Tina hesitated.
‘Do it now,’ The Wraith snapped. ‘Don’t test my patience. It won’t end well.’
And that was the problem. Tina knew it wasn’t going to end well, whether she made the call or not. But she knew she had to do whatever it took to prolong her life so she took out her burner phone and called Ray, thinking fast.
‘Hey Tina, where are you?’ he asked. ‘I thought I heard your car pull up.’
Tina stared at The Wraith and the gun in her hand. She knew that if Ray went out the back entrance, he’d be a sitting duck. The distance from Mrs West’s bedroom window to her back patio was no more than twenty-five feet. The Wraith wouldn’t miss from there. But she also wouldn’t want to be looking out of the window with Tina at her back, which meant as soon as Tina finished the phone call, she was dead.
She watched the woman’s finger tighten on the trigger.
‘That’s right, I’ve just arrived now,’ said Tina, feeling awful that she was about to sentence him to death. ‘But there are police all over the village. Plainclothes. I’ve seen them. You need to get out the back way now. Go.’
‘Thanks, hun,’ he said, using his old pet name for her. ‘I’m gone. I’ll call you when I can.’
He ended the call, and Tina slowly put the phone back in her pocket, her whole body tensing, suddenly feeling terribly vulnerable because she knew there was no way the woman opposite her was going to let her walk free from here.
And she was right.
‘Thanks, Tina, that wasn’t so hard, was it?’ said The Wraith, and shot her twice in the chest.
I was in Tina’s bedroom when I got the call. I was on my feet in an instant, throwing on the backpack that contained my meagre possessions and crawling over to the bedroom window. If the police were going to raid the place they’d come from the back and the front, but when I lifted my eyes just above the bottom of the frame, I could see that the hill rising up beyond Tina’s back garden to the woodland at the top was empty.
Moving fast, I crawled out onto the landing to the front bedroom, which looked out over the high street, and peered out of the window as surreptitiously as possible. The street too was empty. Completely. And Tina’s car was parked directly outside, with no sign of Tina herself.
Something was wrong here, but staying put wasn’t an option. Crawling back away from the window, I pulled out the burner phone and called Steve Brennan’s mobile number.
Brennan answered on the third ring.
‘There’s been a change of plan,’ I whispered, getting to my feet and running down the stairs. ‘How soon can you get to the rendezvous point?’
‘I drove up early. I can be there in about …’ He paused. ‘The satnav says fourteen minutes.’
‘Do me a favour, Steve, and put your foot down. I’ll meet you in ten.’
28
This whole thing was turning into a messy job for Jane Kelman. Two more people dead, and she still hadn’t taken out Mason.
Now she stood in the shadows behind the old lady’s open bedroom window, waiting for her target to come out of the back of Tina’s house and into view. The light was beginning to fade, which suited her fine. She could still get a good shot at Mason, and with no witnesses either as the temperature was dropping fast and none of the neighbours were outside. She’d make the kill and escape the way she’d come in, up the hill and into the woods beyond, where she’d parked her car earlier.
She didn’t like waiting around like this. Her usual MO was to take someone out then put as much distance between them and her as possible. The only reason she was putting this much effort into taking out Mason was because of the amount of money on offer for his death. Three hundred thousand dollars, including the bonus the client had just paid her to keep going with the job. With everything else she’d made and invested over the years, she was only a couple more jobs away from a comfortable retirement at her condo in Panama.
Unfortunately, for a man with the police on his tail, Mason didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to emerge. She looked at her watch. Five minutes since Tina Boyd had ended the call and there was still no sign of him.
‘Come on, come on,’ she whispered.
And then she saw the back door to Tina’s house fly open and Mason come running out, keeping low, turning round and looking up just as she aimed the pistol at him and pulled the trigger.
He was already diving for cover and the bullet struck his backpack in a puff of smoke. But now he was down on his hands and knees on the patio and she took aim again, this time at his head, her finger tightening on the trigger, only vaguely aware of movement behind her.
Tina had still been wearing the Kevlar vest under her sweatshirt and jacket when The Wraith had shot her and, although she fell down hard, banging her head in the process, she was still very much alive, if badly winded. She’d lain utterly still, holding her breath with her eyes closed, knowing that at any moment the woman could walk over and put a third and final bullet in her head. It had
