Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  I stopped for a moment and thought about it. Who knew we were here? Who wanted Krys Holtz dead? Who would have bothered to remove his blindfold before he killed him? Only someone who had a personal reason for wanting him dead. Kalinski. It had to be Kalinski. I was going to have to wake the others. I turned round.

  A shadow suddenly filled the doorway. I started, then brought up the gun instinctively, finger tensing on the trigger.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

  It was Tugger. I felt myself relaxing. ‘Something very fucking bad,’ I said, approaching him.

  Tugger retreated, and I saw that he too was holding a gun by his side, though where he’d got it from I didn’t have a clue. He lifted it so it was pointing in my direction. ‘Hold on, stop there. What are you talking about?’

  I stopped. ‘I think Kalinski’s snuffed Krys. I heard some movement down here; it woke me up. I came down, saw that the cellar door was open, and went to take a look.’

  Tugger didn’t move. ‘Where were you going just now?’

  ‘I was checking the doors to see whether they were locked.’

  ‘And are they?’

  ‘That one isn’t,’ I said, motioning towards the kitchen door. ‘Look, you can put the gun down now, Tugger. I’m not the one who’s offed Krys.’

  ‘You put yours down, then.’

  I did. ‘Look, Tug, how long have we known each other? A long time, right? I’m telling you the truth. If you don’t believe me, take a look. Krys is dead and there’s no way I’d want to kill him.’

  He stepped over to the cellar door, and peered down, switching on the light as he did so. He watched me carefully out of the corner of his eye as he put his foot on the first step. It was funny what a lot of money did to people’s personalities.

  ‘I’m going to check on Kalinski,’ I said. ‘See if he’s done a runner.’

  At that moment, the sound of a car starting came from out front. Tugger jumped back through the cellar door. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Go see who it is,’ I snapped. ‘I’ll see if Kalinski’s gone.’

  Once again, he gave me a suspicious look, then turned and hurried out to the kitchen door. I ran up the stairs, wondering why Johnny hadn’t surfaced by now, and tried Kalinski’s door. It opened immediately and I knew he’d gone, an assumption that lasted as long as it took me to reach for the light switch and flick it on.

  Kalinski lay on his back under the covers of his bed, his eyes open and staring at the beamed ceiling. The pale sheets covering him were stained with blood around the chest area, and he didn’t seem to have made any attempt at a struggle. I stepped forward and pulled them back. Three deep knife wounds an inch to the right of his left nipple suggested that death had been instantaneous, the result of stab wounds to the heart. Whoever had killed him had known what he was doing. But then, I already knew that, because he’d left two people dead with hardly a sound. My bedroom was right next door to Kalinski’s, and I’d been lying no more than ten feet away from him while the knife was going in. And I hadn’t heard a fucking thing. My luck was still holding, but only just. Whoever was trying to kill me – to kill us all – was getting closer and closer.

  I thought I heard a shout from outside and it was at that point that I made a decision: something had gone badly wrong and I needed to get out of there with the money, and fast. I flung the sheets back over Kalinski, turned and ran back to my own room, knocking on Johnny’s door as I passed but not bothering to wait around for an answer. I wondered whether the Holtzes had the place surrounded and who among us was the one feeding information to the other side.

  I pulled on some shoes, grabbed the holdall from under the bed, and went back out onto the landing. Johnny wasn’t responding. I knocked again, then opened the door. Even in the gloom, I could see that the bed was empty. What the fuck did that mean? Was Johnny the traitor? All kinds of thoughts were flying through my mind, clouding an issue that was already as murky as a peat bog. But there was no time to stand around and analyse, so I ran down the stairs and pulled open the front door.

  The van we’d used for the ransom pick-up was about ten yards away in the middle of the driveway. It was in the exact spot where Kalinski had parked it earlier but the lights were on and the engine was idling. I stepped outside and looked for Tugger, but he was nowhere to be seen. The thick walls of trees on both sides of the driveway were silent and empty, but who knew what or who was behind them.

  Clutching the gun in one hand and the holdall in the other, I jogged up to the driver’s side of the van, keeping my head down and turning round every so often, just to check I wasn’t being followed, and pulled open the door.

  Johnny Hexham’s body tipped out unceremoniously and I had to jump out of the way to avoid being knocked over.

  ‘For Jesus’s sake…’

  Johnny stared blankly up at me, glassy-eyed and dead, his throat, like Krys’s, cut from ear to ear. But this time the wound was fresh and bubbling, the blood still dripping down onto his shirt. Blood dribbled out of the sides of his mouth like something out of a horror film. For a moment I couldn’t move, so stunned was I by the turn of events. I’d been set up, and set up beautifully, and I still didn’t have a clue why, or by who. Johnny lay dead in front of me, probably murdered only a couple of minutes ago, if that, and his killer was almost certainly still in the vicinity. And where the fuck was Tugger? Had he taken out Krys and been coming after me when I’d turned round and spotted him? But there’d been no blood on his clothes. Still, that didn’t mean anything. He could have changed. Could have stood out of the way of the blood’s trajectory as it spurted from the wound. And what had he been doing creeping around down there?

  I chucked the holdall across the driver’s side and onto the passenger seat of the van, then went to jump in.

  Which was when I saw the front tyre. A deep slash ran all the way down it. I looked at the back tyre. The same. Set up perfectly, absolutely perfectly. I’d never been in a situation like this, one where I was so alone, so utterly out-thought, facing an enemy I couldn’t see, let alone identify, and who seemed to know every step I’d take before I’d even taken it. At that moment in time I was the most frightened I’d ever been in my life, and the most certain that this was a situation I wasn’t going to get out of alive.

  I stopped for a few moments to compose myself, to calm down so I could take stock of the situation. But Johnny’s dead eyes continued to stare up at me like something out of some murderous, madness-inducing dream and I was forced to use every ounce of self-discipline to stop myself from falling into a blind panic.

  Then I heard movement over by the side of the house. Turning round, trigger finger tensed, I saw Tugger coming back round. Shoot him, my instincts screamed. Shoot the bastard now! Except he was staggering drunkenly, not seeming to focus on anything. He stumbled, then fell to his knees, eyes making contact with mine, surprise in them, blood dribbling down his chin.

  Instinctively, I started to run towards him, and that was when I saw the knife sticking straight out of his back, only an inch of blade still visible, and there was something in his eyes, and his mouth was opening in a desperate effort to speak. It looked like he was trying to warn me of something.

  And then I heard footsteps coming round fast from behind the van, and the next thing I knew something smashed hard into my face, knocking me completely off balance. I felt the gun drop from my hand and I fell to my knees, my vision blurring into watery colours. Someone was standing above me and whoever it was had what looked like a sharpened spade in his hand. He hit me again, this time in the side of the head, and I felt my face smack against the concrete drive.

  I was still conscious but couldn’t seem to move. Vaguely, I heard my assailant walk over and pick up my gun, and I knew that this was it. The end. Strangely the blows seemed to have knocked all the fear out of me as well. My head ached ferociously and I was still having difficulty focusing, but slowly, I rolled over and lifted my head up, wanting to at least take
a look at the man who was about to kill me.

  ‘How are you feeling, Max?’ asked a smiling Joe Riggs, the shovel in his hands.

  Even in my dazed state, I felt the shock surge through me. ‘Joe,’ I managed to say, through split and bloody lips, ‘what the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Getting payback, Max. Getting payback.’

  I spat blood out of my mouth and managed to sit up. I still couldn’t believe that it was Joe who’d killed Krys and the others. ‘Why? What for? I thought you were dead. I kept your share. I was waiting here for you.’

  ‘I know you were,’ he said. ‘I was watching. In fact, I was back here before you were.’

  My whole world seemed like it was as blurred as my vision. ‘Why?’ I managed to ask again.

  Joe stared down at me grimly. There was no humanity in his eyes, just a quiet intensity. I’d already come round to the fact that I was going to die but couldn’t work out whether the bang on the head was causing me to see things or whether it really was true that my friend and business partner was going to be the one doing the killing. ‘Why these blokes? Because it’s business. They mean nothing to me. Not your friend, Hexham, who’s a fucking coward, not Kalinski, not even Tugger Lewis. He was an OK bloke but nothing special, and I remember once he fucked me over in a game of cards. Cheated, and took money off me that wasn’t his. I don’t forget things like that.’

  ‘But why me, Joe? What did I ever do to you?’

  ‘You killed my wife, Max. You killed my wife.’

  ‘What the fuck are you—?’ I never finished the question. I saw Joe raising the spade, the metal gleaming in the moonlight, and threw up my arms to protect my face as it came crashing down on my elbows, blade first, sending a searing pain up them. I fell backwards and lay there, curled up in a ball. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Joe,’ I said, my voice muffled by the fact that my arms were still pressed close to my face. ‘Honest, I don’t.’

  ‘Modern technology, Max. That’s your problem. You remember Dietrich Fenzer, the guy who got convicted? Well, he committed suicide six months ago, still protesting his innocence. Said he definitely saw and argued with Elsa that night but that he never killed her. Three weeks ago, I got a call from the German authorities, saying that they were reopening the case. Apparently they’d started to get their own doubts about it, and they looked again at DNA samples taken from Elsa’s body at the time, and after further investigation it turned out that they didn’t come from Fenzer at all.’ He stopped and struck me hard across the back, making me cry out in pain. ‘Too late for him, but it got me thinking back. Because you see, at the time, I knew she was having affairs with other men. It upset me, but I could tolerate it because I really fucking loved her. But I remember things she said, things that made me think that maybe one of the men she was having an affair with was you.’

  ‘Joe, I swear—’

  The spade came down again, this time on my fingers. I heard several of them break but didn’t move them, knowing that to do so would invite a further blow to my exposed head. I clenched my teeth hard against the excruciating pain.

  ‘I always tried to push those thoughts out of my head because you were Max Iversson, my good mate, my fucking drinking buddy.’

  ‘I was. I am.’

  ‘Like fuck you are!’ he snarled, smacking me again on the broken fingers. I wailed with the pain, my eyes watering. I wondered how much more of this I could stand. ‘But then the copper who phoned me said they were looking again at the soldiers on the base at the time because they believed that several of them had been having affairs with her, and I got to thinking about how you’d been after the murder, and how jittery you were, and that maybe, just maybe, if they hadn’t arrested Fenzer so quick I would have probably ended up suspecting you, even though you were my friend. And then I also thought that if you’d seen her arguing with Fenzer then maybe you could have planted the weapon you used in his house—’

  ‘Please, Joe … please. I didn’t do it, I swear.’

  I felt the edge of the spade cut deep into my thigh as Joe brought it down with all his strength. Instinctively, I grabbed at the wound with one of my battered hands, feeling the blood gurgle out, and Joe lifted the spade high above his head ready to strike. ‘Why don’t you just admit it, Max? Why don’t you just fucking admit it? I know you—’

  The gunshot cracked across the still night air and suddenly Joe’s expression changed from rage to mild surprise. He stumbled, and the spade fell from his hands, clanking loudly on the concrete. A second shot rang out, and this time he fell forwards, narrowly missing me, and rolled over. Within a couple of seconds he’d stopped moving.

  Slowly and painfully, I manoeuvred my body round so I could see who the shooter was. Tugger was holding the gun, a .38 by the looks of things, different to the one he’d been holding when he’d bumped into me in the hallway. He was still lying on the ground, having propped himself up on one elbow to deliver the shots, and he looked close to death. His eyes seemed glazed and the blood was still coming out of his mouth. The knife, too, remained firmly embedded in his back.

  Somehow I managed to stagger to my feet, wincing as I used my broken fingers to lift myself up. I limped over to Tugger, still holding my bleeding leg, but he was fading fast.

  He rolled onto his side and coughed violently. A thick load of gluey blood and phlegm emerged, winding its way slowly towards the ground. I sat down in front of him, trying to think what I could do to save his life, but knowing it was a lost cause. His eyes tried to focus on me but they couldn’t. Finally, he spoke, slowly but emphatically, the effort looking like it might prove too much for him at any time.

  ‘I don’t cheat at cards,’ was all he said. Then he rolled onto his back and died.

  For a long time I watched him, my mind so torn up by what had happened that I found it impossible to think straight and to come to terms with events. Eventually I forced myself to my feet and staggered towards the van, knowing that I had to get that flight to Bermuda if it was the last thing I ever did.

  * * *

  I had difficulty turning the key to let myself into her apartment, but managed it on the third go. It was five past seven in the morning and I looked a mess, probably the worst I’d ever looked. My eyes had been blackened, my lips were split, and I had a long, deep cut across my forehead. Three fingers were broken and the wound in my thigh looked like it might be getting infected. It had been a bastard of a journey to get here, but I’d made it.

  The apartment was dark. I didn’t call her name, figuring that she was probably asleep. I needed sleep too, more than I’d ever needed it. I was going to have to get myself cleaned up before she saw me, otherwise the poor woman would get the shock of her life, but it was going to have to wait.

  I walked down the hall to the bedroom and slowly opened the door. It was dark in there and the curtains were drawn, but I could make out her figure under the sheets. It was the most welcoming sight I thought I’d ever seen. I put the holdall on the floor and removed my jacket and shirt, chucking them down too. When I was naked, I checked my wounds again, and saw that my thigh was still oozing blood. I was going to have to bandage it before getting in beside her.

  ‘Max? Is that you?’ Elaine sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were coming back later.’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t worry. I’m coming to bed in a moment.’

  She switched on the bedroom light and gasped. ‘What the fuck’s happened to you? Have you been attacked?’

  I think I might have managed a grim smile. ‘You could say that. Look, don’t worry about it. I’m OK, I promise.’

  ‘Christ, come here.’ She stepped out of bed, dressed only in a baby doll nightie, and for a moment I felt my troubles fading. It’s amazing what female flesh can do for a man. We embraced, and I kissed her on the mouth, ignoring the pain in my lips. ‘It’s good to have you back,’ she whispered, looking up at me, her fingers stroking my inner thigh. In spite of everyt
hing that had happened, I began to get a hard on. ‘Did you get the money OK?’

  I smiled as her fingers drifted across to my balls, and motioned towards the holdall. ‘Yeah, I got the money. And I think I’ve earned it.’

  Gallan

  I yawned. It was early, far too early for a Sunday, but it was all about surprise. Confront your quarry when they least expect it. However, quarter past seven on a Sunday morning could almost be construed as harassment. I was sure a clever lawyer would see it that way, but I’d worry about that later. I didn’t want to waste any time. With all the absentees on the Matthews case, it was good to get the chance to speak to someone who was still actually around.

  I crossed the road and walked up to the entrance of the apartment building. An attractive middle-aged lady in jogging gear was coming out. I smiled at her, and she automatically kept the door open for me to walk through. Very careless, particularly in a city like London. I could have been anyone. I didn’t complain, though, since it made my job easier. Just smiled and thanked her, and she smiled back.

  When I was inside, I started up the stairs.

  Iversson

  She pulled me towards her, kissing me hard, her tongue slithering and tumbling into my mouth like a three-legged lizard. ‘We’re rich, baby. Rich beyond our wildest fucking dreams.’ She laughed out loud, stroking my cock while I let loose with the old moans of pleasure, beginning to forget all my various aches and pains. Bending down in front of me, she brushed her lips across my nipple, gently nibbling it, before sinking slowly down to her knees in a way that was guaranteed to bring forth a bout of premature ejaculation. I let out a thin gasp like a hamster’s squeak as she slowly swallowed me up, all the time gazing up at me with those big brown bedroom eyes.

  I smiled down at her, then let my eyes drift around the room as I tried to stop myself from coming, eager to prolong things as long as possible. My battered face stared back at me from the mirror on the opposite wall, grinning stupidly. I focused on it for a moment as Elaine’s tongue created sensations I could hardly stand.