Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (52 page)

Lorcan Devitt was standing outside in the porch. The afternoon was so gloomy and his rubber raincoat was so dark that all Katie could see him of was a black silhouette, except for the dull shine of the pistol that he was holding.

‘Drop the weapon, Devitt,’ she told him.

‘I will in my balls.’

‘I’ll call for an ambulance,’ she said, keeping her gun aimed directly at Lorcan Devitt’s midriff. She knew that her voice sounded shaky but she was confident that now she had the upper hand.

‘Don’t fecking bother yourself,’ snapped Ruari. ‘We’re taking my brother out of here and we’ll find our own doctor, thanks, you fecking witch.’

‘You don’t have a hope of getting away with this,’ said Katie. ‘You’ve murdered a man right in front of me.’

‘Oh yes? You just try and get yourself a conviction, Missus Detective Superintendent As-Was,’ Lorcan Devitt retorted. Then, ‘Come on, girl, I’ll lend you a hand there. Let’s get him into the car and make tracks.’

‘You need to stay where you are,’ Katie warned them. ‘I’m going to call for an ambulance now, and backup, too. You’re both under arrest.’

‘Let’s call this a Mexican stand-off,’ said Lorcan Devitt. ‘We’re taking Aengus away with us now and you’re not going to prevent us, because if you try to drop either one of us, the other one of us will drop
you
. Ruari, pick up that shooter.’

Ruari picked up Aengus’s pistol and pushed it into her pocket. Lorcan Devitt shifted his pistol to his left hand so that he could keep it pointed at Katie while he bent over and helped Ruari to drag Aengus over David’s body and on to the porch.

Katie glanced quickly down at David to make sure that he was really dead. His head was at angle so that he appeared to be looking up at the cut-glass light fixture on the ceiling. A bullet had gone directly into his right eye and blown the back of his skull off. Apart from the blood and glutinous brain matter that had sprayed over Katie, there was more of it splashed up the floral wallpaper and on to Katie’s raincoat.

Between them, Lorcan Devitt and Ruari managed to heave Aengus on to his feet. Each of them hooked one of his arms around their shoulders and between them they helped him to shuffle up the driveway. He was groaning and spluttering, but he was obviously semi-conscious at least. From the dark red patch on his trench coat Katie could see that she had hit him in the right side of his chest and had probably punctured his lung. She went out on to the porch as the three of them reached the front gate, but Lorcan Devitt had been keeping an eye on her and he turned himself around and pointed his pistol at her and called out, ‘Don’t even think about it, Detective Fecking Superintendent Fecking Maguire!’

They disappeared from sight, off to the right, but almost at once Katie heard car doors slamming and an engine starting up, so they must have parked close to her house. She hurried back inside, stepping over David’s body, and picked up her car keys from the kitchen. She knew that she should be calling for an ambulance and backup, but she was determined not to let the Duggans get away with this – the Duggans and everybody else who had allowed them to kidnap and extort money and murder two of the most promising young officers at Anglesea Street.

She ran out to her car, climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. She backed out of her driveway into the road, right in front of a van that blared its horn at her. She ignored it and pressed down hard on the accelerator pedal, heading north.

The Duggans came to kill me, she thought, as she drove faster and faster, looking up ahead for any sign of them. They came to kill me, but why? And who told them where I live?

She sped past the Passage West ferry terminal at more than 80 mph, then up ahead of her she saw tail lights. She stamped her foot down even harder and caught up with them, and then she could see that they belonged to a black Touran people carrier, the same kind of vehicle that had been used to abduct the Pearses and Eoghan Carroll.

She flashed her lights and blew her horn and swerved to the right to try and overtake it, but the Touran swerved, too, preventing her from driving past. She dropped back a little, but then she put her foot down again, right to the floor this time, and rammed the Touran as hard as she could.

There was a
bosh
! and a jolt, and the Touran slewed from side to side. Katie’s seat belt cut deeply into her shoulder, but she put her foot down yet again and collided with the Touran even harder.

This time, with its tyres screaming an operatic chorus, the Touran careered to the left and hit the end of a low concrete wall. Katie heard the shearing thump of its collision as she sped past it, and immediately pressed her foot down hard on the brake, her car sliding sideways until she stopped. She spun the steering wheel and turned around. As she drove back she groped her hand across to the passenger seat to make sure that the SIG Sauer automatic was still there.

When she reached the wreck of the Touran, however, she saw that its entire front end had been crumpled by its collision with the wall and orange flames were already licking out from underneath it. She parked on the opposite side of the road and climbed out, pushing the gun into the waistband of her skirt. There were no other cars in sight and she had left her mobile phone at home.

She crossed the road. The Touran’s windscreen had been shattered, so that it was frosted and opaque. When she looked in through the driver’s-side window, however, she could see Lorcan Devitt leaning forward over the steering wheel, which was draped with the now-deflated airbag. His eyes were closed and his grey hair was wildly awry, as if he had been given an electric shock.

She tugged the handle and the door creaked open. She gripped the sleeve of Lorcan’s black rubber raincoat and pulled it. At first she couldn’t budge him, but when she took hold of the back of his collar as well as his sleeve and pulled at him even harder, he tipped sideways out of his seat and she was able to drag him out on to the road.

The flames were now leaping even higher out of the back of the wreck and hissing and spitting in the rain. Katie tried to see in through the dark-tinted rear windows of the Touran, but all she could make out was a pale oval shape which was jerking fitfully from side to side, like somebody waving a lamp. She tried the door handle but the door was either locked or jammed, so she knocked with her knuckles on the window and shouted, ‘Ruari! Can you hear me? The door’s stuck! Can you open it from inside?’

There was no answer, so she knocked again. ‘
Ruari
!
Can you hear me
?’

Almost at once, Ruari let out a high-pitched shriek, and then another. ‘My feet are trapped! My feet are trapped under the seat! I can’t get out! My feet are trapped!’

‘Can you reach the door handle? Can you open the door?’

‘My feet are trapped! It’s so hot in here! Get us out of here! Please God get us out of here!’

Katie yanked the gun out of her waistband, gripped the barrel and hit the window with the butt. The first time she did it, she made only a star-shaped crack in the glass. She hit it again, and again, and then it shattered and dropped out, and she could see inside.

Ruari was sitting on the opposite side of the people carrier and it was her pale face that Katie had seen moving from side to side. Aengus was leaning against her shoulder. His eyes were open but it was clear that his bullet wound had left him too weak to move.

‘Get us out of here, for the love of God!’ screamed Ruari. ‘Get us out of here!’

Flames were now jumping up against the Touran’s rear window as if a pack of fiery wolves were trying to get in. The rear tyre was ablaze and Katie had to hold up her hand to shield her face from the heat. She pushed the gun back into her waistband and reached inside the broken window to find the door handle. She levered it outwards, but the door still refused to open.

‘
Get us out of here
!’ Ruari shrieked at her, and her face was like
The Scream
.

Aengus lifted his head and turned to stare at Katie as if he couldn’t understand what was happening. He opened and closed his mouth, and then he, too, let out a high, hoarse, meaningless cry. It was more like an animal, or a baby, than a man.

Katie pulled at the door handle again and again, but the door must have been shunted back into its frame by the impact of the crash. She was thinking of trying to climb over the wall and reach the door on the other side when she heard an ominous buckling sound. Burning petrol suddenly poured out over the road and the Touran’s rear window burst with the heat.

She took two or three quick steps backwards and then she turned around and ran back across the road, throwing herself down on to the high, wet, grassy embankment, among thistles and teasels.

As she did so, the Touran blew up. The blast was so powerful that the people carrier was lifted two or three feet clear of the road surface and then dropped down again with a rending crash. Katie was hit by the shock wave first, as if somebody in the street had rudely pushed her, and then she felt an oven-like wave of heat against her face.

The vehicle was now a fiercely blazing skeleton. Katie walked cautiously back across the road, but the heat was still too intense for her to go more than halfway. She saw that Lorcan Devitt had recovered consciousness, because he had crawled further away from the wreck and was now sitting up with his back against the wall, holding his head in his hands.

Inside the back of the Touran she could see both Aengus and Ruari Duggan. The explosion had probably killed both of them outright, but they were still both sitting up, their carroty curls blackened, their faces stretched with heat so that they appeared to be grinning, their raincoats on fire. They looked like two religious effigies burning on a bonfire.

Katie took out her gun again and went over to Lorcan Devitt.

‘Lorcan,’ she said, ‘give me your weapon.’

Without looking up at her, Lorcan Devitt reached inside his raincoat and handed it to her, butt first.

‘Do you have a mobile phone on you, Lorcan?’

Lorcan Devitt fumbled in another pocket and then passed her an iPhone. If anybody living around here had heard the Touran exploding, and seen the flames, she guessed they would have called the emergency services already, but all the same she pressed out 112.

‘They’re dead, then, the terrible twins?’ said Lorcan Devitt, still without raising his eyes.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Oh well. Always had it coming to them, I suppose. They thought they were magic, but nobody’s magic, are they, Detective Superintendent Maguire?’

‘No, Lorcan, nobody’s magic.’

Katie called the fire brigade and the ambulance service, and then she rang Inspector Fennessy.

‘Liam?’ she said. ‘DS Maguire.’

‘DS Maguire?’ he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

‘Liam, the Duggans have just come after me.’

‘What?’

She stood in the road beside Lorcan Devitt while the soft rain fizzled on the burned-out wreck of the Touran. Trying to keep her voice steady, she told Inspector Fennessy everything that had happened and told him to send out at least two patrol cars and a technical team. ‘The Duggans are dead, Liam. Even if that call that Kyna took was nothing but a hoax, you still don’t have to hand over the ransom money. I very much doubt if anybody will turn up to collect it, not now.’

‘Jesus,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘I’d better call Molloy.’

‘No, don’t,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll come into the station later and tell him all about it myself, if he’s still there.’

‘He’s not here at the station at the moment, but he’s bound to hear about it. I’ll have to call MacCostagáin and even if McCostagain doesn’t tell him, the media will be swarming all over you like flies before you know it.’

‘I’m sure he
will
hear about it, Liam, before I get the chance to tell him. But I still want to tell him to his face. You don’t get many chances in life to get your own back, but this is one of them.’

The skin on the right side of her face was beginning to feel tight, so when she had made all the calls she needed to she switched on the iPhone’s camera and looked at herself. Below her right cheekbone there was an S-shaped swirl of dried blood, David’s blood, with several tiny fragments of bone stuck to it, ike some kind of primitive face decoration.

Her stomach knotted with nausea, but she swallowed hard and the feeling of sickness subsided. She pushed the iPhone into her pocket and pointed her gun stiff-armed at Lorcan Devitt.

‘Stay there,’ she told him. ‘Don’t even think about moving.’

‘Oh, I will, yeah.’

She crossed the road to her car, took a pack of wet-wipes out of the glovebox and sat in the driving seat, still pointing the gun at Lorcan Devitt with her right hand but rubbing her cheek over and over again with a tissue, so hard that it hurt.

***

It was past midnight before the fire brigade had finished making sure that the burned-out wreck was no longer a fire hazard and an ambulance had arrived to check that Lorcan Devitt had suffered no serious injuries and would not need hospital treatment. The two paramedics peered with morbid curiosity at the incinerated bodies in the back seat of the Touran, but they didn’t touch them. Aengus and Ruari were so badly charred that it would take a pathology specialist to remove them without damaging them too severely.

Four Garda patrol cars turned up, too. Two officers handcuffed Lorcan Devitt and drove him off to Anglesea Street, to be charged and detained. Four others cordoned off the crash site, set up reflective signs in the road and directed what little traffic there was. They also called a tow-truck from Glanmire to winch up the Touran off the road and take it to the Technical Bureau garage at the back of Anglesea Street.

A plump middle-aged female garda drove Katie home, while her partner followed them in Katie’s Focus. Katie said nothing to her all the way back. The shock of what had happened was beginning to make her feel shivery and weak, and when they arrived outside her house she barely had the strength to walk inside. The female garda held on to her elbow to help her.