Hit Back Harder

by Andy Maslen

  “That smells good. Your mum’s a good cook, clearly. I hope you can do her recipe justice.”

  Terzi turned to face her and as she did so, she noticed his eyes flicker down over her chest and back to her face again. Something Marilyn had said pinged just below her conscious mind.

  “I have never had any complaints. And you are hungry? Despite what you have to do tonight?”

  “Can’t work on an empty stomach, never could. Tell me something, what line of surgery were you in before your little falling out with the medical authorities?” Because I already know, and I want to see if I can trust you.

  “I was an aesthetic plastic surgeon. Breasts, noses, lips, faces, you know, the usual. But mostly what they call ‘boob jobs.’”

  “Is that why you were checking mine out just then?”

  He smiled and nodded briefly, holding his hands wide.

  “Forgive me, force of habit. Drink?”

  “Just water, thanks. So what’s in your mum’s recipe?”

  Terzi unscrewed the lid on a full bottle of sparkling mineral water with a hiss from the escaping gas and poured them both a fizzing glass.

  “Very thin lamb cutlets, black olives, onion, tomatoes, garlic – lots of garlic – wine, olive oil, butter and a few other things.”

  She took a gulp of the water, stifled a belch and smiled as the gas prickled her eyes and the back of her nose.

  “Oh, right, ‘a few other things.’ That’s the bit where if you explain, your mum appears with a carving knife and stabs you to death.”

  He smiled, then drank from his own glass.

  “No. She would never do that. Not to her only son.” A beat. “She would stab you, though.”

  After the meal, during which Terzi filled her in as much as he could on the appearance and characteristics of the two Albanians, she helped him clear the table and wash up. One thing had become clear during their conversation. If the two thugs were part of a gang, it was at one or two removes. Terzi had consulted the Wilkses, and they’d made a few discreet enquiries on his behalf. The reports that came back were unanimous. No organised Albanian gangs working on this part of the Costa del Sol. They were a start-up. Probably trying to suck in cash from local businesses as funding for a drugs operation.

  All of which gave Stella confidence that there would be no recriminations. Removing two thugs after protection money only to wither under a hail of automatic gunfire from a fully organised criminal gang was not her idea of a successful outcome.

  Terzi was pacing up and down on the rug in the centre of the sitting room. His face was tight and he kept biting at the skin on the side of his right thumb. He checked his watch again. “It’s after eleven,” he muttered. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready or something? And what about afterwards?”

  “What do you mean?” Stella asked.

  “The bodies, of course!” he said, raising his voice, then immediately dropping it to a conspiratorial whisper again. “How do you intend to get rid of them once you’ve killed them?”

  “First of all, stop pacing, you’re making me nervous.” Terzi sat, obedient as a well-trained dog, on the edge of the sofa facing Stella. “Second, don’t worry about afterwards. In fact, don’t worry about before, either.”

  “Don’t worry? You’re about to kill two men in my house. How can I not worry?”

  “Yiannis,” she said, deliberately dropping her voice and using his first name to settle and focus him, much as she used to do with nervous witnesses of crime, or occasionally, perpetrators. “I’m not going to do it here. It would be far too messy, and probably loud. You have neighbours. They could hear something and call the police. Plus all this,” she swept her arm around in a semi-circle, “is so nice, I’d hate to spoil it by getting it messy.”

  “Then what?” He stood up and resumed pacing, stopping at every turn to look at her.

  “They come and you pay them, just like normal. I’ll be waiting for them outside. Whatever happens will happen far away from here so nothing will point at you. OK?”

  He nodded. “OK. Fine.”

  50

  Lex Talionis

  STELLA WAS SWEATING in her clothes. She had found a shadowy spot outside the front of Terzi’s house, where a tree with low, drooping branches and long, finger-shaped leaves had created a natural tepee. She sat, her back against its smooth-barked trunk, and waited. Terzi’s neighbourhood was mostly residential, and traffic was minimal. She saw a few big cars swoop up the hill and take the left turn onto his tree-lined avenue, then cruise past her vantage point before turning left or right into a driveway or underground garage. When she did catch sight of a badge on the wide-mouthed grilles it was either a three-pointed star, a blue-and-white quartered circle or four linked silver rings.

  “Merc, Merc, Audi, BMW, BMW, Audi, ooh, Jaguar, good for us!” she murmured as she kept count of the expensive machinery purring past her to disgorge their well-heeled occupants.

  Checking her watch, she was surprised to see that it was five to midnight. She frowned, wondering whether she’d lost time somewhere. No. She could remember the passing minutes since she’d left Terzi’s place. As she was trying to remember whether she’d ever gone into a dream while on surveillance posts, a different style of engine note roused her to alertness. No sound-deadened, expensively tuned exec-mobile, this. It was altogether rougher. Though Stella had never shown the level of interest in cars of her male, and occasionally female, colleagues, she could tell this was a high-mileage diesel, the giveaway chuntering as its engine struggled in too high a gear confirming it.

  She peered between two branches and saw a dark-coloured estate car pull up outside Terzi’s house. Could have been French, or Spanish, or German, or Japanese for all she knew. What she cared about was the two men who, as she watched, climbed out and stretched. So you’ve come a reasonable distance, boys. A long enough journey to need to want to ease those backs. Their conversation carried across the road, even though they were keeping their voices low. It wasn’t a language she recognised, but it had the sound of Greek mixed with Russian that she could imagine being Albanian. They weren’t big, average size, both of them, wearing what she’d long thought of as East European gangster couture from her days on the Met. Stone-washed jeans, shiny shirts, white trainers and black leather bomber jackets. Military-looking haircuts and dark-complexioned faces, both clean shaven. One appeared to take charge. He tapped the other on the chest with the back of his left hand and the second man nodded. Then they both reached inside their bomber jackets. Their right hands emerged clutching black pistols. Some kind of semi-automatic. Stella patted the left side of her chest under her own jacket. Felt the reassuring, hard shape of her own weapon, and continued to observe her prey.

  They checked the guns over then replaced them inside their jackets and strolled up to Terzi’s front door. The bagman, as Stella had immediately dubbed him, stretched out an index finger and held it down on the bell push for a few seconds. After a short wait, the door opened and in the light spilling round him from the hallway, Stella could make out Terzi’s worried expression. Just play it straight, Yiannis, she thought. Don’t get cocky or start play acting.

  The moment the door shut behind the bagman, Stella moved. Running in a half-crouch she reached the estate car in a handful of seconds. If it was locked, she was prepared to wait out of sight behind another tree and then hold them up with the pistol, but there was no need. She tried the handle of the rear offside door, lifting it with a firm pull. It opened soundlessly, and she was inside. She’d been gambling on the Albanians’ being cocky, making their regular call and far too confident to think of something as mundane as locking the car. They were gangsters, after all. And who would risk getting on their wrong side by trying to nick their wheels?

  She retrieved her pistol from the improvised shoulder holster she’d assembled out of a couple of belts and a large leather purse she’d bought in Marbella. It wouldn’t win any prizes in quick-draw competitions but it gave her convenient
access to the pistol. She dropped the magazine, thumbed out the first couple of rounds and then pushed them home again before reseating the magazine with a muted click. Scrunching herself down behind the passenger seat and trying to still her thumping heartbeat, she began her second wait of the evening.

  This wait did not last long. Just a few minutes later, she heard the Albanians’ rough voices floating through the night air towards the car. In they came, slamming the doors home after them with a loud double clunk. In the close confines of the car, their smell was unpleasant: rough, nicotine-heavy cigarette smoke that made her wrinkle her nose despite her own status as semi-reformed smoker; cheap aftershave; and whisky. Obviously they’d demanded their reluctant host provide hospitality along with the protection money. They were laughing and slapping each other’s thighs, almost play fighting, before the leader twisted the key in the ignition, slammed the poor car’s transmission into first and lurched away from the pavement.

  Stella kept her head down, listening to the two men’s excited chatter in that odd, guttural language, until the regular flare of streetlamps lighting up the interior of the car stopped, to be replaced by unbroken darkness. So we’re out of town, then? She made her move.

  Slowly, keeping her pistol up, she slid herself from the rear footwell onto the back seat. As part of the same, continuous movement, she placed the muzzle against the back of the driver’s head, ready to swipe it sideways against the other man’s temple if he should make so much as a twitch towards his own weapon.

  “Guns. Now. Or you’re dead,” she said. Yiannis had told her they used English so she knew they’d understand this simple trio of sentences.

  Both men reacted with surprise.

  The driver swore in Albanian, and she could see him resisting the urge to swing his head round to see who was shoving – harder now – a gun into the base of his skull.

  The passenger did whirl round, then, once he’d registered the barrel swing in his direction, face front again, stiff as a corpse.

  “Guns!” she shouted. “By the barrels. Now!”

  With one hand on the wheel, the driver fished around inside his bomber jacket and handed his pistol over his shoulder. Stella took it and placed it on the seat beside her. Then she reached forward a second time and relieved the passenger of his own weapon.

  “Nice,” Other Stella, said from the seat next to her. “You’re building up quite the little armoury, aren’t you?”

  “Who are you? What do you want?” the driver asked, his voice shaky.

  “I’m a friend of Dr Terzi. I don’t like you taking money from him. So now we’re going to find somewhere nice and quiet for a chat.” She spotted a turning ahead leading uphill into some scrubby woodland creased by ravines, inky black in the moonlight. “Take that turn, nice and easy.”

  “What friend?” he asked, easing the car off the main road and onto the side turning, which was little more than a farm track.

  “That doesn’t matter. Keep driving until you find a clear spot. Then stop the car, turn off the engine and give me the key. Try anything funny and I’ll shoot you where you sit.” As she said this she noticed a movement out of the corner of her eye. The passenger was reaching into his jacket again. She swung the gun barrel sideways and clipped it against his left ear, hard enough to draw blood, and a yelp from its owner. “See, that’s exactly what I mean. Knives, too. Now.”

  Collecting the two proffered flick-knives, she stuffed them into the pocket of her jacket.

  In the white light of the moon, she saw a clearing emerge on the driver’s side of the car, about fifty yards ahead up the track.

  “You want me to stop there?” the driver asked.

  “Yes.”

  He swung the car off the road, across some rutted earth, and then killed the engine, which subsided with a wheezing rattle and a few deep clunks from the transmission. Hardly El Primo gangster transport, she thought.

  Slowly, presumably because he didn’t want a matching wound to his own ear, the driver pulled the keys from the ignition and held them over his shoulder.

  “Drop them,” Stella said, then caught the falling keys in her left palm and transferred them to her other pocket.

  She exited the car, moving fast before the two Albanians could figure out whether the change in circumstances offered them any advantage. She turned and tapped the pistol on the window a couple of times, and signalled for the two men to get out.

  A wind had sprung up, and the trees fringing the clearing were thrashing their topmost branches about as if desperately trying to warn the Albanians that trouble was coming. Trouble of the very worst sort.

  Keeping a six-foot distance between her and her captives, Stella spoke.

  “You’ve been lucky so far. You’ve taken money from my friend and suffered no comebacks. But your luck just changed.”

  The driver spoke next, holding out his palms.

  “Please. Don’t shoot us. We are trying to save up to go to England.”

  Stella shook her head, unsure she’d heard correctly.

  “What? You’re saving up? So this protection racket is so you can go and have a fucking holiday?”

  “No! It is not a racket. We are not gangsters. My brother and I, we are just trying to get to UK for work. But we need money for documents.”

  This wasn’t what Stella had been expecting at all.

  “So, what, you’re telling me you’re not part of an organised crime group? No Albanian mafia?”

  The two men surprised her by laughing at this. Then the passenger, whom she now realised was the driver’s brother, spoke.

  “No. Not mafia. We are carpenters. We will join building site in UK.”

  The barrel of Stella’s pistol dropped a fraction. Then it jerked back up again.

  “Where do a couple of ambitious carpenters get pistols from? They sell those in the Marbella Homebase, do they?”

  The two men looked at each other. Then they turned back to Stella.

  “OK, we maybe do a bit more than save up. We got the guns from our cousin. He is dealer.”

  “Dealer?”

  “Guns. Drugs. Whatever you need. Look, I show you.” He reached into his trouser pocket and Stella watched as his hand vanished.

  Which is when the brother leapt forwards, closing the gap in a split second and smacking his fist down onto Stella’s gun arm. She dropped the Glock, and watched in slow motion as he dived down to get to it before she could.

  She may have lost the gun, but she still had the unarmed combat training, drilled into her by former Sergeant “Rocky” Stevens, when she’d gone to him for help toughening up before taking on PPM in the first place.

  Instinctively, she jerked her right knee up, feeling the jolt all the way up to her hip as she connected with the point of his jaw.

  The driver was on her, too, even as his brother went down into the dirt, stunned. His hands went round her throat, fingertips digging deep into the soft tissue of her neck.

  She could have struggled, but he was physically stronger than her. So she went limp, and as he lost his balance under the extra weight, she reached into her jacket, pulled out one of the confiscated flick-knives, and released its wicked blade.

  As they stumbled over the prostrate form of the driver’s brother, Stella swept the knife across the driver’s forehead, opening a four-inch cut that sheeted blood over his eyes, blinding him. He released her, swiping at the blood and yelping with pain.

  She staggered back from the pair, and bent to retrieve the Glock.

  No more talk.

  She took aim and fired.

  Two shots.

  Two knees.

  Two screams.

  She leant over the writhing pair and spoke in a slow, clear voice.

  “Dr Terzi told me what you did to his daughter.”

  The bagman spoke through gritted teeth as he clutched his shattered knee.

  “We only wanted to frighten her. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

  Momentari
ly rendered speechless by the man’s attitude, Stella just stared at him. Which was the opportunity Other Stella had been waiting for.

  “Give me the gun,” she said, holding out her hand.

  Stella handed it over then stood back.

  Other Stella knelt beside the bagman and shoved the pistol’s muzzle hard into his left eye socket.

  “She lost an eye. And you know what the Bible says about eyes.”

  Then she pulled the trigger.

  The remaining gangster scrabbled backwards on his elbows, ruined knee staining the ground with blood that looked black in the moonlight. He managed to get to his feet as Other Stella whirled round, raising the pistol. Then with a yell, he fell backwards over a rock and vanished.

  She ran to the point where he’d last stood and looked down. The second gangster had fallen into a deep ravine, lined with scrub. She could see a few newly snapped branches on low-growing bushes, but of the Albanian there was no sign. She craned her neck and strained to catch a sound. There! The distant crashing as he rolled, presumably to his death, at the foot of the rocky slope.

  Shrugging, she stuck the pistol into her waistband and walked back to the car.

  “Fuck him,” she said. And disappeared herself.

  Stella climbed into the car, started it and slewed round in a circle, the steering on full-lock to avoid running the dead man over, before powering away down the rutted track, not caring about the juddering, filling-loosening surface, until she was back onto the smooth tarmac of the main road and driving back towards Terzi’s place.

  51

  Disappearing Act

  TERZI’S GUEST BEDROOM was as beautifully furnished as the rest of his house. Richly figured antique furniture abounded, from a clothes chest to an antique wardrobe with polished brass handles. The bed was wrought iron, and dressed in exquisitely soft, cool linen. Stella had crashed into sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Now she woke to the sound of birdsong coming in through the shutters. She opened her eyes then flinched: a thin band of bright sunlight bisected her face like a knife. She turned her face away before rolling out of bed and going to turn on the shower in her en suite bathroom.