The Detective Jake Tanner Organised Crime Thriller Series Books 1-3 (DC Jake Tanner Crime Thriller Series Boxsets)

by Jack Probyn

  On the passenger seat beside him was the digital camera he’d used to snap the photographs of Charlotte and Jake at The Head of the House the night before.

  Liam picked up the camera, switched it on and aimed it at the family.

  Elizabeth Tanner was pushing a buggy while walking her eldest by her side. Maisie Tanner skipped along and smiled ebulliently, full of youth and a zest for life. Inside the buggy was Ellie Tanner, Jake’s second daughter. Liam had been thrilled – ecstatic, even – to learn that they’d decided to name the child after his own mother. It was an honour, which made it even more of a shame that it had come to this. He liked Jake, Elizabeth, his family – they were loving, caring, welcoming people. But Jake had become a hiccup, and now they all needed to be dealt with in the same way.

  We’re going to pour water down this little problem’s neck.

  Eventually, Elizabeth and the girls found a seat on a nearby bench. The space was empty and Elizabeth was quick to occupy it all. She pushed the buggy along to the end of the bench, sat Maisie to her left beside the buggy and then herself on the other end. Then she reached down to the storage compartment and pulled out a bag, the contents of which made Liam’s stomach grumble even louder.

  For the next few minutes, he trained the camera on them as he watched them eat, snapping photos of them as they did. While he sat there, he tried not to think of Jake and how he had everything Liam had envisaged for himself: beautiful wife, beautiful children, beautiful home, beautiful life. He tried not to think of the fact that he’d never had children, never had the time to start a family with his wife, never had the courage to start one. It was his own fault really; only himself to blame.

  Something up ahead distracted him, pulling him out of his thoughts.

  Elizabeth had dropped something on the ground. It was her purse, and as she bent down to pick it up, a man wearing a black jumper with his hood pulled over his face and his back to Liam reached for it and handed it to her.

  Quickly, Liam snapped a few images of the Good Samaritan returning her purse. A smirk grew on his lips.

  He was at the perfect angle.

  After the man had left, Liam opened the photo library on the device and scrolled through the photos. The small thumbnail clearly showed both Elizabeth and the Good Samaritan looking at one another, passing something between their hands.

  From the photo, there was no knowing what had been exchanged.

  From the photo, there was no knowing what their relationship was.

  And that was exactly how Liam wanted it. He imagined the headlines: cop’s wife caught in drug deal with kids in park.

  All it would take now was for him to plant a piece of evidence inside the Tanner household, and then he could really crank things up a gear and make Jake wish he’d never started this campaign against him. For too long the man had ignored the warnings, and now it was time to deal with the fallout.

  But first, before he did any of that, he would follow her for the rest of the day. Not just because she was nice to look at, but because he thought she might offer more opportunities to incriminate herself unknowingly. And he wanted to be there, ready to capture the moment when it happened.

  CHAPTER 79

  THE SOUND

  The Farmer was a man of his word. If he was given a contract, he would see it through to the end – no matter how reluctant he might be to finish it off. It made good business sense. More dead bodies meant more money. More dead bodies meant more clients. More dead bodies meant more business.

  But this next one was one he’d been looking forward to least.

  Things were beginning to get out of hand. He’d originally only been contracted for one: Danny Cipriano. That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. But there had been too much collateral with Richard Maddison, Pete Garrison and Michael Cipriano thrown in as well. Too many. All in such a short space of time. And now he’d been forced to add his own team member into the mix. Nigel’s death was unfortunate but vital. The man had been complacent, and if the contracts were going to keep coming in at the same rate they had been, then Georgiy couldn’t allow any form of complacency.

  His next appointment had come from above, direct from The Cabal.

  The reasons are twofold, The Cabal had told him on the Kingdom of Empires messaging platform. She knows too much. She’s a liability. Second, you’re doing this to hurt someone. Liam hasn’t been doing his job. He’s getting weak. Now you need to teach him and someone else an important lesson.

  The bounty on Danika Oblak’s head had been placed at an extra hundred thousand pounds. The price of silence.

  Georgiy cast his mind back to the day before. How she’d been as high as a kite, passed out on her own sofa, struggling to cope with the drugs coursing through her veins. A part of him hoped she’d overdosed, so he could earn the easiest hundred grand of his life. But he knew the reality of it was different; from the amount of drugs on the coffee table, she’d only be knocked out for a couple of hours. More than likely, she was alive.

  For now.

  Georgiy prepared himself by wrapping a pair of thick, black leather gloves over his hands. Leather was hot and sticky, but fingerprints could bleed through latex, and as he removed the Beretta M9 from beneath the passenger seat and placed it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket, he realised he didn’t want any traceable markers pointing back to him. Inside his other pocket was a sound suppressor and a mask.

  Pulling the face mask over his head, he opened the car door, swung his legs out and sauntered the short distance to the house, surveying his surroundings. There was nobody around.

  Georgiy pressed the buzzer, listening intently for the sound of life.

  It was there. The sound of coughing. Movement. The television playing in the background.

  Footsteps approaching.

  He wrapped his hand around the gun just as the front door opened.

  Before Danika could react, Georgiy thrust the Beretta into her face and placed his finger to his lips.

  ‘Nice and easy,’ he said. ‘You understand?’

  Danika nodded, the whites of her eyes illuminating the rest of her face.

  ‘In you go.’ Georgiy pushed the nose of the gun harder against her skin, forcing her into the house.

  Danika stepped backwards into the hallway, keeping her eyes locked on his. Behind him, Georgiy bolted the door shut.

  Once they were in the living room, Georgiy ordered her to sit down on the sofa. He moved to the front windows, pulled the curtains shut and then muted the television.

  ‘Are you here to kill me?’ she asked.

  ‘Is not personal,’ Georgiy said, his fingers beginning to get sweaty beneath the leather. ‘They pay me get rid people like you – people who know too much. They worried about grassing.’ He struggled to say the final word. It was a new addition to his English vocabulary.

  ‘Aren’t you curious to know what I know?’ Danika eased herself into the sofa, like she was making herself comfortable, already accepting of her fate. ‘I could tell you things, you know. A lot of things.’

  ‘Why I want that?’

  Danika shrugged. ‘Use it to your advantage. Help work your way to the top.’

  ‘You bargain for life? You think I won’t kill you?’

  Danika shook her head. ‘I’ve seen what’s been going on in the news. I saw what you did to Danny. And Michael. And Richard. And Garrison. I know there’s no escape – I’ve known for a long time that something like this was going to happen. But you don’t understand how fucking painful it is not being able to tell anyone about it. Now I don’t have to live in fear of the consequence, because I can pass the burden on to you. Don’t you want to find out where your money’s coming from so you can get more of it?’

  Georgiy didn’t reply. He lowered the gun to his hip. The Cabal was a person of extreme secrecy and betrayal. And in his business, those were unfavourable characteristics. There would always be the concern in the back of his mind that The Cabal could, at any moment, hi
re another contract killer and place a bounty on his own head. He wanted to be prepared for if – and when – that day came.

  A smile grew on Danika’s face. She flashed a set of yellow and black teeth that hinted her drug and smoking addiction wasn’t a recent affliction.

  ‘Gotcha,’ she said, winking at him. She reached across the sofa, grabbed her handbag and overturned it. A bottle of vodka spilled out onto the cushion, and a bag of weed landed beside it, along with a packet of Rizla, filters and tobacco. He watched intently as she rolled the weed and tobacco into a joint.

  ‘You mind? I wanna be relaxed when you kill me.’

  Georgiy shook his head, incredulous at was happening.

  ‘You want some?’ she asked, licking at the paper before rolling it tightly.

  Georgiy shook his head again.

  She grunted. ‘I understand. You don’t wanna get pulled over driving under the influence. That shit carries a max sentence of fourteen years.’

  ‘What you think I’m here to do? I not here to chat.’ Georgiy raised the gun and pointed it at her head again.

  She pulled the joint away from her mouth and stared at him.

  ‘You’d think I’d be scared, right? I wish I was; I really do. But I’m not. I came to terms with dying a long time ago. There are things in my life that I can never set straight, and I gave up trying an even longer time ago. All because of that cunt Jake Tanner. If he never caught the brothers in the first place, if he never put them in prison, then we wouldn’t be in this situation, you wouldn’t be holding a gun to my head and I wouldn’t want you to pull the trigger. How different our lives could have been.’

  Georgiy opened his mouth but struggled to say anything. This woman didn’t deserve to die. She wasn’t a criminal. She hadn’t hurt anyone. Stolen from anyone. Murdered anyone. Raped anyone. Her only crime was having knowledge. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And now she was suffering for it. Judging by her frail body, it looked like she’d been suffering for a long time.

  A bullet in her skull would only speed up the process.

  Georgiy lowered the gun and started towards the living room door.

  ‘Where are you going? You’re going to leave me here… alone?’

  ‘You’ve got your vodka.’

  ‘One bottle isn’t going to do too much.’

  Georgiy froze in the door frame and looked down at the weapon in his hands. It was unregistered and the serial numbers had been scratched off. There was no DNA on it, no fingerprints, nothing. It was a ghost, just like him.

  He removed the magazine from the weapon, decanted all the bullets bar one into the palm of his hand and then placed it on the arm of the chair.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘I leave up to you.’

  Georgiy shut the door behind him.

  He idled down the hallway, opened the front door and headed towards the van, keeping his head low. As he opened the driver’s door, he heard the unmistakable sound of a gun firing from inside Danika Oblak’s house.

  His fingers wrapped around the sound suppressor in his pocket.

  CHAPTER 80

  MR MCNULTY

  Drew had never felt so paranoid in his life and it was beginning to feel like it had all come at once. Thirty-three years’ worth of life and paranoia and fear, all rolled into one. His leg drummed on the floor of his car and his eyes constantly bounced between the time on his dashboard and the empty multi-storey car park in front of him.

  He was on the fourth level, parked in the usual spot. He just hoped that there had been no issues or delays with his reservation; the manner in which they communicated always meant it was a one-way stream. If anything had gone wrong, or if he’d somehow missed his slot, he wouldn’t know until a few hours later, when his appointment was a no-show.

  In the past, Drew had only ever needed to use their services once before.

  It had been for a friend of his. A criminal. Convicted of multiple murders in a single gang-and-drug-related incident. Drew had been the one to help his friend evade capture then, and he’d never heard from him since. He supposed that was a good thing. If his friend could disappear, then he hoped he could too.

  The sound of a car engine bouncing off the walls disturbed him. For a moment, he held his breath, for fear it was Jake or Charlotte or Liam or Hannah or someone else he’d managed to hurt in the past. But as he realised the number plate was false, he relaxed.

  Keeping his body upright, he slid his left hand across to the passenger seat and wrapped his fingers around the flick knife he’d bought months ago as an extra source of protection. He hadn’t needed to use it yet, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to, but it made him feel safe knowing that he had it in his possession. It reminded him of all those stats that the press banged on about in an attempt to stop people carrying knives. That you’re more likely to stab yourself than someone else. Bullshit. He was prepared to defend himself if it came to it, just like all others who carried one. The way he saw it, if you pull a knife out on someone, you intend to hurt them, and you most certainly know what you’re doing. It’s the ones who don’t know what they’re doing that get hurt, that become a part of the statistics. And Drew wasn’t about to become another one of those.

  The driver pulled the car to a stop. It was an old, sky-blue Ford Mondeo with blacked-out windows in the back and a suspension that had been lowered considerably. Whoever owned it was clearly still living in the late nineties.

  The driver killed the engine. Drew tightened his fingers around the blade.

  Keeping his head low, Drew exited and briskly walked over to the car. As he approached, the driver lowered the window. In the low light, Drew was able to discern the same features of the man he’d encountered last time. The broken nose. The grey hairs on his chin. The missing molar in his mouth.

  ‘Didnae think ah’d be seeing yer face again,’ the man said, his Scottish accent thick. The only name Drew had for him was his nickname: The Magnate. Other than that, details were kept scarce.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ Drew replied as he loosened his grip on the blade in his pocket. ‘Surprised you’re still going.’

  The Magnate grunted. ‘Aye, get in the front.’

  A little shocked, Drew shuffled round the back of the car and hopped in the passenger side. ‘Tightening up security now, are ya?’

  ‘Y’ken wha’ they say – cannae be too careful nowadays.’

  Without Drew realising it, the man reached into the side compartment of the door, pulled out a gun and pointed it at his chest.

  ‘What? Why?’ He’d always had a natural aversion to guns. They were too loud. Too deadly. Too dangerous. Too quick. Not to mention they were too fucking scary to deal with.

  ‘Security.’ The Magnate shrugged. ‘People like tae think they can tak’ things withoot paying for ’em. That’s how ah lost this…’ He pointed the nose of the gun at his tooth. ‘Bastards nearly beat me tae death.’

  ‘All over some documents?’

  ‘People’ll do anything tae get oot o’ tha country nowadays. Cannae get oot o’ this shithole fast enough. Cannae blame ’em really.’ The Magnate turned the gun back on Drew. ‘Yer pockets – empty ’em.’

  Drew swallowed hard. ‘Come on, man… is that necessary?’

  ‘Empty ’em!’

  Slowly, Drew put his right hand into his pocket and pulled the inside out. Then, he removed his left. At the sight of the small, concealed switchblade, The Magnate’s expression remained impassive. Saying nothing, he reached across and snatched the weapon from Drew’s grasp.

  ‘Add that tae the collection. Dinnae try it next time, otherwise ah’ll mak’ sure this is loaded.’ The Magnate wiggled the gun in front of Drew’s face. ‘You have the other thing ah asked for?’

  ‘You didn’t ask for it,’ Drew said, reaching into his trouser pocket. ‘You didn’t tell me a price, so I assumed it was the same rate as before. It’s not gone up, has it?’

  Before the man had a chance to respond, Drew handed him a
wad of money that he’d concealed in the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Fifty grand. It’s all there. All yours,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to count it, are you?’

  The man said nothing and, still keeping the gun pointed at Drew’s face, removed a brown envelope from the glove compartment and dropped it onto Drew’s lap.

  ‘Yer lobster, sir. Passport. Driving licence. Debit cards. Credit cards. National Insurance number. Twenty-thousand euros o’ liquidated assets in an offshore account – all in tha’ wee book.’ The man removed the gun from Drew’s face, slid it back into the door pocket and placed his hands on the steering wheel. ‘We’re done here. Tak’ yer things and leave. Oh, and enjoy the rest o’ yer life, Mr McNulty.’

  CHAPTER 81

  TOP BOY

  Vitaly recalled what Tatiana had insisted on reminding him of, like he was a little child. Keep your head down. Don’t look at anyone funny. Don’t say anything to anyone. Don’t even think about anyone. And, most importantly of all, don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.

  His errand was simple, so why did they insist on making it so fucking hard?

  Vitaly tucked his chin into his chest as he strode along the street, fighting his instinct to look at the short skirt that had just walked past him. A few feet later, he stopped by a red telephone box and turned left. In front of him was an off-licence, and to his right was the entrance to a multi-storey car park.

  Keeping his head down, Vitaly entered the off-licence, bounded up to the cash register, grabbed a handful of the nearest pay-as-you-go SIMs from the revolving carousel beside him and slammed them onto the counter.

  ‘Anything else?’ the proprietor asked.

  ‘Nah.’

  The three of them were rapidly running out of SIM cards to use – especially when they were supposed to destroy them after each and every hit. But that hadn’t quite gone to plan – not with the number of contracts they were receiving. They simply didn’t have the time.