Heller’s Decision (50 page)

Hurriedly
returning to bed when I heard footsteps approaching, I observed
something interesting when Joe shut and locked the door. My flat
was a good place to stow hostages because the front door could be
locked from the outside. However, this room was just an ordinary
bedroom, with the lock on the inside, for the occupants’
privacy.

I briefly
contemplated locking Joe out when he next disappeared from the room
and then climbing out the window. But when I tried it, the window
was locked, with no key to be found in my quick search. I could try
to use something to break the window, but I didn’t. It wouldn’t
take much effort for one of those big guys to burst through the
door, locked or not. I wouldn’t have enough time to smash the
window and escape. Exhausted and in pain, I didn’t think I had it
in me to do that. Even the thought of being caught and tied to the
chair again made me burrow down further into the bed. I’d have to
come up with another escape plan.

I took the
painkillers from Joe and surprised myself by falling asleep
immediately, sparing only a moment to wonder what was happening
back at the Warehouse. Had someone picked up Niq? Had Clive managed
to get in contact with Heller? Were he and his team stealthily
approaching the house at this very minute, ready to rescue me? I
wanted to see him again so much, it hurt. There were some aches
that no amount of painkillers could dull.

A loud banging
on the door woke us both. Joe, who’d made a makeshift bed on the
floor next to me, leapt to his feet in alarm. In the near distance,
a jumble of male voices shouted hoarse instructions to each
other.

Someone or
something crashed heavily against the door. Muffled voices and
scuffling came from the hallway, as if some hand-to-hand combat was
taking place outside the bedroom. Joe stepped to the light and
flipped the switch. Nothing.

“Shit,” he
muttered. I could only see his silhouette in the darkness, but he
pulled something out of his pocket and flicked it open. “You stay
here.”

He slipped out
of the room, leaving me by myself. I didn’t feel the slightest bit
lonely though, as I had no intention of staying in the room one
more second. At the door, I stopped to recall the directions we’d
taken when Joe escorted me to the bathroom. I shut my eyes and
replayed it.
From this room, we’d taken a left turn and another
left turn into the bathroom.
That probably meant I was on the
opposite side of the hallway to Marcus’ bedroom, which meant the
front door was to my right.

Waiting until
the fracas receded from me into the depths of the house, I escaped
the bedroom and turned right, feeling my way to the front door,
pleased to see it had been the correct choice. With a nervous
glance over my shoulder, I tried the door handle.

It was locked
from the inside. Unsurprisingly, Kirnin had installed
deadlocks.

Refusing to
believe that I could be on the brink of freedom, but thwarted by a
metal mechanism I used every day, I tugged and yanked at the
handle, silently attempting to
abracadabra
it to open for
me. It stubbornly disobliged.

Wasting
precious seconds pointlessly kicking the door and swearing at the
lock, I abandoned it to search for the key. I ran my fingers along
the wall looking for any key hooks, but couldn’t find any.

“Shit, shit,
shit!” I fled back to the bedroom, frantically searching for
something I could use to smash the window. If I didn’t escape that
way, I’d have no choice but to sneak past the fighting men in the
living room. I didn’t like my chances of making it through them
without being detected or maimed, even in the dark. I had no way of
knowing who the other side was, though I prayed with every cell in
my body it was some
Heller’s
men.

I tried a
couple of random items I found in the room to smash the window. At
one desperate point, I held a pillow in front of me and rammed the
glass with my shoulder, achieving nothing except an ungraceful
recoil backwards on to my butt. The window must have been coated
with some kind of protective film to prevent it from shattering,
because nothing I did to it had any effect.

Verging on
tearing all my hair out in frustration, I left the bedroom and
inched towards the backyard, from where all the noise came. I tried
what I presumed was the door to the garage. It was locked.
Please, let something go right for me tonight
, I sent up to
whichever celestial body decided to take pity on me as I switched
direction to the living area at the back of the house.

And that was
the precise moment a man grabbed my shoulders with brutal
force.

Chapter
34

My shriek was
quickly smothered with a none-too-clean huge hand over my mouth. I
was pressed up close to a body that smelt of booze and felt bigger
and taller than mine. Something round, cold and metallic thrust
against the skin of my temple.

“Move,”
Kirnin’s voice spoke into my ear. In the darkness it felt quite
disconnected from either of us, and as deafening as someone calling
me at close quarters with a loudhailer.

I thrashed
against him. It earned me a whack on the side of my head with the
butt of his gun. That sharp, stinging pain took a while to
subside.

“Shut your big
mouth, bitch. You have caused me no end of trouble.”

Despite my new
headache, I tried to protest that unfair accusation. After all, I’d
never asked him to kidnap me. But my undecipherable, muffled
argument failed to convince him. He whacked me again without really
listening to the nuances of my reasoning. Kirnin then moved his arm
down to my throat, the gun pressing more closely into my skull.

“I
will
fucking kill you if I have to. Don’t force me to,” were the words
of wisdom he decided to share with me.
No wonder Marcus didn’t
find him much of an inspiration as a role model
, I thought
fuzzily to myself.

I shuffled
awkwardly with him down the hallway to the back of the house. The
rear glass doors were thrown wide open, Kirnin’s men ranged around
them, all holding guns. He nudged me through his men to stand at
the doorway. It was possible to make out some vague figures of men
in the late night darkness.

“Chalmers,”
called a familiar voice from the shadows, a hint of anguish there
that none of us missed.

“Hugh,” I
choked out, a sudden catch in my throat. Kirnin’s grip tightened
around my neck.

“Shut it,”
Kirnin said, jabbing the gun into my head a couple of times.
“Right. Here she is. Let’s start negotiating.”

I waited
expectantly to hear Heller’s calm voice mocking him.

“You can have
your two back in exchange,” came Clive’s voice instead from the
inky depths. “They’re in a car waiting at a safe distance. The car
will arrive when I give the signal.”

“Fuck that. I
want a lot more than them to hand this beauty over.”

What
? I
couldn’t believe what I heard. Clive was talking about his
wife
and
son
.

“That’s what’s
on offer. Your family for our woman. Take it or leave it.”

It was as if
Kirnin didn’t even hear him. “Where’s Heller? I’ll only deal with
him. I refuse to speak to his . . .
staff
.”

Even I could
feel the hatred for Kirnin rolling off Clive for that jibe.

“Heller’s not
here,” Clive told him in a voice so cold it would freeze the sweat
on a camel’s arse. “You heard the offer. Give us the woman and I’ll
call the other car. That happens – we leave here without any
trouble. That doesn’t happen –” A dramatic pause followed that I
wouldn’t have suspected Clive of having the subtlety to pull off. I
was weirdly proud of him when he did. “Then I can’t be responsible
for any repercussions.”

He left that
hanging in the air with all the drama of Marilyn Monroe parachuting
into her nearest fan convention. Kirnin wasn’t impressed –
obviously not a Monroe fan.

“And you heard
my response. Bring me Heller and we might start talking.”

“I told you
that’s not possible at this time.”

“Well, isn’t
that just tough shit for his bitch here? He couldn’t even be
bothered to show up in person to secure her freedom.” He laughed. I
didn’t. He shook me roughly. “I guess you know where you stand now,
don’t you, bitch? You’re nothing special. Nothing but a passing
fuck to him. A bit of warm flesh on a cold night. Put a bag over
your head and you’re easily substituted with a billion other
women.”

“Don’t listen
to him, Chalmers,” Farrell called out. “You know you mean
everything to him.”

Fine advice,
maybe. But the implacable problem with that principle was that once
you’ve heard something, you could never unhear it. My anger
blossomed and flourished. Kirnin may have aimed to denigrate me in
front of a bunch of men, filling me with insecurity, but I doubted
he ever imagined the response I actually felt.

Kirnin
immobilised my head, but I found if I cast my eyes sideways, I
could make out the general position of his facial features. I
slowly slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled out the
shampoo.

“Hey, Kirnin?”
I asked in a weak, pleading voice, hoping to draw his
attention.

It worked. When
he turned his eyes to me, I squeezed that bottle right into his
face, hoping to get some in his eyes.

He cried out in
pain, loosening his grip. I yanked myself free, running along the
side of the house, my hand touching the bricks to guide me. I’d
just reached the corner, when a sharp crack sounded in the evening
silence, something whizzing past my head, loud enough to hear. I
slammed to the ground, eating dirt.

A second shot
rang out, followed by a short, intense barrage of gunfire.

“Hold your
fire!” yelled Kirnin – or maybe it was Clive? “You fucking idiots!
The cops will be here now. Everyone get the fuck out of this
place.”

A couple of men
came after me, one reaching me before the others – Farrell. He
roughly pulled me to my feet and with his arm around my waist,
urged me on. His breath warmed the side of face. “Come on,
Chalmers. Faster. I have to get you out of here before the cops
come.”

We ran down the
side of the house, coming up against a huge fence separating the
front and back yards.

“It’s not as
hard as it looks,” he encouraged, waiting restlessly while I took
too long to scale it. I found footholds wherever I could, shimmying
down the other side to land heavily on my butt.

A scuffle, and
a series of grunts from the other side of the fence hinted that
Farrell had run into trouble. Someone shouted loudly in pain and
Farrell’s head briefly appeared over the top of the fence.

“Don’t wait for
me. Run to the car,” he shouted. “
Move it, Chalmers!
”

Not knowing
where the car was, I stopped at the footpath to look both ways. I
could barely make out two Heller’s vehicles in the dark, parked a
few houses down from Kirnin’s. Farrell, now more than a little
scuffed around the edges, clicked the car key remote when he hit
the ground, sprinting towards the vehicles. We reached the 4WD at
the same time we heard sirens approaching. Before I had a chance to
buckle up, he tore off in a burst of squealing tyres.

“What about the
others?” I puffed.

“We’ll meet
them a few blocks away.”

“Are they going
to be all right? Everybody had guns. And the police are coming. I
don’t want anyone to be arrested.”

“Kirnin
lives
here. His neighbours are probably his friends – if
anyone could befriend an arsehole like him. But I do know that he
wouldn’t be happy about attracting the attention of the police.
That’s a hell of a lot of explaining to do.”

We drove a
couple of blocks in silence before he pulled over and parked again.
The street he’d chosen was deserted and quiet, though the sirens
cut through the peace.

Farrell leaned
over and cupped my chin, examining my face. “They roughed you up,
sweetheart,” he said simply.

A few tears
gathered on my lashes. “I’ve definitely looked and felt better
before.”

“Hey,” he said
gently, wiping one tear trail away. “None of these. You’re safe
now.”

“Thanks for
getting me out of there.” My voice trembled and broke.

“Anything for
you.”

He placed his
hand on the back of my neck and drew my head towards him. He leaned
over and pressed his warm lips on mine, the kiss tentative at
first, as though he expected rejection, his assurance, and the
pressure of the kiss, growing with each passing moment.

“Thank you
again,” I whispered when we separated.

“That was
thanks enough for me,” he whispered back.

Three
Heller’s
men ran towards us, breaking the moment and making
us spring apart. They piled uncomfortably into the backseat, a
space far too small for such muscularity, but I wasn’t giving up
the front. They assured us the others were on their way and that
everyone had escaped before the cops turned up. Farrell didn’t wait
for them, but commenced the drive back to the Warehouse.

“Shouldn’t we
tell the man with Kirnin’s family to go home too?”

I half-expected
to hear that Rose and Marcus had never left the Warehouse in the
first place. I’d presumed from the lack of any real negotiation
that Clive never had any intentions of reuniting the small family
tonight. He’d come solely to secure me, while also keeping Rose and
Marcus. Holding all the cards in this cutthroat security game
provided an ideal opportunity to extract more concessions from
Kirnin about his dealings with
Heller’s
.

“Ring him,”
Farrell instructed the men in the back.

I was surprised
to hear that Clive had brought them along. I could only imagine it
was in case he decided to parade them in front of Kirnin for some
reason. But as it was unlikely Clive and I would ever share a deep
and meaningful conversation about anything, I guess I’d never
know.