Dead Watch: a fast-paced thriller you don't want to miss

by Steve Liszka

  Lenny laughed. ‘If you want to know who I am, just ask your mate Neil MacDonald, you piece of shit. I ain’t fucking scared of you.’

  Bogarde steadied himself as the van took a left turn. ‘Then, you’re even more stupid than you look. Let me go, or you’re a dead man.’

  ‘Not if I kill you first,’ Lenny said, picking up the truncheon. ‘Now, give me the key before you get a large slice of what your mate just had.’

  Bogarde shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Give me the key, or do I need to start breaking fingers?’

  ‘What key?’

  ‘The fucking key, that’s what. Now don’t make me say it again.’

  The driver stirred and started to raise himself up. Lenny slammed the truncheon across his back, and he collapsed into a heap once more. He looked to Bogarde and scratched the back of his own neck with the truncheon.

  ‘Do I really have to ask again?’

  Three minutes later, the van was back on the street. It crawled up to the masked man still standing in the same place they had left him. It stopped briefly, allowing Lenny, sitting in the passenger seat, the opportunity to hand something to the figure. The man briefly inspected it, then turned and walked toward Bogarde’s office.

  When he got inside the lobby, he took an object out of his pocket and held it up in the air.

  ‘Justice for Palestine!’ he shouted as loudly as he could, then threw it at the security desk.

  The area immediately filled with thick white smoke, forcing anyone present, including the intruder, out of the building to the fresh air outside. With the deafening fire alarms adding to the confusion, the man was able to disappear down the street without being noticed. After turning the corner onto the quiet avenue, Harrison took off the hat, scarf and glasses and walked toward the fire engine that had just turned on its lights and sirens in preparation for its short journey. As it passed, it slowed down just enough for him to throw the key to Wesley through the open window.

  When the appliance pulled up outside the building, the staff had done what was expected of them and gathered at the rendezvous point. The fire marshal in her high-viz jacket had valiantly managed to get hold of the register before being forced to flee and was now taking names in between coughing bouts. When they got out of the cab, Jo and Dylan were already under air, and after giving their tallies to Jimmy, who promptly inserted them into the BA board, they made their way to the top of the steps where Wesley was talking to the security guard. In broken English, the man was trying to explain what had taken place and was miming the actions of a grenade being thrown.

  ‘Okay,’ Wesley said, turning to address his BA crew, ‘there’s no fire, so you’re not going to need a reel. Just go in there and ventilate. When you’re done, we’ll get the fan on and pump it out.’

  He was saying it for the benefit of the guard and anyone else who could hear. His crew already knew exactly what they had to do.

  When they got inside, the smoke was still thick, and they struggled to find their way past the lobby into the offices. Harrison had done his job well. They hadn’t wanted to involve him, but if the stunt was going to work, they needed the right amount of people. Like any successful incident, it was a numbers game. Bodhi had already had to book sick in order to help Lenny deal with Bogarde and his driver, but they still needed someone to get the van there and, more importantly, to clear the offices. When Harrison found out who they were going up against, he was more than happy to be involved. He hated what Bogarde represented as much as Dylan did. The smoke grenade had been Lenny’s idea. He’d got it from one his bouncer mates, who got it from fuck knows where.

  Once inside the offices, it was pretty much smoke-free. The heavy fire doors had done a good job in checking its progress. It wasn’t a particularly big area, not considering that millions of pounds were made there every year. It was mainly his property empire that was conducted from these rooms, but numerous other ventures – some legal, some not so much – also took place within its walls. Bogarde’s office was located on the mezzanine, and he was its sole occupant.

  Other than a large portrait of himself that sat above his desk, the room was dull and boring, bereft of the extravagance that Bogarde had become known for. From their interrogation of Mac, they had found out that the safe in this room held all of Bogarde’s dirty secrets. Every dodgy deal he had ever done, every penny he had cajoled, blackmailed, stolen or made from nefarious deeds were all documented and stored in a little red book, inside a little steel box right there in that room. He’d even documented all the killings he was responsible for within the book’s pages. It stemmed from Bogarde’s arrogance. It wasn’t enough that he had made his money. He wanted to remember, to recall every last penny he had stolen from every last person. Sometimes, when he had time to himself – and it was rare for a man like Bogarde – but when he did, he liked nothing more than to take out his ledger and recall his brutal rise to the top.

  Even though Jo and Dylan were in possession of the key that would allow them the most intimate access to Bogarde’s private life, it meant nothing if they couldn’t locate the safe itself. If Mac hadn’t revealed where it was, it was unlikely they would have found it either. As he’d instructed, they moved out his desk, then after picking at a few of the wrong ones, they lifted one of the carpeted floor tiles which revealed a twelve-inch square safe located in the floor. Dylan put in the key, and, to his surprise, the door opened, revealing nothing but a tattered-looking red diary. He took it out and buried it in the inner pocket of his tunic. After locking up the safe, he nodded at Jo, then the two of them put the desk back in place and made for the door. Halfway there, Jo turned and jogged back to the desk.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Dylan asked.

  Jo ignored him and picked a pen up off the desk.

  ‘Come on, let’s go!’

  ‘Chill,’ Jo said as she scribbled on the writing pad in front of her.

  Dylan walked over to inspect her handiwork. He stared at it for a few seconds then turned to Jo and shook his head at what she had written.

  Got you, dickhead!: Love, your friendly neighbourhood firefighters x

  ‘You’re so childish,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s get some windows open, and we can fuck off out of here.’

  They had to fight their way past the gale-force winds being generated by the positive pressure fan as they left the building. Jo moved her fingers back and forth across her neck as they exited, giving Jimmy the universally accepted “knock it off” signal.

  As Wesley went back in with the security guard to oversee the resetting of the fire alarm, Dylan and Jo changed their cylinders and serviced their BA sets double quick. By the time Wesley was out of the building, they were back on the lorry, ready to go.

  After clambering into the front of the cab, Wes turned to face his crew. ‘Did you get it?’

  As Jimmy drove off, Dylan took the ledger out of his tunic and waved it in the air.

  ‘We got the motherfucker.’ He sang the last word, his voice getting higher with every syllable until it was high enough to torment animals.

  Jimmy banged the steering wheel to the laughter of the others. He looked at Wesley then beeped the horn three times.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but we got him. We nailed the son of a bitch. It’s going to be us calling the shots from now on.’

  Before anyone could respond, the alarm on the computer went off, letting them know they had a call. Wesley leant across and looked at the screen.

  ‘Get our game faces on, people,’ he said. ‘We got an RTC, multiple vehicles, persons trapped.’

  Carnage

  It was carnage. As soon as he got close enough to view the scene, Wesley made pumps four; a request for a further three appliances to attend, along with the police for traffic control. Not that they were needed at that point, the three-vehicle accident had shut down the whole of Wilson Avenue. To make things worse, they were the only pump in attendance, a
nd the ambulances were yet to arrive. From the information on the tip-sheet, Wesley knew that both of Central’s appliances had been turned out and should be there within minutes, but with regard to the ambulance, he had no idea. Surveying the chaos, he could only hope it wouldn’t be long.

  It was all too clear what had happened. Wilson Avenue was a steep hill that rose from the seafront, just in front of the fire station, up to the race course on the peak of the South Downs. A souped-up, ten-year-old Fiesta being driven by a boy racer had decided to overtake the Ford Focus in front of him and ran head-on into a Volvo coming down the hill. The driver of the Fiesta had spotted the oncoming vehicle too late and tried to turn back in, knocking the Focus off the road into a three-foot-high garden wall. Considering the impact it must have taken, the Volvo had escaped the incident relatively intact. The thirty grand the owner had paid for it and its Swedish protective engineering was worth every single penny. The damage to the Fiesta, on the other hand, was catastrophic.

  Triage was the foremost thing on Wesley’s mind as their pump pulled up in the fend-off position. Until more manpower and the ambulances got there, there was no point in even thinking about the extrication of casualties. For the moment, his priority was preserving as many lives as he could until the cavalry arrived, then he could worry about everything else. Usually, the crews wouldn’t need to be instructed about what to do at an RTC. While the OIC was information gathering and formulising a plan, the others would be setting up a tool dump and stabilising the vehicles. On this occasion, their priorities had changed.

  ‘Jo, Dylan,’ Wesley said, ‘you two are casualty care on the Fiesta. Just try your best to keep them alive.’

  Jimmy was already busy getting out the hose reel and making the scene safe.

  When he got off the lorry, other than a cursory glance, Wesley ignored the elderly driver of the Focus sitting in the garden next to the brick wall he had just destroyed. Apart from being a bit shaken up, he looked pretty much fine, and the person attending to him, whether it was the owner of the property or a passer-by, was doing a good job of keeping him calm. Wesley’s attention instead had been drawn to the Volvo. The owner, a middle-aged, well-to-do looking man, was sitting upright in his seat being about as calm as he could be, in light of the situation. His face was covered in white powder from where the steering wheel airbag had gone off, protecting his face from almost certain destruction. His wife was sitting next to him, trying to keep a stiff upper lip like her husband, but the tears that fell down her face betrayed her resolve. A female member of the public was knelt next to the passenger door, holding the woman’s hand through the open window. Wesley appeared next to the good Samaritan and leaned his head into the vehicle.

  ‘Are you okay, madam?’

  The woman tried to nod, then winced. ‘I think so. It’s just my neck. It really hurts.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Wesley said. ‘The best thing you can do is to keep looking forward and try to stay as still as possible. No turning around to see that handsome man sitting next to you, got it?’

  Despite her pain, the woman let out the smallest of laughs.

  ‘What about you, sir?’ he said, looking across to the driver. ‘How are you managing?’

  The man nodded, and unlike his wife, his vertebrae seemed to have avoided any trauma.

  ‘Somehow, I’m fine. It’s them I’m worried about.’

  He was referring to the Fiesta that had bounced off his car and sat twenty yards in front of them.

  ‘Me too,’ Wesley said.

  Before he left, he patted the newest member of his crew on the shoulder, praising the woman for what she was doing and encouraging her to keep talking to them both.

  It was the Fiesta that was the real concern. The front of the vehicle, particularly on the driver’s side, had taken the brunt of the impact and had reacted like a concertina, folding in on itself. Worse was the deceased young man whose bloodied upper torso had projected through the car’s windscreen. The impact had split his skull open, leaking the inside of his head onto the car’s bonnet.

  When Wesley got to the vehicle, things didn’t get any better. Jo had taken the unconscious driver’s head and tilted it backwards, ensuring that his airway remained open. The engine block had pushed back into the car, with the steering wheel pressed tight against his chest. It wasn’t crushing him, but it was highly likely that the two had collided and internal injuries were almost guaranteed. His legs were in an even worse predicament. The collision had made the footwell pretty much disappear, along with his feet and the lower half of his shins. They would only find out to what extent they were damaged when they had created sufficient space, and considering the state of the vehicle, that was going to be a real bastard.

  Despite Dylan’s attempt to calm her, the girl in the front passenger seat was close to hysterical. Other than a nasty cut on the side of her forehead, where she must have hit the B-post, she looked fairly intact, not discounting the possibility of internal trauma. It was the sight of her dead friend sticking out of the windscreen, and her boyfriend, the driver, not answering her calls, that was the primary source of her distress.

  ‘Chris!’ she screamed in between her sobs. ‘Answer me. Chris, fucking answer me!’

  ‘Get a salvage sheet,’ Wesley said so only Dylan could hear, ‘and cover him up. It may help to calm her down.’

  It was only then that he noticed another young man sitting on the kerb with his head hung low like he’d spent the night drinking too much. He’d given up trying to stem the steady flow of blood that was escaping from his nose and instead watched it pool on the road. Wesley took it that he had been in the back of the car, but, unlike his friend, had been wearing his seatbelt. The ambulance crew could deal with him later on, Wesley decided. Triage was brutal sometimes. Turning back to the girl, Wesley leant into her window, speaking loud enough to be heard over her sobs.

  ‘Your boyfriend’s going to be okay. He’s had a nasty bang and he’s unconscious, but he’s breathing, and once the ambulance gets here, we’re going to have you both out.’

  ‘I told him to slow down,’ the girl cried. ‘He only got the car last week and was showing off.’

  ‘Let’s not worry about that just now,’ Wesley said. ‘Getting you out of here is my priority.’

  ‘Tell that to Andy,’ the girl said. ‘He’s fucking dead now because of Chris.’

  She tried to look across to her boyfriend, but the dead boy’s body was acting like a curtain, cutting him off from her. Given his condition, Wesley thought that was probably a good thing.

  ‘You prick,’ she screamed. ‘You fucking killed him.’ She winced at the pain the effort had induced.

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ Wesley asked.

  With much discomfort, the girl shifted herself in her seat. ‘My back, my chest, my neck. The only thing that’s not hurting are my legs… Oh my God, I’m not paralysed, am I?’

  Wesley reached down and gently pinched the girl’s thigh. ‘Did you feel that?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘Good, then you’re not paralysed. Now, tell me your name; it’s rude not to introduce yourself.’

  ‘Nicola,’ the girl said. ‘My name’s Nicola.’

  The sound of sirens coming down the hill improved Wesley’s mood. It was tapered slightly when he saw that it was both Central’s appliances arriving in unison. Not that he wasn’t grateful to see them, but if the driver was going to survive, he needed an ambulance fast.

  Smudge, the Watch manager, and Billy, the OIC of the second pump, approached Wesley as he stepped away from the girl. He let Dylan go back to looking after her after completing his task of covering up the corpse.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Smudge asked. ‘Have you got one yet?’

  Smudge was an old-school, no-nonsense JO, and it was fair to say he had a less than glowing opinion in regard to Wesley’s abilities as an incident manager.

  Wesley nodded. ‘As you can see, we’ve got a three-vehicle collision
. I’m not worried about the Focus. The Volvo will probably need extrications, but for now, this vehicle is my number one concern. The driver is trapped, with likely crush injuries. The girl, her name is Nicola, she seems to have come out of it relatively intact, but we’ll probably have to cut her out just in case she’s got spinal injuries. I’m going to sectorise the incident, my crew are going to be sector one, and we’re going to work on the driver. Smudge, you’re sector two, and you can deal with the girl. Bill, you can make a start on the Volvo, and Hove will assist you when they get here. You’ll be sector three.’

  He paused and listened for a second. ‘That sounds like them now. Any questions?’

  Smudge raised an eyebrow then shook his head. ‘Nah, sounds good.’

  It was actually the ambulance and not Hove that Wesley had heard. They arrived a few minutes later. As he’d predicted, it was a bastard of a job. It was always difficult working at an RTC. When you had crews working with heavy cutting gear, and paramedics trying to look after multiple casualties, doing everything they can to keep them alive, it was more than a little tricky. People were often stepping or falling over each other, if not careful, in order to achieve their goals. Hands ended up going in between someone else’s legs in order to reach what they needed, and people had to constantly move around as the vehicle was being cut, all whilst ensuring the casualties remained perfectly still. This job happened to be no different.

  After stabilising the vehicle and managing the glass, the roof was quick to come off. It made life much easier for both the paramedics and firefighters, instantly creating room for them all. For the casualty, the situation was also much improved, helping to alleviate that claustrophobic feeling of being trapped. After the roof removal, Nicola had come out of the vehicle under her own steam, without the need of a stretcher.

  Getting the driver out was far trickier. The only way to release his legs was to create extra space by executing a dashboard roll. This involved making a relief cut, then using the telescopic rams, they were able to lift and push the entire dashboard area backwards. Due to the damage that had been caused to the vehicle and the mess it had made of the driver’s feet, this was a laborious task. Every time they used the rams to push one piece of the vehicle back, it created a movement that pushed something else in towards the casualty’s legs. Cause and effect; it could be a bitch sometimes.