The Dead Tracks

sideways, back against the left-hand door. It slammed shut.

    This time Healy came at him harder, hands out, teeth clenched. For a second, the size of him was immense. Not fat, not overweight, just powerful. Driven on by all the injustice and the heartbreak and the revenge; everything he'd felt in the past ten months, channelled. A second after that, he was at the man's throat, pushing him back towards the ground, fingers white. Squeezing. Pulling. But then everything slowed down. I was only feet away when something glinted in the sleeve of the man's coat. A syringe. He jabbed it once, up into the nearest piece of Healy he could find. In the split second it took Healy to react, the man had pushed him aside and was on his feet. He glanced back at me.

    It was the man from Tiko's.

    The man who looked like Milton Sykes.

    He dropped the syringe into a coat pocket and reached into the opposite pocket for something else. A blade emerged. It was a hunting knife: about eight inches long with a rubberized handle and a guthook built into the end of the stainless-steel blade. He swivelled it inside his palm, so the right angle of the guthook was facing out in front of him, then swiped it across the air in front of me. I stepped back. My heels hit the door to someone's flat. But I didn't take my eyes off him. In the periphery of my vision, I could see Healy off to the side of me. He was slumped against a wall, his hand clutching an area above his heart where the needle had gone in. A speck of blood was soaking through his shirt. He looked like he was on the edges of consciousness, his eyes drifting in and out like a television reception.

    The man started to edge around me, back towards the only way out, the knife up in front of him. As he glanced between the two of us, I noticed something weird: his eyes were moving fast, but the rest of his face was still. Completely still. Almost paralysed. It was a weird, detached kind of look. When I stepped towards him, he jabbed the blade forward again. A warning. He did it again as he passed beyond me. He'd come all the way around. Now all he had to do was turn and run.

    I inched towards him.

    'I wouldn't do that,' he said.

    His eyes flicked to Healy, then back to me. His speech was quiet, but sharp and clipped, as if he was trying to disguise his voice.

    'Where are you going to run?' I said, taking another step. He jabbed the knife at me a third time, his forefinger stretched along the edge of the handle and on to the metal of the blade. He was holding it like a scalpel. Like a surgeon. 'You can't get away.'

    Something glinted in his eyes. You and me,' he said, glancing at Healy, but using the knife to indicate he was talking to me. 'We have something in common.'

    'Put down the knife.'

    'We have a connection.' A smile. Small and tight. 'Did you hear me?'

    I studied him. 'Come on, put the knife down.'

    'Did you hear me?'

    'Put the knife down.'

    He jabbed it towards me again. Another small smile.

    'You can't outrun me,' I told him.

    'I know.' He glanced between Healy and me. Healy was almost unconscious now. 'That's why you're going to stay here.'

    'That's not going to happen.'

    'Oh, it is.'

    'No, it's not.'

    He swished the blade, left to right. Whoosh. Yes, it is. You're going to stay where you are…' He stopped, looked down at Healy. 'Or his daughter gets her throat cut, ear to ear.'

    Healy's eyes fluttered. Fixed on the man. Where is she?' he croaked, holding his chest. The man glanced at him and smiled again.

    'You've got to get to her first,' I said.

    'Wrong,' he replied, and jabbed the knife towards me. You don't control anything here, David. I'm in control. I always have been. If I don't make it back, I've made sure things are set into motion and his daughter…' He made a cutting gesture across his throat. 'She bleeds out like a stuck pig.'

    Healy groaned from the floor.

    The man didn't look at him this time, just stared at me. Then he seemed to hesitate for a moment, his eyes flicking back to the flat he'd come out of.

    'It doesn’t have to be like this,' I said.

    He was still staring at the open door.

    'Just give me the knife —'

    'Shut the fuck up!' he screamed.

    Suddenly he was on edge, angry about something. His eyes pinged from me, to the flat, and back again. Another step. More hesitation.

    And then I realized what was wrong.

    He'd forgotten something.

    A trace of emotion passed across his eyes and, as he got level with the flat, he took another last, lingering look inside. Edged closer to the door, as if wondering whether he could take the risk. Then he turned back to me and realized he couldn't.

    And he ran.

Chapter Forty-six

    Five minutes later, Healy was starting to come around, but' his speech was slurred and one side of him — his foot, his leg, his arm, his fingers - lifeless and unresponsive. I propped him up against the wall and then looked into his eyes.

    'How are you feeling?'

    He glanced at me. 'Okay.'

    'Good. And one other thing: don't ever stab me in the fucking back again like that, understood?' He nodded and massaged an area in the middle of his chest where the needle had gone in. 'I'm going to have a look around the flat.'

    I didn't wait for the reply.

    The flat was an exact replica of Markham's but completely empty. Naked walls, naked floorboards, no curtains, no furniture. A flat that had never been moved into. From the ceiling a white cord hung down, but there was no bulb attached; the windows in the living room were the only light. Right in the middle of the room was a wooden crate and a dustbin, turned upside down.

    On top was a laptop.

    A power lead snaked off to a plug, and another moved off across the floor of the flat to a tiny hole in the corner. It must have fed downstairs to the camera. I walked over to the computer. The desktop was plain, and there were two folders on the right-hand side under the hard-drive icon: one labelled 'Feed Stills', the other 'Pics'. In the centre of the screen, obscuring most of the rest of the desktop, was a loading bar, gradually filling up. It had just hit the ninety-two per cent mark. I stepped in closer.

    Then I realized it wasn't loading.

    It was deleting.

    He was erasing everything on the laptop.

    I clicked Cancel, but nothing happened. Went to Force Quit and hammered the Return key. Nothing. It was a waste of time; the deletion had been locked, and the more time I spent trying to figure out how to stop it, the more data disappeared. I clicked on the desktop, and double- clicked on the first folder. 'Feed Stills' opened up. Inside were forty-two photographs. I opened the first one. Healy and me in the flat fifteen minutes before. I closed it. Opened the next one. exactly the same, except this time I was looking up at the camera. Inside the folder, the stills started to delete from the bottom up, but all of them had been modified within the hour, which meant they