The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [95]
The skin tightens around the driver’s eyes. “You’re a funny guy. Is that what you Brits call irony?”
“You want me to explain irony?”
The driver closes his fingers, all except the longest, and pushes his sunglasses up his nose. That’s his answer.
Ruiz walks away. Twenty yards down the street he pauses at a builder’s skip full of debris and broken bricks. The red-black color is rising from his chest to his face and he can hear a tearing sound behind his eyes like fabric shredding. Picking up a half brick, he weighs it in his hand.
The driver and passenger of the Audi are laughing about something. The side window shatters with the sound and fury of a shotgun. Ruiz reaches through the window and bounces the passenger’s head off the dashboard, making his nose bloom. He’s a bleeder.
The driver reaches below the seat, but Ruiz has already taken a gun from his partner’s hand. Now he’s aiming it across his crumpled body with one eye closed, the other looking along the barrel, his hand steady as a barber with a cutthroat razor.
A thought passes across the driver’s face. Ruiz has always referred to it as the Dirty Harry moment—that fleeting instant when a person wonders: Am I fast enough or lucky enough?
Something tells him no.
Ruiz takes out his mobile and punches the number that was left beneath the wiper blades of the Merc, along with the envelope of cash. It’s ringing… being answered. There are five seconds of dead air.
“Mr. Ruiz?”
“You still want the girl?”
“That was our deal.”
“Don’t talk to me about deals. You kicked in my front door.”
“A mistake, I admit.”
Another long pause, a low rumble in the background—aircraft noise.
“The price has doubled.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m pissed off.”
The American mulls this over. “How can I be sure that you’ve got her?”
“You can’t.”
“Where do we meet?”
“I choose the location, but it won’t be today. In the meantime, call off your dogs. One of them might need a vet.”
Ruiz hangs up and turns the phone to silent. Blood is pouring from the passenger’s nose and across his lips and chin, staining his shirtfront. Tiny cubes of glass decorate his lap like diamonds on a jeweler’s cloth.
“You hear that, ladies? You get off early today.”
He leans through the window and presses the release on the ammunition clip, letting it drop into the lap of the passenger, who has his hand cupped under his nose.
As the pistol falls to the floor, Ruiz simultaneously drops his mobile behind the bucket seat. Then he turns away, joining the professor on the footpath. The entire wedding party is standing on the steps of the house—Claire, her bridesmaids, Miranda and Daj. Claire looks ready to throw the first punch, but Miranda has a dangerous left hook.
“Very smooth,” says Joe.
“I was being diplomatic.”
“I’d hate to see you go to war.”
Ruiz gives him a smile that means nothing.
“Can I borrow your mobile?”
“What happened to yours?”
“I must have left it somewhere.”
20
LONDON
The TV lights leave white spots swimming behind Elizabeth’s eyelids. She tries to blink them away, but the cameras are recording every twitch and grimace. She reaches for a glass of water. A few droplets spill, beading like mercury on the smooth table. She wipes up the water with her sleeve, worried it might leave a mark.
Campbell Smith whispers in her ear. “I’ll give you the signal. Then you just read the statement.”
All the seats are taken. It’s standing room only in the briefing room at New Scotland Yard. The TV cameras are at the back; press photographers at the front. Radio microphones hooked up to the feed.
The police have talked Elizabeth into this—an emotional plea from a pregnant wife to her husband. Not running. Missing. She said no at first, afraid of the publicity. The shame. The thought of people recognizing her in the street, whispering, pointing; not just her neighbors and friends, but the mothers at Rowan’s nursery