Delta Ghost (19 page)

In addition to his squeamishness, Clune was claustrophobic. When he was twelve years old, his mother had taken him to see a psychiatrist because of his assorted terrors: of the dark, of buttons, of lizards, and of confined spaces such as the changing cubicles at the local public swimming pool. The psychiatrist had, as part of his workup, arranged an MRI scan of young Danny’s brain. This had struck Danny, even at the tender age of twelve, as a stupid idea, given this last phobia of his. The MRI scanner was an enclosed tube, in which he was expected to lie completely still for ten minutes while a hellish, clanking industrial noise ground on and on around him.

He’d lasted one minute in the scanner before he’d fled, shrieking, and he’d never engaged with the psychiatrist again, much to his mum’s despair. Since that day, his dread of enclosure in anything smaller than a car or an elevator had grown stronger.

There was
no way
he was getting into the space under the floorboards. He’d rather be kidnapped and tortured.

Instead, he slid the panel back and lay on top of it, on his back. The fear was there, licking at his throat and sending horrible thrills up his limbs, but the gap between the bottom of the sagging mattress and Clune’s face was just about big enough that he was able to fend off a full-blown panic attack.

The problem was, with his ears this close to the floor, the sounds from the level below were amplified.

Clune heard male voices overlapping, then footsteps again. This time, they had the quality of a group of people ascending a staircase.

Oh shit. They’re coming.

As he often did in times of crisis, Clune fell back on a question.

What would Mick Jagger do?

Or Bob Dylan?

Or Jimi Hendrix?

Clune had found a solace in rock music which he’d never known in the traditional bosoms of family, of school, of career. His heroes were entertainers, poets, mavericks.

Faced with a posse of murderous Mexican thugs, Mick would sneer and swagger. And he’d get blown away.

Dylan would try to confound them with some obscure, gnomic utterance. And he, too, would die in a hail of gunfire.

Hendrix would paralyze his enemies with a virtuoso guitar performance. He, alone, might have a chance.

But Clune didn’t play guitar like Hendrix. Didn’t play it very well at all, though he was proud to have mastered the F chord, which increased his repertoire by thirty-three per cent.

Clune felt reality slap him around the face, hard, as he registered the truth of his situation.

He wasn’t in his beloved world of rock music.

He wasn’t even in his jail of an upbringing, in suburban Manchester, with drab ancient wallpaper like bars on the walls and the eternal smell of tea and toast and baked beans pervading the home like the aromas of a prison canteen.

He was in New York City, hiding under a bed in a grotty apartment, while a group of killers from a Mexican drug cartel were closing in with the express intention to find him, abduct him, and torture him.

And, inevitably, kill him.

The realization punched Clune between the eyes.

He was going to die.

Things moved fast after that, because Clune heard the door to the apartment get kicked open, the wood wrenching away from the lock, and all of a sudden death was just a couple of rooms away.

*

T
he crash of a gun was punctuated by a high-pitched scream.

Clune shrank back under the bed.

There was no escaping the noise, because the gun blasted a second time, then a third. The yells were overwhelming now, and Clune thought he heard the odd word or two in Spanish. He had the impression that a crowd of men were trying to get in the front door, but were being driven back by gunfire which had already hit at least three of them.

The odds were so terrifying that Clune felt numbed. A horde of men, against one cop with a revolver.

As Clune watched the open doorway of the bedroom from his hiding place beneath the bed, he saw a man dive into view in the corridor beyond, roll, and rise to his knees. His extended arm held a pistol, and he was aiming back down the passage in the direction of the living room.

Clune felt something surge within his chest.

He knew he represented, to many American’s eyes, a stereotypical Brit. He was feckless, unambitious, and coped with his fears and insecurities by making light of every situation, by affecting a sardonic flippancy in his interactions with people. He was pasty-skinned, and when he went in the sun he got a sunburn rather than a tan. And his teeth were... well, they were pretty bad.

But Clune possessed another clichéd quality, a more admirable one. He had an instinctive sense of fair play, and a tendency towards outrage when he saw anyone being ganged up on.

One cop, an overweight one at that, against six, ten, however many men there were. And although Clune didn’t know much about guns, he knew a revolver held a limited number of bullets at any one time, and needed to be reloaded laboriously on a frequent basis, possibly after just six shots.

The injustice of the scenario provoked him to do something which in other circumstances he’d have regarded as an act of utter madness.

Clune leaned his head out from under the bed and called, “Hey. Over here.”

The kneeling man with the gun frowned, as if he’d heard a distant cry.

“Here, you ugly bastard,” hissed Clune.

The man’s head snapped round. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to yell.

Then his head exploded, shearing sideways in a mist of bone and gore. The crash of the gun followed a split-second later, filling the passage with its roar.

Clune ducked back under the bed, part of his mind registering that Dirty Harry, and Sickert, had been right.

A .44 Magnum could, indeed, blow your head clean off.

He cringed, his eyes open a crack, waiting for the inevitable, the flood of gunmen and the hands that would drag him out from under the bed.

And he saw the first of them, crouching and scuttling through the bedroom doorway past the body of the dead man as another shot erupted into the passage. The man was Hispanic, like the other one, and his eyes bored into Clune’s.

His teeth were bared in fury.

Sickert appeared in the doorway behind him. Clune’s eyes flicked to the detective, and at the last moment the Mexican registered the presence at his back and started to turn.

Sickert shot him in the back of the neck, almost decapitating him. Clune recoiled as he felt blood and brain matter rain down on the bed above him.

He kept his eyes shut, wanting the unbearable ringing in his ears to stop.

The next thing he knew, Sickert’s voice said near his ear: “Come out of there, kid. You’ve got to get moving.”

He opened his eyes. Sickert was kneeling beside the bed, his thumb pushing fresh bullets into the revolver’s wheel. His face was flushed and he was breathing laboriously.

“Goddammit, kid. I told you to get into the hiding place in the floor,” he snarled between gasps. “But it’s too late now. You’ve got to get out of here.”

Clune stared at him, dazed, but dragged himself out from under the bed.

“What?” he said, aware of how stupid he sounded.

Sickert finished reloading. “Got five of them,” he said. “But I hear more of them coming.” He nodded at the window above the bed. “You’ve got to get out there. There’s a fire escape running down the wall outside. Check the coast is clear, then run. Doesn’t matter where. Just get as far from here as possible.”

“Are you –”

“Never mind about me.” Sickert paused, and above his rattling breathing Clune could hear footsteps in the corridor outside the apartment, more shouts. They’d discovered the bodies strewn out there.

“For Christ’s sake, kid,” Sickert wheezed.
“Go.”

Clune leaped onto the bed, his sneaker leaving a bloody imprint from the mess on the floor, and fumbled with the latch before raising the sash window. It jammed partway up, but he was skinny enough that he could wriggle through.

As he squeezed through the frame, he felt something jabbing his hand. He looked down and saw Sickert pushing a cell phone at him.

“Call Venn, first chance you get.”

Clune grabbed the phone, stuffed it awkwardly in his pocket, and heaved himself all the way through the window.

The fire escape ran along the wall a few feet to his left. Below was a dark, sunless alleyway strewn with garbage.

Without thinking, without allowing fear to paralyze him, Clune leaped for the fire stairs.

He hit the iron railing clumsily, grabbed at it and hooked his arm around one upright. The metal was old and black and granular with rust.

The impact of his body against the stairs jolted a screw free from the masonry of the wall, and the fire escape shook.

Clune held on, trying to clamber around so that he was on the rungs themselves.

The stairs juddered beneath him, and with an awful, sick sensation he felt further screws detach themselves from the walls.

The fire escape began to tilt sideways.

Clune hung on, helpless, as the stairs peeled away from the wall and toppled slowly sideways. A crazy, detached part of his mind gibbered:
this is illegal. Some landlord’s going to get into big trouble for this
.

As the creaking metal descended to the ground, held partly in check by the bolts securing its base to the wall of the building, Clune found himself staring up at the window he’d just vacated, like a parachutist watching the plane disappearing above him. He saw flashes of light beyond the opening, heard the cacophony of gunfire, and heard the screams.

Then, one final yell, a hoarse bellow that ended abruptly.

Sickert.

The fire escape ripped free entirely and Clune leaped away, dropping six feet or so and landing painfully on his feet. He fell, rolled, lay still, the shock waves still coursing up his legs. At eye level, he could see the filth of the alleyway, discarded beer cans and plastic carrier bags inches from his face.

Despite the grottiness of his environment, there was something soothing about lying there, doing nothing, thinking of nothing.

A shout from above him brought him back to the here-and-now. He rolled onto his back, saw the face staring down at him, the excited finger jabbing.

Clune stood up, agony exploding through his feet, the alleyway tilting as his sense of balance tried to correct itself.

He broke into a hobbling run, aiming for the light at the end of the alleyway where it opened into the street. He didn’t care if he ran straight into the arms of a welcoming committee. All he cared about was getting the hell away from the alley.

He broke out into the sunlight, not stopping, not looking to either side, just loping as fast as his painful ankles would carry him. Car horns blared as he stumbled across the road, fenders whooshing past his legs, terrifyingly close. Clune heard laughter, and realized in an instant that it was his own.

Because the decrepit, collapsing fire escape had been a blessing in disguise. It would delay his pursuers, who’d have to come down through the front doors of the apartment block.

Which meant Fate intended Danny Clune to survive.

Which meant he was indestructible, and nothing could stop him.

The next moment, he collided with a lamppost on the opposite pavement and went down, hard, bright lights exploding in his head.

Somehow he found himself up on his feet again and soldiering on, zigzagging among the pedestrians and trees and other assorted obstacles on the pavement, feeling the apartment block and its horrors dwindling behind him. People stepped quickly out of his way, alarmed by this scrawny, blood-spattered young man with his shambling run and maniacal giggle.

He was alive.

He was alive.

V
enn was taking the Mustang through the streets of Lower Manhattan, while he and Harmony figured out what to do next, when his phone buzzed.

He grabbed it out of the dashboard holder. Walter’s number.

“Yeah, Walt.”

“Lieutenant Venn.” The voice was shaky, gasping, as if its owner had been running. “It’s Danny Clune.”

“Clune?” Venn glanced at Harmony. “What’s up? Where’s Detective Sickert?”

There was a burst of static, and Venn wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What?”

“Dead,” the kid gasped.

“Holy –” Venn slammed on the brakes and pulled up on the curb, triggering angry horns behind him. He thumbed the speakerphone button so that Harmony could listen.

“Tell me what’s happened,” he said.

From Clune’s breathing and from the changing sounds behind him, Venn could tell he was on the move. “They attacked the safe house,” said Clune. “Shot Detective Sickert dead. I got out the window. They’ll be looking for me, Lieutenant. They found the safe house. They’ll find me –”

“Ah, Jesus,” said Harmony.

“Where are you now?” said Venn.

“On a street somewhere. Harlem, I think.”

“You near a corner? Tell me what the signs say.”

There was a pause. “West 128
^th
Street. And, uh... Lenox Avenue.”

“Okay. We’re on our way, kid.” Venn fired the engine. “Find cover, a doorway or something, and stay put. If you see anybody approaching, Mexican or even if they’re not and they look suspicious, run. We’ll find you.”

He tossed the phone to Harmony and took off, gunning the Mustang up Eighth Avenue.

“Ah, man...” said Harmony. “Walter...”

“They’ll be closing in on the vicinity for several blocks around,” said Venn. “We’ll smash through them if we have to.”

“You think we should call for backup?” she said. “Word spreads that a cop’s down, we’ll be able to pull in the entire Manhattan force.”

“Not yet,” said Venn. “Quicker if we do it on our own.”

*

T
he phone rang again as they were heading up Central Park West toward the Cathedral parkway circle.

“Yeah, kid,” said Venn after Harmony hit the ‘receive’ key.

Clune’s voice blurted into the car:
“They’re on to me, they’re on to me –”

“Where are you?” barked Venn.