Revenger

31

The Lion Market’s security shutters were made of powder-coated perforated steel. The tiny holes punched in their surface allowed a certain amount of visibility. Not long after the first attacks had begun, Ajay Panu had yelled at Maninder to turn out the lights in the store. Now the interior of the shop was darker than the street outside, making it easier for the Panus to see out and harder for anyone on the street to see in. For the past few minutes Maninder Panu had watched in terrified fascination as Ajay had initiated a bizarre form of gopher-bashing, hitting out at the young rioters as they’d come in under the barrier. Initially they’d crawled in one at a time, but after a while they’d taken to attacking in twos and threes, so that Ajay had to race from one side of the shop to the other while the kids shouted and laughed as though this was just some kind of game.

Maninder could tell that they knew Ajay was too decent a man to do them any serious damage. If he’d ever used his full strength he could easily have killed someone. Instead he held back a fraction, hurting them, often quite badly, but never seriously. But now Ajay was getting tired. His chest was heaving as he struggled for breath, and he no longer had the strength even to shout at Maninder for help. Both cousins knew it was a waste of oxygen.

Maninder also knew that for all the paralysing fear that had overwhelmed him, things could have been a lot worse, and might yet become so. The rioters had descended like locusts on the electronics store, which stood directly opposite the supermarket, and looted it so thoroughly that it was now an empty shell. He’d seen the way the Dutchman’s Head had been overwhelmed. It was now completely ablaze, as was the Khyber Star, the Indian restaurant across the way. Two of the Bangladeshi waiters had been dragged out on to the street and hacked to pieces. Maninder could not bring himself even to think about what must have happened to the cooks and managers. The local businessmen’s attempts to defend themselves had been totally overwhelmed, and what had really kept Maninder so rooted to his spot behind the counter was not the attacks that had already taken place upon his shop, but an awful premonition of what would happen when the full force of the criminal storm descended upon him.

He was wondering what on earth he or Ajay could do to escape, or maybe bargain their way out of trouble — exchange every single item in the store for their safe passage, perhaps? — when he heard the sound of gunshots: three quick, distinct rounds, followed not long afterwards by apparently random outbreaks of firing. And then there were more shots, much closer at hand, and the kids in front of the Lion Market scattered and ran.

Maninder’s spirits soared. Help had arrived!

Then he looked through the mesh shutters and saw what was really happening. Two men and a woman were dashing towards the store. A second woman was draped, apparently unconscious, over one of the men’s shoulders. Maninder frowned. He knew the man’s face, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t place him. And then it came to him. This was the customer from earlier in the evening, not long before the violence began, who’d watched Ajay resupplying the bowls outside the shop. He’d come in and bought some chocolate, Maninder remembered. And then he recalled what he’d thought about him: that he’d looked like a man who could handle himself.

The other man held a gun in his right hand. His left was hanging limply at his side, flapping uselessly. Blood was pouring from a hole just above the elbow. He’d been shot.

‘Help us, please!’ the first man gasped. He eased the woman off his shoulder and held her just above the ground. It was obvious he wanted to pass her under the shutters, through the empty space where the window had been. Ajay went over and grabbed the woman’s motionless body under the arms and started pulling her head first into the store. The other woman was already clambering in under her own steam.

Then Maninder saw what the four of them were running from. There was a huge crowd of rioters coming after them. Maninder watched one of the rioters lift a gun and fire on the run, and then he shrieked in fear at the clang of the bullet hitting the steel shutters.

‘No!’ he screamed. ‘You can’t come in here! Ajay, don’t let them in! We’ll all be killed!’

Ajay said nothing. He had dragged Paula Miklosko over towards the counter and propped her up so that she was sitting with her back against it. She started shaking and making incoherent, whimpering noises. Behind him, Carver was helping Schultz to get into the shop. Maninder watched as the wounded man gasped in agony with every movement of his broken arm. Carver was the last in. Ajay ignored what was happening by the window. He simply looked Maninder in the eye with an expression of pity and contempt that filled his older cousin with a shame so deep that he knew it would never leave him. And then Ajay slapped his face, a single fierce blow with the flat of his hand.

‘You are supposed to be a Sikh,’ he said. ‘A man of honour. A warrior. A lion. But you are nothing but a pathetic, screaming old woman.’

Ajay Panu turned back to the four new arrivals. ‘Can you fight?’

‘I’ve got two rounds left,’ said Schultz. ‘After that…’ He nodded at his wounded arm, grimacing as another jolt of pain stabbed through him.

‘Do you have any more weapons?’ asked Carver. ‘Another bat would do.’

‘Do you know how to use a gun?’ asked Ajay.

‘Yes.’

The simple, direct certainty of the answer told Ajay all he needed to know. He called out, ‘Maninder, give us the gun!’ but there was no need. His cousin was already reaching under the counter and unclipping a weapon. He held it out, and in the flickering light from the street Carver saw the matt black silhouette of a Mossberg 590 pump-action shotgun. This was the armed forces derivative of the standard Mossberg 500 hunter’s shotgun, chosen by criminals the world over for the same reasons as soldiers and police officers: it was tough, dependable and perfectly engineered to deliver lethal doses of twelve-bore buckshot. God only knew how these shopkeepers had come by it, but Carver was extremely glad that they had.

Chrystal screamed in alarm. The mob was massing outside the store. Bricks started hammering against the steel shutters, immediately followed by a bottle-bomb that bounced off and ignited on the pavement outside, right in front of the rioters. The front ranks of the crowd pushed backwards to get away from the flame.

Carver took charge. ‘We need to get the shutters back down. I’m going to buy us some time. You two,’ he said, pointing at the Panus, ‘get ready. I need you to get that table out of the way. Chrystal, get Paula behind the counter, under cover. Then see if you can find something to bandage Schultz’s arm.’

The fire from the bottle-bomb had died down. Now the mob was advancing again. A couple of shots rang out, and one of them punched a hole in the shutters. A bottle of wine at the back of the shop shattered as the bullet hit it.

There was a low line of brickwork, about 50cm high, beneath the window. Carver got down on his belly and, wriggling on his elbows and knees, used this as the cover he needed to get to the far side of the window. There he took up a shooting position, kneeling by the window frame, his body partly sheltered by the narrow vertical strip of solid wall at the very edge of the shopfront. He smashed away a few shards of glass that were still attached to the lower line of bricks, and then used that as a solid base on which to rest his left elbow. Then he looked along the barrel and slowly traversed the crowd, searching for his first target.

Another rain of bricks and bottles clanged against the shutters. One of the bottles hit right at the bottom of the perforated metal. The rioters had started thinking. They were aiming for the gap. It was time Carver made them think about something else. A Mossberg’s magazine held nine cartridges. Carver had to make every one of them count.

Then he heard a voice in the crowd shouting, ‘That’s right — aim low! Aim low!’ and recognized it at once as belonging to the skinny, grey-haired figure who seemed to be masterminding the riot. If Carver could take him out there was every chance that the attack would soon peter out. These weren’t professional soldiers he was up against. They were civilians without training or discipline, still less a proper command structure. He swivelled the gun in the direction of the voice. And then, for a fraction of a second, the crowd parted, Carver saw that familiar bespectacled skull of a face and pulled the trigger. But at the precise moment he did so, another rioter ran across the line of his shot, waving a gun in the air, only to have his head almost blown from his shoulders as it was hit by a fist-sized load of buckshot.

Carver’s gun-barrel kept sweeping round the crowd. He saw the big man, Curtis, running towards them, and fired again, hitting him in the right shoulder, aiming to wound, rather than kill. Curtis had twice tried to keep him out of this nightmare and Carver owed him that much at least in return. He traversed again until his sights came to rest on a rioter in a black leather jacket and with a Mohawk haircut. He had his right arm cocked behind his shoulder, ready to throw a bottle-bomb. The rag in the neck of the bottle was alight. Before the Mohawk could move a muscle, Carver put another shell smack into the centre of his chest. The force of the impact knocked him off his feet and flung him at least a metre back through the air. As his body hit the ground, so did the bottle-bomb, igniting right in the midst of the crowd, which broke and ran for cover, dispersing as fast as a startled flock of pigeons. Curtis staggered away after them, screaming in agony, with his one good arm wrapped around a mate’s shoulder. Within a few seconds the road in front of the Lion Market was deserted, just the two dead bodies lying amidst the debris of the riot.

‘Now!’ shouted Carver. ‘Get that table sorted.’

Maninder Panu pressed the control of the shutter, raising it up off the table. Ajay dashed across to the centre of the shattered window, lifted up the near end of the table and heaved it out of the way. Maninder hit another button and the shutters came clattering down until the whole window was covered in a sheet of metal from ceiling to floor.

‘We did it!’ shouted Maninder. ‘Oh, praise God, we survived!’

‘We’ve survived for now,’ Carver corrected him. ‘But they’ll be coming back. And when they do, we’d better be ready for anything they throw at us.’