by Lee Stevens
When one chunk of flesh slapped onto his right shoulder, he screamed and pulled harder until finally, mercifully, both hands slid free and he fell to the plastic sheeting with a noise reminiscent of a freshly caught fish being hauled onto a boat.
He fought down the bile in his throat and looked at the damage he’d done.
Both thumbs had dislocated and been pushed in toward his palms where they twitched like trodden worms. Skin had been pulled in chunks from the meatiest parts of his palms and the insides were a deep, glistening red. Tendons pulsated as though electricity were flowing through them. All of his fingers hand been skinned and several looked broken. Swollen veins were visible on the back of both hands and many were squirting blood. Lower down, he could see that he was missing six and a half toes and that his feet were blackened and swollen. There was no skin on his shins and his calf muscles had been cut in several places. There was a small drill-hole in each kneecap and his testicles and penis had been burnt so that the skin was puckered and black.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on his injuries.
With his hands no more than bloodied useless claws, he reached for the manacle key on the workbench, having to stretch until he thought his ribs would crack. Barely able to grip them (and needing both useless hands to do so) he inserted it into the hole in the manacle shackling his left leg.
After what seemed like hours he managed to unlock it and turn his attention to the other. His thumbs would barely move and refused to function. The blood that seeped from the myriad wounds made the key even harder to grip. His fingers barely worked. His hands were beyond repair. He was beyond repair.
Eventually, and with great difficulty, he managed to undo the second manacle. Once free he instinctively tried to stand but collapsed to the floor within seconds and so began to drag himself towards the loading doors by his elbows. Time was of the essence.
Sandra was awake by now. She was watching him with half-opened eyes but still didn’t seem to be fully aware of what was going on.
“It’s okay,” he said, finding the strength to speak. “We won.”
He dragged his ruined body off the plastic sheeting and across the floor to the loading doors, leaving a slick, red trail like a giant injured slug. He hit the ‘OPEN’ button and left a red claw-print behind that began to slop blood down the wall. The doors began to rise with a series of welcome clanks, revealing the very beautiful, very normal, very peaceful and mundane sight of the industrial estate cloaked in silent darkness.
There wasn’t a car or passerby in sight.
Riley lay on his side, his blood continuing to pool out underneath him, draining him of what little strength remained in his wrecked body.
“Come on, Purvis,” he said. “Where the fuck are you?”
60
McCabe switched the car headlights off as they hit the narrow road that led to the old Scout’s hall.
He held his breath as they approached the building and the niggling doubt in his mind about Purvis being here developed into panic. At the very least, he hoped there would be a light on inside. That would give them an excuse to at least leave the car and approach the building on foot to check the place out. Anything to get Nash out of the car and pop a bullet in him from behind.
McCabe relaxed a little when, through the branches of the trees that lined the road, he saw that there was indeed a light burning behind the closed curtains of one of the downstairs windows. The building itself had changed a lot since he’d last drove by here. Gone were the fallen down walls and caved in roof and the weeds and tall grass on the lands had been cut and tidied. The building had been extensively renovated and from the outside at least looked very habitable. All of which tied in with what Riley had told him; that Purvis had been doing the place up for the last year or so.
Then, there it was. Riley’s Mercedes parked around the side of the building. He’d said Purvis had dropped him off and come back here. Bingo!
“See, they’re here,” he told Nash, confidently as he pulled up by the side of the road.
Nash didn’t answer as he pulled a small medicine bottle from his pocket and tapped some coke onto the crook of his thumb and forefinger. After a good size measure up each nostril, he placed the bottle back in his pocket and raised his gun. His eyes were suddenly wider. His lips were pursed forward like he was sucking a boiled sweet. He sniffed several times and cleared his throat. Then he climbed from the car and quietly closed the door.
“What now?” McCabe asked Turner.
“Let’s carry on as planned.” Turner pulled out his own gun. Another Berretta. “Let’s take care of Purvis and the kid and then do Nash when it’s over. You do the kid, though. Okay?”
“Fine,” said McCabe, unbuckling his seatbelt.
They quickly joined Nash by the edge of the garden wall and looked at the house. It was maybe one fifty yards to the building, but that shouldn’t be a problem, McCabe guessed. They could hug the bushes on the right-hand side of the front garden and hide in the shadows as they made their way closer. That would take them to the left of the window with the light on. There was room underneath for them to sneak under and make it to the front door to try the lock or burst in. Whatever way they got inside, they were here now. The hard part was over. It was time to finish what had started as a little dream scheme between two men in prison and time to make things a reality.
“Come on,” Nash whispered and stumbled through the gates and into the garden. He looked unsteady on his feet and McCabe wondered if he’d make it to the house without falling. He was spurred on by anger and drugs - a deadly combination. They could make people erratic and spoil their judgement. Nash probably couldn’t shoot straight in that condition. Maybe Purvis might be armed and kill him for real and save them a job, McCabe thought as he followed him across the lawn.
They stopped by the side of the lighted window and all three readied their weapons.
“Listen,” Nash whispered.
Sure enough, when McCabe listened, he could here voices from inside. Purvis and Wendy. It sounded like he was reading her a bed time story.
Nash pointed towards the door and the three of them slid under the window towards it.
When he tried the handle and the door pushed inwards, he didn’t hesitate and walked quietly into the hall. He had no reason to suspect anything. The door was unlocked because Purvis was expecting Riley back at some point. And also, who knew that they were here? Purvis obviously thought that he and Wendy were safe.
Stupid fucker.
McCabe glanced at Turner. Turner nodded and they both followed Nash inside.
The hallway was dark and the only illumination was from a thin beam of light under a door to the left of them. As they walked closer, the voices grew louder and McCabe imagined Purvis and Wendy on the sofa, maybe under a thin blanket, him with his arm around her as he read from the book; Wendy lying with her head on his chest, maybe looking at the pictures as she sucked her thumb and hugged her teddy.
This was going to be so easy!
Nash stopped for a second at the door and looked back at McCabe and Turner. He didn’t say anything. Just raised his gun and nodded.
Then his hand was on the handle. A second later, his shoulder was shoving the door inwards. He followed the swing of the door and disappeared behind it just as McCabe and Turner stepped over the threshold.
Then the three of them froze.
61
Riley was sure he was about to pass out – maybe even die – until he saw the car pull up outside.
The sight of it suddenly gave him strength. It gave him the determination to sit up, despite his injuries. It gave him the energy to raise a hand at the man inside the newly-purchased-yet-very-second-hand Renault Clio (a snip at eight hundred quid from a local garage barely ten hours ago) and Riley suddenly found it very easy to smile and let out a laugh as Purvis left a sleeping Wendy safely in the back seat and hurried toward the lock-up. Purvis was laughing also.
Until he got a closer l
ook at Riley.
“Shit, what the hell did he do to you?” he asked, his eyes frozen on the severity of Riley’s injuries.
“Just the bottom half.” Riley raised his ravaged hands. “This is self-inflicted.”
“What... Riley, Christ, you need help!”
“Just see to Sandra.”
On hearing her name Purvis seemed to snap into action and ran to the wheelchair where Sandra had just about come to. She burst into tears when she saw him, and when he ripped her gag off he kissed her and told her everything was going to be okay and that Wendy was fine. She was out in the car, asleep and so they had to hurry. Then he went to untie her hands.
“Oh, Jesus...”
He looked back at Riley who was crawling over to them in a slick of blood.
“McCabe cut her finger off,” Riley said, calmly. “Let’s get out of here so she can get something for the pain.”
“Yeah, right,” Purvis said and began to undo the tape binding Sandra to the chair. “You need help too. Jesus, Riley, I’ve never seen someone so cut up.”
“The stump is on the floor,” Riley said.
“Stump?”
“Her finger.”
“I’ll get it, Riley,” Purvis said. “We’ll take it. Maybe it can be re-attached.”
“The last thing you want is to go to hospital and have a doctor ask questions,” Riley told him. “Besides, McCabe cauterised the wound. They won’t be able to stitch it back on.”
“Okay, we’ll leave it. Get dressed and we’ll go.”
“No,” Riley said. “Even the tip of a finger will have prints. The police will eventually find this place and run a scan on it. Sandra’s prints might be on record. They probably would’ve taken them when they dusted for prints at the mansion after the explosion. We don’t want anything tying her to this place. I’ll get rid of it.”
He scooped up the piece of flesh and bone and then tried to stand. He could feel every one of his limbs stiffening as he struggled to his feet.
Every step was slow and robotic, his legs seizing up as he headed into the next room. He couldn’t bend his knees much and he wasn’t sure how long they would support his weight. The constant trail of blood under his feet made walking even trickier but with sheer determination he managed to get where he needed. His hands were all but useless now, but he should be able to flush the evidence away down the toilet.
He barely acknowledged Howden’s body hanging over the small bathtub nearby, the plug hole stained red by the blood that had flowed from his opened arteries. Obviously McCabe had his reasons for killing Howden but Riley didn’t care to even work out what they might be. Howden was dead. He was another one that could no longer do anyone any harm and at least Dr Carter wasn’t in here with him. McCabe must have left his body back at the house. It was a small consolation, but at least he would receive a dignified funeral and not half a dozen small and unmarked graves.
Two awkward minutes later and Riley had indeed sent a part of Sandra’s anatomy into the sewers and made it back into the main room. He stopped by his pile of clothes on the workbench and sank to the floor and awkwardly pulled on his trousers and coat. He didn’t bother with anything else – especially his shoes. Not only would they be unable to fit over his swollen bloodied feet but he’d never be able to pull them on and tie the laces the state his fingers were in.
Once dressed, he then collected his wallet from the workbench.
Then his mobile phone.
The last call had ended almost two hours ago, just before the torture had begun and just after McCabe had finished his little confession.
“I can assume it worked,” he asked Purvis.
“Better than I’d hoped,” Purvis said as he finally freed the semi-conscious Sandra and lifted her from the seat. “There was a lot of background noise and I had to put the audio through a filter, but it did the job. I also chopped and edited it to match the visuals I set up. It’s hardly my best work but for the time I had it worked out okay.”
“I never doubted you could do it,” Riley said.
Purvis looked again at Riley’s injuries, most of them hidden under his clothes now, the blood instantly seeping through the fabric.
“And I never doubted you.”
62
Eh?
That was the first thing that popped into McCabe’s head upon entering the sitting room of the old scout’s hall.
He could see no sign of Purvis or the girl – at least not in the flesh. Instead, there they were, voices and all, on the laptop in the centre of the room. What the hell was this? A home movie of Purvis reading Wendy a bedtime story? What the fuck...?
The second shock was the group of men standing behind the laptop, guns pointed at them. There was at least six of them, all big, all mean looking, all wearing suits and eyeing them menacingly, as if to show that they were willing to open fire at a second’s notice should anyone try anything.
Before either he, Turner or Nash could understand the situation, McCabe heard footsteps behind them. He looked over his shoulder in time to see another five or six men enter the room behind them, also carrying weapons and looking just as mean as the ones in front of them.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Nash demanded, the Berretta in his hand suddenly seeming as useful as a peashooter in this situation.
Suddenly the group of men in front of them separated, and there he was - Lenny Dainton himself, suited and booted in his best attire, like this was a planned business meeting and he’d wanted to look his best. Behind Dainton, McCabe could now see someone else, a pathetic looking figure dressed in a dirty, torn suit. He was gagged and strapped to a chair and looked beaten half to death. Finally, through the blood and swollen features, McCabe recognised Shaun Rodgers.
Oh, shit!
McCabe looked at Nash, but Nash just stared at Dainton. Turner then looked at McCabe. He looked confused and nervous... scared.
McCabe then looked at Dainton, and Dainton smiled at him. At him! Not at Nash.
Game over, McCabe thought. He didn’t know how, but somehow, he’d been grassed. The fact that he and Rodgers were in this together had been found out. They’d been set up. This was the end. All over. Full stop. But he didn’t know how to go out with a whimper. Only how to explode.
He raised the Berretta and swung it towards Dainton, thinking that having his brains blown out and his heart and lungs ripped to bits in a hail of bullets was preferable to what Dainton would surely have planned for him later.
Before he could get off a single shot, however, he heard a noise like a surge of electricity, a loud Zhuuume! and it instantly felt like his insides had collapsed. All of his muscles tensed and began to spasm. He dropped the gun as his heart seemed to stop for several seconds before going into overdrive. His bladder gave out as he collapsed to the floor. It was then he saw that one of the men behind him had taken him out with a cattle prod. A fucking cattle prod! Right in the armpit. Jesus, the pain. He’d rather have taken a bullet between the legs.
“I suggest you two put your weapons down,” Dainton told Nash and Turner as McCabe continued to twitch and dribble and writhe on the floor.
“Fuck you,” Nash snapped, keeping the gun on his mortal enemy. “What are you doing here? Are you in this with Purvis? You two in this together?”
McCabe, his limbs still twitching, saw Nash raise his gun. But he also saw the men behind him place the barrels of their weapons against the backs of both Nash’s and Turner’s heads.
“Go on, fucking kill me,” Nash said, keeping his gun trained on Dainton. “I’ll put one in you first and then at least I’ll die knowing I got the cunt who had my son killed.”
Dainton smiled, showing his sparkling teeth and shook his head.
“Maybe you should see something first.” He casually back away to the laptop and tapped a few buttons. Purvis’s reading of The Three Little Pigs disappeared. Then the screen lit up and something else appeared.
McCabe was just getting the feeling back in h
is limbs but couldn’t find the energy to do much else. He knew instinctively that what was about to be shown would blow the whole thing open. He didn’t know how he knew, he just did. Dainton wasn’t going to show a home movie of his Christmas party, was he? No, this was important. This was it, the key to the whole thing, whatever it was...
McCabe tried to shout “No!” but what came out was “Nwaaah!” and a string of drool.
Then he saw himself on the screen. It looked like footage from outside Twilight nightclub sometime. Wait, it was the night of the shooting. Just before the shooting in fact. But the soundtrack was new. The talking over the looped footage showing McCabe darting behind the concrete pillar and waiting for the Peugeot was in a familiar voice.
Wait... it was his voice!
“...the original plan was to make it look like Dainton had taken out Nash...”
The voice recording repeated three times in time with the lopped footage. After the third time, the footage continued to show the muzzle flashes off-screen and Nash and Michael junior fall to the floor.
Then the footage changed. It looked to be a home-movie of some kind, unsteady and filmed at night. It showed a car, with one man inside and another at the window. The camera zoomed in more and framed both of their faces. The man outside the car was himself - McCabe. The man inside was Rodgers. Shit, that was only last night. They’d been followed. Spied on!
Then the audio kicked in again, and again, McCabe found himself listening to his own voice.
“...me and Rodgers got banged up in the same nick...”
McCabe looked up at the battered man strapped to the chair. Rodgers was crying, his tears mixing with the drying blood staining his face.
“...we became good mates... both realised things would be better with both bosses gone...”
Nash looked down at McCabe. His wild eyes had glossed over. Then he looked back at the screen where Rodgers was handing over the paperwork.