Deadly Pretty Strangers: US Edition

by Max Thorn

  Christmas moved objects around in a cupboard saying, “I’m out of coffee.”

  “I don’t need coffee.”

  “I want one. Let’s go to the coffee shop.”

  FOURTEEN

  The café at the corner of the road was half-full. Plenty of spare tables at ten o’clock.

  “Welcome to my external office,” she said, pushing me ahead of her. Some of the café staff nodded to Christmas and smiled recognition. We stood in the pungent atmosphere of coffee and steam, behind an orderly line of people waiting patiently beside glass-fronted food cabinets. The customers gazed at their smartphones or chatted to their companions.

  Behind the cabinets, red-aproned staff took orders and flapped octopus-like around the bright coffee-making machinery, thumping used coffee grounds into a bin, pulling steaming levers, and pouring black coffee and white frothed milk.

  A tall, broad-shouldered man from the second row of tables got up and approached me. He wore a black baseball cap over a thick mop of curly black hair, a black hooded sweatshirt and navy-blue cargo pants. There was something odd about his face. Under a broom-bristle mustache he was wearing lipstick like a clown, spread far beyond the corners of his mouth on his stubbled jaw.

  I’d sensed trouble when he’d made straight toward me, rather than the end of the line which now included people behind Christmas.

  Looking quickly left and right, he pulled a black hunting knife from his pants. He clasped the weapon in his left fist, close to his leg, the long blade turned upward, unnoticed by almost everyone except Christmas. She squeezed my arm.

  He swore loudly and shouted, “Where’s the money you owe me!” pointing at me with his free hand.

  The café fell silent. A dark-haired woman hid behind me, pushing me away from the cabinets, closer to the knifeman. Eyeing the blade, I started to say, “I think you’ve mistaken me for—”

  He raised the knife above his head.

  I tried to move but was blocked by the counter and the woman behind me who had an arm at my waist.

  He brought the knife down in an arc toward my chest.

  I tried to grab his hand.

  He was too quick. He pushed my arm aside. The blade passed in front of my face.

  Christmas’s fist streaked toward his head a moment before the knife touched. She hit him under the chin with a loud crack of bone on bone.

  His skull snapped back. The cap flew from his head and his hair fell over his eyes. Her blow was so powerful his feet left the floor for a moment. He collapsed backward into the first row of tables. Furniture and customers scattered as he fell. China smashed and cutlery rang on the floor, shattering the silence.

  Christmas sprang forward while everyone stood paralyzed with shock and fear. Standing on his wrist, she took the knife from his limp grasp. He was out cold. In three strides she was back at my side.

  I looked at her open-mouthed.

  “I know Jiu-jitsu,” she said proudly.

  “That wasn’t Jiu-jitsu,” I murmured. “That was an upper cut.”

  “Yes, but I also know Jiu-jitsu,” she beamed back.

  Four men got up from the second row of tables and surrounded the knifeman.

  Christmas’s hand went to her pistol, ready to draw it.

  Wordlessly, one man picked up the baseball cap. Then they each took a limb, turned away from us and carried the unconscious figure to the door and out to the street. They seemed to be part of the same costume club, all with thick hair, heavy mustaches, painted mouths, caps and dark clothes. They crossed the sidewalk briskly to a mini-van with darkened windows.

  A smaller figure bobbed behind the van, opening the driver’s door on the other side. The nearside rear door also slid open. Like a single multi-legged animal, the group squeezed inside. The door shut smoothly as the last leg left the paving and the van pulled out swiftly into the traffic and was gone.

  They’d risen, collected their unconscious colleague and left the scene in ten seconds.

  People were leaving through every exit.

  The café manager was on the phone in a little closet of an office. I guessed she was calling the police.

  Christmas looked puzzled. “Strange that they left the fighting to just one man.” Her gaze moved to my chest and her eyes widened a little. “Let me look.” She pulled my jacket open.

  I looked down to see a crimson stain spreading across my shirt on my upper chest.

  “Oh!” she yelped. “Sit down.” She pulled a chair behind me. “Can you breathe?”

  “Yes, I think I’m ok.”

  She looked quickly at the blade, turning it against the light. “I think it went in less than an inch.” Christmas undid my shirt and looked at the cut, staunching it with paper napkins from the café counter. “Hold these tight here.” She guided my hand to hold the napkins against the wound. Pressing her ear to my chest lower down, she said, “I don’t hear any gurgling. Take a deep breath.” She listened some more. “I think you’re alright. But I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “No, to yours first. Then the hospital. I’m fine really.”

  We hurried back to Christmas’s apartment. Inside she said, “Let’s get your shirt off so I can put a dressing on.”

  As I tried to pull my shirt free I could feel something holding it to my side.

  Christmas looked down at the steel glint of a thin wire, pinning my shirt to the money belt. “Wait!” She put a hand on my arm to stop me reaching for it. “There’s something here. It looks like a snapped-off syringe needle. Stop moving.”

  I reached down again to pull the needle free.

  “Don’t touch it with your bare hands,” she said urgently, holding my arm away. “Just stay right there until I deal with it.”

  She stepped into her kitchen and rushed back, pulling on yellow rubber gloves. Carefully she pulled the needle out and laid it on the glass dining table. After helping me with the shirt, and holding my arms away from the place where the needle had been, she gingerly unfastened the money belt, laying it on the table beside the needle.

  Rushing over to the window, she opened it wide and slid the table closer to the draught of fresh air. “Someone tried to inject you with something. A poison I’m guessing. Let’s deal with the wound first. Do you feel ok? Breathing ok?”

  “I think so.”

  She stood in front of me and looked anxiously at my face, felt my forehead, looked closely at my eyes. Then she kissed my mouth, holding my head in both hands. “Just in case you drop dead.”

  She looked again at my side where the needle had been, crouching down to look closely. She ran her hand slowly over my side, feeling the skin carefully. “I think you’re ok. The money belt stopped it. Don’t touch any of that stuff until we know what they tried to inject you with. One touch could be lethal if it’s anything like the poisons my dad used to make antidotes for.”

  She went to the bathroom and returned with a first aid kit. Taking the napkins from my chest, she looked carefully at the wound. “The bleeding’s slowed. But I think it needs stitches.” While she taped a square dressing tightly to my chest she said, “I don’t want to worry you, but if you’re going to have two assassination attempts a day, we might have to take our relationship to the next level a bit sharpish. We might not have long to enjoy each other’s company.”

  “I won’t object to sex before I die,” I looked up, momentarily embarrassed because I’d tactlessly voiced an inner thought.

  She laughed. “One track mind—I’ve got some shelves that need putting up. That’s the next level.” She looked at my puzzled expression. “It’s just a joke. I can put my own shelves up thank you.” She kissed me again, breathing hard into my mouth.

  Rushing to the kitchen again, she came back with painkilling tablets and a glass of water.

  I gulped them down.

  She turned her attention to the money belt. “Please remember what I said. Don’t touch ok?”

  “I’ll sit on my hands. Be careful yourself.”


  She held the gloves up at me. We sat at the dining table. Using tweezers from the first aid kit, Christmas slowly removed the wads of money from each of the unaffected pockets and laid them in front of me. “How much cash have you got here?” she asked, a little surprised at the growing pile.

  “About ten thousand.”

  “I’ve got thirty-five pounds in my wallet. Are you some kind of drug dealer?”

  “I thought I might have to live away from home for a while, after the shooting on the moor.”

  When she’d emptied all the pockets and only the pierced one remained, she cut the last pocket free from the rest of the belt and held it up to the light. “There’s a little patch of the fluid at the bottom here. If this is what I think it is, this little patch could have made contact with your shirt and then your skin, and even that would have been enough to kill you.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “It looks a bit like VX nerve agent.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “It’s a lethal neuro-toxin, accidentally invented by a British industrial chemicals company back in the sixties. They were trying to kill insects. Instead they made something that kills virtually everything on contact.” Back in the kitchen, she threw open drawers, grabbing a wad of clear plastic bags and a poster-sized piece of plastic sheeting. “There are international treaties banning it as a weapon because it’s so inhumanly dangerous.”

  “So who uses it?”

  From a cupboard under the sink she brought a hard plastic box the size of a large shoe box, with a sealable lid. “It’s the kind of thing despotic dictators use for assassinations. Usually it’s transported as two separate chemicals, applied separately. When the chemicals combine, VX is formed and the target dies within minutes. It paralyses muscles. Stops the diaphragm from working—no breathing. But this was put into your money-belt as a prepared substance. Those people took an absurd risk. Just handling it could have killed them. No wonder they didn’t want to fight on. They must’ve thought the job was done, once the needle was in.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “My dad. Pioneer gene-splicer and world expert on battlefield drugs and muscle biology.” She put the broken needle into one of the bags and closed the rib seal. Spreading the plastic sheet on the table, she said, “Dinner table talk when I was a child involved pre-synaptic terminals for motor neurons and small molecule neurotransmitters.” She looked at me. “That was after we’d moved on from, the cow goes ‘moo’ and the horse goes ‘neigh’, obviously. They weren’t completely insane.”

  Christmas put everything on the sheet. She lifted the notes from the contaminated wad with the tweezers, a few at a time, inspecting them carefully. In the middle of the wad, oily fluid loosely held fewer than twenty notes together. Around another twenty notes had a crescent of dampness at their short edge. The rest were unmarked.

  “These notes shouldn’t be used. We should give these to the police. They might even pass them to MI5. Are you sure you’re not an international spy?”

  “I couldn’t even get a job as a mystery shopper for a restaurant chain.”

  She looked at my face and put an ungloved hand on my forehead. “No more strange utterances please.” She turned her attention back to the cash. Dividing the contaminated notes into two groups, she put the heavily stained money in one bag and the lightly stained notes in another. “You should wash the unmarked notes away from the public water supply, dry them out and exchange them with the Bank of England, just in case. There’s a special service for contaminated money. On second thoughts, I’ll do it with you, after we get you properly patched up. I’ll get the substance on these stained notes analyzed too. I know a lab that can handle this.”

  She put the unmarked notes from the pierced pocket into another bag. Laying all the bags in a row she said, “We have four categories of notes; completely soaked, for the lab analysis; partially stained, for the police; visibly unmarked, for you and me to wash and exchange with the bank; and the rest of your cash,” she pointed to the unspoilt pile, “for us to spend on a nice holiday somewhere far away from here. The needle goes to the police too.”

  “And if it turns out to be maple syrup, I get all the notes back?”

  “Maybe. But I doubt they’re trying to kill you with breakfast condiments.”

  Working quickly, Christmas put all the bags into the rigid plastic box, wrapped up the polythene sheet and threw it in the bin. She carefully cleaned the dining table glass with a wet sponge and dry paper towel, throwing them away too. After washing her gloves and glasses, she put everything else under the sink. “I’m going to burn that garbage bag,” she nodded to the bin. “Put the rest of your cash away. I’ll deal with the stuff to be analyzed soon but let’s get your wound properly stitched first.”

  I bundled up the unspoilt cash and put most of it in my rucksack and some in my pants pockets. “My local doctor’s clinic will be less busy than the hospital. Let’s try there. I’m not keen on crowds right now.” I took a new shirt from the rucksack.

  “Me neither.” She kissed me again. “Get the wound stitched and then we go to the police. If murderers are coming at you six at a time, I think we could do with a little help.”

  “There were five men.”

  “And a sneaky dark-haired girl who stuck the needle in you while we were tackling the man with the knife. I reckon she was the van driver too.”

  The phone rang. Christmas hesitated before answering. She looked at me. “You’re out of immediate danger. Let me see who this is. Maybe we can arrange some early help.”

  She picked up the phone and after recognizing the voice on the other end said, “Dad, someone tried to inject Zav with something. I think it might be VX…Yes, I know it’s extreme. I’m not completely sure. I’m getting it analyzed. Can you send antidote anyway? And can you send some anti-venom serum too?”

  She listened, thanked him, and looking at me, raised a finger to indicate that she needed a minute. She mouthed the words “I’m sorry,” as she took the phone to her bedroom out of earshot.

  I could hear her murmuring to her father but I wasn’t interested in their conversation. I moved quickly to the sink and brought the plastic box, gloves and tongs, back to the table. I found the unused sealable bags in the drawer and taking one, I quickly took ten of the most heavily soaked notes and put them in the empty bag, replacing them with some of the lightly stained notes from the other bag. Christmas would hand over the bags for analysis with only a few less in each. I hoped she wouldn’t notice.

  I squeezed all of the air from the new bag with the ten heavily soiled notes before closing the seal. Running the re-sealed ends under the tap in case I’d smeared any poison on the outside, I dried all the bags quickly on some absorbent kitchen paper. Carefully, I rolled the extra bag of notes as small as possibly before putting it into the coin pocket of my pants. If anyone came at me with a knife again, I intended paying them for their trouble with twenty-pound notes.

  I could hear Christmas’s voice in a rhythm which suggested she was nearing the end of her conversation. I just caught the words, “how many and what will they be?”

  I washed the gloves and tongs hurriedly, threw the kitchen paper away, put the other bags back in the box which I put under the sink, washed and dried my hands and was back at the table, buttoning the new shirt as she rushed back.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know it’s not the best timing but I had to speak to my dad urgently about something personal. You forgive me, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I’m fine. I’m not even bleeding now.” I looked down at the dressing under my shirt. “Well, only a little.”

  She kissed me again hard. “Come on, let’s go.”

  FIFTEEN

  Christmas drove me to the clinic. In the waiting room I saw three people; an old lady and a mother with a coughing child. None of them looked like assassins so I stood at the windows of the waiting room and waved Christmas away.

/>   The receptionist suggested I’d be better off at the local hospital’s accident and emergency department, but offered to check whether my usual doctor could see me.

  Five minutes later I was in front of Doctor Lopa.

  “Someone stabbed me today. Can you sew me up?”

  “Again! Did you see who did it this time?”

  “A man with clown lips and a wig.”

  “Nothing’s ever straightforward with you, is it? Was this a fight?”

  “More like an assassination attempt. I’m guessing the makeup was their attempt to beat facial recognition analysis. Here’s the knife.” I held up a sealed, clear plastic bag with the knife inside. “Can you check the blade for poison or radiation? You know, polonium or something like that.”

  “Polonium? That’s a bit exotic. Do you have a new career in espionage?”

  “No.”

  “Poison tipped knives are rare. I’ve never seen a case. I’ll take some swabs but,” she paused looking at the blade against the light from the window, “at a guess, this looks like it only has your blood on it. I hope you’re getting the police involved.”

  “I will. But can you deal with this first?” I pointed to the wound.

  “Let me check you’re ok.”

  Lopa listened to my breathing with a stethoscope, looked in my eyes and checked my pulse and blood pressure. “You seem fine, considering.”

  She picked up the phone on her desk and called a nurse who arrived within a minute. They directed me to the examination bed. I took off my shirt and together they peeled off the dressing, injected a local anesthetic, disinfected and cleaned the wound, embroidered me with three stitches and put a new dressing over the injury. Lopa thanked the nurse, who left in a rustle of polyester cotton.

  “Any other injuries, ailments or close encounters with kitchen appliances?”

  “No. My enemies are using more effective tools these days.”

  She wiped swabs over the knife and sealed them in a container. “I’m supposed to let the police know about stabbings. Do you give your consent for me to give them the non-personal details? As in, you were stabbed this morning and came to see me about it.”