The flat is on part of the first floor of an old warehouse. Before I moved in it had been a gym, which I suppose could be considered ironic, given my current means of employment.
I’d been there since I first moved to the city. My landlord had ripped the machines out when the place had closed down, but that was as far as he’d gone by way of refurbishment. I’d been the one who’d organised putting a kitchen of sorts into what had been the gents’ changing room, and converted the office into my bedroom.
The area might have moved upmarket over the last couple of years, but the flat itself was pretty basic. The whitewash on the walls peeled with the damp, and few of the windows closed without gaps. The only heating came through overhead pipes and was erratic at best. There was rumoured to be a central boiler somewhere in the basement that was so decrepit it made Stephenson’s Rocket look as modern as a nuclear fusion reactor.
Despite the fact the heating system operated regardless of my presence, the flat felt cold inside, unlived in. I pushed open the front door against a pile of mostly junk mail, and slid through the gap.
I picked up a few more clothes to stuff into my rucksack, having very much discovered the luxury of Pauline’s washing machine. I sifted through the post quickly, but found nothing of any note apart from an irate card from my landlord, complaining because I’d changed the lock without telling him and had omitted to give him a key. In fact, I’d been forced to fit new locks over a year ago, when the place got turned over, and I wondered briefly why he’d wanted to gain access now.
I moved to the telephone. I’d given Pauline’s phone number to most people who needed to know it, but even so the answering machine light was flashing to tell me I’d one message. I hit the button idly, while I tossed invitations to visit discount sofa factories and take out gold credit cards unopened into the waste paper basket.
When the tape rewound and started to play, however, it brought me to an abrupt standstill.
“Charlie, we need to talk.” Sean’s voice, unmistakable, abrupt. He paused, as though I’d been there when he’d rang, and he was waiting for me to pick up.
When I hadn’t done so, he sighed audibly, and went on in a quiet tone that was somehow more ominous than any shouted threat could have been. “Don’t even think about running again, Charlie. I meant what I said last night. You can’t hide forever, and we’ve unfinished business. So call me.” He reeled off a mobile phone number which I didn’t bother to write down, then rang off.
My legs folded me gently onto the sofa of their own volition. For a few minutes after the answering machine had clicked off, I just sat there, staring at it stupidly. How on earth had Sean got my number? Did he know where I lived? If he knew I was at Pauline’s why hadn’t he rung me there? Or was he just being cunning?
Suddenly, I needed to get out of there. I turned the lights off and yanked the door shut behind me, turning the key in the lock with hands that fumbled. I almost ran down to the bike, kicking it into life with clumsiness born of haste.
All afternoon at the gym, I was jumpy, and nervous. Attila wasn’t in, and being on my own made things worse. I suppose I was expecting something to happen, but it wasn’t until ten o’clock, when the last punter had cleared out, that things started going seriously awry.
I was just contemplating the usual untidiness of the stacks of dumbbells and the careless scattering of the heavy leather lifting belts when, in the best horror film tradition, all the lights went out.
For a moment I was totally unsighted by the darkness. The memory of the network of fluorescent tubes strung across the ceiling was flashed in to my retinas. I panicked at my own blindness, instinctively recoiling. I reached for the counter behind me, and ducked down.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing them to adapt. They did so with frustrating slowness, like waiting for an old Polaroid picture to surface out of the emulsion.
After a few moments that felt like hours, I opened my eyes again and, blinking, I discovered I could make out the outlines of the nearest weights machines. I crabbed along until I found the opening to behind the counter, and edged through it, not stopping until my back hit the office wall.
All the time, I was waiting for the sounds of rapid entry. If this was just a blown circuit breaker, or a power cut, boy was I going to feel a right prat.
Then, muffled by the dividing walls, came the faint noise of glass shattering as someone smashed one of the windows in the changing rooms.
For a second I tensed, then the realisation hit. There were steel bars fitted on the inside of all the windows in the gym, clearly visible from the outside. No way was anybody going to get in that way.
But, a little voice in the back of my head piped up, the gap between the metal bars was plenty wide enough for them to toss an old vodka bottle full of Unleaded through, now wasn’t it?
I carefully got to my feet, groping for the fire extinguisher Attila kept on a wall bracket just behind the counter. It was dry powder, I remembered. You could use it on just about any type of fire.
I yanked the plastic safety tab out of the squeeze lever handle, and hefted the nine kilo cylinder onto my shoulder, staggering out cautiously from my place of comparative safety.
I got as far as the start of the corridor that leads to the changing rooms, when the main door behind me lurched open. There was no attempt at stealth, it just slammed back against the frame.
The shock of it made me wheel round, gasping. I caught the briefest glimpse of two figures in the doorway, silhouetted by the sodium light from the car park behind them, casting eerie elongated shadows onto the gym floor.
It was impossible to tell an identity, but as one of them started to bring his right hand up, I recognised the shape of the object he was gripping in his fist.
A gun.
Before he’d got chance to take a bead on me, I’d twisted on the balls of my feet and started to dive for cover. The people who’d trained me had drummed it in from the start that to move will save your life, when to freeze will get you killed. So, it was a reflex reaction, elevated by the surge of adrenaline that rushed through my system like a flash flood.
Even as I started to shift, I knew I wasn’t going to be quick enough. Instinctively, I shut my eyes and flinched my head, as though that was going to make a difference.
The sharp crack the gun made as it was fired was terrifyingly loud inside the confines of the building. At the same instant, the noise exploded into a reverberating clang like a giant struck bell. The fire extinguisher bucked in my hands. Something thumped me hard on the side of my neck, and I went down.
I lost my grip on the extinguisher as I fell. It landed with the valve downwards, bouncing hard enough on the handle to puncture the CO2cartridge inside and pressurise the contents. Suddenly, my view to the doorway disappeared in a hissing cloud of powder.
The extinguisher toppled over onto its side, but the discharge valve must have snapped off, because the powder kept billowing out of it even when there must have been no more force on the handle. I was enveloped in a choking layer of talcum-like dust.
My neck was stinging and my head felt dazed, but I knew the powder wasn’t going to keep my assailants occupied for long. It takes under thirty seconds to empty a cylinder that size, and the clock was ticking. I had to move – now. Anyone who comes calling armed with a gun has to be pretty damned serious about killing you.
The thought chilled me, but I pushed it to the back of my mind as I scuttled across the carpet on my hands and knees. I cannoned into a stack of weights as I brushed past, and sent them crashing to the floor. Immediately, another shot fractured the air, pinging off the frame of the machine directly above my head. Shit! Too close for comfort.