The car had completed its three-point turn, but Fletcher stood in its way with her hands planted on the hood, and the portly man apparently didn’t have the gumption to actually run her over because he just sat behind the steering wheel, staring out the windshield at her with wide eyes. Dune was on the ground, clutching her face, but Carmichael seized her arm and dragged her upright just as Barron shot another roman candle at Fletcher.
“Look out!” I yelled, and Fletcher’s head snapped around just in time to see the colourful blast rushing toward her. She flung herself away from the car, barely managing to get out of the firework’s way before it struck the bonnet and fizzled out.
The distraction gave Carmichael and Dune just enough time to jump into the back of the car, and now that Fletcher was out of the way, the portly man hit the accelerator and shoot forward. Fletcher jumped at the car one more time, but she checked the motion halfway through, clearly realising that it was a futile gesture.
“Back to the car!” I shouted to Fletcher as Barron flung a few more fireworks at us for good measure. I scowled harshly at him as I started to run down the street after the fleeing car, pointing a finger his way to promise him that we’d be back for him. He responded by shooting his last roman candle at me.
Fletcher and I sprinted toward my car, and I yanked my keys out of my pocket, almost dropping them in my haste, hitting the fob when we were still ten feet away. I practically threw myself into the driver’s seat, jamming the key into the ignition and twisting. We were facing the wrong way to go chasing after the fleeing car, and I wasted precious time turning us around, though I tried to make the manoeuvre as fast and economical as possible.
Our quarry was already at the far end of the street, turning to the left at breakneck speed, and I left the engine in a low gear even as it howled at me, wanting to squeeze as much extra acceleration out of it as I could.
“Come on, come on,” I growled, half to myself and half to my car.
I had to slow as I reached the end of the street. Otherwise, I wasn’t making that turn. I gritted my teeth and prepared to yank the wheel to the side, one hand on the stick so I could shift into the right gear as soon as I was done with the turn, but just as the nose of my car poked out into the junction, a van flashed by coming the other way, and I hit the brakes to avoid a collision, hauling on the wheel to get us out of the way. My tyres squealed, and Fletcher braced her hand on the dashboard as the centrifugal force tried to pull us from our seats. I barely dodged the oncoming car, but the manoeuvre spun us almost one hundred and eighty degrees, and one wheel popped up onto the kerb. The van blew by without bothering to stop to check on us.
The car rocked on its wheels as it finally came to a stop, and all three of us held our breath as the world steadied around us. My hands were locked around the wheel, and my eyes wouldn’t blink as I stared out the windshield.
“Holy crap,” Fletcher gasped from the passenger seat, her hand still braced against the dash.
“Is everyone okay?” I asked shakily, adrenaline coursing through my veins.
“I am,” Fletcher said, and she carefully twisted her neck to look back at Alec. “You?”
He patted his limbs a couple of times, then nodded. “I think so. But it looks like our quarry’s gotten away.”
I undid my seatbelt and climbed out of the car, so I could step into the road and look for Carmichael’s black car. It was long gone, disappearing into the neighbourhood’s warren of streets while we were trying to avoid being squashed by a van.
I let out a deep sigh.
“Damn it.”
Ten
Fletcher, Alec, and I stood in the street in almost identical positions, our hands on our hips as we searched futilely for our prey. I knew it was a waste of time. They were gone, and by the time I got the car off the kerb and turned around in the right direction, they could be anywhere amongst the maze-like streets of this neighbourhood, headed in any direction.
“Let’s go have a chat with Mr Barron, shall we?” I suggested darkly, glowering down the street in the direction the van had disappeared in. I was willing to bet good money that he’d sent the vehicle to waylay us so his clients, such as they were, could get away.
Fletcher cracked her knuckles. “Sounds good to me.”
So we piled back into the car, and I reversed carefully until the tyre bumped back down onto the road, wanting to be sure nothing was stuck on the kerb. Then I started back the way we’d come, eyeing each sidestreet warily to make sure there weren’t about to be any more surprises around the corner.
“He’s not going to be there,” Alec pointed out.
“Doesn’t mean we can’t search the place,” I said.
Fletcher was apparently already way ahead of me on that count, as she had her phone out and was talking to a Justice of the Peace to get us an expedited warrant. In the meantime, as Barron had attacked us with fireworks, and we’d seen him assisting known criminals, the circumstances permitted us to go in as we waited for the warrant to arrive.
A few moments later, we were pulling up outside Barron’s house. I twisted around in my seat to look at Alec.
“I want you to stay here until we ascertain whether or not Barron’s still in the building,” I told him. “I’m starting to think we might need you as our ace in the hole, so we can’t have him seeing you with us and tipping anyone off. If he’s not there, I’ll call you forward. We could use an extra pair of eyes when we search the place.”
For once, Alec didn’t protest being left behind. He just nodded and leant back in his seat. “I’ll be here.”
I led the charge out of the car and across the street to Barron’s front door. Fletcher spun in a circle once as we stepped up onto the pavement, no doubt checking for extra threats or traps, but all seemed calm. Maybe a little too calm. I pounded on the door as hard as I could, each thud resonating through the silent neighbourhood.
“Inverness police! Open up!” I called.
There was no answer from within, not even the sound of footsteps moving away, so I rapped on the door again.
“We’ve got a warrant to search the premises! Open up now.”
“Looks like Alec was right,” Fletcher said. “Barron’s gone.”
“How about we let ourselves in, then?” I suggested with a bit of a wicked glint in my eye. Fletcher matched my expression as she smirked. “Want to do the honours?”
“I would love to,” she said, and I moved to the side so she could square up against the door. Then she reared back and kicked out as hard as she could, knocking the door in with a great crash and a spray of wood as the area around the lock tore.
She put her foot down, and we paused on the threshold, listening carefully for any sign of movement within. When silence met our ears, I turned around and waved at Alec, motioning him forward. He stepped out of the car and hurried over to us, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his dark coat.
“What are we looking for?” he asked, rising onto his tiptoes so he could peer over Fletcher’s and my shoulders into the dark foyer beyond.
“Any communication between him and Carmichael’s crew would be great,” I said as I carefully moved into the building and hunted around on the wall for a light switch. “Especially if it tells us where Carmichael might go. We’ll want evidence we can use to arrest this guy, too.”
“Once we find him,” Fletcher said.
“Right,” I agreed. “Let’s split up. We’ll cover more ground that way. By the way, did anyone get a plate number off Carmichael’s car?”
“I clocked it,” Fletcher said, and she pulled her little notebook from her pocket so she could jot it down before she forgot. “Hopefully, this is right. There was kind of a lot going on.”
“Do you want to text that to Martin and ask him to run it as well?” I asked. “No doubt they’ll ditch it soon, but it can’t hurt.”
“On it,” Fletcher said, and her fingers began to fly across her phone screen. “Do we need to give Dunnel a call, too?”<
br />
“Probably. I’ll take care of it while we search.”
“You might want to keep an eye out for booby traps,” Alec said as the three of us began to move deeper into the house. “If I remember correctly, Barron’s a big fan of those. He’s had plenty of people try to move against him, so he’s gotten pretty adept at driving them away.”
“That is… good to know,” I said and immediately looked down at my feet to make sure I wasn’t about to trip any kind of wire.
The three of us split up. Fletcher went upstairs while Alec began to poke around the ground floor after he’d pointed out a door that I could use to get into the basement. I called Dunnel before I went down, unsure if I’d lose signal.
“Dunnel,” he said gruffly by way of greeting.
“I’ve got an update for you on the bank case,” I said, leaning against the wall while I spoke to him. “We chased down a lead on a potential fence we thought the robbers might use, and we managed to run into them here. We tried to apprehend them, but the fence helped them get away. They definitely still have the money on them, though. We’re searching the fence’s place for any evidence now.”
“Martin told me you’d gotten a name and description from some confidential informant,” Dunnel said. “Care to tell me who that is?”
I glanced down the hall where Alec had disappeared into the kitchen. “That would sort of defeat the point of it being confidential, wouldn’t it, Chief?”
Dunnel hesitated, and in the silence, I could tell he wanted to press the issue, but he eventually relented. “Fine. Do you need backup or support over there?”
“Might not hurt to have a constable keep an eye on the place once we’re done here,” I said. “We could probably use Adams’ help to go over everything, too.”
“I’ll send her over,” Dunnel said.
The two of us hung up, and I put the phone in my pocket before I turned to inspect the door to the basement. Most houses like this didn’t have basements, and I wondered if this was some kind of secret addition Barron had made to aid his business. I cracked the door open and peeked through into the darkness beyond, running my eyes over everything to check for anything out of the ordinary. It all seemed normal, so I opened the door the rest of the way and found the light switch on the wall to my right.
The stairs were wooden and bare, while the walls were cement and just a little uneven in spots. The steps creaked as I tested my weight on them, wanting to be sure they were stable, and the air grew considerably cooler as I descended below ground. The staircase was short, and it wasn’t long before I stepped off it and opened a door into a small, low ceilinged room that definitely didn’t quite match the dimensions of the space above.
I whistled as I looked around. Barron certainly had an impressive work space set up down here. I spotted a 3-D printer in the corner, and the two rectangular tables in the centre of the room were stuffed full of other equipment. I was pretty sure I recognised the kind of laser one might use to clean diamonds, and there was a money counter as well. There were a couple of expensive-looking paintings and small statues in the corner, no doubt waiting to be passed on to their buyers, and Barron had a computer array to rival the one in Martin’s lab. We needed to get Adams down here to bag and tag everything so we could figure out just how much illegal stuff was going on in this room.
I made my way over to the computer. Any communication between Barron and Carmichael would most likely be electronic. It was just a question of if I could get past Barron’s security on my own or if I’d need Martin for that. I pulled on a pair of gloves and tapped the space bar to wake the left monitor up, and a log-in screen appeared, asking for a password. I had no way of guessing it, so I sat down in the desk chair, opened up the desk drawers, and began to hunt around for any notes that might contain the password. I doubted Barron was the kind of person who wrote that sort of thing down, but it was still worth a look.
I was still at it five minutes later when Fletcher came clattering down the stairs, Alec close behind her. I closed up the drawer I’d been searching through, and stood as Fletcher whistled just like I had, her eyes wide as she took in Barron’s work space.
“This is something else,” she said.
“Did you guys find anything?” I asked.
She shrugged and seesawed her hand back and forth. “Not really. I poked through his bedroom. His laptop’s still up there. He probably didn’t have time to grab it when he bailed, but it’s locked. I couldn’t get in.”
“Same here,” I said, gesturing to the computer behind me. “Alec?”
“I searched the kitchen and living room pretty thoroughly,” he answered as he drifted over to take a look at the art in the corner. “He obviously keeps all his criminal activity confined to this room. The upstairs looked perfectly normal.”
“I guess there’s not much for us to do until Adams gets here then,” I said. “We don’t want to disturb too much of this stuff before she gets here. She likes to keep a pristine crime scene.”
Fletcher snorted out a laugh. “I moved a leaf once, and she yelled at me for, like, five minutes.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that. It was pretty funny,” I said, grinning.
Fletcher gave me the evil eye. “Yes. Thanks for just standing in the corner snickering at me while I got chewed out like that. What a great friend.”
I made a clicking sound with my mouth and shot two finger guns her way.
If Fletcher were closer, she probably would have punched me, but luckily, the space between us saved me from that, for the moment.
“Alec, let’s head back upstairs,” I called to the thief. He was crouched in front of one of the paintings, studying it intently.
“Are you sure--?” he began, but I cut him off before he could get halfway through his question.
“Yes, let’s go.”
He huffed out a sigh and pushed back to his feet, casting one last, lingering look down at the art before he turned around and started toward Fletcher and me, already on our way to the stairs.
A click slipped through the air. It was barely there, almost lost beneath the hum of the machines in the basement, but a shiver of ice went down my spine, and I paused, one foot on the first stair so that Fletcher was trapped behind me.
“What?” she asked.
I didn’t answer, but I slowly craned my neck around to look behind me at Alec. He was three-fourths of the way across the room to the staircase, but he’d frozen in place, his face white as a sheet beneath his dark cap and red hair.
“What?” Fletcher repeated.
I scooted to the side just far enough to make space for her. “Get outside, Fletcher.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Now!” I snapped, and Fletcher jumped at the sudden intensity in my voice.
She hesitated a second longer, then pushed past me to rush up the stairs, her boots thudding loudly against each wooden step. I turned around the rest of the way, so I was fully facing Alec, who was still stuck in that same position, his arms slightly out to the side for balance.
“What seems to be the problem?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice as level and calm as possible. I could already see his chest heaving away as he began to hyperventilate, and I didn’t want to make his anxiety any worse than it already was.
“I seem to have stepped on a pressure plate,” he said, barely breathing, as if the act would somehow set off the trap.
“Okay,” I said as my heart thundered away in my chest. “Okay. It’s going to be okay. You just need to stay there until help arrives. We can call someone in to defuse it and get you out of there.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be possible,” Alec replied shakily.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I can hear it ticking.”
My heart dropped into my boots as my mind raced to find a solution. I cast around the room like there would be something I could do, some wire I could pull to stop all this, but there was so much going on with all t
he equipment that I couldn’t pinpoint anything helpful.
“You go upstairs after Fletcher,” Alec ordered. He was trying to sound authoritative, but all I heard was his fear, “and when you’re clear, I’ll make a break for it.”
“No,” I said without any hesitation. “I’m not leaving you here.”
Alec glowered at me from his frozen position. “MacBain--”
“No,” I repeated more forcefully. “I won’t leave you behind.”
“So, what are we going to do?” Alec asked, and he looked relieved that I wasn’t abandoning him.
I stepped off the staircase and moved swiftly over to him, peering down at his shoe and the faintly depressed floor beneath it. Now that I was closer, I could hear the ticking he’d mentioned, and it seemed alarmingly swift.
“What if we swap out your weight with something else, Indiana Jones style?” I suggested. “Then we buy ourselves some time to run for the exit.”
“Yeah? And what are you going to match the weight of an adult human?” Alec snapped.
“It could be calibrated to a lower weight,” I said.
“Sure, it is,” Alec sneered, his fear getting the better of him and turning him nasty.
He had a point. I didn’t see anything in the room that would match his weight, not that I could move easily, in any case, and in that short time that I’d been standing beside him, the ticking had increased in pace. We didn’t have any time left.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said.
I crossed quickly back to the door to the stairs, grabbing a spanner off the table on the way, and jammed one end under the door as far as it would go, not trusting that there wasn’t some kind of trigger that would slam the door in our faces as soon as Alec’s weight came off the plate. Then I jogged back to Alec and held out my arm to him.
“Take my hand,” I said, but he just stared at my fingers blankly, fear overriding his mind. “Now!” I yelled.
Alec jumped and snatched up my hand, crushing my fingers in his.
Fatal Transaction: A DCI MacBain Scottish Crime Thriller Page 14
