Chris was dreaming about the supermarket again, but this time he was watching the whole scene from outside, and the car park was insanely, impossibly full of cars. They were everywhere, every colour under the sun, like spilled sweets, and all in motion, cruising and parking and reversing out like some immense robotic ballet, and he couldn’t get through them. Each time he took a step towards the supermarket and the people in its brilliantly-lit interior, a car rolled into his path and stopped with a short squeak of brakes. He had to go round, he had to go round, and his time was running out. The people inside didn’t know. They were shopping in anaesthetised warmth and content and they had no way of knowing what was coming.
Up on the roof, tube metal groaned and clanked in protest as the reindeer shook its head.
And the cars, he suddenly saw, were all empty. There were no shoppers in them, no one driving, no one loading, no one anywhere. Everybody was inside. Shopping. Fucking shopping.
He made it to the doors and tried to open them but they were closed up with impact plastic boarding and metres of heavy steel chain. He tried banging on the windows, shouting, but no one heard him.
The shots, when they came, rippled the glass under his hands. And as always, they drilled into his ear like something physical.
He yelped and woke up, fists clenched under his chin.
For a moment, he cringed there, curled defensively at one end of the sofa. He’d twisted the blanket up in his sleep and now it barely covered half his body. He blinked hard a couple of times, breathed out and sat up. Dawn had come and gone while he slept, and the office was full of bright sunlight.
He got up from the sofa and found his shoes. Bending to put them on, he felt his head throbbing. He’d drowsed himself into a low-grade headache. He shambled to the desk and opened drawers with myopic clumsiness, looking for painkillers. The phone flashed at one corner of his vision. He fumbled a snarl and checked numbers on the piled up messages. Carla, Carla, Carla, fucking Carla—
And Liz Linshaw.
He stopped dead. The call had come in an hour ago. He grabbed a foil of speed delivery codeine tabs out of an open drawer and hit ‘play’.
‘Chris, I tried you at home but your wife didn’t know where you were.’ A wry curl to the voice - he could see the faint smile that went with it. ‘She, uh, she wasn’t too helpful but I got the impression you might be coming into work today. So listen, there’s a breakfast bar in India Street called Break Point. I’m meeting someone there at eight-thirty. I think you might want to be there too.’
He checked his watch. Eight-twenty.
Jacket, Nemex. He chewed up the codeine tabs on his way down in the lift, swallowed the powder and went out hurriedly into the sun.
It took him a little longer than he expected to find India Street. He remembered the breakfast bar from a damage limitation strategy meeting he’d had there once when he still worked at Hammett McColl. But because he associated the place with the reinsurance brokers at the meeting, he misremembered the address and found himself in an alley off Fenchurch Street with the wrong name. He cast about for a couple of minutes, blurry with the onset of the codeine, before the mistake dawned on him. Working off the new memory, he plotted a vague eastward course and set out again through the tangle of deserted streets.
He was walking north up the glass-walled canyon curve of Crutched Friars, when someone yelled his name.
‘Faulkner!’
The word echoed off the enclosing steel and glass walls, bounced away down the curve of the canyon. Chris jerked around, sludgily aware he was in trouble. About twenty metres away, blocking his way to the right turn into India Street, five figures stood spread out across the width of the road. All five wore black ski-masks, all five hefted weapons that to his untutored eye looked like shotguns. They were faced off against him in the ludicrous cliche stance of a Western gunfight, and despite it all, despite the abrupt knowledge of his own rapidly approaching death, Chris felt a smirk creep out across his face.
‘You what?’
Maybe it was the codeine. He laughed out loud. Shouted it.
‘You fucking what?’
The men facing him shifted, apparently discomforted. They glanced inward to the figure at the centre. The man took a step forward. Hands pumped the shotgun’s action. The clack-clack echoed along the street.
‘Go foah it, Faulkner.’
The knowledge hit Chris like cold water. He opened his mouth to yell the name, knew he would be shot before he could get it out.
‘Just a minute.’
Everyone looked round at the new voice. Mike Bryant stood at the mouth of a side alley about ten metres behind Chris, panting slightly. He raised his left hand, right floating close to his belt. Gripped in the upraised fist was a thick wad of currency.
Makin faltered behind his mask. The shotgun lowered a couple of degrees.
‘This has got nothing to do with you,’ he called.
‘Oh, but it does.’ Mike ambled out of the alley and drifted up the street until he was lined up beside Chris. There was a thin beading of sweat across his brow, and Chris remembered he couldn’t be more than a day out of the hospital. He still held the wad of cash before him like a weapon. ‘You take down one Shorn exec in the street, where’s it going to end? Eh, Nick? You’re breaking the fucking rules, man.’
And out of the corner of his mouth, he muttered to Chris.
‘You carrying?’
‘Yeah, I’m carrying.’
‘Loaded this time?’
Chris nodded tautly. A surge of adrenalin punched through the codeine vagueness, a savage pleasure at the comradeship in the man at his side and the will to do harm together.
‘Good to know. Follow my lead, this is going to go fast.’
‘We only want Faulkner,’ shouted Makin.
Mike grinned and raised his voice again. ‘That’s too bad, Nick, because you got me too.’ It was the bright, energetic tone Chris had last heard when Bryant crippled and blinded Griff Dixon in his own living room. ‘And before we start, gentlemen, just look at tonight’s wonderful prizes.’
He held up the fistful of bank notes again. His voice resonated in the steel canyon acoustics, loud and game-show fruity.
‘For the winners! Twenty thousand euros, in cash! Lay down your weapons and walk away with it all! Tonight! Or, take the gamble, lose and die! Ladies and gentlemen, you decide!’
He hurled the money up and outward. It was bundled together with a thick metallic band that glinted as it turned end over end, high in the bright morning air.
‘Now,’ he snapped.
After that, it all seemed to be happening on freeze-frame advance.
Chris tugged out the Nemex. It felt appallingly heavy in his hand, appallingly slow to bring round and point.
Beside him, Mike Bryant was already firing.
Makin’s contingent were still staring up at the money. Mike’s first slug took the man on Makin’s right under his back-tilted chin, tore through his neck and dropped him in a shower of arterial blood.
The remaining four scattered across the perspectives of the street.
Chris held the Nemex out, memories of a hundred shooting-gallery hours like iron tracery in his right arm. He squeezed the trigger, felt the kick. Squeezed again. One of the men ahead of him staggered. Hard to see blood against the dark canvas clothes. He squeezed again. The man folded forward and collapsed on his face in the street.
A shotgun boomed.
He pointed and fired at Makin. Missed. Out of peripheral vision, he saw Mike Bryant stalking forward, face fixed in a grin, Nemex extended, shooting in an arc. Another of Makin’s men went down, clutching at his thigh.
Another shotgun blast. Chris felt a thin stinging of pellets across his ribs. He spotted Makin, pumping another shell in. He yelled and ran towards him, firing wildly. Makin saw him coming and took aim.
Another figure stumbled into Makin’s path, shooting across the street at Mike. The two men tangled. Chris shot indiscriminately into them both.