Last Line (25 page)

“Yes. It’ll be Diane and Nick and whatever army they’ve brought to round you up. Come on. Better let them see you’re okay.”

He was hoisting Mike to his feet when the first set of wheels hit gravel. A fierce crunch, then a sweeping grind as if the lead car had barely stopped in time and skidded broadside to the house. He frowned. “That one came in hot, even for Diane.”

“Yeah. They think I’m still about to go bomb London.” Michael’s voice was raw. He let go of John with a visible effort and grabbed a handful of kitchen roll. “How much of a mess?”

“Carnage,” John confirmed for him, smiling. “Here, give me that and I’ll—”

Something rattled. A faint metallic clatter, off beyond the hallway. In the living room, John thought, meeting Michael’s eyes. He’d left the window open behind him, hadn’t he?

An explosion rocked the house. The wall between the kitchen and the living room held, but dust burst from the mortar, and a crack went across the kitchen ceiling like a lightning bolt. John seized Mike, who was already reaching for him, and together they dived for the shelter of the massive, ancient table. “Mike, what the fuck—”

“Dunno.” Michael unshipped his pistol and grimly checked the clip. “Where’s Quin?”

“In the…” Sick terror twisted John’s gut. “In the bathroom. Please God.”

“Go find him. What have you got?”

“Not much. Couple of rounds.”

“Right.” Michael didn’t flinch when the next blast came. He pushed a hand under Anzhel’s body and extracted the weapon from the holster at his back. “Take this. Look after Quin and yourself.”

“What? Where are you going?”

“To surrender. John, let me go.”

John didn’t relax the grip he’d fastened round Michael’s arm. “No! I don’t know who these fuckers are, but if they just wanted your white flag, they wouldn’t be lobbing grenades.”

“Whatever.” Michael suddenly smiled and, to John’s astonishment, leaned in and planted a rough, tender kiss to his mouth. “I love you too. Now go get Quin.”

* * *

John couldn’t find him—not in the bathroom or bedrooms, or any of the places where he might have taken cover. The air was thick with smoke and dust. How long did it take a teenage kid to wash? How long since John had left him on his own? Time was on his side in that this was Quin, sufficiently like him to have made Mike put a second bathroom on his list of building priorities for the occasions when both of them stayed in his house, but John was kidding himself, wasn’t he, if he thought the kid had stayed safely out of harm’s reach, away from the…

Away from the living room, whose outer wall was down. John crashed to a halt in the doorway, choking on airborne plaster. Half the ceiling had come in, vast oak beams stark like whalebones crossing the dawn sky on weird diagonals. No. Quin would have finished his wash, come back to the kitchen to find him and Mike, and then with his odd new tact, as if he not only wasn’t fazed by their relationship but wanted to encourage it, he would have veered off. The house wasn’t all that big. He would have come back here.

John had an instant to reflect on all the times he’d have given his arm and a month’s pay to be rid of him. Then the wall behind him burst as a third grenade detonated, the shockwave throwing him just clear of its collapse. He scrambled halfway to his feet, blast-deafened and sick. The sound of gunfire came to him like distant fireworks. “Mike!”

Strong arms closed round him. He felt himself lifted and hauled into the remains of the porch. The oldest part of the house, Mike had told him, the lintel so ancient it bore cup-and-ring marks, enigmatic musings of a forgotten race. He and Mike kept coats and outdoor boots there, like most country families coming and going through the back kitchen door. The front was for weddings and coffins, Mike had said.

He dragged himself into the present. Mike had set him down against the last intact wall and was crouched behind the ruined one opposite, shielding him, returning fire. John couldn’t allow that. He felt around and located Anzhel’s weapon tucked inside his belt. His hands were numb, but they obeyed him. He pushed off the wall and dropped into place beside his partner. “Mike. Who are they?”

“No idea. Balaclavas. And you were right. They didn’t like my white flag. Where’s Quin?”

“Couldn’t find him.” John shuddered, his experienced, deadly hands remaining steady on the gun. It was hard to see in the half-light, but he could just about make out the direction of incoming fire, a human head lifting and ducking down behind a car. That was too tough a target. He took an optimistic shot anyway, put another two neatly into the vehicle’s wheels out of habit. “I can’t find him!”

“Shit. We will, okay?”

John didn’t think so. He had whatever was left in Anzhel’s clip and maybe two in his own. Their assailants were pumping lead at them with the freedom of abundance. It suddenly came to him that he and Mike were at last stand. Fear flashed through him, then an unexpected wash of peace.
By your side, anyway
. His shoulder touched Mike’s. He drew a deep breath and took aim.

Movement on the edge of his field of vision. He snapped round to face it. But Michael grabbed his wrist with bruising force and bore his weapon down. “No!”

Because it was Quin. It was Quin, and yet it wasn’t. John dragged a hand over his eyes, trying to clear them of dust. Quin was walking calmly across the garden. He had lost the dreadful filthy parka he had for some reason been wearing when John arrived. He was in his jeans and the white Shoreline T-shirt Michael had bought him last Christmas. He was just Quin, but John could barely look at him. His eyes streamed and burned when he tried. Some effect of the dawn light was putting a veil between them, making the air iridesce—

Quin
, he tried to shout, but his mouth and throat were numb too. The boy came to a halt in the direct line of fire between the porch and the cars.

The hail of bullets continued for a second, then stopped. A voice John knew well but briefly couldn’t place broke the echoing silence. “What the hell are you doing? Take him out!”

“You can do what you like, mate. I’m not about to shoot a teenage kid!”

And John did know
that
voice. At his side, he saw Michael too coming to astonished attention. “Diane?”

She emerged from behind the car. John thought he could see a glimmer of tears in her eyes behind the balaclava mask. “I’m sorry!” she yelled. “I’m sorry, okay? Fuck this, Nick. You’re on your own.”

She bolted for the second car, parked in the shelter of the first one and intact. There was a moment when John could have taken her out—several when he could have disabled the vehicle. Both, he noted from shocked distance, were anonymous, not from the Last Line car pool, their number plates conveniently splashed with mud. John could have put a round into her skull in the time it took her to roar down the driveway and out into the lane.

Instead he knelt frozen in the ruins of Michael’s house, staring at Nick Skelton. Nick in his turn seemed transfixed by Quin, who for some reason was heading straight for him, smiling serenely.
Walking on water
. John felt dazed. Skelton raised his pistol and took aim.

John’s PPK clicked empty on the kill shot. Before dismay could find him, Michael was a blur at his side, a pissed-off puma clearing the wall. Skelton never saw him coming, went down with a yelp under the force of his flying tackle, and crashed to the turf. Mike flipped him over, pinned, disarmed, and straddled him. He grabbed the balaclava and ripped it away. “You bastard, Nick! What the hell is this?”

Skelton coughed. “What’s it look like?”

“It looks like a hit.”

“Right. You should know.”

“On me? You didn’t see me in the driveway with my hands up?”

“Yeah, I did. That wasn’t an option.”

“What, then—take me out at all costs?”

“Yes. He said you were compromised, too far gone. You know what he’s like. He said to make sure.”

“Webb. Okay. Fair enough. Did he send you to kill John too? And—Christ, Nick. You sat and ate pizza at Quin’s last birthday party!”

“You and any witnesses.”

Michael sat back, breathing hard. Then he got up, hauling Skelton upright with him. “Get out of here.”

“What?”

“Go. I don’t want you or anything to do with you anywhere near my partner or that lad. You go tell Webb what’ll happen to the next bastard who comes within a ten-mile radius of any of us.”

Skelton found a sickly smile. “Come on, Mike. You know how this goes. He sent me and Di out independently. He’ll tell you we were working on our own.”

“I know. Plausible deniability. We all signed up to it. Well, me and John have paid for that. Everybody’s bloody accountable sometime.” He turned Skelton round and began to march him toward the gate. “Get out of here.”

“Er… Diane took the car, Mike.”

“Right. Keep going in that direction about six miles. If you’re lucky, you might get the nine o’clock bus.”

Skelton set off. He took the first few steps unsteadily, staring back incredulously over his shoulder. Michael closed the gate, and for John it wasn’t hard to equip him with wings and a fiery sword. First sunlight poured over the hills to the east, casting him in bronze and gold—a sentinel finding his post at last, the home ground he wanted to guard.

Skelton stopped in the lane. “If he wants you dead,” he said harshly, “somebody’ll come for you. You know that.”

“We’ll deal with it. If you miss the nine o’clock, there’s one at four. Sometimes.”

John watched him retreat into green shadows. The lane was an old one, what the locals called a holloway, sunk so deep between its banks that the elders and hawthorns in their summer abundance almost made a tunnel of it. Skelton broke into a jog. After a moment, he vaulted a fence, or John thought he had. Skelton was hard-trained to disappear, as they all had been. To melt like ghosts into a landscape of fields or city streets. To emerge again as suddenly.

Somebody’ll come for you
. They would never be safe, would they? Not if Webb had cut them loose. John took hold of what was left of the porch wall and used it to lurch to his feet. He looked at his partner, who was still calmly watching the lane—and then at his brother, who had walked through a hail of gunfire to shield both of them.

He stumbled across the lawn. Quin didn’t respond to his name, remained motionless, his dust-smeared face abstracted and empty. John shook him gently. He pulled him hard into his arms. “Quin! What the hell are you doing out here?”

Quin stood rigid, chilly as marble. John had long enough to wonder if, having somehow retrieved him physically, he had lost him in every way that counted. But suddenly the boy relaxed so completely that John had to make a grab to catch him. He rested his brow on John’s shoulder, his expression as peaceful as if he were settling to sleep in his own bed. Then he looked up, frowning, and met John’s eyes. “John? What the hell am I doing out here?”

“It’s all right.” John forced back a tremor of laughter at the just-woken confusion in his voice. “You’ll be all right now.” He held out a hand to Michael, who had turned at last in the gateway and was coming to them across the sun-diamond grass, staring at Quin like a phoenix who had risen from his rubble-strewn vegetable patch. “Mike, he’s okay.”

“I don’t see how.” Mike took John’s hand and reached with his free one for Quin’s tangled hair. “Where was he?”

“No idea. Quin, I couldn’t find you. Where were you when they started chucking grenades?”

“In the…in the living room.”

John glanced at the wreckage of the walls he and Michael had built. “He couldn’t have been,” he said to Mike, who was also surveying the ruins. “There’s not a mark on him.”

Quin straightened. He didn’t dispense with his brother’s support or try to avoid Michael’s hand on his skull, caressing, checking for damage. “I was. I went in to get a book. Then I heard the cars. I went to the window, and…something came in. Something metal. And then I don’t remember, not unti—” He broke off. “Oh, Mike. The farmhouse!”

Mike’s grip tightened around John’s. Their fingers interlaced strongly. “It’s okay,” he said. “I was rebuilding it wrong anyway. We need two decent-sized bedrooms, not three little cubes.” A dawn breeze had risen, carrying off some of the smoke and dust. Summer daylight was falling on earth held in darkness for three hundred years, sweet cleansing fire. For the first time in all those years, there was a view of the Tor. “Everything’s going to change.”

Chapter Sixteen

John climbed the hill to the north of the farm. The last of a glorious sunset was lingering still, painting green-gold fires from horizon to zenith. The night would remain luminous for hours to come. John took the grassy track slowly, breathing the cooling air deep into his lungs. There was no hurry. No need to be afraid.

This was the first place Michael had shown him on his first weekend visit. They had both been so awkward, their easy workday bond dissolving in the silences, trying to weave back together, unsure of the new design. Disconcerting for both of them, that first voluntary sharing of free time. The odd hour at the pub at the end of shift had been one thing, but what did it mean when one apparently straight but unattached man invited an openly gay one to stay with him in the country? John smiled. They had both striven so hard to make it mean no more than that. They were friends. Michael had a nice place and needed help sorting it out. And, on that first Friday night, they had come up here under a full springtime moon, tides of yearning rushing in silence between them. They’d listened to the owls, and John had seen strange lights shimmering over the Tor and known better than to mention them to his pragmatic partner, who’d told him over dinner what a nightmare the constant influx of new agers and UFO nutcases had become.

He came to the crest of the hill. The breeze was fresher up here, a relief after a hard hot day’s work. The close-cropped turf was still warm when he settled on it. He pressed his palms to it, feeling for the solidity of earth, aware of the slope beneath him slowly exhaling stored heat. Flank of an unimaginable beast laid out across the Somerset countryside, falling into vast sleep… John, not prone to flights of imagination even if he did see lights on the Tor, shook himself. He was reaching for distraction. Beginning to be scared. Mike had been gone for such a long time.