The Cutting Crew (34 page)

When I woke up I thought I could hear sirens. My head was pounding, but I lifted it off the plush bedroom carpet and listened. I could hear sirens. Some distance from here, but the sound wasn't fading. In fact, it was growing louder. I looked around, realising that I was lying at the foot of the bed, and that my gun was resting not too far away from my right hand. I seemed to be alone.

Rachel.

I scrambled to my feet, grabbing the gun in the process - an awkward stumble - and then I stepped back in shock as I caught sight of the thing on the bed and everything else - the room, the sirens, the feel of the gun in my hand - went away totally. It was Rachel. She was naked, and so completely still that it was obvious she was dead. Cut so much that I could smell the blood. I put my hand up to my mouth, ready to scream and just collapse, but then reality slapped my reeling brain and it steadied itself as I began picking out details. No, it wasn't Rachel. I took a step closer. It wasn't even female.

I listened. The sirens were very near, and I knew that I had to leave. Instead, I took another step forwards. My shins touched the duvet at the base of the bed.

The body had been left curled up on its side, just as I remembered Rachel lying. A lot of the head was gone. It had been blown off over the pillows and headboard, but there was enough left to see that in life this person had worn their hair short. The colour was pale brown. I walked around the bed and touched the shoulder with the back of my hand. It was still warm. The man had been killed recently.

I knelt down and looked at what remained of his face.

Fuck.

I recoiled back, scrambling to my feet and away from the bed.

It was Rich. The house, the kids - they'd brought Rachel to Rich's house, and then they'd killed him. I looked down at the gun in my hand and realised what else had been done here. I was now holding a murder weapon. The police would dig the bullet out of him and it would match my gun. Worse than that. Lucy worked the crime scenes.

The sirens. I realised that the noise wasn't growing anymore - it was right outside the front of the house, not going anywhere. Go. I ran out of the bedroom and down the stairs as quickly as possible.

Someone banged on the front door just as I reached it.

'Hello?'

I moved down the hallway towards the kitchen. There might be two patrol cars, I thought, which meant maybe four officers, but probably not more. At least one of those would be on the driveway heading for the kitchen door. Presumably, it was still open. I had seconds.

Into the dining room. I pushed the door closed gently behind me.

'Police. Hello?'

A voice in the kitchen. It was inquisitive and cautious, just like you'd expect, but there was also an edge to it that I didn't like.

I moved quietly along the side of the room, between the dining table and the nearest wall. There was nowhere to hide, and it would have been stupid to try. There was a dead body upstairs.

The police would tear this place apart, top to bottom.

I tried the patio door. It moved a little but then hit the lock, hitched, angled slightly in its groove.

I glanced back at the closed door. The police would be in the hallway now, which meant they would have seen the first bullet hole: the one that had taken a large chunk of the doorframe away.

I turned around, stepped away from the patio doors and without thinking - fired once into the centre of the glass. There was a huge explosion, mixed with the sound of the glass shattering outwards: blistering the air across the garden; taking shreds and nicks out of the slide.

'Round back,' I heard somebody say. 'Quick.'

I was already clambering through the remains of the patio door, my mind running away from itself in an effort to keep calm and think at any cost. Panicking would undo me. Was I prepared, I wondered, to shoot a police officer? Crunches of glass under my feet, a slight stumble, and then I was sprinting down the garden.

Would I shoot at a cop in self-defence? I didn't know.

'Stop!'

I heard you, I thought, hitting the shaking fence at the bottom of the garden, scrambling up and over it. But you won't shoot me in the back when I'm running away.

I landed on the pavement behind the fence - another of the Fishers, I didn't know which - and immediately ran to my left.

Behind me, I heard a series of steady cracks as police bullets tore the fence apart where I'd been standing.

'Fuck.'

I ran.

Now, I thought, "I might be able to shoot one of these guys in self-defence. They were firing at a man's back as he ran away, through a fence when anyone could have been on the other side.

And they had turned up on the scene pretty fucking quickly, as well. But then Eli had done this, after all, and Eli powered law and order. He owned the police.

'Get after him!'

Just keep running, I told myself. Just stay calm.

There was a side road off to the right, and I took it, my feet hitting the pavement as hard as they could. But my legs felt weak, both from being unconscious and probably from the adrenaline too. Had the cops made the road in time to see me take the turning? I glanced back and saw that they had: there were two of them, sprinting after me. Much faster than me. As I saw them, one stopped and took aim. He looked cool and together, aiming carefully. Fuck. I dodged and ducked, hearing the shot and the noise as it pranged a car to my right, denting it like a sledgehammer would. I crouched down behind the back of the vehicle. The cops were coming closer. Their shoes tapping on the tarmac.

Keep it together.

I got quickly on the ground, as flat to the road as I could, and watched from under the car. There they were: I could see their legs as they approached. I took careful aim at the nearest.

'Come out from there,' one of them called out.

Not throw out your weapon, though. I guessed that an unarmed man might make an awkward victim.

I made sure of the aim. Okay.

The first shot took the cop in the ankle. Two shots, three, and then he was firing his own gun into the sky as he went down. I'd already adjusted my aim and squeezed another shot at the second guy's foot, and then another shot, and a third. He went down off to one side and started screaming. I heard and felt a bullet smacking into the car above me, and then a second shattered the windscreen.

I aimed back on the first cop, who was on his side now, trying to draw on me. I could see his face: grim and in pain and determined; full of hate. I fired just as his next bullet scraped sparks and dust from the road beside the car. I caught him somewhere in the body, and he doubled up like he'd been punched, rolled this way and that. Let out an agonised screech. But he stopped firing.

Calm for a second, but only in terms of guns and bullets. The other cop was still screaming, calling out for help. In the distance, there were more sirens. Closer to, a car alarm was going off, and I heard a front door slamming shut.

Getting to my feet, it felt like the world was lurching around like my vision was zooming in even as I staggered backwards. The cop on the road was barely moving now, and there was blood all around him. His hands had printed mad, red birds on the tarmac.

The second cop had fallen sideways through a hedge, demolishing half of it, stippling the pavement and grass with blood from the stump at the end of his leg. He was still moving - trying to crawl out of sight.

Everything was in tatters here. Even if I'd had no choice - even if they worked for Eli and had been trying to kill me - what I'd done was shoot policemen in broad daylight, and that meant I was fucked. I couldn't explain this to anyone. Eli had been true to his brother's promise - his crew had made a good start at excising his city's little cancers. Whatever had happened here this afternoon, he couldn't really have lost.

The cop in the garden was crying. With that sound in my ears, I turned around and I ran away from there as fast as I could.

Chapter
Twenty

An hour later, I was sitting in a cemetery in Snake, watching the early evening sky beginning to bruise. Night would be here soon.

The sky was growing dark, although - as usual - the city gave off a slight yellow sheen at the horizon that made the air everywhere seem jaundiced and unwell. Pretty soon, the night would arrive properly and everything would be black. In the meantime, I sat on a cold bench in a graveyard and watched patches of stars prickle into life overhead.

I was shivering badly. Round here - perhaps more than anywhere - you could sit and catch your death. Right now, it felt like an option.

The breeze rustled the unkempt grass between the headstones, which in this light had become a mouldering shade of grey. When night fell completely it would lose even that. The colours would be washed away from the world; from the grass, the trees, from everything.

Jesus. Snake is depressing at the best of times - even in daylight.

Two immense coils of thin streets where nobody wants to live circling graveyards where nobody does. The district is shaped like an 'S', with the city's two main cemeteries resting within the curls.

Each of them is a ramshackle place: an unhappy end if ever there was one. But this one is the worst of the two. The plots come cheap here and you get exact value for your money: stones that sit at angles like broken teeth; grounds that are overgrown and barely tended. You can tell that there used to be religion here at one point, but now it feels cursed and abandoned, as though not enough people have bothered believing and something dark and lazy has seeped in instead. You could splash holy water around and the soil would sizzle.

There is an old church at the centre of the cemetery, slightly above everything else, and it still retains a certain black majesty. It looks as though it might be concentrating hard on something unpleasant. The bricks are thick with soot and the glass in the windows is so stained that you can barely differentiate the colours from the rusted old ribs. Every conceivable entrance was boarded shut years ago. Nobody ever comes here. You die and end up here, and nobody comes.

As it grew dark, it was like sitting inside a tomb with a stone door rolling slowly shut. Night would fall, and it felt like if I didn't get out soon then I'd be trapped here.

But where could I go?

Out of the city? Ultimately, yes - and I supposed the quicker the better. That was what my nerves were telling me, anyway. The police would have my description by now - and they almost certainly had my fingerprints and the bullets from my gun, even if they wouldn't have matched them yet. Eli had clearly thought all this through. Lucy would be in pieces, and pretty soon she would find out that I was responsible. Fifteen years would lose all meaning in one crushing instant; and all those emails would disappear into noughts and ones, fading into black. Perhaps given time she might believe the truth about what had happened, but for now - if she found me - God help me.

On top of that, the regular police tended to take the killing of one of their own quite seriously, and so there would be helicopters, television coverage, roadblocks: everything. They would do their best to make sure I didn't leave the city - certainly not alive - and so in a perfect world I should have been a hundred miles away by now and still accelerating.

Instead, I was sitting here on this fucking bench. Snake borders the western edge of Turtle, but it had been a complicated journey involving lots of back alleys and more than a little awkward climbing. I'd done it quickly - not stopping running until I'd reached here and physically needed to - but now that my breath was back it was surely time to steal another car and get the fuck out of the city while I still could.

On the other side of the cemetery, a couple of birds were gathering together for warmth, huddled in the thin, black skeleton of a tree. It was wavering in the breeze, silhouetted against the darkening blue sky. Night time is inexorable: shy at first, but then the world beckons it on and it loses its reticence and charges in. It would be pitch black here soon. Time to leave.

But thoughts of Rachel kept boiling up from inside me, and my mind couldn't keep its feet. The thoughts left patterns in my head: surges of fear and guilt and hate; bubbles of anger and panic. I couldn't just abandon her. But I didn't even know if she was still alive. The men had taken her with them, but only because the set-up demanded it. One body worked better than two to condemn me.

Despite everything, I'd tried to phone Rosh three times. Each time, the phone was dead. I was on my own.

I realised that I had started shivering badly, and I rubbed my hands together slowly, trying not to cry. I felt scared and powerless, but angry too - I wanted to find these men and kill them. That wouldn't be so hard. If I hadn't been able to hone a certain kind of personal rage then I'd never have been able to shoot a man in the head, or even knock him around his apartment a bit.