Jimmy Coates: Killer

Jimmy wondered why the men didn’t seem to want Georgie. And why were they taking his parents? This was clearly no ordinary kidnapping. One suspicion had taken hold and wouldn’t let go: that something about Jimmy made him the target of men in suits with guns, and that this something was connected to his sudden ability to jump out of windows without getting hurt.

Two engines started up. He had to get a look at the van. It was his only way of finding out who was taking his parents away.

He eased himself on to the ground and rolled out, just in time to see the back of a car pulling away. There was no number plate. It was a long black car with blacked out windows. A large black van was in front of it. They prowled like cats, agonisingly slow.

As they turned at the bottom of the street, he saw the driver of the van in silhouette, with one front-seat passenger. That must be the third man, he thought. The one I didn’t meet.

The light of the street lamps glinted off the windows and something caught Jimmy’s eye. It was the only thing about the vehicles that wasn’t completely black. On the side of the van, towards the back, was a fine, vertical, green stripe. It was just thick enough for Jimmy to make out and no more than ten centimetres long. In the same place on the car was an identical green stripe. He saw it for just a snatch of time, so short that as soon as he had seen it he doubted himself. The van and the car turned the corner, disappearing as if they had never been there.

Jimmy walked back to his house and for the first time noticed that he wasn’t wearing any shoes. He picked his way through the broken glass, which wasn’t easy in the dark. The front door was locked. Of course it was. They all thought Jimmy was on the run somewhere, loose in the suburbs of London.

Everything seemed very quiet. There was no traffic, just the low hum of the city and the sound of lonely cars somewhere in the distance. One of them had Jimmy’s parents in it. Then he thought about Georgie. Where had she run off to? Did she think she was going to be able to find him? Jimmy shivered and wondered whether his sister was as cold as he was. At least she had shoes on.

He hauled himself up the wall at the side of the house and stretched over the gate to lift the latch. It swung open with a creak. He took another glance over his shoulder at the street, but couldn’t see anything. Then he turned to the path that ran down the side of the house. It was darker than he had ever seen it.

Jimmy told himself not to be so scared. It was his own house and he knew there was nobody there. Any noise, he told himself, was just a stray cat. He started repeating it in a whisper. “Any noise, it’s just a cat.”

As he made his way round to the back of the house, he started singing it quietly to the brightest tune he could think up. Barefoot, and singing about cats, Jimmy felt like an incompetent burglar. Car grease blackened his cheeks. When he caught his reflection in a side window he thought it was almost funny.

Knowing it would be locked, he tried the back door. Then he looked for an open window, but there wasn’t one. He considered climbing the front of the house to get back into his bedroom, but it would have left him too visible from the street. Instead, he picked up a large stone from his mother’s rock garden and slammed it through the kitchen window.

As much as there is any right way to break a window, Jimmy did it the wrong way. Afterwards, he remembered that people in TV shows always used their elbows, and put a blanket or something in the way. Jimmy had just pushed his hand straight through. Now there was more glass all over his clothes and falling on his feet. Some had hit him in the face. Fortunately none went in his eyes. What had happened to his ability to do things right? If he did have some strange power to escape dangerous situations it would be much better if it didn’t just disappear when he needed it.

Jimmy reached in, undid the latch and opened the window. When he had scrambled inside, the first thing he did was pick up the phone. There was no dialling tone. All he could hear was the blood surging through his head and his short breaths. He found his father’s mobile, but the casing was smashed. Jimmy quickly realised too that there wasn’t any power in the house. He wasn’t planning on staying anyway. He couldn’t just wait at home while his sister was in the streets on her own and his parents were being taken away in a van.

Jimmy tried to think quickly of all the things he might possibly need, but his heart wouldn’t slow down enough to let him. He didn’t even know where he was going or who he was running away from. He went upstairs for his school bag and threw the books on the floor, replacing them with a change of clothes and an extra jumper. Then he picked out some food from the fridge–as much as would fit in the bag. There were some chocolate bars as well, and he grabbed an apple, in case he really got desperate. He opened the freezer and reached around at the back until he found the wad of cash that his mother kept there for emergencies and pizza. Finally, he jammed his feet into some shoes, still wearing his wet socks with glass trapped in the fibres.

As a last-minute thought, he went looking for a torch. He knew there was one in the house somewhere. He ended up on all fours searching in the bottom of a kitchen cupboard. It was then that he caught sight of his wrist. There was a huge piece of glass sticking out from the base of his left hand. But it didn’t hurt. He hadn’t even noticed it until now: a lethal shard of glass.

He carefully pulled it out. It had gone deep into his flesh–more than a centimetre–but there was no blood. Jimmy wiggled his fingers. He clenched his fist. It seemed fine. There was a cut in his skin where the glass had been, but instead of being red, there was just a deeper layer of skin which looked sort of greyish. That had never been there before. He should have been bleeding to death by now. He considered putting a plaster over the cut, and even prodded it a few times, but decided that as it didn’t hurt, it would be a waste of time to administer first aid in the dark. He spotted the torch and calmly popped it in the top of his bag, then went to sit at the kitchen table.

The house was completely quiet. Jimmy had never realised how lonely silence could be. He stared at the door and couldn’t help imagining his parents walking in, all smiles and jokes. Two mugs waited by the kettle for someone to pour tea. But nobody was coming back. He had never felt so alone.

It’s all so strange, he thought, but the strangest thing of all was him. He went up to his bedroom and looked down at the fall he had made.

The glass shimmered like broken stars and a black tear dripped down Jimmy’s cheek. He wiped his face, smudging grease on to the back of his sleeve, then looked again at his wrist. What was this inside him? What had made him jump out of the window? He thought about why he hadn’t been hurt in the fall, and why he wasn’t bleeding now. A second later he heard his mother’s terror in his head. Why had his father let those men into the house? Why had his parents walked away with them so calmly? And why had Jimmy’s father not wanted Georgie to shout for help?

Jimmy picked up his bag, ran downstairs and out of the front door. If he was going to help his family he would have to get away from the house. And he needed the police. When the men in suits came looking for him, there would be more of them. Maybe he should learn to fight like he had in his bedroom, whenever he wanted. Otherwise he was just an eleven-year-old boy with a dirty face.

Jimmy started walking in the direction the van had gone. The suburbs of London swallowed him up; one semi-detached family house after another in a groaning mess. Thousands of people were asleep in their beds and Jimmy walked past their front doors trying to remember where the police station was. After a time he walked almost without direction. The streetlights just seemed to make the shadows darker, so that’s where he walked, wary of anything that looked like a black car with a green stripe.

He let out a yawn the size of the city and didn’t notice the thin, dark figure of the only other person in the shadows that night.

It had started following him.

CHAPTER THREE – BOY AND A BAG (#ulink_e210e8f8-02d0-503c-9648-a52de5424ae9)

MITCHELL HAD HAD quite a day. Twice he’d nearly been caught lifting a purse from someone’s bag, and both times he had been forced to drop whatever he had his hands on and run. So yesterday he had come out into a part of the suburbs he knew, to work the commuters as they left the tube station. But they were always in such thick bunches that it was hard to get among them without arousing suspicion.

Now the streets were really quiet and he was beginning to abandon hope of stealing anything for the day. He thought about the smell in his brother’s flat and didn’t feel the urge to rush back there. Besides, he knew how hilarious his brother would find it if he went home empty-handed again. Mitchell didn’t like being a thief, and he didn’t much like his brother either. He especially didn’t like living with him, but it was the only place he could go until he was old enough to get his own place. And his brother only let him stay on condition that Mitchell would steal for him.

At first he’d been good at it–beginner’s luck maybe. He was certainly fast when he needed to get away, and being a kid had its advantages; it meant he stood with his head at about the height of most people’s shoulder bags. The last few days, though, had been really tough. He was tired and miserable. He didn’t want to go home, but there wasn’t much point roaming the empty streets and getting cold.

Then Mitchell heard the soft squeak of someone’s trainers behind him and turned to look. In the dim light he made out a single hunched up shadow with a bag over its shoulder. Looks like a kid, he thought. He started to move closer, but realised that this person was shuffling straight towards him. Mitchell jumped over the low wall of a front garden and ducked down. Just a few seconds later, he watched a young boy with black grease all over his face walk past, not even a metre away. Mitchell could easily have reached out and tripped him up, grabbed the boy’s bag and run off. That’s what his brother would have done, but there was too much risk that he’d wake up the people in the houses. Mitchell was smart–a lot smarter than his brother. He decided to be patient. He so badly wanted to end the day with a big catch. He couldn’t mess this up. He would wait until this easy target was somewhere a little more open. Maybe this kid will be stupid enough to cut through the park, he thought.

Softly skipping back over the wall, Mitchell crept along the streets, keeping step with his prey.

Jimmy knew he had to get to the police station quickly. If those men were still looking for him, being out on the street was too dangerous. But every time he thought he had remembered the way, he turned a corner and everything became unfamiliar. It was eerily quiet, which made his steps seem horribly loud.

He wondered whether to knock on someone’s door, waking someone up to ask for directions, but all the houses looked so sinister. Outside one, he even thought he saw a green stripe on the gatepost. He looked again, but it was just a brass number one that had rusted. It can’t be far, he thought. I’ll recognise one of these streets soon. But all the streets were mixed up in Jimmy’s head and he was really tired now. Each time he tried to pick them up, his feet felt like they had been stapled to the pavement.

“Pull yourself together,” he whispered, and stopped outside the next house. He looked it up and down, then took a step through the front gate.

Just as he did, a flash of movement at the end of the street caught the corner of his eye. Jimmy turned his head ever so slightly. Was it a glint of light bouncing off a car window–or did it come from inside the car? He told himself it didn’t matter–that tiredness and shock were making him paranoid.

Jimmy stepped slowly back through the gate and into the street. He squinted at the car. He could see something reflected in its wing mirror: the faint orange dot of the end of a cigarette, muted by its own smoke. In the dark it shone out like a torch. It doesn’t mean anything, Jimmy thought. It’s just someone sitting in their car, smoking–I’m safe. But then the click of a car door opening jammed through his body. He froze. The cigarette light danced around rapidly. A man pulled himself up out of the car, and suddenly the silence splintered into a patter of noise: the car door slamming shut, the other door opening, the crackle of a walkie-talkie, two men walking towards Jimmy.

The driver flicked his cigarette into the gutter and picked up his pace. He was running straight at Jimmy, but Jimmy wasn’t scared any more. All the fear and tiredness drained out of his body, pushed away by that bundle of strength that grew from behind his stomach. It swept through his body and shot up his neck. Jimmy still didn’t have any idea what was happening to him, but he recognised the feeling and knew this time that it was going to protect him. His feet leapt off the pavement and he broke into a sprint.

Jimmy’s legs were possessed, carrying him and his bag as if they were no weight at all. His whole body was contorted into a running machine–arms pumping hard, head leaning intently forward. He had never moved so fast. He dashed up the street for a few metres before darting into a side alley between the houses.

For half an hour Mitchell had followed Jimmy, completely unnoticed. When Jimmy stopped, Mitchell stopped. As Jimmy stood in front of that house, wondering whether to knock on the door, Mitchell crouched in the shadows watching, wondering whether this was the moment to strike. Just as he decided to go for it, he saw two big men running at Jimmy from the other direction. Mitchell abruptly stood upright, shocked–his one chance to salvage the week was being ruined because two other guys had decided to mug the same person. He watched, bemused.

But then he saw that these two men were wearing suits and carrying walkie-talkies. Not even gangs dressed like that, or had such fancy equipment. The thought crossed Mitchell’s mind that maybe this boy was in danger. Then Mitchell saw Jimmy explode into a run. Wow! he thought. That boy is quick.

The men seemed startled when Jimmy took off so smartly, and were slower to get going, but Mitchell could tell they were used to running. He waited until both men had made it to the top of the alley, then followed as fast as he could. If the men didn’t catch this boy, then maybe he would.

Jimmy couldn’t believe how fast he was running. His breathing was hard, but regular. Even with the bag over his shoulder he could feel his muscles moving together, blood surging through them. Something in his head was telling him where to run, too. It kept him darting in and out of back streets, knocking over dustbins, leaping in and out of front gardens. A few moments ago he had been lost, exhausted and ready to give up, but now he was exhilarated. His feet tapped lightly on the paving stones, never stopping. Behind him there was the noise of heavier feet. Jimmy didn’t look back. Still not out of breath, he began to enjoy the thrill of running, even though he felt like he wasn’t in control.

The two men were slowing down now. Jimmy could hear them dropping back. He smiled and the wind cut into his teeth. At the next corner he found himself on a main road, and then he realised why the men had stopped running so hard. Two black cars zoomed towards him, headlights blasting him in the face. He hesitated for an instant, then ran again.

In a few seconds the cars were level with him. Jimmy ducked into a side street. The cars turned with him. He longed for his legs to do something more for him. Then they did–but it wasn’t the extra burst of speed that Jimmy was hoping for. Instead, he hurdled over a front gate and down the side of a house. In two leaps he was up on to the wall and over the gate into someone’s back garden. He took a hefty kick at the football lying on the lawn and saw that the back of the garden was surrounded by a high fence. It must have been twice as tall as he was. Behind him the garden gate was rattling.

Jimmy didn’t stop. He couldn’t. He sprinted forward and with three huge steps he left the ground. He reached up for the top of the fence and grabbed it with both hands. Then before he could process what was happening, he had pulled himself over. His knees buckled as he landed. He staggered for a couple of metres before regaining his balance, then looked around, wiping the sweat from his face with his sleeve. In front of him lay the dark oasis of the park.

Mitchell was still running. He saw the two men give up the chase and thought all the complications were over. Now he could catch the boy himself and take his bag. No problem. He zipped past the two men. They were bent double and completely out of breath. He hit the main road. It was only then that he realised how long he had been running, and how far.

He saw the two cars steaming after Jimmy. This boy doesn’t have a chance now, Mitchell thought. He stood still for a second and watched Jimmy running away from the cars, amazed and a little impressed too. As soon as Jimmy turned, Mitchell started running again. The desire to steal Jimmy’s bag was matched now by curiosity. He didn’t feel tired and was hardly short of breath, but he stopped at the top of the road that Jimmy had turned down, astounded at what he saw.

The cars screeched up to the kerb and four men jumped silently out of each. All eight were in dark suits. Mitchell watched them burst through into the back garden, then return moments later. They didn’t have the boy. One of the men started babbling into a walkie-talkie, his face red from running in the cold.

Mitchell was confused. How could they not have caught him? He hung back, so as not to be seen. Then Mitchell realised how the boy had managed to escape–the park was behind that row of houses. Once you were in the park at night, there were no lights. That’s why it was one of Mitchell’s favourite places to snatch bags.

He jogged back round the corner and headed for the entrance to the park. If he was quick enough, he might catch up with the boy as he ran out. It looked like the others had had the same idea, because they had climbed back into their cars and were heading that way themselves. They were driving slowly, though, as if they weren’t sure where they were going, or even as if they wanted to give the boy a chance to get away.

Mitchell hunched his shoulders as they drove past, half from the cold and half out of an instinct not to be noticed. Then he realised they were looking at him. A torch shone right into his eyes. He flinched and put his hand up to block the beam. It lingered for a moment, then the cars moved stealthily on like a funeral procession. A streetlight caught a small green stripe at the back of each as it drove away.

Mitchell turned the corner and checked that the cars had gone. He was about to give up and go home, but he couldn’t get the boy out of his head. There must be something in the bag really worth having.