Betrayed

by Jake Cross

  Following her instructions, he had left the caravan, shut the door and jammed the two-pence piece into the side of the doorframe a foot from the base. It had been quite visible because it was brown metal against white plastic.

  ‘If the door opens, the coin falls,’ Toni had told him before he left. ‘Only against a sincere attempt by me to prevent it will that door open before you get back.’

  ‘Gone past,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘Not him.’

  Toni felt relief, and fear. She didn’t think Nate would have stood a chance of taking out these guys – the relief. But he had been gone a long time now – the fear. Maybe he’d fled after all, now that he had a new car and a name to chase. But at least these bozos didn’t have him.

  Lazar and his henchman had been waiting by the door, one either side. The hitman had put his hands behind his back, pretending to be all tied up and full of fear again. Now that guy relaxed and Lazar and Hitler came back into the living room. Lazar looked annoyed. He yanked the gaffer tape off her mouth.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t believe he’ll be back,’ said the hitman.

  ‘Maybe he got fries with his burger,’ Toni said. Hitler laughed and Lazar gave him a hard look, which shut him up.

  Lazar sat on the sofa and swung up his legs and put them on her lap. Dropped them hard enough to make her grunt. He leaned back and got nice and comfortable.

  ‘So we wait.’

  ‘I think that’s a bad idea,’ the hitman said.

  ‘We wait.’

  A road marked ‘Deliveries only’ curved around the back of the semi-circular entertainment complex and Nate followed it to a secluded staff car park bookended by a thin river and a walled yard for bins. He parked and locked the car – there might be thieves around – and walked back the way he’d come. If there were watchers, he didn’t want them to see the same car lurking around again.

  He entered Shadows, the caravan plot next to his own, and made his way towards the berm that separated it from Seagull Wings. He found a spot that allowed him to see Starfish and a portion of the plot. There was a map on a board so he pretended to study it while surveying his surroundings. He was looking for people who seemed out of place. People with seemingly nothing to do but be where they were.

  He waited.

  Half an hour. Nothing. Lazar was getting impatient. He didn’t speak, but he paced a lot, and snorted a lot. Like an angry bull locked in a cage. Hitler and the hitman seemed to get annoyed by his constant noise and movement within such a small space. But they said nothing. And Toni said nothing. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Nobody had even acknowledged her existence in the last ten minutes or so.

  Eventually Lazar stopped pacing and got on his phone and made a call. He went into the corridor to the bedrooms and shut the door. It was an important call, Toni could tell. Lazar listened more than he spoke. Lazar’s voice easily came through the thin door, but all he uttered was the odd affirmative. Whoever he was talking to, it seemed to be a superior. She heard him bid goodbye to whoever was on the phone, but the door did not open. Seconds later, he was talking again. Another call. He was more in charge with this call, and Toni figured he was talking to his watcher outside. But this time his voice was quieter and his words were distorted.

  Then he was back, and his face said things had changed. Toni’s suspicions climbed a level. He approached Hitler and whispered in his ear.

  ‘What’s happening?’ the hitman said.

  Lazar faced Toni. ‘Change of plan,’ Lazar said. ‘We’re out of here in one minute.’

  ‘This place is compromised,’ the hitman said. ‘We need to sterilise it.’

  ‘No,’ Lazar said. Hitler went to the knife block and extracted a long blade. Lazar stood before Toni and grinned at her. ‘This place is a crime scene. We’re leaving a dead body behind.’

  To be certain, Nate approached the exit. He stopped by a tree and pretended to be interested in how the bark would flake under a fingernail. But what he was really interested in was the car parked on the main road.

  It was fifty metres away from his position, in a lay-by on the far side of the main road. Mid-way between this plot and his own. Not proof of anything, he told himself.

  Nate exited the plot and ran across the road and stopped. Here the curve of the road put the car out of sight behind the hedge, but that meant he was out of sight, too. He made sure no-one was watching then ungracefully clambered over the hedge and into Leafy Oak. There was a scattering of people on their doorsteps and walking the roads and hanging about, but nobody seemed to have watched his strange entrance, or those who had didn’t give a shit.

  He followed a path that hugged the hedge some ten metres out, all the while watching the main road through the foliage. When the grey of tarmac was suddenly interrupted, he stopped and focused his sight and knew that the blockage was a car.

  He approached the hedge slowly. The car rose into view slowly above the hedge.

  A skinny guy with a buzz cut sat in the driver’s seat, far side. Just sitting there, but with his head turned so he could stare out the window. Above and beyond the car was Seagull Wings. Nate looked carefully and spotted Starfish. Not proof of anything, he told himself again.

  A car came up the road. Its headlights briefly washed the parked car. Then it was gone. But the light had lit up the dashboard of the parked car and allowed Nate to see what rested there.

  A pair of binoculars.

  Proof. His heart started thumping.

  Making sure no-one was watching, Nate pulled out the syringe he’d pocketed and approached the hedge. Another glance around, and then he hopped on top and rolled and came to his feet on the other side, then he ducked and approached the car and squatted by the rear passenger-side door, all in one, fluid motion. The plastic tube that had capped the syringe’s needle slipped from his fingers.

  Something his army comrades had said about him: he could be nervous as hell about the prospect of danger, until it was in his face. Then, he forgot his reservations and dove right in. He was in that zone right now. There was no fear. And none of it was down to the vodka he’d consumed. He knew what he had to do and all that remained was to do it.

  He peeked through the window. As he did, something lit up on the dashboard. A phone. A call, although he couldn’t hear a ringtone. Buzzcut snatched it up and stuck it against his head. Ten seconds later the call was done and the phone was back on the dashboard, but the binoculars weren’t.

  Buzzcut was using them to watch Starfish, which was over a hundred metres away. Nate risked standing up so he could look over the roof. Just for one second, a quick up-and-down. Just that single one-second glance, and the dark and the distance hindered him, but he registered three things, each worse than the last.

  First, the lights in Starfish were off. Second, there was a vehicle parked outside – not the neighbours’ car, because this vehicle was on the other side of the caravan. Third, he saw human activity in the vicinity of both vehicles – three people moving from one to the other.

  Undeniable, then. The kill crew had come for them, just as Toni had thought. One guy to watch from a distance and a number of others to enter the caravan.

  Where Toni was. Which meant they had her.

  He knew if he waited too long, he might feel the danger passing, and back would come the nerves. So he dove right in while the momentum of action was still within him. He yanked open the front passenger door and dove inside, a hand raised, thrust forward. The syringe’s needle had been aimed at the back of Buzzcut’s neck, but he managed to turn his head from the window and Nate felt it jab the jawbone. But it skidded off and angled down and sank into his throat. The door’s opening had kicked on the interior light and Nate saw everything in great detail.

  Buzzcut swiped at Nate’s arm, knocking it away. The syringe stayed in the side of his throat, aimed upwards like a clock hand at 2 o’clock. Nate backed out of the car. The guy stared at him, then reached for the syringe,
horror all over his face, as if he might believe a knife protruded from his flesh.

  He yanked the syringe free and stared at it. The horror heightened within him. This guy, Nate knew, was well aware of what that green shit in the tube was all about.

  ‘Shit,’ Buzzcut said. He looked around, into the back seat, as if for a weapon, or an antidote. Then he gave it up, perhaps realising that one did not exist and the other would not help. He looked at Nate. ‘You got it wrong, pal,’ he said, and already his eyes were closing and his voice wavering. ‘Shit. Don’t fuck me up, mate. I’m only here to…’ He knew what was coming and tried to fight it. He pinched his own face, hard, like someone trying to stay awake. His eyes, just before they closed, turned puzzled, as if the English language had deserted his failing brain.

  ‘Only here to what?’ Nate said. He got in the passenger seat and slapped the guy’s cheek. Conversely to his intention, the blow seemed to knock the last fragments of consciousness away. Or was it just comical timing? Either way, one second post-slap, the guy’s chin fell onto his chest and he was gone.

  Nate shut the door to kill the interior light. Alternative light took its place as another car came up the road. Then all was dark again. His brain raced. Who was this guy? On the back seat was a jacket, which he searched. The inside pocket contained a snub-nosed revolver, fully loaded. Probably what the guy had been thinking about grabbing before he’d realised it might be safer for him to fall unconscious without letting Nate know there was a lethal weapon he could freely take. Nate freely took it. He was surprised at how alien it felt in his hand. Once upon a time, he’d carried firearms daily. And used them.

  The gun proved nothing, but another pocket contained a clear indication that this guy had come here for Nate. A photo of Nate printed on thin paper. The image was a selfie Nate had taken on his phone for his LinkedIn profile. Maybe Buzzcut was a new addition to the kill crew and the photo was so he’d know his target. Maybe the photo was for showing to people at the caravan park – Looking for my brother. Got some bad news for him about our dad. Ya seen this guy around?

  But the photo didn’t seem to fit with what the guy had said: You got it wrong… I’m only here to… What did that mean? That he hadn’t been sent to capture Nate? Then what was he here for?

  Nate slipped low in the seat as the car that had been by his caravan slipped into the road some fifty metres away and turned away from him, towards the exit. Both indicators flashed – clearly a signal. Nate reached for the stalk with the controls for the lights and flashed them on and back off once, hoping that he was adequately responding to nothing more than a see ya later signal. The car sped away, so maybe he’d gotten away with it.

  Nate now couldn’t doubt that the car contained a kill crew. And they had been to the caravan, where they would have found Toni.

  The question was, what had they done to her?

  He would have to return to the caravan to find out.

  Nate dragged Buzzcut out of the passenger seat and into a fireman’s lift. The gate barring the walled area housing the bins was thankfully unlocked. He dumped the guy in a bin.

  The revolver went into a pocket. He’d also found a clamshell mobile phone in the glove box and now sat and scrutinised it. Like Damar’s, and Toni’s, it was a burner bought just for a single mission. No text messages, no contacts in the phone book, no stored music or e-mail account or personalised home screen. There was one number in the call history, but it was incomplete. The first seven digits of a mobile number. A faulty input, or maybe Buzzcut had the final four digits memorised. No use to Nate. The clamshell design made the device easy to snap. He left the pieces in the passenger footwell. The sim card got bent into a chevron and tossed into the darkness.

  Because he wasn’t sure if others in the kill crew had been left behind, and because the woman who used Fettlers Autos might have reported her car missing by now, Nate decided not to use a vehicle to return to Starfish. So he walked.

  His neighbours were outside, and they had brought friends. At least eight people were grouped outside the caravan. Drinking from cans of alcohol, standing around chatting to each other. The door was open and loud music drifted out. A regular alfresco party. A girl was handing out slices of pizza. A guy was waving a video camera around. Nate wondered if the kid was crying in bed because he couldn’t sleep.

  He had no idea if there were other baddies awaiting him inside the caravan, but he was sure that eight or nine witnesses fifteen feet away had made them reassess their plans. They certainly made him change his. He had intended to creep up to the caravan nice and slow and peek in the window, but now he strolled right up to the door and knocked.

  No bullets tore through the door and into him. He heard no commotion from within.

  ‘No-one in, mate,’ shouted a voice, and he turned to see a guy looking at him.

  ‘It’s mine,’ Nate said, and opened the door. Black as an abyssal plain inside. A dangerous moment. The kill crew’s plan to blame Nate for all this shit wouldn’t work if his body was found in a leisure park, but maybe they were beyond all that now. Maybe they just wanted him dead any old how. A nuisance fly that you couldn’t coerce out the window eventually got swatted against the glass.

  So, he opened the door fully and pretended to have a problem hooking it to the latch on the wall, and he called out a fake girl’s name, asking if she was asleep in order to explain the darkness and silence within. Behind him, a quick glance proved that the partiers had forgotten him already.

  No sounds of movement, at least not any loud enough to hear above the racket behind him. So he steeled himself and stepped inside, and immediately saw a body.

  The hitman. With the door fully open, ambient light from next door’s caravan reflected off the blood all over the guy’s uniform. He was still in the chair, but now it was in the centre of the living room. His head lay back at an unnatural angle, allowed to do so by the lack of tension given by a taut throat since his had been sliced. Like Damar’s. This seemed to be their MO. He shut out a thought of Pete with his throat sliced.

  He shut the door and turned on the light. Someone told him he was alone here. At least, he was the only living thing.

  With the revolver now in his hand and leading the way, Nate searched the rest of the caravan. Each empty room accentuated his fear. When he was certain the place was empty, his anxiety reached full throttle. No bad guys present, but no Toni, either. They had taken her. She had been one of the three he’d seen leaving. But where had they taken her?

  And why?

  You got it wrong, pal… I’m only here to…

  Buzzcut had vanished.

  Shit. It seemed that the modified drug was unreliable. It had put Nate and the hitman out for quite a while, but Buzzcut had succumbed only for a few minutes. Or it was the dosage? Nate had retrieved the syringe and only half the green shit had gone into the guy’s system.

  The car driver’s door was wide open. Nate looked inside and saw the busted phone. No longer in the footwell, but on the dashboard. Both pieces lay close together, as if Buzzcut, disoriented still by the drug, had tried to slot them together like a little jigsaw. Hoodwinked by his enemy and unable to move his car, he had then decided he really needed to make a call. So what would he do when he was foiled in that, too?

  Go for another phone.

  Nate ran for the entertainment complex. The goods stores, the swimming pool, the bowling alley, and the Krazee Golf were closed, but the bar was still open and next to it something called FunUniverse oozed light from its windows. He remembered that the bar had no payphone. The only phone was the joint’s private landline, which was behind the bar. Buzzcut would have to ask the barman for permission to make a call on that phone, and Nate didn’t think Buzzcut was going to do such a thing.

  That left FunUniverse, which, with a name like that, could only be an amusement arcade. Nate entered into a world of noise and heat. Despite the late hour, it was rammed with kids and adults. Ahead of him three teenaged girls stam
ped on pads that flashed different colours as they tried to emulate the dance of an animated disco diva on a big computer screen. A beefy lad egged on by his two mates was gearing up to crack his radius on a punchbag. A middle-aged lady was being laughed at by her partner because she couldn’t dunk a mini-basketball into a mini-basket. Adults spun reels on fruit machines in search of jackpot pay-outs and kids twisted steering wheels to avoid smashing computer-generated race cars into computer-generated trees. And everybody seemed oblivious to everyone else. Except for one guy, who was in a black uniform and wearing rolls of tickets around his neck and shoulder like an ammunition belt. He approached Nate, but before he could utter a word from his sales pitch, Nate asked him if there was a payphone. A finger pointed the way.

  A quiet corner, near a fire exit and a vending machine, between a light gun shooter where you blasted big game with a big rifle, and a twin cockpit driving game that was black and dead. No-one was at either working machine or the phone. And that included Buzzcut. He wondered if he was too late. He wondered what was happening in the car carrying Toni – was she bound and gagged in the boot and headed somewhere, or had her captors dumped her dead body as soon as they’d found a remote spot outside the caravan park?

  Nate turned to leave, and froze.

  Buzzcut was ten metres away.

  He hadn’t seen Nate, though. It was clear that the drug still had a grip on him. He was staggering through the jubilant crowd like a guy suffering from diabetic shock, tapping people on the shoulder, saying something to each of them. Some ignored him and went about the business of fun. Some clearly gave him an earful. A woman pushed him aside. He seemed to be asking for something. He was blatantly obvious to Nate, like a shining beacon, but the general population seemed to be oblivious to him. Maybe they thought he was just one more drunk guy amongst myriad inebriated holidaymakers.