The Last 10 Seconds

I was prepared for this and had already thought of my retort. ‘Neither am I, Wolfe. You think I want to have to go off shooting people? It’s risky and it’s bad for business. I’m no nutter. I’m just an ordinary bloke looking for a decent job, that’s all. Now, you send me out on a delivery to pick up your guns, and I don’t complain, I just do it. And then some toerag who needs his eyes tested, a poxy little chef who was probably stoned up to the eyeballs, reckons I’m a copper who nicked him years back, and then suddenly the guns are out and it’s looking like I’m a dead man if I don’t do something, when all I was guilty of was doing you a favour. It’s not even as if you were paying me for it, for Christ’s sake.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Wolfe, lifting his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘I get the picture, and I’ve sorted stuff now. Mitchell’s pissed off about his boys, but he knows you weren’t to blame.’

‘Are his boys OK?’

He nodded. ‘They’re getting treatment and they won’t talk, so there’s going to be no repercussions, although I don’t think Mitchell’s going to want to deal with us again for a while.’

His words relieved me, but I didn’t show it. ‘I’m not saying sorry. I did what I had to do.’ I took a drag of the cigarette. It was time to move things along. ‘So, you’ve got the guns. Now, are you going to tell me who we’re supposed to be grabbing and how it’s going to work, so I can decide whether I’m in or not?’

Wolfe looked over at Haddock, who nodded. He might not have liked me much but apparently that wasn’t going to stop us working together.

There was a long silence in the room before Wolfe finally spoke again. ‘I can’t tell you who we’re snatching until the last minute. That’s the client’s orders, all right? You’re going to have to trust us on this.’

In the past, Tyrone Wolfe had always planned his own operations, and the whole idea of a client paying someone like him to carry out a kidnap was pretty much unheard of. Even the term ‘client’ seemed weird coming out of his mouth. But if there was one, then I needed to find out who he was. So I asked him.

‘I can’t tell you that, either,’ he answered. ‘He wants to stay anonymous.’

I sighed. ‘Look, you spend all day giving me the tenth degree, saying you can’t trust me because I might be an undercover cop, then you go and expect me to trust a man I’ve never met, and whose name I don’t even know. I mean, how the hell do I know that he’s not a cop?’

‘Because I’ve known him for a long time, and more importantly, he’s got the money. All you’ve got to do is a little bit of crowd control and cover our backs while we snatch the target. Do that, and you’ll be a hundred grand richer. Guaranteed.’

I frowned, still confused as to exactly what I was getting involved in. ‘So, it’s a hit?’

Wolfe shook his head. ‘No. We just hold up the guards and retrieve the guy. The client takes it from there.’

‘And what’s the client going to do with him?’

Wolfe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t told me, and I haven’t asked. It’s not my business. And it shouldn’t be yours, either. Are you in?’

Of course I was in, but I was surprised they were giving me the choice now that they’d told me the details. Then I realized that the reason they were was because, having shot two men, I could hardly go to the police and report them myself. I was going to have to think very carefully about how I got round this.

In the meantime, I was still playing the part of an unemployed thug in need of some quick cash. Which meant demanding that advance on the hundred grand, because failure to do so would just look suspicious. ‘You said it’s thirty grand up front.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, you get me that and I’m in.’

For the first time in my presence, Tyrone Wolfe grinned. Even Haddock seemed to relax. And Tommy was beaming from ear to ear. He came over and clapped me hard on the back. ‘You’re part of the crew now, Sean.’

‘Welcome aboard,’ said Wolfe. ‘You won’t regret it.’

And then the man who’d murdered my brother put an arm round my shoulder and pulled me to him. And I had to make myself smile back at him, knowing that finally I had the opportunity for revenge I’d been waiting almost fifteen years for.

Ten

My brother John was the kind of guy everyone liked. He had a big grin and an infectious personality. He was always helping people out – friends, family, neighbours, everyone. He used to do the shopping for the old lady who lived down the road, and when she died, just after his sixteenth birthday, she left him five thousand pounds in her will. And do you know what he did? He gave a thousand of it to the local army cadet corps where he was a member so they could buy some new equipment, and another fifteen hundred to my mum and dad to put towards a family holiday for us all. That was John for you. Generous to a fault.