Читать книгу Closer Than Blood - Paul Grzegorzek - Страница 13

“Jesus, Gareth, what the fuck have you gotten yourself into now?”

I looked up from where I sat, huddled under a blanket on the wall outside the bungalow, and grinned despite the circumstances. In amongst the flurry of uniforms and SOCOs milling around, the newly minted Inspector Jimmy Holdsworth, my old partner, was making his way towards me with a look that was half concern, half relief at seeing me in one piece.

“Inspector Holdsworth.” I threw a lazy salute. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m Charlie Golf nine-nine,” he replied, giving the call sign for the inspector in charge of the division. “So they’ve called me in to sort your mess out. What happened?”

“Jake.”

“Your brother? Don’t tell me he did this?”

“No,” I shook my head and began patting Jimmy’s pockets until I found his cigarettes. “But the guys who did were after him.”

I took two cigarettes from the packet, then slipped one back when Jimmy shook his head and passed me a lighter. I lit mine and coughed, it had been almost a year since I’d last smoked.

“So,” Jimmy continued. “What actually happened?”

I glanced at the still form of the man I’d knocked out as he was carted off on an ambulance gurney. He was still unconscious, but as a precaution they had handcuffed him to the metal arms of the trolley and had three officers with him, two of them armed with tasers. “I had a bad day.”

“No shit. I could do with some details though. Come on, I’ll give you a lift back to the nick to write your statement and you can tell me on the way. They’ve got it in hand here.”

And so, as we drove back into the city, I relayed the entire day’s events to my old friend, leaving nothing out. If there was one person in the world aside from my dad that I could trust with anything, it was Jimmy. His stabbing was the reason I went off the rails all those years ago, that and his subsequent kidnapping by the same people. I got the impression that he felt he still owed me somehow.

“What are you going to do?” he asked as we pulled into the back yard of John Street Police Station.

“Nothing stupid. I reckon my best bet is to go and write a bloody good statement, then go home and get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

I was about to open my door and clamber out when Jimmy’s radio blasted, a flat, ugly sound that meant an officer was in distress. Half a second later, a panicked voice began screaming over the airwaves.

“1020, 1020, urgent assistance! They’re attacking the ambulance!”

Jimmy and I stared at each other in shock as the controller’s voice came over the radio, her tone calm but words fast.

“CC106, message received. What’s your location? Units are coming, but we need to know where you are.”

“I don’t know, we’re in the back of the ambulance. Near the hosp … Oh shit, they’ve got guns!”

The transmission cut off abruptly with a pained grunt. Jimmy spun the car, flicked the lights on and shot out of the car park as the back doors to the police station began to disgorge a steady stream of officers running towards any available vehicle.

We came out of the car park so fast we almost took off, Jimmy hunched over the wheel as we screamed up the steep incline of Carlton Hill towards the hospital.

The radio began flooding with messages as units assigned themselves, until Jimmy found a break in the calls and sent his own message.

“All call signs, this is Charlie Golf nine-nine. No divisional units are to make an approach until Hotel Foxtrot have cleared the scene. Locate the ambulance, but do not approach. Confirm last received.”

I looked over at Jimmy approvingly as the controller picked up his message and repeated it. He’d not been an inspector long, but already he was thinking strategically, even when involved in something himself. Most officers, myself included, would likely have thought of nothing more than finding their endangered colleagues.

“Control, this is CC109,” an excited voice called up. “I have sight of the ambulance on Wilsons Avenue. Doors are shut and no sign of any hostiles. Permission to approach?”

“Negative,” Jimmy called up before anyone else could speak. “I have a short ETA, keep any public back and stand by.”

True to his word we were there in less than two minutes, fighting through the traffic that was building up in both directions. Wilsons Avenue was on the very outskirts of Brighton, with houses on one side and fields on the other, but it was a major road. Jimmy ended up driving onto the pavement to get us past, lights and sirens still going until we reached CC109.

As we leapt out I could see the ambulance, the driver’s wing dented where it had been rammed half off the road. The front doors both open, no sign of the paramedics. I convinced myself that was good news.

Two officers, a man and a woman both in their early twenties, hurried over to us as we approached.

“Orders, Guv?” The woman asked, glancing up and down the street. Her fingers drummed against the taser she carried strapped to her vest.

Jimmy looked around, then at me. “What do you reckon, Gareth?”

“No sign of anyone else, and they’d be idiots to hide in the ambulance. I say we go see if our colleagues are OK.”

He nodded. “Agreed. Amanda, right?”

The woman nodded. “Sir.”

“We’ll approach, you cover us. Anyone does anything out of the ordinary and you pop them.”

She nodded again and drew her taser, following us with her colleague.

We hurried towards the ambulance, watched now by dozens of people who had exited their cars, many of whom had phones out to video our approach.

We paused by the back doors, Jimmy and I taking a handle each as he mouthed a countdown. For the third time that day, adrenaline began to flood my system, making my heart pound. When he reached ‘go’, we pulled the handles and stepped to the sides, allowing Amanda a clear look into the back.

“Fuck,” she breathed. “Are they dead?”

Inside, the three police officers and two paramedics who had been accompanying my bear of an assailant to hospital lay on the floor, the yellow metal awash with blood. The gurney the prisoner had been strapped to was empty, the cuffs that had been holding him neatly cut through with some kind of power tool.

Leaping into the back, I leaned down and began checking pulses.

“They’re alive,” I said with relief, although I wasn’t sure how bad their injuries were. Each of them had nasty wounds to the face or temple, and from the shape of the injuries I guessed that they’d been pistol-whipped into unconsciousness. “Get another ambulance rolling, now.”

The radio crackled to life as Jimmy climbed into the back with me.

“Looks like your shooters came back for their friend,” his voice was almost drowned out by the wail of multiple sirens as other units began to arrive. “Who the hell are these guys?”

“I wish I knew,” I said grimly, “but the only person who does is in the wind and after seeing this, I reckon that if he’s sensible he’ll be hiding so deep that we’ll never find him.”