An Army of One: A John Rossett Novel

by Tony Schumacher

  Finnegan used the basket to push the old man back into the shop and straight down the center aisle until they slammed into the counter.

  Nobody spoke.

  A brass bell cheerfully signaled that Hall and Finnegan were inside and the door had closed behind them. Hall paused to turn the sign around to show closed, then checked the street outside.

  Finnegan stared, knuckles white on the basket rim as he pushed it into the old man’s chest. The wicker creaked, then the old man found the words that shock had scared out of him.

  “I ain’t paying.” In the old man’s head, it had sounded more certain than it did on his lips. “I told your boss, and now I’m telling you, I ain’t paying.”

  Over by the door, Hall rolled his eyes.

  Finnegan smiled. It was time for the bit he liked second best.

  The speech.

  “Listen to me.” He stared so hard, the old man shut his eyes. Finnegan waited for them to open again before he continued.

  “All my life people have told me what ain’t happening. Ever since I was a kid. People have told me ‘I ain’t doin’ this’ or ‘I ain’t doin’ that.’ Do you know what I always say back?”

  The basket squeaked and creaked again. Finnegan waited a second. The old man just stared back, eyes scared, breathing quickly in sharp gasps.

  “I asked: Do you know what I say?” he asked again.

  The old man shook his head.

  Finnegan smiled.

  “I always say”—his voice dropped to almost a whisper, and the basket strained again as he leaned in even closer—“‘You will do what I say.’ And do you know what?” Finnegan leaned his head so far forward his lips almost brushed the old man’s nose. “They always do . . . in the end.”

  Finnegan’s eyes were hooded, cloaked with the kind of scar tissue that came from being a bad boxer with a sharp skull. Under the scar tissue, black shadows got deeper. He leaned in a tiny bit further, turning up the pressure. The weight of his body distorted the shape of the basket so much, it took on the shape of a closed clamshell.

  “I’m going to knock you about a bit now.” Finnegan sounded like he was whispering sweet nothings to a lover. “And then, when I’m ready, you’re going to tell me where the money is. When you do, I’m going to take it and leave. But that won’t be the end of it.” He smiled. “Because this time next week, I’m going to come back and repeat the exercise. I’m going to put bruises on your bruises, and then I’m going to take the money all over again. And then maybe, the week after that, if you’ve learned your lesson, you’re going to give me the money and not get a beating.” Finnegan paused as he lowered his forehead and rested it against the old man’s. “Assuming, of course, you have learned your lesson. If you ain’t, if you are as stupid as you look right now, I’m going to kill you. Just like that. And as you lie dying on the floor of this shit-house shop, you’ll think to yourself: I wish I’d paid good old Mr. Finnegan. But by then it’ll be too late, ’cos you’ll be fucking dying and I’ll be walking out.”

  Finnegan eased back and slowly dragged the basket from the old man’s hands. He dropped it to the floor and smiled.

  “Now, let’s me and you get cracking.”

  “No,” said Rossett. “Let’s me and you get cracking instead.”

  Finnegan looked across to the dark corner where Rossett had been sitting. Rossett nodded to the shopkeeper to get out of the way. The shopkeeper slithered around the counter like an eel hiding behind a rock as Finnegan did a half turn.

  Hall took a half step forward over by the door.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m your worst nightmare.” Rossett kept his eyes on Finnegan as he replied to Hall. “And you two are under arrest for threats to kill, conspiracy to commit murder, and extortion. Oh, and attempting to assault a police officer.”

  “We haven’t attempted to assault a police officer.”

  “Give it time.”

  Finnegan shrugged, a little confused, but too dumb to be scared.

  “You on your own?”

  “Yes.”

  Finnegan snorted, looked at his partner, then back at Rossett.

  “Really?”

  “You’re not very bright, are you?”

  Finnegan frowned, then charged at Rossett like a bull.

  Rossett twisted at the waist, flicking the blade of his left hand up into Finnegan’s throat as he went past. The big man gasped and a dull reflex drew his hands up to protect himself. He was too late. Rossett’s hand was already withdrawing, damage done.

  Finnegan stumbled forward. Blinding lights danced in his vision for a second and then he choked. He grabbed at his neck, lungs sucking at a vacuum as his diaphragm twitched and his throat spasmed.

  He was wasting his time.

  Rossett slammed his left foot into the inside of Finnegan’s knee, then took a half step backward as Finnegan fell, his leg twisted out to the side like a newborn deer’s. The big man tried to turn as he went down, offering his back as a target. Instead he caught his temple on the corner of some shelves and landed in a stunned, crippled heap.

  Finnegan caught the sweet whiff of polish off the well-worn floor. He screwed up his eyes and tried to think himself straight as his breath jammed in his throat like leaves in a drain.

  Don’t panic. He gulped a quarter breath. Do not panic.

  He’d been in enough fights to know panicking got you beaten. He knew the secret was to keep thinking, stay focused, protect your head, and wait for the moment. His breath would come back. He just needed time. Hall would give him that. Hall was always there to cover him. Finnegan just had to wait and protect his head.

  Hall would do the copper, no problem.

  Hall had his cutthroat razor out and down at his side.

  The copper was good.

  Hall had never seen Finnegan put down like that before.

  Hall had assumed he wasn’t going to be getting involved. But now here he was, razor out of his pocket and his heart pounding in his chest. Slicing up a copper was never going to be a good thing.

  Killing one was even worse.

  But Hall had a feeling that was what it was going to take. This copper looked like the kind of man who needed killing.

  Fuck.

  Hall took a few paces toward Rossett and lifted the razor so that he would be able to see it glinting in the dim light. He wanted the copper to focus on it, to worry about it, to watch it coming the way a rat stares into the eyes of a snake.

  Hall frowned when the copper didn’t seem to notice it.

  Rossett stepped away from Finnegan, then walked toward Hall up the aisle as if he were looking for soap on the shelves. He moved fast, but in a way that seemed casual, matter-of-fact, like he was already tired of the fight and just wanted to get it over with.

  Hall stopped. Hall started to back up. Hall never backed up.

  Hall started to wonder why he was doing it now.

  “I’ll cut you!” He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.

  He never shouted, not ever.

  The copper kept coming.

  “I mean it!” he shouted again. This time the pitch was so high, he was embarrassed by it.

  The copper kept coming, faster, certain.

  Like death, black coat open, black suit, black tie, black hair, black eyes.

  Death was coming.

  Hall swiped with the razor too early, missed, tried to swipe again with a backhand, then felt his forearm being gripped and pushed up into his face. He felt another hand against his elbow. The pressure almost smothered him as he tried to not fall backward onto the floor.

  He failed.

  He fell backward and cracked his head so hard, he chipped a tooth and bit through his bottom lip.

  He couldn’t see what was happening, but the weight of the copper pressed down like earth on a coffin. Hall tried to turn his head to get out from under his own arm.

  He couldn’t.

  He tried to pull his other arm around
to land a punch. He couldn’t. He was locked under, buried in darkness, gravity, death.

  He started to panic.

  He felt fingers wrap around his hand. Try as he might, he couldn’t hold the ivory handle of the razor. He twisted, desperate to get out from under the copper, as he felt the razor slide away from him.

  The spare blade, he always carried a spare blade.

  Hall struggled to get his free hand under his body and into his back pocket. He squirmed under the copper’s weight until he was able to draw his knife. His knuckles scraped on the floor as he slipped, then whipped it to where he thought Rossett’s face would be.

  It wasn’t there.

  Hall tried again, lower, and felt the blade dragging through the thick woolen overcoat Rossett was wearing. He pushed harder, trying to angle the knife from a slash to a stab.

  Hall heard the slice.

  It struck him as strange that he heard it but didn’t feel it.

  Hall had never considered that having your throat cut wouldn’t hurt. He’d always assumed it would hurt like hell. But it didn’t, not at first; for a few seconds it just felt strange. Like his face was loose, and the skin around his jaw suddenly didn’t fit.

  Icy, gasping breath filled his lungs as it washed in through the hole in his throat and then out with a chug of blood onto the floor.

  Then, finally, it hurt.

  Sharp, high-pitched pain.

  Hall was dying. He knew it. He could hear gurgling and the sound of his heels banging on the floor. The pressure on his chest eased. He reached for his throat and felt himself leaking out.

  He tried to roll onto his side, but the copper stopped him. Hall gripped at the blood and tried to keep it inside.

  He tried to take a breath but felt like he was drowning.

  He looked at the ceiling and noticed there was darkness at the edge of his vision. His eyes rolled; he caught a glimpse of Rossett, then the ceiling, then Rossett.

  Hall was scared.

  He wanted to ask for help.

  The ceiling.

  Rossett had blood on his face. He was trying to help him, Hall knew it.

  Hall knew it was too late.

  So dark now.

  He wasn’t scared anymore.

  The darkness became darker still.

  He felt like he was sliding into a hole.

  Frank Hall died.

  Rossett sat outside the shop, feet in the gutter, a tuft of white lining on show at the top of his sleeve where the knife had sliced through. Finnegan was cuffed and facedown next to him on the pavement, trussed like a calf at a rodeo.

  Rossett stared at the cigarette in his bloodstained fingers.

  The paper was dirty red, almost brown.

  It tasted bad as it shook.

  He’d be sore later. He still wasn’t fit. The injuries of the last couple of years were starting to add up. It was getting more and more difficult to keep going to the well, draining himself a little deeper each time.

  Maybe he’d come back to work too soon, but what else was he going to do?

  Finnegan grunted and flexed at the handcuffs, turning his head so that he could look at Rossett.

  “You are dead, copper. I swear to God, you are a dead man.”

  Rossett ignored Finnegan and stared off into the distance.

  Finnegan groaned and flexed again at the cuffs. He tried to roll onto his side to face Rossett but couldn’t because of the pain in his busted knee. In the distance the siren of a police car sounded. Finnegan turned his head toward it, then looked back at Rossett.

  “You don’t know who you’re messing with. I’m a dangerous man. Take these cuffs off me and I’ll show you—”

  “Hush,” said Rossett quietly. He put the cigarette back into his mouth and continued staring off into the distance.

  By the time the police car finally made it to them, a few people had interrupted their morning commute to stare at the quiet copper and the handcuffed heavy sitting outside the shop. A slow slick of sticky blood was leaking from the doorway behind them onto the pavement. Rossett ignored it, and the crowd, and just stared into the distance as a sergeant and a young bobby got out of the police car and approached slowly.

  The bobby had his truncheon out, ready for trouble, while the sergeant looked past Rossett at the blood on the pavement, then down at Finnegan.

  “Who the bleedin’ hell are you?” the sergeant said to Rossett.

  Rossett held up his warrant card.

  “Rossett.”

  “Rossett?” Finnegan parroted from the pavement. “I got arrested by John Rossett?”

  Rossett got up from the curb slowly. His bones were already aching from the fight. He flicked the long-dead stub of his cigarette at Finnegan on the ground and looked at the young bobby.

  “Look after him.”

  “I’ve read all about you, sir. Can I just say—” The bobby looked starstruck.

  “No, you can’t.” Rossett stepped past him, over the blood, heading back into the shop.

  In the small storeroom at the back he found the old man sitting on an old wooden chair next to an even older table. The room was cluttered with stock for the shop. It smelled of bleach, damp cardboard, and forty years of slaving your guts out for pretty much no return. There was a bulb hanging from two twisted wires, and Rossett could see the steam coming off a fresh cup of anemic tea on the table.

  “I wasn’t expecting that,” the shopkeeper finally said, almost to himself.

  “Drink some tea.”

  “The way you killed him.”

  “It’ll help with the shock.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it.”

  Rossett went to speak, paused, took a look around the storeroom, and tried again.

  “What were you expecting?”

  “I thought you’d just see them off.”

  “I’m not a scarecrow.”

  “You’ll make things worse.”

  “I’m the law. I live by the law, and the law does what it has to do. I have no half measures; I don’t scare people. I’m a policeman, I do what I have to do, and I do my job properly. That is who I am.”

  Chapter 2

  “You killed a man this morning?”

  “Self-defense.”

  “But you killed him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’re just sitting here?”

  Rossett looked around his office, then back at Kripo Generalmajor Erhard Neumann.

  “I think so.”

  Neumann shifted on the wooden chair he was sitting on. It was uncomfortable, a little too narrow, so he couldn’t quite relax. He wondered if that was intentional, a way of keeping people on edge when they sat opposite Rossett in his office. He looked at Rossett, who was staring back at him with eyes that were so blue they were almost silver.

  Neumann realized the chair wasn’t planned to make people feel uncomfortable. Rossett did that all on his own.

  “You were attacked with a razor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Injured?”

  “My coat and jacket took most of the damage.”

  “Most?”

  “Most.”

  “Stitches?”

  “In me or the coat?”

  Neumann wasn’t sure if Rossett was joking, so he waited for a moment to see if there was going to be a smile.

  There wasn’t.

  “In you.”

  “Just a scratch. I’ll live.”

  “Hmm.” Neumann adjusted his balance on the seat. “Someone once told me it would take an army to kill you.”

  Rossett didn’t reply. Instead he folded his hands on top of the paperwork that was piled on his desk. Neumann looked up at the small portrait photograph of King Edward on the wall to his left. It was the picture that hung in every civil servant’s office in the country. The king was in full military regalia, staring into the distance with the certainty of someone who was finally in his right place.

  On a wall, in a dingy office, with a chest full of me
dals, holding a hat covered in gold braid.

  The medals and the hat were impressive, but it was the Knight’s Cross at his throat that caught the eye. It was out of place, wrong, awkward, put there to make a point.

  Nazis choking a king and his country.

  The portrait was normally placed opposite one of Hitler. The two men looking wistfully across the grime into each other’s eyes. In Rossett’s office there was a hook, but no Hitler, and even the king hung crooked in his frame.

  “Have you heard from Koehler?” Neumann looked like he was talking to the picture.

  “Not since he went back to Germany.” Rossett looked at the Rolex wristwatch his last boss, Ernst Koehler, had given him the day before he had taken his daughter Anja back to Germany.

  Rossett had saved the girl from the resistance, but he hadn’t been good enough to save her mother. That was another scar, another black mark on his record, another blemish on his soul.

  Koehler didn’t see it that way, but Rossett did, and that was all that mattered. He’d failed. Rossett knew what it was like to mourn a wife and child. He’d done his best to save Koehler from suffering the same pain, but ended up saving him only half of it.

  After rescuing Koehler’s daughter, Rossett had woken up battered, bruised, shot, and stabbed in a military hospital. He’d crossed the line to lawlessness and back trying to save the child—but then, so had Neumann, and that was why he was asking.

  Ernst Koehler had nearly taken all of them down. They’d all committed acts that would ensure a firing squad if they ever came to light. But they had saved the girl, and even better than that, they’d gotten away with it.

  Getting away with it was one thing, walking away heroes was another. So when Rossett had finally opened his eyes in the hospital, he’d been surprised to find that he wasn’t chained to the bed.

  He was even more surprised to find out he was a hero all over again.

  Not to himself.

  But to the Nazis and the Mosley government.

  The British Lion had roared, and the papers had loved it. Rossett knew better than to deny the stories. He’d shaken the hands, stared straight ahead, and accepted the bar on his Iron Cross in silence.

  On the back of the Rolex was engraved: “To the British Lion, the best of the best, from Anja and Ernst.”