Nightmare City (59 page)

Sitting there with a bleeding ear, a thumping head, in
soaking wet clothes, he felt very much alone. He knew he could
trust Karl Donaldson - but how could he get to him? And he knew
he
had
to trust
John Rider.

There was a silence between the men, filled by the engine
ticking over. Warm air blew out of the vents.

‘
So did you kill Munrow?’

Rider turned his whole body in his seat to look at Henry. A
slash of yellow light fell across his eyes. The rest of his face
was in darkness. He said nothing.

‘
I thought so,’ Henry concluded.

The search had been thorough. An hour after starting, the
police withdrew, taking nothing away with them despite having
visited every nook and cranny.

Gallagher looked cheated.

‘
What did you expect to find?’ Donaldson asked him. ‘He ain’t
done nothin’ wrong, bud - unlike some people I could mention.’ He
looked knowingly at Gallagher then gladly closed the front door
behind him.

Donaldson returned to the lounge where the two exhausted
daughters had crashed out on the settee and the two weary women,
hollow-eyed, looked tiredly at him.

Kate had gone beyond crying.

‘
Is it true?’ she begged desperately. ‘Can Henry really have
helped a murderer to escape? And rape? What does it
mean?’

‘
You can take it from me that Henry has not raped anyone, nor
has he helped a murderer to escape,’ Karl hissed quietly, one eye
on the two girls. This was a conversation they didn’t need to
overhear. ‘Henry’s as straight as an arrow; he’s just become
involved with people who aren’t.’

‘
What do we do now, Karl?’ Karen asked.

‘
Wait,’ said Donaldson. ‘I’m sure he’ll contact us when he
can. In the meantime, let’s have a cup of tea and get these little
ladies back to their beds.’ He winked at Karen and gestured for her
to follow him into the kitchen.

‘
They were after those statements as much as anything,’
Donaldson said quietly to her. ‘What did you do with ‘em,
babe?’

‘
They’re down my knickers - almost. As soon as I heard them at
the door I grabbed the paperwork and folded it down the front of my
jeans.’

Donaldson’s face turned into a wide smile. ‘Now I know why I
love you,’ he said. ‘Any chance of me removing them with my
teeth?’

She punched him gently on the arm. ‘Every chance.’

Henry was wet and shivering again, the dryness of the car
having been left behind ten minutes ago.

He and Rider were, once more, in dark shadow. This time they
were fifty metres down the road from the front of Rider’s club,
watching the last of the stragglers stagger away from the
doors.

At last the place closed up and the lights went
out.

The street was quiet. Nothing moved.

Ten minutes later the door opened again and the staff
left
en masse,
a
small posse of people probably on their way to a curry
house.

The door closed.

‘
Jacko should be leaving soon, then we’ll have the place to
ourselves.’

Ten more minutes.

No Jacko.

‘
I don’t like this.’

‘
Perhaps he’s robbing the till.’

Rider ignored the remark. ‘I didn’t see the bouncers, either.
They usually leave with everyone else.’

He nudged Henry. Both of them trotted across the road and into
a high-walled alley which ran down one side and the rear of the
club. They stuck to the building line and at the point where the
alley took a right-angled turn, Rider pressed Henry and himself
into a doorway.

‘
Two minutes here, just in case,’ Rider whispered into Henry’s
good ear.

The rain continued to fall, straight down, like thin steel
rods. Unrelenting. Cold.

For Henry the wait was interminable. He needed to lie down.
Here would do, but preferably in a hospital bed with lots of nurses
fawning over him.

Rider tugged his sleeve.

They stepped out of the doorway and almost immediately there
was a scuffling noise and a cough behind them. Rider flattened
himself against the wall, dragging the slow-witted Henry with
him.

A man walked down the alley, back-lit by street lights. He had
that peculiar stagger which denotes someone pissed out of their
heads who firmly believes himself to be sober.

The man paused unsteadily in mid-step, looking in their
direction, peering towards them in the gloom. He was ten feet away.
Henry could smell the beer and spirits on the man’s
breath.

The man unzipped his flies, turned to face the wall. With both
hands he directed his urination up and down the wall, making fancy
patterns. He belched, broke wind, then vomited through the arc of
piss. He spat the remnants of the Chinese meal out and finished his
bodily function. He shook the drops off and slid the member
away.

Henry’s stomach turned.

The man wiped his mouth on his sleeve, turned and wandered
happily back out of the alley, muttering something.

They let him go before moving again.

Rider located the gate which led into the back yard of the
club. It was locked.

‘
We’ll have to go over.’

‘
Fine, fine,’ acceded Henry.

‘
Give me a leg up,’ said Rider, seeing Henry did not seem
able. ‘I’ll open the gate from the other side.’

Henry nodded. He intertwined his fingers, crouched low with
his back to the wall, braced himself and hoped Rider hadn’t stepped
into any dog muck.

Rider put his right foot into Henry’s hands, counted softly
and on ‘Three!’ Henry heaved up, propelling Rider who got his left
foot onto Henry’s shoulder and a moment later was lying astride the
top of the wall. He shuffled his legs over and dropped into the
yard.

Uncaringly, Henry wiped his hands down the sides of his
trousers, dog shit or not.

The gate opened. Rider beckoned him through into the yard,
which was not particularly big and was full of empty beer barrels
and all the paraphernalia associated with the waste from licensed
premises.

The back door to the club was a huge steel panel, riveted to
the brickwork.

Henry studied it despairingly. ‘How the hell do we get in
here? We’ll need bloody cutting gear.’

‘
We don’t - we get in up there.’ Rider pointed up to a window
at first floor level. ‘We’ll stack up some barrels and climb up. It
should open OK. This place is about as secure as Buckingham
Palace.’

‘
I’m surprised you haven’t had it screwed.’

‘
We have. Security’s crap on the outside, but the bar area’s
pretty tight.’ Together they manoeuvred two barrels on top of three
others and Rider climbed cautiously onto the top one to find his
head and shoulders more or less on a level with the window. He
heaved at the window. Nothing gave. He tried to lap his fingers
underneath the frame, which was rotten, and he started to ease it
away. With great effort and persistence there was some movement.
But the window remained firmly shut.

Using the initiative which seemed to have deserted his recent
actions, Henry scoured the yard to find some kind of implement to
assist.

More by luck than judgement he kicked against a rusty
hand-trowel of the type used by builders. He handed it up to Rider
who jammed it between window and frame and applied
leverage.

With painful slowness the window moved. Eventually it was wide
enough for him to get his fingertips in properly, and he completed
the task with a loud, splintering crack, nearly overbalancing off
the barrels at the same time.

Seconds later he was inside the club.

Henry followed, dropping down behind Rider into what was a
long disused lavatory.

‘
Thank God for-’

‘
Shh!’ Rider warned him hoarsely. ‘You never know - cops could
be at the bar, waiting for us to show. Let’s take it one step at a
time.’

Chastened, Henry nodded silently. He followed Rider out of the
toilet and into a dark corridor. With soft footfalls, they made
their way along.

‘
What we can do,’ Rider whispered over his shoulder, ‘is get
some sleep up here. We won’t be disturbed. Then tomorrow. . .’ His
words drifted.

‘
Yeah, tomorrow,’ said Henry sourly.

They stopped at the first door they came to. There was a bolt
on the outside which Rider slid back. He placed his hand on the
doorknob and suddenly the door seemed to have a life of its own and
exploded open.

A huge form careered out of the blackness, brandishing a chunk
of wood which was about the size, weight and length of a pick-axe
handle.

The wood swished down into thin air, slicing through the point
where a split-second before Rider’s head had been.

Rider crimped himself out of the way and the blow was
completely ineffective. In a continuation of the same movement,
Rider swung back, and landed an iron-hard punch into the guts of
the attacker. The wooden weapon dropped out of his hands and
bounced on the floor as the impact of the fist whooshed the wind
out of the man, who sank down to his knees, clutching his
stomach.

Rider stepped behind the figure, clamped his right hand across
the man’s mouth, yanked him upright and growled, ‘Jacko, you dumb
stupid bastard, it’s me!’

From what they could see of him in the darkness, Jacko looked
a mess. Conroy’s men had not been nice to him. His nose was knocked
out of shape, and one eye was cut, swelling and oozing some sort of
unpleasant looking greasy substance. A tooth was loose and his ribs
and stomach were a welter of bruises and grazes.

The three of them were in the room in which Jacko had been
imprisoned. Henry stood on guard at the door, cocking his head down
the corridor and half-listening to Jacko who was giving Rider the
lowdown. Rider listened without interruption.

‘
Six of them, you say?’ he asked finally.

‘
That’s all I saw. Could be more.’

‘
They came in, took the place and they’re still here. I
wondered why we didn’t see our door staff leaving. What d’you make
of it, Henry?’

‘
Conroy ... the guns?’

‘
Yeah, makes sense, taking the place over. But why, tonight,
unless he needs the place now, or later today for something. Jacko,
did they mention anything that could give us a clue?’

He wracked his brains. Couldn’t think of anything.

‘
What’re they doing now?’ Rider asked.

‘
Just hanging about, I think. I got dumped here and haven’t
seen any of ‘em since. I couldn’t hear anything because we’re so
far away nom the front of the club here.’

Rider looked up at Henry again. ‘They’re here for a reason and
it’s nothing to do with selling drugs, because there ain’t no one
here to sell ‘em to. I think you’re right, it’s connected with the
guns. Let’s go and have a look what they’re up to.’

Exhausted, Henry’s heart dropped.

‘
Jacko - you leg it out of the window and stay low. We’ll lock
this door and if they check up on you it’ll look like you’re still
in here.’

‘
Anything you want me to do?’ Jacko asked.

‘
Yeah - gimme your fags and matches and don’t get involved.
Henry ... let’s go looksee.’

‘
This place used to be a casino, closed early sixties. When I
bought it, though it was being run as a club, it was in a pretty
dangerous condition once you got beyond the public areas. So were
some of the public areas, come to that. The ceiling over the dance
floor is not the most secure in the world. I keep expecting the
rotating silver ball to crash to the floor and kill some poor
bastard underneath.’

‘
Any electric up here?’

‘
No, only on ground level.’

Rider was leading Henry along an endless maze of dark, dusty
corridors populated by spiders’ webs, dust, planks and other
miscellaneous pieces of rubbish which made quiet progress difficult
and walking hazardous. The lack of lighting made it all much
worse.

‘
What you see downstairs is only a fraction of what there is,’
Rider continued. ‘There’s two floors over that. Lots of rooms have
been bricked off for whatever reason. It’s just incredible, really.
You don’t appreciate what there is until you start
looking.’

Rider struck a match which flared briefly, lighting up his
face and also what he wanted to see - a door.

‘
I think we’re here.’ He extinguished the match, but before he
threw it down ensured its tip was cold. ‘It’s so dry in some
places, wet in others, don’t want to chance a match anywhere. The
place could go sky high. Fire hazard, really.’

‘
Sounds a peach of a building.’

‘
It will be, it will be,’ Rider said, seeing his dreams for a
moment. ‘We need to be real quiet now. If I’m right we should be
over the main part of the club once we go through the door. I think
the floor’s ... not good, shall we say?’