Chapter 9
Callan
We’ve been on the road in this fucking camper van for half an hour. It stinks of old smoke and blood.
“Are you bleeding again?” I ask as we bounce over a pothole. I’m in the back and getting pissed off about it.
“What do you mean again?” he grits out. “Still.”
“You need a hospital.”
“I need you to shut up and to put a bullet in Maeve’s head.”
“We have to find her first,” I mutter, glaring at the back of Aidan’s seat.
Jack drives with both hands on the wheel, expression blank, eyes fixed on the road ahead through a windscreen streaked with old grime. Every now and then, he checks the mirror.
“Where the fuck are we going?” I ask.
Jack takes a turn without warning, the van rattling hard enough to jar my teeth. “Storage unit.”
“That narrows it down.”
“It’s private. Off the books. I kept duplicates there.”
Aidan shifts in the passenger seat and swears under his breath. One hand stays clamped to his side. The other still has the gun aimed at Jack’s ribs. He has not lowered it once. I respect that, even if the rest of this situation is deranged.
“If this is a trap,” Aidan says, voice rough, “I’ll kill you.”
Jack does not even look at him. “How was I meant to know you’d show up at the other place? They were coming for me, and you got in the fucking way.”
“Seriously?” I snap. “We are doing this now, are we? We have bigger shit to deal with.” I sit back, arms crossed, and wonder how we ended up here.
Headlights flash for a second before a van rams into the side of the camper. The impact throws me hard across the van. Metal screams. Glass bursts. My head cracks against the window, and white pain tears through my skull.
“Fuck.”
Aidan slams into the dashboard. Jack fights the wheel, but the camper lurches sideways anyway. Tyres shriek. The whole van skids, fishtailing across the tarmac before ploughing into a low barrier with a brutal crunch that snaps me forward again.
For one second, everything goes still except for the engine coughing and my own pulse smashing at my throat.
Then Aidan shouts, “Out.”
I hit the floor of the van on instinct. Jack kills the engine. Aidan kicks his door open and half falls, half launches out with his gun up as he slides open the back door.
Practically falling through the door, I get to my feet instantly. Humidity slaps me in the face.
I drop behind the rear wheel as a second van screeches to a stop twenty feet back, angled across the lane. Dark industrial units loom on either side. Security lights burn weakly above loading bays. No people. No witnesses.
Two doors on the other van fly open.
A man gets out of the passenger side with a handgun and another from the driver’s side carrying something that makes my blood run cold. “Run,” I growl as he throws petrol over the van and raises the flame thrower.
Fire roars across the side of the camper.
Heat slams into me hard enough to steal breath. Paint blisters at once. The petrol catches with a violent whoosh that turns the whole side of the van into a wall of orange.
“Move,” Jack shouts as the flames roar behind us.
We don’t wait for a second instruction.
We move.
Fast.
“Herding,” I rasp as we run straight for a warehouse.
“Probably,” Jack pants back. “Ready?”
“Always.” I look at Aidan, who has decided that pain is his bitch and has whipped it into submission.
“Move,” he growls.
I sprint for the warehouse entrance with Aidan on my right, Jack on my left, and I hate all three of us in this moment.
The roller door is half up. Enough to duck under.
Aidan reaches it first and drops low, gun leading. I follow straight after, boots skidding on grit as I dive beneath the metal. Jack comes through last just as another rush of heat blasts across the yard behind us.
Inside is dark and cooler, but only by a fraction. I bring my weapon up.
“Clear left,” I say.
“Right clear,” Aidan fires back.
Jack is already moving deeper in, not waiting for permission. “Office at the back.”
“Convenient,” I mutter, stalking after him.
The place looks disused. Empty pallets, stacked crates and torn plastic sheeting hanging from rusted racking. No machinery running. No workers. No sound except the crackle of the burning camper outside and our breathing.
“Set up and wait,” Jack says.
“Wait for what?” I mutter, but it’s mostly rhetorical.
“For them to come in after us,” Jack says.
“No shit.”
Aidan reaches the office first and kicks the door open with enough force to bang it off the wall. I slice my gun across the room. Desk. Filing cabinets. Broken kettle. Two smashed chairs. One boarded window. No bodies. Yet.
“Clear,” I say.
Aidan plants himself on the other side of the door. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the warehouse beyond the office and raises his gun.
“You have nowhere to go, boys,” Maeve’s lyrical voice suddenly echoes around us.
“Show yourself, bitch,” I call back.
“I’m not here for you. I want him.”
“Take him then. But you leave Annabelle alone.”
Jack growls, but fuck him. I don’t owe him shit.
A soft laugh drifts through the air. Controlled. Wrong.
“You never could separate pretty things from dangerous ones, Callan.”
My skin goes cold. Pretty.
“Show your face, or it’s a cowardly way to stage a family reunion.”
“Oh, don’t be cruel,” Maeve says, her voice syrupy over broken glass. “I came all this way for your father.”
Jack steps into the office doorway before I can stop him. “Then come and fucking take me yourself.”
I want to shoot him for exposing himself. I want to drag him back. Instead, I move up beside the doorframe and keep my weapon trained on the warehouse floor.
“She always did like an audience,” Jack says, low enough for us.
Aidan bares his teeth. “And you know that because you married the cunt.”
Jack ignores him. “She wants us split. Keep your lines tight.”
Aidan’s laugh is short and vicious. “You giving us tactical advice now, Jack?”
“Take it or die,” Jack says.
Metal scrapes somewhere out in the dark.
I hear it at the same time as Aidan. We both shift our aim towards the sound.
Then a body drops from the rafters.
A wet thud echoes as he hits the ground.
“Yeah?” I call out. “And who is he?”
A rope falls from the ceiling, and Maeve slides down it, gun up, but it looks all wrong in her hand. “Come over here and see for yourself.”
“Not a fucking chance,” Jack growls.
Maeve lands lightly, dressed all in black and kicks the body over. I see his face clearly in the torchlight from her weapon pointed at his face.
“Tony Briggs,” I mutter.
Maeve smiles. It is small. Neat. Practised.
“He got what he deserved,” she says.
Aidan shifts his stance. “You set fire to our vehicle and dragged us into an industrial estate to show off a corpse. I’m underwhelmed.”
Her attention slides to him. “Still alive, middle child. Pity.”
“Get fucked.” He fucking hates that. She used it on him as a child to taunt him. Ethan and I used to find it funny. Now, it’s just fucking sick.
She laughs softly. “You always were the loud one.”
My finger settles tighter on the trigger. “You sent him after Annabelle.”
“No, going after her is why he ended up dead.”
A cold pulse moves through me. “You sick bitch.”
“Language.” She tsks under her breath. “You know, Christa hated swearing. She thought it made a room ugly.”
Rage tears through me so hard I nearly step out and fire. Jack’s hand catches my forearm for half a second.
“Don’t,” he says.
I wrench free at once and level the gun harder. “Touch me again and you lose the hand.”
Maeve’s smile widens by a fraction. “Still touch-averse, darling? I did wonder if that ever improved.”
My skin crawls. “Don’t call me that. You lost that right when you started murdering people for kicks.”
“I didn’t kill Christa,” she says, pursing her lips as if she is annoyed that we think that.
Aidan snorts. “Yeah, we’ve fucking heard that one before. You’re going to have to be a bit more original than that, I’m afraid, old hag.”
“Ouch,” she says, looking genuinely offended.
I let out a laugh that is probably inappropriate, but who gives a fuck? “So if not Jack and not you, who killed Christa?”
“That is something you have to earn,” she says.
“So you have no idea, is what you’re saying.” It’s a taunt. She will bite.
“Briggs,” she says shortly, with a disgusted look down at the corpse on the floor.
“Convenient. Why?”
“Because he was an obsessed psycho.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” Jack spits out.
Maeve’s expression goes flat. “I am many things. Sloppy is not one of them.”
“Yet here you are,” I say. “Standing in a warehouse with a corpse and a story that reeks.”
Her eyes come to me, bright and cold. I know that look. I have known it since I was old enough to understand that her affection always had conditions attached.
“You were always the clever one,” she says softly. “You noticed what the others missed. Even as a little boy.”
“I noticed you were a cunt.”
Aidan gives a short laugh under his breath. Jack says nothing. He is too busy staring at her like he wants his hands around her throat. I’m seconds away from letting him get on with it.
Maeve inclines her head, almost pleased. “And still so defensive. All those walls, Callan. All that effort. Then one pretty little girl comes along, and suddenly you start playing at devotion.”
“I’m not playing at anything. Talk. Why did Briggs kill Christa? Did you ask him to?”
“No. Christa and I were friends. Despite the fact that she was fucking my husband.” Her eyes go to Jack.
“The husband you were framing for all your kills,” Jack spits out. “Do me a favour and quit talking while you’re ahead.”
“Jack has evidence you did it,” I say.
“And I have evidence that he did.”
“And yet it was this arsehole dead on the floor. You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe that.”
Maeve gives a tiny shrug. “Believe what you like. It changes nothing.”
“Wrong,” I say. “It changes whether I shoot you now or after you finish embarrassing yourself.”
Her eyes flash, but before she can say anything, the sounds of sirens cut through the air.
“Shit,” Aidan mutters, and I glance at him. “We need to get out of here.”
When I look back, Maeve has gone, and Jack is moving towards a back door, before I can move, Aidan sways once and drops unconscious at my feet.
“Shit,” I mutter and haul him up, getting a shoulder under him as I half drag him out of the warehouse, the sirens getting ever closer.
By the time we burst through the back door, Jack has disappeared, and there is no sign of Maeve. “Fuck. Fuck.”
I have no choice but to keep moving or be caught in the investigation of the burning camper van. I keep moving straight towards the back of the lot, where a metal fence runs along the boundary. Beyond it is an open field. It’s the only place I can go.