Chapter Twenty Eight
“He must’ve lost his keys somewhere. They’re not in his
pockets.”
Sasha
looked up. He didn’t care where Laurie’s keys were. All he cared
about was the wiped-out blank of Laurie’s face, the task of lifting
his shoulders off the ground without shifting the bullet near his
heart. Kucharski was hefting Laurie from behind the knees. Sasha
dragged his mind back to the needs of the moment. Kucharski had
been willing to stand here and defend them all against the
predators crashing towards them through the woods. Laurie had given
him a flicker of hope before passing out—the surreal existence of
that red Mercedes, a God-given getaway car. “If they’re not in his
pockets...” Sasha paused, getting his balance, nodding to Elizabeth
as she pushed aside the brambles to let him through. “Knowing him,
he might have left them in the ignition.”
“Jesus. How does a boy like that end up in a gunfight with
Romani gangsters?”
“He turned the world upside down to keep us both away from
them.” Sasha eased out onto the track. Laurie’s head was resting on
his arm, his face serene beneath its splatter-mask of blood. “He’s
got to have an ambulance. Now.”
“I asked for medical backup with my extraction. And if those
sirens are for us...” Kucharski listened for a moment. Sasha knew
what he was thinking, the calculation between the rescue ahead of
him and the wolves behind, between too far
away and too damn
close. “Foster will have paramedics en
route to us. We just need to meet them halfway.”
They
were almost at the car. Elizabeth had run ahead. She tried the
driver’s door: swung it wide and stared back at Sasha and
Kucharski, her eyes wide. “He did! The keys are here!”
Kucharski chuckled. “Did you ever hear the Eastern European
story, about... villages who treated their idiots like saints,
because they knew that one day they’d do something to save
them?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said with distracted tenderness, darting round
to open the back doors too. “We entertain our idiot angels
unawares. Get him into the back seat, both of you. Alexandru, stay
with him—keep his shoulders elevated. John, come into the front
beside me. I’ll drive.”
“The hell you will!”
“For God’s sake... I’m not stealing your toy car. You’re a
better shot than me, that’s all, and if these guys have their own
vehicle and try and pursue us—”
“All right, all right. Sasha, can you get him in your side?
I’ll come round and help you shift him over.”
Sasha nodded. He could just about manage to hoist Laurie onto
the Merc’s afterthought of a back seat. Never thought you’d need it for this, did you, though we did
have nervous sex in here off a back road near Brighton, because
you’d never made out in a car and you wanted to give it a
try... Kucharski reached in from the far
side, took Laurie’s deadweight by the armpits and helped ease him
into Sasha’s lap. Then he jumped into the passenger seat beside
Elizabeth, who had already worked out the gears and biting point
and was revving the engine. “Easy! Don’t push her so
hard.”
“Her front end is down in the mud. I need to back her out fast
or she’ll stick.”
“Fine. Anyone chasing us who hasn’t already noticed a
bright-red bloody sports car...”
From a
distance Sasha listened to them bicker. His frightened imagination
provided for him a sharp, absurd vision of a normal
childhood—irritable father chewing out his wife for her driving
skills. The Merc bumped backwards out of the trees, found purchase
on tarmac and squealed round. Sasha let the vision develop. If
Kucharski was the dad—and Sasha could think of worse fates than
that for a kid, especially by contrast with Stefan Petrica—that
made Elizabeth...
Laurie’s
breathing hitched and rasped. Sasha leaned urgently over him. The
only family he’d ever known or cared for was the man in his arms
right now. “There’s a casualty department at Uxbridge. I can direct
you down the back roads if you—”
“No,” Kucharski interrupted sharply. “Head towards East Hill,
fast as she’ll go. I can see blue lights coming up along the
bypass. If they’re coming here, we’ll intercept them.”
Fast as she’ll go. Sasha had already
found out how fast that was. Blazing out along the motorway with
the top down, Laurie behind the wheel, his exultation edged with a
fever Sasha now understood... Laurie had been on the run even then,
from himself and from Petrica’s wolves. “I’m sorry,” Sasha told
him, wiping fresh blood from his mouth. “I didn’t know. Please hang
on, love.” Elizabeth glanced into the back. Her jaw set grimly and
she revved the Merc up through the gears. Acceleration pressed
Sasha back in his seat as she laid her foot to the floor and tore
off down the long straight stretch of the East Hill
road.
Always such a deserted place. Laurie had told Sasha how he’d
once gone out there on his own, missed the last bus and had to walk
home. Watching the streetlights throw wingbeats of light into his
lover’s sleeping face, Sasha envisaged that journey. The road must
have stretched out forever to the lonely city boy who had once had
a chauffeur-driven limo at his command. I
was looking for you. But you weren’t there. Laurie, who could make a narrative drama out of a trip to the
corner shop, told all the stories of their first separation in such
simple terms, often avoiding Sasha’s gaze, looking out of the
window. The road was empty. I didn’t see a
soul all the way. Elizabeth looked over her
shoulder again, one swift check. “If I’d taken him with me he’d
have been killed,” Sasha said, as if he’d known her forever and
could be sure that she of all people would understand. “I took him
with me tonight.”
She fixed her gaze on the road. “No. He came with you, Alexandru, all by
himself. Don’t you think that sometimes people need to take that
chance?” Her voice rasped oddly and she swallowed, steadying the
wheel. “Wouldn’t you have preferred it yourself?”
Sasha
didn’t have time to take in the question. Oncoming headlights
pierced the darkness up ahead. Kucharski leaned forward to find the
Merc’s hazards. “This is it. Slow up, Elizabeth—pull over to the
side.”
“It’s just another car, isn’t it?”
“Look behind. There’s two others, and I think the third’s an
ambulance. If that’s Foster, she’s making the right approach—got
them all strung out like normal traffic. Blue lights to get them
here quickly, but now...” The oncoming car began to decelerate,
headlights flickering a response. Kucharski grinned and lifted a
hand to the unseen driver. “Silent running. Stop here.”
Elizabeth obeyed, and he sprang out into the road. Through
the windshield Sasha watched him, lit from behind in pulses of
orange, the vehicles closing around him, coming to a halt. The
first three were police cars, unmarked except for their
roof-mounted lightbars. The fourth... “Please,” Sasha said, barely
able to get the words out past the stone-cold hollow in his chest.
“That’s an ambulance. Tell them we need them, Elizabeth. I can’t
feel Laurie’s pulse any more. I can’t.”
But there was no need to tell anyone anything now. Kucharski
was gesturing back at the Merc. Paramedics were spilling from the
ambulance. Elizabeth scrambled out, pulled the back door open and
beckoned to them frantically. And that was enough: that was all it
took to lift Sasha’s world out of his hands. Green-clad arms
reached into the back seat, reflective sleeve-strips bouncing back
the hazards and headlights. They closed round Sasha, not Laurie,
half-lifting him back out of the car. They were kindly but brusque,
making sure he was steady before they let him go, then abandoning
him absolutely. Questions echoed on the night air—easy stuff Sasha
should have been able to answer. What’s
his name, please? How old is he? What happened to him?
He couldn’t get a word out. He leaned his hands on
the Merc’s warm bonnet and tried to breathe, but it didn’t really
matter. Elizabeth was answering for him, businesslike and clear.
“His name’s Laurie. He’s about twenty one. He has a close-range
gunshot wound to his left shoulder at the back. I packed it, but he
lost a lot of blood before then. I don’t think he’ll survive
another move.”
“Right. We’ll treat him in the car. Mike, go get the
gear.”
Sasha
fell back. He was in the way of paramedic traffic. Burly uniformed
bodies shot past him, back and forth, numinous forces in the light
summer rain just beginning to fall. John Kucharski was still in the
middle of the road. He was bright with purpose, a conductor with
his orchestra finally back under his hands. He pointed down the
road towards the heath and one unmarked car peeled off in that
direction. His voice drifted through the growl of engines. “Unit
two, cut back and circle round through East Hill. Be prepared for
fugitives or a stand-off if you get close—armed and dangerous, all
of them. Foster, take your men and secure the buildings a mile or
so to the west of here in the woods—Jenkins knows the way. Call in
backup and cordon the whole area if you have to; I want that place
taken just as it is.”
Christine Foster. Sasha hadn’t met her, but Laurie had said
she’d been kind to him, and so he huddled against a roadside tree
and watched her. He couldn’t see past the barricade of paramedics
working on both sides of the Merc. She nodded, gathering up her
team with small gestures. She stopped on her way to the driver’s
seat of the third unmarked car. “I thought I was bringing the
ambulance for you, John. Is that...”
“Laurie Fitzroy.”
“Shit. I told him not to come here. Will he be all
right?”
“I don’t know. I fucked up, Chrissy—there was a fight and the
poor kid got shot in the back.”
She didn’t bother telling him the fuckup hadn’t been his.
Maybe in their eyes it had been—maybe everything that happened on
their watch devolved on them. Sasha could understand that. He
understood the bond between them too, the comradeship that made
such responsibility bearable. Elizabeth had said the same thing, or
a truth at least that resonated strongly with it:
sometimes people need to take that
chance... Foster slapped Kucharski on the
arm, cop to cop. “Well, I’m glad the paramedics weren’t for you.”
She glanced around, but her colleagues were already in the car and
waiting for her, Sasha an unseen patch of shadows by the road. She
stood up on her toes: gave Kucharski a brief, ferocious hug. “I’m
so glad they weren’t for you, John!”
Sasha crouched at the foot of the tree. He hadn’t meant to,
but through the receding roar of the last car’s engine had come the
snap of a defibrillator, and his legs had folded. Foster’s
taillights disappeared into the rain. Then there was a silence,
deep as summer night, the core of it the red Mercedes with its
scratched-up paintwork and doors wide open like a grounded ladybird
struggling for flight. One voice breaking it, tired and resigned,
the sound of a man who’d worked over the dying young a hundred
times before, and sometimes succeeded and often failed. Just one
syllable—clear.
Another electrical crack, and then another silence.
Elizabeth knelt beside Sasha. She brushed a hand over his
head until at last he noticed her. “They’re trying,” she said. “You
have to hang on for him.”
“I know who you are,” Sasha whispered, then frowned in
bewilderment. “It can’t be, though. Who the hell
are you?”
She
glanced back over her shoulder. Kucharski was waiting on the
pavement a few yards away. “I’m someone John wishes he could
forget. The bad parts of me, anyway.” She gave Kucharski a small
nod of understanding. “He’d use me as a witness and wipe out all my
sins, if he could. But he’s a good Interpol man. He’d have to take
my past into account.”
Kucharski shifted. He put his hands into his pockets and
looked away. “That depends,” he said hoarsely. “I suppose he’d have
to catch you first.”
Elizabeth took Sasha’s hand. She lifted his chin so that she
could examine his face, and she knelt in the glittering rain and
stared at him as if she could imprint a lifetime of him onto her
soul. “You,” she whispered. “You’re everything I could have hoped
to teach you to be. And you did it all on your own.”
Sasha
tried to concentrate. He tried to focus on something other than the
ongoing silence from the car, but the world was fading out for him,
bleaching to ghosts in the rain. “I did it with Laurie.”
“Yes. The two of you...” She let go of his hand. She leaned in
to kiss him once on the brow, and her scent made the shadow-birds
flutter again on some long-lost wall of the past. “Everything
anyone could want.”
“Please. Tell me who you are.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She got
to her feet. Kucharski was still watching nothing in particular in
the darkness at the far end of the road. He didn’t turn as she
backed away. Sasha noted how well she moved, as if she had
practised the skills of the hunted fox all her life. She barely
disturbed the lamplight. She took a few swift steps along the
pavement, looked once at the Mercedes, as if she would have stayed
to know the ending of that story if she could. Then she ducked into
the trees and ran.
Sasha
lurched onto his feet. A primal urge to follow her stirred in his
veins, but then another snap from the defibrillator wiped her from
his mind. He stumbled towards the car. The broad, strong backs in
their green uniforms remained an impenetrable wall, but if Sasha
stood by the bonnet he could see in through the windshield. One of
the medics had hung up a high-powered lantern and the Merc’s
interior was ablaze with light.
Sasha saw Laurie. He was stripped from the waist up, his
clothes cut away. Electrodes were plastered to his bare chest. He
was a mess of wires and blood, his head turned to the side to
accommodate an oxygen mask, long eyelashes casting their shadows in
the glare. Sasha knew how strong he was, how fit, but Laurie’s was
a strength that didn’t show itself in bulk. Laid out like this, he
looked like a boy, a scrap of flesh discarded and chucked out of
heaven. Sasha could see his ribs. He laid both hands on the
windscreen glass. As he did so, that tired voice said
clear again, and the
defibrillator pads came down. A silence, and after it another
voice, just as flat and hopeless. “Nothing.”
Clear. Another silence.
Nothing.
Nothing.