Unlawfully At Large, page 51
part #2 of DCI Tyler Series
“What the…?” Dillon shone the torch onto the door, confirming that it was definitely ajar. His face morphed into a mask of suspicion. It had definitely been locked before. He knew that for sure because he had tried the handle several times, pulling it so hard that it had almost snapped off. Something was wrong here; how could it have possibly sprung open on its own?
“Hello,” Dillon called out, walking cautiously towards the door. “Is anyone inside?”
As before, there was no response.
He pushed it open and shone his torch inside, but the beam was so weak by now that it barely illuminated the companionway steps that led down into the saloon. Almost immediately, the light flickered and then went out.
“Great,” he said, violently shaking the torch. When that didn’t work, he tried slapping it but it was obviously dead. He shoved the torch into his coat pocket, wishing that he’d had the foresight to put new batteries in before leaving the office.
Dillon cautiously poked his head into the blackness within. “HELLO. IT’S THE POLICE,” he bellowed. He was about to step inside and feel for a light switch when a shapeless form detached itself from the blackness around it. Ragged breathing accompanied the movement, and Dillon had been doing the job long enough to recognise the sound of a desperate man preparing to make a dash for it when he heard it. Feeling the hairs on the nape of his neck stand up, he retreated into the centre of the deck, running his eyes over it for something that could be used as a makeshift weapon.
“It’s over, Winston, so you might as well come out,” he yelled, knowing he was wasting his breath but feeling compelled to at least try and reason with the man. He wished the dog handler would hurry up; in his experience, even psychotics like Winston tended to think twice about having a go when a salivating German Shepherd was snapping at them.
“Don’t be a mug,” Dillon told him. “It won’t end well for you if you kick-off, so why don’t you just do the sensible thing for once and come quietly?”
As the first bitingly cold drops of rain started to fall, blown inland from the English Channel, Dillon raised his eyes to the heavens. At that precise moment, a huge figure exploded out of the wheelhouse door in a feral howl of rage and charged at Dillon, its right hand held above its head.
Dillon’s eyes widened as he caught sight of the fearsome blade protruding from the gangster’s hand, and he instinctively took a hurried step backwards to put some distance between them.
There was no time for conscious thought, only instinctive reaction as Dillon somehow managed to duck under the incoming blow and swivel out of harm’s way.
Winston’s forward momentum carried him straight past the detective, who shoved him hard in the back, propelling him into the ship’s wheel at the bow of the boat.
Snagging his arm on one of the protruding spokes, Winston screamed in anger as he wrenched it free and spun to face the detective.
The rain was getting heavier by the second.
“Drop the knife,” Dillon yelled, crouching to meet the next attack.
“Ain’t gonna happen, pig,” Winston snarled, his eyes blazing with madness.
Aware that there wasn’t a lot of room for manoeuvre on the deck, Dillon backed away until he bumped into the wheelhouse door. He knew he could probably slip inside before Winston reached him, but it had never been Dillon’s style to retreat. Besides, if he did that, Winston would just kick it open and follow him in, at which point he would find himself trapped in a confined space and completely at the gangster’s mercy.
Grinning insanely, Winston made a show of twirling the knife in his hand as he advanced, enjoying the look of fear that flitted across the detective’s face. Suddenly, he lunged wildly at Dillon, unleashing a vicious horizontal backhand slash that was intended to separate his head from his shoulders.
Dillon instinctively threw himself sideways, smashing into the wheelhouse doorframe with his left shoulder as the steel blade missed his throat by millimetres.
Winston took a step backwards and then came straight back in, this time trying to stab Dillon through the abdomen. Sucking his stomach in, Dillon pivoted sideways like a matador, but not in time to avoid the incoming blow altogether. The wickedly sharp blade effortlessly sliced through his coat and jumper, and he felt a burning flash of pain as it made contact with his flesh.
The rain was coming down in great force now, making the deck slippery underfoot. As Winston circled him, getting ready to attack again, Dillon swiped his hand across his face, desperately trying to wipe the water away from his eyes
There was a flash of lightning out at sea, and for a moment the hulking form of the gangster was illuminated. “I’m gonna skewer you, pig,” he taunted, “and then I’m going to cut off your ugly fat head and mount it on the ship’s wheel for all to see.”
“Bring it on,” Dillon growled through gritted teeth. He could already feel the hot trickle of blood running down his skin but the battle rage was on him now and he didn’t care.
This time, Winston came at him with a fierce backhand slash, and Dillon sprung backwards moving just out of range. Winston advanced relentlessly, slashing inwards this time, but instead of retreating, as he had for both previous attacks, Dillon stepped straight inside the swinging arm and grabbed hold of it, pulling it tight against his body. The gangster reacted by trying to yank his arm free, and as he did, Dillon drove his right elbow back into his opponent’s face with jarring force. There was a deeply satisfying crunch, and Winston yelped in pain.
Stunned by the blow, Winston’s arm went slack, and Dillon took advantage of this to smash his opponent’s knife hand against the boat’s safety railing. Once, twice, three times, he struck bone against metal, but the gangster stubbornly refused to let go.
Suddenly, Winston reached over Dillon’s head with his left hand and dug his fingers into the detective’s eye sockets, yanking backwards with all his might.
Flexing his enormous neck muscles, Dillon shook his head left and right, like a dog drying itself, but he couldn’t break free of the other man’s grip. Before long, Dillon’s head had been pulled against his adversary’s shoulder, leaving his neck dangerously exposed.
With Dillon now totally off balance, Winston found himself in the ascendancy, and he lost no time in trying to drive the knife upwards into his adversary’s throat, laughing maniacally as it closed in on its target inch by inch.
As the blade drew nearer, Dillon grew increasingly desperate. In a last-ditch effort to break free, he stamped the heel of his foot into Winston’s instep. The gangster screamed, and his grip slackened for long enough for Dillon to take a sideways step and drive his fist downwards until it smashed into Winston’s groin. The fugitive howled in pain and doubled over, dropping the knife.
Dillon spun around and drove his fist into the other man’s jaw, sending Winston staggering backwards into the wheelhouse door. As he rebounded, Dillon stepped forward and grabbed him by the lapels. Using the powerful muscles of his neck to catapult him forward, Dillon drove his large forehead into the centre of Winston’s face, causing the gangster’s nose to explode in a cloud of red mist.
Winston collapsed in a crumpled heap against the side of the boat, but then he spotted the knife laying a few feet away from his hand and made a dive for it.
Dillon’s eyes widened in horror as the gangster’s fingers curled around the handle.
“No fucking way,” he yelled, rushing forward to kick the big man’s head as though he were taking a penalty kick during a football game.
Winston’s head jarred forward so violently that, for a millisecond, Dillon was worried that he might have overdone it and broken the gangster’s neck.
Dillon’s foot was throbbing wildly as he cautiously approached the unmoving form and knelt down to check that he was still alive. Finding a strong pulse in Winston’s neck, Dillon breathed a huge sigh of relief and flopped down beside him, ignoring the freezing rain that immediately soaked through his trousers and the pulsating agony in his right foot.
It was finally over. They had recaptured Claude Winston. The satisfaction was indescribable, or at least it was until he thought about the dead constable and his family, at which point the victory seemed somewhat hollow.
As he was catching his breath, Dillon heard footsteps moving along the jetty towards the boat. Seconds later, a middle-aged PC with thick, rain-smeared glasses clambered aboard, holding his flat cap onto his head to stop it from blowing it away in the wind. Rain splashed off of his shoulders and ran down his Gore-Tex jacket in tiny rivulets. “I’m looking for DI Dillon,” the officer announced, ineffectually wiping at his thick lenses with a gloved finger.
“You’ve found him,” Dillon panted.
“I’m PC Goodman,” the officer told him, watching on in confusion as wearily Dillon stood up and pulled open his coat. Then, raising his jumper, he started examining his exposed torso, eventually letting out a huge sigh of relief.
“Are you okay?” Goodman asked, clearly alarmed at the sight of the blood that had run down one side of the detective’s body from his ribs to his jeans.
“I’m fine,” Dillon told him, covering up. “It’s just a superficial cut.”
Goodman’s eyes narrowed as he finally spotted the motionless form sprawled across the deck. “Don’t tell me I’ve missed out on all the fun?” he said, sounding bitterly disappointed. “I’ve never arrested a murderer before, and I was hoping that me and Rex would be the ones to find him.”
As he spoke, a furry creature with beady eyes and very sharp teeth bounded over the side of The Golden Sunrise. Tail wagging, the German Shepherd went straight over to Winston’s prostrate form, sniffed him intently, and then raised a leg and urinated over him.
“Rex!” PC Goodman chastised the dog. “Sorry about that,” the dog handler said, looking extremely embarrassed as he reined the dog in. “Rex has developed this really bad habit of doing that to suspects of late.”
Dillon grinned and patted the dog’s shaggy head. “That’s alright,” he said. “He can take a shit on him too, for all I care.”
Chapter 39
Garston wasn’t used to strenuous exercise, and his lungs were fit to burst as he ran a race in which the prize was his freedom. Praying that he wouldn’t twist an ankle on the uneven terrain, he blindly sprinted across the grassland, feeling his legs growing heavier with every step.
A wave of relief washed over him when he spotted the massive blue crane and realised that he was almost back at the road. Behind him, his pursuers were still noisily fighting their way through the shrubbery. His face was crisscrossed with deep scratches where numerous sharp thorns had cut into his flesh, but it had been worth the pain to gain the minute or so lead that he had given himself.
As Garston reached the old church van that he and the others had been driven here in, he glanced over his shoulder and saw a thin beam of light burst through the foliage separating the quay from the open grassland that he had just cleared. Almost immediately, it began weaving its way towards him, bouncing up and down in a steady rhythm.
As he emerged into the car park, his breath exploding from him in great gasps, he spotted a vehicle parked on the gravel by the edge of the road.
The car had its sidelights on, and he could just about make out the shape of a man and woman sitting in the front. He assumed they were a couple of young lovebirds who had stopped off there to enjoy a little canoodling.
As he ran towards them, he clumsily pulled the Brocock from his coat pocket, hoping they weren’t locked in the throes of passion, because he didn’t have time for them to fuck about pulling their clothes back on.
He skidded to a halt and snatched open the driver’s door, making the blonde woman sitting behind the wheel jump with fright. Beyond her, the well-built man in the crumpled suit who was sitting in in the passenger seat with a large map unfolded across his lap seemed equally startled. A handheld radio was balanced on the armrest between them, Garston noticed, realising that they were cops, not lovers.
“What the fuck…?” the woman spluttered as Garston thrust the business end of the gun into her face. Her accent was Irish, he noted.
“Get out of the car,” he screamed, grabbing hold of her hair.
“Let her go,” the man shouted bullishly, opening his door to get out.
To dissuade him from doing anything silly, Garston swivelled the gun on him, levelling it straight at his chest. “Not you,” he said fiercely. “You stay exactly where you are until I tell you to move.”
Shaking with rage, the male cop froze, one hand on the door handle, the other down by his left leg.
Keeping the gun pointed at him, Garston glanced nervously over his shoulder, looking back in the direction he’d come from.
The torchlight he’d spotted earlier was already much closer, and now there were two others flanking it.
His stomach knotted.
The moment Garston averted his eyes, Jack Tyler grabbed hold of Susie’s heavy-duty Maglite, which was in the passenger footwell by his left leg, pushed open the door, and rolled out of the car.
Garston reacted by pinning Susie to her seat and taking aim at Tyler’s fleeing figure. He fired twice, shattering the nearside front and rear passenger windows in quick succession, and sending a shower of glass raining down on Jack as he scuttled along the side of the car towards the boot on all fours.
The explosions were incredibly loud, filling the car’s interior with the acrid stench of smoke and cordite.
Almost deafened by the noise of the gun being discharged right next to her face, Susie screamed and tried to grab it from Garston’s hand.
As Tyler reached the rear of the Astra, shaking tiny shards of glass from his hair, he was aware of manhandling a battling Susie away from the car. Peeking over the top of the boot, he saw the enraged fugitive shove her roughly to the ground.
The sight made his blood boil, but there was nothing he could do about it.
To her immense credit, Susie grunted in pain, spat out a mouthful of dust, and immediately tried to scrabble to her feet.
“Stay there,” Garston snarled, pointing the gun at her face, “or I swear I will shoot you.”
Tyler’s head whirled in confusion. What was Garston doing down here in the car park when he was supposed to be up on the quay by the boat?
Since the earlier outbreak of gunfire, both he and Susie had been trying to establish radio contact with the SFOs to get a situation report, but the handset Newman had left them was only picking up static. Either it was broke or it hadn’t been tuned to the correct frequency. They had tried ringing Dillon and Bull, and then White and Evans, in the hope that they would be able to see what was going on from their position on the opposite side of the river, but none of them had answered their phones. It hadn’t boded well, and the detectives had been so engrossed in their efforts to re-establish contact with their colleagues that they hadn’t noticed Garston’s approach.
The fact that he was running around down here in the car park, and not under arrest up at the boat, could only mean that something had gone dreadfully wrong during the armed deployment, but there was no time to dwell on that, not with their lives in danger.
The rain that had been threatening for some time chose this precise moment to start falling, bombarding Tyler with icy drops of water the size of fifty-pence pieces. Almost immediately, there was a flash of lightning out in the channel, and its glow briefly lit up Garston’s sinister figure as it loomed over Susie.
Tyler decided to try and jump Garston while his back was still turned, but before he could act, the gunman turned away from Susie and rushed over to the car. He jumped into the driver’s seat, but then stopped abruptly, and Tyler could hear him muttering, “No, no, no,” under his breath as he fumbled around on the dash, searching for something. The words became increasingly manic, making him sound a little unhinged. A split second later, he sprung out of the car in a state of agitation.
“The keys, where are the fucking keys?”
Susie held up her right hand and wiggled it triumphantly. “Here,” she said, and even from a distance, Tyler could see the smile of satisfaction that had crept onto her face. Despite the terrifying ordeal of being dragged from the car at gunpoint, Susie had somehow managed to remove the key from the ignition.
Visibly shaking with anger, Garston thrust his left hand out towards her. “Give them to me,” he demanded, and there was a dangerous edge to his voice. To emphasise how serious he was, he thumbed back the gun’s hammer to incentivise her.
Susie disobediently shook her head. “Why don’t you come and get them?” she dared him, jiggling the keyring tauntingly.
At first, Tyler couldn’t work out why she was deliberately antagonising him like this, but then it dawned on him that she was doing it to create a distraction that would allow him to get clear of the car.
Her bravery brought a lump to his throat.
Tyler hated the repellent ugliness of death; he walked amongst it every day, took its smell home on his clothing every night, even had it visit him during his dreams. Now, as Susie’s life hung in the balance, he wondered if death had stowed itself away in their car tonight, and was now gloating at him as it waited for Garston to serve up its next victim.
As Garston took a first menacing step towards her, Jack realised that he had to intervene, even if it cost him his own life. He stepped clear of the Astra and raised the heavy torch to use as a club. As he did, something crunched under his foot and Jack stopped dead in his tracks, hardly daring to breathe.
Please don’t let him have noticed, he prayed.
Like a predatory animal, Garston’s head came up as he heard the sound behind him and, with a vicious snarl, he spun around, bringing the revolver up in one fluid movement.
Jack dived behind the Astra just as a bullet thudded into the side of the trunk inches from his head.
“Jesus!” he breathed as the rear light cluster was blown apart.
