Fade to Black (35 page)

“Holy shit!” Arthur yelled, pulling the car dangerously to the left into long grass.

Arthur’s passenger covered his face, obviously expecting the car to plough into some unseen obstacle. Arthur recovered the car from the wet, grassy verge and straightened it on the road, just as a car flashed past travelling in the opposite direction.

“
Arthur
,” the voice said, “
you didn’t think this was all a free ride, did you? I mean, there are
consequences
to be borne!
”

“Consequences?”

“
Of course! You know that stuff about ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’? It’s physics, man. You can’t mess with that!
”

Arthur broke into a sweat. “Meaning?
”

“
Well, you killed people, so people are going to try and kill you! An eye for an eye and all that; it’s only fair! I must admit, I agree with the Bible on that one
.”

Arthur looked in his rearview mirror; he could see nothing. “These rats of yours,” he said, “what can they do against your old friend?”

“
Kill him, I hope! Here in this space and time is the only place I can really get him. Thanks to you, Arthur, and that St. Clair bitch for letting me know where they are, I’m about to change the nature of the universe! I probably owe you a drink
.”

*****

The big Triumph howled down the highway like an oncoming tornado, the pan-flat Salisbury Plain now a blur. “Are you going to try and beat them to the intersection?” Allie asked, looking back and forth from the motorcycles to the road junction. It would be horribly close.

“It’s all we can do. If we don’t, it could get messy.” Stopping wasn’t an option, so they went for it. It got messy.

The Ducati riders beat them by a second to the point where the A303 intersected Countess Road. A huge silver milk tanker, ablaze with lights, also arrived from the north. Neither Michael nor Allie had seen it coming; their attention had been on the riders.

The Ducati rats lay their bikes down at high speed, slithering, scraping and cartwheeling across the intersection in a screaming barrier of bodies and metal. Hitting the big disk brakes of the Rocket Three, Michael threw it into a sideways drift. Red machines, some upright, some at crazy angles, flew at them, missing by inches. Allie felt Michael absorb some type of impact and pieces of metal tore at her jacket. Fragments of fiberglass, leather and body parts whirled through the air as time slowed. A fine, blood-red mist sprayed her helmet’s visor. More motorbikes hurtled at them. Inexplicably, the tanker also rolled across the intersection and stopped, blocking the road ahead. Motorcycle wheels, exhaust pipes and broken fittings pinged off the road and the sides of the battered Triumph in a shower of sparks and chrome.

“Hold tight!” Michael yelled.

He leaned the bike down on its right side and slid it under the stationary tanker. Allie’s helmet clanged against low-hanging metal and the road tore at her right leg, but she hung on. Sparks from the bike lit up the night as they emerged on the far side of the truck. Somehow, Michael stood the bike up again. Allie knew it was a feat of impossible strength.

The impact as they hit the blue car head on was unlike anything she had experienced. Her helmet mashed itself against Michael’s back and crumbled to nothing as they were catapulted over the roof of the car. Her breath smashed out of her, the road, then the sky, then the road again, filled her vision. This was it. Images of her crash just two nights ago came rushing back. She thought of her sister and brother and of her little friend, Isabelle, killed all those years ago in the waterskiing accident. She said, “Sorry, Jacinta,” aloud and closed her eyes.

The impact with the hard, black bitumen never came. Opening her eyes, she found herself gently hovering, perhaps a hundred feet above Stonehenge. She was dead and the druids would be coming for her in a moment.

“Don’t get too carried away, although I guess you just have been.”

Michael. He held her aloft. Her helmet was gone and a gentle breeze ruffled her hair. She looked down again at the ancient stone obelisks. Of course! They were on Salisbury Plain. The intersection was just down the road from the famous ancient site. They descended gently into a green, grassy field, the lights from broken motorcycles and the milk tanker stabbing the darkness at crazy angles.

“The people in the car…?” she asked Michael.

“They’re ok. Unconscious and with laps full of broken glass and the headlight from my bike, but otherwise, they’re fine.”

“Am I in some kind of shock? Because I feel
good
,” she said, checking out her limbs for the second time that week. She looked up at him and saw that he wasn’t, though. “Oh my God, you’re bleeding!

“I suppose I am,” he said, feeling his cheekbone. “Half of an exhaust pipe from one of those Ducatis tore through my helmet.”

Her hand flew to her mouth as she saw blood soaking through his shirt.

“Michael, is that yours?” She reached a hand out to comfort him, but he stepped back.

“Yes, it’s mine. Something very sharp is in my chest. We’d better get this job done fast, Allie.”

She gasped and turned away, emotion welling up in her own chest. “Michael, I don’t know what to say! Can you
die from this
? Looking down at his increasingly red, sodden shirt, he shook his head.

“It’ll take a hell of a lot more than this. C’mon, let’s go.” He strode off toward the carnage at the T-intersection.

Reaching the road, they each picked their way through the wreckage. Some of the rats were stirring, while others lay very broken and dead in crooked piles. Michael heaved a rat off a bike.

“This one’s alright. You ride this.” He kicked down its stand and searched for another bike. He found one with a faring hanging off, but otherwise rideable. It started easily. Allie fumbled with the gears on hers, never having ridden a Ducati before. It started and ran well enough. None of the bikes had pillion seats, so there was no option but to ride separately and that meant she was vulnerable. She checked her watch, which miraculously, hadn’t been torn from her. It was 11:25 p.m.

Cars arrived from various directions. She booted the sports bike, all safety considerations relegated to the back of her mind. There was no time to worry about helmets and speed limits. They pushed the lightweight bikes as fast as they could go, Allie keeping up with Michael through all but the tightest turns. The route to the Festival site was convoluted. Despite its name, the Festival itself wasn’t at Glastonbury. It was held on a farm at a little place called Pilton. They shot past the hamlets of Corsley Health and Tytherington and a dozen others with quaint names, riding the red racers to their limit on the narrow, twisting roads. Mercifully, the rain eased, then stopped. A bevy of police cars and a solitary ambulance with lights and sirens activated, passed them, travelling at speed in the opposite direction. Allie knew where they were headed. Rounding a sweeping curve, they saw Shepton Mallet in the distance. Allie knew this place; it was not far now to the festival site.

*****

Jacinta Wilkinson supposed it was oxygen deprivation that had caused her to sleep. That or shock. She woke as music invaded her little prison. She tried to stretch her legs, but of course, the confines of the box precluded that. Her back ached abominably and her neck was frozen in the chin-down position. The car motor was still running and she heard muffled conversation. She heard ‘ok’ and ‘through there.’ The car moved off over rough ground. The music was louder now.

The hubbub of a large crowd sounded some distance away. She banged her head as the car lurched through a dip in the road. Someone talking over a loud speaker in the distance clearly said ‘Coldplay.’ Three hours travel, music, Coldplay. She could be nowhere else. They had taken her somewhere very close to the Glastonbury Music Festival.

The car moved slowly on before rocking over even rougher terrain, the bottom scraping the ground. Tree branches buffeted and screeched against the side of the car, then the sound of bubbling water. The pitch of the motor dulled then fell silent. The steep angle of the car caused the box that held her to slide and smash against another object in the trunk. Sharp pain shot through her back. The stench in the car intensified. The vehicle rocked again and two doors slammed. She heard splashing, then an acrid, unmistakable eye-stinging smell forced its way into her prison. Petrol.

She held her breath to block out the odor. She listened, not daring to make a sound. But nobody came for her. Despair took hold. Nobody was going to save her. Tears flooded down her cheeks and her breathing came hard. The band played on.

11:50 p.m.

Allie and Michael rode too slowly through hordes of Festival-goers, dodging new-age hippies, kids in wheelbarrows and painted, wandering minstrels. They moved towards the main entrance, but they were chewing up time. The crowd thickened even more, so they threw down their bikes in the oozing mud and sprinted the rest of the way, pushing people roughly aside. A Festival policeman saw the ruckus as they approached and called his colleague to assist him. The two policemen moved to the centre of the track to intercept Michael and Allie. She thrust her warrant card at them before they spoke.

“DCI St. Clair and DC ..Michaels, from London!”

The senior of the two policemen, a sergeant, acknowledged her. “Right, you are—we were told you were coming, but we’d thought you’d take a little longer. You did well to get through that nasty pileup near Amesbury so quickly.”

“Yes, well, indeed.” She looked at Michael, who gazed around nonchalantly.

“There’s been no sign of the blue Mercedes, Wendell or DC Wilkinson, presumably?” she asked, looking from one officer to the other.

“No, not yet,” said the thinner, junior officer holding up the photos on his clipboard. “Although, we had to send some cars and officers up to the accident, as you would imagine.”

“How many officers do you have left here on site looking for them?”

‘‘I’d say about eight in total.” Eight men—it was nothing.

She ran her hand through her hair, realizing it must look wild and wooly after the helmetless ride. Still, she supposed she’d fit in here at the festival, motorcycle leathers and all. Looking at Michael, she realized he was not out of place either. “That’s not a lot of resources,” she said, staring out over the grounds. “This Festival is much bigger than I’d imagined.”

“Gets bigger every year,” the younger officer advised cheerfully.

“Presumably, your officers back at the crash site are alert to the possibility that the Mercedes might yet go through there?”

“They are, ma’am.”

Allie flashed a tight smile. “Sorry, of course they are.” The younger officer grinned back very enthusiastically.

“One last question and I’ll try not to insult you. We believe our suspect is here or
will
be here to see the Jase Britt's Midnight Show, as you’re aware. Do you have men stationed near his stage?”

The two policemen looked at each other again, clearly embarrassed. The sergeant spoke up. “No, we do not. Nobody’s mentioned that Jase Britt's show was important at all, ma’am.”

Allie and Michael got directions to the huge stage where Britt would perform. The two policemen had simply pointed to the one hundred-foot high white cross that dominated the centre of the quagmire that was the Worthy Farm. She instructed the sergeant to radio his remaining men and deploy them to the stage area immediately. She and Michael ran hard through the mud and slush, the white cross farther away than it first appeared.

Chapter Twenty

Diamond Ray Riley was in his element. He was living his dream—show business. His new management contract with Jase Britt gave him that opportunity in spades. The methods by which he had coerced Britt into signing with him were not common knowledge, but more than a few music industry ‘heavies’ were dismayed at the news that Ray Riley had entered the business; it was corrupt and nasty enough already. Britt’s ‘Christian’ branding added something as well, besides irony. Backstage at Glastonbury, he felt the tension that precedes a big show. He stayed close to Britt while roadies and guitar technicians fussed about, swearing and doing last-minute checks. He peeked through the curtains at the crowd for the sixth time.

Thousands of expectant kids, sparkly-eyed, wholesome-looking mums and dads and bombed-out teenagers stood or sat in the cold rain and the squelchy black mud. Christianity was nothing if not a broad church. Many in the crowd were already holding aloft the little battery-operated, plastic white crosses that they would illuminate at Britt’s command during the show. Riley looked to the rear of the crowd enclosure at the one-hundred-foot-high crane that swayed like a giant articulated beanstalk. The camera mounted in its bucket would provide a brilliant overview of the concert.

Images from that and the three onstage cameras would be fed to the mobile recording studio parked immediately behind the three-story stage. His company, Firestone Music, would release the live DVD of the show within the month. Riley had millions of dollars outlaid on the kid and it was about to pay off big time.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Arthur Wendell, carrying a can of coke and a broad smile, greeted him as he turned.

“Arthur! Very pleased you came. Didn’t think you would after last night’s ‘altercation’ between you and our boy. Mind you, son, I wouldn’t creep up behind me like that again if I was you!”

“Sorry, Mr. Riley,” Arthur said, looking about the stage. “I wouldn’t have missed this though. By the look of the crowd, Britt is going to make a fortune for you!”

Riley grinned broadly. “You better believe it, sunshine. Who’d have thought, eh? Diamond Ray Riley and the new Messiah, joined at the hip!”

Arthur flinched as Mr. Black said,
“Joined at the hip pocket anyway.”