The Payback (30 page)

‘So, what’s the problem?’ he demanded in a low yet strangely musical voice that bore only a hint of its Australian roots.

‘Me,’ I said, coming out from behind the table, conscious of Tina standing up too.

He turned my way with a leering smile that showed off stained, uneven teeth. ‘Ah, Mr Milne. I wasn’t expecting to see you here. Or you, Miss Boyd. To what do I owe the pleasure?’

I was a little disconcerted by his lack of nerves, and by the fact that he knew Tina by sight, but knew better than to show it. ‘We need some answers,’ I told him, pointing the gun at his chest. ‘Now, step away from your friend and put your hands in the air.’

His speed was incredible. In one lightning-fast movement he looped a hand round the barman’s neck and swung him round in front of him so that he was using him as a shield, while at the same time pulling a gun from under his jacket. Before the barman could react, his body juddered wildly as Heed shot him twice, the bullets passing straight through him and narrowly missing me as I dived for cover. Heed kept firing as he retreated towards the
door, using the barman’s body as a shield, his bullets ricocheting wildly off the floor.

I glanced at Tina, who was lying on her front with her head in her hands, then I rolled on to my side and, using the table as partial cover, opened fire, aiming for the lower part of Heed’s legs, knowing that I couldn’t kill him. Trying to keep my arms as steady as possible, I cracked off three shots, their noise explosive in the confines of the room. One bullet took off the barman’s kneecap, but Heed kept moving towards the door.

Then he stopped, and although I could only see his lower half I could tell he was punching a combination into the keypad. I leapt to my feet, holding the gun two-handed, prepared to shoot him in the belly if it would stop him. But the door was already swinging open, and before I could get a shot in, Heed fired back. I ducked, and when I straightened up again, Heed had dropped the barman’s body in the doorway and jumped back into the darkness, disappearing down the steps just as I pulled the trigger for a fourth time, aiming low.

The bullet missed but, unfortunately for Heed, the barman’s body was propping open the door.

‘Stay there,’ I hissed at Tina, who was already getting to her feet, and made for the open door.

I stopped just outside in case it was a trap, but through the ringing in my ears I could just make out footfalls coming from the bottom of the flight of stone steps inside the entrance. Motioning once again for Tina to remain where she was, I started down them, moving ever so slowly, knowing that one wrong move and this bastard would take me out all too easily.

The steps curved round 180 degrees, and I poked my head round inch by inch, wishing I could hear and see better. But there was no one there. Before long I found myself looking into a
darkened stone hallway that looked more like a cellar than anyone’s living quarters. A light burned from somewhere inside, giving the place a dim glow, and a smell of damp filled the still, cold air.

The silence was loud in my ears as I crept down the last of the steps and came out into the hallway proper. A narrow corridor ran off into the darkness to my right, while to the left it opened out a little with doors on either side, before narrowing again into more darkness. One of the doors was partially open, revealing what looked like a kitchen behind it, and it was from here that the only light in the place came.

Narrowing my eyes in an effort to accustom them to the gloom, I made my way over to the kitchen door and pushed it further open with the barrel of the gun. There was no one inside. I looked right, then left, trying to work out which way he’d gone, knowing that if I made a mistake, I’d be dead.

Then I heard it. A muffled cry, coming from behind one of the doors, only ten feet away.

I tensed, raising the gun. Although the air was cold, I could feel a sheen of sweat forming on my forehead. I was getting a terrible claustrophobic feeling, and it took all my willpower to remain where I was. Listening. Waiting.

I risked a quick glance over my shoulder, but there was nothing behind me, and I could no longer hear anything.

The muffled cry came again. From just behind the same door. I took a step forward, the gun feeling heavy in my hands.

And that was when the door opened and I was confronted by a sight that no man should ever see.

They emerged from the room as if fused together.

The girl was naked and thin and dirty, with the hardened, yet still strangely naive, face of the street urchin, and she was twelve years old at most. Her round brown eyes were wide with terror as Heed held her up in front of him, her head forced into the crook of his shoulder. His gun was pressed hard into her cheek, and his watery fish-grey eyes glinted with a malignant cunning. He had the look of a man who knows he’s found his enemy’s weakness.

‘Drop the gun or she dies,’ he said, an unmistakable excitement in his voice. ‘And you know I’ll do it, don’t you? I’ll kill this child, and it will be your fault.’

I kept my gun trained on him, knowing that, of course, he meant it. I could almost see the evil that seemed to come off him in intense, rancid waves.

But I also knew that if I did drop my gun, he’d kill me anyway. And then the girl.

Behind me, I thought I could hear movement on the steps, and hoped it wasn’t Tina descending into this gloomy hell. Unarmed,
she could do nothing. In fact, she could only make things worse.

‘Drop the gun, Milne. You may be a killer, but surely even you don’t want the death of a child on your conscience.’ He winked at me and nuzzled the girl’s neck in a sickeningly intimate gesture. ‘Her name’s Layla, by the way.’

Layla’s eyes burned into me, and I felt a rivulet of sweat run down my forehead and on to my cheek.

‘Don’t do this, Heed,’ I said, conscious of the weakness in my voice. ‘This is between you and me.’

‘If you drop your gun, I will let you walk out of here, and Layla will live to see adulthood. I’m going to count to three and if your gun’s not on the floor then I’m going to pull the trigger. One . . .’

I knew he wasn’t going to let her live. Or me. Yet for the first time in my life my gun hand began shaking, because I also knew that after all the terrible sins I’d committed over the years, to sentence a child to death by my own inaction seemed at that moment to be the worst of all.

‘Two . . .’

The world stopped. I faced Heed down. He smiled at me. He knew my weakness.

His finger tensed on the trigger and Layla began to whimper beneath the yellow, liver-spotted hand covering her face.

‘Three.’

I lowered the gun forty-five degrees.

Then fired.

I was aiming for his kneecap, but because I was trying to look as if I was cooperating, I had barely a quarter of a second to make my shot, and with my hands still shaking, I missed.

Another shot rang out, and suddenly Layla was flying towards me. I caught her in mid-flight but the momentum drove me
backwards, and I landed hard on the ground as a bullet ricocheted off the ground very close by.

Heed fired again as I pushed Layla to one side, trying to get her out of the firing line. But this time he was pulling the trigger on an empty gun.

As I lifted myself up to fire my last shot at him, having to pull my arm out from under Layla and aiming now for Heed’s abdomen, he threw the gun, hitting me squarely in the forehead with a painful thud at just the moment I pulled the trigger for the sixth and final time.

Then, in another surprisingly deft movement, he turned and ran up the corridor, the blackness quickly swallowing him up.

That was when I saw that Layla was dead – her face almost lost under a growing curtain of blood seeping from the coin-shaped hole where the bullet had exited.

I howled with frustration and rage, my voice echoing through the corridor, and I leapt to my feet as the adrenalin surged through me, determined to capture this monster if it was the last thing I ever did.

‘Jesus! What’s happened?’ cried Tina from the bottom of the steps. Then she saw Layla’s small naked body. ‘What’s he done?’ She hurried over and crouched down beside the little girl, hunting for a pulse.

Pulling the second speedloader from the front pocket of my jeans, I reloaded the .45 and ran off after Heed, ignoring the blood running down from the cut on my forehead where the gun had hit me.

The corridor veered left sharply and plunged into darkness as I moved along it, no longer trying to be careful. I forced myself to slow as I almost tripped over a box on the floor. Then, through the gloom, I could just make out an aluminium extension ladder
at the end of the corridor, leading up through a specially cut hole in the masonry towards ground level. This would definitely be his escape route, and I was walking towards it when a silhouette lurched out of an adjacent alcove, and a flash of metal slashed through the air.

As I swung round to face him, trying to dodge the blade, I felt it slice through my jacket, only just failing to break skin. Instinctively, I pulled the trigger on the .45, but Heed had already grabbed my wrist and yanked it skywards, and the bullet flew uselessly away. Adrenalin and anger surged through me and I managed to grab the hand holding the knife and force it away from me.

‘Time to die, Mr Milne,’ whispered Heed in a relaxed sing-song voice, his sour, hot breath scouring my face.

He drove me hard against the opposite wall, driving the wind from my gut. His strength was incredible for such an unhealthy-looking individual and I could feel the knife getting closer and closer to me as I struggled and fought against his grip.

And then I heard rapid footsteps and a second later Tina was on him, her clenched fist careering into the side of his head with such force that I felt it.

‘He’s got a knife!’ I yelled as Heed let go of me and fell back against the extension ladder.

But Tina was quick, and Heed had been caught by surprise. She let him have it with two stunning left hooks that connected perfectly, before grabbing his knife arm and twisting it up behind his back. ‘You bastard,’ she hissed through clenched teeth, grabbing a handful of his hair and slamming him headfirst into the wall with an audible crack.

The knife clattered to the floor, and Heed looked dazed.

But Tina wasn’t finished yet, and she slammed his head into the wall again.

I grabbed her arm. ‘No more, Tina, we need him alive. He’s got to talk.’

She flashed me a look of such naked hatred that I automatically let her go. I wasn’t sure who it was directed at, me or Heed. But after a second, she released her grip on him and he fell to the floor.

‘Was he the one who killed her?’ she demanded.

I nodded. ‘He shot her when I was starting to lower the gun. Then he tried to shoot me.’ It was a lie, but I knew I couldn’t tell her the truth. That I’d risked Layla’s life to save my own, and that in doing so I had effectively killed her. That was something else for me to live with.

Tina didn’t say anything, just took a deep breath, as if steeling herself for the task ahead, before leaning down and pulling Heed up by his hair. ‘So let’s make this murdering bastard talk.’

Tina found some masking tape in one of the kitchen drawers and we tied Heed to a chair in the kitchen. He was still only semiconscious, but we were taking no chances and I kept the gun trained on him until she was done. Next I filled up a cup with cold water from the tap and threw it in his face. When he didn’t move, I repeated the procedure, and the third time I did it he finally shook his head and opened his eyes, focusing on us both.

After a few seconds, he smiled, showing brown, uneven teeth. His eyes were now flinty and alert.

I turned to Tina. ‘You might want to wait outside.’

She shot Heed a look of pure contempt. ‘No thank you. I’m not squeamish. Do what you have to do.’

There was an old electric kettle on the kitchen worktop and I filled it with water and turned it on. As the water boiled, I approached Heed and stood in front of him. ‘I told you why we’re here. For answers. You’re going to give them to me. It just depends how easy or hard you want to make it.’

Heed kept smiling up at me, his eyes scanning like probes,
hunting for weaknesses. There was an aura of fearlessness about him that unnerved me. He should have been a lot more scared, given his position. Instinctively, I wanted to turn away from his gaze, but I forced myself to hold it, remembering that the creature in front of me had just murdered a young child.

Bastard.

A thin plume of steam poured out of the kettle. I picked it up and poured half the contents into his lap, watching with grim satisfaction as he bucked and writhed in the chair, his face turning a strange brass-like colour as he fought against the pain, refusing to cry out. I waited a few seconds for the pain to die down, then repeated the procedure with the remainder of the boiling water. This time he let out a rasping wail, and began to cough.

‘You might think you’re the devil incarnate, Mr Heed,’ I told him, ‘but you’re not. You’re flesh and blood, just like anyone else. And I can hurt you very, very badly.’

‘Fuck you!’ he snarled, his eyes blazing.