The Magpye: Circus (12 page)

"I can help you."

"No, Grace, all you can do is
help yourself. You're a parasite too. You've lived off my family
for generations, weaving us all into your story, keeping yourself
alive through us."

Adam swung the pipe again,
hitting Grace in the torso, lifting her bodily up from the floor.
She came down hard, her head slamming against the hard concrete
floor.

"How many years, Grace? How
many different Kings have you taken to your bed to bear their
children? How long have you been using us?"

Grace struggled to her feet. A
cut above her eye was leaking more dark, inky blood down her face.
Her tattoos were slipping towards it, and towards the gash in her
knee, leaking out across her skin. Rats, leaving a sinking ship.
Looking down at herself, she tried to scoop them up, smearing
handfuls of ink across her flesh. She was shrinking, and ageing,
before Adam's eyes.

"Since the beginning," replied Grace, her voice no longer
the soft and self
-
assured purr that it
had been, but now the cracked cackle of a crone. "There were no
Kings before me. I started this whole story. I started your story
too, my son."

"Whore," Adam replied flatly,
and brought the pipe down onto Grace's head so hard that it split
cleanly in two almost to her nose. She dropped to her knees, a
sound like wind leaving her, before she fell face first to the
floor. Underneath her, the ink that had been her blood moved like a
flat fish, slithering and sliding across the floor until it found a
crack and started to ooze its way to freedom.

"What was she?" asked Able,
unaccustomed to speaking like this inside his own head.

"A story," replied Adam. "Maybe
the oldest story there is."

"She called you 'son'"

"Long story."

"Are you really Adam King? What
are you doing in my head?"

"Longer story still. I'll tell
you everything later. Right now, we've got a King to kill."

Able Quirk felt the thing he
called Magpye stir, somewhere deep in the undercurrents of his
shared mind. The ghosts, to a dead man, lay silent. Able felt
Adam's mind close, folding over on itself so that, without warning,
there was suddenly an "inside" that Able was not a part of. He
found himself drifting on the currents of the river of memory, just
another ghost, his ties to the physical severed without
warning.

"Wait!" he shouted.

But Adam King wasn't listening.
As he'd said, he had a King to kill, and it seemed he could do it
without Able Quirk.

Owen woke up and pain ran
instantly through his shattered eye socket like a bolt of
lightning. He didn't scream this time, but only because Taylor had
stuffed a dirty rag into his mouth. He felt it pushing against the
back of his throat, threatening to choke him if he struggled too
much. His hands were both cuffed now, his arms tight into the small
of his back, a metal pipe digging in between his shoulder blades.
Taylor hadn't needed to secure his ankles, White's busted leg was
numb now and stubbornly refused to move. There was an awkward kink
in it that shouldn't have been there and White knew that it was
only numb as an alternative to hurting like all hell. Crippled,
tied, gagged, White's one remaining eye swivelling manically in its
socket, scanning his surroundings.

He was at the same intersection
that he had been. The detective in him slipped into crime scene
mode and noted the absence of his eyeball. No sign of Taylor, but
the trap was clearly set. His screams, that would bring them.

Cops without a family became a
family. That was the mistake, the flaw in the plan. The blood shed
on the streets made bonds of its own.

Owen twisted his head towards
the sound of gunfire. Three shots at a time. Pop pop pop, pop pop
pop. It was Rogers, it had to be. The guy's aim was like nothing
White had ever seen, and he always shot in threes. Two in the
chest, one in the head. Two in the chest, one in head. White had
never seen Rogers pull his gun other than on the range, but
practice did make perfect.

Rogers was getting closer.

Owen kicked with his one good
leg and tried to drag himself out of the corridor. If Rogers saw
him, he was dead.

***

Adam King walked calmly through
the paper mill. He'd never been here before. When you owned as much
property as the Kings, you were unlikely to set foot in even a
fraction of it. Above him, he could hear gunshots and shouting,
following them was as good a direction as any.

Submerged in his own mind, Able watched carefully. Adam was
no fighter, that was for certain. He had pulled Malcolm forward and
was letting him do the work, pistols raised and barrels hot. For
his part, Malcolm had not disappointed. Over the past six months
the mysterious
Englishman
had become
more and more blood thirsty. Thankfully, Cane King seemed to have
an almost endless supply of thugs and trigger men for Malcolm to
sate his appetite on.

The other ghosts muttered and
whispered but, for the first time since he could really remember,
Able couldn't really hear them. Somehow, they were keeping their
thoughts shielded from him. Or Adam.

***

Pop, pop, pop. Chest, chest,
head.

Rogers worked his way
methodically through Cane King's men. They were untrained, sloppy
and confused. Tough, sure, and certainly scary. In the chaos of a
street fight they'd be dangerous, but in the narrow corridors and
cramped rooms of the paper mill they were getting in each other's
way, tripping each other up and cutting across their lines of
fire.

"You think King's cleaning
house?"

Pop, pop, pop. Chest, chest,
head.

"What do you mean?"

"He's supposed to be a smart
guy, you think he'd pick a battlefield that would suit his
forces."

Rogers rolled his eyes. Hartley was a smart guy too, and a
genius when it came to computers, but he had a hard time accepting
that anyone didn't think the way he did. There were times when it
made him the best cop in the world, almost as analytical as Rosa,
but with an ability to see not just what was there but what
wasn't
. Inconsistencies stood out to Hartley like fireworks in
the night sky. A great talent for a cop when he was interviewing a
suspect, or checking witness statements, but a liability in a
fire-fight. Rogers knew that White had partnered him up with
Hartley for just this reason, just like he had partnered Rigby and
Cooper. He'd spread his soldiers out thin, trying to keep everyone
alive.

Not that it had helped Lee
Grice.

Pop, pop, pop. Chest, chest,
head.

"Not everyone thinks that way,
Hartley,"

Bang. Hartley took out one of
King's men, the big .45 he insisted on carrying tearing the side of
the guy's head off and splattering his brains up the wall.

"Lucky for us."

Rogers smiled. Maybe the
soldiers weren't spread as thin as he thought.

"Come on, this way. This
corridor should take us straight to the others, we can press on
from there."

"Perfect place for an
ambush."

Rogers rolled his eyes.

***

Nutt checked his watch. The
minutes were moving by slower than he'd liked, but White's orders
had been clear. Stay in place, make sure nobody leaves. Radio
silence for twenty minutes, then check in. If they were still
alive, Nutt stayed in place to make sure that reinforcements didn't
show up. If they were dead, then he got out of there and didn't
look back until he hit the next city.

"Doesn't make sense," muttered
Nutt. "They need me in there."

Of course, it did make sense.
Owen White and Rosa Blind had sat down with a map of a disused
paper mill and planned the murder of one of the most famous men in
America. The Clean Squad, the incorruptible cops, had turned
dirtier than the criminals they had been sent to hunt. And it was
Nutt's fault.

White hadn't said it, none of
them had, but he knew they were thinking it.

White had partnered them up
carefully, putting the thinkers with the fighters, trying to pair
everyone up with someone who could watch their backs. Nutt was
supposed to have Grice's back and so it was on Nutt that Grice had
ended up cut to pieces and delivered to the precinct in a duffel
bag. It was on Grice that good cops had put away their badges and
pulled on body armour to hunt down a man on the say so of the
dirtiest cop in the precinct.

Grice's death had broken them,
and Grice's death was all on Nutt.

Nutt checked his watch again.
Fifteen minutes.

"Screw it," he said resolutely,
and slung his rifle over his shoulder. "This is for Grice."

***

Owen yanked hard on the cuffs,
trying to pull himself away from the wall. Behind him the pipe
groaned but refused to budge. He could feel the cuffs cutting into
the flesh of his wrists, feel the warm trickles of blood down
between his fingers. He wondered if breaking his wrist would let
him get his hand out, and if he even had the strength to it.

Pop, pop, pop. Bang. Rogers was
getting closer. It sounded like Hartley was still alive too, his
ridiculous .45 picking off the Kingsmen that Roger's didn't. Rogers
was a hell of a shot, fast too, and methodical. He clocked more
hours in the firing range than any of them, even Cooper (and Cooper
had liked guns a lot). Owen let himself believe that there was a
chance that Taylor's trap would backfire, just a chance, and got
back to work on his cuffs.

Pop, pop, pop. Bang. Bang. Pop,
pop, pop.

Owen wondered how many people
actually worked for Cane King. At the rate that Rogers and Hartley
were cutting through them, he was going to have a hell of a
recruitment drive come morning. If he was alive, that was.

"Holy shit!"

Rogers and Hartley came through
the doors nearest to White. Hartley's eyes bulged when he saw
White's injuries. White grunted, howled, tried to scream, but the
rag stuffed in his mouth blocked the sound. Swinging his gun left
and right, Rogers came down the corridor, Hartley close behind
him.

Crouching down, Rogers pulled
the rag out of White's mouth while Hartley covered him.

"Trap!" spat White, "It's a
trap, get out of here now!"

"I knew it," said Hartley, just
before a bullet passed through the top of his head and blew off his
jaw. He dropped to his knees, his tongue flapping around as he
tried to say something, then fell forward and lay dead on the
floor.

Rogers rolled onto his back and
put three rounds into the ceiling before scrambling to the opposite
side of the corridor from White.

"Jack Taylor…" panted White.
"Rigged some sort of explosive and took us out."

"Us? You mean the others are
gone?"

"Rosa, Terry, Reg, yeah. Rosa
got killed in the explosion, Taylor got the other too."

"Christ."

Rogers twitched as something
shifted in the ceiling above them. He fired another two rounds in
the direction of the sound.

"You think you got him?"

"I've got no idea," said Rogers
tersely. "I prefer a target I can see."

"You think you can get this
pipe off the wall?" asked White. "I'm cuffed."

Rogers stole a glance at the
pipe, only daring to take his eyes away from the ceiling for a
moment.

"Looks pretty solid, I'm going
to need something to prise it off with."

"Forget it," said White. "Just
get the hell out of here. This whole thing was a set-up. They knew
we'd come after them for Grice, and they were ready for us."

Rogers didn't answer. Cooper
might have been the one who said it, but it had been Owen White's
incandescent fury that had brought them all here. They were all
caught in his wake, they had been since the day they came here, and
now they were drowning.

"Cane King's here," said
Rogers. "I heard one of his guys talking on a radio. If Taylor's
here too, we can cut the head off this whole organisation. We can
do it tonight."

Owen pulled against his cuffs
again. The pipe shifted with a creak.

"I've got one eye, a busted
leg, and I'm cuffed to a pipe."

Rogers smiled. "OK,
I
can do it tonight.
But you're doing the paperwork tomorrow."

"I'd rather die," quipped
White. "Get the hell out of here, Pete. For me."

Rogers stood and crept slowly
along the wall back towards the door he'd come through.

"I'll get Nutt, we'll come back
for you."

White smiled. He knew he'd be
dead by the time Rogers got back, but it didn't matter. Denied his
prize, Taylor had no need to keep White alive, and that suited
White just fine. At least moving, Rogers had a chance. Taylor was a
sneaky son of a bitch, but Rogers…

The bullet came through the
glass at the top of the swing doors and cut through Rogers' throat,
spraying arterial blood into White's face. Gurgling, clutching his
neck, Rogers staggered back. He tried to raise his gun, but the
strength was already draining out of his body. He put three rounds
into the floor as Taylor calmly walked in and put his gun up to
Roger's forehead.

Pop, pop, pop.

Bang.

"You son of a bitch!" shouted
White as Rogers collapsed in front of him. Blood spread from
underneath his body, soaking into White's trousers. He realised
that Taylor was clutching his side, and saw a patch of blood
spreading there too.

"He got you, didn't he?" said
White, a grin starting to spread across his face.

"Shut up," replied Taylor,
bringing his gun down hard on White's temple, sending him
spiralling into unconsciousness once again.