Ultimatum

Thirty-six

17.45

I watched the body slide slowly to the floor, then dropped Dav’s gun into his lap and pulled my wallet from his pocket before turning away, having no desire to look at what I’d just done. For a few seconds the room was silent, bar the incessant ringing in my ears. I rubbed my neck where the cord had bitten into it and fought down a rising nausea.

‘Where the hell were you?’ I asked Cecil.

‘It’s a good question,’ said Cain. ‘We almost ended up dead in here.’

‘They had another guard posted near the fence. I had to get past him.’

‘Where’s he now?’

‘I was waiting for him to move. Then I heard you shout from inside, so I took him out with a knife, then came over as fast as I could.’ He was bouncing on his toes like a flyweight boxer as he talked, the adrenalin from the fire fight making him hyper. He looked round at the bodies littering the room. ‘What the hell happened in here?’

Cain sighed as he looked down at Dav’s body. ‘This one got a phone call to say that Brozi, the guy who set up this deal, had been arrested, and because they didn’t know Jones, they thought he might have had something to do with it. It’s a pain. These guys were useful suppliers. But at least we’ve got what we came for. And if they’re dead, they can’t talk. I’m sorry about what happened, Jones. I wasn’t expecting that.’

‘Neither was I,’ I grunted, not wanting to let him off the hook easily. I’d come far too close to dying, and it had scared me.

There was a pool of blood forming round Dav’s head and I tried to ignore it. I inspected the cut on my leg where Dav had caught me with the cleaver, but it was only a minor flesh wound and would stop bleeding soon enough.

Cain turned to Cecil. ‘Let’s grab the box and get out of here. Jones, make sure you’ve got everything. At some point, this place is going to be a major crime scene, and if any of us have left any trace we were ever here, we’re in real trouble.’

I nodded, but I was suddenly filled with an intense curiosity. Five men had just died, all for a single weapon. I was also damn sure that whatever the weapon was, it was going to be used against the people of this city. Cain clearly didn’t give a shit about taking innocent lives, so I needed to make sure that it wasn’t something that was going to affect my family.

I was following them into the back room when Cain turned round.

‘Where are you going?’ he snapped.

‘I want to see what I almost got killed for.’

Cain seemed to think about this for a moment, then exchanged glances with Cecil who was standing inside the sparsely furnished back room where an open six-foot-by-three-foot wooden crate rested on a metal table. From the angle I was standing at, I couldn’t see what was inside.

‘Jones is one of us now, sir,’ said Cecil. ‘We need to trust him.’

Cain paused, clearly not convinced, before finally he nodded.

We approached the crate and looked down.

And straight away I realized why they’d wanted to keep its contents a secret so badly.