Nailbiters

by Kane, Paul

  The man you’re going to kill today.

  Christ… Where the fuck has he—

  Then Lomax spots him, just a head bobbing down the corridor, but distinctive: that curly brown hair, greying just slightly. That bouncy stride of his, as if he’s walking on air. As if he doesn’t have a care in the world. He will soon, Lomax will see to that.

  I am the bringer of grief.

  He pushes past staff and visitors alike. Past the women that man had been flirting with, in their tight, blue and white uniforms. There will be no more of that after today, no more. Lomax will see to it.

  He races past nauseating turquoise walls, past wards filled with patients, and spots his prey pressing the button for the lift. Come on, come on…

  No: Lomax is too late. The metal doors are closing again before he can reach them. But he knows where the man is heading, same place he always does after work. It’s just a question of how many stops that lift will make on its way down, how fast Lomax is taking the stairs. Very fast, he has to. He’s decided that he’s not going to wait any longer, that the deed must be done today.

  Flinging open the set of double doors, he hurls himself down those steps, two, three at a time. The rational part of his mind is yelling: slow down, you could fall and injure yourself (he’s in the right place to get fixed up though, isn’t he; problem is, he’s also in the right place to get flagged, to get noticed by the authorities, and that’s the last thing he needs, not when he is so close).

  The irrational part is saying: fuck it.

  Should have lain in wait down there, but he’d had to be sure. Needed to know for certain his prey was in the hospital itself. Just because his car is…

  Down, down and down. Below the hospital itself, underneath. The staff car park, so dark and full of shadows, no matter how many panels of strip lighting they scatter about the place. Lomax feels at home here – he knows the layout, after scoping it out on several occasions. Knows where the CCTV cameras are. Knows also that if he pulls up the hood on his sweatshirt and angles his head just right, he can avoid detection, avoid identification.

  He fights to control his breathing as he hits the basement level. He’s going to need it to be even anyway, for what comes next. There’s no room for excitement, for adrenalin. Lomax has to be cool and calm now and—

  The blood again, the slices: peeling back skin, sinking the knife further inside. The scars that will be left behind afterward, ugly and ragged. The tears stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. The work of uncaring, unfeeling hands.

  No, concentrate. You’re in the moment.

  First things first, he needs to work out how far ahead his quarry is. The lift’s bought the guy some time, but Lomax was quick descending those stairs. He keeps himself fit, you see. Has to, it’s the only way to do what needs to be done, fuelled by…

  Over there, on his way across the car park. There’s no mistaking that confident swagger, coat over one arm. That fucking grin. Lomax moves silently across the concrete, flitting between the vehicles – passing 4x4s and people carriers and sports cars – using them for cover, without ever looking like he is. It’s a skill: partly practised, partly organic. And soon he isn’t very far away from the man at all, which is good, because already the target has his keys out, is depressing the button on them with a bee-beep. The orange sidelights of the sleek, silver Jaguar XF flash on and off momentarily. If Lomax is to make his move, it has to be soon.

  Has to be now.

  He darts between bays, rising and gliding forward at the same time. One hand reaching under his coat.

  ‘Hey… Hey you!’ As before, the voice breaks his concentration, and he turns to see a figure heading his way. ‘What are you up to there, eh?’ Once again, he has failed to spot this person creeping up on him – that’s supposed to be Lomax’s job, the creeping – because he was so intent on what he was going to do. So blinkered that…

  His prey is turning as well, closer than the interloper to Lomax. Close enough to see what Lomax’s hand is resting on at his belt, and panic. The other man, the figure running over towards him, is closing the gap. Lomax sees that he is also wearing a uniform. Not hospital staff: security. And his baton is pretty much drawn. This really isn’t good.

  His prey is backing up towards the Jaguar, turning and fumbling with the door handle. He’ll escape if Lomax isn’t careful. If you’d been more careful in the first place… he says to himself, but doesn’t finish the sentence.

  Lomax sighs, and rushes towards the security guard.

  He avoids the baton swing, ducking and coming up again in a single, smooth movement, arm out straight, catching the man – solidly built, but terrible reactions – across the bridge of the nose. It explodes in a fountain of blood. The security man scrunches up his eyes. Lomax knees him in the stomach, crumpling him over; the baton falls from his grasp, clattering on the concrete. They’re attracting too much attention, Lomax knows that. This needs to be finished, and quickly. One more blow to the back of the head ensures that the guard isn’t getting up again any time soon.

  Then it’s back to the original focus of his attentions. Covering the distance in a couple of strides, reaching inside his coat, drawing the gun and aiming. The driver’s door is now shut, though – the engine of the Jaguar being gunned. Lomax skirts the vehicle, trying the door and hoping against hope the bastard hasn’t had time to lock them after him yet.

  Click! He hasn’t.

  Lomax yanks open the door, but the man’s ready, fear driving him. He lashes out, knocking the pistol from Lomax’s grasp. Then he pushes Lomax back and into the neighbouring car. The glass of the passenger window cracks as Lomax connects with it. He lets out a grunt – not of disgust now, but because of the pain in his back.

  His quarry has barged past him, just as Lomax did with the people in the corridor. But Lomax is quick to recover, always has been. He’s on the guy in seconds, leaping and toppling him, bringing him to the ground with a rugby tackle. But the man still isn’t going down without a fight; not that Lomax would have expected anything less. The guy kicks out a foot, ramming it into Lomax’s shoulder. It’s enough to set him free again, and he’s crawling away.

  Enough of this shit! Lomax gets to his feet, walks calmly back to the Jaguar and picks up his pistol. The quarry has also regained his footing and is stumbling, attempting to run. It doesn’t matter. Lomax aims and fires, hitting the man squarely in the centre of the back. He goes down, hard.

  It’s over.

  No, not yet. Now they have to get out of there before anyone else shows up. Before more people arrive than Lomax can handle. He is only one man after all, even if he is a predator. Lomax holsters his weapon, goes over to his target and plucks out the dart. How’s it feel to be on the receiving end of a needle, fucker? he thinks to himself. There’s no point saying it out loud, the man is unconscious.

  Lomax picks him up, carries him to the Jaguar like a best man getting the groom back to his hotel after a stag do. He glances round quickly, then opens the door and deposits his prize on the back seat. He swings into the driver’s seat and closes the door.

  With the precision of a professional, Lomax reverses the Jag out of the tight spot, manoeuvres it around, and drives up and out of this section. He looks into the rear view only once as he makes his way out of the car park, up and into the world above.

  But he fails to see the vehicle pull out of its own space just moments after him.

  Fails to see the dark green Ford that follows.

  * * *

  As Lomax finishes strapping down the naked man to the cold, metallic surface, he allows himself a half-smile, though it is tinged with pain. Finally, he says to himself. Finally.

  Then he thinks about all the things he has planned, what he’s going to do. Start with an incision down the middle, probably. He sees the flesh parting again, the blood. There will be so much blood. So much…grief.

  The man’s eyelids are flickering. He’ll be waking up from the drug soon enoug
h. Lomax has gagged him, not because he doesn’t want to hear his pleas for mercy or his screams – those would be so sweet. But because he doesn’t want to hear his excuses. He’s heard far too many of those.

  Lomax taps his knife against his lips. With the man laid out in front of him here, he can’t help musing about the events that set him down this path.

  Did they turn him into what he is? Perhaps. But don’t they also say that the capacity to kill is either in you or it isn’t? That no matter what the trigger is, some people act, while others don’t. How can anyone say how they’ll react to a certain set of circumstances unless they are in them? It’s impossible. It’s like…

  Like being in love.

  You know how you think you’ll act, but nothing prepares you for that bolt out of the blue. Or how it will change your life forever. The loss of it changes you too, Lomax knows that. It’s as much of an adjustment, though infinitely less pleasant it has to be said.

  Once upon a time, another life ago, Lomax had been in love.

  It is better to have loved and lost…

  Lost, so lost. So long ago.

  He’d been married, in fact, his wedding anniversary the 24th March. His wife, Tracey, knew what he did – and though she didn’t like it, she tolerated it. She knew this was what he was good at. Being a hunter.

  John Lomax. Detective John Lomax.

  Deep down, he knew she also respected him for bringing people to justice. Catching murderers and rapists. Lomax never thought he’d be tracking down his wife’s killer. Never thought he’d be doing it alone, either, without the support of his former colleagues. But then, if Tracey hadn’t gone in for that surgery…

  Minor, they’d said; a routine operation. His smile turns into a grimace as he looks down on the man below him: the curly-haired doctor with the laugh, with the grin. ‘It’s just routine, she’ll be up and on her feet again in no time,’ he had chirped back then, shaking their hands.

  Doctor Brendan Carter, he called himself. In a different hospital, a different city. A different world. A happier place until—

  Lomax remembers the time he spent with Tracey before the operation. How scared she’d been then, suddenly – and how right she’d been to be so. ‘John,’ she’d said, laying in the bed, chewing her bottom lip, ‘I have a terrible feeling about this.’

  Lomax had patted her hand, told her everything was going to be fine. ‘Trust me,’ he’d even said. Jesus, how many times did they say that in soaps: everything was going to be all right? It was always the kiss of death. Like saying ‘I’ll be right back’ in some cheesy horror movie, before getting your head lopped off.

  But the trust she’d placed in him, the trust Lomax had placed in the doctors – in Carter especially – had been very misplaced indeed.

  Lomax fights back the tears, as he recalls waiting in that corridor; thinking that this was taking a long time, longer than they’d said it would. Remembers seeing staff rushing to and fro, as if to answer some emergency but assuming they’re for someone else, it’s a big place, there are more patients than Tracey having ops. But he’d known, even as they emerged through those double doors, even before Carter could say a word, that she was gone.

  ‘We did everything we could,’ intoned the curly-haired man, though was there just a slight trace of a smile playing on those lips? And was he – yes, checking out those nurses in the corridor, in their tight blue and white uniforms. For fuck’s sake! ‘There were…certain complications.’

  ‘What kind of complications?’ Lomax had demanded, feeling oddly detached, as if he were having an out of body experience (weren’t they supposed to be reserved for people actually under the knife?). It was as if he wasn’t even there, like he was watching this on some stupid soap.

  Carter spouted a load of medical jargon about internal bleeding and trying to locate the problem, though in the end it amounted to one thing and one thing only: they’d screwed up and now he was a widower. Tracey had been his everything, and now he had nothing.

  Nothing except trying to get to the truth, trying to get her justice.

  Lomax had insisted on an investigation, which the hospital said they’d conduct internally. Lawyers were brought in, but they were useless. In the end Lomax went down to the morgue and broke in, examined the body himself, which was still on ice because of all the fuss he’d kicked up. He’d wept over her cold form as he saw all the cuts, the rough patchwork of stitches that made up her body (they later tried to tell him it was because of the ‘further work’ they’d done to fully determine cause of death – work that had been conducted because of Lomax’s questions). But that had just earned him a reprimand, and meant the ongoing investigation would now be shut down. His Super had even suggested taking some time off, that he was too close to all this.

  ‘You’ve got to believe me,’ he said to his partner Temple, a strapping ex-Marine who’d joined the force after injuring his leg on some foreign battlefield. ‘There’s something more going on here. A cover up… I don’t know.’

  Temple trusted him, the kind of trust Carter couldn’t begin to understand. They’d worked together for a long, long time and on a number of cases – some of them quite high profile, such as catching the train track killer – always had each other’s backs. In fact, Lomax had even taken a bullet for Temple on one occasion, something he reminded him of then. So Temple agreed to help him look into all this, on their own time. ‘You have a sense about these things,’ Temple had said. ‘I’ve always envied that.’

  And he had – Lomax had always possessed a flair for thinking outside the box when it came to criminal behaviour. (Takes a killer to track a killer…isn’t that so?) Something about this whole thing, about Carter in particular, didn’t sit right. He and Temple had conducted their own private investigation, fitted in around the cases they had on their desks. And guess what? More suspicious deaths had cropped up, linked to Carter, who had used a variety of different names in the past. ‘This is it,’ Lomax had said to his friend. ‘This is all the evidence we need.’ He would finally get justice for Tracey. But they’d been dismissed again, told to drop it – Lomax ordered to take some personal time.

  Then, lo and behold, Lomax discovered that Carter had done a runner. Nobody had seen him for a fortnight. So he’d taken that holiday. Taken that and more besides, and gone after his wife’s killer. The man had obviously been doing this a long time, courtesy of the perfect cover – everyone trusts a doctor, they do all that they can (well, what if they did a few things they shouldn’t? Played God with death as well as life?). And he would continue doing this unless Lomax found him and put a stop to things.

  It had taken a while. Taken all of Lomax’s detective skills, his tracking abilities, to find the man – posing as one Doctor Gerry Young – and now he would make him pay. Lomax would cause him so much grief, transfer it onto him and maybe then he’d finally be able to find peace. For himself and for Tracey.

  Lomax hears the man on the table stirring, his muffled groans through the gag. ‘Ah, you’re awake,’ he says, leaning over him. ‘Hello again, Doctor “Carter”. Remember me?’

  The man thrashes about, but he’s held tight by his bonds. He’s going nowhere.

  Lomax sweeps a hand behind him, drawing attention to their surroundings: an abandoned warehouse he found down by the docks. The perfect place for a little privacy. ‘What do you think?’

  The man mumbles something and Lomax laughs softly, holds up the knife, which glints in the light from a portable lamp. ‘This is my operating theatre, doctor. My theatre of pain.’ Then he goes on to relate all the things he’s intending to do, getting justice for poor Tracey. No – getting revenge! Even as he’s saying them, Lomax realises how sick it all sounds, but he doesn’t care. This is the only way: the one, sure-fire way he’s going to assuage these feelings.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Johnny,’ comes a voice, echoing through the warehouse. Lomax stands stock-still. For the third time today, he’s let someone get the d
rop on him. Getting old. Old and tired.

  Third time’s the charm, though, right? And he recognises that voice.

  ‘Temple,’ he says, under his breath.

  ‘Long time no see, Johnny. You didn’t write, you didn’t call…’

  Lomax turns, faces the large man striding across the warehouse floor, half in shadow. He cuts an imposing figure, Temple. Shoulders like breezeblocks, arms like iron girders.

  ‘Walk away, Lewis, this doesn’t concern you.’

  Temple sighs. ‘I’m afraid it does. I can’t let you kill an innocent man, Johnny.’

  ‘Innocent?’ Lomax spits out the word like snake venom he’s sucked from a wound. ‘How can you say that? This fucker killed my Tracey.’ He nods at his captive.

  ‘No… No, he didn’t.’

  Lomax looks from the strapped down man to Temple. ‘What are you talking about? You saw the evidence, same as I did.’

  ‘There was no evidence, John. Deaths, yes – but not down to Carter. Different doctors in different hospitals. All accidents, all due to negligence or human error, but not done on purpose. Just part and parcel of the risks you take when you have surgery, that’s all. Just stupid, bad luck. Like what happened to Tracey.’

  ‘No!’ he screams. ‘You’re lying. Why are you lying? Did they get to you?’

  ‘Who, John?’

  ‘The people who covered it all up?’

  Another sigh. ‘There are no people, John. There’s no Carter anymore, either.’

  ‘No, I know. He’s calling himself Young, now. He’s there Lewis, right there. He ran away, but I found him.’

  Temple continues walking towards Lomax. ‘Carter’s dead. You killed him, remember?’

  No, not yet. But I’m going to, Lomax says to himself.

  ‘It’s the grief, John. That’s what did this to you. Can’t you see that? You have to trust me.’