King felt his pulse quicken. He realised that the conspiracy in Jameson was significantly larger than he had originally thought. The man who’d just questioned him had worn the uniform of a missing policeman. That meant the two hitmen from the night before were merely pawns. A single cog in a larger machine. He knew this feeling all too well. He had felt it many times before.
The revelation that he was onto something.
And it was in that moment he knew he would not leave Jameson until he had answers.
He sat back down at the table and waited for activity. Attempting to break through a locked metal door would achieve nothing.
Movement outside. His ears picked up the sound faster than most people. Being prepared for combat put King into a mental state of heightened senses and constant readiness. Every slight sound was amplified tenfold. That was how he heard the footsteps before the door opened.
Brandt’s imposter stepped into the room. King registered the man’s wide eyes and the determined, icy look on his face. Then a millisecond later his gaze darted to the pistol in his right hand. He wasted no time mulling over possibilities. As soon as he saw the weapon he exploded with the force of a raging bull.
He tensed his legs and powered up off the chair. Brandt started to flinch. He’d been in the process of raising the gun, and the burst of movement from King made him jolt. King got both his hands underneath the metal table and wrenched it off the floor.
Lifted by the inhuman power that comes with a surge of adrenalin, one end of the table rocketed off the ground and hit the man clean, accompanied by a dull thunk. The impact threw him back across the room. He maintained balance for less than a second, then toppled out the open doorway. King heard the clatter of a handgun skittering across concrete and knew he had disarmed the man.
The table landed on its side and slid for a moment, spurred on by the momentum of the heave. It came to rest on one side of the room. King stepped over one of the table legs blocking his path and moved out into the hallway.
Kitchener and Dawes were nowhere to be seen. The imposter was unconscious, knocked senseless by the massive power of the contact. He would come to soon. And he would have a headache for a week. King stepped over his body, picked up the pistol he had dropped and tucked it into his own waistband. A Beretta M9, he noted. American. Not the standard issue for the Victorian Police, that was for sure. This wasn’t Brandt’s gun. It was the imposter’s… whoever he was.
I have to leave.
The events occurring in the shadows of Jameson were serious. Incredibly serious. Whoever was behind this had just broken into a police station to try and get answers out of him. When that had failed, they’d attempted to kill him. He was now in significantly more danger than before. They knew who he was. The two officers who brought him here were good people, but they wouldn’t get answers. Not within the boundaries of the law. That much he knew.
It was time to do something drastic.
He knew other officers would arrive any second. Whether it be the man in the lobby, or Kitchener, or Dawes. He turned right out of the interview room and moved fast and quiet down the hallway, leaving the imposter knocked out cold on the linoleum floor. He did not care who found him there. Or what they did with him.
There was no sign of life in this section of the station. He guessed the Jameson Police Department was short-staffed as it was. Perhaps there were only four officers in the whole place. It was a reasonably large building.
King knew he could vanish effortlessly.
He glimpsed natural light in the gap underneath a wooden door. A way out. He tried the handle. It opened, leading to a evidence room almost entirely devoid of evidence. He saw empty metal shelves lining the walls and a bare concrete floor. A rectangular window was positioned high at the far end of the room.
He could fit through.
He strode past the shelving until he was directly underneath the window. Suddenly, he heard muffled voices from the centre of the station.
Female: ‘Holy shit. This guy’s wearing Brandt’s uniform.’
Male: ‘Where’d King go?’
Female: ‘I don’t know… what the hell! Who moved the table?’
Male: ‘Fuck, what’s happening?’
Kitchener and Dawes. Even from the other end of the building King could sense their panic. Their inexperience. Small-town cops weren’t supposed to deal with situations such as these. They were supposed to take care of speeding tickets and unpaid rent and other menial tasks. Nothing to the degree of missing police officers, and mysterious strangers, and assassinations.
They meant well. But they could not help. King accepted the fact that he would have to deal with this matter himself.
He reached up and tried the window. Locked. He took a deep breath, wrapped his fingers around the handle and gave it a vicious pull. Accompanied by the sound of a flimsy bolt snapping, the window pane flew up. There was just enough room to fit a man through. He gripped the bottom of the windowsill and levered himself up, utilising his upper body strength. In one swift motion he shimmied head-first through the open window and outside the building.
It was a sizeable drop to the dirt. King squeezed one leg out and let go of the ledge, falling silently to the ground. He landed like a cat and straightened, getting his bearings.
He was somewhere around the rear of the police station. The back of the building was nondescript, made of brick and entirely flat. The window he’d escaped through seemed to be the only one on this side of the station. The area was small and claustrophobic, like a prison yard. It didn’t look like it had been tended to in years. Weeds sprouted from the base of a high wooden fence and the grass itself was overgrown and brown. On the other side of the fence, the tall pines of the forest cast shadows across the ground.
It was late afternoon. The chaotic events of the day had made time pass quickly. It shocked him to think that less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had been trekking the road from Queensbridge with not a worry on his mind.
But he would not leave these questions unanswered. Not now. He was in too deep. There was one person who could at least fill in some blanks, which would hopefully result in an explanation for the deaths he had witnessed last night.
Kate Cooper.
As he scaled the fence and dropped down into the woods behind the police station, he came to the grim conclusion that she would not give him answers voluntarily. Especially since she had seen him taken away in a police car not an hour earlier.
He sighed. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
He would have to kidnap her.
CHAPTER 15
‘Absolutely fucking not,’ Billy said, standing on the other side of the same familiar back room. An empty paper plate sat on the table in front of King, previously piled high with chicken cacciatore. He’d graciously accepted the offer of leftovers and wolfed the meal down without hesitation. It had been necessary after the afternoon hike.
The trek back to Jameson had taken hours longer than he’d anticipated. Not long after heading into the forest he’d considered doubling back to the police station. The endless rows of pine trees had begun to induce claustrophobia, to the point where he thought he would never make it out of the forest. Sticking to the main roads would have been a better option, even if it ran the risk of discovery by the police, or a group of furious bikers, or whoever the hell else wanted him dead. That number seemed to be increasing exponentially with each passing day. King wondered how many enemies he would have by the time he left Jameson.
If he could leave.
‘Billy, I need your car,’ he repeated. ‘And I might need to keep it this time.’