Dictator

72

Just across the road, Carver saw a grocery store. It was about as basic as a shop could get – a single room, open to the street, with steel shutters at the front that could be drawn across like garage doors at the end of the day. He made his way smartly towards it, aware that he was being followed, the men fanning out behind him to block any possible attempt to run his way out of trouble. The man giving the orders was walking in the middle of the line. He sported a scraggly goatee beard and moustache and was wearing an old olive-green army shirt, unbuttoned over a black vest. He was about thirty yards away now. At a steady walking pace, that gave Carver around fifteen seconds’ start.

As he got closer to the store, Carver saw that a grey-haired old boy was sitting on a white plastic garden-chair to one side of the entrance. In front of him was a waist-high wooden counter. Cardboard boxes were piled up against the counter and along the side walls. Most of them were still taped shut, but the ones on the top row had been opened to reveal their contents. In the ones nearest him, Carver spotted a random collection of eggs – some regular, some pale blue, some covered in what looked like green mould – dried mushrooms, abalone and starfish, long-leaf Chinese lettuces in clear plastic bags, cooking sauces in glass bottles and folded cotton dishcloths. Above these boxes was an equally disordered collection of vegetables, dried goods and even sweets hung in plastic bags from hooks whose top ends were attached to metal rails suspended from the ceiling.

Behind the shopkeeper’s head, so that he could not look in it without turning round and craning his neck, was a mirror in which it was possible to see almost the whole interior of the shop. Two narrow lines of bare metal shelves – dirt-cheap free-standing units, rising above head-height – stretched about fifteen feet back to front through the store, creating three very narrow aisles, one by each of the two side walls and the third down the centre. There was a door in the far wall, opposite the centre aisle. Carver was counting on that leading to a rear exit from the building. Without it, he had no way out.

He walked into the store and started assembling his weapons. He picked up three of the sauce bottles, placed them on top of one of the dishcloths, then closed the corners of the cloth over them and twisted the ends so that the bottles were tightly trapped in the cloth. Now he had a crude but effective club. Keeping it tightly clasped in his left hand, he reached up with his right and unhooked a large net filled with bulbs of garlic. Carver removed the net and was left holding the hook in his right hand.

The only other customers in the store were a couple of middle-aged women a few feet away, who were chattering over a display of dried chillis arrayed by the side wall of the shop. Without any warning, making the change in his demeanour as extreme as possible, Carver took two paces towards them, raised the hook menacingly and shouted, ‘Bad men coming! Get out! Get out now!’

They glared defiantly at him and did not budge. One of them started shouting at him in Chinese. He got the feeling she wasn’t exactly passing the time of day. Carver didn’t have time to argue. He swept the hook along the shelf to his right, sending glass jars filled with something that looked like white testicles floating in brine crashing to the floor at the women’s feet. The one who’d been shouting shut up. The other one gave a little scream. Carver raised his hook at them again and this time they took the hint, hurrying past him, neither of them even as tall as his shoulder, out into the street.

As he watched them go, he could see that the five men were closing in on the shop. They were barely five yards away, walking with the steady, purposeful gait of professionals going about their business. Carver saw the shopkeeper catch sight of them, too, glance back at him, then dive beneath the countertop. Very sensible, Carver thought. Now it was his turn to save his skin.

He backed away to his left, into the aisle furthest away from the shopkeeper’s counter, letting the men come towards him. The aisle was so narrow, there would only be room for one man at a time to attack him.

Unless, of course, they came from two different directions at once.

The man in the army shirt pointed down the centre aisle and two men stepped towards it. They were going to try to outflank him. The leading man was dressed in jeans and a pale-grey hoodie top. The one behind him had on a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans from which a chain hung loosely. Wherever Carver went in the world, the punks always seemed to look the same.

Two more men stepped into the aisle where Carver was standing: a gaudy, short-sleeved floral shirt and a camouflage T-shirt. The one in the camo had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. His pal wore metal-framed aviator shades.

Carver backed away from them.

As he went, he glanced up into the mirror. The two men in the centre aisle, the hoodie and the black T-shirt, were almost level with him.

Carver kept moving back. The men in his aisle kept pace with him, not closing the gap, waiting for the trap to close behind him.

Out of the corner of his right eye, Carver was looking at the goods on the shelves beside him. There were jars of herbs; more jars of some indeterminate bits of beige gristle with a picture of a snarling shark stuck to the glass; tins of vegetables… none of this was of any use to Carver. He was being backed all the way to the end of the aisle. He didn’t have any room for manoeuvre.

Then he saw packets of tea, racked from top to bottom.

Carver glanced back up at the mirror, stopped walking backwards and moved closer to the shelf till his right shoulder was almost touching the packets of tea. Then, still holding on to the hook, he smashed his right hand through the tea and out the far side of the shelf. He swung it forward and felt the impact as the end of the hook drove into the soft flesh at the base of the hoodie’s neck. He heard a gurgling yelp of pain and pulled the hook hard back towards him, slamming the hoodie into the far side of the shelf.

One down.

Carver let go of the hook, switched the bundled-up sauce jars to his right hand and in the same movement swung his right arm like a tennis backhand at the ponytailed punk in the camouflage T-shirt. The guy swayed back, but not enough to evade the blow entirely, and Carver hit him just above the right eye, drawing blood and making him stagger backwards. Carver drew back his arm and swung again, in a brutal downward chopping motion, hitting the forearm the man raised to protect himself, hearing the crack of a bone and then driving the heel of his left hand into the side of his face.

That was another man downed, for now at least. But it was also the end of the good news.

Carver felt a throat-tightening, nauseating shock of pain on the point of his left shoulder and realized that he wasn’t the only one smart enough to use a weapon. The dandy in the floral shirt and shades had flung one of the shark jars at him and was reaching for another.

Carver dived forward, rugby-tackling the dandy to the ground, then reaching out to grab his head and smash it into the shop’s tiled floor.

Behind him, he could hear scuffling as the fourth man rounded the far end of the shelf and came dashing towards him. Carver rolled on to his back and kicked out, catching an oncoming knee with his heel. The man in the black T-shirt staggered back a couple of paces, giving Carver the fractional amount of space and time he needed to spring to his feet and leap upwards to catch the suspended rail above his head, swing forward and hit Mr Black T-shirt smack in the face with both feet, sending him careering into several boxes of iced seafood lined up along the back wall.

Carver kept moving, allowing the momentum of the swing to pull his legs forward and up, letting go of the rail and executing a backward somersault, like a gymnast dismounting a high bar. A gymnast, of course, aims to land in a perfect upright position, with his feet close together. Carver, however, stumbled when his feet hit the floor and fell forward.

That was what saved his life.

The fifth man, the leader of the group in the army shirt, had evidently tired of the low-tech approach. If he couldn’t take Carver alive, he would have to take him dead. He’d reached round to the back of his trousers, pulled out the gun shoved inside the waistband and fired two shots that missed Carver’s head by inches and instead hit his pal in the black T-shirt, who had just been extracting himself from the seafood display and was staggering to his feet.

The group leader didn’t seem to care. He fired again, and Carver had to fling himself forward and scramble on all fours round the end of the aisle as bullets smashed into jars, ricocheted off the metal shelving and dug craters in the floor tiles. He got to his feet, came round the far side of the shelving, almost slipping on the blood that had spurted from his first victim’s neck wound, then hurled himself against the nearest shelf-unit with all his strength, pumping his legs to overcome the dead weight of all the goods stacked upon it until finally it toppled over, deluging the man in the army shirt in a hail of jars, cans and cardboard packets.

The men who’d come to take him were all down. But not all of them would stay that way.