Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [128]
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‘Keep back!’
Chris skidded to a halt after he charged out of the smog and almost fell upon Patsy and her attacker. The man was slightly built, with close-cropped hair and a smart black suit, but his eyes were full of wildness and terror.
‘Keep back,’ he warned Chris again, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. He ran the end of the gun down Patsy’s cheek in a parody of tender-ness. ‘This is my town, do you understand?’ he told her. ‘It don’t belong to you and your weirdo friends. It’s mine.’
‘I understand that,’ Chris nodded, adopting the conciliatory tone he’d used to negotiate many hostage situations. ‘This is your town,’ he repeated. ‘All yours.’
‘You’re one of them,’ the gun-man told Patsy. ‘I saw you singing at that club when my devil came.’
Oh Goddess, Chris thought, this man’s completely psychotic. How on Earth was he going to handle this? How on Earth was he going to handle this on his own?
‘I’ll show them I can use a gun. I’ll show all of them. Prove it to the whole frigging world. The devil said that Gordy Scraton’s a coward but I ain’t. Oh no.’
Chris took a small step forward, trying to maintain eye contact with the man, who’d begun to drool. ‘Gordy? Is that your name?’ It was familiar. The Doctor’s account had told of a criminal working for people who’d created the Toys. What the hell had they run into?
‘I know that you’re not a coward. Gordy,’ he said, mustering all the sincerity he could. ‘You don’t need to prove that to me. I know that. Everyone knows that. Give me the gun, then you can tell me all about it, hey?’
The whole point of flattering an armed suspect was to disarm them – literally as well as figuratively. While Chris would be trying to reassure and charm the suspect, Roz would be stalking him from behind. Well, Roz wasn’t there and Chris had no idea how to get the gun out of the attacker’s hand before he used it on Patsy.
‘Oh no,’ Gordy said, almost apologetically. ‘I can’t do that. I’ve got to show everyone. Albert, my devil, the Doctor. Got to show ’em all.’
Chris measured the distance between them. There was no way that he was going to reach them before the man, Gordy, fired. At the Academy, cadets were taught that, as a last resort, the only way for a weaponless officer to tackle an armed man head on was by a Diving, Rolling Breakfall with Kick.
It was always taught as a last resort because even the instructors said that it never worked. It involved throwing yourself forward and down, hands out-stretched, curling into a forward roll staying down to take out the attacker’s leg with a sharp kick to the kneecap. There were less energetic ways of com-223
mitting suicide. Chris wasn’t about to try it while the gun was pointing at Patsy.
He watched Gordy’s trigger-finger start to squeeze.
‘You’re such a cowardly little shit, Gordy,’ Chris yelled suddenly. ‘You’d shoot a woman, but you’d never dare try and take on someone your own size. Put the gun down, you’re not responsible enough to have one.’
For a terrible second there was silence and Chris suddenly knew exactly what it must feel like to be the Doctor. What it felt like to gamble with other people’s lives. It was the most terrifying thing in the world.
‘Oh yeah?’ Gordy said and pointed the gun straight at him. Chris smiled, as if it was an act of great generosity.
He whispered a prayer and leapt forward at the same instant as there was an ear-splitting explosion and the whole world slid sickenly into slow motion.
The Doctor drove the MG through the locked gates of the Petruska Institute at a casual seventy miles an hour. The impact knocked out one of the headlamps and sent the little car spinning off the driveway and into a long uncontrolled skid across the wet lawn. The scarlet sports car carved a long dark groove in the grass as it careered to a halt, narrowly missing a tree.
The shock of the accident disturbed the Doctor’s delicate empathic connection to Petruska, and she began to wake, startled to find herself in