by Nick Oldham
‘Just to reiterate: by behaving yourself and leading these fine gents to your wheels, you’ll save innocent lives.’
Bussola nodded at his men. ‘Okay, away you go.’
Kruger’s face and hand hurt bad where the burning cigar had been screwed into his skin, but these injuries were right at the back of his mind as he tried desperately to figure a way out of this predicament.
Whatever he did, it seemed, he was destined to die.
There was no time for niceties any more. There would be no building up of rapport. No sweeties. No laughter.
No love.
That was all in the past, before the betrayals had sent him to prison. Now the little ones he had loved so much had to suffer and feel the pain he was feeling. It did not matter that they would not actually be the ones who had gone to court and damned him. It was the principle that mattered now.
He had to make a point.
No one betrayed or hurt him and got away with it.
No one.
Trent was sitting on a green park bench in the recreation area adjacent to Claremont Road in the North Shore of Blackpool. Watching, waiting, listening, his senses buzzing, anticipating. Soon, he knew, his opportunity would come.
His eyes took in all the activity. Several youngsters were playing on the swings and slide. Most were accompanied by adults.
Trent’s lips snarled at the inconvenience.
He lifted up his newspaper, reckoning to be engrossed in it.
He could wait, despite the urges inside him.
They began the journey from the lounge to airport parking. Kruger felt as though he was walking on the moon. His legs became light and bloodless. The same pretty much applied to his brain.
Everything was completely unreal. Being walked through Miami International Airport to be executed - how real was that?
Everything blurred at the edges. His ears pounded like his head was inside a bass drum. People drifted by in a mist. Sound distorted, like a tape being eaten by a Walkman.
Kruger shook his head, opened his eyes wide. Then his mind picked up the pain again from the burns on his skin, a sensation it had been suppressing. This brought him back to sharp focus.
Back to the real world.
Suddenly the unreality of before seemed much more preferable.
Without doubt, Kruger was about to experience another of those Big Life Moments.
Chapter Ten
The shop was on Dickson Road, Blackpool, the road which runs behind the Imperial Hotel which is used each year as a base for political parties during conference week. The shop was one of those grocery-cum-everything shops which opened from 7 a.m. until extremely late. It was owned by an Asian family who had turned it into a thriving business by their sheer hard work.
Claire Lilton had the straps of her sports bag over her left shoulder, holding the bag underneath her armpit. She had a metal shopping basket in her left hand, leaving her right hand free. The zip of the sports bag was open about six inches and if she squeezed the bag in a certain way, a hole appeared when the zip parted.
In the basket were a couple of items from the shelves. In the sports bag were even more items from the shelves, none of which she intended to pay for. She paused near the sweet display, picked up a Kit Kat, looked closely at it, replaced it on the shelf. Her eyes moved to the corners of their sockets and she checked the aisle. Apart from a doddering old woman, Claire was alone.
She picked up half a dozen Kit Kats, squeezed the bag and dropped them expertly into the hole. Casually she dawdled along the sweet display and dropped a 10p chocolate bear into the basket. She moved on.
By the time she reached the till, her basket contained six cheap items. Her sports bag, which began to weigh heavy, contained a great deal of contraband.
At the till she paid for the stuff in the wire basket and even asked for a carrier bag.
Then she stepped out of the shop, only to be dragged back in by an irate Asian man, no taller than herself.
‘Get your dirty hands off me,’ she screamed.
The man did not let go. ‘You steal,’ he said. ‘You steal from shop. I call the cops.’ He had hold of her biceps. ‘In there - stolen property.’ He pointed at her sports bag. ‘I watch you steal.’
‘I’ve done fuck-all, you bastard,’ she yelled into his face. ‘If you don’t let me go, I’ll sue you for assault.’
She wriggled and squirmed and kicked out at him. Her Doc Marten boots connected with his shins and he emitted a yell of pain. Still, he hung onto her.
‘Call cops!’ he shouted to the woman behind the till, who had been watching the encounter with open mouth and no gumption. His shouts galvanised her into action, and she reached for the phone behind her.
Meanwhile, the little Asian shopkeeper discovered he had a tiger by the tail.
Claire spat horribly into his face. ‘I’ve got AIDS, you bastard. Now you have!’
She wrenched herself free from his grasp. He lunged gamefully after her again. But, as Danny Furness had discovered, catching Claire Lilton was no easy matter.
She side-stepped him and picked up the charity box from the counter - which was shaped like a rocket - and swung round, holding it with both hands, rather like the movement an athlete makes when throwing the hammer. She did not let go of it, though. Building up force with momentum, she crashed it into the side of his head.
The box burst open spectacularly, sending a shower of copper coins into the air. More importantly, however, it felled the shopkeeper and gouged a deep gash into his head which spurted blood.
Claire hoisted the sports bag back onto her shoulder and dived out of the shop.
By the time the bloody-faced Asian looked out of the door, she had disappeared.
His Urdu was unrepeatable.
‘Do you enjoy your work?’ Steve Kruger asked the bodyguard to his immediate right.
There was no response. The guy continued to look dead ahead.
All five men were now on the first-floor level, walking down the middle of the concourse past the shops. No one took any notice of them. They were real professionals, the type of people who, somehow, never seemed to draw attention to themselves. A skill in itself. They simply made it look as though they were out for a stroll. All five of them, Kruger included.
Kruger looked at the members of the public close by. He acknowledged that what Bussola had said was true. If he did anything foolish at this stage, he would die, possibly others too, and these guys would simply dematerialise.
And as much as Kruger didn’t want to die, he didn’t want others to be killed because of him.
Even the security cameras, which he knew were all around, wouldn’t be much use to him. They would never finger these bastards.
‘How about you?’ Kruger enquired of the man to his left.
‘Speak once more and you get it here and now,’ he said through the side of his mouth.
‘Gotcha.’
They walked past the Disney Store.
‘He’s gotta be here somewhere,’ Myrna Rosza gabbled agitatedly. She scanned the bank of TV monitors in front of her whilst the operator casually, but swiftly, clicked from shot to shot. ‘He’s gotta be here,’ she repeated desperately. She glared at Mark Tapperman. ‘This is your fault.’
The big Lieutenant shrank away from her eyes. He gave a pathetic shrug. ‘He might not be here,’ he said weakly.
‘Don’t kid yourself.’ Myrna was caustic. ‘Once he gets an idea into his stubborn head. . .’
‘You sound like you care about him.’
‘I do - he pays my wages.’ She returned her attention to the screens. ‘Now, where the hell is he?’
They were in the security control area of the airport, in the CCTV room, peering over the shoulder of the operator who flicked through the images received from all over MIA.
‘There!’ Myrna almost shouted, pointing to a screen. ‘Focus in there!’
The operator did as instructed.
‘Shit,’ she said
with disappointment as the high powered lens zoomed in. It wasn’t Kruger.
The frustration she was feeling could have been sliced open with a breadknife. Ever since Tapperman had called her at home with an hysterical edge to his voice and. explained what had happened, Myrna had been on a high.
Suppose Kruger had gone storming to the airport? Suppose he’d got himself involved in a situation he couldn’t handle? Suppose he was already dead meat?
Myrna had initially hung up on Tapperman and phoned Kruger. No reply. She called Tapperman again and instructed him to get a SWAT squad to the airport.
He had guffawed. ‘Just on the off-chance - impossible!’
‘At least get some cops up there.’
‘Right. And do you know how many cops are on-duty at this moment in Miami as we speak?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I ain’t gonna tell you. Suffice to say the public thinks there’s hundreds. I’d be lucky to scrape a dozen unoccupied officers together. No resources, babe. Usual story.’
‘Then you’d better get yourself there. I’ll see you at the meeting point in twenty minutes.’ And she slammed the phone down without waiting for a response.
Myrna dressed in seconds. Tracksuit, trainers, her pistol around her shoulder. She kissed her sleeping husband and, grabbing her cell-tel on the way out, ran to her car. She constantly rang Kruger’s home and mobile numbers as she drove at warp factor six to the airport.
There was no reply.
She and Tapperman came together as arranged and using his badge and contacts, got into the CCTV room, where they had been ever since.
Myrna rubbed her eyes. She had been having trouble sleeping, not least because she had cheated on her husband not many hours before and could not get her mind off it. She had secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, been attracted to Kruger ever since she began working for him. Personal and professional considerations and responsibilities ensured it never went further than banter or mild flirtation. The previous couple of days had put an end to those issues and it had been an absolute necessity for her to finish up in Kruger’s bed. She had truly believed she could take it for what it was, keep it as a one-off, go back to equilibrium.
Instead she found herself completely disorientated. She couldn’t get Kruger out of her head, nor the memory of him out of her body.
She had been fully awake, if exhausted, when Tapperman rang, and for a while after, the adrenaline flowed. Now, it was ebbing in despair.
Standing there, in front of the bank of TV screens, she had to admit to herself that she loved Steve, had done so for longer than she cared to recall, and the prospect of not seeing him again caused her to panic.
A little squeak escaped from her lips. Tapperman shot her a quick glance.
Then; ‘There he is!’ Tapperman proclaimed confidently. He rapped the appropriate monitor with his knuckles. The camera shot in, focused. Myrna’s heart shuddered so hard in her chest she nearly fell over.
The screen showed Kruger, surrounded by four tough looking guys, stepping through a sliding door. There was an anxious expression on his face, as well as an injury of some sort which Tapperman could not define.
‘Where the hell’s that location?’ he demanded.
Kruger, his four friends and a couple of other people were standing by a bank of elevators which would take them to the multi-storey parking lot.
The elevator arrived, the doors opened. A flood of people disgorged and dissipated. Kruger and the others stepped inside the large elevator, constructed to carry about twenty people plus luggage. A woman turned to him. ‘Which level?’
‘The top, please.’
She pressed her own selection, then his.
Just before the doors eased shut, a big hand stopped the process and forced the doors to re-open.
Two extra people stepped in. A man and a woman ... a couple, bickering about something, like they’d been together too many years.
‘C’mon, you go damned bitch, we’re holdin’ people up here.’
‘You stop bad-mouthin’ me, you asshole,’ the woman replied, apparently fuming with anger. ‘You ain’t done nothin’ but since we arrived.’
‘Well, you deserve it, you lazy slut,’ the man said. To the rest of the people in the elevator he said, ‘’Scuse us.’ He yanked the woman between Kruger and the bodyguard to his left. ‘We’ll carry this on back here.’
Kruger’s expression did not change. His eyes showed no flicker of recognition. But inside, his stomach lurched. The hairs on the nape of his neck prickled with excitement. He hoped the guys behind him weren’t staring at his neck, otherwise the game would have been given away.
The doors closed. The elevator rose smoothly, stopping at various levels, allowing people to step out. No one else got in.
Kruger heard snatches of the couple’s argument which had been reduced in volume. It was clear there was a major domestic going on.
‘You’ll be tellin’ me next it’s healed up,’ the man hissed. ‘I ain’t had it for weeks.’
‘You don’t deserve it, the way you treat me.’
‘Nag, nag, nag,’ the man said spitefully.
‘An’ you do nothin’, nothin’, nothin’.’
Eventually the only people remaining in the tin box were Kruger, his four buddies and the warring couple, all obviously destined for the top level.
When the elevator arrived, the doors slid open.
Kruger was about to step out when one of his captors grabbed his elbow and held him back. Another said to the couple, ‘After you.’
‘At last,’ the woman said, ‘a gentleman.’ She smiled maliciously at her partner.
‘Bitch,’ hissed the man, shouldering his way out, pushing her ahead. They turned right.
Kruger got a shove in the ribs and stumbled out to the left. From the corner of his eye he saw the couple move towards a car.
Although they were on the top level, there was still a roof over their heads, and like most high-rise parking, the lighting was relatively poor.
Kruger led them towards his Chevy, parked at the very end of the level. His mind worked furiously, trying to decide what to do, wondering what Tapperman and Myrna, the perfect couple, had planned ... if anything.
Shit, shit, shit, he said to himself, trying to make a decision.
The closer he got to his car, the more certain he was he would have to make the opening move.
Without further thought he went for it.
He stopped abruptly in his tracks. The bodyguard directly behind him walked straight into him. The ones either side went on a few paces.
As soon as he and the man made contact, Kruger swivelled at the hips and in a flowing, single motion, rammed the point of his elbow into the man’s chest, connecting with the sternum. Kruger’s arm rose and he smashed the back of his clenched fist into the man’s face, making a wonderful, crunching sound, like a wooden ruler snapping.
The whole movement took less than a fraction of a second.
Even so, fast as it was, Kruger saw that guns were already appearing from nowhere in the hands of the remaining three team members.
‘Move, Steve, move!’ Tapperman bawled.
Kruger looked up, saw Tapperman and Myrna about twenty feet behind. Tapperman’s body was fully exposed. Myrna was crouching over the hood of a parked car. Both had weapons drawn, ready for combat.
Kruger knew he had to keep going.
He grabbed the lapels of the nose-smashed bodyguard and swung him round into. the gunman to his left, pushed and let go. They mangled together with spectacular success. Using the momentum generated by this manoeuvre, Kruger dived down between the two nearest parked cars, into cover, out of the line of fire. Tapperman yelled, ‘Armed police! Drop your weapons!’
The two bodyguards who were not busy turned instinctively towards Tapperman, guns rising.
They moved instantaneously as professionals should when faced with a situation for which they had been trained.
The two bo
dyguards who had been positioned to Kruger’s left side and were therefore not affected by this startling move, spun on their heels quicker than ice-skaters to face Tapperman and Myrna. Their firearms were rising and aiming as they did so.
The one who’d had his face broken by the back of Kruger’s fist, though dazed by the blow, still had the presence of mind to drop to his knees so he would not get in the way. The fourth one, who’d watched Kruger disappear between the parked cars, threw himself to the ground between the cars nearest to him. He also had his gun ready and as soon as he hit the deck he was looking underneath the car towards where Kruger had landed.
This particular bodyguard was certain of one thing: even if this little task of theirs got flushed down the pan, Kruger would still die.
That was professionalism.
Tapperman saw them swinging around at an alarming rate. He noted the glint of firearms and did not intend to hesitate.
As both of the bodyguards were moving at roughly the same speed - lightning fast - there was little to choose, target-wise. So, because Tapperman was standing on Myrna’s right-hand side, he chose to shoot the guy on his right.
Part of Tapperman’s mind begged Myrna to bag the one on the left. He knew he could take out one of them but only one. There would be no earthly hope of taking two.
Myrna had to act as quickly as he did - and go for the correct target.
‘Shoot, Myrna, shoot!’ he pleaded silently.
The pad of his right forefinger pulled the trigger back.
The wind whooshed out of Kruger’s lungs as he thumped down onto the concrete floor. For a brief moment he did not move, other than to open his eyes and look underneath the car to his left where he saw the bodyguard, who had decided that, come what may, he would kill Kruger.
