Action Man had almost reached the fifth floor, hugging the inside of the banister in search of a clear shot upwards. He could see the gun, gripped in two hands, moving along the railing like it was on a track. The man himself was out of sight, but that meant so was Matt. He waited for the tell-tale change of pace as the gunman reached the next flat section, then hurled the extinguisher down and jumped back again.
There was a deep tolling sound and a sharp cry as the vessel struck, then further peals as it rolled and tumbled down the next flight. The footsteps ceased, breathy moaning and swearing taking their place. Matt looked down through the railings, edging cautiously nearer the banister until something other than grey stairs was in view below. The gunman was crouched on the landing, clutching at the lower half of his left leg. He noticed the movement above him immediately and aimed the pistol, rolling on to his back and loosing off three more rounds. They all zipped into the ceiling, but Matt felt a rush of air terrifyingly close to his cheek as the first one passed.
He clattered back through the swing-doors and looked either side of himself. This time, to his right, he noticed that there was dim light shining in two shafts on the corridor floor, between where he stood and the main stairs. Open doors. Had to be. A sign opposite the stairwell read ‘Mayfair and Splendide Suites’, above an arrow pointing right. Matt began running again, figuring that with Action Man limping a little, he’d get to the main stairs before he was in range again. If he kept leading him round in circles, perhaps the guy would die of boredom.
Matt reached the entrance to the first suite as he heard the inevitable crash of his pursuer emerging behind. He dived through the open doorway, skidding across the tiled floor as the ricochet of another bullet zinged along the corridor. His heart was hammering and his brain couldn’t spare even one synapse to wonder what the hell this was about. He was operating on reflex and sheer survival instinct, and the grey-matter Pentium was channelling all processing power into simply keeping him alive.
Matt climbed to his knees and looked around the interior of the suite, the shuffling gait of now-limping footsteps like a countdown. He had until zero to improvise.
The suite was, as Simone suggested, still undergoing work. Unfortunately, the joinery tasks in progress had not required the use of a chainsaw or a nailgun. The door had not been hung yet, presumably held off until they had finished carting certain bulky items in and out. It stood resting at an angle against one wall, next to a two-seater sofa wrapped thickly in polythene. The room’s king-size bed, also mollycoddled in plastic, had been shunted undeferentially into a corner to create working space. Lengths of timber lay schematically around where a walk-in wardrobe was under construction, next to one of two robust and heavy-looking workbenches, which sat three or four yards apart. The one nearer the wardrobe bore a hammer, a plain and an electric drill, the flex of which was plugged into a socket by the doorway, via an extension. Exposed back-boxes elsewhere in the skirting demonstrated that the electricians hadn’t finished in here either.
The second workbench sat at ninety degrees to the doorway, forming a channel between itself and one wall, leading towards a set of patio doors, beyond which was an exterior terraced area. Two paving slabs and a fine covering of masonry dust rested on top of the workbench; but still no chainsaw, nailgun or grenade launcher. There was, however, some kind of circular sander lying on the tiled floor by the bench. Maybe he could buff him to death.
The shuffling countdown continued. Matt had another desperate look around, like there might be another exit he’d missed the first time. There were two sets of patio doors leading to the suite’s terrace, a section of blank wall between them. What if he could climb down to the balcony below? he wondered, but the answer to the corresponding ‘what if he couldn’t?’ made him drop the idea.
Matt looked at the workbench and the electrical flex again, and had what in the circumstances passed for an idea. He ran to one set of patio doors and pushed them slightly open, just enough to squeeze through, then retreated to behind the workbench, where he crouched down and gripped the power cable.
He could only see Action Man’s legs as he entered. He was dragging the left one behind him, a dark dampness staining the bottom of his trouser leg. Matt feared there’d be a yellow dampness staining his own, a bit higher up, as the gunman paused just inside the doorway, looking around. If Matt was spotted, it was over. The moment stretched to unfeasible duration. Leaves fell from trees. Winter set in. Lambs gambolled in the springtime. Rivers dried. Generations were born and died. Civilisations rose and fell. Man abandoned religion, explored space, cured disease, ended conflict, evolved to a higher plane of existence, and at the end of it Matt was still stuck cowering behind a bench waiting to see whether this fucker would clock the open patio door or notice him and blow him away.
The fucker clocked the open patio door and began moving purposefully towards it. Matt yanked at the flex, pulling it taut at shin-height as planned. Not planned, as soon as Action Man’s right leg hit it, the plug came flying out of the socket. Before Matt’s bowels could respond accordingly, the cable snagged under the gunman’s descending boot and tightened again, tangling further around his ankles as his left leg caught up. He tumbled forward, spinning as he did so, and landed on his back on the floor. Before he’d hit the ground, Matt was already charging the workbench to tip the thing sideways on top of him.
Matt spilled to the floor alongside it, sprawling flat-out next to the electric sander. The bench was now on its side between them, the weight of its worktop pinning Action Man to the deck at his right shoulder, so that only his arm was visible from where Matt lay. Matt hauled himself up to his knees in time to see that the arm, though trapped, was laboriously turning to point the pistol in his direction. Still kneeling, he grabbed the sander in both hands, but it was about five times as heavy as he was expecting, and the weight of it toppled him forwards again. He gave a diaphragmic grunt of effort as he fell, and managed somehow to land the device on the outstretched limb.
The gunman roared with pain, but still he gripped the gun and still his wrist slowly turned, the trigger-finger squeezing off shots closer and closer to Matt’s head. Matt was flat-out and face-down on the tiles, the end of the silencer just out of his reach. About ten more degrees and it would be pointing between his eyes. He looked to his outstretched hand, still resting on the sander, and noticed the lettering on the device’s distinctive semi-circular protruberance. This informed him, better late than never, that the sander was in fact a masonry saw.
Click. Whirr. Spray.
Disarmed.
Matt wiped the blood from his eyes, the gunman’s cries slightly muffled by the screening effect of the worktop. He turned the saw off again and crouched beside it. The severed forearm lay absurdly on the floor nearby, its hand still gripping the pistol. It was a bit late for being squeamish, but he couldn’t yet bring himself to prise the weapon from its fingers.
There was a grinding rumble of wood and metal on tile, accompanied by a bellowing scream. In a rage of anger, pain and sheer desperation, the gunman had hauled his shoulder and the stump of his arm from beneath the worktop and got to his knees. His left hand reached to the floor for the Uzi, the strap of which was tangled around one of the bench’s legs. Matt hefted the saw once more and threw both it and himself across the barrier at the gunman, flicking the switch as he fell.
Action Man’s howls were matched by Matt’s own primal, animal yell as he pinned his pursuer under the saw, which tore ravenously into his chest and upper abdomen. The man’s screams were suddenly silenced when blood began flowing up out of his open mouth, at which point Matt estimated it was safe to turn the saw back off. He stood up woozily, shaking and shivering, looking down in awestruck incomprehension at what he had wreaked. He was soaked from the crotch upwards in blood and fuck-knew what else. Even his hair was wet with it.
Matt stepped unsteadily away and rested his bottom on the edge of the toppled worktop. He was breathing heavily through hi
s nose, the sound seeming to fill the room. The shivering continued, even though he was sweating from exertion, and his hands trembled like he had the DTs. He gripped the bench to right himself, feeling like if he sat on the floor he might fall off the world. Blood continued to seep from the corpse, puddling towards his feet.
‘Oops,’ he said throatily.
His attempts to reinvent himself as a more morally responsible individual didn’t appear to be going quite to plan. He’d managed to resist taking sexual advantage of a vulnerable female, but had ended up slaughtering someone instead. That was the big weakness when fate played the comedian: once it was on a roll, it tended to get carried away with itself and its sense of irony became less and less subtle.
He needed air. He desperately needed air. He stumbled over to the patio doors and through the gap he’d left.
The dim glow lighting the suite and the corridor was from the Lido’s illuminations beneath, darkness now having fallen across the highland skies. Over in the Laguna, there was one lonely light shining up in the residential floors, its empty rooms also equipped with Gavin’s NRG-Sava system. ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ pounded out from ground-level.
Matt walked to the edge of the terrace and looked over the balcony, then ducked immediately back out of sight. He crouched on the uneven floor, still missing some slabs, and peered down through the railings. There were two more guys in combat gear outside the Laguna’s main entrance, evidently standing guard, or standing by.
A radio crackled on the deceased Action Man’s belt.
‘Booth, this is Jardine. Come in, over.’
‘Christ,’ Matt muttered, walking back inside. Revulsion turned once again into fear as he remembered the gunman telling his radio-buddy he was ‘dealing’ with ‘a stray’.
‘Booth, this is Jardine. Are you there? Over.’
Matt took a deep breath then crouched down by the body, unhooking the blood-spattered radio and lifting it to his blood-spattered face. He pressed the Talk button.
‘Yeah, Booth here,’ he growled, trying to remember Action Man’s accent. He hadn’t heard enough to get more precise than ‘English’, but what the hell, everyone sounded much the same on these things.
‘Did you lock down the problem?’
‘Yeah, I got him.’
‘Is he dead?’
Matt looked at the Sam Raimi special effect beside him on the floor. ‘Safe to say, yeah.’
‘So the area’s secured?’
‘Yeah. Hotel B secured.’
‘Good. Remain in your position until further orders. Out.’
Matt exhaled very slowly. He wasn’t going to waste brain-time asking himself what this might be about, but he knew one thing for sure: it was only beginning.
Bad-ass perpetrators and they’re here to stay.
He pulled the Uzi free of the workbench and slung it over his shoulder, then removed the spare clips from the dead man’s belt and stuffed them into his trouser pockets. Slung around the man’s back there was also a compact pump-action shotgun, which he tucked under his arm. He attached the radio to his waistband, then moved around the workbench again and ungripped the pistol from the fingers of the severed arm.
Such a sweet thing …
You said it, Alice.
No more Mister Nice Guy.
Matt pulled the keycard from his back pocket, then thought better of it as he noticed the state of his hand and remembered what the rest of himself looked like. ‘Out damned spot’ wasn’t going to make it. He gently knocked on the door, covering the spyhole with his hand.
He heard footsteps, then Simone’s voice: ‘Matthew?’
‘Simone, it’s me. Don’t open the door.’
‘What?’
‘I mean, when you do open the door, don’t scream.’
‘Why would I—’
The door opened and Simone breathed in sharply. Matt couldn’t be sure whether she was restricting herself to a gasp or gearing up for a lung-burster, so he placed a bloody hand over her mouth and backed her into the bedroom. Horror and confusion lit up her wide eyes. He was relieved, for practical reasons, to see that she was still fully dressed. All other ramifications were now a long way from relevant.
‘Something very, very bad is happening,’ he said, looking into her eyes but still covering her mouth, ‘and I need you to keep the heid. Okay?’
She nodded. He took away his hand.
Simone looked him up and down in aghast disbelief. She struggled for words, making a few false starts before managing a bare whisper of ‘What’s going on?’
Matt shook his head. Blood whipped from his hair and streaked the wall.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you this much: it’s the last time I practise safe sex.’
21:12 orchid suite the uninvited
Gavin’s party wasn’t proving quite as enjoyable as he’d hoped. He was wise enough to know that when you look forward to something so much, a sense of disappointment is almost inescapable when at last the reality arrives. But nonetheless, it was difficult not to feel hard-done-by about the way certain things were turning out.
Simone, of course, had screwed things up for him, but that was to be expected. That was her raison d’être these days. Her jealousy of his success had eaten her from within and left a rotting hollow where the woman he loved used to be. She couldn’t appreciate that his successes were their successes, that everything they had together was the product of their marriage, not of his achievements. He’d always understood that her role at home was as important to their success – theirs, not his – as his activities further afield, but then he had always thought marriage should be a partnership. Unfortunately that can’t happen if one party sees it as a contest.
For a while he thought he’d simply been naïve, too idealistic, but upon reflection he became determined that, damn it, an equal relationship – partnership – should be possible. However, for it to work, he realised, the partners had to be equal in the first place, and that was the problem. It was a painful thing to admit, but the honest truth was that Simone perhaps wasn’t quite cut of the right cloth to be the wife of someone like himself. She had too many insecurities, and had consequently grown resentful of his pre-eminence, envious that he had turned out to be – for want of a more modest term – a more gifted individual than she. He wasn’t saying she should have been content to bask in his reflected glory, but perhaps a stronger woman would have seen how that glory brightened up the place for both of them, rather than wish she was the one doing the shining.
It was little wonder he’d been driven into the arms of others for comfort.
She knew how much this reunion meant to him. That was the danger when someone so close goes from ally to enemy: they know best how to hurt you. Therefore she had been determined to ruin it for him. He could see that now; in fact, couldn’t believe he hadn’t better anticipated it. Up until tonight he thought the extent of her sabotage had been her insistence on tagging along, even though he knew she’d no desire to see these people again. She never talked about them and she certainly didn’t share his interest in seeing how their lives had worked out, something he found distastefully cold.
But she had done a load more than just tag along – she had gone behind his back and invited Matt bloody Black, for a start. There he’d been, Mr TV star, large as life in the lobby, all bloody full of himself, blissfully unaware that he wasn’t wanted. The man wasn’t even funny. Gavin had seen one of his videos, and as far as he could make out it was just filth and gratuitous abuse. It was the emperor’s new clothes: people laughed because they didn’t want to be seen to be not ‘getting it’, Simone among them. Same as the bloody awful music she listened to. Emperor’s new clothes and a dose of snobbery thrown in. The irony, of course, was that she forgot how it was Gavin’s understanding of the tastes and likes of normal, ordinary people that had made him what he was today. So if M People were good enough for Tony Blair, they were good enough for him.
Also, r
ather than let him and Catherine get on with their more official role as hosts, Simone had been swanning around the ballroom like she owned the place, all dolled up to the nines too. She looked surprisingly good, he had to give her that, but it did occur to him rather bitterly that if she’d made the effort to look that way for him now and again, their marriage might not be in the state it was these days.
And to worsen matters still, Simone’s high profile had been making Catherine uncomfortable about accompanying him around the ballroom. Catherine even suggested that she should be the one who took a backseat, letting Gavin and Simone play hosts; or that the three of them should work the floor individually. Gavin had insisted Catherine stick with him – he wasn’t letting that bitch spoil everything – but she hadn’t been very happy about it. It wasn’t obvious to the party-goers, of course, Catherine being far too professional for that, but in a way she was too professional, as there wasn’t much chemistry on show to get people speculating.
Not everything was down to Simone, though. There’d been a very disheartening lack of rapport between himself and his guests, most of whom had shown a uniform ambivalence about the hotel industry. Only a paltry handful had turned up for his tour, the rest opting to stay in their rooms, at which point he’d made a mental note to check whether some idiot had stocked Buckfast in their mini-bars.
They’d not been overjoyed to see him once the party commenced, either. Sure, they’d been polite enough and expressed gratitude for him organising the soirée, but once the initial pleasantries had been dispensed with, they’d often seemed desperate to latch on to someone else’s company. Eventually, he’d decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and cottoned on to a couple of larger groups himself. Unfortunately, all they wanted to talk about was their days at St Michael’s, rather than what everyone was doing now. It was sad, really, to be so obsessed with the past.
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Page 19
