KILL ME GOODBYE

by A K Reynolds

  For Craig and Helen (with thanks for the beer)

  And

  Fi and Becky (with thanks for the food)

  KILL ME GOODBYE

  A. K. REYNOLDS

  Published in 2022 by Dark Edge Press.

  Y Bwthyn

  Caerleon road,

  Newport,

  Wales.

  www.darkedgepress.co.uk

  Text copyright © 2022 A. K. Reynolds

  Cover Design: Jamie Curtis

  Cover Photography: Canva

  The moral right of A. K. Reynolds to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, stored, or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  ISBN (eBook): B09JL3DSTR

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  TUESDAY

  My mind was focused on Sarina as I entered the alley, which is why it came as a shock to find I wasn’t alone when I unlocked my car. A youth was standing next to me. He must’ve been hiding in the shadows and come out of them without my noticing. His hoodie obscured his face but I could just about make out his eyes. Doing my best to ignore him I opened the door. He booted it, slamming it shut. Shocked by his aggression I stepped back, my heartrate soaring off the meter.

  Should I run for it or fight it out? Neither option was attractive. At the age of thirty-one I hadn’t done a stroke of exercise or even physical work since leaving school. The closest I’d come to exerting myself had been a few walks I’d taken in scenic areas. I’d be out of breath within minutes if not seconds if I tried to run away. As for fighting, I’d never been good at that even though I’d gone to a rough school. I was a swot who avoided confrontation and got picked on by the bully of whichever class I was in. It was a relief when I left school to go to a sixth-form college.

  The youth, who I judged to be about sixteen, carried himself with the confidence of an expert in unarmed combat. I’m five foot three and weigh no more than a hundred and twenty pounds. He was at least six feet tall and looked as if he kept himself fit. Plus, he had a couple of stone on me. Not good odds for running or for fighting. No sooner had I worked this out than the odds worsened. Two shapes peeled off from the shadows to my right. Both wearing hoodies and bigger than me.

  To either side of us Victorian buildings reared up into the night sky. Behind me was a high brick wall, soot-blackened with pollution. Surrounding me were three youths. It was clear they didn’t have my best interests at heart. I wondered if I could reason with them.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said, voice trembling.

  Hoodie number one moved quicker than I would’ve thought possible. He pushed me in the chest with both hands. There was nothing sexual about it. His move took me by surprise. I fell backwards onto the cobbles. On any other day that would’ve been a painful experience but I was so full of adrenaline I didn’t even feel it. Lying on my back, propped up on my elbows, I stared at him, waiting for his next move. I should’ve got to my feet but was paralysed with fear. What little light there was in the alley caught his face for a moment. I got an impression of narrow eyes, thin lips, and a snarling expression like that of a mad dog.

  ‘You know what I want,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  It seemed he wanted money. That was a relief. It provided me with a ray of hope. If I gave him money, he and his gang would go away and the nightmare would be over. I’d be able to get on with my life. I stood up and faced him. He was flanked by his cohorts. One of them was only about my height but had the sort of muscles you get through lifting weights and taking steroids. His shoulders were three times as wide as my own. His face was unusually pale, which somehow made him more intimidating.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, taking my purse from my jacket. I removed all the notes from it and offered them to him. ‘Here’s ninety pounds for your trouble.’ My voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

  He grinned.

  ‘Just hand over everything you’ve got.’

  Feeling sweat erupting from every pore in my body, even including those on the palms of my hands, I gave him the purse, while wondering again if I should run. But where would I run to? How would I get past them?

  ‘And the mobile.’ So he knew I had a mobile phone. But then again, everyone has one these days. I handed that over, too.

  He slapped me a couple of times gently on the cheek. The expression on my face must have told him I was cowed and wouldn’t make a move. I could only hope that, having taken my valuables, the gang would leave me alone.

  The ringleader gave me a further slap to my cheek. ‘Good girl,’ he said, which felt more than condescending as he was some fifteen years younger than me.

  I’d just have to swallow that one, on top of everything else I’d swallowed that day. He turned to his associates with a gloating look on his face as if they’d struck pay dirt and could afford to retire on their ill-gotten gains.

  I thought that was it, and I’d got away more or less unscathed, and could go home to Sarina. An image of her face formed itself in my head. It left promptly when he caught me with another smack which came out of nowhere. Harder than the first three. I don’t know whether he did boxing or karate or both, but his blow struck me with the force of an iron bar swung at speed and decked me. I went down so hard it felt like the back of my head had exploded against the cobbles. While I was lying on my back, his associates stepped over me as if I was a drunken buffoon lying on the pavement outside a bar. One of them thoughtfully stopped to give me a few kicks in the ribs. They weren’t gentle.

  ‘Does it make you proud of yourself to pick on a woman?’ I said.<
br />
  Some years previously I’d been on a train with a girlfriend and we’d come close to being beaten up by a hooligan. We’d done nothing to provoke him. As the hooligan raised his hand to strike me, I used that line and it stopped him in his tracks. I was hoping for a similar result here. But all I achieved was to prompt him to give me a few more kicks. I curled up and cried out again. He got bored of kicking me and joined his mates, who were busy inspecting their haul.

  The ringleader plucked something from my purse. I couldn’t make out what it was, because my vision was blurred and my body was racked with pain. If there was a part of me that wasn’t hurting, I wouldn’t have known where to find it. To take my mind off the pain I did my best to think about getting home to Sarina, although I was beginning to doubt I ever would.

  The ringleader walked over to me. I was in a foetal position on the ground and moaning to myself. As I looked up at him, he dropped into a crouch. All I could see of his face were his mean eyes glinting in the shadow of his hood. It was like staring into the face of a demon. He waved something in the air. I realised he was clutching my credit card and debit card.

  ‘Pin numbers.’

  I hesitated, not because I was holding out on him, but because I was in a daze and struggling to take the question on board. The next thing I knew he had a knife at my neck.

  ‘Pin numbers. Now.’

  The cold metal of the blade was resting on my throat. It drove all thoughts of Sarina right out of my head. All I could think about was my proximity to death. I swallowed hard, hoping that the act of swallowing wouldn’t cause the knife to slice my throat open. Fortunately it didn’t. Equally fortunately, the pin numbers came to me out of the mental fog. Then I thought fuck it, I’m not giving up yet, and I gave him a false PIN. I just hoped I wouldn’t end up regretting it.

  He swiped the blade of the knife across my cheek. ‘Something to remember me by.’

  He straightened up and joined the other two. The three of them stood in a huddle, presumably discussing how best to drain my accounts of money and rack up the biggest credit card debt I’d ever had. One of them looked at me and sniggered. His attitude hurt almost as much as the physical pounding I’d taken. It stung me so much I swore to myself I wasn’t going to let them get away with what they’d done. Then I felt something hard in my mouth, like a pebble with sharp edges, and spat it out. It bounced a couple of times and came to a halt. A tooth. The ringleader must have heard it because he looked my way.

  ‘I’d nick your car, girl, but that pile of shite ain’t worth nicking.’

  They all hooted with laughter.

  Detaching himself from the group the leader came to where I was still lying helpless on the ground and stood over me. ‘Thanks for the contribution to our coffers,’ he said, waving my purse around. ‘But this is just a side benefit. It’s not what we came after. Where is it?’

  My mind whirled. He wasn’t making sense. What else could they possibly be after? I’d given them all I had.

  ‘Where’s what?’

  I should have been expecting another kick but I wasn’t, so when his foot caught me in the ribs it took me by surprise. He must’ve been wearing steel toe protectors because it was seriously painful.

  ‘Don’t fuck with me.’

  ‘Honest, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If I did, I’d give it to you.’

  ‘I’ll slit your throat if you don’t tell me where it is.’

  This was it, then. My life was about to end, in a dark alley, with no-one around who loved me to hold my hand. My throat was going to be slit because I didn’t know where or what something was that someone wanted, and I was going to bleed out and breathe my last not even knowing the reason why. It would be as irrational and pointless a death as I was capable of imagining. And it would come just when I thought my life was as good as it could get, because I’d met Sarina. She was the woman I loved and wanted to spend the rest of my days with. We’d only had a few precious months together. Our private utopia was about to come to a premature end. It wasn’t fair.

  ‘Just tell me what it is you want, I might be able to help,’ I said desperately.

  One of the ringleader’s colleagues joined us. He was black and carried a menacing aura like a boxer at the start of a prize-fight. He booted me in the middle of my thigh. He must have known what he was doing because it hurt worse than anything I’d experienced so far and I began writhing on the cobbles in agony.

  ‘Please stop. I don’t know what you want. I’m telling you the truth.’

  He booted me again, half-heartedly this time.

  Turning to the ringleader – the one who looked like a snarling dog – he said, ‘I think she’s telling the truth.’

  The lad nodded.

  Thank God. Maybe it would stop now. Maybe I wasn’t going to die in this God-forsaken place after all. Maybe they were going to let me go. Then I could make my painful way home to lick my wounds and have Sarina pamper me and make me feel better. I tried to stand up but couldn’t because my leg had gone numb, so I crawled towards my car, hand over hand, on my belly like a snake. My fingers touched something. My car key. I must’ve dropped it. Crawling to within feet of my car, I raised my hand and zapped the door. The gang didn’t try to stop me. My instincts had been proved right. They were going to let me go.

  ‘Might as well kill her now.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve had our fun.’

  ‘It’ll be a waste. She’s hot. We could have more fun.’

  ‘No time for that. We’ll use her for target practice.’

  So they weren’t letting me go. It wasn’t over. It would only be over when I was dead. That knowledge gave me a new-found strength born of dread, and in spite of the pain I was in, I managed to get unsteadily to my feet, open the car door, and pull myself into the driver’s seat. My muggers, if that’s what they were, didn’t pay any attention to me while I was doing that. As far as they were concerned, I was an insect they could safely disregard. They made no move to kill me. Like everything else that evening, their attitude didn’t make sense. But I didn’t waste any time trying to puzzle it over.

  I took the steering lock off the steering wheel, cursing the time it took to do it, and lobbed it in the footwell on the passenger side. Then I pushed the car key into the slot. My car was an old Renault Megane of the sort that uses a plastic card rather than a key. I pressed the start button. As the engine fired into life a thought occurred to me. I was a newly-qualified barrister working in the field of criminal law. If my career panned out as I’d planned it to, I’d devote a lot of time to defending people like these. Now I’d become a victim of crime, I wondered how good I’d be at defending scum like they were. Would my heart be entirely in it? Probably not. This incident could prove to be my wake-up call. I now knew I wasn’t cut out for the line of work I’d chosen as my career. Aside from anything else, it didn’t even have the virtue of making me pots of money. People think barristers are all rich. Some are, but those at the bottom of the food chain doing criminal work like I was have to scratch about for a living. That living can be lean at the best of times. Which is why I’d left my car in a dark alley to avoid parking charges. On reflection that hadn’t been a great idea.

  I was shaking with fear and anger.

  I don’t think I’d ever allowed myself to feel real anger before. I’d been brought up with the belief you should always be reasonable, and try to see things from the other person’s point of view. I’d always held myself in check and rationalised things. It was the ethos I’d been taught by my middle-class parents. They were so middle-class they’d sent me to the local school – a tough comprehensive – on the grounds it’d do me good to mix with what they called ‘real people’. People of the sort – with due respect to my parents – they’d never mix with themselves. Most of the kids I met at that school didn’t give a monkeys for the other person’s point of view. The only view which counted was that of the most intimidating member of any given g
roup. I felt like I was back at school again.

  Wiping it away I told myself it was high time I ditched the ethos my parents had taught me, and see things entirely from my own selfish point of view. I promptly did that, and as soon as I did, I felt my anger surge and pulse and grow and blossom into an all-encompassing rage. And it felt good. Keeping the handbrake on, I pressed my foot on the accelerator while slowly releasing the clutch, building up far more tension than was necessary.

  The lads were standing in line between me and the end of the alley, blocking off my exit route. I honked the horn giving them warning I was about to drive out of there so they could clear off, and I could make my getaway without hurting them. When they heard the horn, all three of them reached into their jackets like synchronised toys. When their hands emerged, they had guns in them. It was only then I realised this had been their intention the moment they allowed me to reach my vehicle.

  Pressing the button at the end of the handbrake I quickly released it and the car shot forwards at a speed which shocked even me. The hoodies, taken by surprise, pointed their guns at me and pulled the triggers. Flashes of gunfire illuminated the alley throwing the brickwork of the buildings either side of me into sharp relief. The noise was deafening, or would’ve been, but for the fact I was hearing it above the roar of my engine at maximum capacity. The windscreen developed a spider’s web of cracks and fell away, showering me with a snowstorm of glass. In the same instant I caught the ringleader smack in the middle of the front bumper, launching him in a lethal parabola over the top of the bonnet. My manoeuvre dealt his short associate a glancing blow with the offside corner. It was more than enough to put an end to his sniggering. Somehow the third member of the gang managed to dive out of harm’s way. Or so he thought. I saw him in the rear-view mirror squirming on the ground, so I put the car smartly into reverse and stepped on the gas. He tried to roll out of my path. Not successfully. The car bumped up and down as the nearside wheel ran over his torso. I thought I heard him squeal but could’ve been mistaken. It might have been my tyres as I stamped on the brake pedal.