6. A Lesson in Murder
CHAPTER SIX
A LESSON IN MURDER
P ercy slowly, very slowly, lowered himself towards the floor. He could hear the laboured breathing of the man behind him. He could all but feel the gun on his back.
He would have to be fast. A very quick roll to the left, a half turn, and fling the knife at the neck. Failure to murder would invite a fatal response, so a clean death was the only option.
Percy played the moment over in his mind. He would get one brief glance only. It had to be exact.
The muscles of his abdomen, his thighs, his right biceps tightened as a steel-cold calm settled.
But then, “Percy, don’t!” came a familiar whisper from the shadows.
Joe, who had silently descended the stairs from a bedroom above, knew that look on Percy’s face.
Percy scowled into the darkness. He could hardly get involved in an argument right now. He could hardly slow his slow descent any more than he already had. But he’d also had his concentration thrown off. And it had been a nice night so far, and he didn’t want to piss Joe off by killing an innocent in front of him.
Then, in a flash, his troubles turned to humour with a slice of brown leather, and Joe’s ridiculous idea that he could wrest the gun from the hands holding it with a flick of his whip.
He did manage to get the whip out into the room, but unfortunately it clipped his own shoulder first, resulting in some loud swearing, the redirection of the gun, a bullet slimly missing Joe as he slipped down the stairs, and the flop of misused weaponry onto the floor.
With a pleased chuckle, Percy did his roll, but took a little more care with his bewildered target, throwing the dagger into his right arm instead of his neck. He had weighed his chances that would be his good arm, and either way, the gun fell to the floor. Percy lunged forward and slid it back to Joe, then leapt up and smacked an elbow into the man’s face. “What the hell was that?” Percy laughed.
Joe’s eyes went to the flaccid whip. “You made it look easy.”
“It is easy,” said Percy. “It’s all in the wrist.” He winked suggestively at Joe as the man attempted to stumble to his feet.
“Could you please not sexualise my whip?” said Joe.
Percy looked him over with smouldering eyes. “You sexualised it the second you touched it.” Then he turned back and broke the man’s nose with a thoroughly disorienting headbutt.
“Percy, no.” Joe winced. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
Percy, immaculately, confoundingly unhurt, took the man in a headlock and hauled him across the room. He shoved him against the sill of the broken window, picked up his legs, and tossed him into the moat.
Joe was at Percy’s side in a second. “What did you just do?” Searching frantically, he pointlessly repeated, “What did you just do?”
“Come, Ignatius. We have a painting to steal.” And he made for the stairs, but hearing no footsteps behind him, he sighed heavily, forced to turn back to Joe, half hanging out the window.
“Where is he? What if he can’t swim?”
“Then the problem’s solved,” said Percy. “But there will be more of them soon, and I don’t want to die tonight, so better him than us. Let’s go.”
Joe, eyes still on the water, began unbuttoning his vest. “He could be anyone. He’s not a henchman, you know, he’s in uniform. He’s just a hired guard. What if he’s got kids? A partner? What will his parents say?”
Percy placed a firm hand on Joe’s shoulder. “You are not going in there.”
Joe shoved him off. “Yes, I am.” He threw down the vest and mounted the window.
“Joe!” Percy’s strong arm threw him back to the floor just as gently as Percy could manage, which was understandably still quite rough. “Behave yourself! We came to do a job.”
“Exactly!” Joe bounded up irritatingly fast.
“Look, I’ll…” And with a remembrance of his nice corset, Percy stopped abruptly before volunteering to go in. He did, nevertheless, have the wherewithal to take up Joe’s whip and search for the man. “Look. Over there. Flailing.” He indicated towards some splashing close by. “He’s fine.”
Joe put a hand on Percy’s biceps to look past his handsome frame. “I don’t think flailing is ‘fine’ in a lake.”
“It’s just a moat,” Percy argued. “It’s probably not even very deep.”
“The literal purpose of a moat is to be inaccessible,” Joe said, all too sensibly.
“Then we’re living proof this moat is bullshit.” Percy arrested another of Joe’s attempts to jump into the water before groaning loudly. “Fine. I’ll save him. But if that painting kills more people because I’m busy doing this, every one of those deaths is on your head.”
Joe watched open-mouthed as Percy aimed the whip. “Percy, that’s an awful thing to say!”
“Sorry. It was, a bit.” He flung the whip out to the man. “It will, in fact, be his fault for not having the decency to just drown.”
After a few attempts, the rudely un-drowned man caught hold of the whip, and Percy pulled him back to the relative safety of the chateau with a great deal of huffing and grumbling, and quiet, steadily rising adoration from Joe.
Once the guard was helped back through the window, Percy ascertained that he did indeed understand English, and explained that he could choose to remain silent in a locked bedroom for the period of one hour, or he could have his throat slit there on the floor by Percy’s hand.
The man, wet and wounded as he was, chose the former, and was soon escorted up the turret to the first floor room where Joe had kicked the window in and stashed the fake painting, along with their bag of burglar’s goods. Percy suggested they tie the man up and shove him in the wardrobe, but Joe only gave the man the quilt from the bed to keep warm and asked him politely to please stay quiet.
It made Percy’s job a little harder, but he determined to use the situation as a learning experience.
He took the opportunity to disable the bedroom door as they left, but they had only just reached their destination, third floor murder room, when the shout went out from the window below that the offenders were in the turret.
Joe quietly suffered through one of Percy’s more withering looks for all of ten seconds, before he blurted out, “I’m sorry, okay?”
All too smugly, Percy leaned his shoulder against the heavy door. “Never mind. If Dubois knows we’re in here, and if he has any sense at all, he’ll simply leave us to our gruesome deaths.”
“And if he doesn’t?” asked Joe.
Percy only offered an unhelpful, “We’ll worry about that later. First, let’s try not to die by ghost.”