by AD Davies
As distractions go it wasn’t particularly ingenious but I knew he’d have to work the computer to authenticate whilst talking to me. I moved slowly round the desk as I talked.
“Who’s holding her?” I sat in Gorman’s chair.
“Locals. Paid ’em a couple a’ hundred dollars.” He looked up at me, suspicious, gun still firm in one hand. When he was satisfied I couldn’t see the keyboard, he hit a few keys to disengage the first password, then used a combination of Alt plus other keys, and then finally another password. His face lit up with a white glow. The gun and its suppressor wilted.
A woman’s voice said, “Okay, I’ve got it.”
Mikey frowned. “What—”
I brought up my hand, pressed the end of a nail gun into Mikey’s forearm, and pulled the trigger. A six-inch nail thunked out and pinned him to the desk. He grimaced, but held onto the gun. I shot another nail further up his arm, and another into his leg.
“Oh, you really are a bastard,” Mikey said through clenched teeth.
It didn’t take much to remove the gun from his hand.
“I’ll find you,” he said. “The stripper-whore’s dead!”
“No you won’t.” I took a few steps back. Raised the gun.
He took in my plan. Benson’s body lying on the rug. “Thought there was something off about that. The way it felt.”
“Plastic sheeting,” I said. “Took it from the building site below and lay it under the rug. Got this lovely nail-gun from their lockup too.”
“Smart,” Mikey said. “But stupid. You can’t kill me without repercussions.”
“Sure I can. You decrypted the drive for me.”
“Right,” Jess said through the speakerphone that I left open from the start. “It’s all through.”
I explained the computer on which Mikey accessed the drive was paired with one on the PAI network, and right now every bit of information was being copied and stored on a server in a faraway place, right next to where Gorman stashed the Deep Detect System. No need to decrypt the file if someone else has a password.
I said, “Me and Harry and Lily, we go free, or you all go down.”
A buzzing sounded from Mikey’s jacket.
I said, “I’d get that if I were you.”
He answered with his good hand and tried to sound like he was still in control. “I know. I’m on it. Yeah, prick copied it.” He listened. Held out the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
I aimed the gun at Mikey. “Hang up.”
“It’s Vila. He ain’t happy.”
“Hang up,” I said.
He obeyed. From Gorman’s drawer, I took a set of carpenter pincers, another item liberated from the site below. I dropped them on the desk, careful to remain at least two arm-lengths from Mikey. He used them to pull the nail pinning him.
I said, “Step back.”
Again, he obeyed, cradling his oozing hand and glancing backwards where he was planting his feet, a limp prominent. His eyes lingered on Harry, slouched twelve feet away on the couch.
“Stop,” I said.
He did so. “You guess what I’m thinkin’?”
“That you can get to Harry, yank out one of the other nails as a weapon, and use him as a human shield to get away. Close?”
“Spot on.” He nodded, impressed. “I told Vila he was full of crap about you. A pretty-boy playin’ tough-guy games. Way you attacked me last week, that was some clumsy white belt technique.”
“Out of practice.”
“Yeah. Now look at you. Guess Vila was right. You got a shit-ton a’ cold in you.”
“I’m not like you people.”
“Sure y’are. You put this setup together in one hour. You were never gonna back down about the data stick, and I’m guessin’ there ain’t one security camera workin’ in this place.”
“Actually, we shut down the city center. This building, anything controlled by the council, anything linked to the same network the council uses. Mysterious bug.”
“Smart-arsed bastard. And you got plastic under this rug, ready to get rid of our bodies. Me an’ Benson. All ’cos you can.”
“No,” I said. “I did it because I knew I couldn’t be safe from you. Once you got that disk, I was dead, and so was Harry. Everyone else you threatened too. Jess, Lily, Jayne. All of us. That’s why I have to do this. Call it pro-active self-defense.”
He tried to flex his pierced hand. “You don’t know shit, Park. I was gonna walk outta here with that and you’d never hear from us again. Vila genuinely likes you. It’s weird, I know. But he saw what I’m seein’ now. Stone-cold killer. You always were, I guess. Just took somethin’ special to pry it loose.”
During the years I spent sculpting my body into what I thought of as a fierce machine, his words would have given me nothing but encouragement. I’d been itching all of that time to fight, to hurt, to kill. But now, holding that gun on Mikey, having planned his murder with as much conscience as arranging the funeral of someone who was already dead, I pushed the logic on myself again. He was a killer.
I had no choice.
Beside Benson’s corpse, Mikey said, “This’ll look great on your CV next time Vila has a job vacancy.”
I edged forward, close enough to not miss. Added pressure to the trigger.
“Adam Matthew Park, what in God’s name are you doin’?” Harry had found his feet. His body was still shaky but that drunken slur and foggy expression were gone.
“Harry, you don’t get it,” I said. “He’s a killer. He will do the same to us, first chance he gets.”
“Two wrongs, Adam…”
“He’s willing to kill a girl. To punish me.”
“Don’t give you a right to kill him. Adam. You’ve won.”
Mikey said, “He’s right. You got your copy.” He adopted a whiney girly voice: “If I die or go missing or anyone I care for is taken, the file goes public.” Back to normal: “Right?”
Mikey was unarmed, stood on a sheet of plastic, a blight on everything good and decent. If my soul was the price of cleansing this world of him then so be it.
Harry said, “It weren’t self-defense the last time I talked you outta killing someone, and it ain’t self-defense now.”
Jess was right about what I did to Gareth. But I would get away with it. Just like I could get away with killing Mikey. But what then?
Harry stepped toward me shakily. “C’mon, son.”
“But Lily…”
Harry’s face set itself hard, his lines far deeper than mere days earlier. “If you kill this man, he’ll have done far, far worse to you.”
“Spare me the clichés,” I said. “I’ve killed already. I did it because I had to at first, but I didn’t care. I didn’t enjoy it, Harry, but I didn’t hate it either. It wasn’t difficult. They’re right. This is who I am.”
“But it isn’t you, son.” He came closer now, circumventing Mikey in a wide enough arc to avoid offering the smaller man a hostage.
“I’m damaged enough now for it not to matter. It won’t haunt me.”
He made it to my side. Placed his arms around my shoulder. The gun didn’t waver. He said, “But you doing this … killing him? It will haunt me.”
Mikey’s smile was forced. He didn’t know what I was going to do. I wanted to prolong it, to make him suffer. But I lowered the gun. Mikey breathed out. Harry nodded sadly.
“You know, pretty-boy,” Mikey said, “you had me going there a while.”
Harry pulled away from me. “You ain’t that damaged after all.”
“I damn-near soiled myself,” Mikey said. “No-one done that to me since I met Vila the first time.”
“I’m honored,” I said.
I weighed the gun in my hand. Savored its power. One squeeze of one trigger.
“Tell me,” Mikey said. “You were serious, weren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was serious. Get the hell out.”
“I have that drive? We still need what’s on it. Ev
en if it ain’t private no more.”
I stood aside, ushered Harry out of Mikey’s reach and Mikey limped forward. Removed the USB drive, and pocketed it. He used the pincers to remove the other two nails, teeth gritted against the pain.
“Damn it,” he said. “This proper hurts.”
I shrugged. “I’d say I was sorry, but I’d be lying.”
“Yeah, look at the pair of us. Couple a’ paid-up card-carrying psychos.”
“He’s not a psycho,” Harry said.
“Oh, he is,” Mikey said. “If it weren’t fer you he’d a’ done it. Right, pretty-boy?”
I neither confirmed or denied it.
Then he threw the computer at me. I batted it away, but he was already on me. A nail in his hand slashed at the gun, knocking it to the floor. An elbow landed in my ribs and I curled up low and punched his injured thigh. He staggered backwards, losing the nail. He came at me empty-handed, a ferocious howl on his lips, eyes bugging, all pretense of normalcy gone.
I returned a couple of good shots, my own blood rising, my elbow connecting with his jaw, the uppercut pinging a couple of teeth out. Yet he kept on coming, alternating strike zones, up, down, side-to-side, so I could predict nothing. No defense for it. When I finally gave in and dropped to the floor, beaten and exhausted, only then did he take a breather.
The lights of Leeds swam through Gorman’s huge window, and the river that runs through it blurred. The shimmering mass of water. I tried to focus on the room. Thought Mikey was looking for something.
Harry found it and was pointing it at Mikey.
“Give me the gun, mate,” Mikey said.
Harry held it firm. “No.”
Casually, Mikey said, “Fine, have it your way,” and picked up two of the nails he’d discarded. “Be more fun this way anyhow.”
“Don’t,” Harry said. “I might not have killed anyone recently, but I know how.”
“War’s different.”
“Not too much, I reckon.”
I pulled myself up, every muscle in my body resisting. I felt blood on my face, down my back.
“Wait,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Mikey said. “I’ll keep my end. Won’t hurt the bitch. But I’m turnin’ you into a kebab.”
He rushed at me again. The gun spat with a metallic clunk and he bucked virtually in mid-air.
The recoil knocked the weakened Harry over and he dropped the gun.
Mikey landed on his back, but he was up quickly, the bullet high enough in his chest to avoid his heart and lungs. He stared at it. Insulted that he’d been wrong about someone else that night.
I dived for the weapon. Mikey dived too. But the new wound in his body was enough to give me the edge. I rolled away and held the gun on him.
Harry sat up slowly, gaze working between us. He sighed heavily, the way he did on those rare occasions he had to admit he was wrong.
“Fine,” he said. “I shouldn’t have stopped you before.”
I remained strangely calm. “Difference between you and me, Mikey? Is that if I kill you here and now, I won’t ever do it again. You, on the other hand, you’ll go on and on and on.”
Mikey said, “Yer bluffing.”
I took one shallow breath.
Harry closed his eyes.
I said, “No more compromises.” And I fired a very quiet bullet into the back of Mikey’s skull.
The spray covered half the couch and a large section of the wall. Hardly any of it landed on the rug covering the plastic.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
I don’t know how long I stared at the two dead bodies on my floor. The clock showed ten to midnight. It would be Roger Gorman’s floor in a few minutes.
I placed the gun on the desk. Harry consoled me on what I must have been through to bring me to this place, to turn me so cold and so clinical. He told me he loved me, and that he was proud of what I’d done.
Outside, Harry’s Land Rover pulled into the car park. I helped Harry to the lift and escorted him down to the ground floor. As soon as she saw us, Jayne leapt out of the ancient vehicle and ran like a lovesick teenager and swept her husband into her arms. Harry grinned and tried to kiss her but she pulled back and said, “Get off me, you old fool.” But she saw how much he needed the affection and gave in. “Fine, quickly then.”
The pair kissed. For a few seconds.
“Happy?” Jayne said.
Harry’s grin remained. “Very.”
“He’s a bit weak,” I said. “Get him home. Rest. Malt whiskey.”
As she took him away, I heard Jayne say she’d get him to a doctor and I heard that kind offer rebuffed in no uncertain terms. It hurt to smile, but I did so anyway. I was going to have to break my agreement with Roger Gorman in a major way.
In Monday’s edition of the Yorkshire Evening Post, and the inside pages of a few national newspapers, a story would run about how some anarchist group crippled Leeds City Council’s ability to control their CCTV network. The bug also knocked out a number of online security systems whose servers tied into the many businesses that partnered with the council and the police, and this resulted in the neutralization of burglar alarms, as well as dozens of fire prevention systems. So, while the blaze at Park Avenue Investigations triggered an alarm to the fire service, the CO2 jets protecting the mass of servers malfunctioned.
Had that floor been equipped with water-based sprinklers, gravity would have sucked the water through and doused the flames before they took hold. But because Roger Gorman valued the dearth of information and computerized knick-knacks so highly, he’d only installed the CO2 system, which is supposed to smother the flames and preserve the microchips and diodes and terabytes of data that water would destroy.
One thing the newspapers would not report, however, would be the lone man standing a quarter of a mile away, watching the business he’d spent his whole life building up burn in a beautiful orange ball. The fire engines arrived within fifteen minutes, but the flames already gripped deep in the oak paneling, spreading fast to the rest of the property.
Investigations into the blaze would reveal that arson was the cause. They would uncover the bodies of Michael Durant, a private military contractor turned mob-enforcer, who murdered his boss after trying to kill Lily Blake, a dancer at the club with whom he’d grown obsessed. To evade his troubling attention, the dancer herself fled to the continent on a false passport. Indeed, this was not the first example of such behavior from Mikey.
One Sarah Stiles also confirmed that he was an obsessive stalker, hence why she, too, had fled after robbing the safe in desperation with her then-boyfriend Gareth Delingpole. And when Sarah’s story built into one of human trafficking and the white slave trade in South East Asia, the bodies in Park Avenue Investigations were soon forgotten. The foreign office announced the arrest of property-tycoon-cum-sexual-predator Vuong Dinh, and for a while the Vietnamese even took over from Muslims as the right-wing press’s bogeymen-du-jour.
Early Sunday morning, before a single press story broke on the subject, I met a traumatized Lily at Leeds-Bradford airport, her transport a private jet laid on thanks to my newly released funds. She was freed via a begrudging phone call from Vila Fanuco, acting under my orders. He was now cooler on the idea of us working together, but he said he trusted that I would keep that data secure. He didn’t fear me, though. That much was clear.
I took Lily to the hospital and posed as her boyfriend to get to her bedside, and was promptly introduced to her mum, who rushed up from Lincoln. Although they’d not spoken in a couple of years, Lily found it in her heart to forgive whatever prompted such animosity and agreed to move back in while she recovered. The rather well-to-do woman was surprised her daughter was dating a beaten-up man in his mid-thirties, but swallowed any judgment and limply shook my hand.
I’d changed of course. Showered, scrubbed raw, put on a slick Armani suit for some reason. I guess I needed to offset the bruises with a respectable wardrobe.
Lily a
nd I talked in private, her mother taking the hint to go get a coffee. She’d left on an overnight ferry from Plymouth to Bilbao, and loved the onward train to the south of Spain. Despite the cramped conditions she was mesmerized by the landscape and was welcomed so warmly by more experienced “backpack-people,” as she called them. She avoided hotels and took advice from her new friends and booked into hostels and stayed up late talking and drinking and talking some more. She’d been so happy to listen to other people’s adventures, and although she never fully revealed her own background, she once confessed to being a stripper, and everyone cooed about it sounding exotic rather than sleazy. She hooked up with an American mountain-biker named Kurt, and went with him to Tunisia, where he was due to cycle some route in the Atlas Mountains. When my money stopped flowing to her, she couldn’t resist Facebooking that I ruined her holiday and dumped her like a sack of old meat. This was when her phone automatically checked her in at the souk in which she was drinking with her new beau. When the men took her, they did so quietly, and Kurt thought she’d done a runner on him. She replied on Facebook to say she’d fill him in later, but no—she would not run out on him.
She’d see him soon.
I kissed her forehead and told her I’d take care of her. She could travel as long as she wanted.
After the hospital, I took a walk to my office building. The top floor was a gaping black frame atop the glass-fronted structure. Police still worked alongside investigators. A black-and-white car guarded the entrance, a uniformed man and woman on duty. I met Roger Gorman at the edge of the cordon, in the courtyard below the charred ruins. He was wearing a red tracksuit, the first time I’d seen him without perfect formal attire.
“Adam, thank God,” he said. “I thought maybe our little rivalry had driven you to suicide.”
They’d extinguished the flames and found bodies. Unidentified at this stage.
“Sadly not,” I said.
“Please, Adam, I am not a monster. I may not like your hippie pacifist nonsense, but I value human life.”
“Just not brown people’s lives, huh? Not the kids your clients sell guns to in war zones around the world?”