Death in High Places (3 page)

He never got the sentence finished. He'd been right about the gun. The outline of the man against the landing light, which had barely moved in the long seconds since it appeared in the doorway, moved now: not extravagantly, not flashily, but with an incisive speed that was awe-inspiring. Horn gasped and recoiled.

There wasn't much he was too slow for, but he was too slow now. The intruder had chosen to use his weapon in a manner for which it had not been designed but was nonetheless highly effective—cripplingly effective, and all but silent. He palmed the ugly weapon and slapped Horn across the jaw with it.

Pain exploded through his face and ran like molten steel down his spine. His strong limbs went to string and his fit young body spun half a turn before crashing to the floor. The light had gone out before he hit the carpet.

 

CHAPTER 2

B
UT HE WASN'T
unconscious long. Pain drilling every tooth in his left jaw yanked him back. He lay in a fetal curl under the window, arms cradling his raging head. He heard himself whine like a kicked puppy, but his vision was worse than useless—a dark mist laced with shooting stars. He'd always thought that was a comic-strip invention, but like most clichés it was an accurate observation first.

He didn't know which way was up, he hardly knew what had happened, but he knew he had to get back on his feet. He didn't want to. He didn't want to move, for fear of making the pain worse, for fear of being hit again. But primordial instinct wanted him to live even more than it wanted to spare him pain, and it drove him back ruthlessly to the reality of that cold, unlit room and the killer he shared it with. If he went on lying here he was going to die on this square of grubby carpet, adding his blood to the sum of its uncertain stains. That was going to be his obituary: a packet of Shake ‘n' Vac in his landlord's shopping cart.

Probably he was going to die anyway, but he had an element of choice about how. Nicky Horn had faced death many times, much more often than was reasonable for an otherwise rational man in peacetime. But he'd never faced it groveling on the floor, whining about being hurt. He put out a hand, groping for something he could use to pull himself up.

To his muddled surprise, someone helped. He still couldn't see anything but stars, but only the two of them were here, so it had to be the man who'd hit him. His reeling brain wasn't up to working out why: he let the strong hands gripping his shoulders lift him to his feet, and was too groggy to note that someone holding him with both hands must have put his gun away.

The man propped Horn against the wall and held him there, quite gently, with one hand in the middle of his chest. It wouldn't have stopped him from throwing a punch, but then it wasn't meant to. It was to stop him from sliding back down the wall. After a short contemplation the man leaned forward, peering into Horn's face. “Can you walk?”

Even Horn knew it wasn't solicitude. The man wanted to take him away from here, a house he shared with a dozen other people, to somewhere he could finish his job without fear of interruption, somewhere he could leave the detritus that it mightn't be found for weeks; and he wanted Horn to leave under his own steam in case someone saw them. The assault was carefully calculated to knock all the fight out of him without leaving him so incapable he'd need to be dragged, with the attendant risk—even at this time of night—of attracting attention. Horn went to shake his head, thought better of it, carefully mumbled, “No.”

The man smiled. Horn couldn't see the smile but he could hear it in his voice. “I'm sure you can. I'll help.” He draped Horn's arm over his shoulder, and that was how they went down the stairs, out into the dark street, and round the first corner to where an unremarkable navy blue saloon car was waiting. It might have taken a minute, no more. Anyone seeing them would have thought Horn was drunk, his killer a helpful friend.

Horn spent the time thinking—almost expecting—that something would happen. Someone would stop them, or a police patrol would swing by, or Horn would recover just enough of his strength to knee his assailant in the groin and leg it, trusting he could get back round the corner faster than a man nursing that most personal of hurts could draw his gun.

But none of those things happened. They reached the car. The man opened the back door. Horn planted an unsteady hand against the frame, as sure as death and taxes that if he allowed himself to be forced inside the game was over. “You don't have to do this,” he mumbled, steering the words carefully past his throbbing teeth. “Tell him you couldn't find me.”

“And what? You think he'll pay me anyway? You think my employer will worry if my children don't get their ski trip this year? I'm sorry. But this is how I make my living.”

“I don't deserve this,” insisted Horn weakly. “I haven't done anything to deserve it.”

“No? But you see, I don't care.” Quite calmly the man exchanged his grip on Horn's arm for a handful of his hair and banged his forehead smartly on the top of the car. The shooting stars took flight again like a flock of startled starlings, the pain in his face exploded like fireworks, and as Horn's knees buckled the man folded him expertly onto the backseat.

Then something unexpected happened.

Because in all honesty, nothing that had happened up to this point had been in any way unpredictable. It had only been a matter of time. Horn had run as long as he could, laid up as carefully as he could; but he'd always known that one of Hanratty's dogs, faster or keener or more persistent than the others, would find him one day. Today was that day. He couldn't honestly claim to be surprised.

But the smooth inevitability of it seemed now to meet an obstacle. The car door that should have closed with the crisp snap of a hangman's trapdoor remained open, the engine silent. Instead, after a moment, he heard voices.

“The sensible thing,” said the one he hadn't heard before, “would be to leave him here and drive away.”

There was a brief pause in which Horn almost heard the sound of mental cogs changing gear. Then Hanratty's man said mildly, “I don't know what you mean. There's no problem here.”

“No? Let's ask him.”

The man with the gun hadn't forgotten he had it. He just wasn't ready to draw it in front of someone he hadn't come here to kill. He moved proprietorially between Horn and the new arrival. “I've got a better idea. Let's not.”

“It doesn't look to me as if he wants to come with you.”

“He doesn't.” A light, inconsequential laugh. “But his wife wants him home just the same.”

“He isn't married.”

Horn heard the elevated eyebrow. “You know him?”

“Never met him in my life. But I know a lie when I hear one.”

When his lie has been rumbled, a wise man stops lying. This wise man's voice dropped a couple of tones. He wasn't trying to sound menacing. He didn't have to, any more than a tiger has to try. “You don't know what you're getting involved in. So I'll tell you what you need to do. Turn round and walk away.”

The other man laughed. There was gravel in it. “Oh, I've a pretty good idea what's going on. If I walk away, he's going to end up dead.”

“If you don't, maybe you will.”

“Or maybe he survives, and I survive, and you die in prison for all the times you did this and got away with it.”

A longer silence this time. When Hanratty's man spoke again, for the first time Horn heard a fractional uncertainty. “You know
me
?”

“Not your name. Not where to find you—though I know where to find people
like
you. But I know what you do, and how you do it. What's the preferred term these days? You're a mechanic—a hit man, a professional killer. You aren't going to compromise your own safety doing your job. Martyrdom is for people who espouse causes, and you don't believe in causes. You're a practical man. If you let him go tonight, you can find him again tomorrow. If you don't, things are going to get messy, and noisy, right now. You'll have gone to a lot of trouble to keep them clean and quiet, so I'm pretty sure you won't want that. But whether I start shouting or you start shooting, you're going to have an audience in just a few seconds from now. Unless you leave.”

Incredulously, Horn began to realize that it could actually happen. That an assassin hard enough to appear on Tommy Hanratty's radar just might back down before the extraordinary courage of a passerby. Not because he couldn't take him too—of course he could. But he was a professional, he had to think about the next job and the one after that, and to do them he had to keep a low profile. He didn't have to let Horn go—he just had to let him go for now. In all probability Horn was still going to die. But there was now a chance that he wasn't going to die tonight.

The pause could only have been a few seconds. It wrung Horn like the rack. Finally the man said, faintly aggrieved, “Bloody amateurs!”

The other man, the passerby, said softly, “You don't know that. You don't know who I am or what I can do. You can gamble everything on a guess. Or you can do the sensible thing, which is haul him out of there and drive away. That way there's always another day, another chance.”

A few seconds more and it happened. A yank on his ankle landed Horn on his back in the wet road. For the first time he could see the two figures, dark against the rain-reflected glitter of the streetlights. They were about three meters apart. Far enough that the only weapons that would reach were bullets and words. Still he could see no faces.

But the one nearest to him got back in his car and shut the door. Horn heard the quiet electric whir of the window. “I won't forget this.”

“I don't imagine any of us will,” said the other man calmly. “But I'll keep quiet about it if you will.”

The engine started and the car moved off, slowly at first, then gaining speed. Then there were just the two of them—Horn too weak with concussion and relief to clamber to his feet, and the man to whom he owed his life.

Who now turned back toward the main street and said casually over his shoulder, “Good luck, then.”

“W-w-w-?” It wasn't just the concussion making Horn's head spin. “Where are you going? Who are you? Why…?”

The man looked down at him with the same admixture of indulgence and exasperation he'd have worn if his puppy had fallen down the coalhole. “Do you want to pick one?”

The other man had been bad news—the worst—but his appearance had not come as a surprise. Horn had known he, or someone like him, would turn up sometime. He'd known why, and he'd known what to expect of him. What was he to make of a complete stranger risking his own neck to offer him protection?

He did as he was told and picked one. But first he crawled on his hands and knees to a handy bollard and hauled himself to his feet, and leaned against it to stop the world swaying. “You saved my life. Why?”

The man thought for a moment. “I suppose, because I hoped it was worth saving.”

The dull fear that had given way to tremulous hope was now yielding to a kind of uncomprehending rage, because none of this made any sense to Nicky Horn. When a large part of his world had collapsed about him, he'd consoled himself with the thought that—unlike most men—at least he knew how and why he would die. Now even that seemed to have been snatched from him. He felt he was owed an explanation. “You can't know that! You don't know me.”

The man moved a couple of paces closer. They stared at one another by the limited light reaching the side street. Horn saw a tall, rangy individual in a long, dark coat, short hair the color of moonlight. Narrow, clean-shaven face. A bit of an intellectual, you'd have said, if you hadn't just seen him face down a hired killer.

For his part, the man saw someone physically and emotionally battered, with blood on his face and road dirt on his clothes, struggling to keep his feet both actually and metaphorically. A young man in his midtwenties, not tall but sturdy, strong. Dark hair, overdue a trim, falling in his face in rats' tails courtesy of the rain. No coat, and no shoes. He didn't look as if he'd fallen in the gutter. He looked as if he'd been living in it.

His voice was gruff, plainly well-educated, and laced in equal quantities with humor and irritation. “You're—what?—twenty-six, twenty-seven years old? It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that somewhere in the next fifty years you might do something of value to someone. In fact, you might make it a kind of New Life's Resolution. That one day you'll help someone else who has no one left to turn to.”

“He could have killed you!” Disbelief sent the words soaring. “I thought he was going to kill you.”

The man shook his head. “No one was paying him to kill me. And he couldn't kill you and leave me standing here, so he couldn't kill you either. Today. Tomorrow will be different. If I were you, I'd try to sort out my differences with whoever sent him.”

“I wish I could,” said Horn feelingly.

“Too much water under the bridge?”

“Too much blood.”

The man's head was tilted to one side as he studied Nicky Horn, apparently unsure what to make of him. Something about the tilt was familiar. Yes—the mirror. The man in the car who met his eyes before looking away to check his mirror. “I've seen you before,” said Horn.

“That's possible,” the man agreed negligently.

“Last night. Outside the sandwich bar.”

“Yes?”

“You live round here?”

“I was on my way home.”

Though Horn wasn't on top form mentally, he could see the problem with that. “So what are you still doing here five hours later?”

The man chuckled, enjoying Horn's confusion. “You're accusing me of loitering? Of lowering the tone of the neighborhood? You wish I'd taken my cheese-on-rye and gone home?”