The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [164]
“I’m armed. Come out now and you won’t get hurt.”
He listens. There is another muffled cry. Someone captive. He kicks open the door and crouches, pivoting and swinging the gun towards the chest of a seated figure. Muddy-eyed, he yells at the figure to put up his hands before realizing that she can’t. Her arms are bound. Her legs. Her mouth covered by masking tape.
Holly.
Luca is resting his forearms on the dashboard, occasionally wiping the fogged window. He lost sight of Ruiz a few minutes ago. It seems longer.
At times working in Iraq he had been scared—at checkpoints or during firefights or when he was arrested in Baghdad—but over there he’d felt somehow better equipped. It was a war zone. He was doing a job. He had colleagues. Accreditation. Here he’s an outsider. He’s like an extra or an understudy who has wandered into the wrong play.
Ruiz is a different personality. He acts instinctively, unburdened by doubts or refusing to succumb to them. Luca shouldn’t have let him go. They should have waited for the police. What’s taking him so long?
He sees something moving at the periphery of his vision, near the back door of the Merc. Ruiz returning. He turns his head and frowns momentarily at the man squatting in a shooting position, his eyes alive with the thought of killing. The side window shatters and a round strikes Luca’s shoulder like a fist wrapped in nails. Two more shots, fired with a silencer, punch into the metal of the doors, searching for his prone body. But the doors on the Mercedes 280 are built with a German Panzer in mind.
Luca lies very still as the pain drills through the bones of his shoulder. The longest minute passes. The kill shot doesn’t come.
Ruiz rips the tape away from Holly’s mouth. Her lips are cracked and bleeding and her body streaked with dirt and sweat. She’s wearing some sort of vest over her thin dress. Putting the Glock on the floor, he runs his fingers around the edges of the heavy fabric, feeling the metal disc on the breastplate and the ball bearings packed tightly around the plastic explosives. His eyes follow the wires to the detonators.
“Please get it off me.”
“Shush! Let me concentrate.”
He looks for switches or pressure pads, feeling a rectangular outline beneath the material, two of them, detonators. Holly is handcuffed to the chair. He can’t remove the suicide vest without first freeing her hands. Unless…? He needs a knife, shears, something sharp to cut the fabric.
“Get it off! Get it off!” whispers Holly.
Ruiz holds a finger to his lips and looks around the room, lifting boxes, opening cupboards, fumes in his head. He tries the bathroom. The sink is broken. A cascade of water runs across the broken ceramics. The mirror—it would take him too long. He has bolt cutters in the car.
Re-entering the bedroom, he catches a glimpse of the Courier at the last moment and pivots to take the first blow on his shoulder. The second comes down on the side of his head. The third crushes his scrotum, sending pain to the center of his brain. The Glock was on the floor next to Holly. He can’t see it. Where has it gone?
He rolls on to his side and puts his hands on the floor, trying to rise but the floor won’t let him up. The butt of a pistol thuds into the side of his head. Barely conscious, he feels himself being dragged across the room. Something closes around his wrists. So this is how it ends, he thinks, a victim of his own stupidity, a sucker for a sob story. One door too many—that’s what they say when someone dies in the Armed Response Group. “One door too many.”
Ruiz opens his eyes. Blood is trickling from his forehead down his nose and over his lips and chin. He is handcuffed to a radiator. Holly is standing in the corner, her thin dress clinging to her frame, the suicide vest still buckled around her torso. Ruiz jerks at the metal cuffs.
“I wouldn’t trouble yourself. It’s a done deal,” says the Courier, who turns a chair backwards. Sits. Legs akimbo. He has a face now, real features. Dressed in black with razor-rimmed