Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [94]
dead garage man, swatting away the flies that buzzed around the numerous wounds on the body.
‘Didn’t work, me old china,’ he told the corpse, kicking it heavily in the ribs.
‘’Cos, like see me, I’m that hard I am. I took out the disco bootboys. Easy!’
‘It’s the first sign of madness you know? Talking to yourself,’ Tegan told him, as the whine of the helicopter came closer and the lights swooped out of the night sky. Tegan put her hands up to cover her mouth and eyes from the whirlwind of dust that flew in her direction. Blind and mute, she stood and waited until Paynter’s voice cut rudely through her defences.
‘Come on, darlin’, look lively!’
‘That’s it, I quit!’ muttered Tegan, running close to the ground towards the helicopter. It was already beginning to rise and Paynter put out a hand and pulled her into the cramped interior. As the ground slipped away from them, and she took a last fleeting look at Dave Milligan’s now shrouded body, something deep within Tegan finally laid down and died. If cynicism is what this life requires, she told herself, then I can be the most cynical bitch the world has ever seen.
‘What’s the matter, sport?’ she asked Paynter, slapping him hard on his bad leg. ‘You afraid of a bit of exercise, or what?’
And they continued to bicker all the way to Los Angeles.
The door to Eva Oblon’s apartment stood open. From the corridor Robert Chebb knew something was badly wrong.
A quick check of the holding cell confirmed the nagging doubt he’d had in the back of his mind since he found a bloodstained thumbprint on the exterior doors to the block. Something terrible had gone on here.
Something evil.
The face of the thing that had been Eva was unrecognisable, mashed beyond sanity or comprehension by a series of savage blows. Chebb knelt and felt for a pulse although he knew there would be none. Resisting an urge to either scream or vomit he moved quietly out of the cell and closed the door behind him. In the living room he picked up the phone and dialled Michelle Stonebringer’s number.
‘He’s about to go into conference with the people from UNIT,’ Michelle told him when he asked to speak to Sanger. ‘If it’s really urgent . . . ’
Chebb felt a hysterical urge to wrap the telephone cord around Michelle’s neck and tighten it until her head burst. ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘It’s a minor matter. I’ll come over and speak to him when his meeting is concluded.’ He replaced the phone, wiped his fingerprints from the receiver, opened Eva’s drinks cabinet and removed a bottle of finest Scotch malt whisky, slipping it 180
into his pocket. Then he left the apartment, knowing it was only a matter of time before the place would be crawling with cops.
The sight of a young man splatter-painted with blood wandering up and down Sunset Boulevard, shouting and shaking his fists at the traffic, wasn’t as un-common as the average person might like to believe. But it was unusual enough for somebody to report it to the LAPD.
It had been a pretty quiet Friday night (all things considered) for the two uniformed officers cruising around central Hollywood in their patrol car when the call came through. Mike sighed deeply, wiping his mouth and putting the remains of his Taco Bell chalupa back in its packet.
‘If it’s not one thing, it’s something else,’ he told his partner, Dan, who responded to the call and turned the car around, initiating its wailing red siren.
It took the pair about twenty seconds to spot their target. And fifteen of those were because they were looking on the wrong side of the road. He was, they would decide, hardly making things difficult for them.
He was a slender, young white male with short red hair wearing what appeared to be a tight-fitting school uniform. The two officers exchanged intrigued glances before stopping the car a few feet from the suspect.
‘Easy fellah,’ said Mike, getting out of the passenger side of the car. ‘Whatever the problem is . . . ’ But he didn’t