Country of the Blind (42 page)

239

"Aye, fair enough," shrugged Paul, and pushed off into the water. The river to the south was about twenty feet across, the smooth calm of its surface hinting at its depth, but belying the speed of its current. It wasn't swift, by any means, but it did pull them along steadily, eliminating the need for more paddling than was required to negotiate the bends and to keep pace with one another.

Paul had been right. They were well hidden down below the banks, they were moving faster (for considerably less effort), and noise would not betray them. There was little to disturb the night other than the soft lap of water against their fibreglass vessels and the occasional gentle splash of a navigational paddlestroke. And the loud, shrill, electronic shriek of a portable phone. Paul almost capsized. It rang a second time before he could reach between his legs to where it was sitting, but he was lost for a moment as to what to do.

"Fuck's sake, answer the thing," Tam hissed from the canoe in front, turning his head. "Before the whole country hears us."

"B-but what. . .

who. . . ?" stumbled Paul, looking alternately from the phone to his father as it rang a third time.

"Just
answer
it!"

Paul pressed the Receive button and cut off the fourth shriek, thoughts cascading rapidly through his head as to who the caller would be expecting to answer, and therefore who might be on the other end. He swallowed and cleared his throat.

"Hello," he said sheepishly.

Tam turned his head around again, even in the moonlight able to read the bewildered incredulity on his son's face, a look he had seen too many times of late.

Oh Christ.

Paul held up the phone.

"Dad," he breathed, as if he couldn't believe his own words. "It's for you."

240

TWELVE

It made a sort of sklumpfing sound, going in so suddenly, so without warning, and so lightning fast, metal forcing its way forward, flesh and cloth giving way painfully and bloodily to sharp, cold steel.

Harcourt had edged the door open with a practised delicacy. He tucked his gun into the back of his belt with his left hand, gripping the knife in his right. He placed the gloved fingers of his left hand loosely on the door, spread and curved like a spindly insect with a black leather exoskeleton, his hand working as a suspension system to smooth and temper the force of his arm as he pushed forward. The door, then, didn't so much swing open as slide away from him like a smooth-rolling drawer.

He had stepped inside and out of his shoes, fearing the rubber soles would squeak on the polished floorboards. The lightweight curtains over the casement window glowed with orange streetlight from outside, the assassin's equivalent of a bomber's moon. There was no sound but the breathing of the two bodies, lying there motionless, obliviously unaware that they would be staying that way. She was on the right, lying on her side, face turned away from the doorway, her hair spilling out over the quilt. He was the nearer, lying face up, one arm by his side, the other tucked under the pillow to help support his head.

He'd get the bloke out of the way first, quick blow straight through the throat. There'd be time later to make it look frenzied. That way he could have some fun with the woman before he did her too. Make the scenario more authentic; in fact it would be negligently suspicious not to. What kind of knife-wielding crazed maniac breaks into a bedroom and murders two people without shagging the tart?

Harcourt paced forward slowly, concentrating on the face of the man, but staying aware of what was in his peripheral vision. He was standing over him by the side of the bed when he became worryingly aware of a sniffing sound amidst the breathing, and realised with relief that it was himself. Wasn't the first time. You could be so intent on what you were doing, so focused on the victim or victims, and upon what you could see, that you kind of forgot you were there in the flesh, as if you were watching it on closed circuit. 241

He placed his left foot on the wooden base of the bed, like it was a stirrup, and swung his right leg over the sleeping man, touching his foot down lightly on the quilt, then lowered his frame, sliding his right knee into the space between the bodies. He was straddling the man, but without resting his weight on him - yet. He heard his own sniffing noise again and thought for a second he saw the man's eyeball move behind the lid. He switched his breathing to his mouth instead, which was quieter, but made a slight sucking sound. Harcourt knew he tended to breathe in sharply as he brought the knife up, just before that first precipitous moment of attack, so, checking his weight balance and raising the knife above his shoulder, he breathed in silently by opening his mouth wide.

Upon which the man stuck a gun in it.

Sklumpf.

Parlabane was, to be frank, completely fucking sick of this. There was an infuriatingly egocentric arrogance to the fact that they probably all thought they were the first bastard to have a go at it. He wouldn't even dignify this particular loser's attempt by saying he had been face-to-face with death. Death wasn't even in
town
that night, and if he had been, he wouldn't have been seen - well, you know - in the company of this fucking arsehole. Parlabane was not, on the whole, a light sleeper. When the gods had been smiling, when Sarah had been smiling, when the story broke or the cheque cleared, when Celtic and Rangers both lost, several pints down and feeling no pain, he was a hard man to rouse. But when pondlife like Michael Swan had been doing away with billionaires and had a party of hitmen out on clean-up duty, looking to tie up a loose end that was asleep in his living room, a bird farting outside on the telephone wire would have startled him. The scratching of a blade effecting criminal damage to his kitchen window was more than enough.

He had shaken Sarah, placing a hand over her mouth and explaining the situation with a few brief gestures and whispers. Sounded like three of them coming in over the kitchen sink, unquestionably armed. He told her to lie back and pretend to be asleep until he said otherwise, no matter what she saw or heard. She nodded nervously but unquestioning; he wouldn't tell her how to give an anaesthetic.

Parlabane reached under the bed on his side, padding his hand quietly along the boards until he touched it: a nine-millimetre Beretta, held in place by masking tape. He pulled it loose with one hand while his other located the magazine, then drew both of them under the quilt. He slid the magazine into place and smoothly, quietly gripped the top of the shaft and pulled it back 242

to chamber the round, heart-wallopingly grateful to himself for keeping the mechanism clean and oiled. What noise there was was muffled by the covers. Parlabane swallowed hard, contemplating what he could do. He had the element of surprise in his favour, plus the fact that he was a prodigiously accurate shot, something to do with his "mutant middle-ear and short-assed low centre of gravity", according to his friend Larry, who had once taken him to an LAPD practice range. Larry had been admiring but enviously acerbic, talking distastefully like it was some kind of deformity. Parlabane had been even less pleased with his new-found talent. It had scared the hell out of him and he'd resolved never to touch another firearm. Circumstance had subsequently over-ruled that resolution.

He knew from experience that the level of resistance these testosteroneoverloaded fuckwits expected from innocent victims seldom extended to closerange ballistic weapons fire, but at three against one there was nonetheless something unmistakably suicidal about it. He looked across to Sarah, lying with her face away from the door, trembling very slightly, and thought then of Nicole, their principal target, asleep and defenceless in the living room, where he had heard them go.

Christ.

Conscience, morality and sheer logistics tortuously tangled the paths before him.

But in the time it had taken him to warn Sarah and prepare his weapon, he realised the decision had been made for him, as he heard his front door being unlocked. Whatever had happened in the living room was over - one way or the other. Through the wall he could hear footsteps in the close. He had lain back with the gun gripped in his right hand, under the pillow, and fractionally opened his right eye, watching the door.

Then the latest candidate for the post of Jack Parlabane's Assassin had walked in to receive his Dear John letter.

The hard, sharp triangular sight on top of the barrel had snagged for a fraction of a second on the wool around the top of the balaclava's mouth-slot, before its momentum snapped it free and drove the muzzle viciously into the back of the failure's throat. Parlabane pulled back the hammer until it locked and forced the sight deeper into the soft flesh of the not-assassin's palate.

"Hair trigger and the safety's off," he said, staring furiously into the man's eyes as they peered out through holes in the Wool. "And I'm not just talking about the gun, by the way."

Parlabane sat up, peremptorily tugging the weapon up and backwards, gouging excruciatingly with the sight. "Arms out. Wide," he commanded.

"Drop the knife. You disobey, you try anything, you rock the bed, you even 243

look
at me funny and it's gaunny be brains tartare served on a culee of loser's blood all over that wall behind you."

The man dropped the knife on to the duvet.

"Sarah," Parlabane instructed. "Get the knife. Pad him down, he'll have a gun somewhere."

Sarah slipped out of the bed and walked quickly round behind him, now trembling again as she stood at his back and ran her hands around the intruder.

"Sarah," Parlabane added with nagging impatience, "I wouldn't stand directly behind him if I were you."

"Oh, sorry," she whispered, ducking so that she was out of the bullet's probable path. She patted her hands down the man's spine and found the gun tucked, muzzle-down, into the back of his trousers. So
that
was what arse cleavage was for. She backed away, training the pistol on the failure, and switched the light on.

Parlabane saw it: the look, the flinch. The light went on in the bedroom and a light went off in the guy's mind; the moment he saw Parlabane's eyes properly and realised there was going to be no bluff to call.

"Yeah, that's right," he said, burning his diabolical stare indelibly into the man's retinas. "And don't think you're the only one here with connections. I'll have someone in here repainting that wall while your weighted carcass is falling off a ferry in the Firth of Forth. And try saying
that
with a gun in your mouth, prick."

Sarah had edged out of the room. Parlabane was momentarily concerned for what she might see, but as they had each witnessed a roughly equal share of mutilated bodies (Sarah's ones frequently still alive - at least temporarily) and as he was otherwise engaged, there was no point in being sexist about who went.

"Nicole's gone," she said loudly, looking through the doorway to the empty settee and discarded quilt. Sarah ran into the living room, to the windows that looked on to East London Street. She saw a black Ford Mondeo driving off at speed, and made out the head of a man in the back window before it disappeared towards Broughton Road.

"Phone Jenny," Parlabane called out. "Get her round here pronto."

Sarah walked briskly back to the hall and speed-dialled the number.

"All right, just let me work this out for myself, and don't interrupt," Parlabane said to the failure, kneeling up on the bed. "Couldn't kill her on the spot because you didn't want anyone to know she was ever here, in this flat where myself and my good lady were to be found murdered. And before you top her, you've got to find out how clued up she is and who she's told, in case you 244

need to add some more names to the death-list, where there are already ticks against Lafferty and Campbell."

The failure's eyes flashed at the mention of the names.

"What, you wondering what else I know? Well I know this. I know one of you fuckers killed my friend by force-feeding him a cyanide capsule. I know that some of your wee balaclava brothers killed Voss and his missus up in Perth. I know that you were going to kill me and then Sarah, and I'm trying to restrain my imagination from speculating what else was on your agenda before you planned to leave here tonight."

Parlabane put a foot on the floor and stepped off the bed, pushing the gun roughly forward until the man gagged, then drawing it back a little and lifting it up, the man's head with it, indicating he should rise to his feet.

"What I don't know," he continued in a slow, breathy tone, "is where your pals have taken Nicole Carrow, but believe me, Jim, right now I'm not sure whether I want to know that quite as badly as I want to pull this trigger."

"Jenny's on her way -
oh shit
," said Sarah, walking into the bedroom as the failure backed out of it, prompted as ever by Parlabane's nine-mill. He wasn't as big as he had seemed, she noticed. He was taller that Parlabane, but then most people were taller than Parlabane, and his build seemed deflated now that he was slouchingly upright. As they edged past her she could see blood beginning to seep into the balaclava amidst the drool from the man's mouth and the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes from the sharp, constant intrusion of the metal into the delicately sensitive tissue in the roof of his mouth. The intruder's gaze occasionally strayed nervously towards his feet as he was forced reluctantly backwards, but Parlabane's never faltered from blazing into his captive's face.

"Get the door, please, Sarah," he said quietly, as they made their four-legged way through the hall.

As she swung the front door in, Parlabane's arm straightened and he angled the gun upwards and more urgently backwards, seeming suddenly to drive at the intruder as his feet picked unsteadily at the floor of the close. It forced him off balance as Parlabane lengthened his own stride, his weight distribution low and solid like he was a bowling ball and the failure was a pin. Parlabane kicked a foot against the close wall to turn the man as he began falling, the small of his back hitting the banister with a wooden thud and a low hum of vibrating metal. Parlabane shifted his weight on to his front foot and toppled him over the edge, the failure's upper body out in space above the wide spiral, his feet straining to touch the floor on the other side, his coccyx the fulcrum, the banister the pivot. He pushed the gun out, causing the man to gag if he tried to strain back towards safety, and stretching his 245