Stephen Leather - The Long shot

He had no way of knowing how long Hennessy would be away. Something had clearly spooked Bailey. Perhaps he’d be better trying to break the pipe before she came back. He breathed slowly and deeply, bracing himself for the pain he knew would come. His preparations were interrupted when the door to the basement opened and he heard footsteps on the stairs. He looked up like a schoolboy with a naughty secret, expecting to see Mary Hennessy. He was surprised to see a young woman, skinny with long, dark hair. She stopped halfway down the steps and he heard the click-clack of a round being chambered in a handgun. As she got closer he saw her eyes were narrow, almost Oriental, and her face was thin and pointed. She wasn’t conventionally pretty but she had an animal presence which was both attractive and disturbing. She was wearing tight black leather jeans and a purple T-shirt, cut low at the arms so he could see that she didn’t shave her armpits. In her right hand was a matt black handgun. At first glance it looked like the P228 which he’d taken from the men in New York, but without the silencer. As she got closer he saw that it was a Smith amp; Wesson model 411. It was a lightweight handgun with a four-inch barrel but it was more than capable of blowing a sizeable hole in his body.

“Hello, Mr Cramer,” she said, her voice heavily accented. “We haven’t been introduced. My name’s Dina.” Joker said nothing as she looked him up and down, her gaze concentrating on his groin. She smiled coyly. “You don’t seem very pleased to see me.” She transferred the gun to her left hand, then reached out to touch his stomach with her free hand. She ran her hand down to his groin and stroked his pubic hair, a sly grin on her face. “I bet I could make you glad to see me,” she said. Her fingers tightened around him and she squeezed. Joker brought his knee up, hard, powering it into her groin. All the breath went from her lungs and she pitched forward, her legs buckling. Bolts of pain shot through his wrists and Joker yelped involuntarily. The woman staggered forward, her head banging into his chest, his blood smearing against her face. The gun clattered to the floor at his feet and her hands went to her groin as her breath came back in small, puppy-like, gasps. Joker leant back, taking more of his weight on the chain, and slammed his knee up into her chin, snapping her head back with an audible crack. Her eyes rolled up and she made a wheezing sound, then she slumped to the ground, stunned rather than unconscious. She fell face down and she tried to pull herself away from Joker, her fingernails scrabbling along the concrete floor. Joker looked down. His right ankle was next to her neck and he lifted it and placed his foot against the back of her head, trying to hold her still. She pushed up against him and tried to get to her knees and he thrust down harder. Her breathing was steadier and he knew she was getting her strength back — he wouldn’t be able to hold her down for much longer. He raised his leg and before she could react he drove down with all his might, slamming his heel into her temple so hard that he heard bone and cartilage splinter. He felt something warm and sticky gush over his foot. He lifted his knee and brought his heel down again, smashing into the same place and feeling the skull break. Her feet beat a rapid tattoo on the floor and he knew she was dead, it was just that her body hadn’t realised it yet.

He looked around for the gun and couldn’t see it. He realised she must be lying on it. He levered his foot under her arm and with a grunt he forced her over. As her head lifted from the floor her left eye plopped out of its socket and hung grotesquely on her cheek, gelatinous fluid dripping from it. Her hair was matted with brain tissue and blood and as he flipped her onto her back it spread out in a pool around her head like a scarlet halo. The gun was by his feet, its safety off.

She’d closed the door when she’d come down into the basement and she’d made very little noise as she died, so Joker reckoned no-one upstairs would have heard. He used the tip of his right foot to slide the gun so that it was between his feet, careful not to touch the trigger. He was finding it difficult to focus, and sweat was pouring off his forehead and dripping into his eyes. He shuffled his feet together and manoeuvred the firearm so that its butt was angled up, its barrel away from him. It was going to hurt, he knew, and he tried to prepare himself. He doubted that he’d have the energy for more than one attempt, and he prayed that he wouldn’t pass out. He took a deep breath, then brought both feet off the ground, swinging them up and taking all his weight on his bound wrists. It felt as if his hands were being ripped from his wrists and he screamed before he bit down on his lip. He contracted the aching muscles in his stomach and pushed up with his legs, trying to maintain his momentum. His legs were dead and his abdomen felt as if it was going to collapse. He screamed, partly in agony and partly out of frustration. He tried to blank out the pain and imagined that he was back in basic training, hanging from wall bars and doing repetitions of leg-lifts, building strength and stamina. He grunted and sweated and held on to the image, remembering the old sergeant-major who’d cursed out any of the recruits who couldn’t manage at least fifty of the torturous leg-lifts. He screamed again and realised that his knee was banging against his chin. He opened his eyes and saw his legs were up, the gun almost slipping from between his feet. Two more inches and it would be in his hands. He held his fingers wide like a child trying to catch a ball and brought his knees closer to his face, the pain in his wrists like red-hot manacles searing down to the bone. He felt something warm and hard against his fingers and he grabbed the butt of the pistol — just in time because his legs fell back to the floor, his stomach and leg muscles cramped and strained.

He stood up on tiptoe to relieve the strain on his wrists. His body was bathed in sweat and all his wounds were open and streaming blood. He shook his head, trying to clear his vision. Under normal circumstances he was a crack shot with a pistol, but his present predicament was far from normal. He could barely focus on the chain where it wrapped around the pipe, and the sights on the gun kept splitting apart as his vision blurred. He blinked and screwed up his eyes, bringing the sights into line with the chain. He took a breath, let half of it out, and squeezed the trigger, twice. The shots echoed around the basement, the sound deafening him. The chain was still in one piece. There were two metallic streaks on the pipe, the closest to the chain was some three inches away. It might as well have been a mile. He concentrated and fired again, two shots. The second bullet slammed into the chain, breaking one of the links before ricocheting into a wall, and Joker felt the chain unravel from around the pipe, dropping all his weight onto his legs. They couldn’t take the strain and they buckled underneath him, leaving him sprawled across the woman’s body.

His hands were still chained together, the broken link had been on the section passed around the pipe. He didn’t have time to try to free his wrists because Hennessy and Bailey and whoever else was upstairs would have been certain to have heard the shots, despite the sound-proofing. He could see two light switches, one at the top of the stairs and one close to the bottom. He felt himself begin to lose consciousness and he fought against it, shaking his head in an attempt to clear it. He staggered over to the lower light switch and flicked it off, plunging the basement into darkness.

Cole Howard made notes in his tiny, cramped handwriting, filling in the gaps on the photocopied report sheet. The caller was a housewife who had been buying a set of saucepans at a Glen Burnie shopping mall when she’d seen a woman she thought might be the one in the photograph. She’d bought a large pepper mill and the caller remembered that her hair looked as if it had been dyed blonde. She’d used a credit card because the woman recalled having to wait while it was swiped and approved.