by Adam Carter
Then her body collapsed in agony and at last her mind accepted precisely what had happened.
She opened her eyes. There was a pale glow from the windows, striped black across her vision by the blinds. She was lying on a hard bed in a small room which contained several amenities, indicating that it was likely a cheap hotel room. There was a faint smell of greasy chicken to the air and the dull hum of a persistent fly. But it was February, and it was too cold for flies, so Thompson strained to listen and decided to put the hum down to the steady thrum of a distant or quiet television.
“Jen! Jen, you’re awake!”
She already knew that, wasn’t quite sure why Lin saw the need to tell her, but the concern in Lin’s eyes as she hurried over to her was welcoming. Thompson tried to sit up, although Lin held her back even as pain shot through her body once more. Thompson grimaced; if she could fight through the pain she could certainly fight through Lin’s efforts to stop her rising.
“What happened?” Thompson asked, refusing assistance and managing to sit up slightly. Lin fussed about putting a pillow behind her for a rest, and Thompson allowed her this small comfort.
“How are you feeling, Jen?”
While it was nice Lin cared so much, Thompson was unused to such attention. If her experience in the car park had taught her one thing it was that pain could wait until after the mission was done. Dan could have got into a lot of trouble over that, but Thompson had convinced her father Dan and George had taken her out shopping for shoes. Her father hadn’t a clue about her anyway and bought the shoe-shopping theory. It had brought Thompson and Dan closer together, but only strengthened Thompson’s assertion that pain was secondary. Pain was always secondary.
“Tell me you know why the police were there,” Thompson said.
Lin seemed to at last understand Thompson had no intention of detailing her various ailments, and filled her in on what she knew. The more Thompson listened, the less she liked. That Arnold Arcady was the only one to have escaped unharmed was not exactly the best of results, yet they could not change what had happened.
“So who killed his family?” Thompson asked at last.
“We have no idea. We assume a neighbour reported the screams, or that they saw someone enter the building, but we don’t know for sure.”
Thompson thought back. “The motive wasn’t rape. The poor woman was stabbed several times through the sheets. There were signs of a struggle, but anyone intending to rape her would have torn the sheets away first.”
“Anything else you can remember?”
Thompson shook her head. “Only that the armed police were there almost straight after us. Where are we?”
“In a hotel. We had to pretend you were hung over from a party last night.”
“And you’re eating fried chicken for breakfast?”
“Trust me, we’re not being picky.”
Thompson could sense there was something else, but Lin would tell her in her own time and Thompson could not be bothered to press the issue. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and Lin went to stop her. A single glower stopped Lin and Thompson made it to her feet, even if she did stand a little shakily.
She walked to the end of the bed and parked herself on the edge so she could watch the television. Lin had it set to the news, and was clearly waiting for something regarding the attack to turn up. Thompson did not know where Foster was and didn’t really care enough to ask. There was however one thing she could have done with knowing.
“What’s the DCI told us to do, then?”
Lin hesitated, and Thompson guessed this was the thing she didn’t want to talk about.
“Sanders sent us a doctor for you, but we didn’t wait for him to show.”
“Why not?”
“Because we thought he might be hanging us out to dry.”
“Ah.” Thompson at last understood Lin’s problem. She thought Sanders had turned against them, had sent the armed police himself. Why Sanders would do that was a mystery easily solved: he wouldn’t have done it.
The sound of a key in the door sent the hands of both women to whatever weapons they could find within easy reach, although as the door opened and Foster stepped through they relaxed.
“Nice to see you up and about,” Foster said to Thompson, “but you really don’t have to offer to brush my hair for me.”
Thompson tossed the brush on the bed with a mild scowl.
“What did you find?” Lin asked.
“Just what you sent me out to find. Arnold Arcady is hiding out with some friends. I have an address if you’re both fit to move.”
“Fit as ever,” Thompson said, ignoring Lin’s attempt to say anything to the contrary. “Did you get a look at him? What was he like?”
“Didn’t see him. I just tracked him.”
“So how can you be sure he’s in the place you think he is?”
Foster adopted an annoyed expression. Thompson wasn’t too keen on her and the feeling was mutual, although Thompson knew Foster didn’t handle stressful situations very well and wasn’t about to risk her life on Foster’s assumptions.
“I can go myself if you like,” Foster offered sharply. “Could do without dragging the dead weight around.”
Thompson growled and headed to the bathroom. “Five minutes and I’ll be with you.” Closing the door behind her, Thompson realised she really wanted a shower, but she would hold herself to her own timescale. Instead she carefully removed her top and perched her palms on the bathroom sink as she stared at her shoulder wound in the mirror. The bandage was basic and badly made, but she guessed Lin didn’t have any experience in these things. Blood was seeping through and Thompson could feel even without touching it that it was going to tear a lot of her skin off when she removed it. Still, there was no sense in namby-pambying about it.
She removed her combat knife from her belt and set it between her teeth, clamping down hard upon the reliable metal. Taking a firm grip on one corner, Thompson tore the entire bandage free. Her body almost exploded in agony, but she bit deeply into the knife, the dull metallic taste honey to her tongue in these instances. She held her eyes tight to the pain and spent the next full minute hyperventilating as she attempted to come to terms with the pain. Eventually she was able to breathe normally and opened her eyes to look at herself in the mirror. Her body was covered in sweat and blood, her chest was rising and falling at a level she still wasn’t happy with, but the wound didn’t look too bad. Fresh blood was seeping from the bullet hole, but at least it wasn’t pumping.
Taking a towel, she addressed the wound, cleaning it to prevent infection and also to get a proper look once all the excess blood was removed. Once she was cleaned up it didn’t even look all that bad.
Tucking her knife back into her belt, Thompson tried flexing the muscles, but it was too soon for anything like that. There was no sign of the bullet, however, which was a good thing. She had cut slugs out of her body with her knife before and it wasn’t an experience she especially wanted to repeat if she could help it.
Drying herself off, Thompson applied another bandage and shoved her shirt back over her head. She took a moment to stare at herself in the mirror. This wasn’t an ideal job, and if she died in the line of duty no one would ever know. Sanders wouldn’t likely make a record of the fact. She would just disappear from the police database, an anomaly forgotten and uncared for.
She wondered how long it would take her father to realise she was dead, if he ever did.
Straightening her back and taking a deep breath, Thompson headed back into the hotel room proper to find the other two women waiting anxiously.
“Ready,” Thompson said, glancing at the wall clock as she headed for the door. She had set her own deadline and had ten seconds to spare. She wondered what Dan would have had to say about that.
CHAPTER FOUR
The three women had the house under surveillance, but there seemed no likelihood at all that Arcady would be coming out any time soon. Foster had
discovered the place where Arcady was hiding and had expected to swing by the hotel and collect Lin, so together they could storm the place and find out from Arcady just who would want his family killed. That Thompson had been awake when she returned was a bonus. Only things hadn’t worked out quite as Foster had expected, and instead the three of them were staking out the house from a car parked halfway down the road.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, absently drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, Foster thought through Lin’s theory that the family of the woman Arcady had killed had been responsible. It seemed a bit of a stretch to Foster’s mind. It was natural to want revenge, but even if you entered a man’s house with the intent to kill him, surely you’d have to be pretty far gone to do what had been done at the house. Upon finding Arcady not there, who would slaughter his entire family, including two kids?
However, nor did it reek of a professional killing. The cops had been on the scene far too quickly for it to have been a proper hit. What that left, Foster could not say; but she firmly believed a long chat with the last surviving Arcady might well get them those answers.
“He’s planning a retaliation,” Thompson said as she re-entered the car in the back seat. Lin was sitting up front with Foster.
“How do you figure that?” Lin asked. “You get any KitKats?”
“What else is he gonna be doing in there? Hiding with his head between his legs. Uh, no.”
Through the car’s mirror, Foster could see Thompson rummaging around in a carrier bag she had brought back to the car with her. “I think we’re placing too much intelligence on this man,” she told her companions. “He was skimming money off his employer, it doesn’t mean he had connexions to the Mafia or anything. Besides, what do we even really know about ...”
“Mars bar?” Lin asked. “Really?”
Thompson shrugged, placing her carrier bag aside as she tore the top off some ready-made pasta or something: Foster couldn’t quite see what it was. “It’s still chocolate isn’t it?” Thompson said as she took up a plastic fork.
“Jen, you can’t compare a Mars bar to a KitKat.”
“Excuse me,” Foster said, glowering from one woman to the other, “but don’t we have better things to be doing than arguing about chocolate bars?”
The two officers stared at her hard and finally Thompson shook her head in exasperation and went back to her pasta.
“What we need to do,” Lin said, “is draw him out.”
“Smoke grenade,” Thompson muttered.
“What’s up with you two?” Foster asked. “You’re treating this as some kind of game. We’re practically on the run, we won’t know whether we can trust Sanders until we find out how the police got to the house so quickly, and for all we know our faces are plastered all over the news. Aren’t either of you even a little worried?”
“Sharon,” Lin said gently, “you need to relax. We’re alive and for the moment we’re free. If we’ve compromised WetFish it’s all over. If we’ve compromised ourselves Sanders will abandon us. Both of those are true, but what’s done is done and we can’t change it now. We’re doing all we can to get ourselves out of this mess, and that’s all we can do. So while we’re sitting here waiting for Arcady to make a move, we can bite our nails and pull out our hair, but it won’t change anything.”
“It’ll just annoy me,” Thompson said from the back as she shovelled more pasta inside her. “Foster, you’re not used to field assignments, so just take it from us; this sort of thing’s happened before. We’ll get out of it fine.”
It was true, but Foster would not give either woman, especially Thompson, the satisfaction of knowing that. Foster was not ordinarily a field agent and did not like to do a lot of legwork. She was a statistician and solved most of her cases at the office. She attended court, interviewed a few times, but she didn’t get involved in fire-fights and police chases. She knew some of the other officers seemed to revel in such things, as though they were the A-Team and not a super-secretive police operation. Foster always felt that if things had degenerated into fighting she had already lost control of the case.
Fighting was not something Foster was comfortable with, which was probably why she had never got along with G.I. Jane in the back seat.
“I’m going over there,” Foster said.
“Whoa.” Thompson’s hand was on her shoulder before Foster could even get her seat-belt unbuckled. For a woman with a gunshot wound to her shoulder. Thompson was surprisingly swift in her movements. “You are not compromising this mission, Foster.”
“Mission?” Foster span to face her, all her anxiety and fear coming to the fore, but she hardly cared. “The assignment ended when you walked in on Arcady’s dead family. There is no mission, Thompson; all we have to do now is make sure we get out of this alive.”
“Assignment still stands,” Thompson corrected her. “We’re supposed to get Arnold Arcady back in the frame for something. I planted the evidence, so the police will have found it by now. They’ll connect him to another murder, and pursue a line of enquiry which will get them even more motive for someone to want to kill him. Chances are they didn’t recognise me, bound up in a shower curtain as I was. The information Sanders has left the police to find about this frame-up will get a result. Arcady will be put away and someone will be blamed for his family’s murder. Not quite the result we were after, but it’s a result nonetheless.”
“Shouldn’t we be finding the real culprits?” Foster asked.
“No,” Thompson said. “We have an assignment and Sanders wouldn’t be too happy with us rushing off to do our own thing.”
“So again it all boils down to whether we trust Sanders?”
Neither officer answered her.
“Great,” Foster muttered, folding her arms and leaning back in her seat. “Just so long as we got that straight.”
There was silence in the car for all of two minutes; then Thompson said, “She’s right, Sue. I’m going out there.”
“You?” Foster asked. “You’re the one who’s most likely to be recognised.”
“Sure. Which means if I’m not, you two are definitely safe.”
“I should be the one to go,” Foster persisted.
Thompson snorted her response as she headed out the car and down the street.
Foster watched her go with dull incomprehension to her face. “What is with that woman?” All she could put it down to was that Thompson didn’t like to be shot. It was a revenge thing, it had to be. That was all there was to it.
*
It wasn’t a revenge thing, but Thompson knew Foster thought it was. The problem with people like Detective Sharon Foster was that they did not believe anything existed beyond their own small-scale way of thinking. It was amazing that Foster had been accepted into WetFish, the way she could not understand the broader picture, the way she could not understand that there were always answers within answers within answers. It was amazing in fact that Foster hadn’t been killed on the job long ago, but perhaps that was why the woman took so many desk assignments. Maybe Foster was clever enough to realise she couldn’t stand the pace with the rest of them.
If Thompson was in charge of WetFish, all the Sharon Fosters would be booted out so fast they wouldn’t even have time to collect up their glossy gossip magazines before they hit the street.
She stopped to compose herself, knowing that if she barged into the house after Foster had wound her up like that she wouldn’t be doing anyone any favours. While she controlled her breathing she cast her eyes about the street. It was a normal, residential road, with trees lining the kerb and each terraced house bearing a moderate front garden. They were nice places, affordable by nice people. You didn’t have to be a criminal to live here, and there was every chance whoever had put Arcady up wasn’t involved in any shady business. They were probably just friends.
Thompson thought about that concept, then. She had never really had any friends, not real ones anyway. Her family had all been military
and growing up she had only known her father. Any family members who hadn’t been killed in action were so distant from her she either had never met them or didn’t remember them. She had moved around a lot when she was younger, never staying in the same school for very long, and subsequently didn’t form any lasting bonds of friendship. The only person she was ever really close to was Dan Stewart, the only time she was alive was when she was in the barracks. They were her friends, her family, and she would do anything for them, and they her.
But even that door was closed to her. Dan had been dead for a long time now, and after the funeral she had spoken kind words to his family, to his friends in the barracks; but then she had drifted away from them. Without Dan the barracks no longer seemed the family it always had been.
When she had joined WetFish Thompson hoped, almost expected, things would be like the army. She thought the DCI would be strict and firm, knowing just what he was talking about. She thought she would form strong bonds with the troops, that they would get up to all manner of mischief when the chief wasn’t looking. But the reality of the situation was that this was a tighter run ship than the army had ever been. Besides, she was an adult now, and her job was important to the country. Life wasn’t about making friends, it was about making a difference.
And Thompson had yet to make a big enough difference. That was why she knew it could not end yet. She hadn’t done nearly enough.
In the right frame of mind at last, she approached the door and rang the bell. Her jacket covered her shoulder wound, but there was blood staining it if anyone cared to look closely enough. The door was opened after only a minute and Thompson came face to face with a young man of around twenty-five years. He wore casual clothes and a worried expression, although he was trying his best to look tough. Thompson had seen photographs of Arcady and knew this wasn’t him. But then she had doubted very much Arcady’s friend would have sent him to the door.
“Hi,” Thompson said. “Arnold in?”
