The Last 10 Seconds

The taxi driver did another flying kick and this time the door flew open and I hobbled inside on the crutches. I told him to dial 999 and pressed the button for the lift. It opened immediately, and I got inside and pressed for the fourth floor. The taxi driver made no move to follow me as the doors shut, the phone already to his ear.

I knew what I was doing was insane. I was unarmed, on crutches. I could offer Tina no protection whatsoever, and could easily get myself killed. But I owed her. This was my fault and I didn’t know what the hell I’d do if I was too late and she was already dead.

The lift doors opened and I charged through them. Apartment 4B was opposite me, and straight away I saw that the door was on the latch, but as I shoulder-barged it, with no obvious plan of action whatsoever, it only opened a few inches. The chain was across it. Somewhere further inside I could hear the sound of a struggle.

I cursed, hobbled backwards and charged it again. This time it flew open, and I stumbled inside, only just about keeping my balance, before starting off down the narrow hallway in the direction of the struggle.

Another shot rang out, followed by the loud bang of someone hitting the floor, and I heard Tina let out a short, sharp cry of pain.

I hobbled faster. ‘Police!’ I screamed. ‘Drop your gun, Samuel-Smith! It’s all over!’

As I reached the doorway, I saw him standing above Tina, who lay sprawled out on the floor, her eyes shut, moaning in pain. He was still wearing the same raincoat he’d had on earlier, except now he also had a balaclava covering his bald head, and a gun in his gloved hands.

He turned my way, lifting it up to fire, his eyes frowning behind the mask.

Without hesitating, I threw one of the crutches straight at him, and as he knocked it aside with his gun hand, I threw myself forward, ignoring the searing pain in my leg, and slammed into him.

My momentum and his lack of preparedness drove the two of us across the room and we slammed into the windowframe. I grabbed his gun hand by the wrist so that the weapon was pointing away from us, and with my free hand punched him hard in the face. He fell backwards so that he was half hanging out of the open window, forty feet above the street below. I could see the taxi driver staring up at us, a look of shock on his face, the phone still to his ear as I punched Bob in the face again and again, leaning all my weight into him, ignoring the agonizing pain in my leg, a pure and terrible rage surging through me as I thought of all the treacherous things this man had done: the way he’d protected the men who’d murdered my brother; the way he’d mutilated an innocent woman to protect a discredited politician; the way he’d come here to murder Tina. I wanted to kill him now, to tear him to pieces. To keep punching him until he finally fell sprawling and lifeless on to the concrete like the piece of dirt he was.

The gun fell from his hand and clattered to the ground, but still I couldn’t stop myself, enjoying the hot pain in my knuckles as I kept up my assault.

‘Stop it, Sean. You’ll kill him!’

It was Tina. On her feet now, her nose bleeding, her words slightly slurred, her hands grabbing at my arm.

‘We need him alive. He’s our only link to Wise.’

And in that moment, the anger seemed to flood out of me, and I let go of Captain Bob and stumbled backwards, before falling to the floor under the dead weight of my bad leg.

The last thing I saw before I shut my eyes and lost consciousness was Tina ripping the balaclava off the man who’d been my boss for ten years, revealing a face that was a bloody, defeated mess.

It was over. All of it.

Epilogue

Tina settled into her seat on the plane as it waited for take-off, and relaxed with an orange juice. She’d been off the booze for close to a month now, and wasn’t even missing it any more, although she knew it was far too early to claim success. Alcohol has a way of sneaking back, unnoticed, into a person’s life, but for the moment she was doing a good job of forgetting about it. The cigarettes were a different story. She’d managed to cut down from twenty a day to ten, but that was the extent of it. Still, she figured any normal person had to have some vices.

It was six weeks now since Robin Samuel-Smith’s arrest for attempted murder, and he was currently awaiting trial in the top-security wing of Belmarsh Prison. Tina’s own suspension had been lifted at the same time, it having been decided by the powers-that-be that punishing the police officer who’d done so much to break the whole case wouldn’t sit too well in the court of public opinion.