The Animals look away, shuffling their feet as he’s dragged away.
Come on, come on, come on...
The coppery tang of blood overlaid the dark waxy taste of plastic.
Probably be lucky if he had any teeth left at the end of this.
Assuming Danielle didn’t come back halfway through and shoot him.
Logan gnawed and gnawed and—
The cable tie gave with an audible snap.
Ha, ha!
Pins and needles coursed through his fingers as he sagged onto the bin-bags again.
Two more things to do.
He reached down and yanked at the cable tie around his ankles. Hauled. Pulled. Wrenched...
Nope.
OK. So even if he managed to get out of the boot, what was he going to do with his ankles fastened together: make a hop for it?
Maybe there was something in the boot he could use, like an emergency toolkit?
He scrabbled through the black-plastic bags down to the boot’s rough carpet lining, fingers searching... That was probably a roll of duct tape. That was a plastic bag of what felt like more cable ties. That was a roll of bin bags. And that was his peaked cap.
No toolkit.
Sod.
He ran his fingers around the boot again. There was a ridge in the carpet, running from side to side, right through the middle. As if it folded... Of course — the spare wheel and all the bits and bobs needed to change it! And if the carpet folded in the middle, there had to be a handle or something at the edge closest to the bumper.
He found a small gap to put his fingers in and pulled.
The whole front half of the boot’s floor tried to lift up in one solid flap. Only he was lying on top of the thing, so it couldn’t.
Aaaargh!
Kinda weird, the way life turns out — the stuff you end up doing for a living.
The kid was waking up, so Ian dumped him on the floor. No point carrying him if he could walk.
Now, you know, the guys at the golf club would’ve been appalled to see this. Wee boys and girls? Oh heaven forfend you do anything nasty to the tiny ickle angels! Yeah, well, if you wanna go down that road then you might as well go vegetarian. Or worse: vegan, like bloody Sarah with her sulky teenage sighs and passive aggressive bullshit.
Nah, when you strip it all back: human beings? Just animals, weren’t they. No different from cows, or pigs, or chickens, and nobody cried when they got put out their misery, did they?
’Cept the vegetarians.
And Sarah.
Swear to God she only did it to wind him up.
Ian grabbed a handful of Lot Four’s hair — better to think of them as numbers: once you started giving them names, it was a slippery slope — and dragged him through the equipment store. Past the crates with all the other kids in them. And out the door into the rain.
Dirty — bastarding — bloody — wanking — boot!
‘Move, you piece of shit!’
How? How was he supposed to do this? How?
How was this even supposed to be possible?
Thumping back and forward didn’t make any difference. It was impossible to lift the flap when he was lying on top of the bloody thing.
AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!
OK: forget the toolkit. Get out of here first and then find a sharp edge to cut the cable tie round his ankles. Scissors, hacksaw, a knife...
Logan shuffled over onto as much of his back as he could and slammed both palms upward into whatever was over the boot.
Thunk.
It barely budged. Had to be thick chipboard? Something like that. Something solid and wedged in tight.
Thunk.
Still nothing. Who the hell had a wooden boot cover?
His hands scrabbled across it... wires and what felt suspiciously like the underside of two speakers. Which explained the wood — it was a heavy-duty DIY speaker board.
He struggled his way over onto his front, tensed his arms, shoved, and slammed his back into it.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Harder!
THUNK.
And it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried, was it?
Ian hunched his shoulders as the rain battered down. Should get some decent lighting installed out here. Something better than a couple of manky wall-mounted jobs with low-wattage bulbs in them. A faint orangey glow wasn’t gonna deter thieves, was it?
All them foreign holidays. Travel’s supposed to broaden the mind, but you try broadening a sulky bloody fourteen-year-old’s mind when she won’t eat bloody pain perdu cos it’s got honey in it and honey’s ‘cruel to bees’.
Cruel to bloody bees!
Ian dragged Lot Four across the concrete, not bothering to go around the puddles.
Got to hand it to him — the kid kept his mouth shut. Not a lot of them could manage that. They’d be whingeing about the cold, or the rain. Or what was gonna happen next.
I mean, they’re only bloody bees.
And you didn’t need a degree in psychology to know what it was really all about. Well, you know what? Wasn’t easy raising a daughter on your own. Wasn’t his fault Kirstie got breast cancer. Wasn’t his fault the chemo didn’t work. Think that was fun for him? Watching her wither and die?
Soon as they were within three yards of the truck, Enfield did his car alarm bit — lunging at the canopy window, barking his great big head off. Teeth flashing in the dim orange glow of them half-arsed wall lights. Good boy.
Why couldn’t Sarah be more like...
Ian stopped. Turned.
There was something up with the white Clio parked three cars down. Rocking on its springs like someone was going at it in the back seat. And this really wasn’t the time, or the place, for vigorous lovemaking.
He let go of Lot Four’s hair. Pointed a finger at the concrete beneath the kid’s bare feet. ‘Stay. You move: I don’t put you out of your misery before I feed you to Enfield.’
Lot Four nodded, scarred arms wrapped around himself for warmth, blood dripping off his chin from the broken nose.
See? Some kids could do what they were told.
Ian walked over to the Clio. Had a good squint inside — no one in the front, no one in the rear, but the boot? Now that was a different matter. The internal cover thing was bumping up and down, shifting as something moved underneath it.
Might be a dog?
Or it might be something else.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the butterfly knife: nice, titanium, really good balance. He flipped it open with a basic horizontal, then a quick fan, into a backhand twirl. The blade shone as it spun in and out.
Oh yeah.
Whatever was in the boot, was about to get a new hole in it.
Ian grabbed the boot release with his other hand.
Clunked it open...
Seriously: who gave a toss about bees?
He yanked the tailgate up.
Logan exploded from the boot, arms outstretched and curled into fists. Both ankles still cable-tied together. Snarling. Barrelling into a someone wearing a mask like Danielle Smith’s, only with a big number five on it instead.
‘Aaargh!’ Number Five staggered, falling backwards, crashing into the wet concrete with Logan on top of him. ‘Get off me you—’
Logan smashed a fist into the guy’s mask.
His head bounced off the concrete.
Then again. And again.
His left hand wrapped around Logan’s throat, squeezing, the thumb digging into his Adam’s apple.
‘Gggnnnphnnnng...’ Logan grabbed Number Five’s head and battered it into the concrete with a dull grating thunk. Pulled it up and battered it down a second time, putting his weight behind it.