Ethan’s voice came into Helix’s implant. ‘Ormandy must have joined the dots. There’s a patrol rolling in your direction.’
Helix activated his comms. ‘How far out are they?’
‘I reckon you’ve got about fifteen minutes.’ Ethan’s lighter clicked and he took a deep draw on what was probably another joint. ‘This doesn’t make sense. If you were going to assassinate someone, the last place you would run to is back home to the wife and kid.’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘I don’t like it. I’ve got a tingle down below and it’s not an itchy stump.’
‘You can get cream for that sort of thing.’ Helix drew his P226 from under his arm. ‘Keep me posted.’ He broke from the cover of the tree and jogged across the road.
Light spilled from the window of Blackburn’s apartment in a pale yellow puddle on the pavement. Helix pressed his thumb to the door access panel, assuming Ethan had reactivated the universal access Ormandy had revoked earlier. A thin gap appeared down the left side of the door as the lock released. Helix crouched and pushed the door inwards, scanning the narrow entrance lobby. The faded aroma of an earlier meal leaked from inside. Musical nursery rhyme chimes played from a room on the right. Helix tilted his head at a distant conversation. The accent and articulation of the male interlocutor was too clipped to be Blackburn. A TV chat show or news bulletin perhaps. Helix stepped over the threshold, his feet cushioned by the thick carpet. Leading with a firm double-handed grip on his weapon, he peered around the frame of the first door into a child’s bedroom. The source of the music hung over a cot on the far side of the room. A shoal of grinning fish suspended on thin cords circled above Blackburn Junior. Helix ducked into the room, confirming the absence of any adult occupants.
The volume of the conversation increased as he made his way towards the sitting room. He bobbed around the door frame of the second bedroom long enough to note a single foot, with an ankle chain and toe ring protruding from under the dishevelled duvet. A forearm hung next to a bedside table, a wedding band visible on the finger. Helix held his breath. Listened for the sound of sleep. Utilising the mirror on the door of the wardrobe, he confirmed the rest of the room was empty. An identical black Kevlar and carbon fibre jacket to his own hung on the back of a door leading to a deserted en-suite bathroom. The matching trousers lay draped over the back of a chair. Helix’s nose wrinkled as a familiar metallic liver-like tang fought with the aroma of fresh laundry. Olfactory associations detonated in his brain. His heart hammered in his ears. Blood.
An archway framed the simply furnished sitting room. An overflowing box of soft toys sat against the wall. Above, a family portrait: Blackburn standing proudly behind his wife, the baby cradled in the crook of her arm, flanked by the two dogs panting in the hot lamps of the photographer’s studio. Fuck! The dogs. Helix swallowed. They must be outside, otherwise they would have nailed him the moment he came through the front door. He deployed a pair of nano-cams and waited. The video overlay in his eye confirmed the room was free from any canine presence.
Pressing his P226 to his chest, he leaned to the right, peered into the room and immediately swayed back from the arch. Blackburn was at one end of the sofa facing the TV, identifiable by the angry battle scar on the back of his head. The same metallic iron smell from the bedroom pervaded the sitting room.
Helix took a deep breath. ‘Blackburn?’
No response.
‘Ray. It’s Helix.’
The TV news reader continued her recap of Yawlander’s death earlier that evening.
Another stolen glance into the room revealed no change. Edging forward he scanned left and right. The living space opened up revealing a dining table, high chair and kitchen beyond. He swept the corners, his P226 firm in his grip, then sucked a heavy breath through his teeth as he stepped around the end of the sofa. ‘Fucking hell.’ He ran his hand over his chin. ‘Not going to get a lot out of him, Ethan.’
‘So it would seem. You’ve got about eight minutes before the cavalry arrives.’
‘Two shots to the head, two to the chest. Small calibre. No exit wounds. Subsonic.’
‘What’s that just underneath his left shoulder?’
‘Either he or someone else has removed his location tracker.’ Helix teased the two sides of the wound apart. ‘It’s normally just under the skin below the left clavicle. Not like the new issue nano models.’
‘According to what I’m seeing it’s definitely not there. I’m getting a ping from the garden.’
Helix crossed the kitchen to the patio doors. A switch to the right of the door frame filled the garden with light. ‘OK. That explains the lack of canine greeting.’
‘Fucking hell, that’s grim. I’m pretty sure that’s where you’ll find the tracker.’
The nano-cams liquified and squeezed beneath the door frames. Reacquiring their spherical forms they rolled across the concrete yard towards the headless carcasses of the two sleek Dobermans laying six feet apart. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ He holstered his P226 as he strode back down the corridor to the adults’ bedroom. He focused on the red-smeared feeds from the nano-cams as they separated and burrowed into the dogs’ carcases.
‘Got the tracker,’ Ethan reported. ‘In the stomach of the dog on the left.’
‘Nice. All I can see is red mush.’
Helix entered the room and tossed aside the duvet. He’d grown immune to dead bodies but they didn’t normally have their throats cut
