Little Criminals (35 page)

Brendan Sweetman’s voice was as cold as his stare. ‘We’ll go when we’ve somewhere to go to.’

For Martin Paxton, going on the run was throwing dice. The chances of getting to a safe place were not great.

Whatever will be will be
.

He knew that sooner or later the penny would drop for Sweetman and Finn. At that stage, they could go in any direction. Chances were, Dolly would run for the hills. Sweetman might run for it, too, or he might try to use the hostage to bargain.

Or, he might decide she’d seen too much.

We haven’t killed anyone yet. Keep it that way
.

A little more than half an hour later, the contact arrived with the keys to the rental.

‘That’s it,’ Milky said, waving towards the door, ‘shift yourselves. And take her with you.’

When the lead car of the ERU pulled up outside Adrian Moffat’s house, the driver realised immediately he’d made a mistake. The wide wooden gates were open and there was a white Ford Transit van in the driveway, facing out on to the road. The guy sitting in the van driver’s seat – thin-faced, with a Fu Manchu moustache – saw the unmarked police car and you could almost hear his brain whirring.

‘Shit,’ the police driver said. There were high hedges either side of the gate. Had he stopped anywhere else, they’d have arrived without warning.

A second ERU car pulled up behind the first. Inside that car, the unit’s tactical commander, Sergeant Derek Dowd, was cradling an Uzi sub-machine gun below the line of the car window. A high hedge blocked his view of the suspect house. Situation like this, ideally you have even twenty minutes to suss it all out, figure how many, who and where. Today, he was dealing with a ticking clock. Could be a duff lead, could be the real thing – no time for niceties, go in.

Sergeant Dowd was halfway out of the car when he realised something was wrong. The lads in the car in front were sitting stock still.

*

The driver of the first ERU car made eye contact with the guy behind the wheel of the white van. The seconds were ticking. Could be Fu Manchu wasn’t the brightest, maybe he figured this was a salesman come to make a special offer on replacing the gutters.

How are you going to play this?

A third ERU car bypassed the first two and came skidding to a stop.

‘Ah no,’ the driver of the first car said, as the driver of the white van threw it into gear and the van jerked forward. The ERU driver watched the white van speeding towards him.

When the cops arrived, in their unmarked but unmistakable cars, Dolly was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Ford Transit and the engine was ticking over. Behind the van, Brendan Sweetman was stepping down from the front doorstep, guiding the masked hostage towards the open rear doors of the van. Milky was standing at the front door of his home, with Martin Paxton in the hallway behind him.

The sound of two cars stopping made Sweetman pause. When the third skidded to a stop he pushed Angela’s shoulder. ‘Hurry!’ She was three feet from the back of the white van.

Dolly put his foot down and the van took off, leaving Brendan Sweetman standing, his mouth open. He was barely aware of the unseeing hostage walking on down the driveway away from him.

‘Ah,
shit!’
Milky said.

The driver of the first garda car couldn’t reverse, the second car was too close behind. With the third car in front, he had only a few feet to manoeuvre. He started forward. Dolly jerked the wheel to the right as the van cleared the gateway, but the gap was too narrow and the left front edge of the van clipped the rear of the police car.

There was a harsh metallic noise and the Ford Transit lurched down off the pavement and went into a spin across the road. The police car was knocked sideways, the two gardai shaken violently.

There were cops coming out of the other two cars, guns out, seeking targets.

At his front door, Milky was frozen. He stood straight, his hands down by his sides.

There was a loud smacking sound as the side of the van collided with a lamp-post on the far side of the road.

Brendan Sweetman put his pistol down by his side and moved, slowly at first and then in a stooped run, away from the front door and across Milky’s front garden.

Martin Paxton called, ‘Angela!’

The hostage, now near the front gate, pulled the mask off her bruised faced. Blinking, she looked back towards Martin and then towards the gate. Off to the left, beyond the garden hedge, she could see the top of a lamp-post, bent at an angle.

She stared at it for a few moments, then she walked on towards the gate.

Which was when the shooting started.

When the van stopped moving, side-on to the bent lamp-post, Dolly got out, holding his automatic at arm’s length, pointing it at the police. One shoulder had taken a wrench, but nothing serious. He walked backwards, fast, his back straight, his face blank, his arm moving this way and that, aiming in turn at each of the four plainclothes cops he could see crouched behind two of the cop cars. The two in the car he had rammed were slumped in the front seats. Seemed to be out of it. Dolly didn’t pull the trigger, just let the cops know he was ready if they wanted to take this up a notch.

On a suburban street like this, they’d be reluctant to start the shooting.

One of the policemen shouted something.

Dolly glanced quickly left and right.
More of them?
Nothing. He moved sideways, stepping behind the brick gatepost of a house diagonally across the road from Milky’s place. As he did so, one of the cops fired.

Dolly Finn looked around the gatepost and fired three times.

When he pulled his head back into cover, there was a fusillade, the bullets making
chuk
sounds as they hit the gatepost.

Angela was in the line of fire. She heard a shout, Wait till you have a target’, and something tugged at her left arm.

‘Get down!’

There were men with guns, crouched, cars spread untidily along the street, their doors open.

‘Missus. Get down!’

Angela looked to her left. She saw what she took to be someone kneeling in one of the gardens. Then she wasn’t sure if there was anyone there.

‘Mrs Kennedy – get down, lie down on the road.’

Angela looked one way, then the other. From behind her, she heard the sound of running. There were more shots.

Running forward, through the gateway of his house, past the hostage, holding his hands above his head and waving them, Milky reached the roadway and found himself staggering sideways, his balance gone. One second he was running, next second he hit the ground, back first.

Fuck that
.

What happened?

He lay on his back and knew that there was wet somewhere down his left side.

Jesus, they shot me. Shit
.

He felt pain where his back hit the ground, and nowhere else.

Winged and winded
.

Where?

Somewhere down the left side
.

Nowhere else?

He did a quick inventory. Both arms were working, one leg was caught under the other but he could move both of them, no pain. It wasn’t his stomach, there was no blood on his chest. Most important, he hadn’t taken a hit in the head. Definitely hit, no doubt about that. Somewhere down the left side, low down, but no sign of a dangerous injury.

Fuck you, Frankie. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on
.

Dolly Finn moved quickly along the side of a house, kicked open a flimsy wooden door and ran across someone’s back garden. At the bottom of the garden, he crossed into another back garden, then went through a side door into a front garden and stopped.

He brushed down his clothes, put the gun in his pocket and walked down the front driveway and out on to a street.

When the shooting started, Brendan Sweetman made it through a thin section of hedge, into the garden next door to Milky’s house, crossed that garden and burrowed his way into a deep bush. His shotgun was in the van, gone with Dolly. First thing he did, he took his handgun out of his pocket and slid it into a tight-knit clump of roots. No way was he getting into a pissing match with a platoon of garda storm troopers. Best he could hope for was he might get to stroll out of here in the confusion.

There were bluebottles at both ends of the road, now. Squad cars parked here and there, and the toughies with shooters were coming down like dandruff.

Tripping over one another. Might be a chance
.

Give it a couple of minutes, wriggle through the hedge into the next garden, see where that leads. Try to make it out through a side entrance to a back garden, see if there’s a way on to the next road. Maybe even stay here, keep the head down until it’s all over, just walk down the next-door neighbour’s garden path, on to the footpath, stroll across the road like a regular citizen. Play it right, it could be done.

‘Hey, you.’

Oh
.

‘You, in the bush.’

Fuck
.

From somewhere behind.

‘Hey, fatso.’

‘Don’t shoot. I’m not armed.’

‘Hands on your head.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where’s your gun?’

‘I put it down, sir. Under a bush.’

‘Good boy. There’s now a possibility that I won’t blow your head off. OK, back out of there. Slowly.’

Shit. Shit-shit-shit
.

‘That’s it, keep your hands right up. On your head. Keep coming. That’s it. Stop there.’

‘You want me to lie down?’

‘That would be nice.’

Dolly Finn was two streets away, standing in the middle of the road, his gun pointing at the windscreen of an approaching car, a boxy little blue Fiat. The car stopped. The driver was a young woman with short dark hair and a black business suit, and when Dolly got into the passenger seat she reached for the door handle beside her and Dolly said, ‘Drive!’

‘Take the car, let me go.’

‘Drive.’

‘Please!’

Dolly looked back and saw a car come slowly round a corner maybe fifty yards back, passenger door open and a plainclothes copper trotting alongside, an automatic rifle held in the crook of his arm. Dolly jammed his gun into the woman’s side. ‘No chat, drive now.’

One of the bastards, the fat guy from the bushes, face down on the ground, handcuffed and out of the picture. The older guy in the green check jacket took a hit, from the look of things he was out of it. The driver of the van – who the hell knows?

How many does that leave?

Sergeant Dowd crouched behind his car, assessing the situation. The car was several yards down from the kidnap house.

‘Hold your positions, everyone. Stay alert.’

A voice in Sergeant Dowd’s earpiece told him the driver of the white van had been spotted hijacking a blue Fiat.

By now, armed back-up was on the scene, crouched uniforms were muttering into radios, sorting out roadblocks, the area was being locked down. The victim was alive, standing in the middle of the road, directly in front of the suspect house. Sergeant Dowd’s men were working their way in from all sides. The two officers from the car that had been hit by the van were still a bit groggy, but they were out of the car, taking cover. None of the good guys seriously hurt so far. Time of the morning – kids at school, adults at work – no sign yet of curious civilians spilling out to clog things up.

This could work out not too bad
.

‘Missus?’

No response.

Are they all gone? Or are they using her as bait, waiting for a clear shot?

‘Missus?’

Get her moving. Shooting starts again, we don’t want her standing there in the middle of it. Get her away from the front of the suspect house. Move her down this way towards the car.

‘Missus?’

Jesus, she’s a mess
.

The woman looked up, one eye puffed and closed, the other looking directly through the sergeant.

Christ. The poor bitch. Can’t let this drag on
.

‘Mrs Kennedy?’

No response. Just standing there like she’s waiting for her turn at the supermarket checkout.

‘Heads up, lads, I’m going to get her.’

Sergeant Dowd stepped out from behind the car, into the middle of the road.

Danger most likely to come from the left, the suspect house and the gardens around it. But there was no telling. Too many high hedges, both sides of the street.

He knew there were at least half a dozen police guns trained on the house and the gardens around it. His own Uzi was firm against the bend of his elbow, the muzzle pointing up at forty-five degrees. Ready to turn in any direction.

Times like these, when there were guns about and he felt the shadow of cross-hairs on his throat, the sergeant thought of a superintendent named Oakley. Gruff but cuddly type of man, everyone’s favourite uncle. Face like a spaniel. A natural sympathiser. He had a niche in personnel. Times like these, if something went wrong, it’d be Oakley walking in the sergeant’s front gate, maybe an hour from now, Oakley walking up the sergeant’s pathway. Oakley’s compassionate face the sergeant’s wife would see when she opened the front door.