To Snatch a Thief (3 page)

There was already quite a mob of kids hanging around outside the main office when Skye got there. King, flanked by some of his mates, was chatting up a dewy-eyed girl with a cat-walk body and a cloud of silver hair. By the soppy expression on his face she didn’t think he’d welcome an intrusion. Amongst the general buzz of voices, she heard Chloe mouthing off to her cronies, but apart from shooting Skye a look, she left her alone.

A blonde girl she didn’t know elbowed her in the ribs and pointed a finger at the window. Her nails were so pointed she could have used them as toothpicks. ‘Snow, hey look snow.’

‘It’s white.’ Skye replied with no real enthusiasm. ‘White, wet and cold.’

‘It’s beautiful. Just beautiful.’

Skye raised her eyebrows. Nobody in their right mind thought snow was anything but a pain. ‘Where do
you
come from?’ she asked, already guessing by the upper class accent and top of the range clothes. She’d probably been in the girl’s parent’s house at some point during her recent activities. Her conscience gave a slight twinge.

‘Bethnal Green.’

Yep, right on the money.

‘Daddy usually takes us all skiing every year, but I’m going to miss out…’ Her rosebud mouth puckered and for one awful moment Skye thought she was going to burst into tears, but she rallied and shot a watery smile. ‘I deserve it. I mean, I so totally deserve to be locked up. I’ve been such a spoilt cow; such an absolute pain in the bum for years.’

‘Yeah, I bet.’

‘I think I like you,’ she said on a sudden laugh. ‘Rose. Rosie Fitzpatrick.’ She held out a hand.

‘Skye Forrester.’

‘My boyfriend was totally annoyed when I was arrested…again.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘We’d planned a weekend; he was mega-pissed off. Guys, what can you do?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Don’t bother with them.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Nope.’ It was the truth. She’d learned the hard way; loving people led to pain. They hurt you, left you, one way or another. With the exception of her brother, her heart was solid ice. Sure, she appreciated the wrapping – she was only human – but as far as anything deeper went… Not even the Titanic, she’d decided long ago, ploughing into her iceberg heart, would budge it an inch.

‘God,’ Rosie said, giving her an incredulous look. Lowering her voice, she leant in closer. ‘Don’t suppose you know where I can score round here?’

‘Sorry, not my scene.’

When the office door opened everyone surged forward.

‘Back! Back! Everyone stand in line.’ A grim-faced guard waved a hand and they fell into a ragged queue. He tapped a finger on an e-board and started calling names.

‘Rosalind Fitzpatrick.’

Skye’s new friend squeaked. ‘Gosh, that’s me. First up to bat.’ She shimmied forward and was handed a gold-edged klip which she immediately activated. ‘Twelve,’ she remarked before rushing off. ‘Twelve effing messages from my mother, not a bloody one from my bloke. God.’

Eventually, Skye was handed her ancient wrist unit. It was like being reunited with an old friend, moulding to her body as soon as she clipped it on. ‘Display message bank. Audio.’ she said, the moment she got back to her room. ‘C’mon, c’mon.’ Impatient, Skye gave it a couple of taps with her finger just to help it along, and after two or three false starts the battered screen flickered to life. ‘
You have two new messages.’
It went on to say they were both a week old, both from her waitressing girlfriend Ashleigh. They could wait till later, she thought, she needed to call a number.

Butterflies hatched in her stomach as she waited for the connection to be made. At last, after what seemed like an age, her brother’s angelic face filled the tiny monitor. ‘Transfer visual to wall screen,’ she ordered, and sagged onto the bed with relief.

‘Lex, you okay?

He lifted a shoulder. ‘Guess so.’ The initial pleasure at seeing her faded from his enormous grey-green eyes. ‘When’re you coming to get me?’ Plaintive, as only a six year old could sound, his little eyebrows pulled together.

She swallowed hard, pasted a bright expression on her face. ‘I’ve got things to do for a while yet, but I’m doing everything I can to get there soon. Is Mrs Abbott looking after you okay?’

‘Mmm-hmm. But I have to sleep with Mitch and Tommy and Mitch says he doesn’t like me much and his feet smell like dog’s poo.’

‘That can’t be good. Are you getting enough to eat?’

‘We don’t get soy burgers or fizzers. Mrs Abbott says you didn’t leave enough dollars for fizzers.’ He scrubbed a fist over the tangle of blonde curls which, like her own, refused to be tamed; Lexie always looked as if he’d just got out of bed.

‘Aw, I’m sorry. Are you going to school every day like you promised?’

He nodded. ‘But some boys don’t come anymore. Timmy Barnes hasn’t come for a whole week. His mum came though and she’d been crying. I knowdest she’d been crying ‘cos her face was all red and wrinkled. She took his things away and she was crying then.’

Something prickled at the back of her neck. ‘Lexie, you feeling okay – you don’t feel ill or anything? You still taking the Preventix I left for you?’

Her brother’s solemn eyes, that never failed to tug at her heart, narrowed to slits as he considered the multiple questions; his lips pursed. After a few mind-numbing seconds, during which Skye’s heart stalled, he shook his head. ‘I don’t feel sick, but Pretend-it makes me sneeze.’

She let out the breath she’d been holding in. ‘Good, that’s good, Lex. Not the sneeze,’ she clarified as his brows knit again. ‘The spray tickles your nose I know, but it stops you getting really, really bad illnesses.’

‘Like daddy?’

‘Yep,’ she managed. ‘Daddy didn’t have any Preventix.’ The medical shield against most known diseases had been an unattainable luxury in their house. ‘So he got something the doctor’s couldn’t fix.’

‘Like Mummy.’

The fact their mother had died giving birth to Lexie was something she dreaded having to tell him. One day he’d have to know she’d slipped through the system, but that was in the far distant future; it was too much weight for a child to carry. She took the coward’s way out. ‘That’s right. Look, I have to go, Lexie.’

Watching his eyes begin to swim, she blew him a kiss. ‘It won’t be long now, Lex, I promise. Love you. Be good. Keep that klip in a really safe place so I can call you next week.’

She broke the transmission and cried herself out.

.

CHAPTER THREE

For a dead person Sargeant Goodwin looked surprisingly happy. Her paper-thin lips were shaped into a kind of a smile. It gave Skye the willies.

‘Here,’ she grinned showing her teeth. ‘Lieutenant Hunter left this for you.’ She dumped a pile of hardcopy manuals and a compact E-reader on Skye’s desk. ‘Homework.’ Her black uniform made her sallow skin look even more ghastly.

‘Are you serious?’ She was gob-smacked. Wasn’t it bad enough the walking-dead had interrupted her girl-chat with Ashleigh without handing her…
homework,
for God’s sake?

‘I don’t do homework,’ Skye said. ‘I don’t do any sort of work, especially when it involves reading and remembering and writing stuff down. It’s not in my DNA.’

The thin lips threatened to split her skull. ‘You do now. Ridiculous as this scheme is, this part’s made my day.’

‘But…’ she didn’t know what else to say, just watched the woman positively dance out of her room. Well hell.

She rose from her prone position on the bed and poked the E-reader aside with the tip of a finger, tilting her head to scan the top manual’s title. Basic Points of Law. Well, double hell, and take a naked nose-dive into the flaming fires of damnation.

That’s not bad, Skye. Pleased with her colourful imagery, she used the pat on her back to steady her nerves for what was to come.

‘
Congratulations on your purchase of a Whiz-Quiz KI-5000 the interactive touch sensitive educational tool, with photovoltaic glass screen and preloaded with five hundred multiple choice questions
,’ the stupid machine recited when she eventually dared to switch it on. ‘
What do you want me to do
?’

‘Walked right into that one didn’t you?’ Skye muttered. ‘Oh, okay. Start your silly programme.’

‘
Was that, start the second programme
?’

‘For goodness sake!’

‘
I’m sorry. Let’s try that again.’

Teeth gritted, she glared at the thing, decided it was useless to argue with an inanimate object however much she wanted to fry its circuits, and admitted defeat. So, keeping a picture of Lexie’s sad little face in her mind as incentive, said more pleasantly, ‘Start the first quiz.’

Outside the tinted windows dusk fell at three thirty, activating the light sensors. Two illuminated squares in her ceiling increased power by fifty percent. She leaned back in her chair, running a hand around her stiff neck. Allowing for food breaks and a couple of trips to the mirror to check her brain wasn’t actually dripping out of her ears, she’d been wading through manuals for five hours.

God, she deserved a medal. No, Skye corrected, she deserved chocolate. Okay, she was going to have to settle for an all-nutritious, rehydrated, vitamin-enriched carob bar from a vending machine, but as she’d never tasted the real McCoy, she wasn’t about to be finicky. Idly, she wondered how King was enjoying The Importance of Following Orders - the Chain of Command, with a sub-section on Your Right’s & Obligations as a Law Enforcer. He hadn’t appeared in the refectory at lunchtime so she assumed he was holed-up with files.

She went into the bathroom and froze as all the lights went out. Groping blindly in the dark, her fingers found the cool hard shape of the washbasin. Reassured, she held on and turned. The main room was as pitch black as the windowless bathroom and that struck her as odd. The city never slept. Light pumped out from it day and night, filtering through even treated glass to bathe the room in a pale yellow glow.

Hurried footsteps sounded in the corridor outside; shouted orders. ‘Stay exactly where you are. Nobody move about the building. The backup system will come on shortly.’ A sliver of light showed under the door – a torch she presumed, and then was gone along with the voices.

Being in the dark was scary enough, but the silence was really freaky. She hadn’t realised, until it wasn’t there, how comforting the background hum of electronic devices doing their thing, was. She could hear herself breathing – unsteady intakes of air, ragged breaths out. The temperature was dropping too, but she wasn’t going to panic. They’d get the auxiliary power going; everything would be fine.

Moving gingerly, Skye felt her way into the main room and along the wall to the window. Where once she’d have seen a mess of lights, stretching, like a lumpy, spangled carpet as far as the eye could see, there now appeared to be a large chunk missing; a huge square of black where a portion of London was totally blacked out.

Something moved in the snow beneath her window: a crouching figure moving stealthily along the perimeter wall. She strained to see who the person was, but in the dim light it was impossible to see if it was male or female.

She was still clutching the sill when the lights came on ten minutes later. The climate control unit droned back to life. The figure had gone.

‘All inmates go immediately to the gym. Make your way to the gym on level one. Roll-call, ten minutes.’ The disembodied voice of the public address system had the usual nasal whine.

The fitness centre was in uproar. Everywhere kids were telling their stories, kidding around; relieving tension in laughter.

‘We was in the bleedin’ lift,’ she heard one lad relate. ‘Me ‘ole life flashed before me. Thought we’d ‘ad it for sure.’

A girl with him cocked an eyebrow. ‘What he had was his hand up my skirt!’ She giggled, giving him a shove, and made everyone laugh.

The room soon filled. Six guards came in. They ticked off names. They counted heads.

Eventually one called for attention. ‘Has anyone seen King?’

The resulting frantic search and interviews resulted in zilch. King was nowhere in the complex, no one had been with him when the lights went out, no one remembered seeing him after they came back on. And although she had her suspicions, Skye kept quiet about the figure she’d seen in the snow.

Hunter blew out a breath. For the first time, since Skye had known him, he looked ruffled. Parked at the front entrance, she glimpsed the sleek rapid-response vehicle he’d arrived in: with a sexy black body on slim white skis the Dart looked one hell of a ride.

Five thirty. They were alone in the Superintendant’s office where he’d summoned her. ‘Did you know he was planning to run?’ His eyes seem to bore right through her, daring her to lie. But she wasn’t one of them yet, and King was a friend.

Her return gaze was steady as she answered. ‘No.’

Whether he believed her or not, Hunter lowered his eyes. ‘Smart,’ he stated, almost to himself. ‘Thought on his feet: used the peak power surge and subsequent outage to make his escape; took nothing. Once the surveillance cameras went down, he was over the wall and legging it, while every rank in the division chased their tails with pedestrian and traffic chaos in one third of the city. Damn!’ Hunter rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Well, he’s blown it. The department won’t give him a second chance.’ He cocked an irritated eyebrow. ‘You sticking, or do I have to have my backside fried over you too?’

Not that she cared, but it suddenly struck Skye Hunter may have put his reputation on the line in his choice of cadet candidates. She thought of the mile long queues outside the job centre, of scrubbing dishes in some filthy club - if she was lucky. She thought of Alexei.

She sucked in a breath. Once she put on that uniform she’d step over a line, well a huge gaping canyon really.

He was still waiting, a frown creasing his forehead. Those arctic eyes never leaving her face. Taking another deep breath, she said. ‘I guess you’re stuck with me.’

Hunter nodded. ‘Good.’ Something in her expression must have amused him. The ice in his eyes thawed. ‘How’s the studying going?’

Skye’s resulting snort would not have been out of place in the farmyard. He laughed. ‘Stick at it,’ he advised in a pleasant tone, as if he was actually human. ‘It’s important to know the rudiments even though you’ll be mostly updating files. The more interesting stuff happens if you pass cadet trainee.’