Real Tigers полностью

Ho looked up from his phone. Standish was glaring at Lamb in a way that made him glad it wasn’t happening to him. Babes, he told Louisa, that lady can be mighty fierce, you hear what I’m saying? Surviving family was her mother and a brother, Craig. There was a fiancé too, one Benjamin Traynor.

Traynor . . .

“Something else you should know,” he told Lamb.

Shirley found a staircase, its fire door hanging by one hinge, and bounded up to the next level. Smells of piss and weed: you didn’t have to abandon a building long before nature stepped in to reclaim it. Even here: not quite the heart of the city, but its appendix or something. Its bladder. She almost tripped at the top, but didn’t; stepped out onto the first level, and ran lightly down a corridor with a view of the wasteground through its glassless windows. Bitching dark now, one big shadow, but Shirley could make out shapes. There was the Black Arrow van, where they’d have taken Marcus. She hoped it was where they’d taken Marcus. The alternative—that they weren’t taking prisoners—didn’t bear thinking about.

Because apart from anything else, there was at least one of them on her tail right now.

At the end of the corridor she swung a hard right: more windows, now with a view of the railway lines, behind a breeze block wall topped with lengths of wire, the topmost one barbed. A digger was parked against the wall, its tool semi-upright, angled like a stepladder. Those things were always yellow or red. This one was yellow.

An open doorway. She spun into it, dropped to a crouch. Waited. Private security operations aimed to hire the brightest and the best: they wanted fitness, smarts and enough nous not to go belting into the dark after an unknown subject without checking out the terrain. What they mostly got, though, were lumbering wannabes who thought duffing up a Goth in a pub car park made them Jason Statham. The one on Shirley’s tail trundled past her wheezing like Thomas the Tank Engine, the gear on his utility belt slapping his thighs in cumbersome counterpoint, before erupting into a brief solo when she thudded into him waist height, sending him flying through the unglassed window. He didn’t fall far—it was only the first floor—but he hit the ground like a sack of spanners. Shirley tried to remember how many Arrows Marcus claimed to have seen, but couldn’t. One down, anyway.

Hearing more feet on the stairwell, she slipped back out of sight, noticing as she did so a strange sensation in her face; an unaccustomed tautening of muscles. She used her hand to check—yep. She appeared to be grinning.

Nothing like a drug-free high, she thought, and waited in the shadows for the next Black Arrow to make his move.

River wasn’t dead.

River might be dead, but act like River’s not.

So: River wasn’t dead.

That, or something like it, was the burden of Louisa’s thoughts as she stood face-to-balaclava with the Arrow who’d just brought him down. Sometimes you can tell when a man in a mask wears a smirk. She wiped it off him by feinting a blow to his stomach, hindsight letting her know that a feint wasn’t necessary—the blow might as well have landed for all his ability to parry it—then punching him in the throat instead, because that had worked well for her so far this evening. While he windmilled backwards, she stepped over River’s prone body and took two lengthy strides down the aisle, towards the ruptured doorway.

Dive and ro-o-o-ollll . . .

She could almost hear the instruction bellowed at her as it had been time and again one long day in hell, issuing from an instructor who looked like a sex doll: five foot nothing, curly blonde hair, ruby red lips never seen closed . . . But boy, could she bellow. Dive and roll! Anyone not diving, not rolling, to her satisfaction spent the next fifteen minutes doings squat thrusts. And like any good sex doll, she was never really satisfied; always wanted more.

But you learned to dive and roll all right, and it wasn’t a skill you forgot in a hurry.

So Louisa dived and rolled, and when she came upright again she was holding the gun Traynor had spilled when he fell. First she shot the man who’d put River down, then the two who were securing Traynor. The rest had scattered by then, back through the ruptured doorway or behind collapsed shelving.

Two shots came back at her, but she was somewhere else already, pulling River’s body behind cover.

“Fuck was that?” he drooled.

Not dead, then.

“That,” she told him, “was a Taser.”

“Not again . . . ”

“Good shooting,” someone said, and she almost proved his point by shooting him too.

It was Donovan.

“Where’s Ben?”

Louisa pointed with the gun. Traynor was still where he’d been dropped and cuffed: in a heap ten yards away. Of the two bodies next to him, one was twitching and the other not.

“Alive?”

“Think so,” she said.

“How many?”