Night Strike

by Chris Ryan

  Wade and his two mates were thirty metres away, the Beretta 92 glinting under the moon. Then the muzzle barked and flamed. Two rounds swooshed past Bald. Missed. Bald scrambled to his feet and broke into a sprint. Another shot broke the air. Bald heard the American grunt at his six o’clock.

  Bald glanced over his shoulder. Dark liquid was oozing out of a ten-pence hole on the American’s right arm. He toppled forward, smacked against the dirt. Blood fountained onto the scrubby grass. Three more shots. At Bald’s six o’clock. Rounds hailed down. Bald turned away from the American. He had to get the fuck out of the slums. Stick around and he’d soon have a hundred more angry locals searching for him. Itching to tear him a dozen new arseholes.

  ‘Shitting fuck!’ the American yelled. His breathing was erratic, his face varnished in sweat. ‘Don’t leave me here.’

  Bald ignored him and set off down the alley.

  ‘Please,’ the American said, his voice jumpy and desperate. ‘I know what’s really going on.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘They’re lying to you.’

  Fuck this, thought Bald.

  Wade and a mate were twenty-five metres away, but the third gangster was the immediate threat. He was eight metres short of the American. Wade unloaded three more rounds from the Beretta. They zipped through the air and slapped into a fence four metres to Bald’s right. The fence spat wooden mist in his face.

  Now the nearest gangster was four metres from the American.

  Bald dropped to one knee. Gripped the Five-Seven with both hands. The gangster was wielding a knife and arrowing it down at the American. Ready to give him the good news.

  Two metres.

  Bald unleashed two quick-fire rounds from the Five-Seven. Precious little recoil, to the point where he wondered if he’d actually discharged rounds, but they tore viciously into the guy’s chest, one after the other. He tumbled silently, without protest, like he was grateful this business of living was over and done with. Bald rushed back to the American.

  But Wade was still racing towards them at speed, his long-legged gait allowing him to leave his mate in his tracks. He moved in a zigzag fashion, making it harder for Bald to get a fix on him with the Five-Seven’s sights. Now he was fifteen metres from the American, eighteen from Bald. He rushed diagonally across the alley, left to right. He had the barrel level with Bald.

  Pulled the trigger.

  White light flickered in front of Bald. Blinded him. Hot pain lacerated his left ear. Something hot and sticky was weeping down his ear and onto his neck. Now Wade was moving right to left. Still hanging low. Still moving diagonally. He was ten metres from Bald. Beretta still level with Bald’s head.

  But Wade had made the fatal mistake of not properly zeroing in on his target. You go to shoot somebody, make sure you have something small to aim for on their body. A necklace, a logo on a T-shirt. Aim for the small target and you’re more likely to strike the big target surrounding it. That was weapons training basics, fundamental to an operator. But not to a street tough. The round thwacked into the ground to the right of Bald. Dread etched itself across Wade’s face, like he’d been bitch-slapped. He realized he had blown his big chance.

  A ca-rack and Wade’s ankle shattered like a fucking Jenga block. Bits of ankle bone and ligament muscle dolloped out. His leg kept moving but his foot stayed where it was, nearly detached from the rest of the limb. Veins and muscle strung like goo between the two joints. Wade howled. Then he fucking stacked it.

  Bald scrambled to his feet. The third gangster was bounding towards them. Bald levelled two luminous green dots on the Five-Seven’s rear sight. The guy ducked for cover behind a dumpster. Bald squeezed the trigger. The moving parts inside the Five-Seven stressed and tensed.

  He squeezed harder. The chambered bullet sprang its jacket out of the side ejector and ruptured the air. Struck the dumpster and went straight through it. The guy screamed. Bald put down three more rounds. The Five-Seven bullets were piercing through the dumpster like it was a wet paper bag. Blood pooled out from behind the dumpster, a black hole opening up. The screaming ceased. The guy had got his fucking ticket punched.

  Wade was writhing on the ground, pawing at his ankle. His leg was in fucking rag order. He was whimpering like a dying dog. Bald kicked the Beretta and shoved the Five-Seven into the side of his head and trod on his busted ankle. Wade squealed like a stuck pig. Bald got a weird kick out of watching Wade’s eyeballs bulge in their sockets.

  ‘Looks like you’re all alone, fuckface,’ he said.

  A voice came back to him. The one he could never silence. The one that he had heard more and more since he left the Regiment. Just because Laxman got away, doesn’t mean I have to go home empty-handed.

  He trod harder on Wade’s ankle. Like he was grinding a cigarette butt. Wade gagged and choked. Bald applied a degree of pressure to the trigger.

  ‘You got a fucking stash somewhere. Where is it?’

  Wade flashed his most defiant face. But the giveaway was in his eyes. They were big and frightened. Bald pulled the Five-Seven away from Wade’s head. The guy keeled over and alternated between choking to death and taking deep, greedy breaths of air. Now Bald grabbed him by his cornrows and said, ‘Fucking tell me.’

  A beat of silence in the alley, stippled only by the shouts of angry neighbours, the hyperactive squawk of a car alarm. Then Wade locked eyes with Bald and said, ‘In about five minutes you’re gonna have half the neighbourhood coming down on your crackerjack bitch-ass.’

  ‘Wrong. In about five minutes I’ll be fucking long gone.’

  Bald hauled Wade to his feet and shoved the Five-Seven into his mouth again. This time he cocked the hammer with his right thumb. Tempted the trigger back a little. He could feel the resistance in the weapon, the various moving parts ready to snap and discharge the chambered 5.7x28mm round. The gangster’s tears and saliva were binding at the barrel and forming a soapy foam. Bald removed the Five-Seven.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Shit! Cool the fuck down, nigga.’

  ‘Where can I find the stash?’

  ‘I ain’t telling you shit.’

  Something made Bald look round at the American.

  Then he spun around. Saw several Rorschach splotches of blood across the ground. Saw the alley unfolding up ahead: strewn trash and weeds and darkness. But he did not see the American.

  He’d disappeared.

  thirty-one

  2103 hours.

  ‘Lost your friend, bitch?’ Wade’s voice hacked.

  Something flipped inside Bald. It had been burning slowly, cloistered in his guts for days, fuelled by every drop of alcohol and missed opportunity for a fuck. With the sleeper now gone and taking Bald’s five-million-quid payday with him, the rage exploded.

  He smashed the Five-Seven’s butt down on the back of Wade’s head. The blow left a groove an inch and a half wide and a quarter of an inch deep. Wade mouthed his pain into the dirt. Bald grabbed him by his cornrows and thrust him upright. Wade’s fucked-up foot touched the ground and he howled again. Without painkillers the agony would quickly become unbearable.

  ‘Where’s the fucking stash?’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Wade couldn’t get the words out quickly enough now. ‘There’s this place across the block. A connect. Goes by the name of Leon.’

  ‘On your feet. We’ll pay Leon a visit.’

  ‘He don’t deal with strangers.’

  ‘He’s not going to see me, fuckface. Just you.’

  Sniffing now, his eyes watering, his lips shivering, his nose sticky with snot, Wade meekly picked himself off the ground and hopped at gunpoint down the alley. Bald kept the Five-Seven six inches from the back of his head. After fifty metres they emerged from the other end of the alley onto Pike Street. It was eerily vacant. The lights on every house were extinguished. Everything that could be locked and latched and shut, was. The porch seats abandoned. Bald guessed the residents in this neighbourhood were familiar enough with gan
g violence to know the drill. Stay indoors and keep your fucking head down. It’d be a short while before someone plucked up the courage to call the cops. Until then Bald had the streets to himself. Well, himself and Wade. The gangster had given up the tough-guy front. He whined and rasped with every draw of breath.

  Wade hopped ahead of Bald down Pike until they came upon a modest single-storey home flanked by a column of stripped-back palm trees and foregrounded by a weed-scarred lawn. Empty Coca-Cola cans and malt beer bottles rolled on the steps of the flaking white porch.

  Bald pushed Wade up the porch steps. They stopped in front of the door. A chicken-wire screen covered the main door. Bald flipped the screen door open, shoved Wade up to the main door and knocked briskly. Footsteps decanted through the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ a voice echoed.

  ‘Me, yo,’ Wade said. ‘Open up for your boy.’

  The door cracked open a couple of inches. Whoever was inside lived a life fuelled by paranoia and fear. The guy inside clocked only Wade’s face. Didn’t see Bald.

  ‘Who the fuck bitch-slapped you, son?’

  ‘There’s a white—’

  Bald thrust Wade through the gap and booted the door wide open with his left foot. Wade nosedived into the corridor, the guy inside backed up, and in the same motion Bald was training his Five-Seven on the guy. He instinctively raised his hands. He was twenty-five or thereabouts with a buzzcut shaven down to the scalp at the front in the shape of a ‘G’. He wore a long white vest and silver San Antonio Spurs basketball shorts that curtained down to his ankles. The guy hung in the doorway for a second, his eyes flicking from Wade’s wounded leg to Bald.

  ‘No offence, bro,’ the guy said, shifting on the balls of his feet. ‘But you don’t know who you’re fucking with. This is Red’s stash, yo.’

  ‘Give me the coke,’ said Bald.

  The guy grimaced.

  ‘Fucking do it.’

  The guy weighed up his options. Bald tightened his grip on the trigger to show he meant business. The guy took another look at Wade. Then he reluctantly edged back from Bald, stepping in reverse down the corridor. He almost tripped up over Wade’s prone figure. Regained his balance and ducked into a kitchen bathed in UV light. Bald looked back out of the front door and across the street. The warning signs in his head told him that Wade’s gang mates would be here any minute. He looked back at the kitchen. Cockroaches scuttled across the laminated wood floor.

  ‘I’m a find you, I’m a put a fucking bullet in you,’ Wade said.

  Bald said, ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’

  ‘Nah, fuck that. Me and my boys, we gonna hold you down, cut you up with an axe.’

  ‘These boys friends of yours? Like your mates in the alley?’

  The sound of a safe being unlocked reached Bald. Music to his ears.

  A Rottweiler burst out of the kitchen door. Pure muscle. It throttled towards Bald, and he pumped four rounds into its belly. The dog yelped. It didn’t die, but worked itself up into a frantic, lurching growl, swiping its heavy paws at thin air. Its right ear was blown completely off. Its nose was like a plum chopped in half and drooled blood over its teeth. Bald couldn’t believe the fucking thing was still alive. It was just two metres from him now and launching itself into the air, snarling and giving him a view of its saliva-coated teeth. He pumped a round into its mouth. That did the trick. The Rottweiler whimpered and dropped. Its jaws slackened; the rump of its belly inflated and deflated like a bellows. It whined, lamely pawing at the bullets stitched across its belly.

  ‘My fucking dog,’ the guy screamed from the kitchen.

  ‘Get out of here now with the shit, before I give you and Rover a premature reunion.’

  The guy trudged tearfully back down the corridor. He was carrying a brown paper bag and two bricks of coke, each one shrinkwrapped and the size of a hardcover book. He stopped beside Wade and slid the bricks and the paper bag along the floor towards Bald. He bent down, eyes never veering from Wade and the stash guy, and scooped up both bricks with his left hand. Stuff looked pure. Had to be a sell-on value north of fifty thousand dollars. Bald looked inside the paper bag. It was choc full of wads of hundred-dollar bills. Bald thumbed one of the wads. Had to be two hundred Benjamins to each wad. Twenty gees per wad. Four wads in the bag. Eighty large. He dumped everything in a Nike sports bag propped up by the side of the front door. Zipped it up and shouldered the bag.

  ‘We’ll find you,’ the stash guy said.

  ‘Chop you up,’ Wade added.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Bald.

  ‘Shit, man, you’re taking my livelihood. This is my business,’ stash guy said.

  ‘You won’t be needing it any more,’ said Bald.

  He put a single round through the guy’s head. He dropped like gravity had doubled under his feet and landed side by side with Wade, who screamed like a little bitch. Bald put a round through Wade’s skull too. No witnesses. Cleaner that way. Then he bugged out. Closed the door. Four minutes later he was pacing along Vine Street and putting a healthy distance between himself and the slums. His burner vibrated in his pocket. He checked the display. Hit the answer key. His fingers reeked of gun smoke.

  ‘Is it over?’

  Rachel.

  Bald struggled to hear her above the police sirens approaching the ghetto. Bald doubled his pace. ‘It’s over,’ he lied. He still had his eyes on that shag.

  A sigh of relief breezed down the line.

  ‘Where are you now?’ Rachel’s voice was perking up.

  ‘Vine Street.’

  ‘Wait there. I’ll come pick you up. I think it’s about time you unwrapped your present now, don’t you?’

  thirty-two

  2213 hours.

  Rachel had a room at the Hilton St Petersburg Carillon Park, about twelve miles south and east of Clearwater and pissing distance from St Petersburg International Airport. Bald didn’t say a word during the drive. He was fucking knackered. He thought of the drugs concealed in the Nike bag currently nestled between his feet, and how good it would feel to finally nail Rachel. Things were working out after all. He gazed out across Tampa Bay. The sky was percolating its charcoal blackness into the water. Moonlight shards lay like spent brass on the still water.

  They parked in the underground lot. Rachel excused herself and stepped out of the car to take a call. Bald reached into the back seat and retrieved the gym bag loaded with cash and passports. He waited until Rachel’s back was turned, then he transferred both coke and the paper bag into the gym bag. He had mates in Miami, contacts he’d made on the Circuit, and he knew they would definitely be interested in snapping up the gear wholesale. Once Bald was done ploughing Miss Florida he’d drop those guys a line.

  He was zipping up the bag as Rachel returned to the Chrysler.

  ‘All set?’ she asked. Bald nodded and eased his exhausted frame out of the car. Each muscle seemed to have been taken apart and clumsily put back together. It hurt to walk, it hurt to breathe.

  It was gone 2245 hours when Rachel slid the card into the door of room 221. Vanilla light flushed over soft-focus, inoffensive furnishings and smoothed-out cream sheets adorning a double bed. The room smelled of detergent and pot-pourri.

  Bald shut the door and drew Rachel close to him. Wasted no time getting to work on her clothes. He ripped off her blouse and felt something hot spill open in his guts.

  ‘You like to play dirty?’ she said. ‘I like dirty too.’

  Bald cast off his T-shirt and let Rachel lock herself around him. She took turns tonguing him and chewing his bottom lip like it was a piece of gum. She dragged her fingernails down his back. Bald leaned in to kiss her. She shoved him back onto the bed. She peeled off her skirt and kicked off her shoes and pounced onto the bed. She slid his jeans off and crawled up him until her nose was touching his.

  She breathed violently into his ear. She smothered his face in the warm fold of her tits for a long and blissful moment before pulling herself up s
traight and sliding her thighs across Bald’s arms so that she was pinning him down at the elbows. She pressed her lips against his and breathed hot, almond air over him.

  ‘I like to be beat,’ she whispered. ‘I like to be told I’m a bad girl.’

  She lifted up her right knee, giving Bald just enough space to manoeuvre his left arm. He reached around to her arse and spanked it. She froze for a moment. Then she did something he didn’t expect. She spat on his cheek and followed it up with a harsh slap across the same spot.

  ‘I said beat.’ Rachel’s voice was laced with aggression. ‘Not spank. Jeez, fucking hit me.’

  For a second Bald figured she was play-acting. But the look in her eyes told him otherwise.

  ‘Hit me, you fucking dick. Hit me so hard I bleed. I wanna feel the pain.’

  She slapped Bald on the pecs. ‘You wanna fuck me?’ she said. ‘Then do it.’

  So Bald struck her on the face. His knuckles connected with the triangle of her cheekbone. A soft, high-pitched scream escaped from her mouth. She shied away from Bald and for a moment he thought he’d gone too far. That maybe she had been fooling around. Then she slowly angled her head back at Bald. The soft-focus lights coloured in her features and gave the purpled bruises on her face a pretty sheen. Her cheek had swollen up like a rotten pear. She seemed – not angry. Not even upset. More like – disappointed.

  ‘I know you can do better than that, John.’ Her eyes hardened. ‘Hit me again. Harder this time.’

  Bald slugged her across the chin. His knuckle joints were on fire. That told him he’d given her a proper smack-up this time. Job done, he shaped to tear off her bra and get down to the serious business of fucking. But she interrupted him and said, ‘Choke me, John. Put your hands around my neck and squeeze tight. I want to feel like I can’t breathe when you’re inside me.’

  Now Bald locked his hands around her neck and applied a degree of pressure to her air passage. Her mouth evicted a peculiar sound into the sheets. Not quite a groan and not quite a pained noise. More like a satisfied moan.