Errand of Mercy: How far do you run, and where do you hide?

by William Walker

  Eric nodded from the opposite side of the doorway. They waited a four-count before they heard movement inside.

  Lucy’s head appeared at the top of the stairs. “What the…”

  Eric swore. “Get back, Lucy.”

  Heavy footfalls pounded to the door. The first set thrashed in an odd rhythm, a clumsy bull charging.

  The German lurched out and turned immediately toward Eric and the direction of the stairwell. He lunged with arms like stovepipes.

  Eric spun on his legs and delivered a back kick into the man’s solar plexus. The German grunted and bent at the waist. He turned and lashed out at O’Brien, who ducked to the side and shot an elbow into his sandbag of a chest. Udo recoiled only slightly and for a brief instant O’Brien was left staring at two ugly eyes atop a bloody cave of a mouth.

  Starr and Murdock came out and rushed toward the stairs. Eric blocked their forward progress with side-to-side strikes, and the wet smack of a solid hit to the face came from the clash. A gun from somewhere sailed through the air and rattled on the linoleum floor. Eric scrambled for the weapon, and Udo abruptly turned from O’Brien and followed his two partners down the stairs.

  O’Brien reached the pistol first. He leveled the weapon on Udo’s back at the same moment he heard Lucy scream from the second-floor landing. Sounds of a scuffle came from her position, followed by a flurry of hard steps descending through the stairwell. In quick time the ground-floor exit door banged open, and the threesome of felons disappeared.

  “Lucy!” Eric yelled, jumping down the steps by two-by-two.

  O’Brien looked over and down to see Lucy on her feet, but squirming in obvious pain. He sprinted three steps to the shattered apartment door, smashed the splintered wood frame aside, and shouldered through the doorway. “Gina?”

  She sat on the sofa with her head down. Her breath came in hard, choking spasms, and her blouse was splotched with blood. She had also been sick, and her clothes were splattered with stomach acids.

  He moved beside her and took her in his arms. She turned into his shoulder and began crying in racking sobs. “Daniel...I...” She coughed with a gag reflex.

  “Shh...you don’t need to talk.”

  After several minutes she raised her face. “They’re killers…they tried to…”

  “I know what they tried…shh.” He examined her. A trickle of blood was coming from cuts on both sides of her mouth, but the wounds were already coagulating. She’d been hit hard in the face several times. He had a good idea what else the murderous assholes had in mind.

  Lucy staggered into the apartment helped by Eric. “Starr, the son of a bitch, hit me,” Lucy said through her tears, but with an attitude. Her face was a bleeding and she was holding her left wrist with her right hand in a grimace of pain. Then, “My God, Gina. Are you all right?”

  Gina swiveled away. “Daniel, who’s that?”

  “Lucy’s brother. He’s a good guy.”

  “Lucy?” Gina pushed off the sofa and stood in a wobbly stance.

  “Easy,” O’Brien said.

  “Come here, Gina.” Lucy said.

  “Lucy, I’m all—”

  “I know what you are,” Lucy said. She pulled Gina into her arms and held her. They sobbed into each other’s shoulders, and O’Brien knew that Gina couldn’t have resisted Lucy’s embrace even if she’d wanted to.

  At length, Gina wiped her face with the back of a hand and brushed her blouse. “I’m okay, maybe. But let me take a look at you, Lucy,” she said in a pale voice.

  “That son-of-a-bitch,” Lucy sniffed. “My face will look worse tomorrow, won’t it?”

  “We’re all going to look worse tomorrow,” Gina replied attempting a smile that didn’t work. She turned Lucy’s face sideways, touched her nose carefully. “Let me see.”

  “Ouch!”

  “Guys, we need some clean towels and ice packs,” Gina said. “And we need you to protect us from any more attacks.”

  It was unclear who was helping whom. The women disappeared into the bathroom, a shaky two-step of dance partners hanging on to one another.

  O’Brien looked at Eric. The first order of business involved the telephone. O’Brien called Sudbury and was routed to his mobile. The inspector was already on his way along with the paramedics, thanks to the phone call from the man in the nearby apartment.

  “The cavalry is on the way,” he said.

  Lucy’s brother stood immobile. He rubbed his hands together after a bit. “Well, that felt good,” he finally remarked. “Busting the door in, hitting those slime balls. I totally crushed the thin guy in the face. I think I heard cartilage go. Never thought I’d be doing that for real.”

  “You need to get out more,” O’Brien said. He tried for a light tone that wasn’t there. “We saved Gina’s life tonight. Not a question about it. Thanks.”

  “She’s the one with you, that Lucy was talking about?”

  “Yeah.” O’Brien flexed his right elbow. He’d caught the German squarely and he could already feel it becoming stiff.

  Eric seemed at a loss. He glanced around the apartment. “I guess I’d better go park the car someplace. Can’t leave it out in the street with the cops on the way.”

  “Be careful. Our friends might still be hanging around out there.”

  “Right. Back in a few minutes.”

  O’Brien examined the floor. His cousin had put down oak boards stained with a blond sealer and topped with a couple coats of gloss polyurethane. The smear of blood and regurgitated matter stood out clearly and appeared to originate from a point in front of the sofa. He assumed Gina was held down in that area.

  Eric ducked back through the open doorway a minute later in a rush. “Shit! My Toyota is gone.”

  O’Brien looked up. “What? Gone as in—”

  “They must’ve stolen it. The keys were in it. Dumb me, but I was more concerned with covering you in all the commotion.”

  “It’ll be something else for the cops to look for,” O’Brien said. “It could make finding them a little easier.”

  “Great. I had my uniform and line badge in there.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  Eric shook his head. “I guess not. It just pisses me off.”

  The flat went quiet for a while. O’Brien took some damp rags to the floor. Eric helped. A neighbor peeked through the doorway, then another. The atmosphere of the place reminded O’Brien of the calm after a summer squall, people picking up lawn chairs and the like.

  O’Brien called Charlie and filled him in on the assault and the damage to his flat. “Can you do anything about clothes for Gina and Lucy?” he asked after a few minutes.

  Charlie held the phone, talked to Jenny in the background. He came back. “Jenny and I will be over in thirty minutes. We’ve got the clothes figured out.”

  “Be careful, Charlie, you and Jenny both. Somehow we were tracked to this place, and I have a feeling it might have been through you.”

  His cousin let out a heavy breath into the phone. “Blast it, Danny. How much ’a this stuff is going to fall on us?”

  “Charlie, I’m sorry. Sorry for everything. I’ll pay for the damages, but without your help we’d probably be dead. I’ll never be able to thank you enough. None of us will.”

  His cousin mumbled a tired reply and rang off.

  Sudbury materialized through the non-existent door along with a team of police inspectors. He caught the last part of the conversation.

  “Sounds like you Yanks are wearing out your welcome.” He wore the same brown coat as earlier in the day. He’d changed his shirt and lost the tie, as if he’d come from a dinner out.

  “I don’t blame him,” O’Brien said. “We’ve caused my poor cousin nothing but trouble.” He went through the details of the encounter as the inspector poked around.

  “I’d like to talk to Gina and Lucy, get their statements after the paramedics check them out,” he said after a few minutes.

  O’Brien nodded.

/>   Sudbury leaned against the counter, folded his arms, and peered at O’Brien. “I still can’t quite understand what makes you people so important to these assassins.”

  The paramedics walked into the apartment at that moment lugging satchels of medical equipment. The young man and woman seemed to know Sudbury. “Who do we have injured here?” one asked.

  “They’re in the bathroom down the hall,” Sudbury replied. “Although,” he looked at O’Brien, “if I remember correctly, one of the women is a doctor, so perhaps she can lend a hand herself.”

  They watched the paramedics troop down the short hallway. An inspector interrupted. “Ramsey, this weapon has been fired recently.”

  O’Brien looked over his shoulder as the man sniffed the end of the barrel. He held the pistol using a pencil through the trigger guard.

  “And that confirms what I told Inspector Sudbury,” O’Brien informed him. “Even though it’ll have my prints on it, the Murdock fellow fired two rounds into the door.”

  “Well, if this is Murdock’s weapon it’s bloody important to us.”

  Sudbury let his eyes rest briefly on the weapon and shifted his glance back to O’Brien. “So. Right. Once we round up your statements here, I think it might be healthy for all of you to take the next flight back to the States.”

  “We don’t have to hang around?”

  “Someone, for whatever reason, wants you three people dead. I’m more worried about your safety at this point, and to be honest, if you hang about there’s a good chance I’ll have to deal with your homicides. I don’t want that on my doorstep.”

  “Well, that’s a way to put it.”

  Sudbury formed a thin smile. “I’m due to retire next month, but like I said earlier, we’re all good cops here. We want you safe.”

  “Understood.”

  Sudbury added, “If you’re deposed or called forth for testimony then we can teleconference. It’s the modern age, even here in Great Britain.”

  O’Brien nodded.

  “So here come the women,” Sudbury said. “I’ll need to talk to them.”

  25

  Lucy and Gina followed the paramedics into the living room. Lucy’s wrist was sprained but not broken. She’d hit Starr in the thick, bony side of his head as he tried to reach the stairs, and in the process received a counter blow to the face. She had a cut below her eye and a swollen area that was going to look a lot worse before it got any better.

  Gina had cuts and bruises on her lips and cheeks. Abrasions covered her face.

  “Oh, my God, Gina,” O’Brien said, and immediately regretted it.

  “Thanks, Daniel. You could have dialed back your surprise a bit. I hope I don’t look that bad.” She talked in a broken pronunciation favoring one side of her mouth.

  “I didn’t mean…” He moved to hold her lightly. She came to his embrace.

  “It’s all superficial, Daniel,” she said into his cheek. “These cuts will give me trouble with lipstick for a while. The asshole didn’t have a ring on the hand that hit me. Otherwise, I’d have scars.”

  Sudbury sat down with Lucy and Gina. He took them through the assault slowly and quietly. His calm, sleepy-eyed demeanor reminded O’Brien of Mr. Roberts from the long ago Mr. Robert’s children’s show. Won’t you be my neighbor?

  Fifteen minutes later Sudbury stood and moved to the demolished entrance guarded by the remaining inspector. “We’re logging the crime as an aggravated assault,” he said to O’Brien in the doorway. “It sounds bad, and it is, but it could have been much worse, and I suppose you know that. It’s a bloody good thing you chaps arrived when you did.”

  O’Brien gave him a handshake and a wave-off, and watched as he departed down the stairway. He moved into the flat and took a seat on the sofa beside Gina. “Everything okay?”

  “We’re all right,” Gina replied with fatigue. She stared at O’Brien, then at Lucy, then at the opposite wall of the room.

  O’Brien spoke slowly as he explained their intentions. “We’ve got rooms at the Gatwick Crowne Plaza for tonight. That’s Eric’s layover hotel and we’ll be going out with him in the morning.”

  Lucy spoke after a long moment. “Gina and I want to stay in the same room.”

  O’Brien nodded. “That’s what I assumed. Your room is going to be between Eric’s and mine.” He paused. “Gina?”

  She gave him the barest smile. “I’ve got a lot to deal with right now. Lucy and I will have a good cry tonight. Get it all out of our systems.”

  Lucy touched her cheek. She held a blue cold pack against her right eye. “Damn right. I’ve been building up to a good one for a while. I just haven’t had the right moment.”

  “Someone’s coming,” Eric said. He had placed himself by the door.

  O’Brien stood. “It’s got to be my cousin.”

  Charlie arrived by himself with an armload of clothes. “Don’t ask me where I got these,” he said. He examined the destroyed doorway, peered into the kitchen and studied the soiled floor. He slumped his shoulders. “Danny...shit,” he mumbled as he wandered into the apartment.

  “I’ll pay for everything, Charlie,” O’Brien stressed again.

  Charlie stared at the women. “And what in God’s name happened here? Are you guys okay?”

  “You should have seen us before we cleaned up,” Lucy said.

  “We’ll tell you all about it, Charlie. Just not right now,” O’Brien said.

  His cousin shook his head slowly with a dazed expression, his mouth open. “Well, look. I’m going to dump theses clothes on a bed, and I’m going back home. I’ve got to call a carpenter right away.” He stepped into a bedroom and reappeared. “Well, sod it, Danny. I guess the flat can be repaired. The good that came out of everything was Doctor Gina, and Gina we owe you tremendously. Come back sometime when you’re not bringing the bad guys with you.” He gave O’Brien a squeeze on the shoulder. “Email me once in a while, Danny,” he said departing, “and I’ll do the same for you.” He waved a goodbye and moved back through the destroyed entrance.

  “Which bad guys did he mean?” Lucy asked.

  O’Brien sighed. “I’m not sure.”

  “We’ll need a couple of cabs,” Eric said from his position in the doorway.

  Gina showered before they left and changed into another blouse and skirt that belonged to Jenny. Lucy kept the same clothes she’d been wearing. Even O’Brien thought the ones Charlie had brought for her were funky looking.

  “I’m not wearing these things,” she squawked. “Look at this.” She held up a ruffled pink blouse with sequins bordering a deep cutout to her navel. “What the hell does he think I am? A pole dancer?”

  O’Brien brought out his wallet and slowly produced a five pound note. He held it out to Lucy without a smile.

  “Daniel!” She tried to make a face, cried out in pain, and tossed the pink outfit at him.

  A Ford van showed up fifteen minutes later. Lucy and Gina insisted on one cab for the four of them, and this one could have passed for the police van they’d ridden in earlier in the day. The steel grate was missing, but replaced by a purple, cardboard tree hanging from the rearview mirror.

  Lucy grabbed the box of laundry powder on the way out of the apartment almost as an afterthought, it seemed to O’Brien. She swung it in her hand, diamonds and all, as they walked to the cab. “Gotta wash my clothes,” she mumbled, and dropped the bright orange box on the floor of the cab.

  No one spoke again until the cab reached the A23 motorway and accelerated toward Gatwick.

  “I told Gina about the hidden cargo when we were in the bathroom together,” Lucy said, kicking the box. “She’s so smart. She’d already put everything together.”

  Gina spoke up. “You wouldn’t want a dumb doctor working on you, would you?”

  O’Brien cleared his throat. “If either of you want to talk, let the stress settle out, we can go over what happened tonight if you want, maybe over a bottle of wine. Eric and I will listen.” />
  “So now you’re a shrink?” Lucy said. “I liked you better as a pilot.”

  Gina laughed, and the sound was delightful. “I just want to sleep, Daniel,” she added. “Maybe we can discuss everything on the flight home tomorrow. That’d be better. Maybe.”

  “I told you before, we need a good cry first,” Lucy said. “And you guys don’t realize that? Duh…”

  26

  According to the British authorities, more than half of the forcible assaults and homicides occur between the hours of one o’clock and four o’clock in the morning, and Murdock had been responsible for his share.

  Three-thirty in the morning was a dead time. Streets were empty and shops were closed. Even the twenty-somethings had retired from their nightclub vigils. Petrol and convenience stations were still open, but the night managers were especially wary, watching men with big pockets and cars parked tail first against the stops.

  Murdock had ransacked numerous houses along the south coast of England, Plymouth to Dover, although the authorities were still clueless about most of his crimes. He’d killed two men and a woman and committed forcible rape against more than a few assorted females along the way.

  He drove the Land Cruiser slowly through the clouded darkness along Queen Anne Street. Rain was falling again, a light drizzle that would not clear when the weak sun came up.

  A plastic packet of paracetamol lay on the seat beside him and he wedged the cap off and chewed through another four tablets. They were supposed to be extra strength but someone had obviously pissed in the brew. His face hurt like hell, and he took in breaths through his mouth. His nose had stopped bleeding only because the broken cartilage had swelled to the point at which no blood could drain.

  He glanced at the idiot beside him. Somehow they’d not only allowed Gary Starr to escape, but they’d staggered around like bloody wankers and let a couple of Yankee shit-heads get the better of them. It would not happen again. Even before he called the Conductor he’d made that vow to himself.