Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Tankard wasn't going to quit. Maybe if he made her a bit jealous? So he told her a story that was half true about a party he'd gone to back when he was in the police academy.

'I crack on to this chick, things hot up, I take her home, she goes, "Lose the threads," so I start getting my gear off, and then she goes-'

'Stop the car!'

Startled, he braked sharply. They were patrolling at the bottom end of High Street. The shops were sparser here. There was a bank, a pub, a real estate agency, an anonymous two-storey building with Lister Financial Services painted on the window. Even though it was Friday there was almost no one around.

'What?' Tankard said, glancing up and down, looking for the problem.

Nothing that he could see. 'What's got your bloomers in a twist? Or do you call them knickers? Scanties?'

'I need to see someone,' Pam said.

'Who?'

'Just someone,' she said irritably. 'I'll only be five minutes.'

And she got out, leaving him double-parked. He watched her dart across the road and into Lister Financial Services.

Tankard sank back into his seat. Tattered, sun-faded Christmas decorations still clung to a power pole. A gritty wind was gusting. The manhunt for Ian Munro was three days old but no one in Waterloo seemed bothered about it. An old man pedalled by on a bicycle hung with string bags crammed full of plastic shopping bags. Two teenagers were slumped, smoking, on a bench outside a struggling record shop, a sign saying 'This Business For Sale Inquire Within' pasted to the glass. A little red Golf drove carefully around the police van, an elderly woman at the wheel, disabled-parking sticker on her windscreen. He saw her brake in the street ahead of him and look with apparent longing at the disabled-parking bay outside the bank.

It was occupied.

'Stiff titty, love,' Tankard murmured, and he began to crack his knuckles for want of anything better to do.

Something niggled at him, somewhere in the back corner of his consciousness…

He turned toward the bank again. The vehicle parked in the disabled-parking bay was a chunky-looking Ford pickup. Nothing immediately remarkable about it except it didn't feel right, for some reason. Then he knew: your disabled person usually drove something a bit easier and tamer, like your little Jap job, or your Golf. For your average disabled person, driving an F100 would be like driving a truck.

Check out the disabled-parking spots, Kellock had said, and John Tankard, who had scoffed at the time, now thought there was something in the senior sergeant's theory of the self-selecting crim.

He backed up, waited for another parked car to leave, and swung the police van in next to the F100.

That had been a mistake, he realised later. A lot of grief might have been saved if he'd had the brains to pull in behind the F100 and block it in.

He got out, sauntered toward the rear of the big pickup, and noted the numberplate. Then he wandered around to the front, checked out the windscreen.

No disabled-parking sticker.

'Right, I'll have you, mate,' he muttered with satisfaction, returning to the van to call it in.

That's when he noticed a movement in the pickup. He paused, turned toward it for a closer look, and saw what he hadn't seen earlier, owing to the high sides of the vehicle's cab: a man stretched out along the seat, apparently reaching down for something in the passenger-side footwell. The window was partly open. Tankard came closer and tapped on the glass.

'Sir? Excuse me, sir?'

The man stiffened. What the hell was he doing? His back, his reaching arm, the bulky overhang of the dashboard, Tankard couldn't see clearly.

Maybe he was handicapped. Maybe his walking stick had fallen off the seat.

'Sir, my name is Constable Tankard and I'd like to talk to you about-'

That's when he saw a metallic gleam, some stray beam of autumn sunlight reflecting coldly off the twin barrels of a shotgun.

Tankard gasped, stepped back, trying to think. He couldn't think. He'd been trained to think in these sorts of situations, he'd learnt how to advance on an armed suspect, draw his weapon, fire two rounds, and reholster. He'd been taught to walk backwards, kneel, turn and fire without sighting, first with the right hand, then with the left.

He'd learnt how to aim at the largest body mass: trunk, shoulders, head. Your first shot could be your last, so make it count. Out at the shooting range, Tankard had regularly hit twenty-seven or twenty-eight targets out of thirty. Not very many officers could beat that kind of shooting.

He'd also been taught to at least take his revolver out of its holster…

God. Seconds were passing and his hands and mind weren't working. His mouth felt dry. He wondered if he should shout a warning. Finally his hand did find its way to the leather strap that held his revolver in its holster.

His fingers refused to find it, fumbling so that he had to look away to see what he was doing. By the time his nerveless hand was around the butt and he'd returned his gaze to the man in the F100, the open mouths of the shotgun were trained on his face and he was looking into the steady eyes of Ian Munro.

Hadn't even unsnapped his own gun.

'Take it out,' Munro said.

'What?' Tankard's voice was dry, a croak. He tried again. 'What?'

'Your gun. Take it out, two fingers, give it to me.'

Tankard swallowed. He complied, dropping his gun through the open window as if it were a dead mouse.

'Keys.'

'What?'

'Walk backwards to your van, reach in, take the keys out of the ignition or I'll blow your fucking head off.'

Tankard did as he was told. He had no choice but to obey the man's contemptuous, whipping voice. He felt sick to his stomach and knew that he was going to die now.

'Give them to me,' Munro said. He was actually snapping his fingers.

A kind of petulance came over Tankard. 'No,' he said, and he dropped the keys through a stormwater grate.

Munro laughed. 'I wasn't going to steal the van, you stupid prick.'

He laughed again and started the F100, slamming it into reverse. The tyres squealed briefly and he was gone.

Tankard supposed that the pickup was stolen but it took him some minutes to call it in and find out for sure, and meanwhile he had to run across to the men's room in the pub and sit there for a while, and when Pam Murphy reappeared he couldn't get the words out. It was she who went into the bank, expecting to find blood. There was none: Munro had had dealings with the manager there, but Tankard had apparently interrupted him before he could go in shooting. And it was Pam who asked Tankard where his service revolver was. That's when the shame really began to settle through him.