Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [83]
Flat against the wheel of the Range Rover, I uncurl and look to the signal house through the rain-smattered windows. He’s still in there. And about to find an abandoned car. I open his rear door and slide inside. I close the door with the handle held up to dull the click shut, and crouch behind the driver’s seat. Mounted on the dashboard is the GPS system blinking with my location.
Now I untie my right boot. Eye by eye I draw out the lace, binding each end around the four fingers of both hands. I can hear only the raindrops pattering on the roof. And my thudding heart. This is hide and seek, boys’ games. But instead of name- calling and ribbing the found, we have a shooting.
Finally the clunk of the lifted handle, the door opening. ‘Fuck,’ he says. He can’t see me. I hear him spit. ‘Where the fuck?’ He stands for a moment, no, an eternity, before getting in. And when he falls back on to the seat, I’m nearly pinned by his weight. I have no idea if he has the gun in his hand or not.
As soon as the door’s shut, I move, up and over the seat back, yanking hard on that lace about his throat, holding on for dear life. He bucks. The lace is a rein. I put my knees into the seat back and pull harder.
He makes no sound, nothing. Nothing. I’m choking him to death and he’s silent. Both his hands work on prying free the cord, but I’ve cut into flesh, slicing his jowls with nylon. When his hand dips to his inside pocket, I quickly pass the lace from left to right, twisting tighter. Then I go over the front of his chest, like a father might fasten a child into a safety seat. And the two of us draw the one gun. We both grip the hilt, that schoolyard game of interlocking fingers, not knowing whose is where and how to move. He’s stronger, but I have my weight coming down, gravity. He’s trying to angle the barrel from his chest into mine.
‘Give me the fucking gun,’ I hiss. He does not. The lace is about his windpipe, but he can still breathe, the headrest holding off the crucial centimetre. And he knows this much. In fact he knows a lot, to find me here in this field, to be this intimate in our deadlock, within kissing distance, my soft cheek an inch from his teeth. He’d bite a hole in my face if it was offered, and I lean out further. A mistake. He jams a finger inside the trigger guard.
When he starts firing I still have a hold of the hilt. Foam explodes from the passenger seat. I can feel the bullets passing through the down of the ski jacket, grazing my armpit. I’m over the top of his head now, working the barrel away from my body. The passenger window pops with the next shot. And now I help him out a little, wedging my finger over his and firing, firing, firing, the action of the hammer louder than the silenced shot, the flying bullets lost beyond the broken window.
On the empty click I swing back around the seat, pull again on that nylon noose, and lift. He fights the cord with both hands, gasping now. I bunch both ends of the lace in my right hand and reach into my jacket pocket, whipping out the cuffs. I drop them on his lap. ‘Put them on.’ He doesn’t. Once more I pull with both hands, as though the lace was a length of cheese wire and I might severe his head. ‘Or die in this fucking field.’
When he’s snapped them on, run through the steering wheel as instructed, I release the lace. He gasps like a man who just swam a length underwater. I jump out of the car, open up the driver’s door and find him slumped over the dashboard. I grab a handful of collar and wrench him upright. His throat is bleeding, a fancy red necklace.
‘Now talk to me.’
Handcuffed to a radiator in a kitchen, I leave a man who was hired to kill me. When I pushed him through Gary’s back door with the muzzle of his own gun between his shoulders, I think my brother was more afraid of me than my prisoner. He saw again what I was capable of, remembered what I’d done with a pocket knife twenty years ago. How I thought revenge could bring a soul back to earth.
But he had nothing to fear. There were no revelations from a tortured interrogation,