I jerked back from his finger. I could relax now. Lovell had just nailed himself to the wall. ‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘No reason why we can’t do business. I was just checking.’
Lovell got to his feet. ‘Well, you’ve done your checking and now you know what the score is. You don’t ever get smart with me, bitch, you hear? I tell your poxy band where they play and when; you do no deals without consulting me first.’ He put a hand in his pocket and tossed a small mobile phone on the table. ‘Keep it on you. My number’s programmed in at number one. That’s the only number you call, you hear? I get any bills that say otherwise and you pay a service charge I guarantee you won’t like. You can buy a charger unit anywhere that sells phones. I’ll let you know when your first gig is.’
Whatever he was going to say next was lost. The door to the club crashed open again and two men piled in, shouting, ‘Police. Don’t move.’ The door to the ladies’ toilet opened and the other two rushed into the room, heading for the minders. A fifth cop jumped over the DJ’s turntables as Della ran out from behind the bar towards Lovell. Everybody was screaming, ‘Police. Don’t move.’ The acoustics of the club had a strange effect on their voices, almost swallowing them in the vastness of the space.
Lovell’s face went deep red from the neck up, like a glass filling with coloured liquid. ‘Fucking bitch,’ he yelled. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’
But before he could go anywhere Della’s sergeant, a rugby prop forward from Yorkshire, misjudged his run from the DJ’s platform and cannoned into him. Seeing their boss floored and themselves outnumbered, the muscle decided that the game that had been keeping them in made-to-measure suits was over. Lovell was dead in the water. But that didn’t mean Tweedledum and Tweedledee had to sink with him. In perfect sync, two right hands disappeared inside their jackets and emerged holding a matching pair of semiautomatic pistols.
Suddenly, everything went quiet.
Chapter 22
It’s not just the immediate prospect of being hanged that concentrates the mind wonderfully. Staring down the barrel of a gun does the trick just as well. For a long minute, nobody moved or said a word. Then Tweedledum gestured with his pistol towards Della. ‘You, bitch. Over here.’
At first she didn’t move. I knew what she was thinking. The more spread out we were, the harder it would be to keep us all covered. ‘I said, over here,’ the gunman screamed, dropping the nose of his pistol and firing. A chunk of wood from the dance floor leapt into the air inches from Della’s feet and frisbeed away across the room. ‘Fucking do it,’ he shrieked. I’ve never understood why it is that the guys with the guns always sound more scared than those of us without them.
Slowly, cautiously, Della moved towards him. As soon as she came within reach, he pulled her to him by the hair, back against his chest, gun muzzle jammed into her neck. I knew then that these guys were the real thing. The neck is the professional’s option. Much more sensible than holding it to the temple. The muzzle buries itself in the flesh of the neck rather than sliding on bone covered by sweating skin. Guns to temples are amateur city, a mark of someone who’s watched more movies than they’ve committed crimes.
The man holding Della turned so that he and his companion were almost back to back. ‘Nobody fucking move,’ the other one screamed.
‘Get this fucker off me,’ Lovell yelled.
‘I said nobody fucking move, and that means you.’
‘You fucking work for me, shithead,’ Lovell screeched, his face purpling now with sheer rage.
‘We just handed in our notice, OK?’ the gunman shouted, his gun pointing at Lovell and the cop still sprawled on top of him. ‘OK, Let’s go.’ He took a step backwards as his buddy moved forwards. Awkwardly they made their way over to the fire exit. Given that only two cops had burst in the main door, I guessed that the remaining two men were outside the fire door. I sincerely hoped neither of them was the heroic type.
The gunmen had nearly made it to the fire door when Tony Tambo suddenly erupted into action. I don’t know if he was playing at knights in shining armour or if it was just sheer rage at seeing his club abused like this, but he jumped up on the seat, ran straight across the table, leapt to the floor and went for the heavies. The one facing us didn’t even pause for breath. He just let off two shots. The first caught Tony in the thigh, his leg bursting into shattered fragments of flesh and bone in a spray of blood. The second caught him in the abdomen as he fell, the exit wound bursting out of his back like someone had used a morphing program on his suit. His scream was like every nightmare you hope you’ll never have. The groans that followed it weren’t a whole lot better.
‘I fucking warned you,’ the gunman shrieked, sounding like he was about to burst into tears. ‘Let’s get the fuck out,’ he added.
His companion kicked the bar on the fire exit, which sprang open. I could just see the corner of the basement stairs that led up to the street. Then he shouted, ‘Get the fuck down here now, or the bitch gets it, you hear?’ He stepped back, yanking Della with him. Nothing happened, so he sidestepped her, still holding her hair, leaned into the doorway and fired. I heard the singing whine of a ricochet against the stone walls of the stairway. Then he hauled Della in close again. ‘Get them down here,’ he snarled.
‘Come down quietly,’ Della shouted. ‘That’s an order.’
By now, Tony had stopped groaning, so I was able to hear the sound of heavy feet on the steps. Two men edged through the door into the club. They followed the gestures of the man with Della and the gun and moved round the walls until they were almost parallel to Lovell and Della’s sergeant. ‘OK. Nobody follow, you hear? Or the bitch dies,’ he screamed, rushing the door, followed by his companion.
As they disappeared, Lovell made a superhuman effort that caught the sergeant unawares. Suddenly he was wriggling free. I jumped onto the table and launched myself in a flying kick that would have got me suspended for life in any legitimate Thai boxing club. I hit Lovell in the side, and as we crashed to the ground together, I heard the satisfying crunch of snapping ribs and his simultaneous squeal of pain before the wind was completely knocked out of him. I rolled free and left him to Della’s sergeant. I ran for the fire exit, along with one of the cops. The others were already out of the main door and heading for the street in a desperate bid to cut off the gunmen.
We reached the door at about the same moment the gunmen, slowed by an uncooperative Della, reached the street. With a roar that King Kong wouldn’t have been ashamed of, the one trying to control her picked her up bodily and threw her down the flight of narrow stairs.
No amount of training in how to fall drills you for that sort of experience. Della tumbled down the steps in a loose ball, head defended by her forearms, bouncing off the walls. The cop and I stepped forward to break her fall. It was probably the worst thing we could have done. As she hit us, her leg shot out and snagged the wall. I heard the crack as bone snapped. Then we were a tumble of limbs. We settled with her face a couple of inches from mine. ‘What a fuck-up,’ she breathed. Then she fainted. I managed to free one arm from under her in spite of the excruciating pain that ran like a flame up to my shoulder. When I saw the tattered sleeve of my jacket drenched in blood I fainted too.
It had been a quiet night in Casualty until we hit the infirmary. Tony Tambo was on the critical list, having blood pumped into him and hanging onto life by sheer willpower, according to the nurse strapping up the wrist I’d merely sprained in the crush at the foot of the fire stairs. The blood had been Tony’s. I’d landed in it when I’d rolled free of Lovell. Mr Big Promo was under arrest with four broken ribs and a collapsed lung, and I was half expecting one of Della’s zealots to charge me with assault. Della herself had been sent down to the plaster room to have her ankle set and immobilized. The cop whom we’d both landed on was being kept in for observation with a double concussion, two unlovely black eyes and a missing front tooth. You couldn’t get near the coffee machine in Reception for uniformed cops.