Redlaw - 01 (26 page)

Khalid sneered and drew back a fist. “The Commodore said ‘in one piece.’ But I might risk disappointing her.”

The blow never landed, as Redlaw took advantage of Khalid’s little moment of preening to ram his knee up between the Sergeant’s legs. Khalid’s cheeks and eyeballs bulged and he sagged to the floor, letting out a sound like a steam whistle. Redlaw snatched up his Cindermaker and staggered out into the hallway.

Qureshi knelt by Khalid. “Sir, are you all right?”

“Get him!” Khalid said, red-faced, spewing spittle. “Blow the damn
kafir
away if you have to!”

Qureshi took a few steps into the hallway, where he found Redlaw confronting the third SHADE officer, Heffernan. Father Dixon was slumped at Heffernan’s feet, looking dazed and ashen. Blood trickled from a cut to his forehead.

“Move,” Redlaw said. “That’s an order.”

Heffernan was a former doorman who had found God during an unusually violent bar brawl, when a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared before him and prevented him from walloping a troublemaker who was brandishing a broken bottle at him. He now bore the facial scars from that encounter, along with an unyielding sense of mission. Very little intimidated him.

“I don’t take orders from ex-shadies,” he said. “You’re not getting past me.”

“I’ll shoot.”

“He won’t,” said Qureshi.

Redlaw didn’t glance round. “You’ve hurt Father Dixon. Right now I’m in the mood to put a bullet in all three of you.”

“I’m okay, John,” Father Dixon said wanly. “It’s nothing, just a bump on the noggin. Don’t be shooting anyone on my account.”

“This is unacceptable,” said Redlaw to Heffernan and Qureshi. “You’re SHADE, not thugs.”

“Put the gun down,” said Heffernan. “You’re not leaving this place unless it’s with us.”

“I beg to differ.”

Redlaw squeezed the trigger, and a hole appeared in the front door just inches from Heffernan’s head. Heffernan recoiled, clutching his cheek, which had caught the splinters. Redlaw charged him, driving his left shoulder into Heffernan’s meaty midriff, clubbing the shady’s skull with the butt of his Cindermaker. Heffernan yowled and groped blindly, angrily, for his attacker. Redlaw twisted under the man’s flailing paw, and grabbed the door handle. He was just seconds from making good his escape.

He heard a bellow behind him. Khalid came furiously out of the lounge, his Cindermaker out and pointed straight at Redlaw. In his maddened, streaming eyes there was clear, murderous intent. A bullet in his gun had Redlaw’s name on it.

“No!”

This from Father Dixon, who lurched to his feet.

Khalid fired.

Father Dixon, throwing himself in front of Redlaw, took the round in his upper abdomen. He was hurled back against his friend, and both men struck the door.

“No!”

This from Redlaw, who clutched Father Dixon. All at once, any thought of getting away had left him. He took Father Dixon’s weight, lowering him gently down onto the doormat. The vicar’s body was going into spasm. Blood spilled down his shirtfront from a teacup-sized cavity in his ribs.

The three SHADE officers were too aghast to move. All stared at the wounded man, none more wide-eyed or gape-mouthed than Sergeant Khalid.

Father Dixon turned his head to Redlaw. He tried to speak.

“You’ve... you’ve got to...”

“Save it,” said Redlaw. “We’re getting you an ambulance. Ambulance!” he shouted at the shadies. “Somebody bloody call one!”

Qureshi delved into his pocket for his phone.

“It’s... I hope to God I’ve been right all this time,” said Father Dixon. “Otherwise... it’d really not be funny.”

“Let’s not have any of that. You’re going to be okay. I don’t think it’s too bad.”

But the wound was making a sucking sound, and Father Dixon’s breath was rattling wetly at the back of his throat.

“God’s work, John,” he choked out, spitting blood. “Never forget... you’re doing...”

He shuddered. His head lolled. He went limp.

St Erasmus’s parish no longer had its pastor.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The ambulance arrived, futilely. As paramedics rushed up the vicarage’s front path, Redlaw was frogmarched the other way at gunpoint. Heffernan, jowl quilled with splinters, shoved him into the back seat of a patrol car and slid in beside him. Sergeant Khalid tossed Redlaw’s Cindermaker and weapons vest onto the passenger seat and took the wheel. Qureshi had been assigned to stay behind to handle the paramedics and, when they came, the police.

“Shouldn’t have resisted,” Khalid said as he pulled out into the road. His groin was still tender. “It was your fault. You brought this on yourself.”

Redlaw said nothing, just stared fixedly at his knees.

“If you’d only come quietly, none of it would have happened. Things wouldn’t have got so out of hand.”

Redlaw continued to stare. If he was listening, if he could even hear Khalid, he gave no sign.

“If it wasn’t for you, he’d still be alive.”

Khalid checked in the rearview mirror. Redlaw had raised his head. Their eyes met, and the sheer venom that radiated from Redlaw’s glowering gaze made something inside Khalid shrivel, like wax in flame. He focused his attention back on the road, knowing that he was hated by the man in the back seat as he had never been hated by anyone.

“
Allahu akbar
,” he consoled himself under his breath. Everything was God’s will. Even accidental deaths.

The holding cells were on the third floor of SHADE HQ. Khalid and Heffernan took Redlaw straight up there from the sub-basement garage. Both were handling him brusquely, as though he were still a potential threat and flight risk, but the fight had gone out of him. Father Dixon’s death had left him hollow and raw.

He went meekly, numbly into the cell. The officer in charge of incarceration, Noakes, closed the door on him and shot home the locking bar.

“It’s a crying shame,” Noakes said with a wistful shake of the head. “I mean, Stokers, vampire wannabes, druggies who think they’ve been bitten, the odd Sunless, yes, I’ll happily bang them up for the night... But
Redlaw
?”

“An object lesson to us all,” said Khalid. “Look after these.” He handed Noakes Redlaw’s gun and vest, then turned to Heffernan. “You should go and have your face seen to.”

Heffernan fingered the splinters gingerly. “It’s not so bad. Not compared to this.” He traced the bottle scar that ran in a jagged line down the right side of his face. “I’m just as pretty as I ever was.”

“Still, don’t want it to go septic, do you?”

“True.”

Heffernan trotted off to the minor injuries unit on the second floor. Khalid headed in the opposite direction, up to the Commodore’s office on the eighth. Concerned though he was for Heffernan’s welfare, he had sent him downstairs mainly so that he could bring Macarthur news of Redlaw’s capture on his own. That way the credit would not have to be shared, and he could come clean about the shooting of the vicar. If he gave Macarthur his side of the story first, before she heard about it from anyone else, she would be more understanding and, he hoped, more lenient.

There was, after all, a captaincy going begging in the north-east quadrant. Khalid felt he was long overdue for promotion, and bringing in Redlaw ought to have clinched it for him. Father Dixon notwithstanding, the position might still be his, assuming he played his cards right.

Macarthur was on the phone when Khalid knocked and entered. She looked harassed and irritable. “I have nothing to tell you right now,” she said to whoever was on the other end of the line. “Events are in motion. Perhaps by the end of the night, when the first phase of the transfer operation is complete, then I’ll be in a position to make a statement. Until then, stop bothering me. Goodbye.”

Clunk
went the receiver. She looked up at Khalid. “Bloody journos. Bet you anything you like there’ll be another one ringing in a moment or so. Press time’s looming and everybody wants a comment. Anyway, I’m guessing by the glint in your eye that you did it. Mission accomplished.”

“He’s down in the cells,” Khalid said with a nod.

“That’s a relief. Well done. Were there any problems?”

“There was... collateral damage, I’m sorry to say.”

“He’s hurt?”

“Not Redlaw. The priest, Dixon.”

“Oh, no. How badly?”

Khalid did not reply, and that told her how badly.

“What happened?”

He explained: Redlaw resisting arrest, attempting to flee, causing grievous bodily harm to both Khalid and Heffernan, not to mention discharging his firearm twice with intent to wound, possibly to kill.

“When I fired, it was meant as a warning shot, to bring him to heel, but I did feel that my life was in danger, so it was more or less self-defence. Father Dixon just got in the way. He moved unpredictably. A split second earlier, a split second later, all would have been fine. The situation was fluid, chaotic. I deeply regret the loss of life. I can hardly express how saddened I am. I know Father Dixon and you were on friendly terms. I’m sorry, marm, truly I am.”

It galled Khalid to have to abase himself before this... this
woman
. In a fair and just world, a world that lived according to the tenets of the One True Faith, the likes of Macarthur would not hold positions of public responsibility. She would cover herself appropriately, as Khalid’s wife Zaina did, and remain out of sight, in keeping with the Prophet’s decrees. She would not cut her hair so short, either. She would not unsex herself like that and deny the feminine attributes God had given her—such as they were, for Gail Macarthur was not one of life’s great beauties.

“I feel Redlaw must bear some of the burden of blame,” he went on, biting back his resentment. “If not most of it. Had he not been there, hiding behind the priest’s skirts...”

The phone rang shrilly. Macarthur picked up the receiver and dunked it straight back down in its cradle.

“Well,” she said after a lengthy, ruminative silence. “What’s done is done. I’ll expect a full report, of course, corroborated by whoever was there with you. As for Redlaw, I’m minded to leave him to stew in his own juices for a while. On the other hand, any excuse to get away from this damn phone...”

A sharp rap on the door was followed by Noakes calling out, “Occupant of cell two, stand facing the opposite wall, hands on head, fingers linked.”

Redlaw did as instructed. The camera embedded in a corner of the ceiling was watching him, relaying an image to a small screen inset next to the door.

In came Commodore Macarthur.

“Do you need me in there with you, marm?” Noakes enquired.

“No,” she replied. “I’m perfectly safe with this man, I’m sure of it.”

“Very well. I’ll be right outside.”

The door clanged shut.

“Turn round, John.”

Redlaw turned.

Macarthur slapped him across the cheek, hard enough to leave a crimson imprint of her hand.

“That’s for getting Graham Dixon involved in your nonsense,” she said.

She slapped him again, harder.

“That’s for getting him killed.”

And a third time, snapping Redlaw’s head sideways.

“And that’s for the crap you’ve pulled on me this past couple of days.”

Redlaw touched his smarting cheek.

“You know you deserved those,” Macarthur said. “That’s why you’re not even thinking of hitting me back.”

She was right. It hadn’t once crossed Redlaw’s mind to retaliate.

“You stupid, stupid bastard,” she went on. “Look at you. Look where you’ve ended up. Standing there without your weaponry, you know what you look like? Like a useless, pointless old man. Not a SHADE officer, just a washed-up has-been. Someone who had it all and threw it all away.”

Redlaw winced.

“Now, sit down.”

Redlaw lowered himself onto the cell’s thinly padded cot. Macarthur remained standing.

“So here it is. A one-time-only deal. I’ve got a million demands on my attention this evening. The army’s going into seven separate SRAs, accompanied by every shady I can muster, and they’re rounding up a total of one thousand Sunless, putting them on trucks and driving them out to Solarville One. I can spare you five minutes of my time, but that’s all you’re going to get. This is your one and only chance to explain yourself before the cops come and drag you off to Paddington Green nick on charges of taking a vehicle without the owner’s consent, reckless endangerment, affray, and anything else I can think of. You’d better have a reason for what you’ve been up to and it had better be phenomenally good.”

“Will it change anything, however good it is?” said Redlaw. “Will it get me my job back?”

“Almost certainly not.”

“Then why should I bother?”

“Because I think you need to tell me. You need to get it all off your chest.”

“Confession’s good for the soul?”

“Clock’s ticking, so you’d best get on with it, if you’re going to.”