Red Eye - 02 (3 page)

Seven and Six hooted and high-fived.

Three shot One a look that said,
Children
; One just shook his head at her in return. High spirits at the end of the successful mission were permissible. Men would be men, and indeed boys would be boys.

He secured his mask back into place. “Let’s evac. Job’s done, and if God is in His heaven there’ll be hot coffee and turkey sandwiches waiting for us at the debrief.”

“I’d settle for a pint of haemoglobin,” said Four.

“Man, me too,” agreed Seven, his eyes lighting up.

And in the eyes of all of them, even One’s, there was a similar sudden glint of greed.

They all knew what their metabolisms should have: meat and drink.

They also all knew what they really wanted: something that was both meat
and
drink.

They craved it, in fact.

P
ERHAPS IT WAS
the prospect of fresh human blood. Perhaps it was the exhilaration that came with completing a potentially hazardous task.

Either way, Team Red Eye weren’t on high alert as they marched back through the system of abandoned tunnels towards their exit point, a defunct station somewhere below 9th Avenue. They had lowered their guard and weren’t paying full attention to their surroundings.

Otherwise one of them would surely have spotted the bright scarlet LED status indicator light glowing in a trackside alcove once used by subway workers to avoid oncoming trains.

And the hi-def digital camcorder to which the status indicator light belonged.

And the young woman who was holding the camcorder and who crouched in the alcove, eye to the viewfinder, hand trembling, scarcely daring to breathe as the seven heavily armed and armoured paramilitaries filed past.

CHAPTER

TWO

J
OHN
R
EDLAW WAS
in an alleyway, on his knees.

He did not like being on his knees. Not unless he was praying, which at this moment he most assuredly was not.

His knees were old knees, clicky and stiff from fifty-plus years of running, fighting, beat-pounding and general wear and tear.

They often ached. Chronic progressive cruciate ligament and meniscus damage in both of them. A doctor had once suggested the possibility of titanium replacements. Redlaw had not visited that doctor again, preferring to think that the knees God gave him at birth ought to see him out the rest of his life.

They ached particularly badly at this moment because they were buried in snow some ten inches deep. The cold and damp were making them throb.

But worse than that, the reason why Redlaw was truly not enjoying being on his knees, was the gun which was pressed against his head.

Not just any old gun, either.

A Cindermaker.

Now, there was irony.

Or, perhaps, poetic justice.

“S
O
I
’M THINKING,
” said the young man holding the Cindermaker, “all that cash you just flashed, that nice thick stack of Benjamins, you should hand it over to me. ’Cause why should an old geezer like you have so much of it, you knowum sayin’? ’Cause you’re, like, eighty, and I’m just turned eighteen. My whole life ahead of me. Got bills to pay, ho’s to lay, you get me?”

He was a white kid who dressed and spoke like a hip-hop star and went by the name of D-Funkt, which was doubtless not what his parents had christened him. He wore a huge thick quilted jacket and had a do-rag tied round his head, and a fur-trapper hat on top of that with the earflaps fastened under his chin. A silver lip ring lent him a perpetual sneer. A fuzz of beard clung to the underside of his jaw like moss.

“Whereas you, mister”—and D-Funkt ground the barrel of the Cindermaker harder still into Redlaw’s temple—“don’t got more’n a few years left. Way less than that, you don’t do like I say
right now
.”

“I don’t want any trouble,” Redlaw said, as calmly as he could.

“‘I don’t want any trouble.’” D-Funkt mimicked Redlaw’s accent badly, sounding more Australian than British. “Izzat so? Then how come you’re on the Lower East Side after dark, buying a motherfucking gun?”

“That’s all I want. The gun. I’ve paid you the amount you asked for. We have a deal.”

“Yeah, and you know what I have to say to that? ‘Fuck you, nigga’ is what I have to say to that. I don’t want to give you the goddamn gun no more. I want you to give! Me! All! Your! Money!” He accompanied the last five words with several harsh jabs of the Cindermaker that bent Redlaw’s head further and further to the side.

“All right, all right.” Redlaw reached inside his overcoat and produced his wallet. He held it out to the kid between index and middle fingers. It was, he had to admit, rather ostentatiously stuffed with dollar bills. In hindsight, he should have been more careful.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about, old man.” D-Funkt plucked the wallet from his hand. “See? Wasn’t so difficult, was it? And now I don’t haveta put a cap in yo’ wrinkly white ass. Everyone’s a winner, baby.”

He proceeded to tuck the wallet away in a pocket. For that moment, barely even a second, his attention was divided, not fully on the gun and Redlaw.

That was when Redlaw struck.

He grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the Cindermaker and twisted the gun away from his head. At the same time, he drove the elbow of his other arm into D-Funkt’s knee, hard as he could. He felt a satisfying
pop
as the patella dislocated. More satisfying was D-Funkt’s sharp, startled howl of agony.

Keeping a grip on the kid’s wrist, controlling the gun, Redlaw rose to his feet. He turned to see a once-jubilant face now crumpled in distress.

“Jesus, man!” D-Funkt blubbered. “My motherfucking knee! Oww! Jesus fucking Christ...”

Redlaw punched him in the face.

“Don’t.”

He punched him again.

“Take.”

And a third time.

“Our Saviour’s name in vain.”

D-Funkt sagged to the snow, nose broken and gushing blood. Redlaw wrenched the Cindermaker out of his numb grasp.

“Ohhh, man,” D-Funkt groaned. “Oh, God. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me no more. I’m begging you.”

“I said I didn’t want any trouble,” Redlaw said. “I gave you every chance.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Wasn’t it enough that you’re charging me a thousand dollars for this gun? How much money do you really need?”

D-Funkt mumbled something about rare imported items, backstreet deals, a guy had to do what he could to get by in this economy.

Redlaw sniffed in disdain. He reached down and groped in the kid’s pocket for his wallet. “I’ll have that back, thank you,” he said as he restored it to its rightful place in his own pocket. “And you owe me a box of Fraxinus rounds too. I believe that was included in the price.”

“There.” D-Funkt nodded to indicate the other side of his jacket. Redlaw delved into that pocket and found the box. Fifty 9mm ash-wood rounds, all present and correct.

“You want your grand back? Take it. It’s in my jeans,” D-Funkt snivelled. “Please. Just leave me alone. I ain’t gonna give you no more problems. Take it and go.”

“No. We had a deal,” Redlaw said. “And I, at least, am a man of my word. The money’s yours. You could probably do with it anyway. I’ve heard the healthcare system in this country is extortionately expensive, and you don’t look to me like the type to take out insurance.”

L
ATER, IN HIS
hotel room, Redlaw sat at the dressing table and field-stripped and cleaned the Cindermaker. As he did so, he reflected on the fact that he ought to have foreseen D-Funkt’s attempt to mug him. Really, what had he expected? It was a furtive, illegal exchange taking place in a blind alleyway in one of New York’s roughest districts. The surprise would have been if the kid
hadn’t
tried to rip him off.

Maybe I’m getting old
.

But there was no maybe about it. He
was
getting old. Every day, one step further away from the acuteness and resilience of youth. Every day, one step closer to the grave.

With deft, practised movements, Redlaw reduced the gun to its components. The guide rod and recoil spring were a little rusty, but he’d bought some oil and a lint-free cloth. He’d also bought a bore brush and some solvent to clean out the dirt and carbon build-up in the barrel. A bit of a scrub, some lubrication for the moving parts—the hammer, the trigger assembly—and he’d have the Cindermaker working as good as new.

A television bantered in the next room, a late-night chat show, the volume up too loud as if to hide something bad going on. Directly below, a man and a woman were arguing, voices escalating as their tempers rose. The heating vent in the floor wheezed, pumping out air that was lukewarm at best. The hotel, occupying a slender brownstone just south of Gramercy Park, was hardly the Ritz Carlton. But then Redlaw was on a tight budget. The Cindermaker was a hideous but necessary expense. Aside from that, he was having to make every penny count. He had plundered his savings in order to make this trip. A few thousand quid, all he had in the bank. Not much to show for thirty years’ loyal service in both Her Majesty’s constabulary and the Night Brigade, but it would have to do, because he had no income now. As far as SHADE was concerned, John Redlaw was persona non grata. If he showed his face around headquarters, he would be arrested on sight. He was on wanted lists, technically a fugitive from justice.

He had nothing.

Nothing except a promise made to a woman he’d barely known but greatly admired. A woman he might go so far as to say he had loved.

That promise and his faith were the only two things keeping him going.

And he wasn’t so sure about his faith any more.

Reassembling a gun was, Redlaw always found, a therapeutic act. Barrel into slide, slide into frame. Slotting the interlocking pieces together, like solving a jigsaw, or a crime.

When it was done, he racked the slide on the Cindermaker, checking that the action was smooth. Then he loaded the clip with Fraxinus rounds and slapped it into the magazine well.

The Cindermaker rested nice and heavy in his hand, intimately familiar, lethally fit for purpose.

Unable to take a Cindermaker of his own through customs on the transatlantic flight, Redlaw had made it his first priority on arrival to find one. Enquiries at a firearms dealership in Little Italy had met with shaken heads and puzzled frowns. British-manufactured pistol? Ash-wood bullets? Not in this country, buddy. No call for that sort of thing in the US of A, no sir. Leastways, not yet.

But a customer in the shop had overheard, and had drawn Redlaw aside and told him in a low voice that he knew a guy who could get him what he was after. It would take some greasing of the wheels, but...

A hundred-dollar arrangement fee had set up the meeting with D-Funkt in the Lower East Side alleyway.

Now Redlaw was armed. He had protection, just in case.

It was time to go looking for vampires.