The Lawless Kind

by Hilton, Matt

  No, no, no . . .

  The eyes in the darkness moved towards her, and the shadows formed and solidified around the knife it held. She opened her arms and the porcelain doll fell and shattered at her feet, as she invited in the blade that plunged towards her. Her cry of terror was not that she was about to die, but that she had failed her boy.

  She continued to scream as her son, Benjamin, grown to manhood under his father’s tutelage, rammed the blade deep into her throat, again and again.

  Chapter 10

  Reaction made me reach for the gun in my waistband, but after a few seconds of mild panic I pushed back the fog of sleep and realised that Kirstie had merely cried out in her dreams. I noted the sweat pasting her auburn hair to her face, the rapid flicker of her eyelids as she continued to endure some horrendous nightmare. It was a second or so before I realised she was slumped across my lap, my left arm draped protectively over her.

  ‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ Rink said from the driving position, ‘seeing as you were both so comfortable.’

  ‘Jesus, Rink . . .’ I slowly extricated my arm.

  ‘Both of you sleeping like babies. Well, you were until something seemed to upset the lady.’

  Whether it was our subdued conversation or some final dramatic act in her dream, Kirstie snapped awake. She was looking at my knees, and it was as if she wondered where the hell her nightmare had taken her now. She shot bolt upright and stared at me from the opposite corner of the car.

  ‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry!’

  ‘Hey, no problem,’ I reassured her. ‘If it’s any consolation, I didn’t even know you’d fallen asleep on me until a few seconds ago.’

  Kirstie glanced accusingly at Rink, but my buddy merely grinned. Her scrutiny went back to me, and in particular my thighs. A dark patch stained the denim near my right knee.

  ‘Oh, God! I drooled all over you.’ She batted at the side of her face, embarrassed all to hell, as she sought to wipe away any incriminating evidence.

  ‘That’s a novelty for Hunter . . . women drooling over him.’

  ‘Glad you find it funny, Rink,’ I grumbled.

  ‘Now you know what it’s like to be me.’ He broke into a loud crack of laughter.

  The joke helped bring any further embarrassment to a stop, for both of us. I shook my head in mock disbelief. ‘You’ll get used to Rink soon enough, Kirstie. He has this inflated impression of his looks. When I look at him I see a bulldog chewing a wasp, but some women seem to find the rough-and-ready look attractive.’

  ‘Don’t confuse “rough-and-ready” with “rugged”,’ Rink said, still laughing.

  ‘Or “rugged” with “conceited”?’

  ‘No harm in believing in yourself, brother,’ he countered.

  To Kirstie I said, ‘That’s why he never wears a hat. He can’t find one big enough for his head.’

  The banter was serving its purpose. It alleviated Kirstie’s embarrassment, but also pushed away the lingering memory of her dream. She tucked back her hair and reached for the cap that had fallen on the floor between my feet. As she leaned close I experienced a mild flutter of electricity that rode my body all the way to my throat, and my senses were filled with her closeness and the scent of her perfume. It was an intimate moment. Kirstie was staring at me, and I looked enquiringly.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘You were in my dream.’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘Yes. But not like that.’ She gently shoved Rink’s shoulder with the heel of her palm. ‘I was being chased.’

  ‘By me?’

  ‘No . . . someone else . . .’ She didn’t expound, but I noted a flicker of horror dart across her features again. ‘But you were there. You were leading me to safety, but, well, I didn’t make it.’

  ‘Want to tell me who was chasing you?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t remember.’

  Kirstie was lying, that was obvious, but I wasn’t about to press her. My attention was drawn by Rink’s soft hiss. I looked past him to lights in the road ahead. They were red lights, strobing off and on, interspersed by a blazing white that cut harshly into my retina. Someone stepped away from a car, waving a flashlight up and down, then directly on the front of our car. The torch bleached the windscreen; trail dust and dead bugs fogging the glass.

  ‘Fucking inept cops,’ Rink growled. ‘You’d think they’d know better than blinding a goddamn driver. What does he want to do . . . run me off the goddamn road?’

  Yeah, I thought, even an inept cop should be more careful than that.

  I checked the position of my gun, ensuring that the tail of my shirt concealed it.

  Chapter 11

  Having dozed for who knew how long, I had no clue where we were, other than it was somewhere remote. Still dark, with a patchwork of stars amid low cumulus clouds, the horizon was a meandering wave of hills and valleys, where only a few pinpoints of light showed habitation. On the opposite side sheer cliffs pushed for the heavens, broken fingers of stone interspersed by large and forbidding bulwarks. There were certainly no streetlights to illuminate the car sporting the gumball lights. Our headlights were countered by the strobing red and white, making the figure moving towards us appear to stutter in his stride with each flickering beam.

  ‘What the hell is this all about?’ Rink swayed uneasily as he applied pressure to the brake pedal.

  ‘Whatever it is, I don’t like it.’ I pressed a button on my cell phone, sending a prearranged signal to Harvey a few miles back.

  Kirstie looked fraught.

  ‘Don’t worry, just keep your head down like before and let me do the talking. Here . . . pull your cap down.’ I eased the peak round so that it covered much of her face, even as she settled into the corner as if deep in slumber. The cop would have to lean down on my side to see Kirstie, and I’d do my best to block his view.

  The flashlight beam stroked the windscreen, sending daggers of light inside.

  ‘Asshole,’ Rink said. ‘He’s deliberately trying to blind us.’

  ‘Playing the big man, trying to intimidate us,’ I muttered.

  I ignored the approaching figure, peering into the deep shadows between the buttresses of rock nearby. Nothing.

  ‘Son of a bitch!’ Rink transferred his foot to the gas and pushed the car forward.

  Immediately I snapped to battle mode, grabbed Kirstie and shoved her down into the space in the well behind Rink’s seat. In the next instant I slipped out my SIG and racked the slide. Then I snatched a look to see what the fuss was all about.

  The figure approaching us was deliberately blinding us, to conceal the shotgun he held braced to his shoulder with his opposite hand. As Rink pushed the car towards him, he had to move out of the way, drop the torch in order to get full control of the gun. He was wearing a uniform, I noted, but this was no random police stop. He fired the shotgun, and flame jetted through the air currents a full foot in length from the muzzle. Thankfully he was off balance and his shot ill-aimed. The lead pellets struck the top right of the windscreen, starring it, but the angle and velocity of the car helped redirect the shot up and away.

  Rink yanked down on the wheel, aiming the car sideways at the cop, who had to leap for his life. He went down on his knees, but then twisted quickly and fired off another wild shot. Hitting the window button, I swung my SIG to cover him but was loath to shoot him. Despite firing on us, he was still a cop and out of bounds where my codes of practice were concerned. In the dark I caught only brief details of his uniform, but it appeared official – though I wasn’t familiar with the local police dress code. Then again, his approach – not to mention his choice of weaponry, which I now recognised as a sawn-off pump-action shotgun – wasn’t regular police tactics.

  We tore away from him as Rink trod on the gas.

  The cop fired another load of shot after us, and the dull concussion echoed through the car as the pellets struck the trunk. I checked Kirstie was unhurt. Her face was a pale oval, her eyes large and start
led, but there was no hint of pain. Up close a sawn-off is a devastating weapon, but not much use against a car moving at speed.

  Then we were flashing past his parked car, and there was nothing that marked it as an official police vehicle. It was a bottle-green pick-up truck, the wheel arches corroded. The rack of lights on top looked jerry-rigged, fed by a cable running through the open driver’s window, probably to the cigarette lighter inside.

  ‘That was no cop,’ Rink said.

  ‘What the hell was he then?’

  ‘Carjacker? Robber? Beats me.’

  ‘Probably not alone in that case.’

  My words proved prophetic. A hundred yards ahead of us another pick-up truck burst from hiding in a ravine that cut like a knife slash through the cliffs. The headlights were dead, but only until the truck hit the highway and swung towards us. Then they flicked to high beam.

  ‘Bastard!’ Rink cried as the harsh light invaded our car.

  Quickly checking behind, I saw the first man running for his vehicle, even as a third truck burst from concealment in our wake and accelerated after us.

  ‘We should’ve expected something like this,’ Rink growled. ‘Especially after what happened at the border.’

  Even though the cameras at the checkpoint had observed us, it didn’t follow that an ambush should have been laid for us here. I trusted that Harvey or one of the others would have spotted an obvious tail, so there was no way anyone could have known where we were heading. This had to be random: robbers lying in wait for the unwary. Yet something about the scenario troubled me more than the prospect of fighting off armed thieves.

  Rink ducked just as the windscreen exploded as a bullet struck the upper left corner. Chunks and slivers of glass rained over me, and out of instinct I squeezed my lids tight to avoid injury. When I looked again, the truck in our path was weaving side to side, attempting to block all lanes of the road. What did the driver think we were going to do? Stop?

  Rink forced more speed from our rental, and I leaned past him.

  ‘Ears,’ I said in warning, a split second before my SIG cracked noisily. Rink didn’t flinch but already he must have been half-deafened by the nearby blast. He gritted his teeth and powered directly at the truck, even as I continued to fire through the shattered windshield. Below me I could hear Kirstie’s faint yelps with each empty shell that bounced across her shoulders. I watched where my bullets struck the other vehicle and tightened my grouping. Moments before I’d been reluctant to shoot; thinking the first figure was a cop. Now the rules had changed. I placed six rounds through the low corner of the windscreen exactly where a driver would be hiding behind the steering wheel. This time the truck shot across the shoulder at the side of the road and impacted with the cliff. The hood crumpled, the rear end thrown skyward, and a man was ejected from the bed, flailing in the air before he too struck the unforgiving rocks and moved no more. I doubted the driver had survived my bullets, and the likelihood was that any passengers would have been squashed when the cab was compressed to a quarter of its original dimensions.

  Two vehicles were still pursuing us, and likely a number of armed and determined enemies, but now the road ahead was clear, and no way could they catch us. Not that I was ready to cheer just yet. I’m a firm believer in Murphy’s Law, and if anything could go wrong it probably would. There are too many variables to rely on luck remaining on your side. A tyre could blow out, the engine could seize, or another third-party element could enter the fray, and slow us enough for our pursuers to catch up.

  Or Rink could hit a one-eighty skid so that we again faced our enemies, which was precisely what he did.

  Ordinarily the tactic would be madness, but I wasn’t complaining. The only way we could be certain of escape from these determined attackers was to neutralise them and we couldn’t do that while running away. With a screech of rubber on blacktop, the car shot towards the two oncoming vehicles. I hit the release on the magazine and it fell in the spare front seat, rattling across the cooler box. Then as Rink accelerated I slapped a fresh mag in place and readied the SIG for action. The first truck’s gumball lights punched shards of conflicting hues across the cliffs that were now on our right. The third vehicle in their pack had overtaken the first, and was heading for us; illuminated by flashing lights were two men on the back who were holding long guns. One of them fired but the round was lost in the desert somewhere; then the second man opened up, which was more troubling. He was armed with a machine-gun and was rattling bullets at us on semi-auto. They walloped the front grill like a roll of thunder. The car shuddered with the impact, but kept moving.

  Rink concentrated on driving. He had a gun in a shoulder rig, but to go for it now would compromise his control of the car. It was my SIG against a rifle and an MP5: not good odds.

  ‘Give me a weapon,’ Kirstie shouted. ‘I can help.’

  ‘You can help by keeping your head down,’ I shouted over the continuous roll of my gun as I rapidly squeezed the trigger. Within seconds the slide locked back and I hit the mag release and slapped in a fresh one.

  I had starred the windscreen of the oncoming truck, but hadn’t got the driver this time. The men on the back fired at us, and I could hear their war cries over the roaring of engines and rattle of gunfire. Bullets shattered one of our headlights and tore chunks in the hood. Rink ducked and dived, avoiding bits of heated metal thrown through the open window.

  ‘Drop that motherfucker with the machine-gun or we’re dead!’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to do!’

  I leaned fully over the passenger seat so I had a clear view through the windshield, and loosed a close grouping of three rounds at the machine-gunner. Whether I hit him or not, I wasn’t sure, but he disappeared, ducking down behind the safety of the cab.

  Then we were swerving around the truck and I caught the pale flashes of passing faces both inside and on the rear of the truck. Four men in total, plus the bogus cop. Our odds weren’t looking much better than before. We had to change things in our favour.

  Rink pushed the car forward, steam now billowing out from under the buckled hood. I craned round, watching the truck driver perform a decent one-eighty turn. The gunners were up again and firing. It would take time to catch up with us, unless the damage to the engine of our car stalled it within seconds. Something under the hood was making a regular knocking noise, but then that could have been the bullets hitting the road beneath our wheels.

  Kirstie struggled to move, but was jammed by my knees. She was reaching for her purse, and I had an idea she wasn’t looking for her lipstick. ‘Leave it alone, Kirstie. It’s more important you keep out of the way than join in the fight.’

  She struggled free, snapping at me, ‘No one is going to stop me saving Benjamin!’

  ‘A bullet in your goddamn skull will,’ I snapped back, and I shoved her down, just as we came in range of the bogus cop. He was driving much slower, wary that we might try to ram him, and had poked the muzzle of the shotgun out of his window. Flame erupted from the barrel and lead peppered the rental. Something incredibly hot burned a furrow across my scalp and I knew that I’d been hit. Thankfully it was a glancing blow and the shot didn’t embed itself in my cranium. Still, it was as if I’d taken a punch to my forehead and white sparks flashed through my mind. Blood began pouring across my features. I questioned the validity of the man’s bloodline, cursing viciously as I batted blood from my eyes. Immediately I squared the muzzle of the SIG on the spot behind the shotgun and fired. My shots were wild and designed to halt a second blast from the shotgun. The driver hit the brakes, swerving on to the hard shoulder, then on to the soft sand: unfortunately he didn’t collide with the cliffs the way his first buddies had.

  In our engine something shrieked, and more steam hissed banshee-like from under the hood. The car bucked as it began to lose power. Then it bucked again and the engine went silent.

  ‘Shit,’ I said against the new hush.

  The other truck was barrelling up b
ehind us; on the back the gunmen rose up and the machine-gun and rifle spat fire.

  Chapter 12

  The cliffs were our best hope of refuge, but at that moment we were rolling on tyres alone, and though Rink angled off the road we only made it a few yards before the front sank in the loose sand. Rink piled out of the door, pulling his gun from his shoulder rig, while I grabbed hold of Kirstie and yanked her up.

  ‘OK, get your gun. Things have changed now.’

  Kirstie snatched her purse, and I was already ducking out of the door. Our saving grace was that we still had the car side on to the approaching gunmen, but that advantage would last seconds only. I helped Kirstie out, then pushed her down behind the wheel, to offer some protection: the car’s body wouldn’t halt a round, and Rink had already claimed the spot behind the engine.

  I took a quick look over the trunk, saw the truck had slowed and the men on the back were searching for targets. Beyond them, the bogus cop had abandoned his vehicle and was jogging towards the fight. But that was all I got of the scene; I snatched my head down as bullets caromed from the roof of the car, spinning wildly away among the nearby cliffs. A second later, Rink returned fire across the hood, and his bullets banged loudly as they struck the truck. Brakes screeched.

  Kirstie was scrabbling through her belongings and came up holding the gun she’d chosen from the stash we’d brought with us. It was a Glock 19, a good fit for her hand. I watched her slip the clip out, check her load and then slap it back in place, before racking the slide. She knew her guns. But it was one thing shooting paper targets, quite another a living thing. Particularly when the living target was shooting back. ‘Your safety’s the most important thing, Kirstie. Only use your gun if you’ve no other option.’

  Rink glanced our way.