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“Listen to us, do what we say, and you’ll probably get out of this alive,” the gunman says with a terrible smile.
He has a ski mask over his face, and Barnaby can only see his eyes and mouth, but that is enough. There are three men. Two in here, both with guns, and one down in the strong room.
Barnaby steps forward and raises his hands placatingly. Special forces should be here in a few minutes, but until then…
“I’m sure there will be no need to hurt anyone,” he says in a soothing voice.
“Yeah?” The robber seemingly in charge says.
He steps up toward Barnaby and abruptly lifts his arm, shooting an older, well dressed banker in the head.
The man drops to the floor, as several people scream hysterically.
“Wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
Barnaby feels himself go numb, cold sweat on his neck. His last negotiations training was a while ago, but he can hold his own against them, he feels it. At least long enough for special forces to get in.
A woman in the corner won’t stop screaming, completely undone by the situation.
“Shuddup!” the man tells her.
Several people nearby try to hush her, but to no avail.
Barnaby takes a step toward the man, then another, until he is nearly at the man’s elbow.
“Listen, we don’t have to do this,” he starts.
BANG.
Barnaby stares at the pool of blood steadily growing around the woman.
“Not screamin’ no more, is she!?” the man says in Barnaby’s direction.
There are twelve innocent people in the bank, he knows this though he didn't count them. Two are dead. He can save the others. He is convinced he can, but how....?
He doesn't think as quickly as he should. Doesn't have a solution. Two are dead because he doesn't, but he will make sure the others make it out of here alive.
He briefly finds himself wishing for Troy. The man would follow Tom’s lead and they would be able to do something.
Just as quickly, he’s glad the boy isn’t here. If something happened to his boy . . . his stomach clenches down to the point of pain.
He has to do this alone, but he thinks of him . . . he thinks of him out there, maybe already with the special forces.
Don't be brave, Gavin. Just this once. Let them do their job. But until then . . . .
In the silence after the shot, he hears muffled sobbing, but he doesn't look around. He hears the click of the gun as the safety slides back into place. Good, they're not nervous; they're not feeling threatened. He can work with that.
“You know what kinda bloke I really hate?” the killer says conversationally to the room.
No one answers as dread begins to curdle in Barnaby’s gut.
“Blokes like you,” the man says, abruptly whirling around and going to stand in front of an older, well-dressed man across the room.
“Lookit that watch, and those bloody cufflinks. Gold, ain’t they?”
Barnaby scurries across the floor after him, his mind whirring a thousand thoughts per minute.
He doesn’t recognize the man’s accent. It’s not quite right, like it’s been learned later or something.
The robber grabs the well-dressed man by the front of his waistcoat and slams him into the wall.
Barnaby grabs his arm and tries to pull him away, but the man shakes him off like water after a storm.
God, he’s bloody strong, is the terrifying thought that follows.
“Isn’t this where you ask me somethin’ like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’” The robber’s voice is low and silky.
Threatening.
The older man’s chin wobbles a bit, and wetness begins to seep across the groin of his trousers.
“Bloody weak,” the robber spits, grabbing the man by the neck and lifting him off the floor.
“Stop! This has gone on quite long enough. You must stop; you’re killing him!”
Indeed, the well-dressed man is turning red, now blue, purple. Barnaby pulls frantically at the robber’s back, kicking and punching at his head and legs until he turns and swings a fist at him.
Barnaby drops like a rock. At some point he hears the sound of the well-dressed man’s head repeatedly hitting something hard, like a marble bank wall.
He groans and pulls himself up in time to see the body hit the ground. His head is bleeding profusely.
Barnaby scuttles over to him in time to see his chest as it stops moving. He shakes him, tries to start CPR, oblivious to the blood beginning to cover his hands, sleeves etc.
He’s kicked away by the killer. Both robbers now stand over him.
“You’re like an annoying gnat, you know?” The second one spits.
The pain from being kicked makes Barnaby double over, but he gets back to his feet. He sees he can't save the older man. It's too late, his body couldn't take it. That's three. But he has an idea now, and he drags himself over to the dying body on the floor. He restarts CPR, senselessly, and from the corner of his eye he watches the killer. The nameless anger as he sees what Barnaby is doing. The snarl.
Barnaby feels the warm wetness of blood, all over him, but his mind is beginning to shut it out. Instinct. It works. He sees the killer lunge at him, and he doesn't dodge it. Just lets him drag him a few feet away. He expects the blow, hard and full, to the left side of his face. He sinks onto his knee, head reeling.
Good, he thinks. Keep going.
The other robber strides forward. Barnaby hears him coming, turning slightly just as a foot connects with his back. He lets out a cry as he falls to the side, the breath briefly gone from his lungs as he tries to regain some sense of himself.
He rolls over and tries to push himself up, but a fist punches him in the low back, and he grunts, head barely keeping from intersecting with the floor.
The robber rounds on him and begins kicking his side with big steel toed boots. Barnaby cries out as he catches him in the ribs, and his legs come up under him automatically, shielding his balls without thinking.
Please hurry up, he mentally pleads with the back-up. They should be here by now.
Then it stops, and his body doesn't feel like it's going to move. Feels out of place, pressed to the ground by pain, by something like tiredness, but he can't let it, can't faint, he has to keep going. The robbers are standing around him. He hears them talk; something about the third having finished in the strong room. Barnaby begins to push himself up from his stomach, onto his hands. When there is no reaction, he looks up at them, finding his left eye sticking together.
"We're not finished," he tells them.
He's on all fours, and his body tightens as he expects another kick or blow. Instead, a boot steps on his back, and he's being pushed down. His arms give out, and he sinks down, his face almost crashing against the marble floor, and the boot is still on his back, pressing him down. Keeping him there.
"You are," the killer tells him.
Barnaby hears the gun, the alarming click of the safety, and he closes his eyes, breathes against the ground, and for a moment he's almost ready to accept it, before lashing out blindly with one arm.
He catches a leg, an arm maybe. Doesn’t matter. There is a snarl and someone is pulling him up by the back of his coat, letting go just long enough to punch him in the chest, knock the air out of him, and he’s pinwheeling backward, crashing into the bank counter. He slides down, letting out an involuntary groan as he does.
They pull him up again, rinse and repeat, only this time he slams into the window, unwittingly leaving a smear of blood down the glass.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees black figures running around the edge of the building before fading out of sight.
He pushes himself up and away from the window anyway. The robbers can’t see this. He stumbles upright, veering toward the middle of the room. His head is swimming, there is blood in his mouth, blood running freely and unchecked under his shirt.
The killer comes up to him with a smile.
“What’s your name?” He asks him with a sharp grin.
The world sways for a moment, and Barnaby hears his own voice as if it is very far away.
“I am DCI Tom Barnaby.”
His knees buckle as the door abruptly bursts inward, and twenty men dressed in black rush into the room.
One of the special forces men rushes over to him after all of the robbers are secured.
“Come on, sir, up you get.”
The civilians are rescued, led out, and Barnaby along with them.
An emergency doctor checks his injuries, but Barnaby refuses to go to hospital.
He knows he’s not broken, only very bruised and winded and maybe a little broken, but he can’t handle the fuss, can’t handle the lights or the noise or the people.
George—Barnaby can literally hear the man rolling his eyes—finally steps in and puts him in his car and drives him back to his office, down to autopsy. He does it all with a long suffering look on his face and a scowl that does little to conceal his apparent concern.
Barnaby blinks and Troy is abruptly in the room, time having begun swimming past him in fits and bursts; something that has happened on other, similarly memorable days.
There’s a look of pain on Troy’s face—not pity, thank God (he couldn’t have dealt with that)—and then his attention is grabbed rather forcibly by George’s gloved hand on the right side of his face, pulling his chin to look in his eyes.
“You are a bloody mess,” George says, frowning.
“Yeah,” Barnaby slurs, only upright because of the chair back.
Thank goodness he isn't on an autopsy table. He might have just laid down and given up there.
Still though, the chair is George’s old office chair, the one he thought they’d thrown out.
He’d said that out loud. Blast.
“Ah well, you know how they are ‘round here. If there’s any chance of it being fixed . . . “ George says, trailing off with a smile that twists into a grimace.
“Troy?” Barnaby asks George.
Why is he here? Is what he doesn’t say.
“He’s our witness. We’ll even get to take pictures of you, though I can’t promise anything glamorous. They don’t seem to teach that here,” George says with a glittering smile.
Barnaby scowls.
“Coat first, I think,” George says, pulling on his cuffs with a yank that makes his shoulders and back ache. “And a pill,” He adds, pulling a little white pill and a glass of water into Barnaby’s field of vision with a flourish.
“No,” Barnaby answers.
“‘Fraid it wasn’t a question,” George retorts.
“No pills,” Barnaby answers, aware that his voice is becoming petulant.
“You take this pill or I’ll have Gavin sit on your head and force it down your throat,” George says, familiar smile not wavering.
Barnaby scowls.
And opens his mouth for the pill. George hands him the glass of water after.
“Open your mouth,” he says after Barnaby has drunk half the glass.
“You are ridiculous,” Barnaby answers, opening his mouth obediently.
George shines a penlight in his mouth and has him lift his tongue.
“Good. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
The smile on George’s face is evil.
Tom tells him so.
There is a choked laugh from the other side of the room.
Barnaby bears the rest of the exam in stoic silence, his obedience helped along by the opioid that George has put down his throat. It doesn’t quite make him float, but it takes a definite edge off the worst of it.
“Looks like you were right,” George says at last, pulling a layer of gloves off and sitting down on a nearby short stool.
“No broken bones, no internal bleeding, though to be completely certain, we’d have to go visit a certain place that you refused to set foot in . . . I have a suspicion that Joyce will shove you through the doors when she gets home, regardless of your refusal.”
Barnaby shivers in the cool autopsy air, having been only in his pants for the past 15 minutes while George stitched up a few still bleeding places.
He bears it a bit longer as Troy takes pictures of his body, standing with George’s help, the smaller man always stronger than he looks.
George turns back to him as Troy is putting up his camera.
“Do I need to do a manual check of your penis and testicles?” George asks in a low voice.
Barnaby flushes darkly, surprised at the strength of his reaction to the question.
“No,” He answers in a choked voice.
“You’re not just saying that because . . .” George side-eyes Troy silently.
“They’re fine. I swear it,” Barnaby answers quietly.