Król turned his head Mick’s way, gave a thumbs up, and vanished back inside the shop.
Mick hit the gas. Beside the street containing the lock-ups was a fenced building site, and he looked for a way in. The site was vast and contained stacks of bricks and building materials, but no workers. And no fucking gate. So, Mick waited for a shallow segment of kerb and then turned right, hard, and hit the chain-link fence with enough force to wrench a section from one post and open it like a door. It rasped along the side of his car and snatched his wing mirror.
He twisted the rear-view mirror so that it showed his face. ‘Ya fucking dead now,’ he yelled, right into his own eyes.
The car bounced where the earth was packed hard from the trundling of heavy machinery, and slipped where the soil was loose and wet from yesterday’s rain. He had to slow to a crawl, but even so the wheel struggled in his hands.
Towards two o’clock was the graffitied wall, the two roofs of the long buildings poking above. And the two escaping bastards, right there. He cut towards them.
He had to slew around a dumped mass of concrete pipe sections – if only he could roll one across the bitch and flatten her like dough – and that needed his eyes. When he found the roof again, Seabury and the woman, small at this distance of 300 feet, had already climbed off the end of the building and onto the wall. Below them was a skip full of rubbish, no more than a ten-foot drop. Mick thought it would be too scary for a prim bitch like Liz Grafton, but she amazed him by being the first to leap. He wound down his window as she dropped, hoping to hear a scream as something hard and sharp tore her open.
‘Save some for me, bitch,’ he yelled into the rear-view.
She vanished into the trash, then resurfaced, apparently unharmed. She started waving at Seabury who paced at the roof’s edge.
Mick stared at himself and shouted: ‘Just waiting to die, Seabury.’
More movement caught his eye. Król, emerging onto the roof. Mick lost sight of all three of them as he was forced to flick left to pass a shipping container that had been converted into an office.
Once past the office, Mick saw that Seabury had already leaped. He and the bitch were clambering out of the skip. Król was at the edge of the roof and displaying the same damn fear Seabury had shown. Mick glared into his own eyes again.
‘Król, you fucki— Jesus!’
He hit the brake, hard. Barely in time. Dried mud was churned into dust beneath the wheels and launched around the car as the vehicle skidded to a halt. Some kind of concrete-lined trench ahead – for sewage or water – blocking his path, whatever the hell it was for. Mick backed up, turned, and powered up again, now driving parallel to the trench. Two hundred feet to his right, the three on foot ran alongside. Seabury and the bitch were making good speed because she had lost her shoes somewhere along the way. Król, although skinny and younger, just couldn’t close the distance.
‘I’m gonna crush you,’ he screamed at his reflection.
Like a fucking scene from a comedy sketch, Seabury and the woman veered to pass a long stack of wooden planks, but Król clearly liked the hurdle analogy and tried to leap it. His foot caught the top, and after that his face caught the ground.
Mick looked away, searched ahead, seeking an end to the concrete trench. But on it ran, for ever. Then he saw a makeshift bridge some way ahead, nothing more than a rusty metal sheet laid across it: constructed for the passage of heavy machinery, which meant his car would have no problem. To get the angle, he turned left, then carved a large semicircle to the right, and came dead-on towards the bridge. Ahead, Seabury and the woman raced past. Król was 130 feet behind them.
‘Here we go, fuckers,’ Mick bellowed.
The metal bridge held. Rumbled like thunder, but held. On the other side, Mick tugged down hard on the left side of the wheel. Soon he was hot on their tail. A clear run at them now. One hundred and sixty feet to Król, maybe 200 to Seabury and the woman. Nothing beyond them for another 300 feet, until the fence. He would crush them long before they got there.
Król filled the windscreen.
I got webcam, ain’t I?
He was stumbling along, giving Mick his back. No meth junkie going cold turkey ever wanted a hit as much as Mick wanted to ram that fool’s ass with his Nissan badge and fold him up into a wet red mess between soil and steel. But he skipped alongside at the last minute because he needed to know more about this webcam threat, and he needed an extra pair of hands to deal with dead bodies.
Król slapped the side of the car as it raced by, like a good buddy saying well done. Did he think this was a fucking game?
‘This is real shit!’ Mick roared.
One hundred and thirty feet between the car and the fleeing pair. Ahead of them, Mick saw a torn-up area of concrete and earth, surrounded by traffic cones with yellow tape strung between them. Next to it was a sign:
DANGER HOLE BELOW
The mirror got, ‘That’s your fucking grave!’
Sixty feet, and then fifteen. They grew in his windscreen as if it was a camera zooming in. He wanted to ram them, but also didn’t. Just like with that bastard Grafton before he blasted him into oblivion, Mick wanted to utter some gem of a final line, and give him a deathbed memory. His foot shook on the accelerator as his brain fought itself, both trying and refusing to stamp down hard and send them soaring.
‘Fuck it,’ he yelled, and crushed the accelerator.
Thirty feet. And then fifteen. And there the choice was taken out of his hands as he realised that the churned area had raised foundations. He stamped the brake and twisted the wheel.
The Almera slewed around, and Seabury and the woman filled his side window, their heads turned to watch him. Just as it seemed he was about to bowl them over, they leaped and cut through the yellow tape like marathon winners, and then the wheels slammed into the raised edge of the foundations and the car stopped dead. The sudden check of momentum sent Mick’s right arm and shoulder hard into the door, and his head hard into the part-open window.
As pain and lights flashed through his head, he had a funny thought: if the window was down, I could have grabbed the bitch. Instead, he watched Seabury and the woman run across the torn-up concrete. In the centre of the area was a hole surrounded by more cones and tape, like the bullseye on a target. A short way beyond was the perimeter fence, and past that a road, and a thousand escape routes thereafter. But they stopped by the bullseye as if having hit a dead end. Both were panting, exhausted: Seabury more so than the woman, surprisingly. Survivors, like Mick, would have run until there was nothing left in the body, but this pair had given up.
And that suited him just fine.
Mick tried to open his door, but the car was pressed up against the foundations, and it was jammed shut. He scrambled out of the passenger side. But he needn’t have panicked because Seabury and the woman were still there. The street was only a hundred or so feet behind them, within shouting distance, but the fence had debris netting and no one would see a thing. They were his for the taking.
Watched by his prey, Mick stepped up onto the smashed raised area. Casually. Calmly. One step, just to say he was here. His eyes were locked on the bitch, and he itched to get at her, but she was the last piece of Grafton to wipe out and he didn’t want to rush things.