Big City Jacks

by Nick Oldham

  Lopez shrugged indifferently. ‘I don’t really care. That’s a bridge I’ll cross when I come to it.’ He nodded to his men.

  ‘Up!’ a harsh voice ordered from behind Donaldson.

  Donaldson glanced over his shoulder. Both of the heavies were on their feet, guns in hand, pointed at his back. They were big-calibre revolvers, unwieldy, but probably reliable and deadly at close range. Donaldson rose slowly, a cynical, defeated expression on his face.

  ‘You think you’ll take over from Mendoza?’ he sneered.

  Lopez nodded confidently. ‘I have everything in place. It will be my inheritance. He would not have achieved anything had it not been for my business skills anyway. It’s only right that I now assume control.’

  ‘Somehow I doubt it,’ Donaldson said. Lopez shrugged, but a dark line of puzzlement crossed his face. ‘He’s too smart.’

  ‘Unlike you, my friend,’ Lopez said, dismissing the comment. He pointed at him for the benefit of his men and said, ‘Finish him,’ in Spanish.

  They did not do it in the restaurant. They should have done, but they didn’t, and once Donaldson realized they were not going to blast him there and then, that they intended to drive him somewhere isolated, kill and dispose of him, he knew he had a chance. Their mistake.

  He was in the back seat of a car, a big old Peugeot. Child locks were on and he was sitting directly behind the driver, one of the two guys from the restaurant. The other man was sitting in the front passenger seat, twisted round, his piece aimed lazily at Donaldson’s body mass. His forefinger was on the trigger and the gun looked dangerous.

  They were confident guys. They had done this before, that much was apparent. Probably to some dumb hood or another, maybe more than once. They kept quiet, speaking only when necessary, the one in the passenger seat keeping constant vigil on Donaldson.

  The car headed out of Ciudad Quesada, then turned inland towards the weather. The wipers struggled against the volume of rain. The headlights, on main beam, hardly seemed to penetrate the darkness ahead. They left the main road and began to climb.

  Donaldson considered going for the driver. He could lunge, arms going around the headrest, hands on either side of his neck, and snap the neck within four seconds. Too long. Four seconds was a lifetime in these situations. It would be long enough to see two big, nasty bullet holes in his chest.

  He also thought about the pros and cons of going for the one with the gun. He was a fraction too far away. It could be done, but the angles were not favourable.

  He would have to wait . . . and there was also the problem of the car. Where would it veer to? Peering out into the rain, feeling the car go higher up steep mountain roads, there was a good chance that if he did try something, they would end up over a precipice. Donaldson wanted to come out of this alive . . . so he waited.

  The road became narrower, winding around hairpins, rising all the time against the atrocious weather.

  He smirked, snorting a laugh down his nose.

  ‘What you laughing at?’ the guy in the passenger seat asked.

  Donaldson regarded him with a chill. ‘The way you’re going to die,’ he said. The man’s face dropped. He shifted, then smirked.

  ‘Don’t you mean the way you are going to?’

  ‘No.’ Donaldson turned away and looked out of the window, seeing dark trees rising through the heavy rain, liking what he saw. The elements were on his side and also the fact that two street-hardened tough guys were contracted to kill him. To him, that put them down as amateurs.

  Twenty minutes later they stopped.

  ‘As Mr Lopez said, this will be quick. You will not suffer.’

  ‘Please thank Mr Lopez for that.’

  ‘You stay seated,’ he was ordered.

  The driver climbed out and went to Donaldson’s door whilst the other guy covered him. Donaldson knew this would be the only chance he had – one in the car, the other outside.

  The driver had his gun in his hand now, pointed at Donaldson through the window. He put a hand to the door, pulled it open a fraction of an inch.

  ‘Out!’ the guy in the passenger seat barked.

  Donaldson sighed and nodded. He knew if he got out, acquiesced, and then gave them the chance to both be out, he was dead. But one in the car, one out, different story.

  ‘How much not to kill me?’ he pleaded.

  ‘You haven’t got enough, gringo,’ sneered the guy.

  ‘OK . . .’ He placed his hand on the inner door rest and pushed the door. The guy on the outside, the one getting drenched and severely irritated by the delay, stepped away from the car. Donaldson paused again, letting him get wetter. ‘I’m an FBI agent, you know. They’ll come for you.’

  ‘Let them.’

  ‘Hey, you fuckers! Hurry up!’ the wet one bawled.

  ‘They won’t give up. You should let me go.’

  ‘Get out of the car.’

  ‘I’m going.’ He opened the door a little more. Rain dripped in. The sound of it hitting the car roof was incredible, like marbles being thrown down from the heavens by the million. He gazed up at the wet one. He was half-drowned by now, miserable, wanting to get on with this. Donaldson opened the door a fraction further. Rain cascaded in now, soaking his trouser leg. He needed to move before he too got weighed down by water.

  He swung both legs out, but not too quickly, then stood in the rain.

  Wet One backed off.

  Donaldson bent back inside the car, feeling the rain hitting the back of his shirt. Surely it didn’t rain in Spain like this. He looked at Dry One, opened his mouth to say something further and got the desired effect. Wet One strode across and rammed his gun into Donaldson’s ribs.

  ‘Get out now. Stop fucking around.’

  Donaldson nodded and slowly stepped away from the door, then slammed it shut.

  One inside the car, one outside.

  Dry One turned to open his door and join his companion, a movement which necessitated him having to look away for a few seconds. Donaldson stood upright, seeing Wet One stepping backwards away from him, the gun now out of Donaldson’s ribs and pointing towards the ground.

  Donaldson’s right arm arced, his body twisted. The edge of his hand sliced through the air, blurred by the rain, almost impossible to see.

  He connected with the side of Wet One’s neck with such force that the head sprung sideways as though he had been struck by the axe of an executioner. The blow sent him staggering to one side, knees sagging weakly. Donaldson’s follow-up was violent and decisive, as he drove the base of his right hand upwards to the man’s nose, smashing his septum up into the brain like the blade of a small knife. He fell hard, dead before he touched the ground – but as he dropped, Donaldson wrested his gun from him and turned to take on Dry One.

  Dry One was only just standing up after getting out of the car. His gun swung upwards. He fired.

  The flash and the sound in the rain was dull, making Donaldson think that the bullets in the gun were sub-standard. He returned fire, his finger squeezing the trigger back twice in quick succession – the double tap. But only the first shell left the muzzle, the second stayed where it was. A misfire. He pulled again. Another misfire. Defective or wet ammo – or empty . . . whatever.

  Dry One fired again – and his gun worked.

  That was enough for Donaldson. He spun and ran low toward the dark edge of the road, plunging head first into what lay beyond the light.

  The Land Rover emerged on to the main road, Donaldson sighing happily at the smooth flatness of the tarmac after the pot-holed terrain of the country track. A sign indicated Torrevieja and Alicante to the left.

  ‘Where should I drop you?’

  ‘Airport?’ he dared to suggest.

  ‘OK,’ Maria said brightly. ‘It’s about half an hour from here.’ She pulled the Land Rover on to the road. ‘You never really told us why you came to be where you were,’ she said. ‘You’ve been really vague with us.’

  ‘It’s best yo
u don’t know,’ he said, tight-lipped. ‘I told your father quite a lot, but kept the details sketchy. It’s better that way.’

  A headlong plunge into the darkness, no idea at all of what was waiting there for him. Which was the more stupid? That or facing a man with a gun? Twenty metres into the forest he wished he had chosen the latter, something he’d had more experience with, as suddenly he lost his footing and the ground underneath him just disappeared, becoming a perpendicular drop of shale, rock and protruding branches. It was as though he had stepped off the edge of a cliff, which, in essence, is exactly what he had done.

  He could not recall much of the fall, just covering his head, rolling into a ball and hoping for the best, as he bounced down the incline, his breath being driven out of him each time he smacked down. Then, just as suddenly as he had started the fall, it was over and he stopped rolling.

  Breathless he lay there, panting, feeling the pain. The rain beat down on him, torrential and as hard as little stones.

  ‘I’m alive,’ he said to himself. He took a moment to work out whether anything had been broken. His feet moved, his knees could bend; he flexed his fingers, his hands and arms and rolled his neck. Everything seemed to be in order, though he felt like he had just been hammered in a street fight, beaten, maybe, but still in one piece. ‘Now if I can just get up.’ He groaned and moved at the same time, turning over on to all fours, his head lolling wearily between his arms. ‘Jesus, Jesus!’ he gasped, then slowly rose to his feet. ‘Made it,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I can stand . . . that’s good . . . I’m on my feet . . .’

  Still the rain battered down. He looked round into the pitch black, unable to work out anything at all. He had no conception of where he could be. He had fallen down a steep, rugged hill and miraculously hit the bottom relatively unscathed. Didn’t think anything was broken. Slowly his breath came back.

  Then something made him cock his head to one side. A noise. A rumble. Something not part of the rain. He tensed up, fearing something, but not having any idea of what it was. The rumble grew louder. It had a sort of liquid sense to it.

  That was his moment of realization.

  He was standing in a river bed. A dry river bed. It had been raining in the mountains . . . he recalled somebody saying that. Heavy rain, persistent.

  As a wall of water hit him at knee level and scythed away his legs, the words ‘Flash flood!’ formed on his lips.

  John Elliot found him next morning as he patrolled the periphery of his land, inspecting the damage caused by the storms and the flood. It was the first time Elliot had known the river bed to flood since he had lived at the farm, even though there had been bad storms in the past. In some respects the sight of a washed-up body on the banks of the river did not totally surprise him, nor did it panic him. Thirty-three years as a cop had made him immune to death.

  Finding him alive was a bonus, but not a straightforward one. After conveying the bedraggled, exhausted man to his home, he would have preferred to call the emergency services, but all phone lines were down and he did not possess a mobile phone and the access lane was impassable at that moment, far too muddy even for the Land Rover. He and Maria were effectively cut off from the rest of the world for a time.

  He knew of a retired doctor who lived in the next valley, but it was a four-hour hike, so he decided to tend the man from the river himself. There was no way he could accurately tell whether the man was badly injured internally, but he trusted to luck.

  Elliot was reminded of the old cowboy movies where the patient fought a fever and either died or recovered. Donaldson was feverish for a day, then slept a deep, exhausted sleep for a further day before awakening to that wonderful morning sunshine and the delicious sight of Maria Elliot in her thin clothes.

  Donaldson thanked Maria for the lift back to the airport. She said little to him as he alighted from the Land Rover, but her eyes said a lot.

  Donaldson waved her off reluctantly. She drove back to her world as he walked into the terminal building and re-entered his.

  Nineteen

  Forty-eight hours after almost going headlong on the ward floor, Henry was discharged from hospital and found himself at home. He was still scouring his brain for the memory of why he had been driving down the motorway with the chief constable, another man, a gun and some bullets. But being cooped up in the house drove him barmy very quickly. He paced like a caged rat and to escape this he decided to go for a walk, both to get out of the house and to get his mind turning again.

  On the second morning at home, still booked off sick from work, he was striding down the promenade at Blackpool, heading north towards Bispham . . . when he suddenly stopped because he had no recollection whatsoever of how he had actually got there.

  He knew where he was and that he must have walked there from home, but for the life of him he could not recall putting his feet out of the front door and setting off. To get where he was, he estimated, would have taken him a good hour and a half, but that ninety minutes was just a void.

  A sensation of panic rippled through him.

  ‘This,’ he said worriedly to himself, ‘is very bad.’ He was convinced that his mind had now completely gone kaput. The madness of Henry Christie. He quickly found a seat in a shelter and plonked himself down next to two old ladies who were openly displaying their underwear. He smiled at them, but it must have been more a frightening grimace and they cowered away from the sex-crazed murderous fiend who was obviously about to rape and kill them.

  He sat with his head in his hands for a few minutes, breathing deeply and trying to regain some iota of control. ‘Get a grip,’ he instructed himself with a growl.

  Gradually he became aware that someone was standing near to him. He raised his eyes to see a man, out of breath, maybe as old as he was, a few feet away, looking at him. The man’s right arm was in a sling. He looked dreadful, unshaved, eyes sunken, skin grey and sagging.

  ‘Can I help?’ Henry asked, wondering if this was the start of a new life for him, one in which he played a major part in the care-in-the-community scene. The man looked slightly demented, hunted even.

  ‘Thank God you stopped,’ he said, panting. ‘I thought you’d go on forever. I’ve been following you for ages.’

  Henry’s heart missed a beat. ‘Why?’ he snarled. ‘Do I look like a nutter?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ the man said. ‘No, I need to talk to you.’

  Henry’s next thought was that he was being picked up. Maybe the gay scene was actually his next move. ‘I’m a cop, you know,’ he said, hoping to fend the man off for good.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ the man said. ‘You’re an SIO.’

  This brought Henry upright. At that moment, something else jarred in his tumble drier of a mind . . . something about a clown and a van. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Cos I’m a cop, too.’

  Henry’s mind was definitely hurting now. ‘OK, so why have you been following me?’

  ‘My name’s Lawrence Bignall,’ he said. ‘I know who killed Keith Snell . . . and I need protection.’

  It took a few moments for Henry to actually remember who Keith Snell was, then, as quick as a brick flying through a window, everything suddenly slotted back into place. And at that exact moment Henry remembered something else which was vitally important, making a connection that, until then, he had been grasping for unsuccessfully.

  He stood up. Everything was now clear.

  Lawrence Bignall showed Henry his shoulder, peeling back the dressing to reveal an ugly red wound seeping unhealthily.

  ‘Keith Snell did that to me,’ he said.

  They were sitting in an interview room at Fleetwood police station, Henry having decided to go there because it was quiet, out of the way, and there was less likelihood of an interruption. They had flagged a taxi down on the promenade to take them.

  Bignall looked fearfully at Henry. ‘I checked myself out of the hospital before treatment was complete . . . I couldn’t stay in. It was too dange
rous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A feeling. More than a feeling, actually . . . I just knew I was a liability to them . . . and the truth is, I am,’ Bignall admitted. ‘I got scared and they saw I was scared. I’m surprised he pushed me out at the hospital in the first place.’

  ‘Hold it there,’ Henry said. Bignall was far too ahead of himself now. Henry needed to reel him in, rewind right to the beginning, then press play. But even knowing that, Henry still could not resist asking, ‘Who’s they? And who is he?’

  Bignall’s face screwed up, and he hesitated. This was one of those defining moments and both he and Henry knew that. The moment of no return.

  ‘They are the “Invincibles”,’ he said, ‘and he is Phil Lynch.’

  A good sign. Henry recalled both in his recently revamped memory.

  He remembered sitting in the CID office at the Arena police station in Manchester – seemed like a year ago – and seeing a poster with the word “Invincibles” on it . . . and then he had been introduced to his Single Point of Contact, his SPOC. A detective sergeant called Phil Lynch.

  A curious sensation travelled all the way from Henry’s heart to what is affectionately known as the ‘ringpiece’. He kept a calm, outward exterior, although inside he was almost having a cardiac arrest at this information. When he said, ‘Let’s take it back to square one, shall we? Tell me in a logical, chronological sequence, then I can understand everything you are telling me,’ he did manage to keep a straight face and not jump up and down with excitement.

  Two hours later, Henry, Dave Anger and Jane Roscoe were with Bignall. Henry had realized immediately that he could not keep any of this to himself. It was far too big for one man to handle and although it stuck in his gullet to go to Anger, he did it because it was the right thing to do.

  Following Bignall’s revelations to Henry, he had actually decided to relocate the witness away from any police station. Even though Fleetwood was a pretty quiet backwater, the police family is a pretty small one and word travels fast. He wanted to keep a lid on what was happening, so he contacted Rik Dean, the DS at Blackpool, and ordered – yes, ordered – him to drop everything and pick him and Bignall up at Fleetwood cop shop. Henry did not explain anything to Dean and Dean did not ask. It was unusual enough for Henry to ‘order’ anyone to do anything – he usually worked by persuasion – so Dean instinctively knew something big was afoot. He kept his questions to himself.