Hit Back Harder

by Andy Maslen

  The landscape out here in the countryside was beautiful. More beautiful even than Wales. So much space. So many trees. Such colours: the greens and yellows in the fields, the occasional splashes of purple where tall roadside plants flowered in clumps. Even this road was beautiful. Like driving beneath the roof of a cathedral. He readied himself, patting the gun in its holster beneath his jacket, and taking a firmer grip on the leather steering wheel.

  Oho! Now you look behind! OK. Let’s do this.

  He closed the gap between the BMW’s front end and the bike’s rear to ten feet, then simply mashed the throttle into the floor.

  Returning her gaze to the horizon, Stella caught movement in her offside mirror. The rectangle of glass was rapidly filling with the predatory grille of a car. Then she did something she shouldn’t have. She flicked her head round to glance over her shoulder. The “life saver” look. That’s what the bike instructors called it these days. It was supposed to stop you from turning into the path of a vehicle coming up fast on your inside, or outside, as you made a turn. It did work. If that’s what you were doing. But if the vehicle in question wasn’t about to cut you off, but was, instead, headed straight for your rear end, a more apposite name would be the “time waster” look.

  By the time Stella had gasped and shrieked a muffled “Fuck!” the BMW was upon her.

  39

  What to Bring to a Gunfight

  THE COP WAS quick, he gave her that. She’d kicked down a gear and opened her own throttle wide. But Ervin was ready. And the engine beneath the silver bonnet was better able to respond to the needs of its driver than the bike’s.

  Seconds later, he felt the satisfying jolt of steel against steel. Hammer and nail, he thought.

  He hit the brakes and watched.

  The rear of the bike wobbled, then lurched, then hurled itself sideways as the unbalanced forces acting on it demanded and achieved release.

  Stella had dropped bikes before. Sometimes by accident, as when she’d hit a patch of diesel on a roundabout and slid gracefully into a hedge on her arse, with her ride joining her a few moments later. Neither of them had been damaged beyond some superficial scrapes and, in her case, a wallop to her pride, as a trio of builders cheered at her from a feeder road. Sometimes she’d done it on purpose, as the lesser of two evils. Coming over a bridge on a ride through the countryside to the west of London once, she’d found herself heading towards a herd of sheep that filled the narrow road from one side to the other. Dropping the bike had seemed preferable to creating a couple of tons of minced lamb.

  This crash fell into neither of those categories.

  This was enemy action.

  She tried to accelerate away from the onrushing BMW. She’d even had time, and the presence of mind or just instinctive reactions, to boot the gear lever down from fifth to fourth. But it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

  Even as she opened the throttle she began preparing for the inevitable.

  Which arrived three seconds later.

  She felt the rear end slewing from side to side.

  Then, with a convulsive shake, like an unbroken horse throwing a novice rodeo rider, it flung her forwards, over the bars and down onto the road.

  Bouncing and sliding along the gritty, grey tarmac, she had the unsettling view of both the Speedmaster and the BMW behind it chasing her down the road.

  The bike was striking sparks from its metal parts as they met the road surface. It tumbled, end over end, appearing intent on reuniting itself with its owner.

  The car had slowed, however, and in her hyper-alert state she saw the face of its driver. He was swarthy, with dark stubble shadowing the lower half of his face. And he was shouting. No, not shouting. He was laughing.

  Ervin followed the careering bike, laughing as the front wheel dug in and catapulted the cop over the handlebars. He slowed, matching his speed to the somersaulting machine, and checking his rearview mirror, which was free of anything but the brilliant green tunnel of trees. Era was crooning to him from the speakers, and he joined in, singing to her a modified version of the song, in which the lyrics spoke of his undying love for her.

  With a final shower of sparks from its exhaust pipe, the bike slid from the road into a ditch on the left-hand side.

  Good, he thought. One less thing to worry about.

  The cop was flat on her back, spread-eagled. Not moving.

  He put the gear lever into Park and turned off the engine. He pulled the Ruger from the shoulder holster, switched off the thumb safety and racked the slide. As he left the car, he had a brainwave and reached back in to turn the left indicator on. Anyone coming would simply assume he’d been caught short and would pull round him nice and smooth, nice and fast.

  Stella opened her eyes. She’d blacked out for a few seconds. She wiggled her toes. Felt them move inside her boots. Thank Christ! I’m not paralysed. Now think—

  “No!” a voice shouted in her ear, which was odd, given she still had her helmet on. “Don’t think. Move! Get up. Now!”

  She felt strong hands urging her upwards and staggered to her feet. The adrenaline coursing through her bloodstream would have anaesthetised an elephant, and the pain from her battered muscles and joints she experienced more as a movie playing somewhere in her head with the sound turned down and the screen darkened. There, but somehow not detectable.

  She turned. The driver of the car was walking towards her. He was about thirty yards away. He was holding a gun in his right hand. But it was down by his side. He was grinning now and she could see his lips moving. Still singing.

  Stella looked down. The messenger bag was at her feet. The strap had sheared at one end and it must have fallen off her as she stood up. She dropped to one knee and wrenched the flap open. Grabbing the Glock, she whirled back to face the driver.

  He was levelling his pistol at her.

  She tried to aim for the middle of his body. What did they call it on the firearms course? Centre mass. That was it. That’s good. We remembered. No, stay focused. He’s going to kill us. Not if we kill him first.

  Her head was suddenly wrenched sideways as if someone had grasped her helmet and given it an almighty twist.

  The man was only twenty yards away now and holding his pistol straight out in front of him, one-handed. The muzzle was smoking. Her ears were ringing.

  She brought the Glock up in a two-handed grip and squeezed the trigger. Kept squeezing as the pistol jarred her wrists.

  The man stopped and fired again. He missed.

  Stella saw a blossom of red open on his chest. It was like one of the roses from the garden at Jason and Elle’s.

  He staggered, then brought his gun back up.

  Stella dropped to her chest. Smaller target. That’s good.

  From her prone position she aimed more carefully this time.

  As he swayed before her, she closed one eye and lined the sights up on his face.

  She felt chips of tarmac spattering her helmet and saw the puffs of fine grit blasted from the road surface as his shots hit the ground in front of her.

  “Not good enough,” she said. Then she squeezed the trigger. Again and again and again until her magazine was empty and her man was down.

  Her firearms instructor would have been delighted.

  What would he have said? she wondered, watching as the driver’s head exploded in a pink cloud. Nice shooting, DS Cole. Next time we’ll have you putting candles out.

  She stuffed the still-smoking Glock back into her bag, tossed it into the undergrowth near to the Triumph and ran over to the body. Everything above the top lip that might have identified the man had disappeared. What remained was a mess of red, yellow and grey, speckled with bone fragments. She held her breath and patted both sides of his jacket until she found his phone, which she extracted and slid into her pocket.

  Grunting with the effort, and the sudden onset of the pain from her road-level acrobatics, she hauled the corpse by its ankles into the ditch. It settled beneat
h the ferns and brambles with a soft thump, all but invisible as the foliage sprang back over it. She prised the gun from the clawed right hand and stuck it into the waistband of her jeans.

  Stella looked up. A car was approaching. Still a few hundred yards off, but she needed to move fast. She looked back where she’d come off the bike; the scene looked clear. The road around her was strewn with gore. She wrenched off her helmet, tossing it behind her as she climbed into the BMW’s driver’s seat, then swept a hand through her cropped hair.

  She glanced in the mirror. The car was slowing. Then it was stopping alongside her, a dark blue Volvo estate. She turned and buzzed the window down.

  The driver, a middle-aged man with thinning silver hair and gold-framed glasses that magnified his brown eyes, did the same.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked. “I saw you’d stopped and, well, nothing to stop for here, is there?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. Thanks.” She noticed his eyes flick ahead to the patch of red on the road.

  He turned back to her, a frown carving three deep lines into his forehead.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing ahead at the blood.

  “I hit a deer. It was awful.” She let the anxiety coiling and squirming in her stomach add a tremor to her voice. “It ran off, but I’m afraid I must have really injured it.”

  “You poor thing. I mean, obviously the animal, too, but they do warn you about them. Did you see the sign back there?”

  “Yes, of course. But there’s nothing you can do, is there? It just ran out in front of me.”

  He sighed. “No, I suppose not. Do you think it went far? Maybe we should go and find it. Put it out of its misery.”

  She doubted he really wanted to do any such thing. He was wearing a white shirt with a sky-blue cravat at his neck and a navy blazer. Off to a golf-club lunch. Or the masons. She shook her head.

  “I did try but it vanished into the woods. We’ll just have to let nature take its course, I’m afraid.”

  He sighed again, more theatrically this time.

  “I suppose you’re right. Circle of life, eh? Well, look, you take care. It must have been a nasty shock. Drive carefully. There’s a café a few miles down the road. Maybe stop off for a nice cup of tea.”

  “That’s a good idea. I probably will. Thank you.”

  She buzzed the window up and waved, relieved as he mirrored her and pulled away, keeping to the far side of the road until he’d passed the slick of blood on the tarmac.

  “Patronising old fart,” was Other Stella’s response. “I need a cigarette. And a drink.”

  Stella nodded at her passenger.

  “Me too. But first things first.”

  She climbed out, wincing as her stiffening muscles protested, and walked back to the spot where the Triumph had left the road. She climbed down into the ditch to inspect it.

  The handlebars were bent back on themselves into a U. The brake pedal was wedged in tight against crankcase, which was deeply scored. And the tank and mudguard were scraped back to shining bare metal.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” she said. “I couldn’t have pulled you out anyway.”

  She stood and began pulling ferns over the ruins of her bike. The finishing touch was a scattering of leaf mould that she gathered from under an oak tree about fifteen feet into the woods beyond.

  When she’d finished, there was no sign of the bike’s ever having been present, as long as you didn’t count the multiple scrapes and scuffs decorating the road surface for seventy feet back from the place where she now stood. She retrieved the messenger bag containing the Glock and walked back to the BMW.

  Inside the car, she reached back for her helmet and pulled it between the front seats to inspect it.

  Roughly in line with her left temple was a deep, jagged-edged groove extending for two inches from front to back. She pursed her lips. Must’ve been what spun my head round. Good job he wasn’t a better shot. Then she twisted the key in the ignition, breathed in deeply and pulled away.

  40

  Threat/Counter-threat

  DRIVING A CAR felt different. That was what Stella realised as she motored through the country roads back to the hotel. She was alert, checking the rearview mirror every few seconds, but that was all. No sweating. No shakes. No feeling that death was about to leap from a hedge garbed in tattered and burnt robes and slash at the windscreen with a scythe. She lowered the window and turned briefly to blow a stream of cigarette smoke into the wind.

  “Maybe things are changing,” she said. “I can have a drink without wanting to down three bottles of pinot. Now I can drive.”

  “Yeah, babe, and soon, you’ll be able to fly, too,” Other Stella said from the passenger seat.

  “There’s no need to be like that. I was only making an observation.”

  “And all I’m saying is let’s walk before we can run, OK?”

  “Fine.” Stella knew she sounded like a sulky teenager, but she hated the way Other Stella poured scorn on her every attempt to take a lighter view.

  She jabbed a finger at the on button for the stereo and jerked back as a female singer’s wailing voice blared from the speakers. She shot her hand out and twisted the volume knob to quieten the music, which, she decided, she liked. Maybe it was what the dead guy had been listening to when he was following her. Other Stella spoke.

  “Yes, and about that, you need to sharpen up. That was a rookie error. Didn’t you ever do a pursuit and surveillance course?”

  “Of course I did. As you know.”

  “Then may I suggest you take a little more care? Getting picked up by a traffic cop for speeding, or killed by another PPM hitter would be beyond stupid.”

  The hotel receptionist was all smiles. Her name badge said she was called Kerry.

  “Welcome to Allenby Court, madam. Good day?”

  “Hi, Kerry. Er, yes, I think you could say that.” I just carved another notch on my gun butt so, you know, things are looking up.

  “Brilliant!” the young woman said, beaming at Stella like a lighthouse.

  Obviously feeling she’d made enough of an effort, Kerry returned to her computer terminal.

  Inside her room, Stella stripped off her clothes and stood facing herself in the full-length mirror beside the writing desk.

  “Jesus!” was all she said.

  Her left arm was a mottled mass of purple and dark-blue bruises. She twisted sideways to inspect her left side, lifting her arm to get a better view of the damage. Her ribs were turning the same colour as her arm and her left buttock was the colour of ripe plums. Demarcating her thigh midway between hip and knee was a horizontal bruise with weirdly straight edges. But nothing felt broken. She tried flexing each of her joints in turn and none caused her to screech in pain although most felt like someone had emptied sand into them.

  She ran a bath, emptying the contents of the courtesy tube of bath gel under the hot tap, poured a glass of red wine from the minibar and sank, with a sigh of relief, up to her chin in the steaming water. She got out again. Fetched the phone she’d taken from the dead guy’s pocket and returned with it to the embrace of the tub.

  “Now then. Were you the security-conscious type?”

  She tapped the screen. It woke up, showing her a picture of an attractive blonde woman, her face framed by a comically oversized fuchsia fur hood. Overlaid on the woman’s figure were the familiar array of app symbols.

  She snorted.

  “Apparently not.”

  She took a pull on the wine, rested the glass on the side of the bath and pulled up the list of starred Contacts. None of the names jumped out at her. They were mostly East European-looking. Sergei-this and Alban-that. The small circular photos didn’t reveal anything useful either: dark-haired men with stubbled chins and death-or-glory expressions. Next she tried the call history. This was better. As she swiped through the list she noted that ninety percent of them were to the same contact. Someone called Tamit. He was handsome, for a
murderer. The dead guy’s boss, in all probability.

  She tapped the call button. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Ervin. Is it done? Did you kill her like I said? Out of London? I’m seeing Collier tonight. It would be good to give him good news.”

  Stella took a breath and let it out in a soft sigh.

  “Actually, it’s not Ervin. It’s Stella Cole.”

  “What the fuck? Where’s Ervin?”

  “Well, that’s a very good question. Where is Ervin? Most of him, I mean virtually all of him, ninety-five percent at least, is currently beginning to rot in a ditch. The flies have probably arrived by now and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the beetles weren’t making their way to the party as well. The remainder is spread over a patch of tarmac, though it may be sticking to car tyres by now.”

  She listened, smiling, to the man called Tamit struggling to control his breathing. Got you!

  “I’ll get you for that, bitch. I’ll come for you myself. Ervin was my little brother. They’ll have to use buckets to collect you when I’m—”

  “Guess what?” she interrupted. “I don’t have time for your threats. Tell Collier this. He’s running out of friends. And I’m coming for him. As for you, if you get in my way, I’ll kill you, too. Now fuck off, you’re spoiling my bath.”

  41

  Oh, I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside

  AFTER WOLFING DOWN a breakfast of sausages, fried eggs, bacon, mushrooms and fried potatoes in the hotel’s dining room, and washing it all down with a couple of mugs of English Breakfast tea, Stella went for a walk in the grounds. A peacock approached her, hissing, and rattling its quills; she pointed an imaginary pistol at its tiny, iridescent head and shouted “bang!” – the bird executed a leisurely about-turn.