Collision Course

by Matt Hilton

This, she’d cautioned, was an information-gathering mission. Eavesdropping an unfettered discussion between the Toners and the troublemakers could give her more answers than she could gain from trying to question either party. But she also anticipated events getting out of hand rather quickly, and was torn as to how she should respond. If there were violence for instance, the obvious move would be to call the police. Except she never could stand by waiting for a response, choosing instead to intervene where it meant saving a victim from harm. Hopefully she wouldn’t have to get in the middle of things again, but in part she hoped things would grow emotive, with voices raised enough to hear. After that, then who knew?

  If the Toners were engaged in illegal activity she should report them. However, she wasn’t suffering the storm just so she could finger them to the cops. The Toners had come within the circle of her investigation and she felt – wrongly perhaps – that she was somehow responsible for their safety. She owed them nothing. Mr Toner had almost pushed her over the bannister earlier, and Maddie had been nothing but obstructive in connecting her with Hayley Cameron, so why should she be concerned about them? The answer was simple. She’d judged them as she’d found them, and it wasn’t as criminals to be reviled, but ordinary decent people who’d made some wrong decisions that were now coming back to bite them.

  And then there was Hayley and Jacob. She felt that they’d gone into hiding in Maddie’s apartment as a direct result of Tess being in town. She had placed them in the line of fire, so therefore felt responsible for them too.

  There was no way of hearing the van’s arrival over the storm, or in fact an ascent of the stairs. Tess’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she quickly checked the message from Po.

  THEY’RE HERE.

  She didn’t reply to the message. Instead she tapped Pinky’s thigh, alerting him to the arrival of the troublemakers. He squared up his shoulders, but Tess wasn’t ready to confront them yet. She held a finger to her lips. They could’ve jumped up and down singing sea shanties and was unlikely they’d be overheard. She was tempted to crack open the door so she could hear better, but the noise of the storm might alert them and one or the other from the van might investigate the open door. She strained to listen, cringing in the next instant as lightning turned the gloom to midday. She smelled ozone, felt her eardrums compress, and also the corresponding boom of thunder in her insides. Pinky almost went to all fours but thankfully only from surprise. ‘Holy crap,’ he wheezed.

  She’d no idea how distant the lightning struck, but it was too close. Again, she was seriously tempted to abort her mission, but from the other side of the door she heard gruff exclamations. The lightning’s near miss had even startled those in the stairwell. As Pinky straightened up, she again cautioned silence, indicating with her hands that the troublemakers had arrived on the landing. One of them hammered on Maddie’s door more forcefully than Po had earlier. The voice that followed carried better than she expected.

  ‘Open up, Mike, I know you’re in there.’

  Mike, Tess assumed, was Maddie’s father’s name. The voice that hollered it was male, therefore belonging to the bearded guy who’d sneered at her from inside the van a short time ago.

  The guy hammered the door again, but could barely be heard for the cacophony overhead. Tess strained to listen as his female companion said something to him, but it was impossible to hear. The guy was deliberately loud; she ensuring her words didn’t carry to those inside.

  ‘I’m going to give you five seconds,’ shouted the guy. ‘If you don’t open up, I’m coming in through this goddamn door. You hear me, Mike?’

  Mike Toner must have responded, but it wasn’t to the guy’s satisfaction. ‘You think I’m fucking playing around? Open up, or I swear I’ll kick my way inside.’

  A muffled response sounded like a plea.

  The bearded man kicked the door.

  Tess tensed, expecting the splinter and crack of wood. She looked at Pinky for support and he was ready to intervene with her. But Mike Toner must have complied and unlocked the door.

  ‘There!’ the bearded man snapped. ‘That’s more like it. Have you forgotten your damn instructions already, you cowardly piece of crap?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten anything,’ Mike Toner responded. ‘I just don’t know what you’re doing here. Kelly said—’

  ‘Kelly changed her mind. She has decided she can’t wait till the end of the month. She wants paid now.’

  ‘But, we only just got started a few weeks ago. We haven’t made that much yet.’

  ‘Whatever you’ve made, Kelly wants fifty percent transferred right now.’

  Listening from behind the closed door, Tess shivered and it had nothing to do with onset-hypothermia. It was surprising what she could learn from eavesdropping, but everything she heard begged extra questions. Who was Kelly? It was one of those genderless names. The bearded man had referred to her as female but it was still unclear if Kelly’s was a given or family name. Tess doubted that Maddie had some sort of cottage industry set up in her apartment, and was not manufacturing tangible goods. Neither did she think Maddie had a pharmacy going where she was cooking crack cocaine or methamphetamine. It stood to reason then that the man demanded half of the cash the Toners had accrued in the past few weeks. How they were making money would have to remain a mystery for now … unless it was literal, and they were counterfeiting cash?

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Mike Toner countered. ‘We have overheads, man! Most of what we made has already been spent.’

  ‘Bullshit. You left your job on the boat today and didn’t even wait for your pay. That doesn’t sound like somebody with a cash-flow problem to me. I’m coming in. I want to see your books.’

  ‘We don’t keep records, Dom. Do you think we’re stupid?’

  ‘So I want to see your bank accounts.’

  This wasn’t about counterfeit currency, Tess decided. She exchanged looks with Pinky, noticing the furling and unfurling of his fists. Things were approaching a head, but she again cautioned patience.

  Abruptly Maddie’s voice rang out. ‘Get the hell out of my apartment. You’ve got no right barging in like this.’

  ‘Your daddy’s told you everything by now,’ the bearded man – Dom, Mike Toner had called him – must have entered the apartment because his voice was more muffled than before. ‘So you know what’s going to happen if you refuse. Do you want to go for a trip in the back of Temperance’s van?’

  Temperance. Tess had learned another name: she must be the mixed-race woman accompanying Dom. And she also understood the threat that Mike and Maddie Toner were under. Had Toner been bundled into the panel van earlier, to be released later beaten and terrified?

  ‘I don’t know who you people think you are but you’ve no right threatening us like this!’ Maddie obviously wasn’t taking the threat as seriously as her dad did, but then he’d had first-hand experience.

  ‘Shut it, bitch.’ Temperance added to the sense of peril by keeping her warning low-pitched. She must still be on the landing. ‘Better do as—’

  A clap of thunder momentarily deafened Tess. She felt Pinky moving beside her, and realized she’d missed something important. When she could hear again, curses mingled with shouts of alarm, as Dom and Temperance forced their way inside the apartment. Her tongue caught against the roof of her mouth; if she was going to intervene it should be now. She grabbed at the handle and tried to haul open the door. It resisted her. No, not the door. The force of the wind against it was more powerful than Tess’s tug. Pinky lent his bulk, grasping the edge of the door, and together they hauled it wide enough for Tess to pass inside. The scuff of rapid footsteps from below told her Po was already on his way up. Pinky lurched onto the landing: his features were grim, echoing what was going on inside the apartment. Something crashed to the floor, causing frightened exclamations. Hayley and Jacob’s voices had joined those of the others as demands and questions rang out. Somebody cried out in pain.

  Tess didn’t thi
nk twice. She rushed through the apartment door and into the middle of a violent struggle. It was the type of fight that could only lead to a fatal outcome for somebody, if not right now, then further down the line. Dom, armed with a pistol, and Temperance with a knife, weren’t the ones in mortal danger.

  EIGHTEEN

  Dom had anticipated there being an extra person to contend with inside the apartment, after Temperance had discovered the old Chrysler belonged to one Jacob Doyle of Standish. He hadn’t expected another young woman to be there, but from the way the skinny kid moved to protect her Dom understood he’d come to the wrong conclusion that Doyle was Maddie’s guy. That Maddie had used her scheme to save her friend’s boyfriend some cash was a stupid, amateurish move, and could prove the ruination of the good thing she’d gotten going. He strode down the hall, and the four figures before him had no option except to stumble backwards. There was a babble of voices, mostly tinged with fear but Maddie’s was strident with infuriation. Temperance aimed her knife at the young woman with a snarled warning to shut her yap. Nobody paid the knife any attention; all eyes were on Dom’s pistol.

  He forced them down a narrow hall, past closed doors he took to be concealing bedrooms, and into a large sitting room. Maddie and Mike Toner stayed close, while Doyle and his girl tried to make space between them and their friends by circling around a low couch.

  ‘Watch those punks,’ Dom commanded Temperance. He was more interested in the Toners. He grabbed the front of Mike’s sweater. Shook him, while waving the gun over at the two youths. ‘The fuck are these two doing here, Mike? What part of your instructions about keeping our arrangement between us didn’t you understand?’

  Toner still suffered from last time Dom had laid hands on him, and was easily cowed again by the man’s presence. ‘They’re just kids, Dom. They’re friends of Maddie’s. They just—’

  Dom struck Toner in the face with the butt of his pistol. A gash an inch wide opened like a third eyelid on Toner’s left cheek. Toner gasped in agony, his knees giving way as blood poured down his face and dripped onto his chest. Maddie screeched at her dad’s rough treatment and launched at Dom to push him away. Dom dropped Toner on the carpet, he backhanded Maddie away and she collapsed on the floor too, stunned and verging on unconsciousness.

  ‘You might want to take things a bit easier,’ Temperance sneered from her side of the room. Stupidly, Doyle tried to shift, to place himself between Temperance and his purple-haired girlfriend. Temperance snatched at his jacket, hauling him almost nose to nose. ‘What I just said doesn’t make me a soft touch,’ she said as she rested the edge of her blade on Doyle’s chin. ‘Try me and I’ll happily cut off your lips. Got it?’

  Doyle swallowed hard. ‘I’ve got it.’

  Temperance shoved him away and his girl grabbed at him for support. Temperance again graced Dom with a sneer. ‘See?’

  ‘Yeah. Fuckers need to know where they stand with us,’ Dom responded. But she had a point; his warning wouldn’t sink in if it were delivered to deaf ears. He bent and grasped Toner, shaking him to lucidity. ‘Get up. I smashed your cheek but you’re not a fucking cripple.’

  ‘For god sakes, Dom,’ Toner groaned as he pawed at the rent in his cheek. ‘I haven’t done a thing wrong, and look at the way you’re treating me. Jesus, man …’

  Dom ignored him, staring down at Maddie instead. ‘Where’s your set-up?’

  ‘I don’t care what my dad agreed to,’ she croaked, ‘you can’t force me—’

  Dom went down one knee, so that he could shove his pistol under Maddie’s chin. ‘I can do whatever the hell I want, bitch. Now, show me your fucking set-up.’

  Toner aimed bloody fingers at the door to an adjoining room. ‘It’s in there, Dom. Go on. Take a look for yourself. Check whatever you want to. Then please just go and leave us be.’

  Dom stood. He didn’t require Maddie to show him the way. He stepped over her legs to approach the room Toner indicated. ‘I told you already,’ Dom said, ‘Kelly wants fifty percent tonight. If you know what’s good for you, she’ll get it.’

  He threw the door open, it swung inward into what amounted to a home office. He saw a couple of desktop computers, printers, an archaic fax machine, mountains of stationery. There were several chairs in the small room. His back was to the hallway. Temperance’s attention was on the other couple. They were unaware of the newcomers rushing down the hallway until Maddie howled in warning.

  Dom wondered if the girl’s warning was for him to shut the door to the room, or if she was warning the private investigators he was armed. Whatever. He snapped around, bringing up his pistol as first Teresa Grey and then her hulking black companion crossed the threshold. Neither of them was armed.

  Dom aimed his pistol directly at Grey’s chest.

  She held out both palms. ‘Take it easy,’ she said.

  The big black guy bit down on his bottom lip. He appeared ready to hurtle at Dom, notwithstanding the gun.

  ‘Move, nigger, and I’ll drop you on your fat ass,’ Dom snapped.

  ‘The police are coming,’ Grey warned him. ‘You’d do well to put away that gun and get the hell out of here.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Dom.

  ‘Why’d you call the police?’ Maddie cried plaintively.

  ‘Dom … we had no part in this!’ Toner also cried.

  ‘Shut up.’ Dom thought feverishly. He’d boasted to Temperance that he held no fear of Grey or her partner. He felt only loathing for the black man. But neither was he a complete idiot that was going to stand around and wait for the cops to arrive. He was confident that Toner would keep schtum about what had gone down between them that day, but Maddie was another story. She was going to take more convincing that Blake and Kelly Ambrose weren’t making idle threats. Jacob Doyle and his girl couldn’t be relied on to stay quiet about his violent invasion of the apartment either. The PI definitely couldn’t. ‘I should shoot you all and have done with it,’ he said aloud, but there was no conviction to his threat. Instead he wagged the gun at Grey. ‘What do you suggest happens next?’

  ‘You put away your weapons, you leave, and when the cops get here I’ll concoct a tale to explain why Mike Toner’s face is split open. Nobody here will mention you were here.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to trust you?’

  ‘You can trust me. Right now, my only concern is for Hayley’s safety.’ She looked at the purple-haired girl, offering a brief wink of support, before returning her full attention to Dom. ‘I have nothing to do with either the Toners, or in your issue with them. That’s not to say I can stand aside and watch them get hurt either.’

  ‘You took a big risk running in here like this,’ Dom said, ‘or you made the stupidest move of your life. What did you think you and your pet nigger could do without a gun between you?’

  He’d purposefully been free and loose with that word even his subordinate seemed to take umbrage with because it was certain to get a reaction. Its usage wasn’t lost on the private investigator. Grey switched attention to Temperance. ‘What do you say? We fight this out, and the cops arrest you, or you leave quietly like I’ve offered.’

  Dom grunted sourly. ‘Doesn’t matter what she says, I’m in charge. If there’s a deal to be made, it’s with me.’

  Grey switched attention again, and Dom repaid her gesture by lowering his sidearm. ‘So we have a deal?’ Grey asked.

  There was little else Dom could do. He could shoot them all, but perhaps not without danger to himself or Temperance. As soon as his first bullet left the gun chaos would erupt: by the fearless glare of hatred aimed at him by the black guy, he might go for broke and actually reach Dom before he was taken out of the picture. They might struggle, and still be caught in a death tussle when the cops arrived. If there was shooting to be done, he should ensure the first bullet was into the nigger’s skull. And where was Villere, Grey’s partner? For all he knew, Villere could be coordinating the police response from a safe distance, or he was keeping back, to
oled up and ready should the worst scenario develop. Dom didn’t want to be pinned down in the apartment and at the cops’ mercy. After killing everyone here, there’d be no walking out alive. He wasn’t afraid of dying per se, but he’d prefer it didn’t happen tonight. He pushed his gun into the holster below his armpit, and nodded at Temperance to follow suit. She wavered, not yet ready to sheath her knife when Grey and the black man blocked the exit.

  ‘Just go,’ said Grey, and she and her friend moved aside.

  ‘We’ll go,’ said Dom. But he then graced Grey with a fixed sneer. ‘You shouldn’t have pushed your nose into other people’s business, Teresa.’ He enunciated her name slowly so there was no doubt in her mind that he knew who she was … and where to find her.

  ‘I told you,’ she replied, ‘my business is with Hayley. I don’t give a damn about you or your beef with the Toners.’

  He apprised Mike Toner, who was staring in disbelief over his cupped palm. Blood still dripped freely. ‘This doesn’t change a damn thing, y’hear? I still expect what we talked about.’

  Toner nodded glumly, and Dom turned to follow Temperance along the hall. Before they were out of the door, he heard Maddie turn her irate screech on Teresa Grey. Apparently her intrusion was about as welcome as Dom and Temperance’s had been. There was the slight possibility that the PI had done him a favor, because her appearance had added weight to the situation and the Toners should take the threat more seriously now. He grinned over his shoulder as Maddie swore at Grey.

  Temperance stepped out onto the landing.

  Dom followed, head still turned.

  Temperance croaked in warning, but it was too late.

  Something sharp pricked the hollow beneath Dom’s left ear. His hands came up, but only so that Nicolas Villere could reach under and unsnap the pistol from his holster. Villere didn’t remove his knife; using one hand he ejected the magazine from the gun, then the cartridge from the firing chamber. The empty gun clattered noisily down the stairs. ‘You can pick up that piece of shit on your way out,’ Villere rasped. ‘Thank your stars you get to live to do so.’