Black Run

by D. L. Marshall

  I breathed out. Hiding in the boot of my car in the middle of the ocean wasn’t going to help anyone, so I did what I always do – pushed everything down as far as it’d go, down to the place from where it only crawls out at night. Ignore it, get up, go on the offensive.

  My main problem wasn’t the question of who’d killed my captive – and therefore also King. The big problem was how they’d done it. How mattered more because it would tell me whether anyone else was involved, and how worried I should be.

  The other question was how I’d kill them – because I surely would – without being discovered and thrown overboard by the rest of the bloodthirsty crew.

  I climbed back out the window and, after another glance up at Miller on the bridge, slowly edged my way back aft along the railings, across the rocking deck to the superstructure.

  I slammed open the door and pushed Katanga out of the way, lurching off down the corridor.

  ‘What happened?’ he shouted after me. ‘Did you find Mr King?’

  The door to the radio room was shut, I opened it and looked inside. He was still in there, Nic, his back to the door, headphones on, tapping a pen against the desk to a beat I couldn’t hear. Katanga was coming up behind me, I closed the door on him and stepped silently behind Nic. The Father Christmas bobble-head moshed in time with the waves.

  Nic’s knife was buried deep in my prisoner. I’d been content to take my time, question him later, more discreetly, but that was before I’d found King.

  I grabbed a fistful of hair, bouncing Nic’s head off the desk with just enough force to get his attention. Wobbling Father Christmas fell to the floor, his head rolled under the desk. Nic screamed, reaching up behind his head and getting tangled in his earphones. I swatted his arms away, dragging him backwards out of his chair and slamming him to the floor, kicking his belly. The scream cut off instantly, he writhed, mouth flapping like a fish.

  The door opened, Katanga looked in then put his hands up and backed away. ‘Woah friend, what the hell are you…?’

  I kicked the door shut, crouched, patted Nic down but couldn’t find any weapons. Leaning in close, I grabbed his hair again, lifting his head.

  ‘Talk.’

  He finally managed to suck in a breath, tears welling in his eyes.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ I hissed into his ear. ‘Give me a reason not to drag you out that door and drop you over the railings.’

  ‘I…’ he struggled for air, voice cracking. ‘I told you. The radio.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the radio, I’m talking about your bloody knife.’

  ‘My knife?’

  ‘Big black German thing. Where is it?’

  Outside the fire alarm started blaring.

  ‘It’s in my room.’

  I bunched up his collar in one hand, picked him up, flung open the door. The passageway was empty, pulsing red in time with the wailing alarm.

  ‘Which is your room?’

  He pointed to a door at the end, past the stairs. I dragged him, spinning him round and pushing him forward, slamming him against the door. He screamed out in pain, I turned the handle, bundling him inside.

  ‘Where’s the knife?’ I said, still holding him by the collar.

  He pointed at a shelf above his bunk.

  I pushed him roughly against the far wall, backed up, not taking my eyes off him, and reached up behind me. My hand brushed along the deep-lipped shelf, knocking everything onto the bed. A couple of grubbily thumbed porn mags, an even grubbier paperback, a chipped mug full of brown stains. No knife.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s there.’

  I lunged, he flinched away but I grabbed a handful of T-shirt and whirled him round, throwing him on the bed. ‘Find it, now.’

  He knelt on the bed, eyes wide when he saw the shelf was bare.

  ‘It was here… Someone must have taken it…’

  The door flew open. I grabbed Nic, pulling him in front of me. Katanga brought up the AK-47 as I reached into my pocket and brought out my pistol.

  ‘Let him go,’ growled Katanga, rifle dead steady.

  I held my own pistol on him just as steadily. ‘Put it down.’

  Feet pounded outside, another gun barrel appeared in the doorway, this one belonging to an ugly revolver held by Miller, who squeezed beside Katanga.

  ‘I told you, Tyler,’ he snarled. ‘My boat, my crew.’

  I looked at them in the doorway, reckoned I could get a shot off at both of them before they squeezed their triggers but I’d rather not if I could help it.

  ‘It was his knife, Miller,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  He fired off a barrage of French at Nic. A heated discussion ensued which concluded with the radio operator having no idea where his knife was or who could have taken it. Katanga joined in with some choice words, there was clearly no love lost between the two shipmates. I glared throughout, still holding my pistol on the pair in the doorway.

  ‘He says he doesn’t know where it is,’ said Miller.

  ‘Convenient,’ I said, but two things struck me. Neither Miller nor Nic knew I spoke French, so their conversation was likely genuine. That meant Nic was either telling the truth, or he was lying to Miller. Either way, it suggested Miller wasn’t involved.

  ‘You can’t go around accusing people, Tyler,’ Miller said. ‘Not on my boat.’

  ‘Someone on your boat’s a murderer,’ I said. ‘And you don’t seem to be doing much about it.’

  ‘You brought the hired killers on board. And you’re outnumbered.’ He waved the revolver, gesturing for me to leave the room.

  ‘Outnumbered, but not outgunned,’ said Marty from outside in the passageway.

  Miller looked over his shoulder, held his revolver up and backed away. Katanga did the same, reluctantly lowering his rifle.

  I advanced through the doorway, keeping my pistol on Miller. ‘Check, I think.’

  Marty was standing to one side of the corridor, gun on Katanga. She was dripping wet, I figured she must have braved the storm to slip out one of the aft doorways and back in at the front, below the bridge stairs. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Fields half-hidden round the corner at the other end of the corridor, a submachine gun pressed into his shoulder. They were positioned to create a killing zone right in the middle without hitting each other, the 180-degree spread made it impossible for Katanga and Miller to respond.

  Katanga’s fingers twitched on the assault rifle but his expression looked vaguely amused, unlike Miller chewing glass next to him. I kept my gun on Miller.

  ‘King’s dead.’ I kept emotion out of my voice. Fields shuffled, Marty gave nothing away.

  ‘What?’ Miller’s expression softened, this was clearly news to him. ‘I’m sorry, Tyler, I am. I know what he meant…’

  ‘He was my fucking brother, Miller,’ the gun shook in my fist, ‘and one of your pirates killed him.’

  ‘Who was it, Tyler?’ Fields growled behind me. I appreciated the backup but could do without him losing his shit.

  Miller pushed the revolver into the waistband of his oily jeans and spread his arms wide. ‘Let’s all calm down, eh?’

  There was a scuffle in the corridor behind me somewhere, I heard Fields mutter under his breath. Miller grinned.

  I chanced a glance over to see Fields, gun now lowered, with the barrel of a revolver held to his head by Poubelle.

  ‘And that’s checkmate, Tyler,’ said Miller.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Fields, you’ve just been outflanked by a fisherman.’

  Katanga had his AK back up again, this was taking us nowhere good. Miller must have been thinking the same, as he broke the stalemate first.

  ‘This is my boat. I’m sorry about King, you know I am, but it’s got nothing to do with my crew. You’ve hired us to do a job, all right, we’ll deliver, but I can’t let you go round attacking people.’

  I didn’t waver. ‘It’s going to be a long journey if we do it all
like this.’

  ‘Won’t last too much longer, not without anyone at the helm.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Get below. Any of you step a foot outside your cabin before we reach Poole, you go over the side, you hear me?’

  ‘Yo ho ho,’ Fields muttered, smirking and looking at me.

  I wasn’t laughing, I’d seen him do it. ‘Loud and clear,’ I said.

  Marty held her gun up and walked slowly to me, the three of us backed away, passing Poubelle as he came the other way. They waited in the middle of the passageway, completely at home swaying with the motion of the boat as we stumbled backwards, round the corner and down the stairs.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Château des Aigles

  Four days previously

  McCartney placed a tray down on the floor, hot croissants, three cups of coffee. As usual I was left to make my own tea. I watched the three of them poring over the familiar map, the pictures of the target, his chalet, the bodyguards. Each of them had woken up with a new plan, and each was as shit as the next.

  Last night it’d taken a while for them to speak at a normal volume in the car on the way back, despite me reminding them who was paying their wages. Ringo had been last to calm down, and when we got back to the chalet he’d spent a while pacing furiously in front of the big windows, looking down on the oblivious target who’d so narrowly evaded us through sheer luck.

  The target could be the worst person on Earth (he was definitely in the running), but his kid was innocent. Doubtless he was bringing the kid up in the same mould, teaching him hate and prejudice directly and subconsciously, but until that kid was old enough to know better, I refused to let him be collateral damage. We could have been careful but three armed men breaking in and killing all the bodyguards before abducting your dad, subjecting him to that, making him, in the best-case scenario, a witness – that’s not really something I go for.

  Our planning of the last week or so was down the drain, we had twenty-four hours to come up with something new, maybe another twenty-four hours to carry it out.

  Ringo’s plan had been shot down immediately – a dawn raid on the chalet with one of us tasked to secure and protect the kid, thinking that’d get me on side. Non-starter. Then McCartney had suggested a post-breakfast hit as they got in their car, knowing the wife and kid would be safe inside. Mildly better, but out in the open against the whole team, with the second team at the foot of the hill behind us and the wife safely next to a phone? Too many variables, too many risk factors.

  Lennon’s had been the most sensible. She’d suggested a hit on their car in-transit.

  I stirred my tea, watching the brown swirling, shuddering at a memory, the imaginary scent of gas crept up my nostrils. ‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

  She put her cup down hard on the wooden floor, coffee spilled onto the map. ‘Don’t like it because it won’t work, or because you didn’t come up with it?’

  I squeezed the teabag against my mug and fired it off the spoon into the bin. ‘Too many unknowns.’

  ‘You’ve done a lot of criticising,’ said Ringo. ‘You know what I think?’

  ‘You’re gonna tell me anyway.’

  ‘Nothing will satisfy you. You’re looking for reasons to pull the plug.’

  ‘You don’t think I wanna get paid?’

  ‘You’re too old. You’ve lost it.’

  ‘If by lost it you mean don’t wanna die…’ I rubbed my eyes and sighed. ‘Here’s the thing. First, we find a stretch of road we can guarantee they’ll be on at a given time. Then we need to separate the cars – we’re only interested in the Rolls, so the backup needs to be split from them. Gotta do it in a non-violent way so they’re off guard. So we split them up with traffic. That takes at least one of us to handle. Once the Rolls enters the kill zone we gotta block the road off – in both directions. That’s at least another of us, probably two.

  ‘That leaves one of us to deal with a moving vehicle and three armed guards – who we can’t shoot at because they’re too close to the target. Please, tell me how you plan on doing that?’

  Lennon scowled. ‘It’s the best we’ve got. I haven’t heard anything from you.’

  ‘We need to isolate him from the bodyguards as quickly as possible. There’s only one place we can do that.’

  I pointed out the window, across the valley, beyond the village, at the tiny string of gondolas climbing the mountain. They looked, shaking their heads.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I continued. ‘Three bodyguards plus the target go up the mountain. Midge sits in the restaurant, only two bodyguards ski with him, so straight away we’ve bettered the odds.’

  ‘Yeah but one of ’em’s that big bastard,’ said Ringo.

  Paul nodded. ‘Bono counts for three men.’

  I shook my head. ‘Won’t matter how big he is if that Ruger ammo is as good as you say. Look, they always ski in formation, right? We’ve watched them. Always Bono first, Bob in the middle, Sting bringing up the rear.’

  ‘We talked about this,’ said McCartney. ‘We’ll have to kill the bodyguards, because otherwise how will we get Bob away? How do we kill two bodyguards on a ski slope in front of hundreds of tourists without having the cops on us before we get down?’

  ‘And how do we get down?’ said Ringo. ‘Dragging the target between us who, let’s face it, is hardly going to come quietly.’

  ‘As per the original plan, we’ll drug him.’

  ‘Fine. So we kill the two bodyguards in front of all those holidaymakers, then we carry a drugged and incapacitated man onto a cable car?’ asked McCartney. ‘And we just what, sit down next to a family and make small talk?’

  ‘Can you imagine us standing in the queue with him?’ said Ringo. ‘Fucking Weekend at Bernie’s.’

  I took a gulp of tea, put the mug on the sideboard, and knelt on the floor, spinning the map around.

  ‘We know their routine, they don’t take the cable car down.’ I pointed at the map then traced a path. ‘Each day they do this black run, then go off-piste for a kilometre, and join up with this blue run. Between these two points they have the mountainside to themselves.’

  They looked at the map, comparing it to a cartoonish resort piste map. McCartney leaned in close.

  ‘Okay, so we could in theory hit them there – if we could deal with the bodyguards.’

  ‘Only two bodyguards,’ I reminded them.

  ‘Armed bodyguards, nonetheless,’ said Ringo. ‘But let’s say we could do it, and drug him. We’ve still got to get him off the mountain. The only way down from there is the blue run below, in full view of the restaurants and the cable car running overhead.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus down there, only with more lights.’

  ‘Exactly, so the only way is to carry him back to the cable car with all those witnesses,’ said McCartney.

  ‘Stretcher?’ said Lennon, thinking outside the box for the first time. ‘Use a Skidoo, make out it’s a medical emergency?’

  ‘Too noisy, too obvious, too memorable. There’s a much easier way.’ I jabbed my finger at a narrow stretch annotated with warning signs. ‘Here. This pass is the exact spot we hit them. Out of sight of the resort, away from the cable car, the piste, away from everyone.’

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ said Ringo. ‘It’s a long way to get down off the mountain from there, and there are a hell of a lot of witnesses in between. Skidoo idea is good, but then there’s the rest of his bodyguards waiting for us at the bottom.’

  ‘Look again.’ I tapped the point on the map. ‘This the shortest route off the mountain.’ I took a Sharpie and drew a circle around the section of mountainside, a centimetre of closely packed contour lines. ‘At this point here it’s only one hundred and twenty metres to the road.’

  McCartney squinted at the map then looked at me, face screwed up. ‘One hundred and twenty metres… straight down.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

&n
bsp; Tiburon

  I’d brought Marty and Fields up to speed, which hadn’t taken long. Showed them the body still rolling around the hatch beneath my cabin, then sat on King’s bed and told them how I’d found his body up on the deck in the boot of my car. All the while, Fields was pulling out and pushing in the magazine in his Glock, leg bouncing up and down, looking at me nervously.

  We were well and truly in the shit, no doubt. Stuck on a boat, tossed around by a storm in the Atlantic, miles from anywhere. A killer on board with us, the crew set against us, our transport job dead with a knife sticking out of his chest. I pictured his face forever set in a grimace of pain, the traces of red staining the T-shirt where it’d escaped around the blade still wedged between his ribs.

  ‘We should strike now,’ said Fields.

  I looked up at him, sat on the desk, eying the door nervously. ‘Strike at who?’

  ‘Them. The crew. Threatening us like that.’

  He looked strung out, maybe Miller was right. After all, he and King were the only two people on guard while Marty and I had been upstairs in the saloon.

  Marty’s voice came up from the hatch. ‘Someone wise once told me to the route to victory doesn’t lie in knowing when to attack, but knowing when not to.’

  ‘You get that from a cracker?’ I asked. ‘That’s some bullshit that sounds wise but when you think about it, it’s exactly the same thing.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  I stretched, then crouched and looked down into the hatch. ‘I mean it is, but sure, go off.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Marty didn’t sound convinced. She crouched by the body, looking at the grate in the floor, then up at the ceiling. ‘There must be another way in.’

  ‘It’s welded shut.’ I followed her eyeline to the grate at the top marking the fuel inlet and ventilation valves.

  ‘Where does that come out?’ she asked.

  I climbed down the ladder to join her. ‘Somewhere under the passageway outside the rooms I guess, but there’s not enough of a gap between the decks for a person to crawl through.’

  ‘You sure? Maybe someone dropped down, killed him, welded it shut after?’