He realised that this was the first time he’d ever seen her in the flesh, without a window in the way or bodyguards surrounding her. Her skin was dirty, hair a mess, dress tatty, feet shoeless and bloody – but she was a pretty thing. It was pleasing to know that Grafton had lost his most beautiful asset, but also cause for regret: if only he could have stripped her naked and violated her in front of Grafton, that would have topped the cake with a big fat cherry. Revenge would have been sweet. But he would get the next best thing: to wring the blood from her like water from a sponge, and know that Grafton was watching from his place in Hell.
He didn’t get to stare for long because she stepped backwards, behind Seabury, using him as a shield.
Król had arrived to spoil a thoughtful moment. ‘Got the fuckers,’ he said. He tried to step up onto the foundations, but Mick grabbed an arm to pull him back. Said nothing, but Król got the message because he stayed where he was after that. Mick didn’t want anyone to ruin this moment.
‘We’ve done nothing. What do you want with us?’ Seabury said.
A pleading tone, which Mick liked. But his face wasn’t contorted with shock, and Mick didn’t like that part at all. Usually that sort of neutral expression was worn by the likes of Mick himself: men who’d faced danger, lived through it, realised that they were tough to put down. Or people with a trick up their sleeve. Seabury didn’t strike him as the sort who was accustomed to trouble. He didn’t have the scars, or the worry lines, or that look in the eyes that came from constantly facing the edge of the abyss. He was nondescript. Which pointed to the latter: a trick up the sleeve. A little caution wouldn’t go amiss. So, he stayed right where he was. For now. Besides, he had an idea: let’s see if he could convince Seabury to betray the bitch.
‘I’m going to give you a chance I never expected to offer, so you should take it. Turn around, run away, forget all about this morning. I just want her.’
‘He can’t stop us, so let’s just grab them,’ Król said. He was almost dancing with anticipation, but Mick’s mind was a tranquil lake. No, Seabury could not stop them, but there was no urgency. She could not escape again. You sipped fine wine instead of gulping it.
‘Where’s my husband, you bastard?’ the bitch shouted, poking out her head from behind Seabury’s shoulder.
So, she didn’t know. The story was in the headlines, but she had missed it. Also realising this, Król started laughing. Mick held up a finger. Król clicked on and locked up, which saved him some pain because Mick would have crushed his head to avoid letting someone else tell her the big news. She needed to hear it from him. But not yet. Not until his eyes were inches from hers, his big, coarse hands around her small, porcelain throat. And not until her mind was already in pieces from the knowledge that the only man in the world working her corner had just abandoned her.
‘So here it is, Seabury. Give her up. Don’t make me come take her.’
Using the guy’s name got the response he wanted: shock. Mick pulled a knife from his pocket and held it up. No words. Just a visual message. In his jacket was a pistol, but for this occasion he preferred the knife, and not just because the sound of a gunshot would roll away across the land.
Now there was fear on the man’s face as he said: ‘What do you want her for? We’ve done nothing.’
‘Never you mind that, Seabury. Step away, live another day.’
No response. Mick took a single step, and stopped as Seabury yanked something from his pocket. Something that looked like a squat green aerosol can. Mick thought he knew what it was.
‘Don’t come closer. One more step forward, you’ll take a hundred back.’
A bold remark, with, surprisingly, the tone to back it up. And Mick knew why. You needed skill and composure to put down an enemy with a knife or a gun, but even an imbecile could cause serious damage with a—
‘Grenade?’ Król blurted. ‘No way that’s a fucking grenade.’
Mick disagreed. He knew the type of shop Seabury ran, and a grenade was a piece of kit that fitted right in there. But there was a vast chasm between being able to wave a grenade about and actually using one.
‘Kill four people? I don’t think so, Seabury. Karl. This is your last chance to step away.’
The urge to get at her was rising, unstoppable. He wanted to throw her down and smash her apart on the ground. He wanted Grafton, down there in Hell, to stare up and see everything. To try to claw his way to her as Mick’s anvil fists ground her up. He imagined the earth as a sheet of glass, Grafton floating just below like a swimmer caught under ice. She was on her front, so their eyes were locked in pain and fear, their scrabbling fingers just inches apart but for ever denied. Mick stared over her shoulder and soaked up Grafton’s distress as he broke her open like an Easter egg.
He was grinding his teeth in anticipation. He dragged his eyes away from her and onto Seabury so he could concentrate.
‘Think hard, Karl. Step away and go and live your life and forget today. You’ve got a wife, and a nice job, and you’d be silly to toss all that away. Remember that you’re in the shit because of her. So, put that grenade down.’
No response to that. He took a step. It put him just twenty inches closer, still a good distance between them; but it felt like he had moved into their personal space, and Seabury obviously felt it, too, because he waved the grenade.
‘This is a momentum device,’ Seabury said. ‘Explodes in the direction it’s moving. I throw it at you, the blast is all yours.’
Brave words, but a flicker in the voice. Clearly Seabury was putting up a front, and that meant he was bluffing. Besides, Mick had never heard of such a device. He took another step forward. One step. Just to prove a point. Just for the fun of the game.
‘Let’s just stop fucking around and rush them,’ Król said.
But that wasn’t what Mick wanted. That wasn’t a show of power. He wanted to come out top. He wanted to convince Seabury to turn against the woman, even though Seabury knew Mick meant her harm. This was wasting time, yet he wanted to see it through. She’d be his in thirty seconds either way, and thirty seconds he could spare.
‘I’ll count to three,’ he said.
‘You can’t do this to us,’ Liz moaned. ‘Where’s my husband? He’ll kill you for this.’
From behind him, Król said: ‘Let’s jump them, now.’
Mick ignored him. ‘Karl, well done for being the good Samaritan, but now it’s time to think about your wife. Your future. Don’t fuck it up just because the woman behind you fluttered her eyelashes at you.’
For a moment it looked as if Seabury was considering it. Walking away and forgetting about her. People got hurt every day, wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t help them all. The guy was, in Mick’s opinion, two seconds from making the right choice, and then Król and his big mouth fucked it up.
‘Here we come, fuckwits,’ he yelled.
Mick turned, pointed his knife right at Król’s disgusting face, said: ‘Shut the fuck—’
Król threw up a defending arm, turned his face away with a yell. But the action was too much, too overdone for just a pointing knife, and Mick realised the truth a half second before he heard the bang. Loud, monstrous. His arms went up around his head and he dropped onto his knees, expecting a rain of lethal debris to fragment his flesh, a supersonic wave of fiery air to crush his bones. He had turned away from Seabury, and the man had snatched the moment to try a daring escape that was about to kill everyone with shrapnel.
Instead, yellow smoke washed over him. It swallowed the world around him. Not a weapon of murder, then. Just a smoke bomb; although it must have been adapted because they didn’t usually create an explosive noise.
Mick stood and turned, but he could see nothing. Król was laughing, and it was the only sound out there. The smoke made Mick cough, but it wasn’t vicious on his lungs, so it hadn’t been adapted to contain CS gas. Designed only to shock and disorient so the user could escape. Some silly ninja trick by a guy with a shop full of such, and he’d been caught out by it.
Angry, he ran through the smoke towards where Seabury and Liz had been, but stopped after only a few seconds because he had no idea of what he might run into – or he did:
DANGER HOLE BELOW