Road Kill (11 page)

“Get rid of her,” Isobel instructed, her tone indifferent.

I heard Jamie begin to protest as I was borne away down the hall towards the front door. His mother told him to shut up in the same crushing kind of voice she must have been using since he was six.

I cursed myself for not expecting that Jacob’s wife might have brought some extra muscle. The man wasn’t a traditional heavy but he was deft and professional, nonetheless. He’d undoubtedly done this kind of thing before and the confines of the hallway was not where I wanted to find out how much. I went limp in his arms and waited for the space to make a stand.

When we reached the forecourt Eamonn let go with a jerk, so I was abruptly sent scattering across the mossy cobbles on my hands and knees. Thankful I was in my bike leathers, I rolled through the fall without injury and came back up on my feet.

I found myself facing a pale man with narrow pointed features and dark reddish hair parted at the side. He wasn’t wearing a tie and his shirt collar was open. The jacket of his suit had been intended for someone with wider shoulders, so the front bagged. Maybe he just liked to have plenty of room to manoeuvre, which was probably not a good sign.

He’d also been expecting the surprise manhandling to have thoroughly unnerved me. That it had clearly failed to do so must, I suspected, have been something of a disappointment to him. But there was a gleam of speculation and interest there, too, and that I did find disturbing.

As I watched, his tongue flipped out to wet his thin lips like he was trying to scent the faintest trace of my fear.

“Who sent you?” he demanded. He had a Northern Irish accent and his voice was all the more deadly for being so soft.

I thought of Clare. “None of your damned business,” I said.

“Oh but it
is
my business,” he said. “It is very much my business.” He smiled unpleasantly at me and moved in, putting his feet down with careful delicacy. I backed as he came on. “I want you to take a message back to your boss man – whoever he is,” he went on, still smiling. “You can tell them it was a nice try, but if they think that’s going to stop me, they can think again.”

Before I had time to ask what the hell he was on about, Eamonn had reached into his jacket and pulled a black cylinder out of his inside pocket. I recognised it instantly and all the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

As he brought it out he flicked the cylinder downwards with enough force to deploy the two inner segments. They telescoped outwards with a smooth mechanical click and locked into place making a solid baton about a foot and a half long.

The baton was similar to the asps the police use, the kind I’d been trained on for crowd control when firearms were not an option. The kind that, if wielded skilfully, could inflict all manner of nasty damage on the human body. And Eamonn struck me as someone who would practice with an unbecoming zeal.

His smile grew broader but my eyes were drawn to the baton which he was lazily swinging in front of me. I flicked my glance outwards, trying not to become blinded to other threats but there weren’t any. It was just Eamonn and me.

“Now don’t you be worrying too much,” he said. “I’m only planning on breaking the one ankle, so you’ll still be able to ride away on that little bike of yours.”

When outnumbered or outgunned and retreat is not an option, the only thing left to do is attack. And the best defence against a long weapon like a baton is to get in close, to negate the effect and hamper them with the one thing they thought was going to put them ahead.

I launched straight in, timing it between the swipes like the kind of skipping game we used to play as kids. I knew I had to get under Eamonn’s guard and disable the arm holding the baton as fast as possible. Before it disabled me. But getting from safe distance to engagement meant passing through Eamonn’s kill zone and that was never going to be easy.

I feinted a short right to his throat. He jerked his head back automatically and I grabbed the arm holding the baton with my left hand. I ignored the baton itself, aiming to get my thumb jabbed in hard to the radial nerve that sits on top of the forearm, a couple of inches below the elbow. I nearly made it, too.

Eamonn hadn’t been expecting me to go for him there and it took him a fraction longer to react than it might have done otherwise. But not long enough. He wrenched his arm free and danced back. The baton swept round in a slashing arc and cracked against the outside of my left knee.

If I hadn’t loosened his grip slightly, or been dressed for the possibility of falling off a motorbike, at speed onto tarmac, the blow would have put me on the ground and probably in the hospital. As it was, the lessened impact was partially absorbed by the closed-cell foam padding in my leathers. It stung like hell but it didn’t do anything permanent and I didn’t go down. With barely a break in stride I slapped Eamonn’s wrist out sideways and brought the outside of my right forearm round and up hard into the side of his face.

Instinctively, he threw his head back again so I caught him on his cheekbone rather than his temple. Nevertheless, I’d put plenty into it, enough to stagger him back a pace or two. But he was tough and he’d done this kind of work before. He shook his head to clear it. His smile grew colder and wider.

“Oh ho, so you’ve got some fire in your belly, have you?” he murmured. “Well, OK then, if you insist. Both ankles . . .”

He darted forwards then, letting off another whistling blow towards my upper body this time. I went forwards to meet him, blocking so the baton cannoned off the protective padding in the sleeve of my jacket. It jarred me to the bone without severe damage, but I was on the defensive and I knew it was only a matter of time before he got lucky.

And then the drive alarm went off. Jacob had an old fire alarm bell attached to the outside of the house so he could hear it if he was in the workshop and it was loud enough to make both of us jump.

We whipped round. Eamonn reversed the baton and twisted it shut in one flowing move. He dropped the weapon back into his inside pocket like a magician’s sleight of hand. He was barely out of breath.

A black Mitsubishi Shogun rumbled quickly onto the forecourt and pulled up facing us, sharply enough to set its soft suspension rocking.

Isobel hurried out of the house with Jamie tailing along behind her. She glanced at me briefly, her eyebrows raised as though she was surprised to see me still on my feet.

Sean Meyer came out of the Shogun without seeming in any particular rush but that cool flat gaze was everywhere. He took in Eamonn’s apparently relaxed stance and wasn’t fooled for a moment by the thin veneer of civility he presented. His eyes swept over me and narrowed in much the same way that Isobel’s had done. Except when she did it I wasn’t quite so afraid of what she had in mind.

“You OK?” he asked.

I shrugged, feeling the protest in my muscles where the baton had bitten me. “More or less,” I said.

He turned slowly towards Eamonn and made a slight sideways movement with his head, loosening the muscles in his neck. Eamonn smiled at him, reaching into his coat and bringing the baton back out into view.

“Knight in shining fucking armour, are we?” he said, extending the weapon again with a practised flick of his hand.

Suddenly he sniffed loudly, pulled a face of almost delicate distaste. “Now that wouldn’t be a bastard squaddie I can smell, would it? Seen plenty of your type. Think you’re a hard man, do you? Think you can take me on?”

He made a couple of showy slashes with the baton, making the air whine as it sliced through.

“Maybe not,” Sean said calmly. He inclined his head in my direction. “But between us we can.”

Just for a second Eamonn faltered, then he grinned fiercely. “Oh, you think so?” And he beckoned us on.

Sean didn’t respond to that, but something had died behind his eyes, like a light had gone out. He began to circle, clockwise, moving slowly. I circled in the opposite direction. Whether Eamonn liked it or not, we were moving in and out of his blind spots. He couldn’t cover us both at once.

But the Irishman continued to smile. He knew that two against one were not good odds in his favour. He also knew, as we did, that if he could get a couple of decent blows in with the baton, he might yet stand a chance of coming out on top.

His eyes went to Sean’s unprotected arms, then to my leather jacket and I saw he’d picked his first target. I wasn’t about to give him a chance to act on that decision. And I wasn’t about to let Sean take a hit to protect me, either.

We continued to circle. I waited until Eamonn had flicked his eyes away from me again, then jumped him. He caught the flash of my attack and spun round, uncoiling the baton at shoulder height, aiming for my head. A killing blow. I ducked underneath it and crashed through his defence, getting in close to his body.

I managed to snake my left hand round and get my fingers pinched hard into the pressure points at the back of his neck, controlling his upper body as I brought my knee up hard, once, twice, into his gut.

Sean moved in smooth and fast, landing a massive uppercut to the other man’s face as he began to fold. The stinging blow broke Eamonn’s nose and sent blood flying.

I let go and jumped back, getting out of Sean’s way. He twisted the baton out of the Irishman’s hand and into his own with almost negligent ease, turning the tables. His first slash took Eamonn’s legs out from under him, then he went for his upper arms just above each elbow. Hit the nerves there hard enough and they shut down like circuit breakers, disconnecting each limb.

Sean hit him with a coldly scientific precision, throttling back to inflict pain rather than outright injury. Enough to put Eamonn down and make sure he wasn’t going to get up in a hurry, nothing more. Then he stepped back and watched the Irishman as he lay writhing and groaning on the dusty ground.

It was too much for Isobel. She gave an outraged howl and launched herself at Sean, clawing for his face. He shook her off, sending the woman reeling.

Jamie jumped automatically to his mother’s defence. I saw him start to sprint and turned to face him, taking half a step into his path to hook my right arm up inside his as it swung past me. His own momentum ensured that as he went on I jerked his arm up and back behind him. I twisted on the balls of my feet and locked his wrist up hard behind his own shoulder blade, a classic police restraint technique.

He struggled against me for a moment longer but I grabbed the point of his shoulder with my other hand and carefully applied a touch more force. It was only as he felt the joint start to tear apart that he gave up. I relaxed the pressure a little but didn’t let go.

Eamonn meanwhile, despite making noise like he was mortally wounded, took advantage of the distraction to rear up far enough to take a swing at Sean. He caught the baton, sending it flying. It clattered away across the forecourt and disappeared under Isobel’s Mercedes. If Eamonn thought that Sean would be easier to tackle without a weapon, however, he was to be severely disappointed.

Sean never blinked. He reached down and roughly picked Eamonn up by the lapels of his jacket, throwing him about like a dog worrying a lamb. Eamonn came down sprawled on his knees, facing away from Sean, who stepped over his legs and took hold of a big handful of the other man’s shirt collar, using it as a tourniquet on his throat.

Eamonn’s colour rose as he started to choke, his fingers scrabbling at his own clothing. Sean immediately shifted his grip so his forearms were clamped on either side of the man’s neck, just below the jawbone, and started to pile on the pressure.

Restricting the blood flow through the carotid artery that feeds the brain will cause loss of consciousness in around ten seconds. It was a method I’d been taught a long time ago – by Sean as I seem to recall – for silently and effectively dealing with an enemy, but it was not something I’d ever shown to my self-defence students. Because when you’re scared and under pressure, it’s easy to misjudge the time and hold on too long. Somewhere around forty seconds, the starvation of oxygen to the brain starts to have permanent effects.

But already Sean had held onto Eamonn for more than ten seconds. The other man had ceased to struggle but I could see Sean’s arms bunched with the effort of keeping the lock in place. And I knew full well that he wasn’t under pressure and he certainly wasn’t scared.

“Sean,” I said sharply. He looked over at me but his eyes were blank and empty.

“
Sean
!” I said again, and this time the anguish and the pleading in my voice seemed to reach him where anger had not. He abruptly relaxed his grip and Eamonn slid limply to the ground at his feet.

Isobel gave a fearful cry and knelt alongside the Irishman, cradling his head. I let go of Jamie. He wrenched himself away from me, rubbing his shoulder reproachfully, but didn’t make any moves to continue his attack on Sean, nor to help his mother.

Isobel gave Eamonn a couple of businesslike slaps across his cheek. He started to come out of it, limbs spasming as life and control returned. He knocked her hands away angrily and instinctively tried to get to his feet, but his co-ordination was shot.