Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘Sorry! Sorry!’ said James, picking himself up.

‘You’re a bloody menace, mister!’ the hippy yelled. James was running again. He’d lost ground. Jack had the lead, but the crowd was getting thicker. For a split second, the devil in him considered drawing his Webley and waving it around.

‘Coming through! One side!’ Jack roared, hoping his accent and gleaming grin would do instead.

His phone rang again.

‘Seriously, Owen, it’ll have to wait.’

‘Don’t hang up! Don’t hang up!’ Owen gabbled.

‘Owen-’

‘We’ve got a thing. A big thing.’

‘Scale of one to ten?’

‘Er…’

Jack hung up. He shoved through a crowd of teenagers outside a video shop. He saw the guy, ten yards away, stumbling over a dog lead. The guy looked back, saw Jack, and hurled himself in through the automatic doors of a mini-mart, banging against them when they opened too slowly.

Jack ran up to the doors, allowed them to reopen, and walked inside. His phone rang. He ignored it.

Bright strip lights. Soulless magnolia lino with trolley scuffs. Aisles of produce shelves and humming freezers. The smell of plastic, soap powder and vegetables. There were a few dozen people inside, most queuing at the tills, some pushing trolleys around the aisles. Everyone had come to a halt and was looking around, even the checkout girls. Muzak played.

Everybody stared at Jack. He walked past the stack of empty wire baskets to the chrome turnstile. It was still spinning.

He slid through it. ‘Looking for a guy,’ Jack called out. ‘He came in here a second ago. I know you all saw him.’

The shoppers and the checkout girls gazed at Jack uncomfortably. They were thinking cops and robbers, they were thinking some dangerous nut with a weapon.

‘Everything’s OK,’ Jack smiled, holding up his hands. ‘There’s no danger. I just need to know where he went.’

He looked at a football mum, who averted her eyes, then at an OAP, who shook her head in a choose someone else disavowal.

‘Come on, help a guy out,’ said Jack. ‘Somebody knows where he is. Anybody?’

He caught the eye of the floor manager, a small, slope-shouldered, scrawny man in late middle age. The floor manager’s supermarket uniform was ill-fitting. He was standing at the price-check post behind the checkouts. He said something inaudible.

‘I’m sorry?’ said Jack, cupping a hand to his ear.

The manager coughed, and slowly picked up the stand mic on the price-check post. He thumbed the ‘on’ button and cleared his throat, which caused a brief burp of amplified feedback.

‘Uh,’ the floor manager’s voice came over the speakers, interrupting the Muzak. ‘Aisle five. Frozen goods.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jack, with an honest nod.

‘Uh, happy to be of service,’ the floor manager replied over the speakers. He took his thumb off the button and the Muzak resumed.

Jack hurried along the aisle-ends, and then darted up aisle four, watching everywhere for movement. The few shoppers he passed cowered back behind their trolleys or simply stared at him in fascination.

‘Hi,’ he whispered to several of them.

The aisles had mid-length breaks. Jack sidled up to the aisle four break, his back against the shelves (cleaning fluids, bleach, disinfectant), and peered around the corner at the aisle five displays.

No one in sight.

He stepped around into aisle five, feeling the cold aura of the chest freezers. There was no one in the aisle except a huge black woman standing beside her trolley as if she’d been told to make like a statue. Her eyes were wide.

No sign of the guy. Jack hadn’t expected to see him. Everyone in the shop had heard the floor manager rat out his position over the Tannoy.

Jack took a step forwards and leant on the nearest freezer compartment (pizzas, stone-ground, deep pan and thin-n-crispy, budget, double-topping) and bent down to peer under the eye-level ice-boxes at the bank of freezers that backed on to the aisle five units to form aisle six. Nothing.

He stood up again. He looked at the big black woman, and raised his eyebrows quizzically.

Remaining otherwise immobile, her eyes still wide, the big black woman extended her index finger and jabbed it repeatedly in the direction of aisle six.

She winked.

Jack beamed and mouthed a ‘thank you’.

As quietly as he could, Jack climbed into the freezer full of pizzas. He gently rolled himself under the eye-level display and over into the adjacent aisle six freezer (chill-fresh prawns, seafood medley, haddock portions, individual boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce, fish fingers). Frosty packaging crackled softly under his weight. The big black woman’s eyes grew even wider.

Flat on his back in the freezer compartment, Jack braced, counted silently to three, and lurched upright.

The man in the suit was crouching down below the freezer’s fascia. He started up at Jack’s surprise appearance.

‘Hi there,’ said Jack.

Dean Simms reached into his briefcase.

Jack pounced on him.

They went down together in a bundle of limbs. Dean’s briefcase fell out of his grasp and slapped onto the lino. Magazine inserts and a rather nice pen spilled out of it, along with a small, greasy beige lump that looked like a not-so-vital internal organ, the sort of thing that was hard to recognise in a quiz once you’d discounted liver, kidneys and spleen.

It flopped onto the hard floor and pulsed gently.

Struggling under Jack’s weight, Dean yelled something. Securing Dean’s arms, Jack gave him a slap that cowed him. Jack hoisted him up by the tie and leant him against the nearest freezer (summer puddings, freezer-to-oven apple pies, sorbets).

‘OK, you’re done,’ Jack told him. ‘Behave yourself.’ He glanced down at the pulsing lump.

‘Eeuww,’ he said. ‘You cough that up?’

Dean said nothing. His eyes blazed.

‘Listen to me,’ Jack began, ‘here’s what’s going to happen. We-’

His phone began to ring.

Jack looked away for a second. All his life, Dean had listened to his old man’s advice, keen to learn from him. Retail wasn’t the only thing his dad had known about. Dean’s old man had been an amateur welter-weight. Tough old bird, his dad.

Dean threw the jab, just the way his old man had taught him.

Distracted by his phone, Jack caught the fist square on the jaw. He reeled away, flailing, and hit the wall-freezers opposite (Ben and Jerry’s, soft scoop vanilla, Cornish dairy cream, triple fudge sundaes). The glass door cracked with his impact.

Jack tried to right himself, his hand to his mouth. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed.

Dean had picked up the beige lump. He aimed it at Jack and squeezed it.

Jack blinked. He took a step back. He got a sudden, strong smell of bourbon and willow.

‘I…’ he said. He glanced around. He leant back against the cracked glass door and shook his head.

Dean started running, the lump in his hands. He headed for the checkout. Shoppers screamed as they saw him coming. Dean pushed through them, trying to work his way out via one of the narrow checkout lanes. A potbellied man was blocking his exit with a trolley heavy with crates of beer. A bulk purchase.

‘Out of my way!’ Dean yelled. He halted.

James was standing on the far side of the checkout, facing him. James said nothing. He stared at Dean, right in the eyes. The meaning was clear.

Dean roared and drove the crate-laden trolley at James. With the bulk purchases on board, the thing weighed fifty kilos.

Dean rammed it into James’s legs.

‘Bastard!’ James yelped. He grabbed the wire cage of the ramming trolley, and threw it sideways. It flew the entire length of the shop front and crashed down on its side near the exit, castors spinning.