The Last 10 Seconds

‘Don’t order me around, Sean. I’ll speak to him at the rendezvous.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘It’s a nice, quiet spot, a long way from any nosy neighbours. About half an hour’s drive away.’

‘Who does it belong to?’

‘What do you need to know that for?’

‘Because I want to make sure there’s no paper trail that’ll lead the police to your client, and then back to me. That’s why.’

‘There’s no paper trail attached to this place. It’s been abandoned for years.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘The client told me, all right?’ Wolfe was sounding exasperated. ‘Now stop asking me questions. You’ll get the rest of your money later, and that’ll be the end of it.’

I fell silent, knowing I was going to have to keep my wits about me for the next few hours because one thing was certain: no one in this van could be trusted. I’d had an uneasy feeling about this job from the beginning, but now, sitting here in the stifling heat, a trickle of fear ran down my spine.

It was a feeling that grew a whole lot worse when Andrew Kent opened his eyes, looked up at me – his eyes full of the same kind of fear I’d seen in the uniformed cop in the moments just before he was shot – and said something very strange indeed.

Twenty-six

‘You’re not one of them, are you?’

Kent spoke the words in a high-pitched, effeminate voice that fitted perfectly with the soft, boyish features of his face – features that I knew to my cost were dangerously deceptive. He’d almost escaped earlier, and my stomach still ached from where he’d caught me with what had been a particularly deft karate kick.

I tensed. Surely he couldn’t know my true identity. I’d never seen him in my life before tonight.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

Wolfe shot round in his seat. ‘Shut the fuck up, you little runt! No one’s interested in what you’ve got to say. Tommy, gag this bastard.’

‘I’m innocent,’ said Kent desperately, staring up at me. ‘I swear it. You know that. They’re never going to pay you.’

‘I told you, shut it or I’ll kill you myself!’ roared Wolfe, pointing his Sig down at Kent’s face.

But Kent didn’t back down, and when he spoke again there was a new defiance in his voice, and a glint in his eye. ‘But you can’t, can you? Because you need what I know. Don’t you?’

A flicker of doubt crossed Wolfe’s face, then disappeared. ‘I can still put one in your kneecap easily enough. And I’ll do it with pleasure too. Cos I’ve got no truck with filthy little sex cases. Tommy, get that gag on him.’

Tommy bit off a length of extra-thick parcel tape from a roll he had on him and grabbed Kent by the hair, lifting him off the floor.

But I used my foot to push him back down so that Tommy had to let go. ‘I want to hear what he’s got to say. I thought we were here on a vigilante job.’

‘You don’t know anything,’ said Kent to me, gabbling out the words. ‘This is nothing to do with a vigilante job. It’s much bigger. I’ve got information they need and once they’ve got it they’ll kill all of us. You too.’

‘Shut your mouth now!’ Wolfe’s words reverberated around the minibus’s interior. Ripping off his safety belt, he lurched snake-like between the front seats, grabbing Kent by the throat with one hand and shoving the barrel of the pistol right into his face. ‘One more word,’ he whispered, ‘just one more word, and we’ll have a dead nonce in here.’

As he lay there, unable to speak, the pressure of the gun contorting his features, Kent met my eyes and mouthed two words: ‘Help me.’

I suddenly felt terribly sorry for him, lying helpless on the floor of a filthy van. He might have been a murdering rapist, but there was no excuse for treating him like this. It was sadistic. If I was going to have any future outside prison walls, then I was going to have to behave like a cop and do my best to protect him. And if he had information that might have a bearing on this op and the identity of the client, I needed to hear it.

‘I want to know what he’s got to say,’ I repeated firmly.

‘Well you can’t,’ snapped Wolfe, glaring at me from barely two feet away now. ‘You’re just the hired help, remember?’

That’s when a part of me just snapped. Being spoken to like that by the man who’d murdered my brother made the red mist come hurtling down, and before I could even think about it I’d lifted my shotgun and pointed it at Wolfe, so that the end of the barrel was barely six inches from his chest. ‘Don’t talk to me like that. You’ve messed me around enough. I’m entitled to know what this piece of shit’s talking about, so do me a favour and drop your gun. Now.’

But Wolfe made no move to pull his pistol away from Kent’s face. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

To be honest, I wasn’t at all sure, but now that I’d made the move I was going to have to see it through. ‘I don’t like the way this whole thing’s gone down,’ I said, keeping the shotgun trained on him, my finger steady on the trigger. ‘I want to know why we’ve sprung this guy, who your client is, and where exactly we’re going. And I want to know it now.’