‘You guys hungry?’ Daddy said.
Billie’s Sunrise had five cars outside and twenty or more people inside, ranging from older guys who looked like they sprouted right there on the stools at the counter, to clusters of youngsters with fancy sneakers and an armory of handhelds. Ancient photographs curled on the walls. Each booth had a selector box for the jukebox that, our server with purple hair informed us, hadn’t worked forever.
We ordered bagels and coffee and, as we ate, Daddy told us about the time he went undercover in a bagel kitchen on New York’s Lower East Side. ‘As kettleman,’ he said. ‘Hundred boxes a night, sixty-four bagels to the box. Took some fancy smoke and mirrors, getting me into that union.’
Bagels date back at least four centuries, he said. Christians baked their bread, Polish Jews took to boiling theirs. The name’s probably from German’s beugel, for ring or bracelet. By the 1700s, given as gifts, sold on street corners by children, they’d become a staple, and traveled with immigrant Poles to the new land, where in 1907 the first union got established. Three years later there were over seventy bakeries in the New York area, with Local #338 in strict control of what were essentially closed shops. Bakers and apprentices worked in teams of four, two making the rolls, one baking, the kettleman boiling.
‘So. Plenty more where that came from, all of it fascinating. Meanwhile, you two wait here, I’ll be back shortly.’ Daddy smiled at the server, who’d stepped up to fill our cups for the third time. ‘Miss Long will take care of you, I’m sure. And order whatever else you’d like, of course.’
Daddy was gone an hour and spare change. Miss Long attended us just as he said. Brought us sandwiches pre-cut into quarters with glasses of milk, like we were little kids with our feet hanging off the seats. If she’d had the chance, she probably would have tucked us in for a nap. Luckily the café didn’t have cupcakes. Near the end, two cops came in and took seats at the counter—regulars, from how they were greeted. Their coffee’d scarcely been poured and the skinny one had his first forkful of pie on the way to his mouth when their radios went off. They were up and away in moments. As they reached their car, two police cruisers and a fire truck sailed past behind them, heading out of town, then an ambulance.
Moments later, sirens fading and flashers passing from sight outside, Daddy slid into the booth across from us. ‘Everybody good?’
‘That policeman didn’t get to eat his pie,’ Susanna said.
‘Duty calls. Has a way of doing that. More pie in his future, likely.’
Smiling, Miss Long brought Daddy fresh coffee in a new cup. He sat back in the booth and drank, looking content.
‘Nothing like a good day’s work. Nothing.’ He glanced over to where Miss Long was chatting with a customer at the counter. ‘Either of you have cash money?’
Susanna asked what he wanted and he said a twenty would do. Carried it over and gave it to Miss Long. Then he came back and stood by the booth. ‘Time to go home,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in the car.’
We paid the check and thanked Miss Long and when we got to the car Daddy was stretched out on the backseat, sound asleep.
‘What are we going to do?’ Susanna asked.
We talked about that all the way home.
Caught on Camera
Zoë Sharp
Traffic was murder. Olivia sat simmering inside her vehicle, one of a stationary herd on the A40 eastbound. Part of the usual vast migration into London on a Monday morning. All going nowhere.
She clenched her fingers around the rim of the steering wheel, a useless gesture when the car was in self-drive anyway, but it gave her some small illusion of control where none existed.
‘Time?’ she snapped.
The in-dash unit responded promptly, although to Olivia’s ears its soothing female tones sounded ever so slightly smug. ‘The time is 08:48 and 26 seconds. The distance remaining to your destination is 4.9 miles. Your current speed is 0.0 mph. At your current speed you will be unable to reach your destination by 09:00.’
‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ Olivia muttered. ‘Now tell me something I don’t know.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand that question. Can you repeat it?’
‘No.’ And before the computer could query that, she added quickly, ‘Mute audio.’
In her head, Olivia was already practising the excuses she was going to have to make for committing the cardinal sin of being late on her first day in a new job. But that’s just how they came across—as excuses.
‘How could you be so stupid?’ She should have known it was going to be bad. They’d been digging up this section between West Acton and the White City toll plaza for months. One snarl-up after another.
It was all supposed to have got better after they privatised the major arterial routes into the capital. Olivia had only made sporadic visits into the city from her family home in Northolt while she’d studied for her degree at Oxford, but she couldn’t say she’d noticed much of an improvement.
And now it was going to make her woefully late for her first day on the job. Not just her first day, but her first job. First proper job since the mandatory community tasks to build enough citizen points to attend uni in the first place, anyway.
The car in front restarted, travelled another two yards, and stopped again. The hope that had begun to bloom in Olivia’s chest stopped with it.
Still, at least she could see the squat grey concrete structure of the toll plaza up ahead. There were only three lanes open, according to the in-dash monitor, which probably accounted for the delay as vehicles jockeyed for position.
Left to its own devices, the auto self-drive would feed everyone through the plaza in no time, but as soon as people with high-end models hit their priority overrides to jump the queue, you were back to chaos again. They were also the only ones who could afford the annual passes, which had their own express lane. Everyone else—Olivia included—had to buy the shorter duration tickets. Her parents had celebrated her graduation by chipping in towards her first month’s pass.
But it was the far left-hand lane—the cash lane—that always caused the most problems. The amount varied according to pressure of traffic and time of day, so you could never be quite sure in advance how much. Half the time people failed to bring the right money, or simply didn’t have enough for the toll. In fact, Olivia could see a young man standing by the cash window now, arguing with the woman behind the glass. His body language was pleading.
Olivia was too far away to hear anything of the exchange, but his thin arms windmilled. There were nervous stains on the back of his hooded sweatshirt.
The young man stepped back, shoulders slumping, and for a moment Olivia thought the argument was over. Then he reached inside the unzipped sweatshirt and when she could see his hands again, he was holding a gun.
Olivia’s mouth fell open, the spit on her tongue evaporating instantly. She scrabbled for her handbag, fumbled inside. When she glanced up again, the young man was still by the toll booth, still brandishing the gun unsteadily at the woman inside. She’d ducked out of sight.
With a growl of frustration, Olivia tipped the contents of the bag out onto the passenger seat. It landed in a haphazard sprawl of keys, hairbrush, makeup oddments, documents, but no smartphone. Then she remembered. When she arrived this morning she was due to be issued with her official kit, including communications. With that in mind, she’d left her own phone at home on the hall table. No point in carrying both.
That thought jogged another. At her final interview they’d shown her the Taser stunner she’d be using. It was twice as old, and probably twice the size and weight, of the one her dad bought her just before she went to uni. She’d decided there and then to bend the rules and carry her own. She had it with her now, in the glove box. It was fully charged.
She leaned across, flipped open the glove box lid and pulled out the Taser. It wasn’t a top
of the range model, but not far off, made of black composite and shaped like a conventional pistol. She swallowed. Her dad had insisted that she practise with the stunner, but that was back when he first presented it to her. She’d certainly never had to use it in anger.
Another glance. The young man was still by the toll booth window, still waving the gun. The similarity between the size and shape of the weapon to the one in Olivia’s hands was not lost on her. But she knew without a doubt that his was a real gun.
She hesitated. Should I get involved? Or sit tight and leave it to the professionals?
‘Time?’ she demanded again.
‘The time is 09:01 and 13 seconds. The distance remaining to—’
‘Mute audio.’
The deciding factor.
Olivia had been a fully fledged graduate detective in the New London Police Service for one whole minute.
Pushing out her chin, she opened the car door and stepped out onto the road. The engine cut off automatically as she exited the vehicle. The driver alongside barely gave her a second glance as she strode forward between the lines of cars. She kept the Taser down by her side so it was hidden in the folds of her long skirt.
The gunman was shrieking at the crouching cashier as Olivia approached, so he didn’t notice until she was a little more than five yards from him. Then he spun round, the fear leaping in his eyes.
‘Stay back!’ He was close to screaming. The barrel of the gun arced wildly in Olivia’s direction. Had he pulled the trigger it was unlikely he would hit her, but she had no intention of relying on that.
She took a deep breath, resisting the urge to raise her hands. The stunner was still hidden from view by her side. Its maximum range was fifteen feet. She knew she needed to be nearer to be sure.
‘Look, all I want to do is get to work,’ she said, pushing out a smile, aiming for reasonable with maybe just a hint of irritation. ‘It’s my first day, and I’m already late. You want money? Okay. I don’t have very much, but I can give you some money. Let’s get this over with and then we can all be on our way.’
The would-be robber hesitated, glancing back at the toll booth. The cashier was still down out of sight, and the slots in the window meant he could neither shoot at her nor reach the cash drawer, lying tantalisingly open inside. He hammered both fists against the bulletproof glass in frustration, hurling abuse.
Olivia edged a step closer. She could see he was barely out of his teens, his cheeks and chin heavily blotched with acne. His hair clung to his scalp in unwashed clumps.
He was scared, too—maybe even more scared than she was. Fear forced the sweat out of him like tar on a summer-hot stretch of road. It sheened on his face and leached through the armpits of the thin sweatshirt.
The gun was a Smith & Wesson Model 14 revolver, practically a museum piece. What her dad would have referred to as a ‘thirty-eight special.’ It looked dark and solid in the boy’s hands.
She swallowed.
Now or never.
She slid forward another foot, trying to gauge the distance, keeping her right hand hidden. In her left she held out a few crumpled banknotes. The euros favoured by the black economy rather than new sterling. Not enough for the fix his body so obviously craved but, she hoped, folded over enough to seem enticing, nonetheless.
And once he caught sight of it, the boy couldn’t drag his eyes away. Muscle memory brought him closer by another couple of steps, closing the gap between them until an instinctive wariness overruled.
Come on, come on, Olivia willed. Just another couple of feet…
He must have sensed something of her own anxiety. The boy’s eyes twitched constantly overhead, checking for the first sign of the Tactical Response Unit that was undoubtedly en route. He began to back up, swinging the revolver up as he did so.
‘Look,’ Olivia said, watching him scurry out of range, ‘I’m going to put the money down right here, and you can come and get it, okay? But be quick, because otherwise you’ll miss your chance.’
She caught the agony of indecision on the boy’s face before she stooped to scatter the euros onto the cracked tarmac at her feet. As she straightened and took a couple of small steps in reverse, the wind was already plucking at the curled notes.
That was too much for him. With an inarticulate cry, the boy dived for the cash just as the next gust sent it skittering out of reach. He pounced again, barely six feet away from her now.
Olivia brought the Taser up level and into full view, gripping it in both hands. She pointed the muzzle at the centre of the boy’s chest, just like her dad taught her.
Oh God, what do I say? For a split-second her mind went totally blank.
‘Police!’ she barked then. ‘Don’t move!’
At least, it should have been a bark, but came out closer to a yelp—more lapdog than attack dog.
The boy had just pounced on one of the errant notes, but his head snapped up, and the triumph on his face shattered into terror.
‘No, no, no!’ He paddled backwards, robbed of both coordination and coherence.
He lifted his right hand. Olivia had time to register the grime caked into his skin, the fingernails bitten past the quick. He scrambled another couple of feet farther away from her, gaining distance all the time. The window of opportunity wasn’t so much closing as being slammed shut.
‘Please, don’t shoot me. It’s not—’
A distant part of Olivia’s brain heard the words, but could not compute their meaning. Her eyes were locked on the gun in the boy’s hands. It seemed to have grown suddenly huge, like a cartoon version, and it was swinging directly towards her.
She shut her eyes and pulled the trigger.
With a disappointingly modest snap, the explosive air cartridge at the end of the Taser’s barrel discharged. It sent the pair of tight-packed electrodes fizzing outwards at just over 130 feet a second. The probes followed fractionally divergent trajectories, widening to their optimum spread. Hair-fine wires spun out in their wake, making a faint whirring noise as they rapidly uncoiled.
Despite Olivia’s haphazard aim, both darts lanced into the front of the boy’s grubby sweatshirt. She opened her eyes just in time to watch the glimmer of surprise cross his face before the fifty-thousand-volt charge hit him.
The initial burst lasted eight seconds, by which time he was on the ground and twisted into a tight foetal ball. His limbs juddered and twitched. The gun dropped from fingers distorted into the arthritis-ravaged claws of an old man. He was ageing and shrinking before her eyes.
Sick to her stomach, Olivia realised that she had no idea how to make it stop. Her dad hadn’t included that particular piece of information in his briefings. After she’d fired, she was supposed to simply put the Taser down and run away, leaving her would-be attacker wracked by uncontrollable spasms. The device would continue to fire short bursts into his system, enough to keep him down, until she had made her escape.
The worst thing was the noise it made. A sort of gleeful crackling, like one of those blue neon tubes in old-fashioned butchers’ shops. The kind used to electrocute flies.
In desperation, Olivia ejected the cartridge as though it was spent. As soon as it was separated from the power pack in the main body of the Taser, the voltage chopped off, and the terrible noise ceased.
The boy continued to jitter and shake for what seemed like a long time afterwards. Olivia toed the Smith & Wesson out of his reach and waited. Her hands were shaking, but she slotted a new cartridge onto the end of the Taser and kept him covered, just in case.
The drama over, she was aware of other sights and sounds returning to her consciousness. The cashier stuck her head up but refused to leave the safety of her toll booth.
A few people from the closest cars called congratulations to her, although she noted none had ventured earlier out to help. But she would bet they’d all taken vids o
n their dash-cams or phones that would already be up on the Internet.
Overhead, above the constant buzzing of the surveillance drones, she heard a chopping thunder approaching through the low cloud to the southeast. The boy had recovered enough to hear it, too. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, glancing fearfully at the sky like a fat rabbit in hawk country.
‘You a copper or something?’ he demanded then.
She nodded.
‘Privvy or State?’
‘State,’ she said, and caught something in his face, no doubt surprise at the way she’d fumbled the whole thing.
The noise above them rose through loud into uncomfortable. The boy’s panic seemed to grow with it. As fast as they’d opened their car doors and windows, the onlookers retreated, shutting them again. She missed the boy’s next words, had to duck her head for him to repeat them.
‘I said, arrest me,’ he shouted. ‘State can still do that, can’t they—even here?’
The helicopter dropped suddenly out of the cloud, a black Westland with the English Constabulary plc logo on the body. Olivia stared up at it, shielding her eyes against the dust. The side door was open and the first of the TRU team was poised in the aperture. He was holding one of the new BAE sniper rifles with the butt pulled up hard into his shoulder, ready.
‘Please!’ the boy yelled. ‘Do it now. Before they land.’
Confused, Olivia launched into the revised standard caution. It was one of the first things they taught you, but she’d known it by heart since she was a child, in any case. ‘You have the right to remain silent…’
While she spoke, the helicopter circled once as the pilot recce’d for a fast landing site. The downdraught blasted grit from the construction works into Olivia’s hair and eyes. By the time she’d finished the boy’s rights, the pilot had threaded the craft between the earth-moving machinery and the overhead wires and touched down less than a hundred yards away.
Ten Year Stretch Page 23
