Headhunter

by Nick Oldham

  ‘I’ll step outside,’ she said, backing off with one last glance. Flynn sensed he had a bit of an ally in her but decided not to ask anything more of her. He liked her and did not want to compromise her, and anyway, once he was incarcerated he doubted he would ever see her again. She left the room and her partner, Robbo, stepped in to replace her, although it would not have bothered Flynn for her to see him unclothed.

  Neither did it bother him that Rik and the male AFO would see him naked either but, just to wind them up, he made a show of wanting some privacy to get changed into the paper suit and insisted the curtain was drawn around the bed.

  He discarded the hospital gown and climbed into the suit, which also came with paper underpants that reminded him of Huggies. The suit was also baggy and unflattering, but he was no fashion icon at the best of times, so wasn’t too uptight about his appearance.

  ‘Where’s the rest of my gear?’ he called from behind the curtain. Before all this had kicked off he had been on his way to Manchester airport to get on a flight to Ibiza to collect his boat from Santa Eulalia. He’d had some hand luggage with a change of clothing in it, and his passport and wallet had been in the hire car he’d been using. ‘Passport, money, et cetera,’ he said.

  ‘All booked in,’ Rik replied.

  ‘I’m going to need some real clothes pretty soon.’

  ‘I’ll fix it, no need to worry.’

  He drew open the curtain just as Rik leaned out of the door to beckon in the cops who were going to transport him to the police station. Molly re-entered, followed by PC Mike Guthrie and his running partner, whose name Flynn did not know. Guthrie had his rigid handcuffs swinging on his right forefinger and Flynn could see from his expression that he was looking forward to cuffing him.

  ‘Hands out in front,’ he told Flynn.

  Flynn had one moment of ridiculous seriousness when he considered seeing if he could put them all down, but there were five, four were armed and one was Molly, and there was every possibility of it all going wrong and Molly shooting him in the leg as per her previous promise.

  He extended his arms and Guthrie expertly applied the rigid cuffs so his hands were bound in front of him. Guthrie then gripped the rigid bar and gave it a little twist to demonstrate his control over Flynn as the steel cuffs dug into his nerve endings on the inner part of his wrists and sent a jolt of incredible pain up his arms.

  He gasped and his whole body submitted.

  If Guthrie had continued with the pressure, he could have had Flynn down on his knees, begging for mercy. He was tough but not that tough.

  Guthrie almost instantly released the pressure, having proved his point. He was in control. Flynn was his. It was known as pain compliance.

  He gave a hard-faced smile and said, ‘Are we on the same wavelength?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Flynn said reluctantly, fighting the urge to call him something he would regret.

  He kept hold of the cuffs and turned to Rik, who had watched the little show of power with a half-grin. ‘Preston nick?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Which was news to Flynn. He had expected to be taken to Blackpool, not Preston. He considered asking for the reason, but he understood. Two Bashkims were lodged in Blackpool cells and Rik Dean did not want to risk Flynn going anywhere near them. Taking Flynn to Preston would ensure there would be no possibility whatsoever of him getting his hands on their throats.

  SIX

  A lot of money had been spent on the frontage of Blackpool Victoria Hospital, giving it an air of slick modernity, although behind the facade of a nice new entrance with coffee shops and a newsagents, the infrastructure was still old and not a little shabby and decrepit.

  A new multi-storey car park had been built close-by on the opposite side of the drop-off turning circle outside the main entrance, and Alan Hardiker was sat in his car on the first floor of this new build, looking across the low wall to the big revolving doors.

  He had been up all night, ever since his clandestine meeting with a man screwing the barrel of a gun into his neck.

  It had been a torrid time and his mind had been in turmoil in one respect, but calm in another.

  He had seen Rik Dean arrive at the hospital, park on the ground floor of the multi-storey and scurry over to the entrance. He knew that Dean, like himself, had been up all night but for very different reasons.

  A short while after Rik’s arrival, a liveried Ford Galaxy had turned up and stopped in the drop-off bay. The two uniformed occupants got out and also went into the hospital. Hardiker recognized them as armed response unit cops, knew both of them well. One was Mike Guthrie who he played five-a-side football with most weeks. Hardiker swallowed a very heavy lump in his throat.

  He knew exactly what it was: dread.

  He also knew that inside the hospital was Molly Cartwright and Robbo, her ARV partner, and that the plan was to use all four armed officers, in two vehicles, to convey Steve Flynn over to Preston. It had been easy enough for Hardiker, as a DS, to discover all this without really trying, and then pass on the details.

  His mind flicked back to the meeting with the man in the deserted industrial park.

  Crossing the line.

  Easy money.

  The information he had passed had netted him £1,000 in very dirty-looking money, crumpled notes probably all tainted with cocaine.

  It only made a small dent in his overall debt but at least it was a start, and he had been promised another two grand if the information he gave was genuine and led to Flynn.

  He had insisted it would be.

  He had also insisted that no cop should be harmed.

  The man with the gun had guffawed at this condition as he tossed the wodge of money on to the front seat of Hardiker’s car.

  The sound of that contemptuous laugh continued to resonate around Hardiker’s brain.

  So the two sides of the coin: calm and turmoil.

  Calm because his debt was at last being serviced; turmoil because four armed cops were about to convey a prisoner the dozen miles or so from Blackpool to Preston and any attempt on that escort was not going to be pretty.

  Hardiker fumbled nervously for his mobile phone.

  Crossing the line.

  The cops kept Flynn waiting while Molly hurried out to her police car, which she had left overnight on the ground floor of the multi-storey, and brought it out to the drop-off at the front of the hospital so there would be no delay in setting off. Flynn could be bundled straight into the Ford Galaxy, put into the back seat alongside Mike Guthrie, and the two vehicles could roll immediately with no need to pause for anything.

  Molly walked quickly through the revolving door at the exact moment her personal mobile phone rang.

  She kept moving as she checked the screen, which read: Alan xx calling.

  She did not answer, thumbed ‘end call’ and pocketed the device.

  From his vantage point, Hardiker saw Molly emerge from the hospital. It was pure coincidence that she exited the building at the moment he called her on his mobile.

  She didn’t even break her stride as she reached into her pocket, pulled out the phone, saw who was calling, dismissed the call and carried on across towards the car park.

  Hardiker ducked back into shadow, watched her entering the ground floor of the car park and go out of sight. He hadn’t realized she was parked there; hadn’t even thought of looking for a cop car, liveried or otherwise.

  He was furious, though, that she had dismissed his call.

  ‘Bitch, I was trying to do you a favour,’ he mumbled.

  Something in him made him try once more.

  ‘Fucking what?’ Molly answered cantankerously as she lowered herself into the unmarked Ford Mondeo, annoyed by his harassment.

  ‘Molly, Molly,’ Hardiker cooed cloyingly.

  ‘What? I’m at fucking work. I have a job on – and why are you calling me at this time of day anyway? Why are you fucking calling me at all?’

  ‘I know. I kn
ow you’re at work, lovey … I just … just need to see you now. Come on, book off-duty or something … say you’re ill …’

  ‘Yeah, as if I could. I’m about to go on a prisoner escort.’

  ‘I know. Look, I need to see you now … just …’

  ‘Just what?’ She ended the call and started the engine.

  Hardiker looked accusingly at his mobile phone screen. He knew he couldn’t have directly warned her or told her to be careful as that would have incriminated him.

  He heard a car start somewhere below in the car park, heard the squeal of tyres, then saw Molly’s Mondeo exit and pull up behind the ARV Galaxy.

  She climbed out and stood by the car door, saying something on her radio, waiting for the appearance of the prisoner and his escorts.

  ‘I did try,’ Hardiker whispered to himself.

  ‘OK, guys, I’m in position.’ Flynn heard Molly’s voice on all four personal radios attached to the uniforms of the three firearms officers and the one in Rik Dean’s hand.

  Guthrie looked Flynn in the eye and mischievously tweaked the rigid bar on the handcuffs just to reiterate his dominance. They all waited for Rik Dean’s nod, and then they were on their way.

  Flynn wasn’t certain what floor of the hospital they were on, but they led him out into the main ward corridor, then out on to a landing to wait for the lift, which they bundled him into, although Rik did not join them. It dropped a couple of floors, clattering to a halt, and the doors opened on to a corridor leading to the hospital exit.

  Guthrie kept a firm hold of the cuffs.

  The other two guys flanked him like wingmen. Flynn could just about see them out of the corner of his eyes. All three looked to be handy fellows, and he thought that if he kicked off they could probably have flattened him.

  They passed a few people in the corridor who couldn’t keep their eyes off a prisoner in his forensic suit being led out between sour-faced cops. In the past, he had done the same to many prisoners and not really cared about how they felt as individuals, and he assumed the same applied to the guys escorting him. He was just a package to be delivered, nothing more.

  They reached a set of stairs with an escalator to one side and once more they took the easy option, the moving stairs down to the foyer. Guthrie had to be one step in front to keep a grip of the cuffs and had to contort slightly awkwardly to do so. The other two were on the step behind Flynn.

  This was another position in which he could have been awkward.

  It wouldn’t have taken much to push Guthrie down and break his grip on the cuffs, then turn to gut punch one of PCs behind him and barge him into the other one, and he did seriously consider this until he spotted Molly standing on the other side of the revolving doors, and knew she would shoot him without compunction.

  So, in a happy line like four oversized dwarfs, they trucked off the escalator without incident and walked towards Molly, who had opened one of the side doors so there was no need to leave through the revolving one.

  Flynn saw the two cop cars by the kerb.

  It was good to step out into the fresh air of a newly forming day. Flynn felt he had been breathing the cloying hospital atmosphere for far too long and inhaling the outside air was like taking a drug, immediately making him feel more alert and alive. Not quite in the league of taking his boat out of Puerto Rico harbour, but under the circumstances it was OK – until a fleeting thought about Maria Santiago flipped through his mind, reminding him she would never be there to share anything with him again. Over summer she had been helping out with tourist trips from Santa Eulalia on Ibiza and the days had been long and languid, full of love and passion.

  The memory hit him hard, made him want to crumble, but he raised his chin and thought again about how best to escape from custody, because being free was the only way in which he could even begin to devour that cold dish of revenge.

  Molly watched the short procession file past her, avoiding any eye contact with Steve Flynn. From now on it was going to be all professional alertness and she scanned continually for any signs of danger, even though she fully expected this to be an incident-free journey.

  The logistics were that Flynn would be in the back seat of the Galaxy alongside Mike Guthrie, whose partner would do the driving.

  Molly was going to drive the Mondeo with Robbo alongside her in the front. They would follow the Galaxy and it was expected the journey would take no more than twenty minutes at that time of day, with very little traffic on the roads to hold them up.

  They were going to go up on to East Park Drive, head south to Preston New Road, the A583, and simply follow that all the way to Preston itself. An easy journey across the agricultural flatlands between the two towns.

  She was content to drive. It gave her something to concentrate on other than Alan, her disintegrating relationship and how she was going to pick up the pieces of her life.

  The Galaxy moved off. Molly selected first gear and followed it up the hill past the Accident and Emergency department and left on to East Park Drive, suddenly feeling weariness overtake her.

  She shook her head to clear her mind and focused on the back of the Galaxy to get the job done, get home to bed and sort out her existence.

  They reached Preston New Road and filtered left, shortly thereafter crossing the motorway roundabout and heading past a huge DIY superstore on the right before dropping on to the clear run all the way into Preston on the A583.

  Molly gripped the wheel, travelling about thirty metres behind the Galaxy, keeping the distance constant as the speed of both vehicles edged up to the fifty mph limit along the dual carriageway. She could see Flynn’s wide silhouette on the back seat next to Guthrie, who was almost as wide but not quite as tall.

  Progress was steady; there were very few other vehicles on the road. It was never an excessively busy route, though there were some hazardous sections of road where speeding and overtaking had caught out many an unwary motorist, often with fatal consequences.

  Flynn sneaked a glance over his shoulder, saw Molly’s car following then faced the front again when Guthrie scowled at him, an expression which seemed firmly screwed on to his face.

  Flynn wasn’t particularly enjoying the journey through an area he knew well from his time as a cop. Much of his early service had been in and around Blackpool and its environs and he had a good knowledge of the local geography, knowing they would soon be bypassing the market town of Kirkham on the left after negotiating the roundabout at Nookwood, where a huge housebuilding programme was underway adjacent to the road.

  Then the blood drained from Flynn’s face as he realized what he had just seen when he’d looked back at Molly. His head jerked around again and his eyes widened with horror at what looked like a huge black articulated tractor unit closing up fast from behind.

  In a concurrent thought of sudden realization, Flynn knew that this roundabout was probably the last best point on the whole route to Preston to launch an attack as less than a mile to the north was a junction for the M55 motorway – and a quick escape.

  Flynn’s head twisted forwards again, his mind racing now.

  His thoughts were that if this was an attack of some sort, then they wouldn’t just be coming from behind – there would have to be a frontal assault and possibly one from the side if there was to be any chance of success. Or maybe it was just a lorry driver on his phone, not concentrating and Flynn was letting his imagination run riot.

  The roundabout was perhaps two hundred metres ahead.

  ‘Fuck you looking at, pal?’ Guthrie demanded crossly.

  The two police cars were slowing down now to negotiate it.

  Flynn ignored Guthrie, hoping he was wrong in his assumptions.

  But as he raised his head to peer over the passenger seat headrest and through the front windscreen, Flynn saw a second tractor unit burst out from the junction on the right and bear down towards the side of the Galaxy, which had just paused on the give-way markings on the roundabout.

&nbs
p; At the same time he spotted the figures of two men lounging by the roadside on the left, as if waiting to cross.

  They weren’t.

  Flynn knew it.

  Confirmed when both men simultaneously pulled on black balaclava masks and threw back their overcoats to reveal the stubby machine pistols – handgun-style, magazine-fed, self-loading firearms capable of fully automatic or bursts of single fire – concealed underneath the material. Flynn recognized them as Czech-made Skorpions.

  The phrase ‘shit sandwich’ jumped into his mind as he opened his mouth to scream a warning, but the words remained trapped in his throat as from three sides a world of terrible violence closed in on them like the jaws of a monster.

  The first crashing, metal-crunching noise came from behind as the truck following Molly’s car smashed into the back of that vehicle and drove the car into the back of the Galaxy.

  Flynn then watched it all happen, piece by piece, microsecond by microsecond.

  The impact of the Mondeo caught the Galaxy driver totally by surprise and Flynn thought, Sleepwalkers! in reference to the cops on the escort, because they always believed it would not happen to them. He did manage to have some reaction, instinctively slamming on the brakes with a roar coming from his mouth, but the force of the impact was too immense to fight and the Galaxy was shunted out into the roundabout. The other tractor unit hurtled at them from the side and smashed into them like a raging bull elephant attacking a safari bus. There was the terrifying crash of the collision, the tearing of metal and the cracking of windows disintegrating, coupled with the sound of the big engine in the truck itself.

  Flynn managed to brace himself.

  At the same time, in the periphery of his vision, he saw the two pedestrians swing the Skorpions into a hip-height firing position and they strafed both police vehicles with a wave of bullets.

  Flynn heard the impact of the shells banging into the side of the Galaxy and also shattering the window he was against.

  As well as bracing himself, he had also pulled his body in tight.