One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (44 page)

And cannonballs.

Matt could see the bad guys’ boat, a souped‐
up cabin‐
cruiser affair, from the Majestic’s ground‐
floor sea‐
view restaurant. It slowed to a crawl as it prepared to pass underneath, between the platform’s vast, vanessafeltzian legs. Pootling a couple of hundred yards behind it was the
Ha’penny Thing
, floods blazing with retina‐
threatening intensity. He looked behind. Still no sign of the others, but his and McGregor’s instructions were to shoot as soon as the boat was underneath, regardless. Vale had chosen McGregor for the task due to his shoeless state – not much good for high‐
speed fetching and carrying. Matt got the gig on the grounds that glass was the one thing he had a track record of hitting.

The cabin cruiser disappeared from view.

‘Couple more seconds,’ McGregor said, compensating for their angle of view. ‘All right. Ready?’

Matt remembered to slide the bolt this time. ‘Ready,’ he said.

‘Fire.’

They stood side‐
by‐
side, six yards back, peppering the seaside windows with bullets until there wasn’t a pane left. When the noise of firing ceased, Matt heard the heavy thump of running feet behind him. Allan Crossland was first there, just ahead of Jim Murray. Charlie O’Neill was next, carrying two, as were Jackson and Davie when they appeared. The room began to fill up over the next thirty seconds, then on Vale’s direction they all took their places along the now glassless outside wall.

Simone sidled in next to Matt.

‘You still up for this, Mr Pacifist?’ she asked.

‘Aye, well, as the man said, if you tolerate this … What about you? I mean—’

‘I’m thinking of it as a very messy divorce,’ she said. ‘It’s him or us. And the kids won’t miss what they never had.’

Vale, leaning carefully out of the window and looking straight down, gave the order.

‘ATTACK!’

The prow of the cruiser came into view, gliding slowly out from underneath the Floating Island Paradise Resort and into open water. It was preparing to set a course for the
Ha’penny Thing
, but ran into extreme and unusual weather conditions in the form of a sudden hail of around fifty bowling balls precipitated from sixty feet above.

Maybe one of the balls hit the engine, maybe the spare rockets, whatever. Either way, the boat went bang.

The trawler was sailing its way clear of the facility by the time Gavin hauled himself on to the wet boards, aching and bloody. He wanted to shout after them, but he had neither the breath nor the hope left.

The blast had blown him clear of the boat, and he’d flapped limply in the water, watching in a bleary daze as the two halves of the cruiser went under. He had struck out for the jetty as soon as his faculties returned, having seen the second boat go around the wreckage and dock on the other side. If he could only get there in time, he’d thought, even just get their attention … He’d made a mistake – a
big
mistake – and he didn’t expect forgiveness, not immediately, but they wouldn’t leave him if they saw him, would they? That would be tantamount to murder.

It was a moot point, anyway. They were gone long before he reached the jetty. He sat dejectedly on the walkway and started to cry. Then suddenly he heard splashes nearby, and looked up to see another survivor climbing from the water. Gavin ran towards him, crouching down to help pull him on to the boards.

‘Where’s the bomb?’ the man said breathlessly.

‘Can you defuse it?’

‘Well, I’ve built a few in me time. Take me to it.’

Gavin ran faster than surely he ever had in his life, ignoring the protests of his pain‐
racked limbs as they climbed the spiralling stairs encircling the lift‐
shafts inside the centre support‐
leg. Reaching sub‐
level two, he careered through two sets of swing‐
action fire doors, his lungs threatening to explode from his chest. By the time they reached the spot, he had no breath left to speak; he could only point.

The timer said forty‐
four seconds.

The other man produced a small knife and began trying to wedge the cover off the detonator housing. It wouldn’t budge.

Thirty‐
six seconds.

He used the knife to tease out each of the two tiny screws holding the cover in place, Gavin’s heart jumping every time the blade slipped from the hair’s‐
breadth grooves. The cover clattered to the floor. It revealed a cascade of bare wires, leading from a conduit beneath the timer‐
device to a number of metal tubes. It looked like a wind‐
chime decoration.

Twenty‐
two seconds.

‘Fuck, he’s daisy‐
chained the detonators,’ the man said.

Eighteen seconds.

‘What does that mean? Can you still defuse it?’

‘I’ll need to cut the lead wire.’

Fourteen seconds.

‘Christ? Which one’s that?’

Twelve seconds.

Above the wind‐
chimes, there were two insulated wires, one green and one blue, connecting the timer to the conduit.

‘It’s one of this pair,’ the man said, slipping the knife between them.

Ten seconds.

Nine.

‘Green or blue?’ Gavin asked.

Eight.

‘I don’t know.’

Seven.

‘Jesus.’

Six.

Five.

‘Fuck it, green’s me lucky colour.’

Three.

He turned the blade and flicked his wrist.

‘God ’michty,’ McGregor spluttered, ducking and clamping his hands to his ears as the first explosion shook the night.

‘Well, that’s something you don’t see every day,’ Vale remarked, barely flinching.

Columns of flame reached toweringly into the sky, accompanied by the scream of tearing metal and the growling rumble of destruction. Every few seconds the inferno would pulse with renewed impetus, in celebration at finding fresh combustibles to consume.

‘Now, if we can just organise somethin’ similar for Torremolinos,’ said Matt.

McGregor laughed, having been thinking along the same lines for Tynecastle.

He began picking his way between the evacuees to reach Dougie at the helm; their gratitude at getting away alive, he noted, had not tempered remarks about just how powerfully the boat reeked of fish. They did have a point, right enough: McGregor’s eyes were watering. The ones not commenting on it were only refraining because they had their heads over the sides, boaking for all they were worth.

‘Out of the fryin’ pan, into the fire, eh, Hector?’ Dougie said as McGregor approached.

‘Whit?’

‘Well, I dinnae think oor Molly’ll be in the best mood when you get back.’

Oh bugger, he thought, recalling that his last words to her were: ‘I’ll no’ be a minute.’

‘Aye, mibbe I should’ve taken my chances wi’ the—’

McGregor never got to finish his sentence. Beside him, one of the puking punters had sprung back from the edge, shrieking in fright as the last of the balaclava‐
bampots came clambering suddenly up the side, utterly covered in sick. The bloke must have been hanging on to the old tyres that buffered the sides of the boat, then climbed up when he decided he couldn’t take the deluge any more.

McGregor looked frantically about the deck as the man got his first leg over the edge; a pistol gripped in one dripping hand. McGregor was unarmed, having eagerly ditched the machine gun as soon as they pulled away from that jetty. Vale was still tooled up, but he was way back at the stern, and there were dozens of bodies between there and here. On the floor beside his feet, however, there was just the thing.

McGregor reached into the ice‐
box and grabbed the monkfish by its tail, then spun on one heel and swung it at the intruder’s head with both hands. It connected with a splat and a crunch of bone, he wasn’t sure of which party. The hijacker crashed to the floor, his gun going off once before it fell from his grip and slid across the deck. The bullet hit the boy McQuade, but he was all right: it only got him in the shoulder.

McGregor pulled the balaclava off the unconscious figure.

‘Connor,’ Jackson growled, arriving from behind and drawing his pistol.

‘No you don’t,’ McGregor warned him. ‘He’s my collar. I’ll take it from here. There’s a plod in Rosstown I’d really like him to meet.’

There were flashing lights all along the front of the liftings yard as the
Ha’penny Thing
chugged slowly into dock: polis, ambulances and the fire brigade, though what the fuck
they
thought they were going to achieve, McGregor wasn’t sure. Not without Red Adair, anyway.

Dougie and a couple of the evacuees threw mooring ropes to the party waiting on the pier. DS McLeod was standing among them.

McGregor bent down and reached for the monkfish.

Finlay Dawson was apprehended at Glasgow Airport, attempting to board a flight bound for Newark. He and William Connor were both detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, with the recommendation that once they died, they should be cryogenically frozen until such time as technology could revive them, whereupon they would each begin another life sentence. It was that kind of judge. You can just be unlucky.

Delta Leisure’s CEO, Jack Mills, was arrested in the US on charges including fraud, conspiracy and murder, and his company indicted at corporate level. In keeping with the renowned expediency of the US legal system, it is expected that the case will come before a judge some time around March 2009. Prosecutors have apologised for the delay, but have explained that they are unauthorised to pull out all the stops unless Mills does something
really
serious, like get his cock sucked then lie about it.

Ally McQuade, following marriage, honeymoon and convalescence, wrote a screenplay based on his experiences, working successfully in collaboration with his former English teacher, Mrs Angela Laurence. The script was sold to a major studio for a six‐
figure sum, and is currently in pre‐
production. Matt Black turned down a lucrative offer to play himself, citing tour commitments. Renny Harlin is directing.