Shredder (25 page)

My luck ran out at the foot of the ladder.

“Stand still,” said Karakurt. His voice was behind me, about two meters away, too far for me to turn and jump him no matter how fast I moved. Raising my hands, I joined them on the back of my head without waiting for him to tell me, because I knew from experience that whatever he told me to do I'd feel compelled to do something else. I turned to face him.

Interesting. He was paler than I remembered, and he'd put on weight. A life in hiding didn't seem to suit him. Those weren't his usual designer clothes, either—his jeans were saggy, and his thin leather jacket looked like it had come from a market stall. But his self-satisfied grin was still there, the smile of
a man who knew he was finally going to have the last word, and the hand pointing the silver pistol at my head was rock-steady. Was that the same silver pistol I'd seen in the riot? Amazing he still had it. Maybe it had sentimental value; maybe Kemal had given it to him.

“Who was the guy in Cyprus?” I said. “The one who died in the fire?”

“I don't know,” said Karakurt. “I never met him.”

“I thought he'd be family. Considering the sacrifice he made for you.”

“Families are a liability,” said Karakurt. “When I need relatives to say that a dead man is really me, I hire them. Where is the girl?”

“You just missed her,” I said.

Karakurt smiled and flicked his gun,
That way
. This time I obeyed, and led the way round to the front of the walnut store. We had to step over the crumpled remains of Squinty, who now sported a boulder for a head, and I took care to avoid stepping in the blood that had puddled around him. If I had to run I didn't want to leave red footprints. Dean and the other new recruit were waiting in the potholed courtyard in front of the main farmhouse.

“Dónde está Javier?”
said the other new guy. He
was tall, bearded and balding, with a long scar on his right cheek where someone had once widened his mouth with a blade. He wore a padded leather jacket—a serious biker jacket, not just for posing—and there was blood on his jeans: my dog's blood, I guessed. At the sight of it cold rage boiled up inside me; but I forced it down.

“Javier está muerto,”
said Karakurt.

Biker glared at me, clearly shocked and disbelieving. What had Karakurt told him to expect? Some clueless gringo kid living alone miles from anywhere? And if they turned up at my farmhouse waving guns I'd invite them all in for sherry and tapas?

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Was that your boyfriend?”

I expected Karakurt to translate, but from the look on the biker's face he spoke enough English not to need it, and he moved fast for a big man. I saw the kick coming and I managed to shift my weight, but the toe of his heavy boot still caught me in the balls hard enough to send pain erupting up the length of my body, flipping my stomach over and filling me with nausea.

I dropped to my knees on the cobblestones and bent forward, trying to absorb the agony and let it wash over me. I wanted to look weak and vulnerable
at that point, but I'd kind of been hoping to act the part, and right now I didn't need to act. I felt my stomach roil and convulse and I went with it, spewing up bile, spitting and retching, all the while keeping an eye on Biker's big heavy boots a meter from my face. If he pulled one back for a kick to my face I was going to take him before he blinded me; it was a gamble, but I figured at this point the Turk would sooner lose this guy than kill me. For now I kept my fingers laced behind my head; I knew that made me look helpless and cowed.

“Where is your girlfriend?” Karakurt repeated. He strolled round to stand in front of me, Biker behind him, and stooped so his eye could meet mine, and I could look into that cold empty abyss he had in place of a soul.

“She ran,” I said. The Turk shook his head, stood up and stepped aside. Biker pulled back his fist; I just had time to notice he'd slipped on a brass knuckleduster before he slammed it into my face, splitting it across the cheekbone and spraying my blood onto the cobblestones. He had opened the old scar Kemal had left. He had little of Kemal's power or technique, but he had enough; a few more punches like that and my head would start to look like a burst
watermelon. From the corner of my eye I saw Dean chuckle.

“She did not run,” said the Turk patiently. “We would have seen her. She is still here, hiding somewhere, and we will find her sooner or later, and the sooner we find her, the sooner this will be over, for both of you.”

I knew that was a lie: Karakurt would draw our deaths out for as long as he could, whatever I told him. After six months on the run he might be out of practice, which meant the torture might last a day or two rather than a week, but I wasn't going to volunteer for either option.

“She ran,” I said. The Turk rolled his eyes and gestured at Biker, who lifted his fist. The same knuckledusters, the same cheek, the same pain and the same stars bursting behind my eyes. But this time I felt something crack in my face, and my mouth filled with hot salty blood.

“Please,” I said, blood spluttering from my lips and spilling down my chin. “I told her to run and hide, I don't know where she went—” I looked up again at Biker and flinched away, and my look rested just a little too long on the crooked door of the woodshed directly opposite the farm. I shook my head to
try and conceal what I'd done and lowered my eyes, spitting blood and snot on the cobblestones, feeling my cheekbone grate under the bruised and torn flesh of my face. Biker cocked his fist again.

“Wait,” said the Turk.

“She went into the woods,” I babbled, “hid out in the old smokehouse. She'll have gone for help—” There was so much blood in my mouth I was almost gargling, but the Turk wasn't listening. He had followed my careless glance over to the woodshed ten meters away from where we stood, its rickety door held shut by a rusting loop of wire running from the handle to a hook cemented into the doorpost.

“Quiet,” said the Turk. He gestured to Biker with a tilt of his chin.
“Buscar allí,”
he said.

I groaned and coughed and spat. “She'll have called the police by now—”

“I said be quiet,” said the Turk.

I watched helplessly as Biker strolled over to the woodshed. His pistol poised in his right hand, he untangled the wire from the hook with his left. The door, hanging crooked on its ancient hinges, swung back halfway with a lazy creak. I dropped my hands from the back of my head to wipe the blood from my mouth and rested my palms on the cobblestones.
Dean had turned his back on me to watch Biker; the Turk's body faced me, his gun hanging loose in his hand, but he'd turned his head away.

Biker peered cautiously round the doorpost and squinted into the dark; it was pitch-black in there, and all he could make out were shelves lined with tins of ancient chemicals. Taking his pistol in both hands, he stepped into the doorway, raised his biker boot and kicked the door fully open.

With a massive flat bang a fireball exploded from the open doorway in a burning cloud, and lethal splinters of oak shrapnel flew outwards from the disintegrating door. The blast blew the roof off the shed and Biker off his feet, and when his back hit the cobblestones his clothes and hair were singed and smoldering and his face was a blackened mask oozing blood.

Dean and Karakurt had both recoiled instinctively, but it was the Turk I went for, diving forward to slam my body into his and sending us both tumbling in a heap. He was flabby and out of condition, while I was half his weight again, rock-hard from my work in the fields. His pistol went flying and I landed two good punches to his face, knocking him into a daze, before I hauled him to his feet.

And then my left knee burst apart in a shattering explosion of pain, and I fell, dragging the Turk down with me. When my right leg hit the cobblestones the pain redoubled, coursing up my leg and my spine to my mouth, but I was already screaming in agony. I felt the Turk wrench himself free of my grasp and instinctively my hands dropped to clutch at my knee instead, but all I found was a mess of broken bone and torn ligaments. I could hear Dean cursing and the Turk panting; I didn't know which of them had shot me in the leg. I fought desperately to focus, to put the agony someplace else, to try to think clearly—this wasn't over, I couldn't give in to the pain—

I opened my eyes and spat blood. The cloud of dust and smoke from the explosion was clearing, and the ringing in my ears was slowly fading. I didn't look down at my knee—that wouldn't help—so I turned my head to the sky, and saw a tendril of smoke wisping from the muzzle of Dean's pistol, pointed straight downward at my face. He staggered a little, and his hand was shaking, but at this range that wouldn't matter.

“You fucking prick,” he was saying, over and over. There was blood running down his cheek from
a splinter embedded in his face a finger's width from his left eye. “You fucking prick.”

“Not yet, not yet!” shouted the Turk, also half deafened by the blast—but his tone was one of annoyance rather than anger. When I turned to look at him he was laughing—at my ingenuity or my malice, or the fact that neither of those had been sufficient to kill him. He had survived yet again, only now he had one less employee to pay off.

“Sodium chlorate!” whooped Karakurt. “Fertilizer bomb! Did your father teach you that? The Irishman?”

I didn't answer; my leg was going numb. Either I was better at this mind-over-matter than I thought or I was losing too much blood.

Karakurt chuckled as he bent to retrieve the big silver pistol I'd knocked from his grasp. “Any more surprises, Crusher? The dog, the rock, the booby trap, what else have you got? The girl, she is hiding here somewhere with a shotgun, isn't she? And the first one to find her will get his head blown off. But that will still leave one of us, and whichever one it is, believe me, both of you will pay.” He looked about. “But we are not going to do this your way.” He pointed his pistol at my uninjured right knee.
“Your girlfriend is going to come to us. And she had better not be carrying any shotgun.”

“I told you,” I said. “She ran.”

“Too bad for you,” said the Turk. “Do you like it here? Living the life of a farmer? It's hard, isn't it? Have you thought about how much harder it will be when you are a farmer in a wheelchair?”

He cocked the pistol and I saw his knuckle whiten as he tensed his finger on the trigger.

“Don't,” called Zoe.

I angled my head towards the house and groaned, and not from the pain in my leg. Zoe was walking out of the door towards us, empty-handed but for an old towel. I'd thought she'd agreed to the plan—that she'd hide, and while I distracted the Turk she'd run into the woods; or if she couldn't do that, she'd bunker down in the cubbyhole where I'd stashed Charles Egerton's old shotgun and wait for them to come looking. Instead she was here, kneeling beside me, tearing the towel into long thin strips, blanking Dean and Karakurt like a paramedic would ignore rubberneckers at a road accident.

“Why?” I whispered through clenched teeth. I knew what she was planning to do and I wasn't looking forward to it.

“You came for me” was all she said. And lifting
my leg, she bound the bloody mess with the towel, cinching it as tight as she could, and the pain nearly made me pass out.

“Inside,” said the Turk.

Now the dressing helped. When Zoe grabbed my arm and heaved, and Dean reluctantly lent her a hand, the crude bandages helped me push the agony to the back of my mind and focus on how we were going to get out of this. Soaked in cooling blood, the left leg of my jeans flapped against my calf, and I could feel the material stick to the skin and peel off with every step. I couldn't take any weight on that leg, but supporting myself on Dean and Zoe, I managed to hop along, the Turk to the rear shepherding us back into the house at gunpoint. It did occur to me to grab Dean, but I couldn't shield both myself and Zoe with him, and anyway the Turk would happily shoot either of us right through Dean.

The kitchen was warm and full of the smell of stew, but it wasn't cozy and homey anymore with Dean and Karakurt strutting around it. While the Turk lifted the lid of the pot and sniffed, Dean pulled the chair facing mine out and sat down. I saw a twinge of pain on his face as he bent his right leg, the one I'd stamped on a year ago.

“Good meat,” Karakurt said to Zoe, who was
standing by the hearth with her arms folded. “But you should not use green peppers in stew, it makes it bitter.” Zoe and I exchanged a glance. The stew was mine, not hers—Zoe couldn't boil an egg. But we weren't going to share any more of our lives with the Turk than we had to.

“It's not for you” was all Zoe said.

The Turk frowned, as if disappointed. “It's funny,” he said. “I grew up in a place just like this. But smaller, not so much land. My uncle worked us eighteen hours a day, all the year round, and still we never had enough food. But he understood the ancient laws of hospitality.” While he spoke he laid out two bowls from the rack, picked up the ladle and filled each one with stew. “When guests come, even uninvited, you feed them. He would make the women lay out all our meat and olives and cheese, and he and our guests would feast. And for weeks afterwards the rest of us would have to eat leaves from the trees.”

He placed a bowl in front of Dean, took a seat at the head of the table and, picking up a fork, speared chunks of green pepper and set them aside on a saucer. I knew what he was up to, and it had nothing to do with the laws of hospitality. He'd explained
to me last summer, in the shadow of that massive shredder:
It is not enough to kill a man. You must first enter his house, eat his food, defile his wife, and slaughter his children, while he watches
.

“And now,” said Karakurt, “the wheel has come full circle. I find you hiding here. It was not hard, by the way—the details of the will are on file, accessible to anyone, for a modest fee. And I like this place. I like what you have done with it. I think it will suit my purposes very well. I will tell the locals you sold me the farm and returned to England. They are used to that. Gringos come, looking for a new life in Spain, then discover to their amazement that no one speaks English, and they cannot buy baked beans, and then they slink off home with their tails between their legs.”