by Conrad Jones
I crouched down next to the baluster, my breathing laboured and beads of sweat trickling into my eyes. There was silence for a few moments, then muffled thuds and raised voices drifted through the walls from next door. It wasn’t the first time I’d woken up the neighbours, but this time would be the one that they’d remember the most clearly. I wasn’t sure what to do, but Evie’s protestations gave me an idea. Despite the streetlights it was dark at floor level all the way down the stairs, and she was much faster than me. I reached for the bedroom door handle and let her out.
She didn’t hesitate. She knew where he was and she pelted out of the bedroom towards the stairs. As she reached the top of the landing, I fired a shot over the banister towards the dining room door. It blasted a huge chunk of plaster off the wall and I heard Knowles gasp in the darkness as wood and plaster hit him in the face. I heard her padding on the carpeted stairs and then her claws scratching the laminate as she reached the hallway at the bottom. I replaced the spent cartridge and followed Evie Jones at full tilt. Turning the power off is not a good idea when a Staffie is on your case. She could see in the dark far better than Knowles could. Bull terriers were bred for their aggression and Evie Jones is at the extreme end of the scale. They are powerful fighting dogs and fear nothing, especially if their loved ones are under threat.
I didn’t have a clue where Knowles was hiding and every piece of furniture became a bunker that he could shoot from, but Evie Jones knew exactly where he was. She ran snarling into the back room and I heard Knowles shouting. There was a muzzle flash as he fired wildly into the darkness and then a scream as she latched on to her target again. As I turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs, I could see him thrashing about wildly. The flames in the backyard were dying down, but they illuminated the room enough for me to see him. The Staffie had him by the right calf, and as much as he kicked her she wasn’t letting go. They don’t let go. I watched him point his weapon at Evie and my jaw clenched tightly at the thought of a bullet hitting her. There was no choice but to take him down.
In a split second, I shouldered the shotgun, aimed carefully and pulled the trigger. I aimed for his upper central mass, knowing that at that distance the deadly spray wouldn’t hit the Staffie. The roar of the shotgun drowned out her snarls for a second, but she didn’t relent from her attack. The blast knocked Knowles off his feet onto his back and the Beretta clattered across the wooden floor. Evie saw the opportunity to switch her attack to his head. I could hear his muffled screams as she ripped at the soft flesh of his face. It sounded like he was drowning. Pointing the shotgun at his legs, I picked up the pistol and left her to it while I switched the power back on. Evie had ripped the balaclava from his head.
With the lights on I could see that Knowles was in trouble. He was mortally wounded. Blood was pooling from beneath him, the lead shot had mangled his insides. It took me a while to calm Evie enough to release her jaw. A fellow Staffie owner had told me that a sharp smack on their anus is the only way to encourage them to release. It didn’t work. When I finally pealed Evie Jones off his face, she had ripped a ragged hole where his nose and upper lip should be and his left cheek was hanging like a piece of raw steak, exposing his teeth and gums in a macabre grin. I bundled her into the kitchen under protest and shut the door. She sat next to her water bowl and wagged her tail as if she knew that she had done something good. If only she knew just how important it was.
When I returned to Knowles, he was crying like a baby and his breathing sounded laboured and wet. His chest hissed every time he took a breath as air leaked through the holes in his punctured lungs. The shotgun blast had smashed his ribs and ripped holes in his vital organs. There wasn’t much time left for him. He looked at me, his eyes pleading. “Help me,” he hissed. Crimson air bubbles appeared where his nose once was.
“You’re a bit fucked up,” I snorted. I took a deep breath to calm myself and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. I knew that the police would be on their way and I didn’t have long. I put the shotgun over my shoulder and smiled. I had nothing but contempt for him. There was nothing inside me but hatred. If Jennifer was right, then he was an rapist of men, women and children. He had threatened me and spat in my face. He sprayed me with pepper spray and kicked me unconscious. I was betting that he ran over Peter too. “I guess what goes around comes around, arsehole,” I laughed, and in a morbid way I found his situation funny.
“Help me,” he hissed again. He had no lips so it sounded like helppsssssh me. Blood dribbled from the side of his mouth and it reminded me of a scene from Saving Private Ryan. At this point, I may have been able to claim self-defence, but then again I doubted it. If he stayed alive long enough to tell them otherwise then they would lock me up until a jury decided if I had used reasonable force to protect my home. Looking at Knowles and watching the flames flickering outside, “reasonable” was not an adjective which sprang to mind.
“Help you? You came to my home to kill me!” I laughed again. “What should I do, call you an ambulance? Or do you want a couple of ibuprofen out of the cupboard? I don’t think so, do you?”
“Please, I’ll make them leave you alone.”
I thought about that for a moment. There was nothing that I wanted more than being able to return to my boring old life, but I didn’t trust him. He didn’t look like he would survive the journey to hospital and what were the chances of him sticking to his side of the bargain? Fuck all. Something told me that he couldn’t stop them anyway. How could one man influence an organization founded on evil? “Why would I trust you, you cunt?” I rarely use that word, but at that time it felt appropriate.
“I can get you money.” His words were slow in coming and his chest was spurting blood as he breathed. He hissed like a punctured inner tube in a bowl of water.
“Stuff your fucking money,” I spat at him. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. “If you tell me where and when you sick fuckers meet, I’ll call you an ambulance before I leave. Otherwise, I’ll let the Staffie back in to finish eating your face before we go. What do you think of that?” I figured that if I could pinpoint where they met then the police could wait for them and arrest the entire nexion, which would vindicate me and allow me to return to the normality that I so desperately craved.
He shook his head and tried to cough. Blood sprayed from the rent in the middle of his face. He groaned in agony. “They’ll kill me,” he said.
“They’re the least of your worries, knobhead.” I took the Remington and aimed it at his left ankle. His eyes widened in terror and I asked him again. “Where do they meet? You’re going to die anyway you fucking scumbag. All you have to do is decide how much of you there will be left to put in the coffin.” I looked out of the back window at the smouldering remains of the park ranger. “I don’t think your friend will fill an ashtray, to be honest. Now, where do you sick fuckers meet?”
The Staffie howled in the kitchen and I knew we were pushing it. The next-door neighbours would have called the police when they heard the first gunshots and saw the flames in the backyard. The burglar alarm was blasting too. The only reason the police weren’t there already was the fact that firearms had been discharged. The regular patrols would be standing back from the scene until they could deploy an armed response team. If any of the armed police were Niners I was a dead man.
As I aimed the Remington at his leg, Knowles closed his eyes and cried. Each sob forced a bloody mist to rise from the holes in his chest. I felt no pity; his tears only served to anger me. I squeezed the trigger and the shotgun kicked. Knowles screamed as his foot flew across the room and landed with a splat in the far corner. A black hole appeared in the laminate flooring and blood from his stump poured into it. He grasped his thigh, lifted his leg and stared wide-eyed at his missing boot. His body heaved and an unearthly scream echoed through the house. “Fussssck yousshhh, you’rssse a deassshd man!”
“Look who’s talking,” I answered sarca
stically. “Where and when do they meet?” I pointed the shotgun at his remaining ankle. His eyes were wild and panicked. He knew I really didn’t give a fuck how much pain he was in. He stopped being a human being when he came to kill me. Blood bubbles were grouping around his exposed teeth. I reckoned his lungs were filling with blood and he wasn’t long for this world. “I’ve got at least five minutes by my reckoning. This is your last chance.”
“Fuck you!” he hissed in agony.
He closed his eyes as I squeezed the trigger again. His remaining foot slithered across the laminate at high speed and stopped against the skirting board. Knowles screamed even louder and it was like music to my soul. “Does it hurt?” I asked as I replaced the used shells. “I’m going to blow your knees off, then your hands, elbows and so on until you die or you tell me, so it really is up to you.”
“No!” he screeched. The prospect of more pain broke him.
“Stop! Brunt Boggart, they meet at Brunt Boggart Farm near Tarbock Green,” his voice was a whisper now.
“When?”
“Three days before the full moon.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Yessssh,” he whined, but I didn’t believe him.
“Are you telling me the truth?” I asked again. He blinked and looked upwards. I wasn’t sure if that meant that he was lying or not, but I wasn’t bothered either way. I squeezed the trigger again and blew his right knee to smithereens. Blood and bone sprayed across my face and splattered the ceiling. Knowles wailed and I liked his pain. I heard sirens in the distance and knew it was time to go. I aimed the barrel below his waist and put one of the remaining shells into his groin, which ripped off his genitals and left a gaping bloody hole between his legs. His body twitched and bucked, but his agony had no impact upon me.
“That one’s for Jennifer Booth,” I said. Then I fired the other shells into his lower face and blew his head clean off. It rolled across the laminate and thudded against the brick hearth. “And that one is for Peter.”
A second and then a third siren spurred me to move. I needed to know what was going on outside before I could make any decisions. If the armed response units were already surrounding the house, then I would muzzle Evie Jones and we would walk out together and take our chances with the judicial system. I wasn’t about to take on a siege of armed police. I ran upstairs and peered through the front bedroom curtains.
Two patrol cars were blocking the entrance roads onto the roundabout and a third was parked in the lay-by to my left. A uniformed officer was talking to a gaggle of my neighbours who were dressed in a mishmash of pyjamas and tracksuits. There was no sign of an armed unit. I sprinted to the back bedroom and looked outside. There was one uniformed policeman stopping traffic coming down the roads at the side of the house. The roads were dead at that time of night and a lone taxi which he had stopped did a three-point turn and went in search of another route. The exit road from the cul-de-sac where the truck was parked was clear, and it was hidden from view by overgrown hedges.
I ran downstairs and grabbed what we needed. Knowles’s body stunk of excrement. His sphincter had relaxed at the point of death and the contents of his lower bowel were oozing out onto my dining room floor. The cloying smells of blood and shit filled my senses. The scene was horrific, and as I looked at his dismembered body parts scattered across the room, it was blatantly obvious that Knowles wasn’t shot and killed in self defence. Forensic officers would look at the evidence and establish that he’d been debilitated by a shotgun blast and suffered a sustained attack from a dog before being systematically tortured, prior to the final lethal shots being fired to his head. I had watched enough episodes of CSI to know that, despite being attacked in my own home, reasonable force was not used. In fact it looked like a mad man had been let loose. A court would crucify me.
I used my feet to prod Knowles’s feet back to his body and the butt of the shotgun to nudge his head closer to the corpse. I positioned them as close to where they once were as I could. I ran into the front room and switched on the gas fire without igniting it and then repeated the process in the dining room. I opened the oven door and switched on the gas and then did the same with all four rings on the hob. I ignited one of the rings and then grabbed the Staffie. I hooked Evie to her lead and we crept unnoticed across the backyard behind the cover of the high fence panels. The shed groaned as I put my shoulder to it and heaved, but it was compliant and slid across the gravel enough for us to disappear through the fence. We tiptoed across our neighbour’s rear lawn and I unbolted their garden gate. It took us into an alleyway between two rows of houses built back-to-back. Apart from half a dozen grey wheelie bins and a rotting Talbot campervan, the alley was empty. We reached the truck and I managed to get Evie into the back without too much noise, then I hid the Remington behind the rear passenger seat. I stashed Knowles’s Beretta under the driver’s seat where I could reach it. If we were stopped by the police there would be no gunfight. I had no wish to go down in a blaze of glory; that is Hollywood bullshit. I wanted to live, but if I got a sniff of any Niners, uniform or not, then they would get a bullet in the face. As we neared the exit to the cul-de-sac, the escaping gas ignited and there was a thumping whoosh as the windows on the ground floor of my home exploded outwards. It had been my home since 1993, and I’m not sure if it was the sadness of torching the house or the horror of what I’d just done to two human beings that made me cry, but I sobbed uncontrollably. Evie tried to console me, but I needed more than a lick on the face. I had to wipe the flood of tears from my eyes before I could see well enough to drive. Evie Jones and I were a mile up the motorway by the time the armed unit arrived at the inferno.
Chapter 20
On the Run
Heading straight for the motorway was the right thing to do, although we would need a lot of luck to put some distance between us and the bloody scene we had left behind. I hoped that the fire would destroy enough evidence to gift me a chance in front of a judge, but my priority now was anonymity. Arterial roads and three motorways surround Warrington and it was obvious I would head for one of them to get out of town, but I was convinced that no one would be looking for me until they’d figured out what had happened at my house.
Ged Knowles was proof enough that the Nine Angels had penetrated the police force. Obviously, I had no idea how far their reach went, but I had to assume that he wasn’t the only one. One thing was certain: when the fire was extinguished and the bodies were found in the ashes, they would blame the carnage at my home on me. They would arrest me and put me into a remand prison while they conducted the interrogation process, which would make me a sitting duck for bad cops and prison inmates alike. The other factor that I had to consider was Evie Jones. There was no way I would let anybody put her back into a kennels. Her hatred of other dogs would make it a living hell for her. I knew that I had to write this book and put my side of events forward in the only way that I know, then disappear. It would take me a while, but I knew that criminals remained undetected for years if they had half a brain and focused their minds on it. I had more than half a brain and my desire to remain alive and retain my liberty was intense. We take both for granted, but it has become my main focus in life.
The nearest motorway was the M6, which headed north and would take me to the Lakes in less than two hours. As we accelerated down the slip road onto the main carriageway, the heavens opened. The wipers squeaked noisily as they struggled to clear the torrent of water from the windscreen. I tuned the radio to Wire FM, Warrington’s local station, and sure enough, within twenty minutes, news of the fire and reported gunshots were the lead bulletin. The newsreader informed listeners that there was at least one fatality at the scene and that there was growing concern about the whereabouts of the property owner, Warrington-based author Conrad Jones. I’d turned my Blackberry off earlier, so if the police had tried to reach me, I didn’t know about it. The radio didn’t mention my partner, so I had to assume that they’d tracked her dow
n to her mother’s and spoken to her. The fact she had left me would only muddy the waters – “Estranged husband goes on the rampage”. Despite the furore, I was desperate to let her know that Evie Jones was with me. I didn’t want her to think that she’d been trapped in the fire. But I guessed that if they were looking for me then they would be monitoring her calls. I hoped that she would figure out that the Staffie would have used the dog flap to escape the fire or she would be with me. It was weird: I had shot two people and set fire to my home, and my number one regret was not being able to tell my partner that the dog was okay.
I had no idea where we were going exactly, but I was acutely aware that the description of my truck would be circulating the motorway police bands pretty soon. I had to reach the section north of the M55 which filtered off to Blackpool before I could exit and disappear onto the remote minor roads. I flicked stations trying to get a better picture of what the police were releasing to the press, but the same bulletin was repeated on a loop. It wasn’t long before my next-door neighbour’s voice was added to the newsflash. He’d been interviewed at the scene and was describing how they had heard a number of gunshots before the explosion: “I felt like I’d woken up in Beirut.” The high pitched voice was undeniably his. I wondered how long it would be before other voices were tagged onto the piece.
The news was vague, which was positive for now. At least they weren’t broadcasting that there was a reward on my head, dead or alive. I analysed every word they said about it over and over. The severity of what I’d done wasn’t lost on me. I knew that I had crossed the line and that my life would never be the same again. A huge flash dazzled me for a second as thousands of volts hurtled towards the earth. The thunderclap rumbled over a few seconds later and the rain began to batter the windscreen. The downpour ricocheted off the tarmac, creating the image of a wall of water two feet high. My head was spinning as we reached about thirty-five miles north of Warrington. We were nearing the quieter stretches of the motorway when I spotted blue lights closing on us in the far distance. Evie Jones was exhausted and sleeping peacefully on the back seat. The truck was cruising at seventy, which is quick for me. I really am Captain Slow. The only time I go over eighty miles an hour is on an airplane. I was on the run, but still couldn’t drive over seventy without breaking into a sweat and envisaging that one of my tyres would blowout at any second. I gripped the steering wheel and pushed my foot down hard. The truck accelerated easily and the speedometer was showing ninety before I felt any vibration in the vehicle. The extra speed didn’t help; the police interceptor was gaining ground on us fast.
