Lynch (21 page)

Still Fernandez was coming.

And from between two aisles, a forklift truck ploughed out and took the Spaniard in the chest. It disappeared out of sight, taking Fernandez with it, and there was a crash. John’s scream echoed around the warehouse. ‘Oh my fucking Christ!’

Scott turned and crawled over to Jesse, put his hand on his chest. His neck was pumping blood and his eyes were shuddering back and forth. Katherine knelt at his other side.

Scott put his hand to Jesse’s wound as though he could stem the bleeding. ‘You’re not dying. Not this time. I won’t let you.’

Katherine reached out and touched Scott’s shoulder. ‘Kane,’ she said.

‘No,’ he snapped. ‘He’s not dying. I’m not losing him.’

‘Kane,’ she repeated.

Scott looked down at Jesse. ‘You can pull through,’ he said. ‘You can do this, Ryan, you can do this. Stay with me.’

Jesse’s eyes stopped moving and seemed to focus directly on Scott, in some apparent state of lucidity.

His mouth opened. A single word bubbled from the blood. ‘Ryan.’

‘What?’

Jesse said no more.

‘Kane,’ Katherine said again.

‘What’d you say, Jesse?’ Scott asked. ‘Stay with me. What’d you say? What’d he say?’

‘Kane, he’s dead.’

‘No.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘What’d he say?’

Katherine took Scott into her arms, Jesse’s body on the ground between them. ‘He said “Ryan”. You called him Ryan.’

John dropped to his knees beside them. He was carrying Fernandez’s gun. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, and covered his mouth. Then he said, ‘I killed him. I killed Fernandez.’

‘We have to get up,’ Katherine said. ‘John, help me.’ And they each took one of Scott’s arms and aided him to his feet. ‘If we can get back to the front unseen, we can get out of here.’

‘I called him Ryan?’ Scott asked, and he could feel hot tears stinging his eyes.

Clark
heard the gunshot and Katherine’s scream. She hoped to God that she hadn’t been hit.

She was nearing the end of the warehouse, conscious of leading the woman too close to the others, but they could go around in circles all day if she didn’t try something.

She wasn’t running any more. Now she was stalking forward rather than backing away. Her movements were careful and precise. She was thinking like a killer, something she’d often struggled to do in the course of her job. There were many sieges or stakeouts where she and her colleagues had to get inside the head of the criminal and the variables were plenty. Was he drugged and, if so, what drug had he taken? Was he fighting to protect himself or some possession? Was he acting vengeful or frightened? Each variable made a target do different things. If he was frightened, for example, he could lash out and leave himself exposed. On the other hand, if he was vengeful, he would be more calculated.

Dealing with any of Ramirez’s hired hands was different—these weren’t opportunistic thieves caught in a kidnapping case, they weren’t drug runners desperate to get away with their crimes. They were trained killers, professionals. These were people who didn’t care and who rarely made mistakes. If she could get inside their heads, she’d be able to predict with some accuracy what they would do, given the situation.

By now, because she’d stood boldly and fired at the woman,
Clark
figured that they knew she had been separated from the others. It was evident that they’d split up, one going after her and one after the rest of them.

She moved from one row to the next and kept her breathing deep and regular. The Spanish woman’s next move would be to get as close to her as possible without blowing her own cover.
Clark
could imagine they were standing on opposite sides of a pallet, moving almost in time. But every time she peered around a corner and pointed her gun, there was no one there.

María moved between two aisles and saw Fernandez’s body pinned to a pallet with a forklift prong in his chest. She closed her eyes and shook her head, not at the loss of a good friend, but at the loss of a good shooter. She’d have to get him replaced as soon as she got out of here. Men like Fernandez, with his almost erotic desire for blood, didn’t come along often.

She noticed his weapon was missing and wasn’t in sight on the ground. So now they had two guns. But who were they? A single cop with her own handgun and a bunch of country-dwellers who probably didn’t know one end of the gun from the other; she wasn’t concerned.

The sound of the alarm had been annoying and disorienting at first, but now it had become a dissonant music accompanying the kill. She forced herself to make a rhythm out of it, the rise and fall of the main tone, the constant bells behind it. For every two falls of the siren sound, she took one breath. Unless she was clumsy, the sound should mask her movements.

To her disadvantage, it was also masking everyone else’s movements, but she reasoned she had a far superior mind than they had, even collectively.

She made a Cross sign on her breast, as was customary by European Catholics when they required intervention, but María did it more through habit than from any real belief.

She leaned forward to glance around another row of pallets and she noticed a shadow moving by her feet. The bitch was behind her.

As she turned, the cop woman swung the butt of her gun and knocked her to the floor.

María slid backwards, tried to raise her M16 rifle, but the blonde kicked it from her hand.

‘It’s over,’ she said, but María rocked back, pushed her feet forward, and kicked the cop into a pallet.

Clark
hit the pallet with some force and almost lost her balance, but she jumped forward and threw herself on the Spaniard.

She punched her in the face, hard and fast, and the Spaniard reached up to try to choke her.
Clark
gripped both her arms, saw the tattoo on her wrist, a girl’s name in cursive swirls:
Lucia
. It took only a second to understand it wasn’t the woman’s own name but maybe a child, a mother, or a lover. And in that instant, she remembered a conversation with Pat Wilson and Ryan Cassidy when Ryan had given them a list of names he’d overheard while spying on his stepfather for NCIS.

Further research highlighted María Herrera as a close associate of Alberto Ramirez. They learned some of her movements, some of her involvement in the case, and Interpol’s Spanish counterparts had tailed her briefly. It seemed she had a daughter with cerebral palsy named Lucia.

María twisted and one arm broke free from her grip and she punched
Clark
in the stomach. In retaliation,
Clark
punched down with her knee and hit her between the legs.

María reached up again and took hold of
Clark
’s hair and they rolled together on the ground. She twisted and reached for her fallen weapon and
Clark
tried to slap it away but couldn’t quite reach.

María gripped the gun and they rolled again. She fired and
Clark
felt an explosion of heat and pain in her side.

With her back to the floor and María above her,
Clark
twisted her legs and caught one foot in front of María’s face. She pulled down and heard the crack of María’s head against the concrete floor, just enough to stun her.

She pushed herself out from under her and reached for the gun María had dropped.

María pulled herself up against a pallet and stared at Clark as
Clark
also got to her feet, blood seeping from her side. Breathing hard, María touched the back of her head, checked her fingers. ‘I’m bleeding,’ she said. She grinned.

‘You and me both,’
Clark
said. ‘María Herrera, I’m arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder. You do not have to say—’

‘Fuck you,’ María said.

‘You do not have to say anything,’
Clark
continued, ‘but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned—’

Scott stopped them from walking any further and he looked back at Jesse. ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ he asked.

Katherine nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Margaret, I—’

‘I know,’ Katherine said. ‘We have to keep moving. That woman’s around here somewhere and we can’t get caught. We need to find Ann and get out of here.’

Scott took a deep breath. He knew the name he’d used as Jesse lay dying. He had used it by accident, a slip of the tongue, but it rocked him enough not to want to believe it.

Ryan.

Will it always come back to this? Scott thought. Will I always come back to Ryan?

He had been truthful to Jesse when asked if he still loved Ryan. Of course he did; he always would. But he had suppressed those feelings enough to be able to get on with his life, enough to try again. You can love more than once, he thought, but first love is special. First love only happens once.

It didn’t matter how many people told him to move on, he never truly would. He knew that now. He did love Jesse—he knew that also. And he would mourn his passing as any lover would.

But Ryan. Ryan was his first. He would always hold that place in his heart and he would always carry him around with him in his head. He realised, for the first time in months, just how much he still missed him. How much he always would.

And now Jesse, too, killed by the same group of people. Killed by the same sadistic minds. He would get out of this. And he would hunt them down. They would pay.

‘Let’s go,’ John said.

Scott nodded, said he could walk on his own, and John and Katherine released him.

‘Are you okay?’ Katherine asked.

Scott looked back at Jesse one last time. ‘No,’ he said.

Just then, the alarm was cut off and they looked around.

‘Is it over?’ Katherine asked.

Scott stood tall. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said, and they moved down the aisle together.

When the alarm went silent,
Clark
’s ears rushed with the sound of her own blood pumping from her body. She pushed a feeling of queasiness away as best she could.

In front of her, under her gun aim, María took this advantage to kick out and turn.
Clark
’s gun arm twisted to the right and a round was fired, hitting the nearby pallet.

As María turned to run,
Clark
dropped the gun, let go of her bleeding side, and gripped the back of María’s hair with one hand and a shoulder with her other, and she swiped a foot out to trip her.

They went down together and
Clark
pounded María’s face into the cold concrete.

‘You should just kill me,’ María said, the blood from her broken nose making it difficult to breathe. ‘You’ll get nothing from me.’

‘I’ll get plenty from you,’
Clark
said. ‘A few years at least.’

‘This is the police!’ a call echoed through the ensuing silence. ‘Put down your weapons and surrender.’