Bootlegged Angel (32 page)

‘Thanks a bunch,’ he said angrily. ‘Do you know the hassle I have to go through to . . .’

Yonk was bending for the bottom case.

I jumped off the case I was standing on and positioned myself behind my stack, put my back to it and pushed.

I don’t know how many cases hit Yonk. I think I managed to dislodge about a dozen and most of them seem to bounce satisfyingly off parts of his body.

‘Shit!’ screamed Lawrence, jumping out of the way.

Then, when he saw Yonk wasn’t moving, he swung a foot at his head and shouted, ‘Bastard!’

‘Come on,’ I yelled to Beatrice, grabbing her hand and jumping down from the trailer, careful to avoid broken glass. Beer was seeping everywhere. It was as if Yonk was bleeding
beer.

Lawrence was making to kick Yonk again, just to take out his frustration on something that wouldn’t kick back. He was actually clearing broken cases of beer away from Yonk’s head to
give himself a better shot.

‘Is he dead?’ Beatrice said.

‘He deserves to be!’ Lawrence screamed, pulling back his foot.

‘That’s enough,’ I said.

Lawrence looked at me long enough to realise I was holding Mel’s shotgun on him and lowered his foot to the floor. Beatrice looked at me wide-eyed and I prayed she wouldn’t say
something stupid.

‘Find something to tie him up with.’

Lawrence looked at me sulkily.

‘There are some old ropes in the trailer,’ said Beatrice.

I looked in and found she was right. Yonk and Fatboy had tied four lengths of rope to the inner stanchions of the trailer to hang on to while they were riding in the back.

‘Get it,’ I told Lawrence, waving the shotgun at him.

He scowled, but climbed up into the trailer.

I climbed over the debris of smashed beer bottles, treading on one of Yonk’s legs in the process, and moved a case of Kronenbourg so I could remove the mobile phone from his back
pocket.

One of the cases had caught him on the back of the head and smashed his face into the floor. His nose was broken and bleeding freely.

‘Hurry up, Lawrence, he won’t be out for long.’

Lawrence was struggling with the knots on one of the ropes, cursing to himself and then producing a lighter, flicking the flame and burning it off.

‘I want you to take the gun, Beatrice,’ I said so he could hear, ‘and keep an eye on both these two. I’m going to see if I can get Mel.’

I handed her the gun and she stuck her face up to mine and mouthed the words:

‘It’s not loaded.’

‘They don’t know that,’ I whispered.

I ran the length of the shed to where the door was still open as Rufus had left it when he wheeled Mel’s chair out, and peered out into the darkness. The rain had eased
off but it still took me a minute to focus on the one source of light this side of the North Downs. Even then, I was too far away to pick out the detail of what was going on.

Down across the sloping hop field and half-way up the track towards the wood were two pools of light formed by the intersecting beams of two sets of headlights. Occasionally a shadow of movement
would flit across the lights. As far as I could tell, the treasure hunt was still under way.

I jogged back down the length of the truck to where Lawrence was tying up Yonk under the two eyes and two barrels Beatrice was levelling at him. He had a five-foot length of rope and had put a
slip knot in one end to form a noose around Yonk’s neck. With the other end he secured Yonk’s wrists behind his back. Still unconscious, Yonk lay there and let him do it. An inflating
and then deflating bubble of blood from his nose told me he was still breathing.

‘What are you going to do?’ Lawrence asked.

‘A deal – if I can,’ I said.

‘What about Mel?’

‘She’s part of the deal,’ I said, but Beatrice didn’t look convinced.

‘I meant what are you going to do about me?’

Lawrence pulled a case of beer off the remaining pile and stood it on its end so he could sit on it. He picked up two loose bottles of beer, held one over the other until their metal tops locked
and then flicked until the top came off the bottom one with a fountain of foam which soaked his trousers.

‘You just sit there and take it easy,’ I said, resisting the urge to make him swallow the bottle as well as the beer. ‘We’ll see what happens if matey-boy out there
doesn’t want to deal.’

‘What if something happens to Mel?’ said Beatrice through gritted teeth.

‘Then I’ll leave him,’ I pointed to Lawrence, ‘to you.’

He looked distinctly uncomfortable at that and I wanted to say
If they move, kill ‘em
, but I didn’t think Beatrice would get the reference and anyway, she had no
ammunition.

‘How are you going to deal with Rufus?’ he said.

I showed him the mobile I had taken from Yonk.

‘I’m going to give him a ring.’

I tried to guess how much beer we had managed to load into the trailer before I closed the rear doors. However much it was, it would have to do.

I jogged back towards the cab, tugging my gloves tighter and zipping up my jacket. At the back of the cab I stopped and disconnected the red air line which released the brakes on the trailer.
With those out and whatever load we had stacked in the most unsafe position towards the rear axle, I had – I hoped – a highly unstable vehicle. I also hoped I knew what I was doing.

I climbed up into the cab and started the engine, letting it idle while I climbed down again and pushed the sliding door open with my shoulder. Back in the cab, I released the tractor brakes and
edged the rig out of the shed, lining it up with the concrete track disappearing down into the dark field.

Then I hit all the lights, full beams, and the horn.

The mobile in my pocket rang within fifteen seconds.

‘Yonk! My man! What the fuck’s happenin’?’

‘Hello, Rufus, I was just going to call you. Found your treasure trove yet?’

‘Who the –?’

‘Nobody you know, Rufus,’ I said, anxious not to give him too much time to work out an edge. ‘Straight deal for you. Take your money and let the girl go. We’ll clean
things up here.’

‘You’ve still got some of my money,’ he said, the instinctive businessman.

I had forgotten that the briefcase I had collected that afternoon was still lying on the floor of the shed near Scooter’s body.

‘Cut your losses,’ I said into the phone. ‘Go now.’

‘Put my man Yonk on.’

This was taking too long. I revved the engine, hoping the noise sounded as threatening across the fields as it did in the cab.

‘Can’t do that, he’s indisposed.’

‘In. Dis. Posed,’ he said slowly, like it was three words. ‘That’s interesting. Don’t think Yonk’s ever been that before. You’re a man of talent, Mr
Angel. You hurt him?’

‘Not as bad as you hurt Scooter. Now let the girl go and get the fuck out of here.’

‘And if I choose not the fuck to get the fuck out of here, what then?’

‘Then I’m gonna run right over you,’ I said. And hung up.

I gunned the engine, dropped into fourth gear and floored the accelerator.

As the truck moved forward, agonisingly slowly at first or so it seemed, I picked out the wet, mud-smeared track and basically pointed the wheels at it.

I was still too far away to see anything clearly, but I thought I could make out a blurring of the headlights of the cars up the other side of the slope and then, quite definitely, one set of
headlights began to move. And they were retreating, back up the hill into the wood.

I hit the horn again as I changed gears, picking up speed. If I had been where they were, facing a charging truck lit up like a Christmas tree, I would have got the hell out of there.

Except the lights which had gone backwards were now coming forward, down the slope, aiming for a spot exactly where I reckoned my forty-one-foot truck would be in about ninety seconds.

Even worse, the headlights of what I could now make out was Scooter’s Jeep were picking something up on the limit of their beams. Another vehicle in the middle of the track, going hell for
leather downhill.

It was Mel in her wheelchair, pumping her arms like pistons. If the Jeep didn’t catch her and kick her airborne, she would wrap herself around the radiator of my truck. There was no
alternative and it was going to happen any second.

The phone rang.

‘You want to play chicken? Let’s play chicken!’

Rufus’s voice was a distorted, metallic scream in my ear. I flung the mobile on to the passenger seat and moved my foot over the brake. My speedometer read 45 miles per hour and I could
feel the trailer swinging behind me on the slippery surface.

‘I’m gonna beat you!’ Rufus shouted out of the phone. ‘She’s mine. Watch her fly, man! Watch her fly!’

Trouble was, he was right.

There was no way I could reach Mel before the Jeep and even if I did it would only be to smash her to pulp. My hand hovered over the Differential Lock switches. With those on I could risk
swinging off the track as I braked and hope to get enough grip on the churned-up field to avoid totalling Mel, the rig and me.

‘Here I come, little lady!’ shouted the ghost voice in the cab.

Mel’s chair had reached the bottom of the slope where it turned up the track I was speeding down. Rufus and the Jeep were yards away from her as the chair’s momentum slowed. Feet
away.

‘Holy shit!’ boomed Rufus’s voice.

In an instant, Mel threw herself from her chair, landing on the track close enough for me to see her face in my headlights. She rolled over twice, like a commando in training, and then she was
up and running with long, loping strides towards the hop field to my right.

‘Keep running!’ I shouted, though there was no way she could hear me.

The Jeep hit the empty wheelchair, booting it up into the air and on to the bonnet of the Jeep where it smashed into the windscreen. The Jeep swerved wildly and began to lose momentum, skidding
sideways into my path.

I forgot about the Differential Lock, pounded the accelerator, swung the wheel to the left off the track and as the cab wheels took their first bounce on earth rather than concrete, I stood on
the brakes.

The trailer, now out of alignment and travelling faster than the tractor unit, its wheels still on the slippery track, began to hang out and overtake the cab.

I had a birds’-eye view in my wing mirror. Rufus got an even better one as forty feet of badly loaded trailer jacknifed straight towards him; an unstable, unstoppable battering ram.

I think I was almost in a standing position, hanging on to the wheel for dear life when the impact came.

I was probably screaming as well, as the trailer smashed the Jeep off the track and right out of my line of sight.

I know Rufus was screaming up to the end. I could hear him.

I was lucky that the trailer had not smashed the Jeep into the cab. I was lucky that the cab unit was still upright, its front wheels buried in the mud of the field. I was
lucky that when my head was going towards the windscreen at high speed I managed to get my forearm up to protect it. I knew drivers who had survived a jacknifing and walked away but never one who
had deliberately jacknifed their rig. Lucky old me.

The first thing was the silence, then the disorientation as I was not sure which way the tractor unit was facing.

Then I heard an engine in the distance and turned my head slowly just to make sure my neck worked until I saw headlights up the hill. They swung around and disappeared, the sound of the engine
dying away in the woods and the dark.

Through the fuzz between my ears I worked out that it must have been Fatboy disappearing in Rufus’s BMW.

I fumbled the cab door open and looked over the wreckage of the trailer and the Jeep. Rufus himself wasn’t going anywhere. The Jeep was on its side and only about half the width it had
been when it left the factory. The trailer was crumpled and piled on top of it. There was beer pouring out of the buckled rear doors and an occasional pop as another bottle exploded.

It all seemed a hell of a waste.

‘You okay?’ somebody said breathlessly below me.

Mel was standing, legs apart, hands on hips, her chest heaving with exertion.

‘Not doing as well as you,’ I said. ‘Nice line in miracle recoveries, I see.’

She gave me her hard look.

‘You were trying to run me down! You were coming straight for me!’

‘Aw, stop moaning! I knew you’d get out of the way in time.’

Her face softened.

‘When did you guess?’

‘First night, when you said you’d got Ivy a brandy after her fall. You have to stand behind the bar to reach the brandy optic. I know,’ I said proudly. ‘Plus today, when
you found my mobile phone. I left it upstairs.’

‘Bugger!’ she said softly.

I had reminded myself and checked to see if my mobile was working. It was, but then I had another thought and leaned over the passenger seat to find the small fold-out phone I had taken from
Yonk. Eerily, it was still on, the line to Rufus and the Jeep still open.

I switched it off and added it to my collection, the effort of straightening up making me dizzy. I shook my head to clear it and carefully climbed down the cab steps. Mel took hold of my arm to
steady me.

‘Was it Christian’s idea?’ I asked her, just to distract her from the wreck of the Jeep. ‘Your Harley Street boyfriend, was it his scam?’

‘Sort of. I did have the accident, it just wasn’t that serious.’

‘But you thought you could scam EuroDisney into a mega-bucks compensation payment?’

‘Something like that,’ she said quietly.

‘Was your mother in on it?’

‘No, she wasn’t, she thought it was a genuine injury.’

‘Going to be a bit miffed, is she?’

I took three or four steps to make sure my legs worked. Nothing seemed to be broken, so I wouldn’t be able to do a deal with Christian myself.

‘
She
didn’t tell
me
she was ripping off the brewery, skimming Scooter’s rent money,’ Mel said grimly.

‘I bet you didn’t tell her you knew what Scooter was up to all along. You even came down to the pub to check me out for him, didn’t you? I bet you acted as look-out for
him.’