‘There’s something—’ Coyle began outside the door, but never finished.
Moon heard a thud. ‘Damn it, I told you to keep quiet!’ he yelled.
Something hammered the door, hard. Moon snapped his body up and away from the woman on the floor, snatched up his torch, stepped furiously to the door and wrenched it open to shine the light in Coyle’s face and aim a punch through it, knocking the fucker’s teeth out for disturbing him.
No Coyle.
Moon stepped out of the tack-room, shone the torch up the aisle that ran alongside the stalls. ‘Hey cop, where’d you go?’
No reply. Coyle must have gone back to join the others.
‘Fuck’m,’ Moon said, only mildly disappointed that he wouldn’t get to kill the guy after he’d done with the woman. He’d been toying with the idea for a couple of hours, for no other particular reason than he didn’t like Coyle’s face. And he was a cop. It had been a while since he’d iced a cop. Somehow it was more fun than killing real people. Killing a bent cop was even better. What could anyone do about it? Call the police? Moon thought that was hilarious.
He turned back inside the tack-room and something hit him a slamming blow to the face. His vision exploded white and he was suddenly on his back, trying to look up through the mist of stars. Blood filled his mouth and nose.
The man standing over him seemed to have appeared from nowhere, as if he’d risen out of the ground.
Chapter Sixty-One
Ben had checked Erin’s pulse and removed the gag. She was unconscious. Her lip was cut from the blow that had knocked her cold. But she was alive. Less could be said for Billy Bob Moon, a few moments from now.
‘Look at me, Moon,’ Ben said. ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ He pointed the sawn-off shotgun in Moon’s face.
Moon blinked, spat blood, and his teeth bared in a red grin. ‘Sonofabitch.’
‘I knew I’d find you here, Moon,’ Ben said. ‘I smelled you. Stand up.’
Moon was hurt, but not that hurt. He was on his feet quickly, knees slightly bent, every muscle tensed ready to fight. ‘You gonna shoot me, better do it quick.’
Ben tossed the gun down and touched the hilt of the trench knife in his belt, without drawing it. He shook his head. ‘You already know what it feels like to be on the handle end of one of these. Now you’re going to find out what it feels like going in.’
Moon spat again. ‘Think I’ve never been cut before?’
‘This’ll be the last time. That’s a promise.’
‘Takes more than some drunk to get the drop on ol’ Billy Bob.’ Moon grinned bloodily. ‘Hey, stumble fuck. Where’s your bottle? How about I slice your fuckin’ arms and legs off and have you eat your girlfriend’s liver? Wash it down with some nice corn whiskey.’
Ben just looked at him.
Moon began to laugh, then cut the laughter short to whip out the Ka-Bar and lunge forwards in a quick two-step roundhouse slash that would have caught most men off guard, even some well-trained soldiers. He was rattlesnake-fast, but Ben was so far ahead of the curve that he knew what Moon was going to do even before Moon did. He stepped out of the arc of the strike, took Moon’s wrist and mashed the nerves in his hand that made his fingers let go of the knife. At the same time, Ben’s elbow crashed into Moon’s face. Moon staggered, but Ben still had his arm, so he could only stagger in a circle as Ben drew the trench knife from his belt.
Ben gripped the knuckleduster hilt tightly and popped Moon in the face with it. Moon was blinded by pain and didn’t see the strike coming or try to block it with his free arm. The spiked steel handguard hit him full on with all the force Ben could put behind it. Moon’s nose became a bloody bubbled pulp crushed up beneath his left eye. Ben hit him again, just as hard, and smashed his jaw and followed through and felt his teeth give. Then he hit him again, and again. Crack. Cheekbone. Crack. Eye socket.
Moon fell, hitting the floor on his back. Ben still had the arm. He pressed Moon’s elbow against his knee and bent it the way it had never been meant to go, with a crackling and splintering that was drowned out by Moon’s gurgling scream. Ben let go of his broken arm, caught the other and did the same to that one. Moon wasn’t screaming any longer. He was squealing like a pig. Ben pressed the sole of his boot against Moon’s throat, pinning him down hard and choking off the sound. He leaned down and looked into the man’s ruined face.
‘Kristen Hall,’ he said.
Then he pushed the tip of the trench knife into the soft flesh under Moon’s chin and rammed it through his broken jaw, through his tongue and palate and up through bone until it pierced deep inside his brain. Ben watched the eyes roll back and the light in them go out. He jerked and twisted the blade free, wiped it clean on Moon’s ‘I DON’T CALL 911’ T-shirt and slipped it back into its scabbard. He felt nothing as he stepped away from the dead man, no anger, no satisfaction. What was done was done. Ben picked up Moon’s rifle and hung it over his left shoulder from its two-point tactical sling, then grabbed his shotgun and slung it over the other.
Erin was still out cold, but her pulse felt normal and her breathing was regular. He couldn’t leave her here. Ben scooped her gently up in his arms and carried her out of the stable block. He passed the stall where he’d dragged the body of the man who’d been with Moon, paused at the entrance, looked left and right. The enemy were six men down. By Ben’s calculations he still had three more of McCrory’s soldiers to deal with.
Not including Ritter. Ritter was the worry.
Ben felt exposed as he retraced his steps past the house, expecting a bullet in the back at any moment. He already knew where he was taking her, and had the keys in his pocket. It wasn’t the perfect hiding place, but it was the best he could do for the moment. Reaching the Dodge Ram parked at the front of the house, he supported Erin’s weight on one arm and shoulder, opened the back passenger door and eased her limp form inside. Even in bright daylight, she couldn’t have been seen through the dark-tinted glass.
He was certain that she’d come to within the next few minutes and was sorry he couldn’t be with her when she awoke, confused and disorientated, in a strange new place. He shut the door silently and clunked the central locking with the key fob. Another button allowed him to remotely disarm the alarm system. He was concerned that if she woke up and moved around inside the cab, or tried the door, she’d set off the siren.
‘I’ll be back for you,’ he promised her, even if she couldn’t hear him.
He slipped away.
Back inside the hallway of the ranch house, Ben looked in the door to his right. The tall grey-haired man was still sitting there with the Indian tomahawk buried in his brain. Not all household ornaments made such useful improvised weapons. The one with half his head missing was still slumped over the bar. Nobody else was around. Ben moved back into the hallway. To his left, a pool of blood was spreading out from underneath a closed door. He opened it a crack, smearing the blood along the floor like thick paint. A dead arm lay stretched out in the blood on the other side of the door. The man who owned it was big and old and looked a lot like Joe McCrory. That accounted for the shot Ben had heard coming from inside the house earlier. He didn’t know why they’d killed the old man. But Joe might have been a problem for Ben, and if he was dead, that just made things easier for him.
Ben moved on. He needed to find McCrory Junior. He knew that Finn was here, because the green Mercedes SL-class was here. Ritter would want to protect his boss when the trouble kicked off, perhaps not out of love or loyalty but certainly to keep the gravy train rolling. Where would you hide such an important non-combatant in a big house like this? Not on the ground floor. Somewhere as far away from the action as possible.
Ben walked to the staircase at the end of the dark hallway and tested his weight on the first step. It creaked in the middle but not at the side, so he kept to the edge. From a landing, the stairs switched back 180 degrees for another flight. At the top, a broad passage led from the upper landing, with do
ors either side. More dead animal heads with glassy eyes adorned the walls. Ben didn’t know if he could have lived in a house filled with the things he’d killed looking at him like that.
He made his way along the passage, checking doors left and right. He was checking the fourth door along, which opened onto a spare bedroom, when he heard something and stopped, head cocked, listening. It was the soft creak of at least three men stalking up the stairs after him.
McCrory’s soldiers were back inside the house.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Ben ducked inside the bedroom. He stood close to the door and listened in the darkness to the footsteps reach the top of the stairs and come padding along the passage. He heard doors being opened and shut, each room being checked the way he’d been doing himself. As each door closed, the footsteps came closer and he could hear them more clearly. He reckoned on four men.
Now they reached the bedroom he was in. The steps paused outside. A ray of torchlight licked along the gap at the bottom of the door. Ben thought he heard the faintest whisper.
The handle began to turn.
Ben stepped back, pointed the shotgun from the hip at the middle of the door and slam-fired three rounds of buckshot into it as fast as he could work the slide while keeping the trigger held back. The muzzle flash lit up the huge ragged hole where the centre panel of the door had been.
Through the ringing in his ears, Ben heard running steps heading back towards the stairs. Just one man. He dropped a slug round straight into the Ithaca’s breech, rammed the pump into battery and swivelled on his feet to chase the runner like a trap shooter chasing a moving clay. With a Brenneke slug, it didn’t matter that there was a wall between him and the target. The gun boomed and kicked hard against his shoulder, and a crater exploded in the wall showering plaster back at him.
Something tumbled down the stairs. Ben rushed for the shattered door and wrenched it open. He jumped over the three splayed-out, piled-up bodies lying on the other side and raced towards the stairs, plucking more buckshot cartridges from his pocket as he went and thumbing them inside the shotgun’s magazine tube. To his right was the huge hole in the wall where his slug had gone through. To his left on the opposite wall was a splat of dark blood. More blood on the stairs. Ben chased down them after his wounded target, reached the first landing and then had to pull back as gunfire sprayed up the stairwell, ripping shreds out of the heavy oak banister. Ben shoved the Ithaca between the stair rails and loosed four buckshot loads in the direction the shots had come from.
The firing went silent. Ben waited, perfectly still in the darkness. He was good at waiting. A minute passed. Then another. No sound from below.
When he was satisfied, he returned up the passage towards the three dead men. There was a lot of blood on the floor and the wall opposite the shattered door. Even in the gloom, he could see that flying splinters had done as much damage as the shotgun blasts. He stepped back over the bodies and walked on.
He checked from room to room until he found the locked door. He twisted the handle. Solid wood. Not the kind of door that could be broken down with a kick or two.
‘Ritter?’ said a voice inside. McCrory’s voice.
When Ben didn’t answer, McCrory opened fire from inside. Three splintered bullet holes opened up in the thick wood.
Ben reeled back from the door. Whatever McCrory was packing in there, he didn’t want any. But his gun was bigger. He popped another Brenneke into the Ithaca’s breech, then rammed the muzzle against the door lock and fired. It was the way military entry teams breached closed doors, and Ben hadn’t seen a lock yet that didn’t burst into pieces under that kind of punishment.
Finn McCrory ducked for cover as the door blew open with such force that it crashed against the wall. By the time he’d straightened up and pointed the .44 Magnum, Ben was already inside the room and right on him. He snatched the big, heavy revolver out of McCrory’s hands and smacked him hard across the face with the butt end. McCrory cried out and staggered back against a desk.
The study was decked out in much the same style as the rest of the ranch house. A traditional brass and green glass banker’s lamp threw out light from the desk. A leather captain’s chair stood between it and a tall fireplace. Above that hung a big rack of antlers mounted on a shield. Resting across the antlers was an old Winchester lever-action hunting rifle that presumably had been responsible for the trophy.
Ben hardly noticed any of it. He saw the beach in Ireland. Kristen running from the men McCrory had sent to kill her. He pictured her in his mind the way Moon and Ritter had left her lying there on the rocks.
‘No,’ McCrory said. His eyes were big and round. He raised his hands as if he thought he could stop a twelve-gauge round from the gun Ben was pointing at his face.
I’m not an executioner, Ben had told Kurzweil.
But in McCrory’s case, he was willing to make an exception.
He worked the pump on the shotgun, the way he’d done a thousand times before. Clack: the rearward movement for the extractor claw to get a grip on the rim of the fired case, draw it back out of the chamber and fling it away as waste material out of the ejector port. Clack: the forward movement to chamber the next round as it was pushed up out of the magazine tube.
But something felt wrong. The pump wouldn’t go back forwards. The action wouldn’t close, because something was stopping the round from chambering. The empty had failed to eject.
Classic pump-action stoppage. Every cop and soldier who’d ever received firearms training was schooled in how to fix the jam. It was something talked about in classrooms but which very seldom actually happened in the field. A one in a million chance. Just one of those things, like a flat tyre or a dead battery. Except it was very liable to get you killed.
Ben could either clear the jam by ramming the gun’s butt vertically down against the floor, or he could toss the weapon and bring into play the rifle he’d taken from Moon, which was still slung behind his back. Neither option was something you could do in less than two or three seconds, and two or three seconds was all the time Finn McCrory needed to see that his opponent was in trouble. McCrory looked startled for an instant, then stumbled around the back of the desk, almost fell over the captain’s chair and made a grab for the Winchester hunting rifle that rested on the deer antlers above the fireplace.
McCrory worked the lever. No malfunctions there. Just the unmistakable sound of a well-oiled rifle action chambering a long, high-powered cartridge. It looked as if Big Joe liked to keep his guns loaded.
McCrory grinned and levelled the gun at Ben’s head.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Staring down the wrong end of the Winchester’s octagonal barrel, Ben dropped the shotgun.
‘Long gun too,’ said Finn McCrory.
Ben unslung the M4 and let it fall.
‘And the rest,’ Finn said.
Ben drew the trench knife out of its scabbard and thought about throwing it at McCrory. But of all the knives in the world, none could have been less suited to throwing. The weight of the big steel knuckleduster would pull it completely out of balance as it flew. Whereas McCrory only had to flick a finger and Ben was as dead as the deer who’d donated his antlers for Big Joe’s wall.
Ben dropped the knife.
Finn’s eyes glittered. ‘So you thought you’d come in here and shoot me, did you, dipshit?’
‘You have it coming, McCrory.’
‘You’re talking about the girl, right? Kristen Hall?’
‘Surprised you even remember her name,’ Ben said.
‘You think I wanted that to happen? Think I wanted her dead?’
‘I’m sure she left you no choice,’ Ben said.
‘That’s how I see it. Anyone in my position would’ve done the same thing.’
‘Of course. You’re just a normal guy.’
‘You think I should’ve paid her off? You think she’d have gone away? Forget it. No chance. She’d’ve bled me dry.’
&nb
sp; ‘She was the one who did all the bleeding,’ Ben said.
‘Everyone has secrets, Hope. Just happens I have more than most people, and your friend knew way too much about them.’ Finn smiled at Ben over the rifle sights. ‘But what am I saying? You do too, don’t you?’
‘It was Kristen who worked most of it out,’ Ben said. ‘All I did was fill in the gaps. I think she picked up on the name McCrory from her history research, and connected it with this up-and-coming US politician she must have read about, who was getting so much mileage out of his grandfather escaping Ireland and becoming a success in America. Good human-interest angle, McCrory. But you should’ve kept your big mouth shut. It was the dates that gave you away.’
Finn chuckled. ‘Is that a fact?’
‘Yes it is, because Kristen dug deeper and found out from the birth records in Glenfell that the real Padraig McCrory, a simple Irish stable hand who worked on the Glenfell Estate, was born in 1809. He’d have been a hundred and seven years old when your father was born. Biologically impossible. It didn’t add up, and Kristen was the kind of journalist who likes to get their facts straight. When she contacted you initially, she just wanted to tidy up the details. She told you about the anomaly with the dates in the parish records. You could have brushed it off so easily. But instead you flipped, because that’s the kind of stupid arsehole you are. That just raised her suspicions and made her dig deeper. By the time she contacted you again, she knew the truth and challenged you with it. By doing that, she made herself a target. Because you had so very much to lose if the truth came out, didn’t you, McCrory?’
Finn’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. His finger twitched on the trigger of the Winchester.
‘That’s how she found out who your real grandfather was,’ Ben said.