Hit and Run

by Andy Maslen

  She thinks she hit me!

  “Looks like it. Which means we have the element of surprise,” other-Stella mused from beside her. “We could just wait by the front door and do her as she comes in.”

  “No!” Stella said sharply. “Not a cop.”

  “She tried to kill you.”

  “I don’t care. She’s probably under orders from PPM.”

  Stella drew the curtain back into place, sat cross-legged on the floor and stared upwards, racing to find the best option. Or the least worst option.

  Go outside and confront her.

  “She’s a trained markswoman with a rifle. A long-range gun. You’re a lucky shot with a Glock and a shotgun loaded with breaching rounds. Two short-range guns. No cover, no advantage to you. She’ll kill you from fifty yards out, no bother.”

  Stay here and wait for her.

  “Better. Now her gun is less useful compared to yours. And you have the element of surprise. She thinks you’re dead, remember.”

  Stella jumped to her feet. She had a plan. Wait here in the room next door, then come up behind the SCO19 woman when she checks for bodies, force her to disarm, then cuff or cable-tie her and continue with Ramage as before.

  Pulse throbbing uncomfortably in her throat, Stella crouched beside the bed and checked the magazine of the Glock. She had no idea how many times she’d fired. Plenty of bullets left – good. With the magazine out, she racked the slide to eject the live round in the chamber and worked it a couple of times more. Smooth as silk. Also good. She slotted the ejected round into the top of the magazine and reassembled the gun. The Winchester was less useful, she knew. Plus, as she totted up the shots fired, six at the front door, then five for Ramage’s hidey-hole, she realised it only contained one round. She considered dumping it on the bed, but other-Stella wasn’t happy.

  “Keep it. It’s still firepower. And it looks threatening too.”

  Stella waited.

  She started as she heard heavy boots crunch on the gravel below the window.

  Just as she was readying herself to move, a faint cry came from the other bedroom. A man’s voice. Ramage’s voice.

  “Help!”

  Shit! He’s coming round.

  This changed everything. He could warn the cop.

  In a flash, Stella saw salvation.

  Grabbing the Winchester, she sprinted from the room and ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time, stumbling at the bottom and almost sprawling to the floor.

  From above she heard Ramage’s voice, stronger this time.

  “Help me! I’m up here. Please. For the love of God, somebody help me!”

  Grabbing the newel post, she swerved round the final curving flourish of the handrail and skidded to a stop beneath the staircase. Checking her weapons, she looked back, trying to breathe silently even as her lungs screamed for more oxygen. She couldn’t see the front door; she was completely hidden by the wide wooden treads. She looked up. On their underside, the treads were sanded and polished but left unpainted. The reddish-brown timber looked recently waxed: it glowed with a dull sheen.

  The crunching of boots grew louder, and in a few seconds, Stella heard the sound of their heavy-cleated soles walk across the fallen front door and stop on the flagstones.

  A quartet of hard metallic sounds grouped into two closely-spaced pairs came next. Click-clack, clack-click. A rifle bolt being worked back and forth.

  Then the footsteps approached the foot of the stairs.

  Ramage called again.

  “Up here! Help! She’s armed. Be careful. Oh, thank God!”

  Slowly, Stella knelt on one knee, raised the Winchester to her shoulder, and placed the muzzle against the underside of the seventh tread. She curled her finger around the trigger, and waited.

  The shooter began to ascend. Stella listened to the heavy steps.

  Clump.

  Clump.

  Clump.

  “Such tight, solid joints, eh, Stel?” other-Stella whispered.

  Clump.

  Clump.

  “Tighten that finger.”

  Clump.

  Creak.

  Stella pulled the trigger.

  In the confined space beneath the stairs, the roar as the Winchester discharged its final Hatton round was deafening.

  Through the fog of gun smoke, Stella looked up. The final Hatton round had blasted a four-inch circle through the seventh tread.

  With particles of burnt propellant stinging her nose she scrambled out.

  As she did, the other cop’s screams suddenly became audible through the ringing in her ears.

  The woman was lying on her back at the bottom of the stairs. Stella ran to her, stopping to pick up the rifle and sling it out through the front door.

  The woman was white-faced with shock and struggling to reach her right foot.

  Or what was left of it.

  The front portion of the right boot was missing altogether. Emerging from the remaining black leather were shreds and tatters of flesh, with broken and splintered bones poking through the mess. A lot of blood too, but Stella knew there were no major arteries down there. This was a serious injury, but not fatal.

  “On your front!” she said.

  The woman’s eyes were rolling in her skull like a cow about to be slaughtered. “You shot my foot off!”

  “Yes, I did. And I could have killed you. Like you tried to do me. Turn over or I’ll shoot you where you lie.”

  The woman complied, grunting with the effort and the agony she must undoubtedly be feeling.

  Stella pulled the handcuffs free from the woman’s belt and cuffed her wrists behind her back. Then she rolled her over again onto her back.

  “Don’t move,” she commanded her. She ran to the tall window to the left of the front door and ripped away the twisted silk tie-back from the curtain. She returned to the supine form of the injured cop and wound the cord around her calf before yanking it tight and tying it off. “Right,” she said. “You’re not going to bleed out. Tell me. Who sent you?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Not very polite,” other-Stella said. “We’ll give her a little encouragement.”

  Stella prodded the woman’s ruined foot with the tip of her index finger, eliciting a scream. She asked the same question again.

  “I said, tell me who sent you. Do it now or I’ll shoot the other one off.”

  The woman looked up at her, eyes screwed into slits as she fought what must be agonising pain.

  “And I said, fuck …” A groan. “You.”

  “We’d better get on with it then,” other-Stella said. “You could do her with her own rifle. That would be ironic.”

  “No! She’s a cop. I’m not going down that road.”

  Other-Stella shrugged. “Suit yourself. What are you going to do, then?”

  Stella didn’t answer. Instead, she ripped open the Velcro of the woman’s jacket and began searching for ID, a wallet, a phone, a notebook – anything that could give her a clue as to what was happening.

  She found the first two in seconds.

  She opened the ID.

  “Lucy Van Houten. Metropolitan Police, SC&O19.” She looked down at the woman, who appeared to be sliding in and out of consciousness. “Bit far from home, aren’t you?”

  The woman hissed through clamped teeth but said nothing.

  Stella opened the wallet. It was a roll-fold of tough, black nylon, closed with more Velcro. Ignoring the notes and credit cards, she riffled through the bits of paper. They were mostly receipts, including one from Campbell’s in Pitlochry, but then she saw a folded piece of shiny paper with colour print. It looked like something torn from a magazine. She unfolded the square. It was covered on one side with black type, from an article about diversity in London policing. She recognised the formatting – it was from The Job, the Met’s own magazine. When she turned it over, she gasped. Smiling out at her in full dress uniform was Adam Collier, his white teeth bright in the badly lit photo. S
crawled in the white border, in rounded handwriting, were two words:

  Lucy Collier.

  “School-girl crush, do you think?” said that sardonic voice in her ear. “Looks like Collier’s got his own private little death squad.”

  “No! It doesn’t have to mean that. OK, she’s got the hots for The Model. She wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Come on, Stel! Do you really believe that a Met firearms officer just happened to be up here on holiday when she decided to stake out Ramage’s house and attempt to murder you? A Met firearms officer who’s clearly in love with the SIO from Richard’s case? Who is your boss. Who sent you down to the exhibits room to rot. Remember what they taught us at Hendon? There’s no such thing as coincidence.”

  “It’s not proof. Not definitive. I can’t deal with this now.”

  Stella shook her head then swivelled Van Houten around and dragged her over to the stair case. She unlocked the handcuffs, threaded the freed hands between two of the balusters and then cuffed them again.

  The wound was still bleeding, but the blood was pooling, not pumping. Stella looked around and spotted a leather ottoman in a corner of the room. She pulled the squat, red, padded cylinder over and lifted the right leg, placing the calf down on the buttoned top.

  “You’ll survive,” she said, with a sigh. “There’ll be blue lights converging on this place well before you need an undertaker.”

  She stood and climbed the stairs, avoiding the ruined seventh step.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Ramage

  INERT HUMAN FORMS are notoriously hard to manoeuvre. Stella had had plenty of experience. The occasional drunk, back when she was pounding the beat with Jack Hempstead as a wet-behind-the-ears detective-in-training, albeit one with a first-class honours degree in psychology from the University of Bath. Victims of muggings, ditto. And then, the kind of victims who stayed inert. Once the CSIs had done their job and collected their evidence and the pathologist had had a good look and a poke around, sticking her thermometer where no decent citizen would want it stuck, Stella had been assigned to help lift the dead into sturdy black plastic body bags and then lift them onto stretchers.

  When she reached the bedroom where she’d left Ramage, she realised she was going to have to do it again. His cries for help having had no effect on his situation, he’d clearly run out of energy. His head lolled forward onto his chest, and when she checked for a pulse, which she found, he didn’t twitch. Dragging Ramage out of the makeshift panic room, down the stairs and onto the drive took all her strength. She cut the cable ties binding him. Then she hooked her hands under his armpits and locked her fingers together over his breastbone. Pushing up from her knees and leaning back, she hauled his deadweight up, then began the hard work.

  Halfway down the stairs, Ramage’s left heel caught on the broken step. Stella swore and jerked him backwards to free his shoe from the splintered timber, then bumped him the remaining six steps to the ground floor.

  Halfway to the front door, she heard Van Houten groan.

  “You won’t get away with it. We’ll find you.”

  Stella lowered the judge to the floor and walked back to the cuffed firearms officer.

  “Who’ll find me? You and Adam Collier? You know he’s married, don’t you? And I don’t think he’d see much to get excited about in you, by the way. Have you seen his wife? Slim and brunette, that’s Adam’s type.”

  The woman’s face twisted, her teeth baring in a snarl, but whether it was of rage or pain, Stella couldn’t tell.

  “You’re dead,” she whispered.

  “No. But he will be, very soon,” Stella said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder.

  Almost falling backwards on the gravel, Stella kept her balance and dumped Ramage by the rear wing of the Bentley. Her lip curled upwards in a feral snarl of hatred and disgust, partly from the wet iron smell of the blood, but mostly because she couldn’t bear to touch him. The catastrophic knee wound had left a five-inch wide smear of blood along the polished herringbone parquet floor and a pool when she’d stopped to talk to Van Houten. The ruined biceps had soaked her own sleeves with the judge’s blood. The rifle she’d taken from Van Houten lay with its barrel poking into a large rosebush growing out of the gravel. She decided to leave it there for the local cops to find. Van Houten would have some explaining to do when they found the bullet in the wall of Ramage’s guest room.

  On the way out, she’d noticed a key cupboard screwed to the wall by the front door above a circular wooden table with a few letters on it, waiting to be posted. She went there now and opened the dinky double doors. Hanging dead-centre was a chunky black-plastic-and-chrome key fob. It bore a chrome winged ‘B’. She plucked it from the L-shaped brass hook and returned to the car, thumbing the door-unlock button as she went.

  The door was surprisingly easy to pull open. Clever engineering, she supposed.

  “Well, we can’t have – what did that helpful sales guy at Bentley HQ call them, ‘enthusiasts of the marque’, was it? – struggling with a hundredweight of steel and glass and all those shopping bags, now can we?”

  She turned to other-Stella. “Could you maybe give me a hand with him, instead of just standing there looking all self-satisfied. Please?”

  After much grunting, pushing, shoving and twisting of recalcitrant limbs, Stella stood back, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a bloody sleeve. Ramage was sitting – all right, lolling – in the rear passenger-side seat. She folded his arms across his chest, leaned over him, and pulled the seat belt out and around his arms and torso, securing it in the latch with another of those damned muted clicks. An extra-long, black plastic cable tie secured his wrists together. For good measure, she reached down into her rucksack, retrieved the bolt cutters and crimped the chromed seatbelt latch with a crunching sound that suggested it would never release the judge.

  The bullet wounds looked messy close up. The blood was still wet on Ramage’s clothing, suggesting that even if she’d missed clipping an artery, the hollow point rounds had damaged plenty of blood vessels beyond repair.

  She backed out, seized with a sudden desire to wound the huge car. She pulled out the awl from her rucksack and wandered round the Bentley, dragging its sharp point up and down its glassy flanks, and over the bonnet and boot, raking off chips of paint with a metallic squeal. They stuck to her hand like fish scales.

  While she waited for Ramage to regain consciousness, Stella toyed with the pliers and the pair of razor sharp I.O. Shen knives she’d brought with her. He was powerless now and hers to do with what she wished. But the idea of torturing him had lost much of its savour.

  Ten minutes later, Ramage’s eyelids fluttered, then opened, revealing those dark-brown eyes that had looked at her so scornfully the day she’d tackled him in his private chambers at the Old Bailey. Stella enjoyed seeing them widen and stretch as they registered the sight of her sitting cross-legged on the gravel by the open passenger door. She watched as he took in the rifle and shotgun at her feet, the Glock in her lap and the knives she held loosely in her hands.

  He wriggled inside the grip of the seatbelt then groaned, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain he must have felt as the webbing belt tightened against his ruined arm muscles. His face was pale, the lips colourless.

  “Where’s your phone, Sir Leonard?” Stella asked.

  “My what? Phone? Why?” he muttered.

  “Is it in your trouser pocket?”

  His eyes flicked down to his right hip pocket. “Why should I tell you?”

  She jumped to her feet, causing Ramage to flinch, and poked the point of the Maoui Deba into the corduroy above his ruined right knee. In a single flowing movement, she slid the blade up towards his hip, slitting the fabric as if it were wet tissue paper. As the pocket peeled back, a phone tumbled free and fell onto the seat beside him.

  Stella pouted as she took in the lock-screen. “Oh, Sir Leonard, you coded it. Well, a quick scan at the grease marks on the glass and
I’ll soon work out which numbers to play with.”

  He smirked. It was probably involuntary, but Stella caught the expression all the same.

  She paused. “You didn’t code it?” She touched the tip of her nose. Then she looked at the phone again. “But someone as sensible as you, as security conscious as you, wouldn’t leave his phone unprotected, would he? That would be silly. So, it must be biometrically protected. What did you use? Retinas. Will I have to twirl my little friend here round and round in your eye sockets to remove your eyes, then?” Again, that involuntary twitch of the lips. “Ah! No, just a simple fingerprint for you, Sir Leonard. Well,” she said briskly, putting down the knife and picking up the bolt cutters, “we’d better get to work, then.”

  He flinched and struggled against the seat belt, but that was the full extent his bonds would allow his fight-or-flight reflex to carry him.

  Stella readied the bolt cutters, gently sliding their short, hard, sharp jaws down to the base of Ramage’s right index finger, ignoring his pleading.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  A Mother's Love

  RAMAGE’S SCREAM BOUNCED off the stone front of his house.

  With the lifeless digit grasped between her own thumb and forefinger, Stella dabbed its tip onto the surface of the phone.

  “Success!” she said, bestowing a wide smile on Ramage, who was moaning with pain. “At least we won’t have to take any more off. Now, let’s see. First, let’s disable the security, then we’ll find your contacts. Where are they?” She tapped and scrolled, hmm-ing as she did so, her eyes scanning the screen for a set of initials. “Aha! That wasn’t very difficult. You must have been feeling very confident when you created this little group.”

  The screen displayed a group called PPM. Stella tapped the ‘notes’ tab and a set of names and numbers appeared. Her eyes flicked up and down the screen. Then her mouth tightened. Adam Collier’s name was blaring at her from the screen as if written in bright, flaming capital letters eight feet tall.