“Lovely to meet you, Vicky. In a few minutes I am going to tell you to close your eyes. You’ll do that for me won’t you?” The girl nodded. Frost smiled down at her. “You just screw your eyes up real tight and everything’ll be fine. I promise you.”
He drew the Browning and held it in his free hand. He wasn’t taking any chances.
He ushered the women and children out of their make-shift cell one by one. More than half of them had lost their shoes. “There’s a lot of broken glass out here; you might want to carry your kids,” he told them. They did what he said without a word. He led them through the ruined warehouse toward the huge green overhead door at the far side of the floor. He heard the devil dog barking before he saw it. “Close your eyes, sweetie,” Frost whispered in Vicky’s ear. He felt her scrunch up against his shoulder, burying her head in his collar. A moment later the Doberman came barreling around the shipping crates, claws scrabbling on the concrete as it ran. Its incredible gait devoured the distance between them in three seconds flat. Frost waited until the last moment, as it reared up to launch itself at his chest, jaws snapping, teeth ready to tear out his throat, and pulled the trigger three times. The bullets tore into the dog’s hide in a tight cluster, ripping through the muscle and bone to rupture the animal’s racing heart. The moment of its charge wasn’t stopped by death. Frost twisted sideways, trying to get out of the animal’s way. All he managed to achieve was presenting it with a smaller target.
The dead dog slammed into Frost hard enough to stagger him back three steps, and off balance, before he fell. The girl in his arms screamed. He realized she’d opened her eyes to see the wild glass-eyed stare of the dead Doberman inches away from her face. Frost covered her eyes with his hand and soothed, “It’s all right, it’s all right. It can’t hurt you now.”
He struggled to rise.
The fact that the dog had hit them here, inside the old warehouse, meant the night watchman couldn’t be far behind.
He had dropped his gun in the fall. Annie stood beside him holding it.
He saw movement in the periphery of his vision: the night watchman. The last man between them and their freedom.
“Give me the gun,” he said holding out his hand.
nnie didn’t seem to hear him. She only had eyes for the night watchman.
“You don’t want to do it,” Frost said, sensing what she was thinking. It wasn’t difficult. Here was a chance to strike back at one of the men who had ruined her life. Who wouldn’t want to kill him given the chance? The gun empowered her. Her arm trembled. Frost knew what was happening. It had happened to him the first time he had contemplated killing. Suddenly the gun weighed so much more than the sum of its parts, so much more than the metal and the polymer. It weighed a life. She wasn’t just pulling the trigger, she was pulling against the weight of all those unlived days, all of those unexperienced joys and sadnesses. “Let me,” Frost said, calmly. “This is what I do. You don’t want to live with his death inside your head.”
“I do,” Annie said. “I need to.”
She pulled the trigger and kept on pulling it until the man went down. The first two went wide, hitting the metal door and raising a shriek of echoes with their impact. The third hit him in the shoulder. The forth in the leg. Neither would kill him. The night watchman lay on the floor, screaming and begging.
Frost held out his hand for the gun.
This time Annie gave it to him.
He checked the chamber. There was a single round left.
It was all that he needed. He walked across the floor, his footsteps echoing, hollow in the funereal expanse of the huge old building. Frost stood over the bleeding man. “One chance,” he said. “Who do you work for?”
The man lay on his back, squirming in his own blood. Frost was wrong. He clutched at his thigh where Annie’s bullet had opened a major artery. That one would kill him.
“You’re already dead,” Frost said. “If I don’t kill you one of the Goon Squad will. And the only way I am not going to kill is if you give me a name. Now, who do you work for?”
The man gritted his teeth.
Frost raised his gun, aiming it squarely between the man’s rapidly glazing eyes.
Frost felt sure he was going to hold out on him aeft.
Frost put the bullet between his eyes.
He had a name. Mabus.
Frost holstered the Browning and walked across to the shutter. On the wall beside it was a large red button. He hit it. Gears groaned to life and the door began to rise slowly, the metal grinding as it was forced to turn.
Beams of light streamed into the warehouse beneath the metal shutter, throwing shadows across the concrete. The chill of the coming dawn raced in. Frost carried the girl out into the open air. The sun rose red over the city on the other side of the river. The lights were headlights. Six cars were pulled up outside the chain-link fence. He could hear voices shouting, but he couldn’t make out what they were shouting. He could barely make out the silhouettes of the men behind the headlights. One of them walked forward so that that he was back-lit by the cars as he reached the heavily padlocked gate.
Frost ushered the women forward.
They were hesitant at first, lost now that they were outside. The women seemed particularly wary, moving cautiously toward the light, like someone might suddenly snatch it away from them and force them back into that hellhole. When they realized the headlights were police cars they started to run toward the fence. Frost was less happy to see the boys in blue.
He thought about setting the girl down and trying to fade back into the shadows. There was a chance he’d find his coat and jacket and, in turn, the Ducati, but all he needed to do was look at the ground beneath his feet and the pool of light there to know that trying to make a break for it now was a dumb idea. Instead he walked slowly toward the gate, resigned to his fate.
By the time he reached it they’d cut through the padlock and were beginning to take care of the first women and children to reach them.
“I can take her, sir,” a WPC said, holding out her hands for the girl. She had a pretty smile but a harsh face. Frost handed Vicky over, ruffling her hair as she squirmed out of his grasp. Another officer walked over, and Frost thought he heard the gods laughing at him from on high. It was the short surly one of the pair he had talked to after getting out of the James house on Halsey Road.
The man made straight for him, and as Frost started to turnaway said, “Well, well, well, fancy seeing you here,” and shook his head slowly, as though to say pigs really had started to fly as far as he was concerned. “It’s quite some coincidence, don’t you think? I feel like I am seeing more of you than I do my own mother. First you’re outside a murder house while all hell’s breaking loose, which, let’s face it, is worthy of a raised eyebrow all by itself. And now here you are rescuing all these women and children like some sort of superhero. You know, all that’s missing is the burning building to make the whole thing complete. So why don’t you start by telling me who the hell you are, Mister Superhero?”
Frost looked at the detective. It took him all of two seconds to have the measure of the man. He had Little Man syndrome. He was bitter, angry, and looking for a scalp. “Frost,” he said. He didn’t bother lying. “Ronan Frost.”
“Should I have heard of you?”
“I don’t see why you would have.”
“Well then, Mister Frost, let’s go for two for two. Who are you? I mean, you’re not one of us-you’re not police-that much is bloody obvious. So who are you? Government? Intelligence? Five? Special Forces? Counterterrorism? Justice League? Who are you?”
“I’m just a Good Samaritan,” Frost said.
“Bullshit.”
Frost said nothing.
“I’m not an idiot, Mister Frost.”
Again Frost said nothing.
“Okay, let’s try again. How did you find out about this place? How did you know what was happening here when no one else had the slightest clue?” He shook his head. “We’re still not sure, and here you are saving the day.”
“I suggest you stop wasting time asking questions I am not going to answer,” Frost said, “and start thinking
