Tommy puts his hand out. “No, she stays,” he says firmly. “She can be trusted.”
McNab slams his fist down on the table. “Do you think I’m stupid? You want to give me half of your cash just to get rid of a few ageing pigeon fanciers? I don’t get it. Is this Candid-fucking-Camera?”
I’ve sat back down, and I’m doing what any good PA does and acting as though nothing’s happened, but I’m twitchy. We thought he’d bite our hand off, not pick holes in our proposition.
Tommy leans forward and lacing his fingers, puts his hands on the desk. “There’s also the small matter of greasing some palms on the supermarket side. There are two other sites in contention. We need them to choose ours.”
At the suggestion of bribery, McNab appears satisfied and relaxes back in his chair.
“I see. You need a fixer. A facilitator.”
Tommy makes noises of agreement. “We believe we can make good use of your skills in other projects. This would not be a one-time deal.”
McNab’s greedy eyes gleam at the prospect of all that cash. “But I won’t break the law. I’m a law-abiding man.”
Yeah, right.
“I’ll have a few words in the right ears.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Tommy says.
Before we leave, Tommy arranges to meet McNab at the proposed site that night so he can give him his “down payment.”
Once we’re back in the car, Tommy turns to Eric. “Man, you know how I saved you from that suicide bomber in Iraq?”
Eric rolls his eyes as though Tommy’s used this line before. “Aye.”
“I’m calling in the favor.”
Eric doesn’t hesitate. “I’m in, but on one condition.”
“Yeah.”
“Do not, under any circumstances, tell me what the fuck this is all about. For my own safety, I’d rather not know.”
So we don’t.
Chapter 33
The wind is howling as we wait in the dark for McNab. Despite the heater in the car being on at full blast, I’m chilled to the bone and scared.
What if McNab knows who we are and we’re being lured to our deaths? Sure, we had our bargaining chip of the gun, but what if McNab killed us anyway, called our bluff about a friend having the gun and taking it to the police if they didn’t hear from us? By all accounts, the man was merciless. He’d once got his thugs to ambush a rival gangster, and they’d held him down and used a cordless power tool to drill a hole in both his legs.
So many thoughts are going round my carousel of a brain that I need to stab my nails into one hand to stop myself from getting hysterical.
Eric, who Tommy has running “recon,” must have been numb with the cold, lying on a chilly hillside, watching the road through binoculars with a Taser by his side. Army trained or not, this kind of weather would freeze the balls off the Wallace Monument.
When I’d suggested we bring a gun, Tommy had scoffed, telling me that wasn’t a good idea. That surprised me. Coming from the army, I thought he’d be all gung-ho about guns.
The headlights of McNab’s Land Rover arrive ten minutes later than our arranged meeting time. Clearly he wanted to make us sweat. When the door opens, he and Scarface get out.
Without a word, we make our way over to the disused warehouse that sits on the land. We’d used a generator to get the lights working. We all traipse inside.
“Stand still,” Scarface barks. “I need to check for weapons and wires.”
Tommy acts as though he’s used to this happening as he’s patted down, whilst I act all appalled.
Throwing Tommy a despairing look, I say,” Mr. Laidlaw, this is not acceptable. Not at all. I want to leave. Now.” Whilst I’m speaking my heart is pitter-pattering away. Scarface could shoot me. I’d seen the gun in his jeans pocket under his shirt when we’d walked into the warehouse. He looks like a man who shot first and didn’t bother with questions.
Just as I expected, when I try to head for the door, Scarface puts out a meaty paw to prevent me leaving. I imagine that same paw being driven into my face and I stop. “You ain’t going anywhere, sweetheart.”
Scarface takes a long time patting me down, lingering way too long on my body like he’s looking for cellulite. His touch makes me feel dirty, and I wish my Taser was in my hand so I could zap him into next week.
Finally, he says, “They’re clean, boss.”
McNab soon gets down to business.
“I take it you have the cash down payment. A hundred grand as a show of faith?”
Tommy nods. “Yes. It’s in the trunk of the car, along with a goodwill gesture. A hundred-year-old Macallan. I hear you’re a whisky connoisseur.”
McNab’s eyes darken. “How did you know that?”
“My assistant here spotted the collection in your office along with your vintage decanter.”
McNab relaxes and nods at Scarface. “Mr. Laidlaw will give you the keys. Go out and get the briefcase and don’t forget my whiskey.”
Tommy throws the car keys to him, saying that the briefcase is under the front seat. It’s gone just like we planned. He knows that by this time, Eric will have taken care of McNab’s driver. Scarface is next.
Tommy’s showing McNab the file on the fictitious people standing in the way of the land sale when a gunshot blasts through the night.
Before we can react, McNab has a gun pointed at me.
“Who the fuck are you? I've asked around and nobody's heard of you.”
All I’ve eaten all day is a cereal bar, but my stomach’s weighed down as though I’ve eaten lead.
Tommy’s expression hasn’t changed. I guess when you’ve faced down suicide bombers and the Taliban as he has, one man with a gun ain’t that big a deal.
“You know who I am, Mr. McNab.” His voice is steady. “The man who’s going to put a huge wad of cash in your pocket. Tax-free, untraceable cash.”
McNab’s face says he’s not buying it. “Tell me who you really are, or I’ll shoot the bitch.”
The gun’s still pointed at me, and my heart’s thundering against my breastbone.
“Help me, Mr. Laidlaw.” My voice is a quiver, and this time I’m not pretending.
Being a victim doesn’t come easily to me, but I don’t want a hole in the heart that no surgeon can fix.
Tommy’s expression still hasn’t changed. He must have ice in his veins. “Let her go. The gunshot you heard has nothing to do with us. You have a lot of enemies, Mr. McNab. Most successful men like you do. Perhaps they’ve tracked you down? Won’t be the first time someone’s taken a pop at you, would it?”
McNab hesitates. The gun moves away from my chest and is pointed slightly downwards, but it’s still trained on me. And I’m getting bored with it. This is the man who ruined my life, and I’m damned if I’m going to stand here quaking whilst he plays one of his mind games.
My mouth forms into the shape of an O, and ignoring the gun, I point at the roof. “There’s someone up there. My God, it might be whoever fired the gun.”
McNab takes his eyes off me for a second, and that’s all it takes.
I rush at him, head down and hurtle into his stomach, and he stumbles backwards, gun spilling out of his hands and clattering onto the wooden floor. Tommy scrambles over to the gun, and picking it up, he flashes me a disparaging look.
“For fuck’s sake, Nancy. Never dive at anyone with a loaded gun.”
McNab clambers to his feet. “Who the hell are you?”
He’s barely got the words out when I retrieve my new Taser from behind the stack of crates where I’d hidden it earlier and take great delight in zapping him in the chest. As his body convulses, Tommy watches, expressionless.
Between us, we drag McNab over to an area of the warehouse where there’s meat hooks. We tie his hands together with thick rope, and threading it through the hook, we suspend him. We also tie his ankles together so he can’t kick out. Unlike Yates and his nephew, I won’t make the mistake of leaving his legs free.
/>
We’ve got him in place when Tommy’s phone buzzes. He listens for a few minutes, then turns to face me. “It’s Eric. He’s okay. Scarface’s gun accidentally went off. Doubt anyone heard, except us on account of the direction the wind’s blowing in. McNab’s two cronies are now spooning in the trunk of his car.”
He goes back to taking on the phone, telling Eric that he’s done enough and that we can take it from here. Then he turns to me. “What do we do now?”
In the buildup to this moment, I thought I’d know what to do, but now the time is here and the source of all my misery is wriggling on a hook, my mind is riddled with indecision. I’d always planned to kill the man, but now it came down to it, I wasn’t sure I could actually do it. I want revenge, but I’m no killer. At least, I thought I wasn’t.
Then the image on my parents’ faces comes drifting into my mind. I wonder who’d died first. Did they see the other one suffer? Was one tortured as the other was forced to watch?
I hadn’t allowed myself to think those things. I’d buried them in the back of my mind and focused all my energy on finding who was responsible.
Marching up to McNab, I spit in his face.
This time when I talk there’s no hesitation, no doubt. “We kill him and dump him in the river. They’ll be nothing to link it back to us. The police will think one of his rivals offed him. We’ve got no option. He knows us. He’ll always be after us. We need to end it. Now. Get revenge for my family, for your brother.”
Once I’ve said it, I’m relieved. Finally, this will all be over and I can get on with my life.
I motion towards the gun Tommy’s holding. “Do you want to do it, or will I?”
Tommy’s eyeing me strangely. “Only if you can’t.”
I’m confused. Why does he think I won’t do it?
“Killing someone changes you, Nancy. No matter who it is. I’ve done it before. You haven’t.” He gives me a sympathetic look. “I won’t think any less of you if you can’t.”
“No, I can do it.” And I can.
As I advance towards McNab with the gun raised, he squirms on the hook, sweat dripping off his face, pleading in his eyes. If he wasn’t gagged, he’d be offering us anything and everything to save his pathetic life.
When I get closer, I see that his trousers are wet. Instead of sympathy, I feel only disgust and a slither of pleasure at what we’ve reduced him to. The big man’s just wet his pants.
The gun’s inches from his head when the door creaks open.
What the hell?
I turn to see a figure in the doorway.
“I can’t let you hurt my dad.”
Of all the people I expected to see, she was the last.
It was Rosalie.
Chapter 34
“That thing’s your dad?”
The words are out before I can haul them back in.
Insulting him is a bad move, because Rosalie has a gun and she’s pointing it straight at us. The shock of seeing her had made me drop McNab’s.
I’m holding my hands up, palms out as I’ve seen them do in the movies, which is futile because it gives her a bigger target to aim at.
“You don’t want to do this, Rosalie.” My voice is soft; I need to keep her calm.
“You pretended to be my friend, but all the time you were trying to get to my dad.”
Which isn’t true, because I’d no idea McNab even had kids, far less a nice girl like Rosalie. At least, she was nice when she wasn’t pointing a gun at me.
“No, Rosalie, I didn’t know you were his daughter. Honestly I didn’t.”
Her pretty face crinkles into a frown. “That’s the reason you gave me a lift home that night, because you wanted to know more about one of his hired gorillas, Paul Conlan. You don’t care about me.”
Her petted lip is worse than a toddler’s. I keep that opinion to myself. Does she honestly believe that we’d become BFFs after a few shifts at the bar and one lift home?
“I do care about you.”
She lowers the gun to the floor, hands trembling as though she’s suddenly realized the gravity of the situation. She goes to lay it down, but instead she starts waving it around wildly, pointing it at Tommy, then at me, then her dad. What is she doing?
Tommy’s standing there eyeing Rosalie with a complete lack of concern on his face. Why isn’t he going all Jack Bauer and trying to disarm her? Calmness under pressure is a good thing, but only if it’s coupled with action.
I’m as much agitated by his indifference as I am with Rosalie’s “eenie, meeny, miny, mo” act. Shouldn’t he be talking her down as if she was an insurgent in Iraq? He’s the one with the training. Apart from some self-defense classes where I kneed the instructor in the balls when he claimed I couldn’t defend myself without his class, the only training I’ve ever done was in how to avoid getting a sore back sitting in a chair at work.
Suddenly, the game of Russian roulette abruptly stops, and the bitch shoots me in the foot. The pain reminds me of the time I stood on a nail in my bare feet, only this nail is on fire and I’m writhing on the ground, screaming like a banshee.
Tommy rushes over, not caring that she’s got a gun and he’s in its crosshairs. “Let me look.”
Gingerly, I try to remove my boot, but the pain stops me. I’m worried I’m going to pass out.
Tommy places his hand on top of mine. “No,” he says, “I’ll do it.”
Gently, he unzips my boot as Rosalie stands there, gun hanging limply by her side. She appears puzzled that a bullet would hurt anyone.
If I weren’t otherwise incapacitated, I’d march over there and grab the gun off her and shot her in the foot so she can see bloody well see how it feels. Then she’d know how real it is.
“The bullet is still in your foot,” says Tommy. “We need to get you to hospital.”
What’s he talking about? “How can we go to hospital? They’ll call the police. They have to by law.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Rosalie has her head down and is sitting on the floor staring up at her dad. She’s made no attempt to free him and there’s no concern on her face—just emptiness. She’s left the gun at her feet. She catches me looking. “Sorry I shot you...” Her voice is dead. “But I had to stop you from killing him.”
From my position on the floor, I give her the death glare. “Couldn’t you have called the police? That’s what normal people do. They don’t go around shooting innocent folk.”
There I go again, riling a madwoman by suggesting she’s not right in the head. When will I learn to keep my mouth shut? But I’m not done with my rant. My foot now feels as though it’s been burned by a red-hot poker, and she’s responsible.
“Do you know your dad had my parents killed and then my brother? My parents were tortured first. I found them; saw the bullets in their heads. They were pensioners. Your dad’s thugs were there. They did it.”
I pause to let it all sink in.
“They raped me, hacked off my hair, stabbed me, and left me bleeding to death on the floor. It was sheer luck that I didn’t die. You’d protect someone capable of that? Because I know that I wouldn’t. Whether they were my dad or not.”
Shrugging Tommy off, I drag myself over to Rosalie. Every jolt reminds me of the dentist when they scrape metal across an infected tooth. But I keep going. The closer I am to her, the better the chance I have of getting through to her.
I’m halfway there when she stands and turns, gun in hand, pointed bull’s-eye straight—this time at my chest.
Fuck, she’s going to shoot me again, and this time it won’t be my foot.
Tommy jumps in between the gun and me. “Put it down, Rosalie. Please. You don’t want to do this. I’ve killed people, and it will haunt you; change you forever in ways you won’t like.”
He’s repeating the same thing he said to me. He’s all out of new lines.
Her face relaxes as though she’s recalling a good memory. “I’m not going to kill you, whoever you ar
e. I’m going to kill him.”
She points a finger towards McNab. He’s not Mr. Expensive Shoes now. Not now that he’s standing here in a puddle of his own pee, groveling for his life.
Rosalie advances towards him, holding the gun out as if she’s on a TV cop show and is scoping out an abandoned warehouse. She talks to him in a low voice, and I have to strain to hear.
Each word makes McNab struggle even more against his binds.
“I was only four when you started coming into my room, telling me I was a big girl now and you had to show me what daddies and their daughters did”—she pokes her father in the ribs with the gun, and he flinches—“to break me in for my husband. You were naked when you got into bed with me. I was so scared when you made me touch you. When I cried, you told me if I was a good girl, you’d buy me a hamster.”
She turns to face me, her eyes filled with despair. But she’s not looking at me; she’s staring right past me as though there’s someone there only she can see. “Snowy had just died.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We knew McNab was an utter bastard, but we hadn’t realized he’d stoop to this. By killing him we would be doing the world a favor.
Rosalie continues speaking in a haunted voice that makes me shiver. “I was only a little girl and he was my daddy. I didn’t know it was wrong.”
“Nobody will blame you, Rosalie. You were only a child.”
Despite the pain in my foot, I’m trying to soothe her. To stop her from ruining her life. If she shoots him, they’ll be no going back. She won’t be able to return to her old life and her college course. Be her own person, far away from the toxic environment her father inhabited.
If she shoots him, she won’t be able to bury what’s she’s done. She might be able to hold off for a while. Then one day, the dam will burst and she’d tell all. Either that or she wouldn’t even last the first interview with the police. We’d all get arrested.
But my words can’t penetrate the armor she’s built around herself. She’s gone back to talking to McNab, saying something I can’t hear, and he’s shuddering with every word.
Hell To Pay (Crime Files Book 1) Page 11