‘That’s my guess. When Amy Devereux was being held at gun point, Sam acted. It’s second nature to him. He’s a born and bred soldier. He serves. He protects.’
‘We need to go back through the people who walked out of that building. Lean on them … see who Sam was actually protecting.’
Pearce sighed, realising that he had just set a very tenacious dog after a potentially delicious bone. While he respected Sam Pope, he also respected the badge.
The justice system.
If Sam was as good as he had seen, then he would still be ahead of them. But Singh wouldn’t stop. Pearce knew it because the same tenacity had rocked through him like a hurricane his entire career. Singh barked orders at a few officers and then turned back to Pearce, her face resigned to having to go back to work. There was also a sadness hidden behind her eyes.
As if she felt guilty.
She cleared her throat and smiled at Pearce through the rain.
‘Thanks for your help today, sir.’
‘Please.’ He smiled. ‘Call me Adrian.’
‘Adrian.’ She returned a smile in kind. ‘It appears the leader of the gang, a Leon Barnett, is missing. Apparently, Sam pulled him out of bed while he was mid-romp with one of his lovers.’
‘Talk about a mood killer.’
‘Quite.’ Singh looked back up to the top floor of the building, imagining the sight of Sam marching a naked man through the dangerous stair well at gun point. The man was fearless, she would give him that. ‘We are putting out a BOLO as soon as possible.’
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Pearce said, as he approached his car. He shook his head, dismissing the ‘be on the lookout’ order.
‘How come?’ Singh said, watching in disappointment as Pearce slid into the driver’s seat of his car. The door slammed shut, and with a low hum, the rain drop covered window slid down, welcoming a blast of wet air to assault the leather interior. Pearce looked up at Singh, noticing that sadness once more.
‘Because if he took him with him, then it means Sam needs something from him.’
‘Do you think he will get it?’
Pearce raised his eyebrows and turned his attention to the road, turning the key and letting the engine roar to life.
‘I’d bet this car on it. And I’ll bet, considering the mess he has left behind, he won’t do it nicely.’
Sean Wiseman took a deep breath before lifting the photo frame from his bedside table. It had been three hours since he had been confronted on his balcony by Sam Pope and Aaron Hill, and as soon as they’d left, he had marched to his door, entered his flat, slammed it shut, and fell to the floor in floods of tears. The last few days had been a war zone, where he had been shot through the hand, shot in the back, seen his childhood friend die, and realised how their way of life impacted the undeserving.
Jasmine Hill didn’t deserve what would happen to her.
The Acid Gang would take her to their employer, and she would be sent abroad, to a dusty, derelict village in Eastern Europe where she would likely be raped, forced into a drug addiction, and then sold to the highest bidder for a lifetime of sex slavery.
She was just a teenage girl.
After he had thrown up twice, he had lit a spliff, allowing the calming effects of the marijuana to filter through his body and his worries momentarily melted. The pain in his hand subsided.
The guilt of the broken family.
He faded…
After awaking a few hours later on the floor of his bathroom, Wiseman brushed his teeth and while staring into the mirror, a revelation hit him.
He wanted out.
With no idea how or where, he was determined to pack anything of value into a bag, strap it to his back, and leave the godforsaken estate behind. The guns, the drugs, the life of crime.
The constant looking over the shoulder.
It was all going in the rear view.
At any moment, he was expecting a message to ping through on his phone, telling him that someone had burnt the estate to the ground with the Acid Gang in it. He had unleashed Sam Pope on them like a rabid dog, and if it ever came back to them that he was the one who provided the road map, they wouldn’t chuck acid at him.
They would submerge him in it until he disintegrated alive.
Rapidly pulling his room apart, he soon found it depressing how little he cared for the material items that cluttered his home. All the pain they’d caused and the laws they’d broken, all for the glamourous life and a stock piling of artefacts he couldn’t give a shit about.
Leaving now felt so right.
After stuffing a couple of sets of fresh clothes into his bag, he pulled up the picture frame.
It was of him and Elmore, back in their high school days. Shirts untucked, ties ridiculously short, gangster poses. They had thought they were so cool but Wiseman had always expected them to grow up, to move on and make something of themselves. He was smart, which was why Elmore kept him around.
But Elmore wasn’t around anymore.
He was dead.
Sam Pope had removed the contents of Elmore’s skull with a well-placed bullet.
The horror of the previous night suddenly rushed to the forefront of his mind and a wave of nausea crashed over him. His knees buckled, and he dropped the treasured photo, his vision going blurry as he stumbled to the bathroom again, his body arching over the toilet as he dry heaved, wishing more vomit forward.
He was empty.
He dryly smiled at how apt that was.
As Wiseman reached out for the grey towel that hung from the rail affixed to the wall, the room shook as a violent knock echoed through the house. Startled, he fell back against the wall, wrapping his injured hand around his shins and pulling them towards him. A bead of sweat slithered down his neck and his heart raced.
Was it Pope?
