Donaldson just nodded. Henry had noticed he had gone extremely quiet, but put it down to tension and circumstance.
They legged it across the road, flattening themselves against the outside wall of the Big City. There was a lot of cover next to the building, several builders’ skips, a couple of tractor units, an old van and piles of building materials, all typical of such an estate.
On a signal from Henry, they sidled up to the corner of the building where they crouched under the lee of a skip filled with what looked suspiciously like asbestos. They dropped to their hands and knees and, comically, peeked around the corner, one head above the other, so they could see down the front elevation. It stretched far and there was a big car park and a large porch on the front of the building.
Two cars were parked up. One being one of the two cars Henry and Donaldson had seen minutes before on the road.
Three people were getting out. Henry squinted in the growing darkness, trying to get a good look at them. ‘I recognize one of them,’ he hissed.
‘Mendoza,’ Donaldson gasped. ‘The guy on his left is Lopez. . the other will be Sweetman.’
‘Father, son and holy ghost,’ Henry said less than reverentially. Both men drew back out of sight.
‘Struck gold here,’ Donaldson said. ‘This must be the return of the drug consignment. . shit. .’
‘What?’
‘Don’t know about you, H, but I’ve never known something like this go smoothly for any of the parties. Tears are often shed.’
‘I want to see what’s going down.’
‘Me, too.’ Henry thought hard. ‘There are several emergency exits dotted around the building, one on each wall, I think. Maybe we could get in through one of them to watch things.’
‘Worth a try,’ said Donaldson, then clutched his chest. Henry thought he was having a heart attack, but it was actually the American’s mobile phone vibrating silently above his heart. ‘Shit. . let me get this.’ He scurried away a few steps out of Henry’s earshot.
It was rather like a badly built shopping mall, lit by massive, but not brilliant, lights suspended from the metal roof.
They met in the middle of the main street in the Big City.
Easton was flanked by Lynch and Hamlet, their breath visible in the chill air of the industrial unit. Three holdalls had been placed on a trestle table in front of them.
Sweetman, with Mendoza and Lopez at either shoulder and Grant behind them both, like a formation of fighter planes, walked slowly down the road, which had been named, appropriately enough, Ambush Alley by the cops in the public-order units which trained there regularly. Officially it was called simply ‘Main Street’. The four stopped, twenty metres away from Easton and his crew.
‘I thought we agreed only two assistants,’ Easton said.
‘He’s my solicitor,’ Sweetman said, thumbing a gesture at Grant. ‘He’s here just to oversee the legal niceties.’
‘Not a good start to proceedings.’
Sweetman shrugged.
‘Is that my property?’ He pointed at the holdalls.
Easton said it was, then, ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘You all step back twenty paces, leave the bags where they are and we pick them up. When we’ve gone, the matter is over. It’s that simple.’
‘Nothing is that simple,’ Easton said.
The seven men stared at each other.
Suddenly the tension was broken by a mobile phone announcing that a text message had just landed. It was Mendoza’s and he instinctively pulled it out of his pocket and thumbed the ‘read message’ button. That was the thing about texts. They were impossible to ignore, even in the most stressful of situations. Mendoza glanced at the display and skim-read the message, his face growing darker with each word he read, as it confirmed something which he had been suspecting for a long time now.
All eyes were on him, but as he replaced the phone in his pocket, looked up and shrugged, everyone’s attention returned to the task in hand. Mendoza’s mind was on other things as he sidled up to Lopez and smiled broadly at his second in command. He placed an arm around his shoulder and said, ‘Soon all our troubles will be over, amigo.’ He nodded in the direction of the drugs. Lopez frowned at this out of character display from Mendoza, and he never got the opportunity to put his plan into action. On his signal, he had intended that he and Grant would draw their weapons and start shooting. Grant would take down Easton, Hamlet and Lynch. Lopez would take great pleasure in wasting Mendoza and Sweetman. Then he and Grant would be in business.
The plan never came to fruition.
Mendoza’s left arm gripped Lopez’s shoulders, and suddenly there was a short-barrelled revolver in his right hand, rising from the pocket into which he had just placed his mobile phone.
Easton was first to see the gun. He opened his mouth and screamed, ‘Get down!’ He and his two sergeants started to dive, but Mendoza’s gun did not even consider them. ‘Double-crossing bastard,’ he screamed and placed the muzzle of the gun hard against Lopez’s right temple and pulled the trigger twice. The two soft-nosed bullets blasted through his brain and virtually removed the left side of his head as they tumbled out on exit. Mendoza’s left arm was covered in blood and fragments of grey brain. He let go of the already dead Lopez, threw himself to one side and scrambled for the protection of the shop frontages.
Easton, Lynch and Hamlet all had weapons in their hands now and opened fire at Sweetman, Mendoza and Grant.
Everything that happened from that moment on, until it was all over, lasted perhaps thirty seconds.
Lynch discharged the single barrel of his shotgun at Sweetman, catching him in the upper arm and neck, sending him spinning.
Mendoza fired haphazardly, missing everyone completely, as he dived through the front door of a florist’s shop just at the moment Easton fired at him and caught him in the upper thigh. Mendoza screamed as he landed and dragged himself behind the wooden panelling of the pretend shop.
Lynch ran up to the squirming Sweetman, blood gushing out of his neck. He stood over the criminal and racked another shell into the breech of the shotgun — a gun which was once owned by Keith Snell — then blasted his face off, killing him instantly.
‘Get the other guy!’ Easton yelled, pointing to the open shop door where Mendoza had managed to crawl. Lynch stepped across the bodies of Lopez and Sweetman, racking his gun again.
‘That’s far enough,’ a controlled voice shouted behind all three of the corrupt cops. They spun to see two masked men standing in combat stance not twenty feet away, each brandishing an MP5 machine pistol.
Lynch was the first to react. Teeth gritted, he swung round with the shotgun. One of the men loosed a burst of his MP5, almost cutting him in half.
Easton, outgunned, turned to run and was drilled with about a dozen bullets from the gun of the other man.
Grant and Hamlet remained frozen in time. Hamlet dropped his gun and held up his hands, but to no avail. Both masked men fired simultaneous bursts, lifting both Grant and Hamlet off their feet, spinning them like ballet dancers, before smashing them to the hard ground of Ambush Alley, the Big City.
Teddy Bear Jackman and Tony Cromer did not waste another moment, ditching their weapons, grabbing the three holdalls and running for the exit. They disappeared into the night.
The sound of gunfire was muted through the breezeblock walls of the building, however, it was unmistakable to Henry Christie and Karl Donaldson, who knew exactly what guns sounded like. They had worked their way to the back of the Big City building when they heard the first shot from inside. Neither hesitated, but gave up all pretence of finding another entrance and now hared round to the front entrance, Henry yelling down his PR to Roscoe that they were responding to the sound of gunfire.
By the time they reached the entrance, each man had tried to count how many shots had been fired. At first it had been easy, but when the rapid fire came, it was impossible.