Omega Dog (21 page)

It wasn’t a perfect head-butt - that would have broken Venn’s nose, and probably stunned him long enough that the guy would have brought the gun up and finished the job - but it connected with Venn’s own forehead. Stars, whole nebulae, exploded behind his eyes and he felt his teeth jarred together. He staggered back on his haunches.

Despite the pain, despite the wooziness and nausea the head-butt had caused, Venn understood on a dim and distant level that this was it, his only chance. He landed on his butt and with one leg lashed out at the man’s gun arm.

His foot connected hard with the man’s wrist, and the man gave a hiss of pain as his hand opened and the gun spun away.

No guns. They were on a more equal level now.

Both men sprang to their feet, Venn reeling a little. At a crouch, they circled one another.

The other guy was a fighter, Venn could see. The stance, the way he held his hands in front of him, protective yet ready to attack. He wasn’t somebody overreliant on guns. Somebody who felt naked without the protection of one.

This was a man who’d killed with his bare hands.

‘Mr Venn,’ the man said. His voice was soft, educated. British.

And he knew Venn’s name.

Just as Venn realized the whole point of it, the familiarity, was to disorient him momentarily, the guy launched his attack.

He came spinning on the ball of one foot, his other leg sweeping across at head height, Venn’s quickly-raised arm lessening the impact but not stopping the blow. Again white light exploded in his vision and he stumbled aside.

But Venn countered swiftly, with his own leg, a piledriver of a kick that pistoned out sideways from the hip. His foot connected with the man’s abdomen. Venn heard the breath sigh out of the man like compressed air.

The guy was tough, though, and although he must have been winded, he came after Venn. For a few seconds they matched one another perfectly in a flurry of blows, blocks and counterstrikes. It was like a superbly choreographed fight scene from a movie, one to which rapid-fire editing had been added.

Suddenly the man got in with a sword-hand to the side of Venn’s neck, and the world grayed out again. Venn swayed, dimly aware that the other guy was behind him now and had an arm tight across his throat. As the pressure mounted, Venn struggled to throw the guy over his shoulder, but it was an obvious move and the man resisted it easily.

The gray was darkening in front of Venn’s eyes now as his consciousness ebbed. He felt the man’s free hand clamp over the side of his skull.

Which he knew was the preparation for the killing twist that would sever his spinal cord at the neck.

Venn was facing the Impala. Through the veil of haziness he saw Beth standing by the side of the car, both arms outstretched. She’d picked up one of the guns, and was trying to aim. But the assailant was holding Venn in front of him.

Venn tried to yell at her to shoot, to keep blasting away until one of the shots hit the man somewhere fatal. He didn’t care if Beth shot him in the process.

Because suddenly, there was something more important to Venn than finding Professor Lomax. More important to him than saving his own skin and getting out of a life sentence for murder.

But his voice wouldn’t come, because of the arm locked across his throat. And he knew that even if he had been able to call out to Beth, she wouldn’t have pulled the trigger. Not when there was a good chance of hitting Venn.

Something rose up inside Venn, like a long-imprisoned demon bursting free from the depths of hell. He’d kept his temper under control, ever since the episode with the drug dealer which had cost him his career with the Chicago PD.

But there was no stopping it now.

With all his strength, with the full force of his weight, Venn stamped his bootheel down on his attacker’s foot, raking the shin along the way.

It wasn’t the most effective use Venn had ever made of the technique, because he was weakened by the restricted blood flow to his brain caused by the man’s stranglehold. But it did the trick. The guy cried out, and for an instant the grip across Venn’s throat fractionally slackened.

Venn slammed his head backward into the man’s face, feeling the nose give way and spread. He slammed his head back again, and this time the guy recoiled away, releasing Venn.

Venn spun and, without pausing to survey the damage he’d done, laid in with his fists. Great haymaker blows from left and from right, the skin on his knuckles splitting where they made contact with bone.

Still, the guy managed to put up something of a fight, but he was on a downward curve. He got the stiffened fingers of one hand up under Venn’s breastbone, into the solar plexus. The pain was a flash of excruciating light, but it only served to enrage Venn further.

He kneed the man in the abdomen, caught him as he doubled up, and slammed his head against the side of the Jaguar, again and again, seeing nothing but red. Even when he felt Beth tugging at his arm, begging him to stop, he shook her off and continued bouncing the guy off the bodywork, as the dented metal surface began to stain a blotchy crimson.

Finally, when his arms and shoulders were fatigued to the point of utter exhaustion, Venn dropped the man, who hit the blacktop face-first. No attempt to break his own fall.

Venn leaned against the side of the car and stared up at the azure, cloudless sky, breathing heavily. He was aware of Beth a few yards off, regarding him.

He thought he’d crossed a line with her, now. Driven her away forever.

Then she was at him, her head buried in his chest, her arms clinging to him. He couldn’t tell if the sobs that wracked her body were those of relief, or fear, or both.

––––––––

T
he word spread through Rosetti’s networks like the tremors down the fine strands of a spider’s web.

From the central hub, her command center in Manhattan, the message went out:
find that Chevy Impala
. Full details of the car’s license plate number, color, distinguishing scratches and dents (courtesy of the car rental shop owner), and likely occupants, were supplied along with the order.

And the responses came flickering back up the web.

A gas station attendant near Hartford, Connecticut, had checked his CCTV footage and observed a car of that exact description gassing up at nine-twenty that morning. The driver, a large, tough-looking man who appeared a little worn out and beat-up, had paid cash. It wasn’t possible to see from the footage who else was in the car, but there looked to be somebody in the passenger seat.

A helpful connection at a toll booth on the New England Thruway section of Interstate 95 reported in that a Chevy Impala had passed through. The guy remembered it because he was a Chevy geek. He couldn’t recall the time, nor did he get the license plate, but he did remember the driver, a surly-looking guy with a goatee. There was a girl beside him. The toll booth guy didn’t see her face, because it was turned away like she was asleep, but he did notice she had nice legs.

And last, but best of all: at a little after noon, Rosetti’s people – Vincenzo, specifically – got an excited call from a motel clerk up in Massachusetts. He’d just come on duty, and a big guy had come in to hand back the room key. The clerk had received a handover from the guy whose shift he’d taken over from. There was apparently a couple who’d rented one of the rooms a few hours earlier, presumably for you-know-what. After the clerk took the key back, he happened to glance out the window.

And saw the Impala, with the tell-tale license plate.

He got on the phone immediately.

Vincenzo relayed the news to Rosetti by phone. Rosetti felt a stirring within her, the closest she came to excitement or even enthusiasm these days.

The first real-time information on Colby’s whereabouts.

She didn’t need to tell Vincenzo what to do. He was already on it.

Across Massachusetts, across New England, the network web began to tremble.

The reward promised for a tip-off that led to Colby’s apprehension doubled. Then tripled. Every minor player, every wiseguy wannabe who had even the remotest link to the Rosetti crew, was contacted.

And made aware that this could be his lucky day. That helpfulness in finding the Colby woman would be looked on favorably by the boss. Very favorably indeed.

A steady stream of visitors flowed to and from the motel, wanting to interview the clerk there to see if there was a scrap of information that could be useful, a morsel of data that others might have missed and which might lead to some advantage in finding the Impala and its passengers.

A couple of hours after noon, Rosetti began to hear new reports. A wrecked car, a Jaguar, had been found in a field off a side road near the motel. In the trunk was a dead man who’d been beaten to a pulp.

The description of the corpse was vague, coming as it did third- or fourth-hand from leaked police reports. Also, there wasn’t much left of the guy’s face to be able to describe. But the account of his clothes made Rosetti sit up in her wheelchair and take notice.

Specifically, his shoes.

They were described as old-fashioned leather spats, brown and cream in color.

Rosetti stared at Vincenzo, who was relaying the information to her.

‘It’s him,’ she said.

‘Royle?’

‘Yeah.’

‘A lot of guys might have shoes like that.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s him.’

So Marcus Royle, international hitman of note, had been defeated.

Which raised the question once again: just who
was
Joseph Venn, this mystery man helping Dr Colby?

‘Vincenzo,’ said Rosetti.

‘Yes, boss.’

‘When we find them, Colby and this Venn guy, we need to throw everything at them. You understand? Every man, every bullet we can dredge up.’

‘Understood.’

––––––––

B
eth drove. She’d insisted on it, and for once Venn hadn’t argued.

Not much, anyhow.

‘At least for the first hour or so,’ she’d said, after checking him out with expert hands as he sat by the side of the road, probing him for broken bones. ‘You look like you could black out at any moment. I don’t especially want you to lose consciousness behind the wheel in the middle of the interstate.’

The Impala was badly dented at the back where the Jaguar had rammed it, but the sports car had actually come off worse. The Chevy was still drivable.

Venn had searched the body of the man he’d killed, reluctantly, as if loath to touch or even look at the mess he’d made of the guy’s face. Beth was surprised how she felt. Or rather, at how little she felt. There was no revulsion in her for the sickening violence she’d witnessed, no appalled realization at how close they had both just come to death.

It would come later, she knew. All of it, in a great sweeping flood.

Venn found nothing useful on the dead man, apart from his gun, some extra ammo, and a cell phone. The guy carried no ID of any kind.

Venn scrolled through various functions on the phone. He said, ‘It’s a new one. Not much on it. No list of contacts. He must have kept all of his numbers in his head.’

‘How did he find us?’ asked Beth. ‘He couldn’t have been tailing us all this way.’

‘He tracked us, somehow,’ said Venn. ‘My guess is he got a lock on my phone. That means he’s got friends in high places. My bad. I should have gotten rid of my own phone when I tossed yours.’

He took the SIM card out of his phone, ground it into the blacktop with his boot heel, and threw the phone itself into the field. He did the same with the phone he’d taken off the dead man.

Then he took out another phone. Beth recognized it as the one he’d told her his employer, Corcoran, had given him. For a moment he stood looking at it.

‘I might have been tracked through this,’ he said. ‘But I doubt it. It would have been easier to find out the number of my regular phone. And if I get rid of this one, Corcoran has no way of contacting me.’

Apparently making his mind up, he put the phone back in his pocket.

Beth helped him dump the body in the trunk of the Jaguar and roll the damaged car into the ditch alongside the road. It wasn’t much of an attempt to hide evidence of what had gone down, but they had little choice, and as Venn said it might buy them a few precious minutes.

‘Because there’ll be others,’ Venn said grimly. ‘Maybe lots of others.’

They drove in silence, and it wasn’t till they’d crossed the border into Maine that Beth said, ‘Thank you.’

He stared at her. ‘For what?’

‘For saving my life. Again.’

Venn said nothing.

Beth tried again. ‘You had to kill him. You had no choice.’

‘Maybe,’ said Venn.

‘But?’

His tone was low, measured. ‘But I didn’t have to kill him the way I did. I snapped. I lost control.’

‘Venn, you were in an extreme situation. You weren’t yourself –’

‘That’s just the problem, Beth. I
was
myself. This
is
me. I’m bad news.’ He was looking straight ahead now. ‘The drug dealer I beat up on in Chicago, that got me fired. That was just the one I got nailed for. There were others. I go over the top. Can’t seem to help myself.’

‘But you’re not like that all the time.’ Beth tried not to sound like she was sermonizing. ‘Earlier, when we were... together. That was the real you.’

‘It was a mistake.’

‘What?’ She veered a little toward the next lane. ‘How can you –’

‘Beth, I should never have let it happen. We were two people thrown together in a stressful situation. But it can’t happen again. Like I say, I’m bad news. You don’t want to be around me.’

Beth felt her temper rise, and she fought to keep it down. Couldn’t explode, right here behind the wheel. ‘How
dare
you? How dare you tell me what I do and don’t want? And what’s this about you
letting it happen
? In case you hadn’t noticed, I was there too! I made a choice, too.’

‘I didn’t –’ he started to say, but she cut him off.

‘Big, tough guys like you. Inside, emotionally, you’re like little scared kids. I’ve seen it so many times. You’ll take on an army single-handed, but you run screaming from ever having to face up to what you’re feeling inside.’