes to go.

  ‘What’s that?’ Carrie said anxiously, staring over Lukas’ shoulder.

  ‘It’s a very small bomb.’ Probably C4, Lukas figured, or maybe even a home-made explosive. Sam was a cook, after all.

  ‘Only a small bomb? That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘A small bomb strapped to some very large gas cylinders.’

  ‘Oh, right…’

  ‘You’d better make a run for it. Run fast.’

  ‘What about you?’

  Lukas shook his head. ‘Not everyone believed me there was an emergency. The markets could still be full of people. I have to try and do something about it.’

  ‘Well, you’d better hurry up!’

  ‘Thanks, I can read the time. Get out of here.’

  ‘Will the gas explode?’

  ‘Of course it’ll bloody explode.’ Lukas was scratching his head, wishing Carrie would shut the hell up so he could think. The obvious answer was to rip the bomb off and throw it into the harbor, but disturbing the thing might set it off.

  ‘Then get rid of the gas,’ Carrie said impatiently. She grabbed a spanner that was chained to the tanks and rapped it on the metal.

  ‘That’s what I was going to say,’ Lukas said, snatching it off her and trying to undo the first fitting. It wouldn’t budge no matter how hard he heaved.

  ‘Come on, Lukas!’

  ‘I’m trying, damn it.’

  In the background an all-too-familiar putt-putt sound came to Lukas and a voice with its unmistakable Indian accent called from a distance, ‘That’s an inflammable gas you’re trying to ignite. That’s the wrong way to do it.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, I am not trying to blow myself up,’ Lukas shouted as he wrenched at the fitting. ‘Keep clear, these things are going to blow!’

  ‘That’s not what I’m trying to tell you,’ the fisherman explained cheerfully. ‘My uncle is a plumber and I can tell you, it’s an inflammable gas and very dangerous. You’re doing it wrong. The pipes use a left-hand thread. You’re turning it the wrong way.’

  Lukas gave it a moment’s thought and an old lesson clicked in his mind.

  ‘Shit, I hate to say the bastard’s right,’ he told Carrie and reversed the spanner.

  The first fitting took an enormous effort since Lukas had inadvertently tightened it. Then it cracked, whistled gas and became a geyser of gushing liquid when the pipe sprang away. Lukas fought within the plume of white to undo the second, which also burst into a chaos of streaming gas.

  ‘You’ve done it!’ Carrie yelled happily. ‘Now we run?’

  Lukas watched the gas clouding around the back of the building, dispersing mostly, but also gathering in the corners and under the eaves. It might be spreading through the inside. Plus he couldn’t tell if the tanks would empty soon enough. There was less than sixty seconds left on the timer.

  ‘Now we jump,’ he told her grimly. ‘It’s the safest way.’

  ‘We what?’

  ‘Can you swim?’

  ‘Sure, but do we have to—’

  Lukas answered Carrie
by dragging her to the edge of the wharf. He pulled off his jacket, wrapping his Glock, phone and wallet in it, and placed it on the ground. He yanked his shoes off. Watching him, Carrie did the same.

  ‘Aren’t you going to take those off?’ Lukas asked her, nodding at her jeans.

  ‘You never miss a chance, do you?’

  ‘Worth a try,’ Lukas said, taking her hand. ‘Ready?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too late.’

  Lukas jumped, pulling Carrie with her. There was a moment of horror in mid-air, before they plunged side by side into the freezing harbour. As before, Lukas was surrounded by the roar of bubbles and the murky grey of the cold ocean. Spluttering and coughing they surfaced.

  ‘Any second now,’ Lukas said, spitting out water and putting a protective hand on Carrie’s head.

  Above them a small puff of white smoke came from the wharf and they heard a soft popping sound.

  That was all.

  Lukas waited a full minute, treading water and counting silently. Finally he decided nothing else would happen. He told Carrie through chattering teeth, ‘That useless, fat arsehole. He can’t cook, he can’t throw a knife—he can’t even make a decent fucking bomb.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ Carrie asked him, frightened by the wharf looming above them. ‘The shore is miles away. Will someone come and rescue us?’

  ‘Oh, any minute now I expect,’ Lukas said wearily, hearing the putt-putting sound coming closer. ‘Do you like Indian food? Need a mechanic?’

  SEVENTEEN

  Lukas was congratulating himself on at least removing his jacket and shoes before leaping into the ocean. After retrieving them from the wharf, they gave him some slight warmth under a blanket with his soaking clothes beneath, while he stood on the shore and watched a myriad of police vehicles with flashing lights buzzing around the car park and the warehouses. The added bonus was his phone, gun and wallet were intact.

  Goodall said absently, ‘No one there, of course, They’ve all done a runner.’

  ‘Have you got the house covered?’

  Goodall lit a cigarette. ‘No, I didn’t think of doing that. You’re brilliant. Want a job in the police force?’