Redlaw - 01 (17 page)

“Right,” he said. “Everything seems to be in order. I’ll just get out of here and you can be on your way.”

As the rear doors swung shut, Redlaw saw Illyria striding swiftly towards him.

“Redlaw,” she murmured. “Snag. The sergeant is contacting SHADE HQ. I just heard him. He told the others he’s decided to check up on you, because you’re outside your usual stamping ground and he finds that strange.”

“Damn.” Redlaw threw a glance towards the patrol car. The sergeant was leaning in through his door, speaking into the radio handset. He cast a look in Redlaw’s direction, making eye contact and almost instantly breaking it. That clinched it; that, and the fact that the other three officers all then looked at Redlaw.

He’d been rumbled. The game was up. HQ had broken the news that John Redlaw was not at this moment officially a SHADE officer. He was, in essence, a civilian pretending to be a shady. A civilian, what’s more, who was interfering with a blood delivery for no readily apparent reason.

The sergeant straightened up. The other three officers, in unison, opened their doors and climbed out of the car. One tugged down the ends of his jacket in businesslike fashion. Another angled his head from side to side as though working out kinks in his neck.

“Redlaw,” said the sergeant. No
Captain
, note. Just the surname. “Seems you’re not only outside your jurisdiction, you’re operating without authorisation. ‘Relieved of duty pending assessment.’ That’s from the Commodore herself, as is this: ‘Detain and transport to headquarters.’ Which, I reckon, applies to your girlfriend as well. Please come quietly, if you would. Let’s not make a fuss, eh?”

The sergeant’s face said Redlaw had made him look a fool and he was not best pleased about that. It also said he was rather hoping Redlaw would
not
come quietly.

Redlaw was in a quandary. The logical course of action would be to go to HQ with these men, meek as a lamb. There he could face Macarthur, endure the inevitable verbal laceration, then present her with his findings and secure her consent to have the BovPlas blood analysed.

On the other hand, he didn’t have any findings as such. What if the blood turned out to be untainted and innocuous? He would be twice as deep in the mire then. Moreover, he doubted Illyria would let herself be taken into SHADE custody.

Before he could reach a decision, he felt himself being seized by the arm and propelled towards the cab of the truck. Illyria shoved him roughly up into the driving seat, then thrust him along into the passenger seat and slid in behind the wheel. One of the drivers yelled an objection—“Oi! Gerroff out of it! That’s my truck!”—and clambered up after them. Illyria grabbed him by the front of his BovPlas coveralls and flung him smartly outwards. He hurtled through the air, landing almost at the kerb on the far side of the road. Something cracked as he hit the tarmac, and he let out a shriek.

The key was in the ignition. Illyria cranked the engine, then slammed the door. She threw the truck into first, stamped on the accelerator, and aimed for the patrol car and the four men standing, slack-jawed, near it.

“No!” Redlaw cried.

“Don’t get your bloomers in an uproar, old fellow,” Illyria said, yanking the wheel to the right. The four officers scattered as the truck roared past. Its front bumper caught the nearside wing of the car a glancing blow, knocking out a tail light and denting a door. Illyria shifted up into second and poured on the speed. The truck responded as well as any fully laden twelve-ton refrigerated goods vehicle, with armour plating, could—which is to say with loud but sluggish enthusiasm.

Redlaw checked in the wing mirror. The second BovPlas driver had rushed to his colleague’s aid. The shadies, meanwhile, were piling back into the patrol car, ready to take off in hot pursuit.

“Why on earth,” he asked Illyria, “did you do that?”

Illyria pulled down her scarf. “To stop you from doing something very counterproductive. You’d rather we had gone to SHADE HQ? Do you honestly think I would let any of those men lay even a finger on me?”

“I’m sure we could have worked out some sort of compromise with them.”

“I’m just as sure we couldn’t have. You’re the one who doesn’t wish me to hurt people. This way, everyone gets a chance of coming out of this with their hide intact.”

Redlaw had to admit she had a point. “But we only came for one pouch of blood. Now we’ve a thousand of the damn things.”

“Then we have been a thousand times more successful than we hoped.”

Redlaw consulted the wing mirror again and saw the patrol car coming up at the rear, fast. The sergeant was hunched at the controls, looking resolute.

“We’re going to have to shake them off somehow,” he said.

“We certainly can’t outrun them in this galumphing great rattletrap,” said Illyria. “It’s your city. Where should we go? Where, Redlaw?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Then think harder.”

Illyria made a screeching left turn at a junction, the truck heeling over onto its shock absorbers. They were now heading towards the Hanger Lane Gyratory.

“Big roundabout coming up,” she said, spying a road sign. “Suggest an exit.”

“Okay. The North Circular.” It was a big road with plenty of turnoffs but no sharp bends or corners. It would give them some breathing space, him some time to formulate a plan.

Illyria gunned the truck up the ramp to the Gyratory, passing through the lights at the top as they turned amber. They were red by the time the patrol car reached them but the sergeant didn’t stop. A night bus, just pulling out in front of them, honked angrily.

Illyria took the first exit onto the North Circular, northbound. Multiple neon-lit lanes stretched ahead, almost devoid of other traffic. It was 3.30am, and tonight even fewer people than normal were out and about in their cars. Illyria used the splitter switch on the gearstick to shift the truck from fourth low into fourth high, and the needle on the speedo edged towards sixty.

The patrol car was right on their tail now, and the sergeant pulled out into the adjacent lane. The officer in the passenger seat had his window open. Illyria glimpsed a Cindermaker in his hand.

“It won’t do any good them shooting at us,” she said. “We’re armoured. Everything’s bulletproof, even the windows.”

“Not the tyres,” said Redlaw. “That’s what he’s going to aim for. I would if I were him.”

Sure enough the man loosed off a round at one of the truck’s rear tyres.

Illyria growled something in Albanian—“
Ta qifsha nanen!
”—which was unmistakably uncomplimentary.

The bullet had missed, but the patrol car was now parallel with the truck and the officer was lining up his second shot with great care.

“Are you buckled in, Redlaw?”

“No.”

“Then do so. Now.”

Redlaw grabbed his seatbelt and fastened it. The next instant Illyria, bracing herself on the steering wheel, hit the brakes. The truck squealed and juddered and slewed. The patrol car barrelled on, the officer squeezed the trigger and a spark flashed as once again he expended a Fraxinus round on the innocent roadway.

Illyria did some complicated gear-shifting and got the truck going again. Now the truck was chasing the car, although the sergeant performed a nifty deceleration and drew back so that the car was, as before, hovering alongside the truck’s rear wheels. Illyria’s response was to veer out of lane, forcing the sergeant to swerve accordingly.

“Easy,” Redlaw said. “You could kill them.”

“And they’re not trying to kill us? I know what I’m doing. Believe it or not, I used to drive a truck for a living.”

“You did?”

“At the docks in Marseilles.”

“Before or after...?”

“After. Night shifts only, loading and unloading cargo ships. I have done many varied things during my decades as a shtriga. You’d be surprised.”

“I probably would. Shall we just focus on what we’re doing right now, though? Like not steering into the back of a lorry full of flammable liquid.”

Illyria overtook the petrol tanker lumbering along in front of them. The patrol car continued to follow doggedly, although the sergeant was being somewhat more circumspect now. The near-miss Illyria had engineered a few moments earlier had given him a definite case of the willies.

The truck was soon hitting sixty again and got flashed by a speed camera.

“Forty pound fixed penalty for BovPlas,” Redlaw commented. “I think they can afford it.”

“I’d be going even faster if I could,” Illyria said, “but it’s as if the truck doesn’t want to.”

“Fitted with a limiter. It can’t.”

“Then we’re never going to be able to lose those men. Unless...”

“Unless...?”

Illyria floored the accelerator, hoping to squeeze just that last little bit of extra juice out of the engine. At the same time she scanned the dashboard until her eye alighted on a small lever. With a grim smile she depressed it and nudged the truck out in front of the patrol car.

The truck’s rear doors began to open. A warning light winked on the dash, indicating this action was not advisable while the vehicle was in motion.

Illyria then began swerving from side to side, and Redlaw gripped the door armrest to steady himself. Objects began to
clunk
and thump in the fridge body behind them—the pallets of blood pouches shunting around. Illyria kept twisting the wheel hard left, hard right, until eventually one of the pallets was bumped to the threshold of the doors and tipped out.

Redlaw saw it in the wing mirror: a spectacular explosion of dark red liquid as dozens of pouches struck the road at speed, along with the plywood pallet. The sergeant swerved to avoid ploughing headlong into the obstacle; one flank of the patrol car was spattered with cow blood, but that was all.

Illyria continued to snake the truck along the road. Another pallet tumbled out, and another, splashing gallons upon gallons of blood across all three eastbound lanes. The patrol car skidded but carried on, its wipers frantically scrubbing its windscreen.

When, however, a fourth pallet landed almost slap bang on its bonnet, the sergeant concluded that the game wasn’t worth the candle. Personal safety was more important than mission success. He slowed almost to a halt, and the patrol car receded rapidly in the truck’s wing mirrors. Illyria laughed.

“Take that,
budol douch
,” she said with satisfaction and hit the lever to shut the doors.

“Pull off at the exit ramp coming up,” Redlaw said. “There’s a retail park, load of superstores and malls. We can lose ourselves amongst them.”

Organ chords crashed in his coat pocket. He opened the phone and winced when he saw the display:

GAIL MACARTHUR

calling

Accept Reject

“I’d better take this,” he said, sighing as he selected
Accept
. “Marm?”

“John.” She sounded calm, and that was not a good sign. It was the lull ahead of the hurricane. “I think I gave you pretty explicit instructions, did I not? I doubt I could have made myself much clearer. You’re inactive. You’re not even supposed to be out of your hospital bed.”

“Marm, I can explain...”

“And now I’m hearing reports that you’re tooling around London on some sort of crime spree. You’ve assaulted BovPlas employees and hijacked one of their vehicles. You’ve also put the lives of four SHADE officers in jeopardy. I keep thinking there must be another John Redlaw out there, a lookalike who’s passing himself off as you. You don’t have an identical twin who’s just escaped from a mental institution by any chance?”

“No.”

“Pity. I felt I should ask, because that would at least make sense. Otherwise I’m left with no alternative but to assume that you’ve gone
stark staring mad
.” Here it came, the howling Gail. “In the name of all that’s holy, John, what is going on inside your head? What the hell am I meant to make of all this? Never mind that you’ve stolen property and inflicted criminal damage and trampled over about half a dozen different SHADE regulations—what are you hoping to achieve? And who is this woman with you? What’s her story? Does she have some sort of hold over you? Blackmail? Is that it?”

“Nothing so straightforward,” Redlaw said.

“She’s strong, by all accounts. Way more than she should be. Is there something you need to tell me, John?”

Plenty
, thought Redlaw.
But I doubt you’ll give me a fair hearing. Not now
.

“Commodore,” he said, “will you just trust me here? I’m on the cusp of something big, I think. Something relevant to the troubles we’re experiencing. I just need a little more time to get my facts straight and sort out what’s what. If you can see your way to—”

“
Trust you?
” Macarthur boomed, so loud that Redlaw had to hold the phone away from his ear. “You lost my trust the moment you set foot outside that hospital. You are so far beyond me trusting you now, I might as well have never met you. Forget about suspension, John. Forget about the sabbatical and the time to reflect. I handed you that little fig leaf so that you could take the hint and do the decent thing. I was expecting you to come back to me in a couple of days and tell me you’d decided to hang up your weapons vest for good. That would have saved us both a great deal of heartbreak and indignity. As it is, we’re going to have to do this hard way. No more beating about the bush.”