Hunters: A Trilogy (58 page)

‘Are we all clear?’ Ken asked, as he re-joined his friend.

‘Yeah, everything’s fine…is he coming around yet?’ Mike said. Seeing Ken’s nod of affirmation, he shut the back door and then both men returned to their seats in the Spear. In fascination, they sat and watched the whole scene on the screen to their front.

Within seconds, O’Hara was on his feet and doing a damned fine impression of a madman. The argument he had with himself seemed as though it might even end in violence.

‘What are we gonna to do if he shoots himself?’ asked Mike, as he watched the man angrily wave his arms about.

‘Yeah, well…that would still be mission complete, wouldn’t it?’ Ken replied.

He didn’t really care about O’Hara and was currently more concerned about Jane. If the truth be known, Ken would have quite happily gone out there and shot the skinny little prick himself. He need not have worried, though. O’Hara stopped, looked at his watch, and then puked long and hard into the bushes. Wiping a hand across his mouth, he stooped towards his bag and undid the zip. When he stood again they saw the weapon in his hand.

Ken, feeling Mike stiffen beside him, said, ‘Don’t worry about it, that peashooter would never be able to get through this thing!’

Mike looked at him and smiled. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ he said, ‘it’s just weird seeing people carrying guns around the streets in broad daylight, especially over here – it’s like being in Kabul!’ He turned back to the screen and watched as O’Hara walked across the road and into the car park beyond.

He had the holdall over one shoulder and the weapon in his right hand. He never acknowledged the driver of the Jag as he walked into the warehouse. The other three men were gathered at the far end of the building, their bodies glowing on the scanner as they stood next to a table. As they heard him enter, one of the men reached up and pulled something to one side, Ken couldn’t see what it was, but Stevo ducked under it and made his way over to them.

All four men gathered around the table and waited whilst he unloaded some items from the bag. They stood around for a while and it appeared as though they were listening to the biggest man, he lifted something from the table into the air and then pointed at the other three. Throwing the object back down, he walked over and they saw him slapping one of the other men around the face. There seemed to be a lot of shouting and arm-waving going on. The big man looked as though he was getting very annoyed – he pointed at the others and then angrily kicked the wall behind him. Stevo reached forward and picked up something from the table. The other three men stepped backwards in alarm.

Mike whispered: ‘That’s the gun! This is where the crap hits the…’

Without warning, a burst of light erupted from the end of Stevo’s hand. Two of the men went down in a blaze of sparks. Their blood flared on the screen, darkening as it splashed onto the cold walls and concrete floor. A swarm of red-hot, empty shell-cases flickered merrily through the air, glowing like fireflies as they zigzagged across the screen. After firing one shorter burst into the fallen men, Stevo then turned to the last man, the big one, who stood in frozen anticipation by the table. They saw the man raise his hands in defence, but it was to be of no avail.

Right before their eyes, they watched as Stevo fired the remains of his magazine at the man, the final hail of bullets leaving the muzzle in a flashing spray of light. The rounds struck home and the man went down with a twisting jerk. Some of the bullets missed and ricocheted around the room, sending sparks flying off the walls and floor. Then the weapon jammed and they watched as Stevo started fumbling with it.

Ken hissed: ‘He’s out of ammo…’

O’Hara straightened and made as if to move towards the table, as he did so, the man on the floor made his own move. The watchers both saw a flash of light leaping from his hand. Stevo‘s head erupted in a spray of warm blood and bone. He staggered backwards for a second and then collapsed where he had been standing. The last thing that Ken and Mike saw, out of the side window of the Spear, was the black Jaguar roaring out of the car park.

Turning back to the monitor, they were in time to see the long-awaited words feeding onto its face: ‘Mission Completed.’

Without a word, Mike touched the control panel and waited for the transfer screen. They had delivered O’Hara and it looked as though he had met his end. There was nothing else for them to do. As they felt the rush of an incoming Shrink Down, both men’s thoughts were with Jane.

Part Two.

It was two days before the gang of kids who’d bunked off school for the afternoon did their usual trick – at approximately two thirty pm they broke in to the old warehouse for a game of football. They always did this, it was fun and the boys enjoyed the on-going war between themselves and the local security firm, whose employees spent a lot of wasted time in trying to catch the kids. Currently, the youngsters were up by about three-to-one. As the boys entered the dusty old building, the first thing they noticed was the smell.

‘Nah, don’t worry about it, you pussies… it’ll just be a dead rat or something…’ the gangly leader cajoled, to reassure his friends. With a wide-toothed grin, he said, ‘Come on, get the ball out – let’s play, same teams as last time, boys!’

Running to the far end of the room, he pulled the old tarpaulin to one side. Someone had suspended the big canvas from the roof and the material was taking up half the playing space. As he tugged on the heavy cloth, there was a thick, tearing sound and half of the material came down to hang lopsidedly from the steel beam above. Behind the tarpaulin lay a sight that made the boy gasp loudly. He hurriedly turned away, shouting to his friends as he did so. ‘Oh shit! Somebody call the police, call the cops!’ He grabbed his pals and told them to run. ‘Leggit, come on, scarper, there’s dead people back there, lots of dead people – let’s go, run!’ In obedience to their unelected leader’s command, the boys ran helter-skelter from the building, not stopping until they were two streets away.

Within seconds of receiving the panic-stricken call, the emergency switchboard had dispatched two patrol cars, along with an unneeded ambulance. Ten minutes later, the racing vehicles swung into the delivery yard of the old warehouse, sirens and lights bouncing crazily within the confines of the high brick walls. The young sergeant knew straight away that this one was a bit more than he was qualified to deal with. Leaving the warehouse in a hurry, the officer pushed the transmit button on his radio. It wasn’t too long before he and his men had cordoned off the area in readiness for the specialist agencies to arrive.

Within the hour the picture at the crime scene became much clearer.

‘Obviously gang-related, wouldn’t you say, Harry?’ DI Bolderson said, turning his large frame towards his partner.

‘Yes, you would have thought so, John. We’ll let SOCO make the final call, but it does appear as though there’s been a hell of a fight!’ Harry replied.

Shouldering the plastic tape out of the way, the short, grey-haired DS pushed into the sealed area where the bodies of the four men still waited. John Bolderson followed him through. The smell of death hung like a fog. A rank odour had begun to permeate through the warehouse. The pool of blood beneath each corpse had attracted a few flies, which were now starting to feed at their new watering-hole. It wouldn’t be long before the need for face masks arrived.

Initial impressions led them to believe that there had been a meeting, one that had turned very nasty. It was obviously drug-related as there were two shopping bags and one black holdall, all sitting in undeniable evidence upon the table. One bag held a large amount of what appeared to be cocaine. The other bag was stuffed with cannabis resin. Two of the men were slumped together. They looked as though they had been killed simultaneously, their bodies entwined like lovers where they had fallen after facing the hail of bullets that had cut them down.

Bolderson looked down at the blood-speckled faces of the corpses. He was sure that he recognised them. ‘Those two are from the Cracker Gang, aren’t they, Harry?’ he asked his partner.

‘Actually, I think they all are…’ Harry said. ‘Look at Mister Blondie over there, surely you recognise that bastard?’ He pointed at the huddled corpse lying by the table.

It was difficult to say for sure as the bottom part of the face was blown away. The man’s lower mandible dangled below his left ear, hanging precariously by a thread of flesh. A single gold tooth glinted beneath the corpse’s shattered top lip. There was a wall behind the body, small pieces of flesh, teeth, and bone fragments lay streaked across its white surface.

‘Well, well, well! It looks as though our friend, Stevo, has finally received his comeuppance, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, either, if you were to ask me!’ Bolderson said, only just managing to restrain his laughter. Winking at his colleague, he said, ‘Make sure that forensics do a proper job on him, won’t you, Harry? I’d be really interested to see where the gun has come from and, more importantly, where it’s been!’ He reached over, and in typical TV-cop fashion, used his pen to pull the blood-spattered machine-pistol away from the corpse. Several empty shell cases rolled out of the way as he did so.

Glancing at the final body, Harry said, ‘John, you’d best come and see this!’

The sense of urgency in Harry’s voice stirred Bolderson from his crouching position. Rising to his full six-and-a-half feet, he turned to where his colleague was looking down at the last man. With his leather-soled brogues clicking officially on the concrete floor, Bolderson stalked over to join Harry.

‘Bloody hell, that’s Jacko Jackson isn’t it, what’s he doing here? I thought he’d given all this up and gone legitimate,’ Bolderson said, knees cracking loudly as he crouched to examine the smartly-dressed corpse.

The body had been almost cut in two by a hail of 9mm bullets, which, they guessed, had probably been dispensed by the MAC-10. Jacko’s dead hand still clutched a .50 Desert Eagle automatic pistol. The two policemen were able to make out a wad of money bulging in his jacket pocket. They weren’t sure of the exact denomination of the bills because they were covered in blood, but it appeared to be rather a lot of money. By the looks of things, Jacko had only fired one round from the pistol, its empty shell-case stood out like a sore thumb amongst the plethora of smaller, 9mm casings littering the floor.

‘That may be the bullet that took O’Hara’s face clean off, huh?’ John Bolderson asked, with a barely-concealed grin starting to widen across his craggy face once more. ‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ he whispered. ‘I have to laugh – these pricks have just saved me ten years of work! All of them were involved in the chip shop killing, especially that skinny bastard, Stevo! I have witness statements all over my bloody desk, and yet not one of them will dare stand up in court. Without them, we don’t have a shred of evidence.’

Bolderson walked over to O’Hara’s corpse and stood staring at it for a moment. ‘Everybody knows that he was there, but we just can’t prove it…’ Nodding at the machine-pistol accusingly, he said, ‘Let’s just hope this time the evidence has been given to us on a plate, eh, Harry?’

John Bolderson’s hopes were undeniably fulfilled. The machine-pistol was later identified as having been the murder weapon at the chip shop. Three more pistols at the warehouse were linked to various other crimes, and the cocaine was identified as being part of a particular batch that was currently doing the rounds. There was no other information available. The four had met in the warehouse, proceedings appeared to have turned nasty, and the meeting ended with Stevo gunning down the others. Two-and-two makes four.

However, it was, as always, Jacko who seemed to have had the last laugh. As he lay mortally wounded, the Londoner had managed one final shot from his oversized hand-gun; his last act was enough to remove most of Steven O’Hara’s face, which permanently removed the blond-headed man’s presence from the planet. The only thing missing was any form of transport and the police guessed that the driver of Jackson’s car had high-tailed it when the shooting started; they also knew they would be wasting their time trying to find him. It was an open and shut case; they didn’t spend too much time chasing other leads, particularly since there weren’t any. Besides, they were quite sure that the demise of the four gang-members would bring peace to many people. They were right.

***

Ironically, the wild-odds bet that Stevo had placed on the two o’clock race turned out to be a smart one. The books had been closed at nearly two-hundred-to-one. A beautiful filly named Angelica, a rank outsider, crossed the winning post in the lead by less than a nose. Malky took the winnings and gave them to Jeanie.

‘She’s a good kid and deserves a break, especially now that useless prick has gone,’ he thought, with a fat-faced smile. Malky was in a position to be generous – O’Hara had been the only one who had put anything on the nag.

The young genius, PJ Rogers, never did buy any ‘sweets’. He was far too busy doing other things. Other things like studying under a scholarship in America, where he had been sent as a guest of the world’s largest software company. PJ loved life in Washington, and so did his Mum.

If you stand near to the edge, very near, you can look down and see things.
Sometimes you can see absolutely everything. But, be sure to take care, and on no occasion should you ever go too near the edge. It’s a long way down and if you do go over, then you might be falling for quite some time, maybe forever…

The last thing that Jane remembered was the searing needle of pain through her side, oh, and the sight of Ken’s worried face blurring in front of her eyes. He had been telling her not to worry, but she knew he was lying, it was all over his face and the look had scared her. Fortunately, the amount of blood she was losing didn’t permit her to remain conscious for too long. She soon sank into the bitter-sweet caress of a strange, red mist, an eerie netherworld that seemed to have risen in her mind. It was whilst she was imprisoned within this red-misted ghost land, that Jane dreamt of her father again.