Aggressor

9
I shook my head, trying to keep it moving, hoping I’d have a chance to get in there first.
When his nose was only inches away from mine, I got my chance. I lunged, and my teeth caught him just on the bridge. I bit down on the hard bone above the cartilage and kept on going. He flung his head from side to side in an attempt to shake me off, but I was like a terrier hanging on to a stick.
At last his grip slackened on my neck and his hands moved up my face. I managed to screw up my eyes before he got there with his thumbs. He pressed them into my sockets, but I just bit harder. Blood spurted over my face.
He went berserk with pain, thrashing about like a game fish under a harpoon.
I let go of his throat and threw my hands round the back of his head, pulling it towards me so I could get a better purchase with my teeth. Then I bit as hard as I could, working my head from side to side as I did so.
My jaws closed and the bone collapsed like a peanut shell. His sinuses exploded.
Blood and snot spurted from the hole in his face and he let out a scream of rage and pain.
I pulled away from him, kicking and punching, trying to get him off me. But he still held on.
I managed to turn us onto our sides, and force my hand down between us until it could close around the cold metal of the pistol grip. I brought the muzzle up beneath his armpit, released the safety, and squeezed.
He took the round full in the chest.
I squeezed again.
Nothing.
There hadn’t been room between us to allow the top slide to move backwards and forwards fully enough to reload.
I pushed myself away from him, scrabbling at the top slide with my fingers until I got enough grip to rack it and release it.
I lay on my back for a moment as he writhed beside me. Then I rammed the muzzle into his chest and squeezed the trigger twice.
I crawled away and sat against Tengiz’s stone. The only sound louder than my choking attempts to regain my breath was another car passing along the road. This one seemed to have parted company with its exhaust entirely.
My tongue had swollen to the roof of my mouth. My Adam’s apple felt like it had been kicked right against the back of my throat. I sat there, gobbing out blood between my jumper and my sweatshirt, trying to leave as little DNA as possible on the ground.
I fished out the mobile, gulping oxygen to slow down for Charlie to understand me. It rang just once before he answered.
‘Back the car up to the gate. Get the boot open. We’ve got a drama.’
He didn’t answer; he just closed down. He knew what was going into the back.
I rolled over and scrabbled about, trying to locate whatever the Hulk had been aiming to cut me into little pieces with. My fingers touched the cold steel of a gollock. No half-measures for this boy; he might have called it a machete, tree-beater, it didn’t matter. What did was that the thing wasn’t buried in my head.
F*ck that. I’d been lucky this time.
I crawled over to the bench, still trying to gulp in air, my mouth still filling with blood. I spat it into my jumper, and managed to heave the slab far enough to get my hand through the gap. I fished about until my fingers brushed against the plastic bag. The papers went back in my jacket pocket. Until the Hulk had turned up, I’d given Whitewall and whoever pulled his strings the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn’t any longer. Charlie and I were being well and truly f*cked over. No-one was getting this now. It was ours.
I groped around with the torch and found the pistol. I pushed it back into my jeans, and shoved the machete down the front of its previous owner’s trousers.
I grabbed his hands, and started to drag him down the pathway. We couldn’t just leave him here. The elderly are early risers, and for all we knew there could be a steady stream of widows from first light.
I could see Charlie bumping the Audi across the road, then turning and backing it up.
I reached the tap and started to wash myself down.
Charlie walked through the gate and saw the body on the pathway. ‘F*cking hell, lad.’
‘You’ve been stitched up, mate. F*cking Whitewall had this knucklehead waiting for you with a gollock.’ I pointed down at the handle sticking out of his waistband. ‘I’ve got to clean up, then I’ll give you a hand.’
I washed as best I could and pushed back my wet hair, trying to look a bit respectable for the hotel. I filled a couple of plastic drinks bottles that someone had left by the taps, and went back to the plot to rinse away the most obvious splashes of blood. I didn’t want the Sunday morning knitting circle to miss a stitch and call in the blue-and-whites.
Charlie and I somehow managed to heave the Hulk into the boot, torso first. For a moment the rest of him was hanging down across the Audi’s rear bumper, as if he was bent over, being sick.
There was rustling, and the crunch of gravel behind us. Bodies on the pathway.
No time for talk: I grabbed the gollock and ran back into the gloom. My eyes out on their stalks, I checked each side of the path as I ran to where I thought the noise had come from.
I stopped just past Tengiz, took cover behind a tomb, and listened.
More rustling, left of the path.
I ran for it between two plots. They heard me and took off. I headed for the shouts of scared Paperclip.
Jumping a low wall, I crunched over the gravel of a plot. I could make out two shapes, maybe two plots ahead, stumbling over fences and walls, trying to get away. I jumped again and fell onto plastic sheeting. A body was under it, moaning, not moving.
Gollock up, I kicked myself free and pulled the plastic away.
One of the shell-suit crew stared up at me, tourniquet still in place around his arm, not moving a muscle. The plastic was pulled between two plots to make a shelter. I shone the torch beam in his eyes, and his pupils remained fully dilated. If he was looking into the future, he didn’t have to look far.
The others were well gone now. There was nothing I could do but head back for Charlie and hope they’d been too f*cked up to see anything. But I knew, deep down, that if they were, they wouldn’t have been jumping around as they had.
We each grabbed a leg and swung him in. I closed the lid and Charlie took off his jacket and jumper and started to wipe blood off the back of the car.
‘He was waiting for me,’ I said. ‘He knew you’d be here. Which means I wouldn’t mind betting those two at the house weren’t there by accident either.’
Charlie carried on with his cleaning while I checked the area for stray shell suits and any other machete-waving psychopaths.
‘I hope you got the full wad up front, mate. It’s a total f*ck-up, but we’ll protect ourselves with the document. Whatever’s in it must be pretty important; every f*cker seems to want to get their hands on it.’
The cleaning was taking too long. ‘Let’s just f*ck off and sort everything out when we get back under cover.’
We got in the car, me behind the wheel.
‘I’ve got a problem, lad.’ Charlie looked like he’d just seen a ghost.
‘What?’
‘I’ve only got half.’
‘You what? What the f*ck were you thinking of?’
Charlie raised a hand. ‘Hold on, everyone’s in the driving seat except for me. I had two choices. Take the job as it was, or leave it.’
I headed for the nearest area of darkness, the high ground towards the TV tower. I couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. You always demand all the money up front. You never know who’s f*cking about with you. I started shouting at him as we bounced back into the shadow of the trees. ‘Didn’t you think you could be stitched up? What the f*ck was going through that wobbly old head of yours?’
He said nothing as we twisted and turned our way towards the darkness.
As I parked up, in what I supposed was a fire break in the pine trees that blanketed the mountain, he finally turned and faced me. It was his turn to shout, and I could feel the force of his soundwaves against my face as well as in my ear. ‘I’m f*cking dying, remember? I need the cash. What would you have done? Assume Crazy Dave would come begging, and just walk away? Think about it.’
I’d known I was wrong as soon as I’d opened my mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. F*ck it, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get the kit in the boot, and then get the f*ck out of here. As long as we’ve got that document, we’re going to be OK, I’m sure of it.’
‘Yeah,’ Charlie quipped. ‘If all else fails we can put it on eBay.’