Makin got clear, raised the shotgun again. There seemed to be something wrong with his arm.
Chris emptied the Nemex into him. The gun locked back, breech open on the last shot.
And it was over.
The echoes rolled away, like trucks moving off down the street. Chris stood over Nick Makin and watched as he stopped breathing. Off to his left, Mike Bryant walked up to the shotgunner he’d hit in the thigh. The injured man flopped about weakly. Blood was leaking in astonishing quantities from his twisted leg. Beneath the mask, his head shifted back and forth between Chris and Mike like a trapped animal’s. He was making a panicked moaning noise.
‘Look, you’re going to bleed to death anyway,’ Mike told him.
The Nemex shell punched him flat. The ski-masked head jerked about with the impact. A new rivulet of blood groped out across the asphalt from the torn wool and gore of the exit wound. Mike knelt and checked his handiwork, then looked up at Chris and grinned.
‘Five to two, eh. Not bad for a couple of suits.’
Chris shook his head numbly. The Nemex hung at the end of his arm like a dumb-bell weight. He unlocked the opened breech, put the weapon away, fumbling with the holster. Post-drive shakes, setting in.
‘This is nice.’ Mike picked up the dead man’s shotgun and hefted it with approval. ‘Remington tactical pump. Fancy a souvenir?’
Chris said nothing. Bryant got up, tucked the shotgun casually under his arm. “s okay, I’ll talk to the police, get one for both of us out of evidence, when they’ve finished with it. Something to show to your grandchildren.’ He shook his head, talking a little fast with the adrenalin crash. ‘Fucking unbelievable, huh? Like something off a game platform. Ah. See you got Makin pretty good then?’
‘Yeah.’ Chris looked incuriously at where the other exec lay, still masked. Up close, you could see the wounds in his chest and belly. His whole body was drenched with the blood. ‘Dead.’
Mike looked around judiciously.
‘I think they all are. Oh, wait a minute.’ He crossed to the man Chris had hit when he tangled with Makin. He crouched and put two fingers to the man’s neck, shrugged. ‘On his way out, I reckon. Still.’
He got up and pointed the Nemex down at the man’s masked face. He was already turning away as he pulled the trigger.
‘How did you know I’d be here?’ Chris asked him.
Another shrug. ‘Carla rang me this morning at home. In tears. Told me you’d had a row, you’d got out in the middle of the zones and now she couldn’t get hold of you. I came in looking for you. Had to break into your office. Sorry about that, I was pretty worried. Anyway, I spotted that message from Liz. Thought I’d catch you up. Took a while, my ribs are still killing me.’
Chris looked at him narrowly. ‘You just happened to be carrying twenty grand in cash?’
‘Oh, that.’ Mike grinned again and crossed to where the bundle of currency still lay on the street. ‘Improvisation. Look.’
He tossed the money across, and Chris caught it awkwardly with his left hand. The notes were twenties. There was a thousand euros in the bundle at most.
‘Best I could do on the spur of the moment. You really walk in from the zones last night?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Must have been some row.’
They stood amidst the carnage, the scattered weapons and spreading pools of blood, and very slowly Chris became aware that, amongst a small knot of people gathered at the end of India Street, Liz Linshaw was watching him.
He walked towards her.
‘Do you have any idea how bad this looks?’
Louise Hewitt stood stiff legged at the head of the conference table and gestured at the projection. Blown-up surveillance camera footage ran grainy and silent behind her, Mike Bryant giving the coup de grace to the two masked gunmen still breathing.
‘Do you have any idea what this kind of brawling does to our image as a serious financial institution?’
Chris shrugged. His side was numb where the Shorn medic had dosed him with contact anaesthetic prior to digging out the shotgun pellets. The rest of him was past feeling very much of anything too. ‘You should be talking to Makin. He started it.’
‘This is not a fucking playground, Faulkner!’
‘Louise, you’re being unreasonable.’ Mike Bryant met Philip Hamilton’s eyes across the table and the other man looked away, towards Hewitt. Beside him, Jack Notley stared into the middle distance, seemingly oblivious to the storm building around him. ‘Makin called this one, all the way down. If I hadn’t been there, Chris’d be dead now and the blame’d be farmed out to zone gangwits. We wouldn’t even know we had a loose cannon aboard.’
On the projection screen, Chris walked away from the bodies and out of shot. It was odd, watching himself disappear, back into the past of three hours ago and the confrontation with Liz Linshaw.
You set me up.
She took it like a slap. For the first time he could recall, he saw open hurt in her face. The sight of it licked the pit of his belly.
You fucking set me up, you bitch.
No. She was shaking her head. Chris, I don’t—
And then Mike was there, and they both slid their masks back on. Passion sheathed. There was control, there were words that meant something factual, there was the long, verbal comedown. Explanations, talk and shots of rough, blended whisky in Break Point to combat the shakes. Sanity leaking into the nightmare aftermath like blood across asphalt.
I just got a call. This guy said he worked Driver Control, he knew what really happened to Chris on the M11, did I want to know too? Meet him here. Five grand in cash.
She brandished the money out of her wallet. Like proof of innocence.
When Mike went to the bathroom, she reached out across the cheap plastic-topped table and took Chris’s hand in her own. No words, only a cabled look, eye to eye. Spinning sudden vertigo, and then the flush of the toilet through cardboard-thin walls, and their hands leapt apart like matched magnetic poles.
Louise Hewitt was talking to him, but he couldn’t make it matter. He levered himself to his feet, faced her disbelieving fury.
‘I’ve had enough of this shit, Louise. It’s pretty fucking clear what happened here.’
‘Sit down Faulkner, I haven’t—‘
‘Makin couldn’t hack the NAME account. I took it from him, and it hurt. He couldn’t take me on the road, so he hired a gangwit kid to do what he didn’t dare do himself. When that didn’t work—‘
‘I told you to sit dow—‘
He shouted her down. ‘When that didn’t fucking work, Louise, he hired some more sicarios and tried this. He couldn’t beat me playing by the Shorn rules, so he broke them. And now he’s dead. Everybody in fucking black.’
‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice didn’t seem to have raised much, but there was an edge on it that cut across the air like tyre screech. ‘You don’t talk to partnership like this. You’re overwrought, but that’s no excuse. Now get out.’
Chris met the senior partner’s eyes, and saw the man who had almost shot him dead in his own office a week ago. He nodded.
‘Fair enough.’
They watched him go in silence. Mike Bryant looked round the table again. He shook his head.
‘This isn’t right, Jack. I mean, it’s a fucking mess. But Makin called it. He’s been a fuck-up since he took over the NAME, he was way too impressed with himself from day one. I would have called him out myself, but what’s the point. Anyone could have seen he’d blink first.’
Hamilton blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You don’t have to drive against someone to know you’re better than they are, Phil. That’s crude. Sometimes you just know what the outcome’d be, and that’s enough. This kill-or-be-killed shit just gets in the way.’
The look ran between the partners like current. Up on the projector screen, the surveillance film had looped. The gun battle was starting again. Jack Notley cleared his throat.
‘Mike, perhaps you could give us some time to discuss this from a partner perspective. We’ll get back to you again on Monday morning.’