Nick Oldham - Dead Heat

He remained motionless, alert, did not move another muscle.

Only then did he realize just how dry his mouth had become and how remorselessly his heart was ramming against his rib cage. His eyes were sharp and his brain was now digesting the pros and cons of the stupidity of his current position.

Supposing there was somebody down there? Supposing it was the person who had set fire to the stables and maimed a horse? Would that person be a pleasant companion for a morning stroll back into the arms of the real police? What would happen if that person did not want to cooperate and was twice as big, wide and nasty as Henry? Henry had been stripped of his powers and could not legally do half of the things he had been doing without a second thought for the past twenty-odd years. Whoever it was down there would be well likely to be a mad, raving lunatic with instability problems of epic proportions. So what would Henry do if he came face to face with this deranged individual?

He could not radio for help. The personal radio, the bane of many a cop’s life, the piece of equipment that Henry had only ever used when it suited him, was no longer in his tool kit. And now he missed it like mad. He felt naked and vulnerable.

Nor did he have any handcuffs.

Nor an extending baton.

Nor CS spray.

He realized with a lead-like thump that he was very much on his own out here. The resources of law and order were no longer at his beck and call.

Though he did have his mobile phone.

Staring down the slope in front of him, he hoped that what he had seen was a sheep doing a bit of lurking, as opposed to an arsonist and horse-molester. He could handle a sheep, however violent it became.

But it was not a sheep.

It was someone who was very good at not being seen. It was a man dressed in army-type combat camouflage clothing, edging on his stomach along the line of the field. Henry’s mouth opened with a pop as he registered the fact that this man was more than good. He was almost invisible and it took a lot of blinking and re-focusing on Henry’s part to keep him in sight.

Henry watched, fascinated. He found it tempting to stand up and begin waving his arms about to attract someone’s attention down at the stables, but at such a distance he guessed it would be a fairly useless gesture — and it would warn the man they were on to him.

The figure crawled into a cluster of trees.

Henry’s eyes kept with him.

Maybe the guy was innocent. He could just be a perv or maybe a white supremacist out on manoeuvres. . one and the same, Henry thought.

However, innocent, guilty or just plain perverted, Henry knew the guy had to be collared and spoken to.

Henry watched as the man lay out on his stomach, twisted round and settled in the trees.

Henry was puzzled. He glanced towards the Wickson house. Three people, including Jane Roscoe, were still at the front of the house. He looked back at the prostrate figure and an ice-cold sensation shot through Henry’s lower abdomen. There was something familiar about the position the man had adopted.

Henry began to move.

Fast.

After setting fire to the stables, Verner had retreated to his position on the hillside to watch the fun and games. They were gratifyingly splendid. The stable block lit up the night sky, flames rising high with the occasional crack as something inside exploded sending showers of sparks up into the atmosphere.

All extremely satisfying.

Watching the lights come on in the house. People dashing about like headless chickens. Panic setting in. The more fortunate horses being rescued from loose boxes and being turned out into an adjoining field. Then, almost twenty-five minutes later, the arrival of the fire brigade and the cops, by which time the tack room and some stables had been destroyed.

Verner did not move from his position for hours whilst he watched all the activity, using his night sights and then, as the night ebbed, his binoculars.

Other cops arrived. An ambulance turned up.

All this from just a little match and a splash of petrol.

He found himself giggling quite a lot.

Then the helicopter belonging to John Lloyd Wickson landed on the pad.

Now Verner was going to have more fun than ever. He came out of his hiding place and crawled along to another position where he had set up the rifle. He squirmed into the prostrate firing position and sighted down the barrel of the gun, picking out the figure of Wickson, who was standing at the front of his house, together with two other people. Wickson started to strut towards the stables.

He was an easy target.

Henry pushed himself over the brow of the hill, whilst at the same time using his mobile phone and trying to tab to Jane Roscoe’s number which he still had stored in his phone. He hoped her number had not changed and even as he rose, a flash of thought went through his mind: Why did I keep her number?

He found it, pressed the call button and stumbled down the hill to where the man was lying in what Henry had recognized as the prone firing position.

He held the phone to his ear. He was about a hundred metres from the man as the phone rang out.

Jane Roscoe was not the sort of person to make snap judgements about people, but in the case of John Lloyd Wickson, she made an exception.

He was a dislikeable, arrogant shit-head, even if he was rich.

He immediately started by throwing his weight around, taking little notice of what she had to say and genuinely seemed surprised that, in this day and age, a woman could be a detective inspector.

She became increasingly angry with him as he flounced around his home, barking orders at people, shouting at his wife and snarling at his daughter. He had no hint of compassion about him, seemed purely self-centred.

Jane was very close to grabbing him and slapping his vermin-like features.

Eventually he relented somewhat and after a flurry of tirades at his family, he turned to Jane and said, ‘I’m going down to look at the stables now — talk to me on the way.’

Then he was gone, hurrying through the house accompanied by the man who had arrived with him in the helicopter. Jane learned this was Wickson’s head of security, a man she vaguely and uncomfortably recognized, but could not quite place. He was called Jake Coulton.

The three of them left the house and Wickson paused for a few moments at the front door to speak in hushed tones to Coulton, then set off for the stables. Jane scurried behind, trying to keep to the pace. As they got on to the track to the stables, her phone went.

‘It’s me, Henry,’ came the breathless voice.

Instinctively Jane looked across to the distant hillside where she saw a tiny figure running down the hill.

‘What is it?’ she asked impatiently.

‘Guy. . up here. . with a gun. .’ Henry panted.

And with that, the ping of the first bullet zipped by and dust flew up on the track just feet ahead of Wickson, followed a millisecond later by the crack of the shot.

‘Get the fuck down!’ Jane screamed. She dived for Wickson who had stopped in his tracks, incomprehension on his face. His security man had walked on, unaware that anything had happened. Jane rugby-tackled Wickson, smashed him to the ground and rolled him to the edge of the track, into the deep, wet ditch parallel to it. ‘Somebody’s shooting at you.’

The message got through to the security guy as another bullet lifted the track surface by his feet.

Henry had no way of being sure that his message had got through to Jane. As his run down the slope gathered momentum, his heels jarring, he yelled into his phone hoping that Roscoe understood what he was trying to say.

Whilst speaking, he heard the first shot crack in the morning air, like Indiana Jones’s whip hitting its target.