Redlaw - 01 (36 page)

Illyria, though she had ferocity and tenacity on her side, was dwarfed by her opponent. Vlad’s reach far exceeded hers, and his blows carried considerably more heft. Inevitably this began to take its toll. Soon Vlad had her pinned to the ground once more and was dishing out piledriver punches one after another, almost as if trying to embed her in the turf like a tent peg.

Redlaw could barely move. He was semi-concussed, his shoulder immobilised by searing pain. Nonetheless he forced himself, teeth clenched, shuddering, nearly crying with the effort, to rise to a sitting position. He felt he was going to throw up or pass out, or both. His Cindermaker lay less than a yard away, but it might as well have been a mile. He extended a trembling left arm. He just couldn’t seem to coordinate himself, to align hand with gun.

Illyria was making horrid grunting gasps. Vlad’s blows continued to fall with metronomic regularity, each one connecting with a wet, meaty
smack
.

Redlaw’s floundering hand finally fell on the Cindermaker. He lifted the gun—it felt like a hundredweight of metal—and curled a finger round the trigger.

Illyria wasn’t moving now except in response to Vlad hitting her, her body twitching under the impacts.

Redlaw took aim. Tried to take aim. Took aim. Tried to. His target wavered in his vision. Vlad couldn’t have been more than ten feet from him. Impossible to miss at that range. But he wouldn’t seem to stay still. One moment he was solid, the next a juddering, smeary blur.

Fire anyway
.

But what if the bullet hit Illyria?

If you don’t shoot, she’s done for
.

Vlad swam into focus. Redlaw made every effort to fix his position in his mind’s eye. Then he fired. And fired again. And again.

Had he got him? He couldn’t tell. The barrel flashes had dazzled him, three gibbous blue afterimages floating across his vision. His ears were ringing from the percussion of the gunshots.

Time passed. Maybe quite a lot of it. Redlaw became aware that he was flat out on the grass. He was cold, chilled to the bone, his overcoat sodden. People were talking nearby. Two men. One was Slocock. The other...

“Shame about Vlad, but it was for the best. Despite what I promised, I couldn’t have turned him loose, not really.”

Lambourne?

“Still, at least he did what was required of him before he got dusted—subdued them both.”

Lambourne. Redlaw stirred himself.
Get up. Go on, do it!

“Hey, look, he’s coming round.”

That was Slocock.

“Can’t have that, can we?”

A pair of legs presented themselves before Redlaw.

“Not yet.”

An expensively shod foot lashed out.

Redlaw saw light, sun-incandescent, then blackness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Wakey-wakey.”

A slap on the cheek.

There was brightness and pain, so much of both that Redlaw immediately let himself slip back into the warm enveloping ink of oblivion.

Another, firmer slap.

“I said ‘wakey-wakey.’”

Again, nothingness was preferable to consciousness. Consciousness meant sharp aches, jagged throbs of light that seemed to scorch his eyeballs.

“Come on, Redlaw. Can’t have you dozing.”

The voice—Slocock’s—became insistent, as did the slapping. Finally, just to make it stop, Redlaw groaned and levered his eyelids apart.

“Enough,” he said thickly. “All right. I’m here. Enough.”

He was in a desk chair, hands fastened behind his back. Electrical flex cut into his wrists. The position was torment to his shoulder. Many other parts of him hurt too, though none quite as badly.

He was in the observatory, on the viewing gallery. With him were Slocock and Lambourne. Of Illyria he could see no sign.

The two men stood side by side. There was no animosity evident between them. Their body language spoke only of common purpose, unity. Their smiles matched, equally smug and superior.

“I should have known,” Redlaw said, looking from one to the other, industrialist to politician, and back. “There was no great falling-out, was there? That was just a lie. A ruse.”

“Well, Nathaniel and I did have something of a difference of opinion earlier today,” said Slocock. “But we’re over it. Once I agreed to bring him you, all was forgiven and forgotten. Think of yourself as a peace offering, Redlaw, a human olive branch. That’s quite a beautiful thing to be, really.”

“I knew you weren’t to be trusted.”

“Yet you trusted me anyway. Either I’m remarkably plausible or you’re remarkably gullible. Probably it’s a bit of both. Plus, you wanted to get hold of some kind of evidence against Nathaniel so badly. I could have told you I knew where to find photos of him strangling flower fairies with his bare hands, and you’d still have come along.”

The flex wasn’t only tying Redlaw’s hands together, it was securing him to the chair back. Straining against his bonds did nothing but increase the pain.

“You, Mr Redlaw, have become a right royal pain in the arse,” said Lambourne. “No, that’s overstating it somewhat. A thorn in the side. You harass my site supervisor at the distribution depot, you hijack one of my trucks, you poke your nose into my affairs—you’ve been so persistent. A regular goddamn bloodhound. I’ve done all I can to get you off my back, pulled every relevant string I know of, and it’s still not been enough. But at last, thanks to Giles—and Vlad, God rest his soul—I have you where I want you.”

He sleeked back his silver hair.

“Sad that it’s had to come to this, but let’s be frank, you brought it on yourself. You didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. You just kept doggedly at it, trying to knock down everything I’ve been building up this past couple of years. I don’t take kindly to people who interfere with my deals. Don’t take kindly to them at all.”

“Let me go,” Redlaw said. “You can’t hold me like this. I’m a SHADE officer.”

“What’s the use of trying that, when we all know it’s bollocks?” Slocock scoffed. “SHADE has disowned you. All you are to them is a runaway ex-employee who’s had a brain fart and needs to be reined in. Which Nathaniel and I have done. You could regard this as us doing our civic duty, making a citizen’s arrest. I can see the headlines: ‘MP And Billionaire Nab Mad Vamp Cop.’ That’s got to swing a few extra thousand votes my way, come the election. Not that I need them.”

“Except you aren’t arresting me, are you?” said Redlaw. “It’s gone too far for that. You’re going to kill me.”

“That hasn’t been decided yet,” said Lambourne. “There’s still a chance for you, if you agree to play ball.”

“You know I’ll never do that.”

“We’re waiting for someone to arrive who might be able to convince you otherwise.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see. Won’t be long.”

Redlaw processed this piece of information. He had a suspicion he knew who Lambourne was talking about, and prayed to God he was wrong.

“Where’s Illyria?” he asked.

“Ah, the luscious but somewhat intimidating Illyria,” said Slocock. “Your raven-haired vampiress friend.”

“We were watching from a safe distance while she was fighting Vlad,” said Lambourne. “Quite the hellcat. There were moments when I wondered if she might not actually win. The odds were stacked against her, but she did well.”

“Where. Is. She?”

“Not dusted, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Slocock.

“Not yet,” added Lambourne.

“Unless you’re keeping her buried under ten feet of concrete somewhere,” Redlaw said, “neither of you is safe.”

“Oh, I think we’re fine.” Lambourne nodded to Slocock. “Giles? Would you do the honours?”

“Of course, Nathaniel.”

Slocock tipped back Redlaw’s chair and dragged it, and him, over to the parapet.

“There. See?”

Down in the pit, Illyria lay prone, motionless. The manacles were fastened round her wrists. Her clothing was clotted with dust—the remains of Vlad.

“Those shackles held Vlad,” Lambourne said. “They’ll hold her. And should they not, there’s always the guns. See those electronic eyes positioned about a metre down? Motion sensors. If anything bigger than a moth passes through that, the guns automatically open fire. A thousand Fraxinus rounds a minute from each. She won’t be dusted—she’ll be puréed.”

“Do anything to her,” Redlaw said, ferociously, “anything at all, and I will kill you with my bare hands.”

“Woo-ooh!” said Slocock on a rising and falling note, in the manner of a gloating child. “Can it be you’ve got feelings for her? The great Redlaw’s fallen for a vampire? Surely not.”

Redlaw refused to dignify that with an answer. He realised, to his chagrin, that there might be a grain of truth in it.

“Mind you,” the politician went on, “if I
was
going to do the dirty deed with a vamp, Illyria’s the one I’d do it with. I mean, if necrophilia’s your thing, might as well make sure it’s with a looker.”

“You aren’t fit to lick her boots,” Redlaw growled.

“Does she make
you
do that? Is that how it is? She does have that air about her, doesn’t she, the whole alpha-female, ball-buster vibe.”

“Now, now, Giles,” Lambourne chided. “Stop being mean. The poor man’s having a hard enough time as it is without you making it worse. Mr Redlaw, Giles and I need to pop out to meet our guest. We’ll leave the two of you alone for a while. Not for long.” He consulted his watch, a Patek Philippe with an alligator strap, worth the price of a medium-sized house. “Quarter of an hour at most. Enjoy your last few minutes together. And please don’t try anything funny. We’ll be right outside, and I have this”—he held up Redlaw’s Cindermaker—“and no qualms about using it if the situation demands.”

He descended the stairs, Slocock in tow. No sooner had the door clicked shut below than Redlaw canted his head over the parapet and hissed, “Illyria. Illyria! Wake up.”

She stirred. Moaned softly.

“Illyria, please. You have to wake up.”

She rolled her head round. Her face was a puffy mass of contusions, so severely bruised it resembled an aubergine in places. She opened one eye.

“Redlaw?” she croaked.

“Illyria, listen to me. Lambourne’s got you chained up. You have to break free somehow. Shatter the manacles, yank the bolts out of the floor, whatever you can. But you have to do it right now, or we’re both as good as dead.”

“Can’t,” she said. “Can’t move. Hurts too much.”

“You have to. You have to move.”

She tried her best to rise up, but it was like the tottering efforts of a newborn foal, feeble and pathetic. Even simply tugging on the chains from a lying position proved beyond her.

“It’s hopeless,” she said.

“No. No, it’s not. It’s not hopeless.”

“You come down here and do something about it then.”

“I can’t. The guns. But there must be a cut-off switch for them somewhere. If I can just...”

Redlaw had another go at his bonds, but the flex was knotted tight and well, and the knots themselves were too high up his wrists for his fingers to reach. He jumped the chair up and down on the floor a few times, thinking he might be able to loosen a screw, perhaps even break the whole thing apart. No luck. The chair was teak and tubular steel, a sturdily constructed piece of office furniture.

“No,” he said finally, defeated.

“What’s... What’s going to happen?”

“We’re going to figure out a way out of this, that’s what.”

“No, Redlaw. Really. What’s Lambourne going to do with us?”

“Nothing.”

“No lies, Redlaw. The honest truth.”

He wrestled with it, then said, “Me, I’m not sure. But you—I think he plans to use the machine guns to dust you.”

A brief silence from Illyria, then: “Oh.”

“He won’t, though. Not while there’s breath in my body. I won’t let him.”

“How very noble of you, Redlaw.”

“I mean it.”

“I know. And I appreciate it. We haven’t known each other very long, have we?”

The sudden shift in her tone, from sardonic to sanguine, told him the direction Illyria was taking the conversation in. He didn’t want to travel that route with her. Couldn’t bear to.

“A couple of nights, is it?” she said.

“Bit more than that. Three days, two nights.”

“But we can’t count the two days, can we? Only the nights. So, not long. But we’ve done a lot together. Been through a lot.”

“Yes.”

“It’s been fun, in a weird kind of way. You’re a cantankerous, pompous old poop, but beneath it all you’ve a stout heart and even a sense of humour. I like you. I could have
really
liked you, had things been different, had we had more time.”

“I doubt it. The longer someone spends with me, the less appealing I become. Only Leary could stand me, and she said that was only possible by ignoring me half the time.”