Lynch

by Merrigan, Peter J

  Fernandez fired and Scott fell to the floor, covering his head as he landed. He looked up. Fernandez was still coming.

  Behind Scott, Katherine screamed. The bullet had taken Jesse direct in the throat and his body slid to the ground.

  Still Fernandez was coming.

  And from between two aisles, a forklift truck ploughed out and took the Spaniard in the chest. It disappeared out of sight, taking Fernandez with it, and there was a crash. John’s scream echoed around the warehouse. ‘Oh my fucking Christ!’

  Scott turned and crawled over to Jesse, put his hand on his chest. His neck was pumping blood and his eyes were shuddering back and forth. Katherine knelt at his other side.

  Scott put his hand to Jesse’s wound as though he could stem the bleeding. ‘You’re not dying. Not this time. I won’t let you.’

  Katherine reached out and touched Scott’s shoulder. ‘Kane,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘He’s not dying. I’m not losing him.’

  ‘Kane,’ she repeated.

  Scott looked down at Jesse. ‘You can pull through,’ he said. ‘You can do this, Ryan, you can do this. Stay with me.’

  Jesse’s eyes stopped moving and seemed to focus directly on Scott, in some apparent state of lucidity.

  His mouth opened. A single word bubbled from the blood. ‘Ryan.’

  ‘What?’

  Jesse said no more.

  ‘Kane,’ Katherine said again.

  ‘What’d you say, Jesse?’ Scott asked. ‘Stay with me. What’d you say? What’d he say?’

  ‘Kane, he’s dead.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘What’d he say?’

  Katherine took Scott into her arms, Jesse’s body on the ground between them. ‘He said “Ryan”. You called him Ryan.’

  John dropped to his knees beside them. He was carrying Fernandez’s gun. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, and covered his mouth. Then he said, ‘I killed him. I killed Fernandez.’

  ‘We have to get up,’ Katherine said. ‘John, help me.’ And they each took one of Scott’s arms and aided him to his feet. ‘If we can get back to the front unseen, we can get out of here.’

  ‘I called him Ryan?’ Scott asked, and he could feel hot tears stinging his eyes.

  Clark heard the gunshot and Katherine’s scream. She hoped to God that she hadn’t been hit.

  She was nearing the end of the warehouse, conscious of leading the woman too close to the others, but they could go around in circles all day if she didn’t try something.

  She wasn’t running any more. Now she was stalking forward rather than backing away. Her movements were careful and precise. She was thinking like a killer, something she’d often struggled to do in the course of her job. There were many sieges or stakeouts where she and her colleagues had to get inside the head of the criminal and the variables were plenty. Was he drugged and, if so, what drug had he taken? Was he fighting to protect himself or some possession? Was he acting vengeful or frightened? Each variable made a target do different things. If he was frightened, for example, he could lash out and leave himself exposed. On the other hand, if he was vengeful, he would be more calculated.

  Dealing with any of Ramirez’s hired hands was different—these weren’t opportunistic thieves caught in a kidnapping case, they weren’t drug runners desperate to get away with their crimes. They were trained killers, professionals. These were people who didn’t care and who rarely made mistakes. If she could get inside their heads, she’d be able to predict with some accuracy what they would do, given the situation.

  By now, because she’d stood boldly and fired at the woman, Clark figured that they knew she had been separated from the others. It was evident that they’d split up, one going after her and one after the rest of them.

  She moved from one row to the next and kept her breathing deep and regular. The Spanish woman’s next move would be to get as close to her as possible without blowing her own cover. Clark could imagine they were standing on opposite sides of a pallet, moving almost in time. But every time she peered around a corner and pointed her gun, there was no one there.

  María moved between two aisles and saw Fernandez’s body pinned to a pallet with a forklift prong in his chest. She closed her eyes and shook her head, not at the loss of a good friend, but at the loss of a good shooter. She’d have to get him replaced as soon as she got out of here. Men like Fernandez, with his almost erotic desire for blood, didn’t come along often.

  She noticed his weapon was missing and wasn’t in sight on the ground. So now they had two guns. But who were they? A single cop with her own handgun and a bunch of country-dwellers who probably didn’t know one end of the gun from the other; she wasn’t concerned.

  The sound of the alarm had been annoying and disorienting at first, but now it had become a dissonant music accompanying the kill. She forced herself to make a rhythm out of it, the rise and fall of the main tone, the constant bells behind it. For every two falls of the siren sound, she took one breath. Unless she was clumsy, the sound should mask her movements.

  To her disadvantage, it was also masking everyone else’s movements, but she reasoned she had a far superior mind than they had, even collectively.

  She made a Cross sign on her breast, as was customary by European Catholics when they required intervention, but María did it more through habit than from any real belief.

  She leaned forward to glance around another row of pallets and she noticed a shadow moving by her feet. The bitch was behind her.

  As she turned, the cop woman swung the butt of her gun and knocked her to the floor.

  María slid backwards, tried to raise her M16 rifle, but the blonde kicked it from her hand.

  ‘It’s over,’ she said, but María rocked back, pushed her feet forward, and kicked the cop into a pallet.

  Clark hit the pallet with some force and almost lost her balance, but she jumped forward and threw herself on the Spaniard.

  She punched her in the face, hard and fast, and the Spaniard reached up to try to choke her. Clark gripped both her arms, saw the tattoo on her wrist, a girl’s name in cursive swirls: Lucia. It took only a second to understand it wasn’t the woman’s own name but maybe a child, a mother, or a lover. And in that instant, she remembered a conversation with Pat Wilson and Ryan Cassidy when Ryan had given them a list of names he’d overheard while spying on his stepfather for NCIS.

  Further research highlighted María Herrera as a close associate of Alberto Ramirez. They learned some of her movements, some of her involvement in the case, and Interpol’s Spanish counterparts had tailed her briefly. It seemed she had a daughter with cerebral palsy named Lucia.

  María twisted and one arm broke free from her grip and she punched Clark in the stomach. In retaliation, Clark punched down with her knee and hit her between the legs.

  María reached up again and took hold of Clark’s hair and they rolled together on the ground. She twisted and reached for her fallen weapon and Clark tried to slap it away but couldn’t quite reach.

  María gripped the gun and they rolled again. She fired and Clark felt an explosion of heat and pain in her side.

  With her back to the floor and María above her, Clark twisted her legs and caught one foot in front of María’s face. She pulled down and heard the crack of María’s head against the concrete floor, just enough to stun her.

  She pushed herself out from under her and reached for the gun María had dropped.

  María pulled herself up against a pallet and stared at Clark as Clark also got to her feet, blood seeping from her side. Breathing hard, María touched the back of her head, checked her fingers. ‘I’m bleeding,’ she said. She grinned.

  ‘You and me both,’ Clark said. ‘María Herrera, I’m arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder. You do not have to say—’

  ‘Fuck you,’ María said.

  ‘You do not have to say anything,’ Clark continued, ‘but it may harm your d
efence if you do not mention, when questioned—’

  Scott stopped them from walking any further and he looked back at Jesse. ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ he asked.

  Katherine nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Margaret, I—’

  ‘I know,’ Katherine said. ‘We have to keep moving. That woman’s around here somewhere and we can’t get caught. We need to find Ann and get out of here.’

  Scott took a deep breath. He knew the name he’d used as Jesse lay dying. He had used it by accident, a slip of the tongue, but it rocked him enough not to want to believe it.

  Ryan.

  Will it always come back to this? Scott thought. Will I always come back to Ryan?

  He had been truthful to Jesse when asked if he still loved Ryan. Of course he did; he always would. But he had suppressed those feelings enough to be able to get on with his life, enough to try again. You can love more than once, he thought, but first love is special. First love only happens once.

  It didn’t matter how many people told him to move on, he never truly would. He knew that now. He did love Jesse—he knew that also. And he would mourn his passing as any lover would.

  But Ryan. Ryan was his first. He would always hold that place in his heart and he would always carry him around with him in his head. He realised, for the first time in months, just how much he still missed him. How much he always would.

  And now Jesse, too, killed by the same group of people. Killed by the same sadistic minds. He would get out of this. And he would hunt them down. They would pay.

  ‘Let’s go,’ John said.

  Scott nodded, said he could walk on his own, and John and Katherine released him.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Katherine asked.

  Scott looked back at Jesse one last time. ‘No,’ he said.

  Just then, the alarm was cut off and they looked around.

  ‘Is it over?’ Katherine asked.

  Scott stood tall. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said, and they moved down the aisle together.

  When the alarm went silent, Clark’s ears rushed with the sound of her own blood pumping from her body. She pushed a feeling of queasiness away as best she could.

  In front of her, under her gun aim, María took this advantage to kick out and turn. Clark’s gun arm twisted to the right and a round was fired, hitting the nearby pallet.

  As María turned to run, Clark dropped the gun, let go of her bleeding side, and gripped the back of María’s hair with one hand and a shoulder with her other, and she swiped a foot out to trip her.

  They went down together and Clark pounded María’s face into the cold concrete.

  ‘You should just kill me,’ María said, the blood from her broken nose making it difficult to breathe. ‘You’ll get nothing from me.’

  ‘I’ll get plenty from you,’ Clark said. ‘A few years at least.’

  ‘This is the police!’ a call echoed through the ensuing silence. ‘Put down your weapons and surrender.’

  ‘Over here,’ Clark heard John’s voice. Absently, she wondered how many of the others were also alive. She saw Fernandez’s body at the far side of the pallet and knew it was over.

  She got back to her feet, slowly, picking up her gun, and kicked María in the hip.

  ‘Drop the gun!’ a voice said.

  She turned, raised her arms in the air and nodded to the police officer. ‘Detective Ann Clark,’ she said.

  ‘Drop your weapon!’ the officer reiterated.

  ‘NCIS,’ Clark explained. She threw the gun away. ‘I’m from Interpol.’ She felt faint, looked down at the wound in her side that was about two inches below her left breast, and she fell to her knees.

  Before she blacked out, she could hear María laughing.

  Chapter 25

  Thomas Walter sat on the chair in his home office but he didn’t swivel in it. Beside his desk, little Lucia knocked her fists against her temples and, on the floor around her, almost half a box of soggy and discarded tissues made flower petals at her wheels.

  When María Herrera had run off after Kane Rider and the others two days ago and left Lucia in his charge, he had wheeled her in the opposite direction, away from the consequent carnage that he knew would follow. He had wandered into a small village of sorts and entered a café, struggling with the wheelchair in the doorway until a fellow patron had offered to help.

  ‘You have to take her in backwards,’ the man had said.

  And in a moment of singular honesty, Walter had replied, ‘She’s not mine. I don’t normally do this kind of thing.’ It made him laugh, somewhat nervously; he wasn’t sure which ‘kind of thing’ he was referring to—caring for disabled children or running from gun fights.

  He had sat at a small round table in the café and ordered a double-shot latte, his phone on the tabletop in front of him, and waited. Half an hour later, his tall latte glass empty, pushing Lucia’s wheelchair back and forth in a bid to entertain her, María hadn’t called him.

  He ordered another coffee.

  And then later, for a change, he asked for a pot of tea. He was beginning to feel the pangs of hunger, but after the events of the last couple of hours, he wasn’t convinced he’d be able to keep a scone down.

  An hour later, his stomach fighting coffee against tea, he stood, hand covering his mouth, and made a run for the toilet. Bile already rising, he raised the toilet lid with the toe of his shoe, knowing he would never wear them again, and he emptied the contents of his stomach into the bowl.

  He turned the tap on with the back of his hand and washed his face and gargled cold, limy water. When he returned to his table, he had almost wished that Lucia would not be there.

  Eventually, with the distinct impression that María was not returning today, he placed a call and waited for a car to pick him up. On the drive back to London, he loosened his tie, his shirt collar slick with sweat, and undid his shoe laces to allow his swollen feet some air. Lucia’s wheelchair had been folded into the boot and she slumped in the back seat, her cheek against the window, her fingers waving in front of her face.

  Now, in his home office, two days later and with the news of María’s incarceration breaking over the Internet and in the national papers, he turned an unopened yoghurt carton over in his hands and stared at Lucia.

  ‘I’ve never had a child before,’ he said. ‘But until your Mummy is released, it looks as though I’ll have to provide her role.’ He peeled the foil lid from the carton and picked up a spoon, stirring the contents as he’d seen María do before. ‘But I’m not cooking,’ he added. ‘I refuse to cook.’

  He was putting off the inevitable call to Ramirez. He knew the Spaniard wouldn’t take news of María’s internment in good spirits and Walter was desperate to put his thoughts in order before taking an ear-bashing from Ramirez.

  He spooned some cherry yoghurt against her lips, but Lucia refused to dine. ‘Mama,’ she said.

  ‘Mama’s not here,’ Walter told her, as kindly as he could.

  He wasn’t sure of his next move. Calling Ramirez would put a whole world of things in motion. Walter set his mouth in grim determination and vowed revenge for María’s arrest. The photographs of Kane Rider and Margaret Bernhard were burned in his memory.

  If only he’d gotten his hands on that Merkava.

  ‘Mama,’ Lucia said.

  Thomas Walter sighed. ‘I’m your Mama now,’ he said, and he pushed the spoon into her expectant mouth.

  The photograph that was on display on top of Jesse Whitaker’s coffin must have been taken about three or four years ago, Kane thought. He hadn’t changed too much.

  The small church in York contained no more than thirty people, including the vicar, and Kane thought back to Ryan’s funeral—how many people had been present then? But he could not compare the two and he berated himself for doing so.

  On his left, Margaret was stoic of demeanour. Dressed in a black trouser suit, her hands were clasped in front of her in silent prayer. Recent days had taken t
heir toll on her, but she was bearing up remarkably well.

  On his other side, John wore a suit for only the second time that Kane had ever seen. Funerals do funny things to people.

  In the front row, Jesse’s mother was being comforted by her friends and family as the eulogy was read. Kane had met with her briefly before the service and he had expected a barrage of hatred from her. It was his fault, after all, that her son was dead. Instead, he was met with cold indifference.

  ‘He loved you,’ she had told him. ‘He talked about you all the time. And for that, I am grateful. I don’t know how much you loved him, but he felt that you did and that was enough. I would appreciate it,’ she added, ‘if after the funeral you would kindly leave.’ She turned and walked away from him.

  He could not blame her for her feelings towards him. He felt the same. Margaret had already admonished him for being so hard on himself. For going on that initial date with Jesse before he felt ready to do so, for forgetting about Ryan, for falling in love again, for being the reason behind Jesse’s premature death. It was all his fault, he knew, regardless of Margaret’s comforting words.

  And he would have to live with that.

  As the vicar spoke about redemption, about God’s love and forgiveness and the welcoming Kingdom of Heaven, Kane Rider thought about mortality. So many people believe that they will live forever, that through either deed or progeny they will survive. But the mark that is left behind will be no more than a stain in someone’s distant memory. And eventually, nothing will remain.

  ‘How’re you holding up?’ John asked him as they stepped out of the church and into its cemetery, the small cluster of mourners making their way towards an as yet unmarked and empty grave.

  Kane shrugged, looked at the back of Mrs Whitaker’s head as they walked the steep hill. ‘Why do they always build graveyards on a hill?’ he asked.

  John took his hand, squeezed it, cleared his throat. ‘She’s not angry with you,’ he said, indicating Jesse’s mother. ‘She’s angry with life.’