Ambush (3 page)

He tried to shake off this weird feeling. It was nothing. Surely he had come home to this before? A quiet house.

He stepped across the threshold and called tentatively, ‘Hello? I'm home. Is anyone else?'

A tiny part of him still expected all three women in his life to leap out in camouflaged onesies and surround him because, surely, he must have forgotten something. Was it his own birthday?

The dog's birthday?

Where the hell was the dog? The slavering Labrador that always greeted him and tried to knock him over and lick him clean.

‘Stuff this,' he thought. Even the bloody dog was being held back for the big ta-dah!

He took a few steps along the hallway and opened the lounge door.

He had perhaps one second to take in the horrific tableau that greeted his shocked eyes: his wife, his daughters, trussed up, bound and gagged on the carpet between the settee and the armchairs. Their terrified eyes.

The stunning blow to his head instantly dropped him where he stood, withering to his knees and tipping forward across his wife. And into complete blackness.

S
teve Flynn looked twice at the young man hunched in the dark recess of the doorway, but didn't make his second glance too obvious. The first was just the normal jerk of the head – what anyone might do while walking past and half-spotting a figure lurking in the shadows. Most people would probably just walk on and forget they had seen anything, and Flynn would have done so too except that at his first glance his sharp eyes, their vision honed by many years of hard use, noticed something as they pierced the darkness.

They saw the outline of a hooded man, his face hidden by the shadow, but also the glint of something in the man's right hand down by his thigh.

That was what Flynn registered on the first look.

The second look, just a flick of his eyes as he walked on, merely confirmed the fact.

The man was armed.

Flynn continued to stroll on because that was what he was doing, simply making his way through the resort of Santa Eulalia, enjoying a stroll, slowly but surely making his way down to the marina for a late dinner. He felt the arm of the woman walking alongside him looped into the crook of his right arm. A good feeling. Like an old married couple. He walked on as though he had not seen anything.

But to the woman he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, ‘We need to call the cops.'

‘
Sí
… yes, we do,' she agreed.

Flynn could not help the shimmer of a smile on his lips.

She too had seen the figure in the doorway and had probably done exactly the same subtle double-take as him.

‘You're good,' he complimented her.

‘
Sí
,
muy bien
,' she purred.

They stopped maybe fifty metres along from the doorway and backed into their own alcove, the doorway of a clothes shop recently closed for business that evening. From here, looking through the angle in the shop window, Flynn could see back along the narrow street, which was called Carrer de Sant Vicent. Flynn slid his left arm around the shoulders of his companion and she fumbled for and extracted her mobile phone from her shoulder bag.

‘He has a gun,' she said.

‘An old-looking revolver,' Flynn said, glancing back along the building line, able to see the darkness of the doorway but not the figure in it. Then he said, ‘Shit.'

‘What?'

‘Two of them.'

The second guy was in a doorway almost directly opposite the hooded man, the entrance to apartments above the shops. Flynn had seen movement in the gloom, then, briefly, a white face peeking out before disappearing quickly.

‘You are certain?'

‘Yep.'

‘What are they doing?'

Flynn weighed it up.

Further back along the street, on the corner of the next junction, was one of those small, ubiquitous Spar shops, a convenience store selling groceries, booze, water and other essentials. Flynn and his companion had walked past it a minute earlier. He had registered that the shop was in the process of closing for the night. The window shutters had already been pulled down and padlocked, but the shutter over the front door was only a quarter of the way down and a couple of customers were still at the till. The message was clear – we're closing and no one else is coming in,
gracias
. Flynn had spotted just two members of staff, a young girl on the till, probably in her mid-teens, and another, slightly older woman hovering by the door, key and padlock in hand, discouraging would-be shoppers.

It was one of several Spar shops in the resort. But they were dotted all over the island too, and Spain, and the world. Good, steady businesses mainly serving self-catering holiday makers and mostly taking cash.

‘The corner shop,' he said. ‘Easy target.'

Both lurking figures were still hidden in their respective doorways.

‘How are you doing?' Flynn asked the woman he was with. Her name was Maria Santiago. Her smart phone was pressed to her right ear.

‘Calling,' she answered.

Flynn nodded. The last two customers, a man and a woman, ducked out of the shop under the partly lowered shutter, followed by the assistant with the padlock.

‘Still ringing,' Santiago said.

‘Shit,' Flynn mumbled.

The woman in the shop said ‘
Buenas noches
' to the customers and reached up to the metal door with a thin hooked rod, attached it and began to unravel the door to close it.

Flynn removed his arm from Santiago's shoulders.

She glanced worriedly at him. ‘Still ringing.'

‘Anything like the cops in England, you'll end up talking to some call centre in Madrid.'

‘I know.'

If a robbery was on the cards – something quite rare in this resort, indeed on the island – it was going to have to start now, just as the shutter was being drawn down, because once it touched the ground it would become a whole lot more complicated.

Flynn stepped out of the doorway at the exact moment the two figures emerged from theirs and started to sprint towards the shop. Each had a gun in his hand.

‘Flynn, no,' Santiago blurted, knowing him all too well.

He gave her a helpless shrug and began to move. He was no sprinter now, his heavily muscled frame ensured that, but he didn't have far to run.

The first hooded guy, the one Flynn had originally spotted, dashed diagonally across the narrow street and slammed his body into the shop assistant dealing with the door. His arms enfolded her and he bundled her roughly back through the decreasing gap as the shutter descended.

Flynn saw the plan: first one through grabs whoever is locking up for the night; second one drags the shutter door down behind him, and then they have time to operate without interruption. Hold the hapless staff hostage at gunpoint, empty the tills, then force the women into the back office and empty any cash boxes kept there. Unless they'd banked earlier that day – which the robbers would know if they'd done their homework – Flynn guessed they could easily be looking at a haul in the region of 3,000 euros, give, take. Not a bad amount for about six minutes' work, if they were organized, not drugged up to their eyeballs, and meant what they did. If they were a good duo they could be in and out, business done and away – with no one hurt. Which was the thought that almost slowed Flynn down. Let them go, let them get away with it. Unfortunately he was hard-wired to react and intervene. The best part of twenty years as a cop and a few years before that as a Royal Marine had mainlined something into him that still hadn't quite evaporated, even all these years after leaving the cops behind.

Drilled into him: a need to intervene.

He pounded across the narrow street.

Ahead, the first guy had done as expected and he and the woman (now stunned but terrified) were inside the shop. Guy number two was already starting to pull down the shutter door which, as Flynn rocked up, was about a metre from closing.

The door was a medium security shutter of the type that allowed people to see through slats into the shop even when closed. It was made of fairly strong aluminium and was controlled manually.

The second guy, in the process of pulling it down from the inside, was surprised when Flynn appeared on the opposite side with his big fingers curled underneath the bottom edge of the door. The two men were both bent over, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, inches apart, glaring at each other through the holes in the horizontal slats and pushing in opposite directions.

The man pressed down harder, panicking.

Flynn took the weight easily, now with both hands holding the door. He started to heave up.

In the shop beyond he saw at a glance that guy number one was holding the collar of the woman's work blouse and was pointing his handgun at the girl sitting motionless at the checkout till, screaming at her, not aware of the tug of war at the door.

He was shouting in English.

The face of Flynn's current opponent in the test of strength was stretched to bursting with the tension and effort of pushing down against Flynn. It was not a fair contest. The guy was thin, without any real muscle, whereas Flynn was pretty much the polar opposite: well built, muscled, strong.

The door, inexorably, inevitably, started to rise.

Flynn and the felon were virtually nose to nose, separated only by the thin door. Their eyes stayed in contact.

Flynn gave him a lopsided grin and then a wink.

Without warning, sensing he could not win this, the guy released the door and stepped away.

The tactic caught Flynn slightly off balance. Suddenly there was no resistance and the door shot upwards on its rollers and clattered open. He teetered back a step and the man he'd been door-wrestling with had his small revolver – something similar to a two-inch-barrelled Smith & Wesson detective special – coming around hurriedly to aim at Flynn.

He came back on balance almost instantaneously.

Flynn's life for the last ten years or so had revolved around keeping his footing on the sportfishing boat he skippered, so tripping up was not something he did and, despite his size, he moved around the boat with the grace of a ballet dancer. He was also accustomed to grabbing and dealing with fast-moving, thrashing, dangerous fish such as sharks with very sharp teeth and marlin with lethal swords, so he had no problem covering the distance between him and the guy with the gun in a micro-flash. He drove his right fist into the man's face before the gun even came around. The face disintegrated as Flynn's brick-like fist connected with the bridge of the nose. The guy dropped straight away as the impact closed down all brain function with an implosion like the formation of a black hole. His knees buckled, he fell as though he had stepped into an open manhole. The gun dropped out of his hand and clattered away across the tiled shop floor under a mobile shelf displaying suntan lotion.

Flynn strode over the unconscious man, his posture filling out threateningly.

The first guy had dragged the screaming hostage up tight against him like a shield. He jacked his forearm across her throat like an iron bar, squeezing her windpipe.

The girl on the till had her hands to her face, peering out through splayed fingers.

Flynn, keeping his eyes blazing at the robber, jerked his thumb at her. ‘Go.'

She fled, leaving Flynn to face the guy he had first glimpsed in the doorway, with the woman pinned between them.

From the wild, wet eyes and hateful expression and the running nose, Flynn could tell the guy was drugged up after all. Speed, coke, a combination, whatever … it meant his metabolism was running at perilous levels, as was his mental state, making him dangerous and unpredictable.

‘What're you? What're you?' the guy demanded of Flynn, waving the gun, which looked heavy and old but nonetheless lethal. ‘Some kind-o fuckin' hero?'

‘Put the gun down, let the lady go,' Flynn said calmly. The woman's fingers gripped the man's forearm at her throat as she gagged for breath. ‘This doesn't have to get worse,' Flynn added, although he was pretty sure it would. He used his large hands with nice slow placating downward gestures, not aggressive.

Instead of taking Flynn's advice, the guy skewered the muzzle of the revolver into the woman's neck, twisting it painfully as if he was trying to drill it into her. She screamed. Flynn could see the whites of her eyes, her terror-stricken features.

At the same time, from the expression on the guy's face, he could see the myriad of thoughts crashing through his head as panic began to rise when his eyes lit on the sight of his partner in crime splayed out, laid out, blood gushing, bleeding profusely by the suntan display and the big, unafraid, menacing man who had done that.

He pulled the gun away from the woman's neck and aimed it at Flynn. The barrel wobbled unsteadily.

‘Even under ideal conditions most folk can't hit a barn door at six feet, especially with one of those heavy things,' Flynn advised – not completely truthfully.

‘Fuckin' good job you're bigger than a barn door, then,' the guy snarled, adjusting and readjusting his aim. Then he jammed the gun back into the woman's head. ‘Won't miss this bitch, then, will I?' he threatened. Flynn again saw the wild eyes, the bad teeth and gums, the terrible complexion as pock-marked as the moon, the snivelling nose.

‘Put the gun down,' he said, soft and firm. In the distance he heard the approach of sirens, cocked his head and flickered his eyebrows meaningfully. ‘Two minutes, cops'll be here, and if that's still in your hand, you're a dead man,' he promised.

Indecision.

Flynn nodded to confirm his prediction. Behind he heard footsteps running up to him. He did not turn but kept his eyes firmly on the robber and the gun. He sensed it was Santiago behind him. The guy's eyes swivelled to the new arrival on the scene.

‘Bastard!' He shoved the woman forward, propelling her with the flat of his hand at the centre of her back. She stumbled against the checkout counter with a scream, then crashed to her knees, dragging an e-cigarette display over with her. Then the guy aimed unsteadily at Flynn again, holding the weapon sideways, parallel to the floor, like all misinformed villains who had no idea how to hold a handgun properly. Flynn gritted his teeth and clenched his stomach muscles, bracing himself for the impact of the bullet. The man pulled the trigger back.