To Kill For (30 page)

The scream came from behind me. It was wretched, savage. I half turned to see who it was, but, as I turned, I knew who it must have been and why. I lifted my gun as I spun back around. It was too late. The flashes lit up the room and blinded me. The roar of gunfire split the air and deafened me. The screaming started again, and it didn't stop. Something slammed into my left arm and threw me back. I fired blind, the gun rocking in my hand, the rounds slamming all over the place. My arm split with pain. I fired until my gun was dry. The flashing lit the room and left after-images on my eyes; a man with a girl, a knife. Something ripped through my side. My mind screamed at me to fill the gun. ‘You're naked,' my mind said. ‘You're dead,' it said. I had to get another magazine from my jacket pocket but my free arm was useless now, a lump of meat. I tried to find the faces again. I saw them. The girl had her eyes shut. Above her, the mask gleamed sickly, the mouth twisted now, mangled with pain.

The woman was in the doorway. Light came through her nightdress and surrounded her with a silver mist. She was still screaming, her hands at her mouth, staring at her daughter. Blood had spattered her. My blood. I turned back to Paget. I should've charged him, not given him time to aim. All he had to do was squeeze. He was good at squeezing. I couldn't do anything. I was lead. I was dumb. I was a carcass waiting to drop. I was dead and I knew it and I didn't much care, except my mocking mind was clear and I knew I'd failed her, and that hurt.

The woman's hands were still at her mouth, but she'd stopped screaming. I waited. She waited. Time waited.

Nothing happened.

The gun pointed straight at me. And then I saw that the slide was all the way back. It hadn't recoiled. His gun was empty. Still I couldn't move. I knew he'd slice the girl's throat. I felt coldness creep down my right side. Then I felt stabbing pain in my ribs. The room tilted and my head went light. I was leaking blood fast. The pain disappeared. I saw Brenda. I saw Kid. I lived with the dead.

We stood there, the four of us. I saw Dunham's daughter, and the blade Paget held to her throat. It was a kind of joke; both of us standing like actors on a stage, waiting for the cue, both surging with the need to destroy the other, both scared, both impotent, both unable to reload and finish the job; me with a fucked-up arm, him with a blade in his free hand. I should have charged anyway. Fuck the girl.

The blade moved across the girl's throat. He was going to cut her. I knew it, knew how his mind worked. I lunged forward. And knew I'd made a mistake. I'd done what he wanted me to do. He sneered and turned the blade towards me. At the last instant, I turned side on. The blade sliced through my left arm, my fucked-up arm. Someone screamed. It might've been me. I hit Paget and the girl like a bag of cement. We crashed to the ground. Something broke under us. My gun fell from my grip. The girl was there, somewhere. I didn't care any more. I wanted Paget. Everything was a mass of bodies, seething limbs, seeping blood, pain, darkness. I saw him. His face was screwed into a fury of agony. His fists pounded my face, but he had no room to move and there was no power in the punches. His eyes were wide, he breathed frantically.

‘Cunt,' he said. ‘Cunt.'

My left was fucked; it had a gaping bullet wound, the knife was stuck in the muscle. I threw a punch with my right that missed and hit the floor. Paget laughed hysterically. I grabbed for his throat. I saw the woman near. She kicked us, shouted madly. The girl was on the floor, crying, her leg trapped beneath us. Paget saw them. He saw the knife in my arm and seized it and pulled it out. The pain was electric. He tried to plunge the blade in my throat, but he kept missing. He reached over and tried to skewer the girl. I tugged him and he missed her. The woman pulled the girl free. I threw another punch, landed it on his jaw, but there was no weight behind it. I needed leverage. I got to my knees. The room spun. I hauled him up with my right. He laughed. The knife arced towards me. I put all my energy into my torso and shoulders and legs. I stood and wrenched him up. The knife flew from his hand. He laughed harder. He collapsed and I saw that he was crying. His right leg was pumping blood. His knee was shattered. One round had hit home. Christ knows what had kept him up. I lifted him by his throat. His hands reached up and took hold of my jacket, pulling himself up, keeping the weight off his knee.

‘All this,' he said through blood and spit. ‘Insane.'

He saw the punch coming. I hit the top of his skull. It felt like I'd broken bones in my hand.

‘Cunt,' he said. ‘Dumb fucking cunt. All this, for what?'

I reached down and took a hold of his face and turned it up so that I could see his eyes. Pain was coming at me all over, my arm, my side, my hand. It didn't matter. It was important that he hear me, that he understood. It was the most important thing in the world.

‘I want to remember her alive,' I said. ‘I want to remember her alive, not in a fucking alley with a face of blood.'

‘All this? For a fucking whore? Why?'

‘I want to remember her smile,' I told him, snarling. ‘But I can't see it, not without the blood.'

‘She used you, you dumb cunt. She knew who you were.'

‘You took that from me. You took her smile and her shining eyes.'

‘She was grassing us to the law. She was only with you because she thought you'd protect her.'

‘I know.'

I smashed his face. Pain shot through my fist, through my arm. Some bone was cracked. It didn't matter. He coughed blood.

‘It doesn't make any sense,' he said, to himself, I thought. ‘It doesn't make any fucking sense.'

‘I know.'

He pulled at me, his hands grappled for a hold.

‘Dunham needs me. I'm valuable to him. I can't die. He'll gut you. He needs me.'

‘I know.'

I hit him again but I couldn't ball my fist. He shook it off. I hit him again, but it was weaker. I staggered. He pulled. I was losing strength. He pulled harder.

‘Cunt,' he said. His voice rasped.

I tried to hit him again, but my body was weak, my hand busted, my punches useless. He clawed at me. I thought I'd failed.

Something tugged at my elbow. The woman was there. There was something in her hand. She held it out to me. I took it. I held it. Paget saw it. He flailed. I smashed him on the head with the butt of my Makarov. I heard his skull crack. He held onto my jacket, his fingers, like daggers, tried to pull me down with him, tried to tear at me. His face was the colour of porridge. He wanted to rip my throat out. I could feel the life draining from me. I could see blood pooling at my feet. I didn't know if it was mine. We grappled with each other, each trying to tug the other down to some hell.

‘She wanted to be a beautician,' I said. ‘That's why you cut her face off.'

He laughed madly, and blood fell from his mouth.

‘She died screaming.'

‘As you should.'

His face curdled in pain.

‘Cunt,' he said.

His head swayed and his fingers loosened. I swayed with him and felt cold. The Makarov fell from my hand. My arm was heavy. I was losing strength and he knew it. He lunged and fell on his broken knee and screamed. His hands were on me, pulling me down, down, and I was afraid. I reached for the gun. The room moved. I got hold of the gun, I lost it, I got it and tried with all my strength to hold onto it.

‘Madness,' he said.

I clubbed him with the gun, pounding his face, mashing it to pulp, but still he held on, still he looked up, his mouth a wrecked smile.

‘Madness.'

‘I know.'

I kicked him off. He sprawled backwards and rolled over onto his front and crawled to my feet in some kind of final act, a death throe. I raised the gun and smashed it into his skull, again and again, crushing the bone and pulping the thing that had been a head until it was nothing but a kind of clot of flesh and bone and brain and blood. I wanted to enjoy it. I didn't. I felt sick. Madness.

The woman and girl had gone. I walked out on shaking legs. Blood was running down my shirt, down my trouser leg. I was cold all over.

Cole stood at the top of the steps, his men around him, Dunham's men face down on the ground, lined up, arms behind their heads. I saw bodies in the distance, by the gate. One of Cole's men was being propped up by comrades, another held his shoulder. Cars were coming up the driveway. Cole looked at me. They all looked at me.

‘Jesus Christ.'

When the cars got there, Cole's men got in. Cole helped me get into one of the cars. He got in beside me.

‘Will you make it?' he said.

‘Dunno.'

We took a long route back because Cole didn't want his car tagged on some CCTV camera, returning from a crime scene. We didn't say anything. There'd be comeback for this, we both knew that. It didn't matter.

As soon as we got back, Browne got to work on me.

‘Happy now?' he said as he cut my shirt away.

He didn't touch the booze while he was looking after me. It was all too much for him, though, and Cole sent his doctor round. Browne didn't complain this time. I passed in and out of consciousness for a couple of days. Browne told me there'd been nothing on the news about Paget, which meant Dunham must have cleaned it up. I didn't think he'd come for us straight away, but Cole had a couple of men at Browne's place just the same. There'd been a lot of stuff on the news about the fight in Barking, but Cole had been lucky about the location and had managed to cover his involvement. The news said something about a turf war and Dunham had had to fend off the law. But he had contacts and the thing had died down after a few days, blamed on rival East European gangs, who nobody particularly cared about. As long as they were killing each other and not some local upstanding citizen, everyone could pretend it didn't happen.

After a few days, Compton and Bradley and Hayward came round. There was a bit of fuss outside when they came face to face with Cole's men, who wouldn't let them through, but Browne settled things and they came traipsing in like they'd come to pay their respects to the dear departed.

I was propped up in Browne's favourite chair, ban-daged around my arm and torso. It only hurt if I breathed. There was a break in the clouds and sunlight bounced around the room and lit up the specks of dust floating in the air.

‘Had some kind of accident, Joe?' Bradley said.

‘Sure.'

‘Must've been a bad one.'

‘Yeah.'

I didn't want them there, but Browne told them all to sit down. He went and made them tea. He was up to something but I was too fucked-up to argue. So, we all sat around and drank Browne's tea and they asked me how I was feeling and that kind of thing. When they ran out of small talk, there was silence. Then Compton said, ‘We've heard a few things. Interesting things. Seems Dunham's had something of a dispute.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Paget's disappeared,' Hayward said.

‘So?'

‘Disappeared for good,' Bradley said. ‘From what we hear.'

‘Yeah?'

Compton smiled wryly.

‘Unbelievable,' he said.

Browne cleared his throat.

‘Joe,' he said.

He made eyes at me and I wondered what the fuck he was on about. And then I realized. I shook my head.

He stared at me, furious. But he didn't say anything to the coppers.

Compton saw it, but he didn't know what it was about.

‘Well…' Browne said. ‘I think Joe needs some rest.'

Compton got up. The others followed and they all started to file out.

‘You knew, didn't you?' I said.

They stopped. Compton turned.

‘Knew? Knew what?'

‘You knew who I was. You knew about Brenda before I told you. You knew what I'd do.'

Compton smiled.

‘Did we?'

‘You knew she was the one who'd sent the evidence against Paget to Glazer. You knew who I was. And you knew I'd go after Hayward. He was bait.'

‘We thought you might. But, Christ, we didn't think you'd get to him that quickly. His wife wasn't supposed to be there.'

‘She's about ready to divorce me,' Hayward said.

‘He ain't kidding,' Bradley said. ‘And you thought Dunham was tough.'

They laughed. It was funny now. They had what they wanted, they were all alive, Paget was dead. Everything was funny.

But…

Still I had the feeling about these blokes. They were law, after all. And there was something phony about this act of theirs. They were making too much of an effort to be friendly.

‘When did you know about me?' I asked Compton.

‘The hospital. The first time I saw you. I recognized you. There were photographs of you from the Elena file. And, yes, we knew about you and Brenda. We thought she might've kept some evidence of what happened. We thought she might've given it to you, but then you didn't seem to know Glazer's role in things and we thought we must've been wrong.'

That was a cue. I ignored it.

‘But you wound me up and let me loose anyway. Just to see.'

‘We gave you enough rope,' Bradley said.

‘What you did, you did yourself,' Compton said. ‘You worked things out. You wanted vengeance. Like I told you before, we're the law. We can't be involved in the planning of a crime.'

‘You didn't want to get your hands dirty.'

‘If you like. You have to see it from our point of view.'

‘Yeah.'

With that, they walked out, Browne following them to the door. Then they were gone.

‘Why didn't you give them the DVD?' Browne said, coming back into the room. ‘That was evidence. They could use it to get these people.'

‘I don't trust them.'

‘You don't trust anybody. So, you want it for yourself, I suppose. The DVD. You're going to use it to find the people left. You want it for your so-called revenge.'