He had been glad when they noticed the fugitives pick up pace, heading faster and more deliberately in one direction instead of just moving about, trying to stay hidden. It was a good bet they had sussed they would be shot on sight like the first guy, and were making for somewhere with civvy witnesses. Even if they hadn’t worked that out, they certainly looked like they were on their way to give themselves up; more concerned with getting somewhere than staying out of sight.
This meant he could end it at will, as he had orders not to let the fugitives be seen. He had still called it in to Knight, though. Technically, Bowman had the authority to kill them any time if he thought there was a risk of exposure, but as he had a bit of leeway on it, it was worth giving the boss his say.
Knight had been chatty, which meant he was feeling upbeat, mainly because Morgan had got a new location on the girl and matters were back under control. Knight said the client was delighted with their progress, especially in taking out the first one earlier today. It had “played” so well, as Knight put it, that the client requested the hunt continue overnight again, because the first kill had really whetted the public’s appetite for the chase.
Knight had told the client he wasn’t on (thank Christ). The boss had enlisted the cooperation of his big-noise mates in the cops and the army, but it was nonetheless too delicate to push, he said. These guys were happy to have their men wandering around and looking in the wrong places for a while, as long as they had Knight’s assurance that his own agents had a bead on the fugitives at all times – and that these agents would disappear and leave them to divide up the credit for the collar when the show was over. They’d suspect there was some kind of political motive for the pantomime they were helping to stage, but they wouldn’t ask questions; it wasn’t the done thing. However, Knight had told the client the cops wouldn’t go for a second night without a result because it questioned their competence, while the army needed their men back on exercises – running around a different mountain, blowing up large quantities of taxpayers’ money in a glorified, large-scale game of tag. Ah, the nostalgia.
“Yeah, finish it,” Knight had said. “I told the client that if he wants it to run on a bit longer, we can delay breaking the news that they’re dead. But it would be bloody negligent to let these fuckers continue scurrying around in the woods. Take them out, clean and quick.”
Bowman took his hand away from the gun, placed it back on his hip. Basic crowd control. If he had his weapon drawn, one of the targets might do something hysterical. But with him standing by, as it were, it defused the sense of critical urgency, created a deflated and less explosive air of, well, anti-climax. A bit of chat would be next. It relaxes them, for want of a better word. When they’ve not been shot straight away, they start to wonder what might be going on, and in that state of despair, the poor bastards are open to imagining any alternative scenario that carries a trace of hope. You don’t need to spin them a line, just talk. Maybe ask a few questions. Names and stuff. Then while they’re confused, wondering what’s going to happen if you’re not going to shoot them, you plug them quickly, bang bang bang.
Too sudden for panic, too fast for reaction.
Bowman looked across and saw Paterson flip down the safety.
Paul never knew violence could be so sudden, so unheralded, so fast, and yet on some other screen in his mind’s eye, the scene played out in simultaneous slow motion.
Amidst the tortured seconds that were stretching because they would be his last, but which he didn’t want anyway.
Lethal force, so shockingly brutal, so merciless, so remorseless, and strangely quieter than he had imagined.
Spammy, God help him. In that small clearing, surrounded by the unheedful trees, a few feet from the bump, the rise where the Wee Shite had been standing when they ran into the trap. Spammy. He was the one standing nearest to the gunmen. Christ, was it as arbitrary as that?
A moment suspended, a moment when Paul’s faculties could not or would not make sense of the image. The image, the moment, when Spammy’s knees seemed to buckle, just the start, the hint of the slightest bend in those familiar spindly legs; and when his shoulders began to fall backwards.
Then his elbows jerked sharply as his left foot flew up and forward with a ferocity that shattered the Wee Shite’s wrist and sent the pistol spinning fifteen feet through the air. Before it landed Spammy had sidestepped and thrown his right arm into a solid, straight blow, power travelling from behind his shoulder to the outstretched tips of his long fingers as they connected with the throat of the Wee Shite’s comrade and collapsed his windpipe. The man dropped as if hamstrung, clutching at his neck and making a strangled, rasping, guttural noise as his knees hit the dirt.
By that time Spammy had blocked a wild swing from the Wee Shite, sending his left instep crunching into his would-be assassin’s groin, then bringing the outside of the same foot down on to the Wee Shite’s straight-locked right knee, which twisted to an angle evolution had unfortunately not anticipated. As he fell, Spammy pirouetted and caught him on the temple with a bone-jarring kick, his foot describing a long, swift arc, and the Wee Shite’s head snapped back, seeming to drag his torso round with it.
At this point, the clock would have been reading less than two seconds.
Spammy sprang back towards the gasping man, leaning down and gripping a hand that had been reaching for a gun. He twisted the wrist, pulling the arm straight and pinning his man to the floor, face-down, then drove his left foot against the up-reaching elbow, which was wrecked with a sharply audible SNAP.
“Heh, just like a twig,” Spammy muttered as his victim began to scream and howl in pain. Spammy grabbed his ears from behind, the man’s head inches from the ground.
“Shut it,” he spat, and knocked him out by smashing his face into a protruding tree root.
Spammy got up again, panting a little, brushing some tangled and sweaty locks from his forehead. Paul and Tam stood, transfixed, eyes bulging, jaws matchingly agape, utterly, utterly speechless.
“What,” said Spammy, “did you think I grew up in that hoose an’ never learnt a few things?”
When Paul’s brain kicked in again, its first attempt to comprehend what had just happened was to revise some of his own personal history, reaching an understanding, a realisation that Spammy would later confirm. The reason none of the hard cases around Meiklewood ever bothered him was that they were fucking terrified of him. When Spammy was fourteen, he revealed, when he had suddenly sprouted into an elongated and oddly proportioned shape that most males normally recover from, and when his feared older siblings had flown the nest, a bunch of chancers had set about him, their big opportunity to “waste a Scott”. They were all older than him, by two, three, even four years. Four on one. He put all of them in hospital.
“I was very humane,” he said. “I called the ambulance maself when I was finished.”
“But I cannae see how your way’s gaunny work,” argued Tam. Mortal danger having evidently passed, normal service had been resumed. Spammy was being enthusiastically strange.
“I’m no sure it’ll work maself,” Spammy admitted, “but for your way, we’ll have to hang aboot until that wee shite comes round, which could be a while. The other yin’s startin’ to moan a bit the noo. Let me see what I can get fae him while we’re waitin’ .”
Tam rolled his eyes. “Aye, fair enough. Gaun yersel’.”
They had been sitting around a small fire, too little to be seen from a distance, the smoke swallowed up by the darkness above. The failed killers lay slumped against two tree trunks a few feet away, hands tied at the wrists behind their backs, various parts of their features and anatomies beginning to swell and discolour. The Wee Shite’s knee, in particular, looked irreparably damaged.
Suffer ya bastard, thought Paul.
They had found the Wee Shite’s pack near the bump he had been standing on, and proceeded to make their way through the provisions they found among the guns taken from the prison bus and
the ropes they used to tie up their captives. The spare magazines, knives, walkie-talkies and maps they had removed from their prisoners’ persons lay in a small pile beside the fire. Paul was toying with the high-tech but oddly bulky phone he had discovered in a pouch in the Wee Shite’s bag. It was a kind of cross between a portable and a field telephone, Spammy opined, working off a local relay somewhere, as they were a bit removed from normal network reception.
Spammy held the pistol he had taken from the bigger man, ejecting the magazine for a moment as he examined the sliding action that fed the chamber. He shuffled it back and forth a few times, pulling the hammer with his thumb and locking it on a hair trigger, then squeezed and listened to the click.
“You know, if we have to shoot one o’ these bastards – you know, if it comes to it, like – I’m gaunny empty every last round intae his heid.”
“Have you no fucked them up enough?” Paul asked.
“Naw, it’s no that,” Spammy explained, with that “being reasonable” tone of voice that warned “reason” was about to become a redundant term. “It’s you know, like in the films. I fuckin’ hate it when the baddie comes back again, like when he’s been shot the wance an’ everybody thinks he’s deid, but he’s no. Every last fuckin’ bullet. Let’s see the cunt come back efter that.”
The game had changed once again, thought Tam. The scale of what they were up against had suddenly been reduced. Yes, who-ever framed them and killed Voss was high enough placed to manage all that and organise the bus escape, but when the “sprung prisoner” showed up to hunt them down, it suggested that their enemy’s personnel were considerably fewer than suspected.
The other guy must have been the driver, the man who rigged the crash. He and the Wee Shite had driven off in front of them, then presumably dumped the car and doubled back, stalking their movements all along. So why wait to kill them? Because they had to be “on the run”, dangerous fugitives that the public wanted dead. But once these guys killed Bob, they couldn’t just leave him there, could they? The authorities – someone for fuck’s sake – would need to know what happened, who shot him. Same would go for himself, Paul and Spammy, even if they were found lying dead with those stolen guns in their hands. Still too many mysteries, too many contradictions.
They needed answers, and now they had someone to ask.
“Where did you get this stuff?” Tam asked as Spammy transferred the boiled-mushroom concoction to a second, cooler can, gripping the one that he had sat over the fire with a bunched-up sleeve.
“This forest’s hoachin’ wi’ them, if you know what you’re lookin’ for. It’s autumn. They’re in season.”
“But you’re tellin’ me you went to the bother of collectin’ them earlier on? While you two were on your own? Did you think they’d let you take them intae the jile?”
“Naw. It was in case I was gaunny get interrogated again. I think I’d have come up wi’ some brilliant answers if I’d chewed doon a couple.”
“An’ what d’you think they’ll do tae him?”
“Should be mildly hallucinogenic. But for somebody in physical and mental distress like your man there, it could be a very bad trip. Might make him a bit mair expansive when you ask him questions.”
Tam stared at him blankly.
“You’re aff your fuckin’ heid. Totally fuckin’ bananas. He’ll tell us nothin’.”
“Naw, naw, we’ll definitely learn wan thing,” Spammy insisted.
“Whit?” Tam asked.
“Whether this strain’s toxic.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
Spammy shrugged his shoulders. “Perfect way tae fin’ oot.”
Paul held the man’s nose with one hand and opened his mouth with the other as Spammy poured the contents of the can down his throat. Paul held his mouth shut as he convulsed, the captive having groggily started to regain consciousness as they force-fed him. He spluttered when Paul took his hands away, some of the dark liquid spilling over his chin. He opened his eyes momentarily, then closed them again, then reopened them, his head jiggling woozily on his shoulders like a baby’s.
They stepped away and waited.
Paul stood holding the portable phone, glancing occasionally at the lifeless figure of the Wee Shite slumped against a different tree. Tam crouched on the ground next to the other prisoner as Spammy knelt by the fire, looking his captive closely in the face.
The man made an involuntary gasping noise, upon which Spammy’s eyes lit up.
“We’re away,” he said delightedly, and began to dance spastically in front of him, waving his arms and legs and making “wooooo” noises.
Tam closed his eyes and shook his head.
Bowman watched the shapes swim, the light and darkness weave before him, the figures draw in and out of not-quite focus. He felt pain, nausea, asphyxia, disorientation. The haze, the amorphous mass seemed to pull together, sounds warped and stretching, his thoughts and memories returning, but in an equally contorted form.
Then fear.
He remembered what had done this to him, saw it loom before him. It had been the octopus-thing. It had reached out and crushed his neck, lashed at him with its self-elongating tentacles. It was floating there, those long protuberances feeling their way towards him, extending out from its body, and its body was made of fire. The fire blinked and flickered in its middle as the octopus-thing swam in the air, while beside it the telephone man stood and stared, and the question master demanded answers.
But he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t talk. You never talk. If you talk, they’ll send Harcourt for you. Harcourt and his knives, the stainless steel. Never talk. Can’t talk. But if you don’t, the octopus-thing will put its tentacle through your neck and down your throat and open your stomach and burn its fire into your guts and the octopus-thing is here and is moving and is coming and . . .
The man’s eyes widened and bulged and he started hyperventilating, trembling and sweating.
“Who are you? Who sent you?” Tam asked.
“Don’t know,” he said, throat wheezing. “Don’t know. Can’t talk. Can’t tell.”
“Who’s behind this?” Tam said, louder, more aggressive. “Who are you working for? Tell me.”
“Don’t know. Won’t tell.” His eyes flitted randomly around, never seeming to focus. “Don’t know. No-one ever knows . . . client.”
“Client? Who’s the client? Who are you working for?”
“Never know . . . client’s name . . . never know . . . someone . . . government.”
“Who killed Voss? Who killed Voss?” Tam grabbed him by the lapels, shaking him, growling the questions. “Did you kill Voss?”
The man gasped again, as if surfacing after having his head forced underwater.
“No . . . not me . . . Knight killed Voss . . . White Knight . . . Chaaarge!” He giggled, then wheezed again. “Knight kill Voss . . . Knight takes Voss . . . Check . . . Knight and Harcourt . . . Harcourt . . . big hard-on . . . killing a billion . . . billionaire . . . doesn’t make you any . . . any richer . . . fucking cunt . . . cock like gra . . . granite.”
“RIGHT!” came a voice from behind, suddenly shaking and silencing them all. “Party’s over, cunts.”
It was the Wee Shite, standing unsteadily, untied, supporting his injured knee with one hand, pointing a gun at them with the other.
Paterson had come round quietly, without any moaning and groaning, and when he opened one eye, he had surveyed what was before him and quickly remembered, despite his throbbing skull, why and how he had got there. Fortunately, they were all busy looking at Bowman at the time, so he closed his eye again and tested his bonds. They were tight, and the pressure ached against his right wrist, the one knackered by the lanky cunt, fucking jammy lanky cunt and his fucking lucky kick. But these guys were no experts, and he could already feel his pinky finding its way into a loop and working a section of the rope loose.
Then he had rocked back slightly – slowly and gently to avoid detect
ion, partially opening one eye to check they were still looking elsewhere – so that he could get more purchase to strain against the knots. And that was when he felt it. The hard wee lump, pressing insistently into his back where it rested against the tree. His spare gun, still taped there. His back-up.
He redoubled his efforts to loosen the ropes, summoning all his will-power not to grimace or wince too obviously as he twisted his wrists and the right one screamed its howl of protest around his nervous system. Then he was free.
He pointed the gun at the lanky cunt, who was nearest, while the others stood by, unable to take their eyes off him for the space of a blink. Aye. They weren’t fucking smiling now. He backed away a few more feet from Lanky and his elastic legs, unlatching the safety catch and glancing down at the pistol tucked into the skinny bastard’s belt.
“Drap that,” he ordered. “Slowly. An’ haud it by the barrel.”
Elastic man delicately withdrew the gun from his belt and let it fall to the ground at his side. Paterson smiled.
“Thought you were so fuckin’ smart, ya cunt,” he said. “Well we’ll see how smart you are in a minute. Yous are aw fuckin’ deid. All o’ yous. But you, Skinnymalinky, I’m gaunny make you fuckin’ suffer before I finish you.”
“Aye, you’re a real hard man wi’ a gun in your haun,” said the old cunt, McInnes. The other boy just stood there, frozen, holding on to the portable phone like he could use it to ask Scotty to beam him up. He’d be fucking lucky.
“Why don’t you put it doon, then you an’ Spammy here can have a square go,” the old cunt continued.
“Save it, Faither,” Paterson spat. “This isnae the fuckin’ movies. I don’t need to prove to masel’ that I can waste any o’ yous cunts.” He shook his head derisively. “You think this gangly yin wasnae just lucky back there? Yous think yous were fuckin’ geniuses ‘cause the polis never found you? Listen, Faither, an’ you listen as well, Daddy Long Legs. The only reason yous cunts made it this far is because they were followin’ orders to look in the wrang places, an’ because they knew we had yous in oor sights the whole fuckin’ time. Wan phone call, wan order, and yous three were dropped. And the phone call’s came, by the way.”
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