The gunman grabs the stripper by her straight, black hair and pulls her up from the floor. She struggles as her modest weight hangs off of his outreached hand, her mane cascading in a ponytail over his fist.
“Stand up fer fuck’s sake”, the Irishman yells. He is every bit the Jason Statham lookalike Wint imagined he himself could have been. The girl scrambles to her feet and gains uncertain foothold in her heels.
“Now, let’s make this very clear and quick”, the Irishman projects into the room that is still silently echoing the music just switched off, with a baseline of gunshots the man fired into the ceiling. “I am after just one person. William Webster. Make yerself known and nobody will have to get hurt.”
“I only want to talk”, adds the man, unconvincingly.
Wint has slowly slid down in the booth, half his body now under the table. What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck, goes his brain. What. The. Fuck? He is paralysed, on an infinite loop.
“This is your only warning!”, the man snarls.
Nobody moves. Most of the room’s occupants have instinctively laid themselves down on the floor, with their hands on the backs of their heads. That’s what they tell you to do in the movies. They identify as hostages.
“Oh for christs’ sake”, the Irishman says and with one swift motion points the gun into the room and pulls a trigger. A shot rings into the air, followed by a visceral scream. One of the punters still sitting on the long bench doubles over holding their stomach. They’ve been shot. The shock of pain must be overwhelming.
“The next one will be in the broad’s head”, says the shooter and presses the nose of the pistol against her forehead. The hot metal barrel singes the girl’s hair, causing her to inhale sharply the smell of her own burning hair. To her credit, she doesn’t cry or scream.
What the fuck what the fuck what the… what the fuck? Wint’s brain finally escapes the loop. What is going on? Where is Ada?
He looks around the room. He can’t see her anywhere. He feels sick in his stomach. All their paranoia and manoeuvres had been justified, but obviously still not careful enough. He has brought danger to her door. Stupid, stupid, stupid stupid. Wint’s brain goes on another runaway thread, but he manages to short circuit it by focusing on the face of the asian dancer. She’s being held at gunpoint, half-naked save for black, stringy lingerie, and yet there is something defiant about her expression. If it was him, Wint thinks, he’d be a slobbering mess. Her eyes, darting rapidly across the room, are looking for a solution. She’s a fighter, but at a hundred pound and one gun disadvantage, there isn’t much she can do.
Wint won’t be responsible for her getting hurt. Against every instinct and message his body is sending him, he slides himself out of his booth and tries to stand up, but his knees buckle. Taking support on the floor he pushes himself up and stumbles into the middle of the room.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”, he yells. “I’m Wint Webster.”
The Irishman digs out a piece of paper from his back pocket with the free fingers of his pistol hand. He stretches his arm out in front of him and squints. He looks at Wint, then back at the picture.
“Really?”
“Yes”, says Wint. As so often, but never before this urgently, he wishes he weren’t.
The man whistles. “You’ve seen better days.”
“Thanks”, Wint says, drily. Insult upon impending injury.
“Just…”, Wint starts, but falters. “Just… let her go. I’m here. What do you want? The bitcoin? I don’t… I don’t have it”, he admits without being questioned and closes his eyes, bracing for the bullet and the absolute, final darkness.
“All right mate”, says the Irishman. “Come ‘ere.” He digs into this vest and throw a fistful of zip-ties on the floor in front of them. “Put those on.”
Wint leans to grab one and starts to fit it around his wrists, but stops, at a loss. He looks up at the Irishman, his eyes asking the pertinent question: how do you zip-tie yourself? The Irishman groans and pushes the asian girl towards Wint. “Help him out, for feck’s sake.” She stumbles on her heels and falls on him. He catches her fall.
At that moment, Ada lunges from the shadows behind the Irishman and comes at him her tazer flashing green. He senses her coming and swings up his arm, knocking the black rectangle from her hand. It skittles across the floor. Unfazed, Ada makes a play for the gun, but only manages to grab the man’s forearm, just enough to prevent him from shooting her point-blank. The man pulls the trigger, twice. The bullets fly just above her shoulder and into the wall. Ada knees the man in the balls once, twice. These shots hit home.
Wint, finally moved to action, pushes the girl off of him, jumps on the man who’s bent over from pain, and manages to wrestle the gun away from Ada’s direction. Not knowing what else to do, he bites the man’s hand and shakes it like a rabid dog, until he releases his grip of the pistol. Wint picks it up from the floor, takes two steps back and points it at the Irishman, panting.
Ada backs off from the Irishman, giving him space to shoot. But it’s not that easy. The man stands up, looking at Wint, measuring him up. “What are you gonna do, mate?”, he says.
Wint’s deafened by a rush of blood into his head. He is full of rage, like he’s never been before. As everyone, he has his share of revenge fantasies, but in his dreams his revenge is cold, calculated, and mostly verbal. Now, with a single pull of a trigger he can deliver a message more powerful than any pen.
He breathes in and prepares to pull the trigger. What does it feel like to kill someone? If he does this, will he be changed for ever? Will it necessarily have to be for the worse? Maybe this is his path.
He pulls the trigger. A bullet exits the weapon’s nozzle and travels at five hundred miles a second until it, roughly in one tenths of the time it takes the average person to blink, hits the Irishman’s arm. The Irishman spins around on his feet and falls to the ground.
Ada grabs the tazer, presses it against the slain man’s neck and gives him a charge that makes his body jolt. Then, satisfied the man is sufficiently incapacitated, she sits down next to him. “Good night, sweet prince.”
Wint looks at the work of his trigger finger in horror. He sees a big, red welt on the man’s arm. Why is there no blood? He looks at the gun, then at the punter across the room who was shot in the viscera. He’s laid down in a jackknife position, but he doesn’t appear to be bleeding either.
“What…?”, he says, examining at gun in his hand. “I thought… I’d killed him.”
Ada shakes her head. “Rubber bullets. I could hear it when they hit the ceiling. Did you think I would really try to take down a man shooting with live ammunition?”
“Since when do you know so much about the guns?”
She shrugged, then clambered her tall frame up from the floor. “We need to go.”
“What about these guys?”, Wint asks. He picks up a couple of the zip ties from the floor.
“No need”, Ada says, shaking the black tazer in her hand. “Once you get a dose of this near your brain stem, you’re a vegetable. For a few hours, at least.”
“They will be fine”, she says, then looks towards the back of the room where the short, squat leather jacketed man lies on his back, with a smouldering crater under one eye. “Except that one. Turns out gin conducts electricity rather well.”
Wint is horrified at the violence of the scene that he’s slowly starting to take in. This is not something he is used to. Even when reporting in war zones, he’s always kept well away from places where he might have to withstand the smell of gunpowder and burning flesh.
Ada grabs Wint’s hand firmly. “We need to go, right this minute.” She leads him down the stairs towards the exit. In the hallway, the lady who showed Wint in is wrapping up her arm with an improvised bandage made out of the frilly, flowery lining of her dress. Ada and the lady exchange looks, nodding in acknowledgement. Before they reach the large double doors to the street, Ada pivots at the small side door and down into an old cloak room, with empty racks of clothes hangers until the far wall. Tugging him by the hand, Ada leads them between the racks. In the back of the room there is a heavy security door. They approach it, and it opens automatically. The lady upstairs must have a button that controls it?
Through the open door, they enter a concrete tunnel, tall enough for them to walk their backs straight, but too narrow for them to walk side by side. Every ten meters or so, there is a wrought-iron lantern whose light is filtered through red glass, and the distance between them is so long that at the halfway point it’s almost pitch black, with only a seemingly endless line of red dots reaching into the distance. Ada powers ahead through to the tunnel with determination. Wint struggles to keep up. Her legs are longer than his.
“Wait”, he stops. Ada does.
“What?”, she snaps at him. She’s either angry at him, or still just amped up from the adrenaline. His blood is still rushing. When he pulled that trigger he crossed some kind of a chasm. He feels reborn.
“Let me go first”, Wint say and squeezes past her, faces briefly brushing past each other, their eyes connecting for a split second.