Nick Oldham - A Time For Justice

Henry had just taken a sip of his second pint of lager. It tasted good, as had the previous one. He was looking forward to the next ones. He felt good and was going to enjoy the celebration first and worry about getting back to the flat thirty miles away in Blackpool second. He glanced around the pub. It was small and narrow with a bar in the centre of the room. The atmosphere reminded Henry of pubs he’d visited in London. Most congenial.

He saw the uniformed Constable appear at the front door, helmet on, a worried expression across his face. A roar of disapproval went up from the assembled detectives who’d all begun to front-load Boddington’s Bitter as though it was going out of fashion. The officer ignored them. His eyes roved the room and found their target. He walked quickly across to FB.

Once more Henry had that bad feeling in his guts. He placed his beer down on the bar and watched as the Constable and FB drew to one side, out of the hubbub. The Constable began to talk earnestly to FB, whose face dropped in stages: happy and carefree, all the way, step by painful step, to serious, concerned, deeply unhappy, shocked.

He patted the Constable reassuringly on the shoulder for the man seemed deeply upset by the information he’d imparted. FB then gave him some instructions, after which he left hurriedly.

FB looked across the room, his face pale and drawn. His eyes met Henry’s, and he beckoned him over.

‘ What is it, boss?’

‘ Bad, very fucking bad,’ said FB gravely. ‘Hinksman’s out. Free.’

‘ What do you mean?’

‘ He’s been sprung. The escort got hit at Galgate and the team that did it slaughtered nearly all the bobbies.’ FB was finding it difficult to breathe. ‘All but three are dead. That’s what the PC told me.’

Henry made a quick calculation. ‘Fucking hell,’ he uttered.

‘ I’m going to the scene now — there’s a car en route to pick me up. You come too, Henry.’

Henry nodded.

FB turned his attention to the detectives squashed around the bar.

He cleared his throat, called for quiet, and with tears in his eyes, made an announcement.

Laura was asleep now. Kovaks was relieved. What had been planned as a two-minute visit had taken him half an hour. And he had a partner waiting out in the car.

Kovaks closed the motel-room door and locked it with his key. Laura would be out of the game for hours now. He would re-visit her at the end of his shift.

Tommo was sitting in the Bucar, chain-smoking, eating a hamburger and sipping a coffee, all at the same time, whilst listening to a cassette which blared country music out deafeningly.

Kovaks slid in beside him. ‘You’re a slob,’ he observed.

Tommo screwed up his hamburger wrapper and tossed it out of the window. ‘Thought you said you’d only be a coupla minutes?’

‘ Sorry,’ said Kovaks, offering no explanation.

‘ So was she worth it?’

Kovaks stiffened. ‘Tommo, just shut the fuck up and drive. As I told you, it’s my sister. She’s gotta few domestic problems and she’s holed up there to get her head together.’

‘ My ass,’ snorted Tommo with a belch. He reversed the car out of its parking space and hit the road. ‘There was a radio call for ya, by the way.’

‘ What did it say?’

‘ Dunno. I said you’d radio in when you’d finished fucking your little sister. I said you’d be about two minutes.’ He cracked up with laughter.

‘ Don’t push it, Tommo,’ warned Kovaks. He reached for the cassette player and switched off Dwight Yoakam. Then he called in.

The radio operator was a sexy-voiced Texan lady.

‘ Yeah, Joe, urgent call came in for ya, ‘bout ten minutes ago. Caller said he’d call ‘gain exactly on ten-thirty.’

‘ Who was it?’

‘ Don’t rightly know. Refused all details — but he sounded scared. Thought I recognised the voice, but can’t place it.’

‘ Received,’ said Kovaks. ‘I’m on my way in.’

‘ You dickin’ that piece of ass too?’ Tommo asked with a leer. Kovaks gritted his teeth and decided to ask for another partner until Karl Donaldson came back from England.

‘ Why the hell did they go via Galgate anyway?’ Henry asked.

FB, pale, shaken, said, ‘It was the Chief’s suggestion. We had a meeting about it yesterday and we worked out the best route with the driver of the lead car.’

‘ But surely it would have made more sense to get on the motorway north of Lancaster? It’s more direct. No winding, narrow roads. No towns to negotiate…’

‘ The Chief’s argument was that if there was going to be any sort of attempt, they’d expect us to go that way. Going via Galgate was the less likely option, therefore safer.’

‘ It was a fucking stupid decision,’ said Henry.

They were both sitting in the back of a traffic car which was speeding them to the scene.

‘ Not only that,’ persisted Henry, ‘whoever sprung the bastard was expecting the escort to go through Galgate. They were all set up and ready. They weren’t just hanging about on the off-chance. Something’s not right here.’

‘ I know,’ said FB with a heavy sigh.

‘ Who actually knew that the escort would be taking that route?’

‘ Me, ACC Warner — Jack Crosby’s replacement, the driver of the lead car, and the Chief Constable. We were the only ones at the meeting yesterday. The idea was that everyone else involved — the rest of the officers on the escort and the ones manning points — would get about fifteen minutes’ notice just before the escort set off from prison.’

‘ Quarter of an hour,’ mused Henry. ‘Not long enough to put that sort of ambush operation into effect. Which means someone blabbed, someone inside the police…’

He looked at FB who had aged about ten years in the last ten minutes.

‘ I’m going to think out loud now,’ said Henry, ‘and I’m going to say something pretty uncomfortable. It’s unlikely that the driver of the lead car talked to anyone because he’s dead now, so it’s either you, the ACC or the Chief.’

The traffic car reached Galgate.

FB and Henry did not immediately get out. They sat in silence for a few moments.

Eventually FB said, ‘Well, I know one thing for sure.’ He reached for the door-handle.

‘ What’s that?’

‘ It wasn’t me.’

Kovaks was sitting at his desk poring over some surveillance reports on Corelli. There was nothing particularly interesting in them, nothing he didn’t already know about the man, but he looked through them anyway, just in case there was something important he’d missed. It annoyed him that Corelli wasn’t a man of regular habits. He needed to know where and when Corelli was going to be in a specific place and for how long, otherwise how could he plan his execution?

Corelli had many favourite haunts, but he visited none of them at a regular time. He was a butterfly. Flitting here, landing there, then taking off again. This was one of the reasons why the FBI had never caught and prosecuted him successfully.

Obviously he spent a great deal of time at his homes and places of business, but these were times when his protection teams were at their strongest and no one could get through the ring uninvited. For Kovaks’ purpose, he needed to be away from these places, out in public.

Kovaks drew up a list of the places in Miami where Corelli ate and the amount of time he spent at each one. Then he averaged the times out.

In most places he spent less than an hour. But in two restaurants he had a tendency to linger for about three hours at lunchtimes. The problem was that he hardly ever visited them. He’d been to both four times in the last two years.

It did seem, though, that whenever he did, he took his time.