times, like. They love to be around it, they fucking love the idea of it, but when it comes to shooting up, they’re afraid of the needle. They’re shit scared of it. Like he’s afraid of this one. So bring the others in. He’ll do nothing.” Spike leaned in to Ward, yelled up into his face. “Bring them in!”
Within a few moments of the echo dying, Thorne had made his decision. He knew that they’d be hanging on every word. That, were it not for the layout of the tunnels, which made it impossible to get close without being seen, they would have been all over Ward already. He knew that there’d be armed officers standing by. That nobody would need asking twice…
He looked up at the speaker and gave the order, not needing to raise his voice very much. “Get down here…”
Immediately there were distant voices raised, then footsteps, and Thorne turned to see Holland, Stone, and half a dozen other officers tearing along the tunnel toward them. They shouted as they ran. Making sure Ward knew they were there, telling him to drop the knife and to lie down on the floor.
Ward did exactly as he was told, as Spike had predicted he would. He dropped the knife and threw himself to the floor the instant that Spike stepped away from him. But almost as soon as his face hit the concrete, Spike was on him again, flipping him over, kneeling across his chest, and holding the tip of the needle an inch from his eye.
Thorne shouted Spike’s name.
Holland bellowed a warning.
The rest of the team were no more than thirty feet away, and approaching fast…
It was a toss-up as to whether Thorne or one of the others would get there first, but before any of them had a chance, Spike had fired a fine jet of blood into Ward’s eyes, and, with the smallest movement of his wrist, directed it down, across Ward’s lips, and into the mouth that had opened to scream.
“That’s for Terry,” he said. “For Bob and all the rest…”
The second Spike had tossed the syringe and begun to move, Ward was seized and turned back onto his belly. An officer ran around and made a grab for Spike, but Thorne stepped quickly across and ushered the boy away. Led him down the tunnel and pressed him hard into the wall. “Jesus… What d’you think you’re doing?”
Spike said nothing. Regaining his breath, looking back down the tunnel to where Ward was being pulled to his feet. His hands cuffed behind him. Unable to wipe away the blood that was running down his face and chin.
Thorne was looking, too. He nodded toward Ward. “What you threatened him with… Are you-?”
“ ’Course I’m fucking not,” Spike said. “We get tested every month, me and Caroline. But he doesn’t know that, does he?”
Thorne watched, listened as Ward begged the officers around him for a tissue, a rag, a scrap of paper. Anything. “Not unless somebody tells him,” he said.
Spike was calm again.
That grin.
“We’ve been scared to death for weeks. Now it’s his turn to see what that’s like. Let the bastard sweat for a while…”
THIRTY-EIGHT
If the sea down below him wasn’t quite as smooth as glass, it was still blue. It sounded good, like a hush, and the sun was hot and Ryan Eales was happy enough. He lay and soaked it all in. Feeling, for the third or fourth day on the trot, that he was finally starting to get his breath back. It was a fortnight since he’d been forced to cut and run, which was longer than it would normally have taken him to recover and relax, but then it had been a kick-bollockscramble.
Cut and run…
He’d had to think so fast when he’d come strolling up and seen the car outside the house, and right until the moment when he’d pictured the bayonet under the bed and had the idea, he hadn’t been sure if admitting who he was and bringing him inside had been the cleverest decision of his life or the most stupid. Even when it was done, when the copper had slid back off the blade, he’d known that the other one was on his way. That he had to move double bloody quick.
It had taken him only minutes to get packed up and out of there, and he was proud of the way he’d done it: moving through the place at speed, but taking everything in; taking a mental inventory as he’d walked around the bedroom, gathering up only what was essential. Passports and papers; a few clothes and all the cash. As long as he had money, he was always able to pick up the pieces.
It hadn’t been the first thing he’d done, of course. He’d realized straightaway that he needed to get the car out of sight; how important it would be in buying him a little time. He’d dug around in the copper’s pocket for the keys; dropped the Volvo off in a side street and walked back to the flat. He’d still been in there getting his things together when the second copper had come knocking. He’d frozen then; crept to the front door and stood there until he’d heard the footsteps going back down the stairs.
“Be careful with that…”
A family with small children was arranged on the other side of the pool. He heard a ball bouncing toward him and the feet of one of the kids slapping on the tiles as he ran to retrieve it. Eales raised his head, reached for the ball and threw it back. The boy smiled at him. Said, “Thank you,” when prompted by his mother.
“You’re very welcome,” Eales said.
Definitely starting to relax…
He felt a tickle, and looked to see sweat rolling across the indigo letters on his shoulder. He thought, as he did often-as he did long before Ward had contacted him with the offer of a job-of the other three men whose bodies bore the same design. They could not have known, on the drunken evening they’d all stumbled into that tattoo parlor and gone under the needle, anesthetized by strong German lager, how bound to one another they were destined to become.
They would live and die as a crew.
All those years before in the desert, there’d been a couple who hadn’t wanted things to go as far as they ultimately had. But it never mattered. It was ironic really, he reckoned, and maybe even a bit sad, because the ones who didn’t fire a shot that day ended up paying the same price anyway, thanks to one person being stupid and greedy.
It just proved, he thought, how some decisions were best taken for you by others…
Ryan Eales lay back down and tried to sleep.
A white spot-the retinal memory of the sun, high above him-darted behind his lids like a tracer bullet; like the point of light he’d seen two weeks earlier in the police officer’s eyes, bright before shrinking.
He rolled his eyeballs, and watched as the pinprick danced across the black.
The lift carried him up toward the top floor of Colindale police station. The CID and the Burglary Squad were on the first floor, the Criminal Justice Unit and CPS offices on the second, but Thorne was heading for none of these.
He let the empty cardboard box he was carrying bounce off his knee; pictured Spike slapping out a rhythm against his legs or drumming his fingers on a tabletop in McDonald’s…
Though it was far from official policy of any sort, Thorne had persuaded Brigstocke to dig up some money for Spike. There was a fund to pay informants, to cover the expenses of those who gave their time to help police operations, so it seemed reasonable to reward Spike for his efforts. He’d certainly earned it in that subway.
There had, of course, been the business with the blood, and once the scene in the tunnel had been cleared, it had required a major effort to keep Spike from being arrested. Thorne had worked hard to convince the team that Spike had been provoked, while at the same time admitting that the boy had exceeded the boundaries that had been laid down…
“I can’t think where he gets that from,” Brigstocke had said.
It was hardly a fortune, but the money Thorne had wangled might pay for the deposit and first month’s rent on a flat. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that it would stop Spike’s feeling guilty about his sister’s death, or help
