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The Bespoke Hitman E-Book

Sam Millar

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Herausgeber: Brandon
Kategorie: Krimi
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Sometimes robbing a bank can become a lot more dangerous than you planned. Halloween night. Belfast city centre. In the freezing, pelting rain, three men in wolf costumes decide to rob a bank. Everything goes awry for the bank robbers when the security systems do not run the way they expect! About to flee empty handed, the youngest of the trio, Brian, confronts a customer who is gripping a large briefcase. The man, tall and very muscular strikes an intimating figure, and is not about to give up the briefcase easily. He is knocked over the head with a gun by Brian and falls into unconsciousness, his briefcase removed. Back at base, the three are initially despondent at lack of success, until they open the briefcase. Over half a million pounds is inside. They can't believe their luck. But why is the media reporting an attempted robbery instead of an actual one? And why no mention of the customer being assaulted? Mystery and intrigue follow and an exciting story unfolds in this crime thriller.

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Leseprobe

‘A complex crime noir story balanced with Millar’s legendary dark humor and fast-paced plotting.’

Jon Land, New York Times best-selling author

‘Hold on to your seats. You’re in for the ride of your life with The Bespoke Hitman.’

Michael Lipkin, Noir Journal, USA

Dedication

For My Best Russian Friend, Olga Mamonova

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsPrologue Chapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoChapter Twenty-ThreeChapter Twenty-FourChapter Twenty-FiveChapter Twenty-SixChapter Twenty-SevenChapter Twenty-EightChapter Twenty-NineChapter ThirtyChapter Thirty-OneChapter Thirty-TwoChapter Thirty-ThreeChapter Thirty-FourChapter Thirty-FiveChapter Thirty-SixChapter Thirty-SevenChapter Thirty-EightChapter Thirty-NineChapter Forty EpilogueAbout the AuthorAlso by Sam MillarCopyrightOther books by Sam Millar

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to the hardworking team at O’Brien Press, for all the belief and encouragement.

Prologue

The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last.

Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.

Homer, The Iliad

Night. When gods slumber and demons plot. Stephen Garland opened his eyes in the bedroom of his north Belfast home. Something had interrupted his sleep, but he wasn’t quite sure what. Turning onto his back, he fine-tuned his eyes to the darkness, searching for some unknown entity lurking there. Shadows were gathering, like puddles of boneless skin.

‘Stephen …? What … what’s wrong?’ His wife’s voice was slightly slurred with tiredness and lingering Havana Club rum.

‘Oh … nothing, Grace. Can’t sleep. I’m just going to grab a cig.’

‘I really wish you wouldn’t smoke in bed. It’s dangerous.’

‘So is being a cop.’ He laughed softly.

‘Don’t be sarcastic.’

‘Go back to sleep, love.’ He tenderly kissed the top of her head. ‘I’ll make it quick – and safe.’

A small time later, her soft snoring started up again, like an asthmatic cat.

Reaching over to the bedside table, Stephen craned his Ronson lighter and a packet of Park Drive. Apprehending a cig from the packet, he balanced it on the ledge of his lips. Got comfortable. Fired up the lighter’s miniature inferno and granted life to the tobacco.

Releasing a prayer of smoke from his nostrils, he sighed with satisfaction.

‘Ah … nice …’

About to click the flame dead, Stephen saw him standing there in the godless gloom, face expressionless, splintered off from normality like Francis Bacon’s ‘Head of a Man, No.1’.

‘What the … you scared the hell out of –’ Stephen’s voice suddenly became a whisper. ‘What … what’re you doing with my service revolver, son?’

The eleven-year-old stood there in the dark, pointing the gun straight at Stephen’s face. The gun looked ridiculously large and vulgar in the two half-curled fists.

‘Please … son, put the gun down before an accident happens … someone gets hurt. You … you don’t want to upset your mother, do you … seeing you playing with a gun?’

The boy’s small thumbs began awkwardly pulling back on the weapon’s reluctant hammer, the sound filling the room like a bleached bone being snapped.

Stephen flinched visibly, squirming like a trapped rat.

The boy began to squeeze the trigger, eyes filled with concentration and purpose.

‘Please, son … don’t do –’

The bullet hit hard, slicing off a good portion of Stephen’s face, slamming him violently against the headboard. The boy fired again, this time hitting his mother smack in the philtrum, just above the upper lip. She moaned something incoherent, then went quiet. Deadly quiet.

The stench of burnt gunpowder began engulfing the room, expunging the remnants of his mother’s expensive perfume from this evening’s dinner-dance at the police social club.

Originally, he had planned to kill them earlier that afternoon, when they were naked, fucking and howling like filthy animals in heat, on top of the bed. That was when he had tiptoed to the slit in the bedroom door, watching her sucking greedily on him.

The sight made him seethe with anger and disgust, but also caused a strange stirring in his groin. Something forbidden and dangerous had occurred, and it perplexed him, his heart beating jaggedly in his ears. Eventually, he backed away from the door. A clearer mind, a shift in the time frame, would make for a better opportunity.

Tonight.

Tonight, waiting for them as they returned home in the dark, drunkenly giggling and snorting like Victorian villains, hiding a sinister secret.

A very sinister secret, indeed.

Unfortunately for them, he had known their sinister secret for a very long time.

A very long time, indeed.

Outside the charming detached house, the night was an army of soulless old men in rags. Filthy rain drummed hard against the windows, like nails being hammered into a coffin. Or two. It was the only sound now, in a moment where boundaries had been torn and discarded, where power dynamics had been run through a mincer.

For a long time, he stood in this bedroom of carnage, simply listening as the drumbeat of the rain and the echo of his heart fused into one. He stared at the gun in his hand, as if seeing it for the first time, a look of awe awakening on his young face.

At length, he walked over to the parental bed, gazing down with wonderment and delight upon his newly formed creation of destruction and murder.

A shocking crimson was quickly pooling on the cloud-white duvet. Above him, the pillows’ bloody goose feathers floated in slow motion. It resembled a Christmas snow-globe, all snow and spreading poinsettias – or discarded entrails on a butcher’s slaughter-block of pre-feast.

The impacts had been catastrophic, the faces now no more than a spongy mush of blood and bones. More akin to papier-mâché than flesh. It was a bigger mess than he had anticipated, but that didn’t diminish the euphoria tingling the stepping-stones of his spine.

Wanting to preserve the detail in his memory, he bent into the scene, exploring with eager eyes. Grace’s face – what remained of it – appeared peaceful. In contrast, Stephen’s had a grimace of horror etched in his left eye, the right eye no longer existing.

A bloody air bubble protruded from Stephen’s left nostril, and the boy now watched in fascination as the bubble ballooned in and out, a life of its own born from a dead man’s breath. He could see his own face captured in the bloody sphere, distorted beyond anything human.

Smiling, he reached and popped the bloody bubble with the gun’s barrel. Then, disentangling his fingers from the trigger-guard, the gun fell with a dull thud on the plush carpet. The heavenly release of heavy metal made his hands and soul feel light, cleansed of all earthly burdens and guilt.

Bizarrely, Stephen’s smothering cigarette remained jammed between victory-salute fingers, releasing tiny plumes of vapour into the air. The boy eased the cigarette out from the dead fingers, careful not to tear its tobacco-filled belly. He studied its thin, pale body – speckled with a gathering of blood-splatter – as an entomologist would study a newly discovered insect.

Bringing the cigarette to his mouth, he sucked hard, listening to the paper and tobacco crackle and hiss. Allowed the smoke to snake inside his mouth for a few seconds, before placing the cigarette back between the ‘V’ in Stephen’s fingers.

He’d been wrong: the blood didn’t alter the taste of the tobacco in the slightest.

Content with the nightmare he had orchestrated, he returned to his room, sprawling out on the bed, arms outstretched in nail-less crucifixion.

He listened to his heart. Its rhythm now normal. A metronome of calmness. Everything in the world was good again. The way it was meant to be from the beginning. Before darkness had come, suffocating the light out of him.

From beneath the pillow, he removed the comic book he had abandoned for the last hour, as he carried out the plan of a lifetime. Or deathtime.

He smiled at his own pun, then turned back to re-reading FantasticFabulous Fables #1, the seminal issue featuring the first appearance of the Dark Avenger and his winged steed, Mercury.

He touched the comic tenderly. It had become a sacred icon, a talisman, keeping the demons at bay on this most unholy of devilish nights.

‘I told you I’d do it, didn’t I?’ he whispered reverently, voice filled with admiration. The Dark Avenger smiled out at him from a splash page.

The Devil may well have been at play tonight in this house of Hell, but the boy was smiling like a Heavenly Seraph touched by the hand of a miscreant God. Not only did he have the smile of an Angel, he looked like one:

Lucifer.

Chapter One

‘Never take a chance on chance. It’ll screw you at the first chance.’

Karl Kane

Halloween. Spooky night-lights flickering inside Belfast City Hall, like melting candles of great expectations on Miss Havisham’s decayed wedding cake of betrayal.

The oppressive, heavy rain – having commenced with a vengeance in the early morning – was still going strong, cascading off the majestic roof and onto the impressive building’s saturated lawn. People attired in every conceivable fancy-dress costume were flooding the streets along with the rain.

Directly facing City Hall, a nondescript, rust-speckled van was parked in a side street, sandwiched between two burly construction lorries and four over-stuffed rubbish skips.

Three associates – Charlie Madden, Jim McCabe and Brian Ross – waited patiently in the van, semi-attired in wolf costumes, for what they hoped would be the biggest payday of their lives: tax-free money. Bags of it.

‘Never stops pissing down in this god-awful place, and those thieving bastards in Stormont have the brass neck to try and charge us for water!’ Charlie, the oldest of the three, was grumbling, glancing up at the filthy sky from the back window of the van. A Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum rested on his lap, like a beloved, peacefully snoozing pet reptile. ‘They’d tax a fart, if they’d get away with it. Fucking politicians and fucking rain, I fucking hate them both.’

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