Sudden Death

by Phil Kurthausen

  Suddenly, there was a burst of static in his ear mic.

  ‘I’ve lost him.’

  Erasmus groaned but this time it was a groan of disappointment. He gently pushed her back.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Work.’

  She cocked her head to one side.

  ‘What is it you do?’

  He half smiled and shook his head.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  He opened the door of the cubicle and gave her an apologetic salute.

  Even against the banging bass of the club and the whoops and cheers of hundreds of drunken and drugged revellers, Erasmus heard the message loud and clear through his earpiece.

  ‘I can’t find him!’

  He began moving quickly towards the exit, pushing people aside gently but firmly so he could carve a path through the heaving, sweating mass of bodies. It was like swimming through flesh.

  A bearded man, dressed to Erasmus’s mind like a cross between a thirties miner and a day-tripper, tried to grab him. He slipped under the man’s arm and brought his mouth close to the man’s glistening face.

  ‘Get out of my way now.’

  The man stared back at him with pupils like black plastic buttons. His dopamine grin changed to a cocaine snarl and he pushed Erasmus in the chest. Erasmus glanced up at the suspended gantry that ran around the circumference of the dance floor. He spotted two bouncers, one of whom was scanning the dance floor for incidents just like this.

  His earpiece growled static and then another message.

  ‘He’s on the roof. Get up here now! I think he’s about to do something stupid!’

  He had no time to debate the issue with Cocaineman, who had now raised his hands and wiggled his palms in the internationally accepted gesture of ‘come on then’. Erasmus sighed.

  ‘When will you kids learn to just say no?’

  Erasmus pulled his right arm back and balled his fist but it was just a feint. It would make what he actually planned to do easier. Cocaineman obliged and, anticipating a punch to the face, started to sway back. Erasmus dropped to his haunches and swept his right foot around in an arc taking the man’s legs away from under him in one smooth movement. He dashed forward and caught the guy’s head before it hit the floor and lowered him the few inches to the dance floor.

  Cocaineman looked stunned and his breathing was laboured.

  ‘Do us both a favour and stay down,’ said Erasmus.

  Erasmus stood up and began to walk quickly towards the exit and the lift that would take him to the top of the building.

  ‘You need to get up here now. I can’t see him!’ The voice in his earpiece sounded desperate now.

  From behind him he heard a scream. Erasmus turned round and saw that Cocaineman hadn’t taken his advice and was back on his feet. Worse, he had pulled out a knife. Erasmus sighed.

  People had instinctively moved away from Cocaineman, but not so far that they wouldn’t see the action. The crowd surrounding him were filled with a nervous but visceral bloodthirsty excitement.

  The blade was six inches long and, reflecting the light from the strobes, it looked like a whirring, diamond power tool. Cocaineman was grinning, no doubt enjoying the reversal of power that his hyper firing synapses were telling him had just occurred. He was wrong.

  There was another scream. Erasmus noticed a tall, pretty, heavily made-up girl run long pearlescent white finger nails over the bare skin of her arm and her red lips part in expectation. Wherever there is a fight there’s always a crowd waiting to watch the blood, thought Erasmus. He looked up and saw the bouncers were on the move heading for the metal stairs down to the dance floor. In a way it was a relief, there was no need for subtlety any more.

  Cocaineman swung the knife at him in a lazy arc. Erasmus moved back an inch on his heels and the knife’s path missed him.

  ‘What did I tell you?’

  Cocaineman ignored him and pulled back his arm ready to strike again. He never got the chance.

  Erasmus transferred his weight onto his toes and then in one fluid movement pushed forward over his right knee, his right palm slamming hard into Cocaineman’s nose. He held back slightly as he didn’t want the bone fragments and destroyed cartilage that he could feel crunching beneath his palm to travel upwards into the chemical mess of Cocaineman’s brain: Erasmus figured he had enough trouble in there to be going on with.

  Cocaineman didn’t even have time to scream before his eyes rolled up into his sockets and he collapsed unconscious to his knees, and then slumped onto the floor.

  The girl with the pearlescent nails let out a small satisfied sigh.

  Erasmus winked at her and then jumped over the man’s prone body and headed for the emergency exit. He risked a look back. The two bouncers had reached Cocaineman and were slapping him around the face to revive him. Nice doorman medical technique, thought Erasmus.

  He hit the metal bar and the exit door burst open leading to a service corridor. Erasmus walked briskly to the end of the corridor and opened the door at the end. It led into the lobby of the club. There were velvet drapes hanging from the double height ceiling and a statue of a large golden cow squatted in the middle of the lobby, totally dominating the space. This was the icon of the Blood House, a refurbished dance and drugs palace that operated in the building where once Liverpool’s oldest slaughterhouse had stood.

  Erasmus ran across to one of the drapes and pulled it aside, revealing a lift. He hit the call button. Above him he heard the sound of pulleys and machinery begin to whirr.

  ‘Can you see him, Dave?’ said Erasmus into his microphone. There was no reply, only the low sizzle of static.

  Behind him he could hear leather soles on tiles. The bouncers were right behind him, running down the corridor.

  The sound of the lift grew closer.

  The head doorman was Jeff Dooley. He was forty-five, a former bare-knuckle fighter and too canny to lead. He left that to Craig, his assistant, who at twenty years his junior should damn well have the breath to run ahead, even though his steroid fed body hadn’t actually been developed for speed during the thousands of hours of gym work that he subjected it to. But it wasn’t just that. Jeff had seen the man take down Barry Gilligan, Cocaineman as Erasmus thought of him. Barry wasn’t professional but he wasn’t a pushover and the stranger had blown through him like a tornado through Texas. Best to leave the point work to Craig, thought Jeff, fingering the plastic grip of the weapon on his belt and flicking open the clip on the leather holster.

  Craig burst through the door and Jeff slowly followed.

  In the lobby of the club the front door banged on its hinges as the hard, cold wind whipped in off the Mersey, got funnelled up through the concrete canyon of Water Street and slammed into the front door. The door crashed against the frame again, this time so loud that Jeff thought it would shatter.

  Craig pulled the door shut.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said.

  There was a loud ding as the lift arrived on the ground floor and the doors opened. Jeff pulled back a velvet drape revealing an empty lift. He shook his head.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Jeff said looking up. ‘He’s taken the stairs. He’s headed for the roof, come on.’

  Jeff stepped into the lift and Craig followed.

  Erasmus was more out of shape then he had realised. As he crashed through the fire door and out onto the roof of the Blood House, the icy air from the Mersey stole away what little remained of his breath. He stood still for a second, panting slightly, and looked around. The roof of the bar had been turned into a terrace, no doubt trying to mimic some New York hotel but in the dark, cold of a Merseyside winter it was deserted and had all the charm of a northern seaside town out of season. Incongruous sun loungers lay in a regimented pattern around a frozen shallow pool that in the summer was blue and fresh but in the winter was left cold and empty.

  The one benefit of the roof terrace was the view of the city that it afford
ed. From here he could look down Water Street and to the riverfront. The tall stone walls of two of The Three Graces, the Cunard building and the Liver building, framed the dark, broiling Mersey. It was chillingly beautiful.

  He took a breath and started forward looking for Dave. He tried the microphone.

  ‘Dave, are you there?’

  He shouted the same question.

  His replies were static and silence.

  Erasmus hurried around the side of the pool and towards the bar area at the far end of the roof. If Dave wasn’t behind it, lying unconscious or worse, than there was nowhere else he could be up here.

  The bar was maybe thirty feet long and behind it was an open storage area for beer and wine crates. Erasmus jumped on the bar and slid across it. There was nothing there save for a few bottle tops and a soggy dead firework. The storage area was blocked off from his view by a ten feet high sign that ran the length of the rear of the bar and which depicted striking dockworkers holding a girl in a forties polka dot bikini aloft on their shoulders. An image that summed up the bar, and in many ways Liverpool: an awkward history, socialism and faded glory.

  Erasmus ran to the end of the bar and into the storage area. This was just a piece of roof, maybe two metres long, and empty save for two aluminium beer barrels that Erasmus guessed some minimum wage student barman had neglected to bring down at the end of summer.

  Of Dave and his client there was no sign.

  ‘Erasmus!’

  He looked around but he couldn’t see anyone yet he had definitely heard his name being called. Erasmus walked to the edge of the building. He made the mistake of looking down. The side of the Blood House building fell away into a narrow dark slit, the alleyway that separated it from the adjacent building, which was slightly lower. From the alley far below came the sound of clattering cans and debris swirling around in eddies caused by the strong, grit-filled wind.

  It was dark but not too dark for him to register how far the drop was to the concrete below and for some primal part of his brain to rebel and, without even realising what he was doing, step back from the precipice.

  His stomach twisted and sent a rush of adrenaline through his system. Christ, he hated heights. A parachute jump, sure, that was no problem at all. He could step out of the plane and barely increase his heart rate, but when he could see the ground it set him reeling.

  ‘Erasmus, here!’

  This time the voice was louder and it was unmistakably coming from the roof of the building next door.

  He took a hesitant half step forward towards the edge and then halted.

  The roof on the building opposite was of a similar size to the Blood House roof. Its surface lay mostly in darkness and with very little moonlight Erasmus couldn’t make much out in the shadows save for a large, rusty looking satellite dish.

  He looked away from the roof and turned his head at an angle so he wasn’t looking directly at it. Using his peripheral vision, which was less sensitive to lack of light, he blinked every few seconds so his vision didn’t adjust to the lack of light and lose its sensitivity. It was an old army trick. He scanned the roof area without looking directly at it. And then there, on a part of the roof that was darker than the rest, was something that looked like a figure.

  Erasmus cupped his heads together and shouted. ‘Dave, is that you? Are you OK?’

  The figure moved slightly and then began to speak, repeating the same phrase over and over. Erasmus leaned forward trying to make out the words, trying to convince himself that what he thought he had heard wasn’t correct.

  The wind dropped for a second and Erasmus heard him clearly now. He froze.

  ‘Dave’s dead, help me,’ said the figure.

  Erasmus recognised the voice of his client. Something was very wrong.

  From behind him there was the clang as the steel door that led out onto the roof hit the concrete doorframe. He stole a quick glance from behind the bar. It was the two bouncers. They had followed him up here. Erasmus noticed that the smaller and older of the two was carrying something in his right hand. Erasmus started to duck back behind the sign but he was too late, he caught the eyes of the older bouncer.

  ‘There. Go get him, Craig!’

  The younger man began to walk forward quickly. He looked excited, always a bad sign, thought Erasmus.

  He would have to move quickly. He had two options: give himself up to the bouncers, explain the situation, wait for the police to arrive and then, maybe, finally, take a tour of the building next door so the police could see if his story checked out, by which time it may be too late for his client; or jump.

  Erasmus looked at the gap. It was probably less than six feet wide. An easy jump if it was between two marks on the floor. But with a drop of one hundred and fifty feet it became a different prospect all together. Bile rose in his stomach. Maybe the bouncers would listen?

  He put his head around the sign again. Craig was standing right in front of him. He was so wide that Erasmus couldn’t see the other bouncer hidden behind his bulk.

  Erasmus held his arms up palms open.

  ‘Listen, I haven’t got time. My client is in danger, he’s over there on the other building and – ’

  Erasmus was cut off mid-sentence by the swinging right arm of Craig. Instinctively, he ducked and the sledgehammer fist went sailing over his head: Negotiations were over.

  He didn’t have time for finesse. From the crouching position he had adopted, Erasmus jumped up and swung his right foot hard into Craig’s steroid shrunken testicles. Craig’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in air and then almost immediately expelled it in a shriek. He collapsed to the floor. As he did so, two silvery jets, shot towards Erasmus. He swerved to his left and the shiny projectiles impacted against the wooden sign behind him. They were attached by trailing wires that led back to the Taser in Jeff’s chubby hand.

  Jeff spat on the floor and his eyes flashed with anger.

  Erasmus blew out a relieved sigh. If the Taser’s barbs had hit him he would now be enjoying the pleasures of 50,000 volts of electricity running through his nervous system.

  Jeff hit a button on the Taser’s body and the projectiles whirred backwards. He started to reload the gun with an air cartridge.

  Erasmus contemplated charging him. He could easily get to him before he could reload but the Taser had a drive stun mode, meaning that the bouncer would only have to touch the gun’s electrodes against Erasmus to incapacitate him instantly.

  No, in the time it would take the bouncer to reload, Erasmus would have to move.

  He ran around the rear of the sign and began sprinting at a perpendicular angle to the low parapet wall. An image of a theatre with high walls and velvet curtains from a long, long time ago filled his mind, and then he changed course and headed for the wall.

  Behind him there was a shout of ‘No!’

  Erasmus’s right foot pushed hard against the top of the parapet just as he realised that he was about to die.

  CHAPTER 3

  Rebecca was in love. She was sure of it. It was the feeling she had only thought possible in an Austen or Meyer novel, not something destined for her. And it was true, you only knew what it could be – how consuming, demanding and overwhelming – once you had experienced it. It was all-consuming, giving yet hungry, and it was like nothing she had ever felt before in her seventeen years.

  She had rushed home from school; a day spent thinking about this moment, this time, her love. She could have used her phone but he had been very clear from the start that this was a private love, and he was right. She wanted to share it with her friends, but not her mother, of course, what did she know about love, real love? Yet she knew that in sharing it she risked diluting it, and it becoming nothing more than the currency of gossip and the shrieking hyperbole that her friends reserved for their silly schoolgirl crushes. He had warned about this.

  The key had been in her hand since the bell rang signalling the end of another school day. She lived close enough to w
alk to school but she had sprinted home, unlocked the front door, ignored her mother’s weary greeting shouted from the lounge over the din of the TV and run up the stairs to her bedroom.

  She flung her bag on the bed, still covered with a pink bedspread illustrated with little ponies that she loved, and pulled out her laptop from underneath the bed. She sat cross-legged on the bed and turned on the computer. She was breathless with the thought of what awaited.

  The old laptop spent an age warming up before the blue screen and icons appeared. She had set her wallpaper to a picture of the Milky Way, which reminded her of her dad, now long gone. He had pointed out the constellations to her on a holiday in France on a clear, cold Brittany night as they stood outside their tent looking into the dark blue of the endless universe.

  She didn’t see this now though. Now, she just hit the internet browser icon and clicked on one of her favourites, her only favourite these days if the truth were told. Then she waited.

  She didn’t have to wait long. He was never late, he always did what he said would do, and she trusted him that he always would.

  This corner of the chat room was always empty, private, reserved for her and her lover. She giggled as she thought of him that way but it was true, she had a lover for the first time in her life. He wasn’t like the boys at school with their immature attempts at impressing her and her friends with their pathetic displays of bravado and nervous gropings. He was a man. Her man.

  She checked her watch. It was nearly 5.30 p.m. The excitement that drove her stomach to twist seemed to act like a furnace sending heat lower, causing her to groan softly with need.

  There was a ping from her computer as he entered her private space in the chat room.

  Ethan’s user ID was E-Z92 and his thumbnail picture – a picture she had spent countless hours studying, worshipping, loving – appeared next to the ID. She knew every inch of his face: the mop of brown hair that threatened to cover his right eye, his beautiful deep brown eyes and the smile, oh my God, the smile that she would do anything for, anything.