by Conrad Jones
“Sorry,” he waved, as he put the bags into the boot of his car.
“Have you forgotten anything?” I called out of the window. He looked at me confused.
“Sorry?” he said.
“I said have you forgotten anything? I wouldn’t want you to get home and realize you’ve forgotten the milk or fucking teabags. Feel free to nip back inside and browse the magazine rack, or better still, move your fucking car!” I said in my most sarcastic voice.
“Charming,” he muttered, as he got in his car.
“Just move the fucking thing before I shunt it out of the way.” I was losing it. The Navara is a big truck and I felt like driving over his car to the next pump. After arsing about with his seat belt for another few long seconds, he pulled away and I jumped out and waited a few minutes for the donkey behind the counter to activate the pump. I filled up the tank, locked the cap and walked to the cash point. It was busy and I was paranoid. Everyone was a threat. Every glance was an assassin coming for me. I slid my card into the machine and entered my PIN. The screen informed me the number was incorrect. I was stressed and in a rush so I tried it again, slowly this time. The same message appeared on the screen: incorrect number. I have used the same number for decades. Someone had blocked my account. I knew without trying again that they had done it. They were trying to stop me running. They were more powerful than I imagined and I hadn’t seen anything yet.
Chapter 17
That Night
I knew that if I was going to run, I needed money. I went home after pleading with the Tesco garage employees to take my name and address, and I promised to return with the money as soon as possible. Of course, I never did. Serves them right for making me wait at the pump. After everything that had happened, I was in a paranoia bubble. I drove past the side of my house where I have parked my car for the last fifteen years and pulled into a cul-de-sac a few hundred yards up the road. I turned it around so that it was facing the exit, anticipating that I may need to make a quick getaway. My imagination was running wild, but what was the alternative? Act normally and wait for someone to take me out? I couldn’t do that. When we first brought Evie Jones home and realized that she was a danger to passing dogs we secured the backyard, making sure that there were no gaps in the fence where she could wriggle out and attack a poor, defenceless Labrador. The only breach in the fence was a weak panel behind the shed. The panel separated our backyard from the first house in the street behind us, and I wedged an old sunlounger against it and then heaved the shed back so that she couldn’t fit behind it. As I walked home, the weak panel became our escape route in my mind. If danger came to our door, we could leave through the back, push the shed a few inches, move the sunlounger and slip into our neighbour’s back garden without being seen from the main road. Part of me was impressed with my ability to plan with such detail and another part of me questioned my sanity.
The roundabout at the front of the house was busy when I walked up the side path to the front door. Knowing that hundreds of normal human beings drove by every hour gave me some comfort. It would be a different story once the teatime traffic faded. The population of Warrington doubles during office hours as commuters travel to a plethora of call centres and business parks, but by eight o’clock it turns back into the sleepy town that it was before all the commerce arrived.
I locked both doors while the Staffie whirled around my feet. There is no command that you can give to an excited dog welcoming you home. You have to face the barrage in the knowledge that it will eventually subside. I checked all the doors and windows, knowing that they were secure, but paranoia forced me to check them anyway. My mind is so full of imaginary goings-on from my books that when I eventually get into my truck I forget whether I’ve left the iron on, if the front door is locked and where I am supposed to be going in the first place.
With the Staffie settled and the kettle on, I called the Santander customer service line. A very helpful lady with a Scottish accent looked into my account and informed me that a petrol station close to Birmingham had reported that someone had tried to use several debit cards in different names to pay for a tank of fuel, and that one of the names was mine. The bank quite rightly put a block on my card until I contacted them. It sounded like a perfectly believable scenario which could happen to anyone at anytime, but in my mind it was them. I had to make a contingency plan to stop them from doing it again. I needed more than one way to access money and it needed to be as anonymous as possible. I logged-in online and pulled up a prepaid MasterCard site, which I had used for a while when travelling abroad. I used the card to buy stuff online, and for travelling they are perfect. I swapped my payment details from Amazon account so that my e-book money went direct to the prepaid card rather than my bank account. At the time, we both had a personal drawer in the kitchen units and I rifled through them, my brains running at warp speed. My partner had left a Barclaycard which I was authorized to use. I didn’t know it was there and she must have kept it from me in case I used it to fund my social life. She didn’t trust me with money, and looking back she was spot on. She had forgotten all about it in her rush to pack, so I activated it online and took that too.
The sun was going down and I wasn’t finished swapping money from my accounts yet, so I logged onto a “we buy any car” website and asked for a cash price for the truck. There are too many cameras on our roads to hide for long. If they had access to police cameras, and I believed they did, then it wouldn’t take long for them to track me down. With all that organized, I tried to think how else they could find me. The obvious way was my mobile phone. I printed off all my numbers from my Blackberry, put them in my laptop bag and then stashed all my notes on Jennifer into a small safe, which we kept in the loft. I planned to buy a number of prepaid SIM cards from the shops the next day. They would keep me in touch with the people I trusted, though God only knows who could I trust.
It took me the best part of three hours to sort everything out and the sun was gone from the sky. I began to think that I’d missed my window of opportunity to travel in daylight. I watched the roads around the house through the bedroom windows, looking for any suspicious vehicles. When you are in that frame of mind, they’re all suspicious. I decided that it was safer to stay at the house for the night and leave in the morning when there was more traffic on the roads. There was more chance of them ramming me off the road in the dark. My run-in with Officer Knowles was still on my mind too. It would be easy for a rogue officer to pull me over at night. I had to start thinking like a man on the run.
I locked all the doors and closed all the curtains, setting the burglar alarm to cover the ground floor so that I could move from bedroom to bedroom at will. The house is a three-bedroom semi situated on a busy roundabout. All the windows and doors were renewed fairly recently and they had good locks fitted. If anyone tried to break in, they would have to smash a window. Behind all those locks, I had the shotgun and the Staffie. At the time, I fancied my chances to get through the night safely.
I resisted the urge to drink myself to sleep despite being home alone, although I took the liberty of smoking my head off. My eyes were burning, and eventually I nodded off into a dream-filled slumber. I didn’t sleep long. Evie Jones woke me. It was three o’clock in the morning when she started barking. I was tired and my head was aching. There was a rattle from the backyard and I rushed into the back bedroom to investigate. I was amazed to see a figure struggling over the back fence panels. They are six feet high and the intruder was considerably shorter than that. A layer of gravel covers the backyard and they landed with a crunch on my side of the fence.
My heart was in my mouth. Although I knew I was in danger, I was still shocked to see an intruder climbing the fence. Evie Jones kicked off and she was bouncing off the window, her snot and saliva smearing the double-glazed panel as she tried repeatedly to charge through the glass. The figure heard the Staffie and looked up at the window and smiled. It was an evil sneer and I recognized her immediately.
It was the Park Ranger. The light from the bedroom illuminated the yard to a degree. I couldn’t believe her nerve, but I was almost relieved to see that it was her. If that was the best that the Niners could send, then I would live forever. Once again, I was wrong.
As I watched her to see what she was planning to do, she took a small haversack from her back and quickly removed a glass bottle. She fumbled in her jacket pocket and then stuffed a rag into the neck, tilting it so that the flammable liquid soaked into it. I realized then she was going to firebomb my home. I had double-locked the doors downstairs and none of the windows opened wide enough to climb out. If she threw the petrol bomb though the dining room window downstairs then we would never make it out of the front door. A judge may see it another way, but I had no choice but to do what I did. Honestly, I didn’t.
Chapter 18
The Niners
I understood the consequences of what I was about to do, but it didn’t matter. It was me and Evie Jones or her. I grabbed the Staffie and pushed her out of the bedroom onto the landing. She was snarling and scratching at the door, but it would hold her long enough. Closing the door so that she couldn’t get in, I turned the butt of the shotgun and smashed the bedroom window with it. The double-glazed unit exploded into tiny pieces. If the Staffie had been in the room, she would have jumped through the opening and broken her bones in the fall. Time slowed right down as the Park Ranger held the petrol bomb away from her body and lit the rag. I held my breath as I pulled the stock into my shoulder and aimed the shotgun. It was a stance that I had taken a thousand times before, except that this time my target was a human.
Without a second thought about the implications of my actions or where I would end up, I squeezed the trigger and the Remington kicked in my hands. The lead shot smashed her wrist bones to pulp and shredded the flesh around them. Only a few strings of sinew attached the hand to her arm. She looked shocked. She stared at the ruined appendage and looked around for the culprit. “Where had the gunshot come from?” was written all over her face.
“You never expected that, did you?” I muttered under my breath as I squeezed the trigger again. The second blast ripped a massive chunk of her bicep from the bone in the upper arm and blood splattered across her neck and chest. A plume of white gravel shot skywards as the pellets smashed through her flesh into the yard.
Her evil smile was gone, replaced by a “little lost girl” expression. She looked scared for a moment as the burning bottle fell from her ruined hand. Her fingers could no longer grip and it smashed onto the floor at her feet. The burning rag ignited the petrol and the flames engulfed her in seconds. I felt no remorse as I watched her knees buckle and her clothes melt around her body. The blackened material mingled with her burning flesh as she turned into a human bonfire. I could hear her hair crackling as it burned and the skin on her face seemed to blister before it blackened and burned. She stared at me with accusing eyes until her eyeballs exploded in the heat and dribbled and sizzled down her burning cheeks. The Remington had another shell available and I could have put her out of her misery with a shot to the head, but I wanted her to suffer. I wanted to watch her die in agony. If you think that that is sick, then so be it. If I had to, I would watch her screaming a second time, and a third. The shape of her skull replaced her facial features as the flames devoured her. She screamed like a banshee until her body finally toppled over, and she twitched for a long thirty seconds before she was finally still.
“I hope that really hurt, you fucking bitch,” I said. I heard my voice and it didn’t sound like me. I felt relieved that I’d shot her before she could pitch her incendiary through my window. It hadn’t occurred to me at that point how I would explain the charred remains in my garden of a woman who had recently accused me of assault. If the Nine Angels were right in their belief that you gain the strength of your victim if you look into their eyes when they die, then I was 1-0 up at that point.
Even now, years on, I feel nothing but contempt for her. I hope she gets everything she prayed for to her dark lord and that she burns in his hell for eternity. Fuck her and fuck them. I leaned against the window frame as the adrenalin dissipated and I allowed my small victory to blind me from any other danger. I said that they wouldn’t come in ones, and they didn’t. I was still gloating when the bathroom window smashed and the Staffie went ballistic on the landing.
Chapter 19
Officer Knowles
I ran for the bedroom door, slamming fresh shells into the shotgun. I nearly spilled them onto the carpet in my panic. I should have realized that the bitch had made it too obvious that she was in the backyard. She had virtually announced her arrival to me and the dog. She was acting as a diversion so that I wouldn’t see someone else climbing on top of the kitchen extension. She had drawn my attention away from the easiest access point. The kitchen had a flat roof, which gave access to the bathroom window. If you stood on the roof, the window ledge was at knee height, and with the glass smashed it was a simple case of stepping into the house.
As I reached the back bedroom door, I heard the Staffie go into attack mode. It sounds like a sports car going into top gear. Her growling drops an octave or two as she launches into an attack. Evie Jones bears the scars of being a fighting dog in her younger years, and had we not taken her from the rescue home they would have destroyed her because of her aggression towards other animals. In the first few days of owning her, she attacked two male bulldogs twice her size and decimated them in seconds. It was my fault because I’d let her off the lead to see how she behaved. I nearly had her put down for that attack, but my partner begged me not to. It was the last time we let her off the lead outside of the house.
I heard her snarling change tone as she attacked the intruder, and there was a cry of pain as she latched on to a limb. I could hear her thrashing about in the bathroom and there was a tearing sound of material and flesh. A guttural growling noise came from her throat. A man’s voice was cursing in a language I didn’t recognize. I reached the door and flung it open.
Officer Knowles was wearing a balaclava, but I immediately knew that it was him. The lights were on and I could see his eyes. I would recognize them anywhere. When he saw the shotgun in my hands, his eyes widened with fear and he found the strength to break free of the Staffie. If he had done his homework at the police station, he would have known I had had a shotgun licence for ten years. Evie fell away, bounced off the toilet and attacked again. She attached her teeth to his right hand. He was holding a Beretta and somehow she knew that he meant to do me harm with it. The Staffie was swinging from his arm as he thrashed about, but she wouldn’t let go. I aimed the shotgun at him but he was spinning around too much for me to take a shot without hurting Evie.
Knowles stumbled through the bathroom door onto the landing, and I stepped back quickly hoping that he would fall to the floor and drop the weapon. He panicked and swung her body against the banister rail. The blow winded Evie Jones and she crashed to the floor as Knowles raised his gun and blindly squeezed off a round. Blood poured from his arm and splattered up the wall and I could see that there was a ragged tear in his forearm. A flap of skin the size of a cigarette packet was missing. I made a mental note to buy her some lambs’ liver as a reward – if we made it through the night.
Knowles fired again and the bullet smashed into the doorframe, splintering the wood and showering me with shards. I fired at the ceiling, blasting Artex and plaster all over us. I wanted him to run away from the Staffie so that I could shoot him. He ducked and stumbled in the darkness towards the top of the stairs, and as Evie readied for another lunge, I tripped over her and the shotgun roared again. A large hole appeared in the bathroom door, but thankfully she was unhurt. There was one cartridge left in the Remington, and without taking aim I fired from the hip. The shot sprayed the landing with deadly lead pellets, some catching Knowles in the shoulder. The force slammed him into the wall, leaving bloody smears on the magnolia, and he squealed like a girl as he threw himself down t
he stairs.
Evie Jones was up on her feet snarling like a pit bull, but I couldn’t risk her being shot by the Beretta as she ran down the stairs. The burglar alarm sounded as Knowles hit the sensors, and I grabbed her collar as she set off in hot pursuit. She licked my hand as I shoved her into the spare bedroom and shut the door. I could hear her running onto the bed and hurling herself at the door. She wanted to finish what she had started, but I had to think for both of us and keep her out of the line of fire.
I loaded three new shells into the shotgun and looked over the banister. As I did so, a bullet whistled by my ear and crashed into the ceiling above me, showering me with more plaster. It crossed my mind that if my partner had returned home and seen the bullet holes, she may have believed what I had been saying. I heard Knowles moving into the back room, which meant that I could make it down the stairs. Then it dawned on me that the electric box was in the dining room and I could hear him fumbling about. He was going to kill the lights.
I was halfway down the stairs with my back pressed against the wall when the lights went off. I stopped suddenly and backtracked up the stairs with my head down. The streetlights on the roundabout provided a dull yellow glow through the curtains and they would silhouette me if I ventured downstairs. I would have been a sitting duck if I had carried on.