To Snatch a Thief

CHAPTER THREE



For a dead person Sargeant Goodwin looked surprisingly happy. Her paper-thin lips were shaped into a kind of a smile. It gave Skye the willies.

‘Here,’ she grinned showing her teeth. ‘Lieutenant Hunter left this for you.’ She dumped a pile of hardcopy manuals and a compact E-reader on Skye’s desk. ‘Homework.’ Her black uniform made her sallow skin look even more ghastly.

‘Are you serious?’ She was gob-smacked. Wasn’t it bad enough the walking-dead had interrupted her girl-chat with Ashleigh without handing her… homework, for God’s sake?

‘I don’t do homework,’ Skye said. ‘I don’t do any sort of work, especially when it involves reading and remembering and writing stuff down. It’s not in my DNA.’

The thin lips threatened to split her skull. ‘You do now. Ridiculous as this scheme is, this part’s made my day.’

‘But…’ she didn’t know what else to say, just watched the woman positively dance out of her room. Well hell.

She rose from her prone position on the bed and poked the E-reader aside with the tip of a finger, tilting her head to scan the top manual’s title. Basic Points of Law. Well, double hell, and take a naked nose-dive into the flaming fires of damnation.

That’s not bad, Skye. Pleased with her colourful imagery, she used the pat on her back to steady her nerves for what was to come.

‘Congratulations on your purchase of a Whiz-Quiz KI-5000 the interactive touch sensitive educational tool, with photovoltaic glass screen and preloaded with five hundred multiple choice questions,’ the stupid machine recited when she eventually dared to switch it on. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Walked right into that one didn’t you?’ Skye muttered. ‘Oh, okay. Start your silly programme.’

‘Was that, start the second programme?’

‘For goodness sake!’

‘I’m sorry. Let’s try that again.’

Teeth gritted, she glared at the thing, decided it was useless to argue with an inanimate object however much she wanted to fry its circuits, and admitted defeat. So, keeping a picture of Lexie’s sad little face in her mind as incentive, said more pleasantly, ‘Start the first quiz.’

Outside the tinted windows dusk fell at three thirty, activating the light sensors. Two illuminated squares in her ceiling increased power by fifty percent. She leaned back in her chair, running a hand around her stiff neck. Allowing for food breaks and a couple of trips to the mirror to check her brain wasn’t actually dripping out of her ears, she’d been wading through manuals for five hours.

God, she deserved a medal. No, Skye corrected, she deserved chocolate. Okay, she was going to have to settle for an all-nutritious, rehydrated, vitamin-enriched carob bar from a vending machine, but as she’d never tasted the real McCoy, she wasn’t about to be finicky. Idly, she wondered how King was enjoying The Importance of Following Orders - the Chain of Command, with a sub-section on Your Right’s & Obligations as a Law Enforcer. He hadn’t appeared in the refectory at lunchtime so she assumed he was holed-up with files.

She went into the bathroom and froze as all the lights went out. Groping blindly in the dark, her fingers found the cool hard shape of the washbasin. Reassured, she held on and turned. The main room was as pitch black as the windowless bathroom and that struck her as odd. The city never slept. Light pumped out from it day and night, filtering through even treated glass to bathe the room in a pale yellow glow.

Hurried footsteps sounded in the corridor outside; shouted orders. ‘Stay exactly where you are. Nobody move about the building. The backup system will come on shortly.’ A sliver of light showed under the door – a torch she presumed, and then was gone along with the voices.

Being in the dark was scary enough, but the silence was really freaky. She hadn’t realised, until it wasn’t there, how comforting the background hum of electronic devices doing their thing, was. She could hear herself breathing – unsteady intakes of air, ragged breaths out. The temperature was dropping too, but she wasn’t going to panic. They’d get the auxiliary power going; everything would be fine.

Moving gingerly, Skye felt her way into the main room and along the wall to the window. Where once she’d have seen a mess of lights, stretching, like a lumpy, spangled carpet as far as the eye could see, there now appeared to be a large chunk missing; a huge square of black where a portion of London was totally blacked out.

Something moved in the snow beneath her window: a crouching figure moving stealthily along the perimeter wall. She strained to see who the person was, but in the dim light it was impossible to see if it was male or female.

She was still clutching the sill when the lights came on ten minutes later. The climate control unit droned back to life. The figure had gone.

‘All inmates go immediately to the gym. Make your way to the gym on level one. Roll-call, ten minutes.’ The disembodied voice of the public address system had the usual nasal whine.

The fitness centre was in uproar. Everywhere kids were telling their stories, kidding around; relieving tension in laughter.

‘We was in the bleedin’ lift,’ she heard one lad relate. ‘Me ‘ole life flashed before me. Thought we’d ‘ad it for sure.’

A girl with him cocked an eyebrow. ‘What he had was his hand up my skirt!’ She giggled, giving him a shove, and made everyone laugh.

The room soon filled. Six guards came in. They ticked off names. They counted heads.

Eventually one called for attention. ‘Has anyone seen King?’

The resulting frantic search and interviews resulted in zilch. King was nowhere in the complex, no one had been with him when the lights went out, no one remembered seeing him after they came back on. And although she had her suspicions, Skye kept quiet about the figure she’d seen in the snow.

Hunter blew out a breath. For the first time, since Skye had known him, he looked ruffled. Parked at the front entrance, she glimpsed the sleek rapid-response vehicle he’d arrived in: with a sexy black body on slim white skis the Dart looked one hell of a ride.

Five thirty. They were alone in the Superintendant’s office where he’d summoned her. ‘Did you know he was planning to run?’ His eyes seem to bore right through her, daring her to lie. But she wasn’t one of them yet, and King was a friend.

Her return gaze was steady as she answered. ‘No.’

Whether he believed her or not, Hunter lowered his eyes. ‘Smart,’ he stated, almost to himself. ‘Thought on his feet: used the peak power surge and subsequent outage to make his escape; took nothing. Once the surveillance cameras went down, he was over the wall and legging it, while every rank in the division chased their tails with pedestrian and traffic chaos in one third of the city. Damn!’ Hunter rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Well, he’s blown it. The department won’t give him a second chance.’ He cocked an irritated eyebrow. ‘You sticking, or do I have to have my backside fried over you too?’

Not that she cared, but it suddenly struck Skye Hunter may have put his reputation on the line in his choice of cadet candidates. She thought of the mile long queues outside the job centre, of scrubbing dishes in some filthy club - if she was lucky. She thought of Alexei.

She sucked in a breath. Once she put on that uniform she’d step over a line, well a huge gaping canyon really.

He was still waiting, a frown creasing his forehead. Those arctic eyes never leaving her face. Taking another deep breath, she said. ‘I guess you’re stuck with me.’

Hunter nodded. ‘Good.’ Something in her expression must have amused him. The ice in his eyes thawed. ‘How’s the studying going?’

Skye’s resulting snort would not have been out of place in the farmyard. He laughed. ‘Stick at it,’ he advised in a pleasant tone, as if he was actually human. ‘It’s important to know the rudiments even though you’ll be mostly updating files. The more interesting stuff happens if you pass cadet trainee.’

Seeing as they were being so friendly, she took a chance while his mood lasted. ‘When you first approached me with this, you said I showed potential,’ she said. ‘Why choose me from hundreds of others?’ Was she fishing? Yes.

He tilted his chair, leant it back against the wall, and tapped the tips of his fingers together. ‘As I explained to you at the beginning, it’s a new incentive, dreamed up by the powers that be, to train young offenders who showed potential, for the armed forces. You and King were to be the guinea pigs in my area. Sadly, there’s now only you.’

‘Potential? Potentially, I’m a thief.’

‘Yes you are. And you’ve only been caught twice in how many years can I guess you’ve been at it?’

She smiled. ‘A few.’

‘And those two times you were unlucky – or we got lucky depending on whose perspective you’re looking at. You’re good at what you do.’

‘Use a thief to snatch a thief.’

‘Precisely. I looked over a lot of kid’s files. Yours stuck in my mind.’

Her eyebrows hit her hairline. ‘Really?’

‘You’ve a brother.’

She swallowed. The knot of anxiety she always felt when she thought of him twisted itself into a coil. ‘What’s he got to do with anything? He’s only six, just a baby.’

‘And with minimal help you’ve been looking after him since you were not much more than a baby yourself. That takes guts. Showed me motive for your crimes other than the usual reason of, I want something you’ve got so I’ll take it. Also made me think you’d have an incentive to go straight. If you want a better life for both of you, Skye - now’s your chance.’ He tipped his chair forward and stood, their chat obviously over. ‘If I think you’re ready, I’ll apply to have you out of here by the end of the month. Don’t let me down.’