Matt Hilton: Blood and Ashes

Seeing the leader of the duo dispatched so decisively should have given the tall one pause. But he was even crazier than he looked. Unfazed by the sudden violence he merely let out a laugh and launched himself at me. ‘It looks like it’s come to that!’

He appeared ungainly and loose-limbed: in fact he was anything but. He threw a series of punches, and I was hard put to avoid them all. One cracked against my cheek, another in my chest. As I stepped away from the clawing fingers that tried to rake my eyes, I missed the man’s leg coming up and kicking at my groin. Only the angles saved me from a crippling blow, but it was still agony when the man’s boot landed square on the point where I’d been knifed.

Chewing down on the pain, I pivoted and avoided the next kick. I dipped the keys into a pocket, then snaked my hand under the tail of my jacket to grab my gun.

Again the tall man surprised me by pivoting the other way and kicking out with his heel with a classic reverse roundhouse kick from tae kwon do. His foot slammed into my gut and pushed me back against the Audi.

I forgot about the gun. The crazy man was already coming at me, fingers tightened to spear into my exposed throat.

‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’

He should have concentrated on fighting instead of crowing.

Sweeping the attacking hand aside, I drove my opposite elbow directly into his face. There was a wet sound from where the elbow hit and he staggered backwards, spitting out loose teeth. The sour smell washed over me again but this time it held a distinctly coppery tang.

Following him, I drove a kick into his groin. More fragments of rotting teeth were spat on the floor as the man bent over at the waist. I avoided the foul stuff. It wasn’t easy while looping an arm over the man’s skull and under his throat so that the blade of my forearm was jammed tight against his windpipe. Catching hold of my wrist with my opposite hand, I reared back, arching my spine. All the pressure was centred on the man’s trachea, and I felt it collapse.

I kept the pressure on.

At first the man tried to claw at my arms. But when he couldn’t get any oxygen into his lungs instinct took over and all he did then was scrabble at the ground with his feet and flap his elbows. Now he really was like a rooster.

It took him the best part of a minute to die.

Finally, I released him and he flopped down face first.

Looking down on him, I guess my gaze would be best described as dispassionate.

Cock-a-fucking-doodle-to-you, I thought.

The stocky man hadn’t recovered from the stab to his carotid. In fact, judging by the widening pool of blood reflecting the disc of the moon, he never would.

Violence still surged through my veins. The same cold rush I’d experienced earlier in Don Griffiths’ basement when I’d recognised that — however I looked at this — more people were going to die. Releasing a ragged breath, I attempted to calm the rage within me.

Then it was as if sense kicked in.

I’d just killed two men in the middle of a car park without concern for who might have witnessed the brutality. Sloppy work, Hunter, I admonished myself. I checked for anyone watching.

Across the way the cat was back.

It sat looking at me as though nonplussed by the violence. This time the cat blinked first. Then it lifted a back leg and began licking. Maybe that was as near to a nod of approval as I could expect.

The Seven-Eleven was three hours from opening, but it didn’t mean that no one would happen along much sooner than that. A delivery truck loaded with fresh produce and other perishables could arrive prior to store hours and staff would likely be on hand to unload it. It wouldn’t be a good idea to be near the place by then.

But I couldn’t simply drive away and leave the two men lying out there for anyone to find. Someone had sent them and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine they’d checked in with this person while waiting for my return. When they were found dead, the same person would suspect who was responsible for killing them. The men’s mission had been to ensure that I wouldn’t return to town: well, the police would do the job for them by locking me up. If the men were only missing, at least I could buy a little time before the cops came knocking.

I’d lied about the Audi being a rental: it was a verbal tactic to disarm them. I didn’t want to chance moving the bodies in it because however careful I was there’d still be forensic traces that would tie me to their deaths. I’d grown fond of the import — a reminder of the car I’d driven back home in the UK — and wasn’t ready to give it up just yet.

Leaning down, I checked the tall man’s pockets for keys. There was nothing, apart from half of a Hershey Bar, a torn wrapper folded round it to preserve it for later. Evidently the guy had had a sweet tooth; maybe that was why they were so rotten.

Next I checked the stocky man, and this time was rewarded by a bunch of keys to the SUV. I left the gun tucked in the man’s belt. Neither of them had a mobile phone, so maybe time was still on my side.

Watched by the cat, I loaded both men into the rear compartment of their vehicle and then used a blanket from the back seat to cover them. I checked around, paying attention to the Seven-Eleven, but it seemed as if surveillance cameras weren’t deemed necessary out here in the sticks. Lastly, I brought a couple of handfuls of dirt from the weed-strewn boundary next to the forest, and scattered them over the pool of blood that had leaked from the stocky man’s neck. It wouldn’t fool a determined investigator, but that depended upon if anyone ever looked here and recognised it as a crime scene.

A single road led in and out of town, two lanes of blacktop that stretched arrow-straight back through the passes of the Allegheny Mountains. On the drive in, I’d noticed that the trails leading off from it had been disused in some years. Logging was a thing of the past here, and though the town got its share of tourists in the summer months, it wasn’t on the hiking trail map. The chances of anyone wandering up any of them in winter were probably negligible.

A mile out of town, I pulled into a rutted track that led up into the deep forest. It would have been preferable to take the corpses even further out in the wilderness but I still had to return to the Audi before the early shift arrived at the store. It was a given that I wouldn’t be bringing the SUV back.

Finding an offshoot from the trail, I turned down it, the branches of spruce and fir trees scraping on the paintwork. Two or three hundred yards in, I abandoned the vehicle and the dead men inside. With luck it would be weeks before they were discovered.

The trek back to town should have been a chore, but I welcomed the exercise. I jogged, and within minutes my blood was flowing freely and the ungainly limp — not to mention the residual pain from the kick I’d taken — were left somewhere in my wake. But I carried a new burden all the way.

I’d killed both those men with impunity.

I argued that given the opportunity they would have killed me, that my actions were pure self-defence. But now, with the heat of battle expunged, I couldn’t help feeling that perhaps I’d overstepped the line that I’d always drawn in the sand before now. The men had been dangerous enough, particularly the crazy one who seemed to know a thing or two about unarmed combat, but on reflection they were mugs. Nobody but a rank amateur shows their gun like that if he intends to use it. The mad one hadn’t even come with a gun. I got the nasty sense that the stocky man had been telling the truth. That they were there only to talk; to dissuade me from any further involvement and see me safely out of the way.