I have the gun held in front of me as I go, but if any of the terrorists have escaped, they’re in hiding now. The police team can find them.

  As I stand waiting for the cable car, I’m fighting yawns as my body comes down from the exertions of the night.

  To protect myself in the event of the salmon mistaking me for a terrorist, I have positioned myself under a light and I have the pistol hidden by my side.

  When a cable car appears out of the snowstorm, I can see it houses a burly figure dressed all in black.

  Chapter 84

  Daniel releases his mother’s hand and follows the bartender to a space where they can talk. Once the terrorists had been defeated, one of the customers stepped forward and said he was a doctor; so, after the doctor had told him the knife had missed all his mom’s vital organs, Daniel left the man to tend to his mother.

  He was glad of the doctor’s presence as it reassured his mother and meant she was getting the best help available.

  What he doesn’t understand is why the bartender attacked the guy in the yellow shirt. It’s a question that he needs answered.

  ‘I heard what you did, you’re a brave one and your mum should be proud of you.’

  Daniel doesn’t answer. He’s not sure how to. As far as he’s concerned, he just saw a good person fighting an evil one and had helped. To him it was as simple as that. Good should always triumph over evil.

  ‘The customer you hit – I figure you’ve got a good reason for hitting him, but I can’t work out what it is.’

  A lazy smile touches the bartender’s bruised lips. ‘Maybe you’d like to take a guess before I tell you?’

  Daniel returns the smile. ‘I don’t know. Nothing I can think of makes any sense.’

  ‘When I came in, the terrorists were gathering in group. I think they were going to shoot all the hostages. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guy sneaking out.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that, I’d have done that if I could.’ Daniel thinks the bartender has it wrong about the guy. ‘And how are you sure he’s the guy who sneaked out?’

  ‘Three reasons. One, he’s the only person wearing a bright yellow shirt. Two, I remember him from yesterday. He and his wife were arguing and the looks they were giving each other spoke of hate, not love.’

  ‘And the third?’ Daniel is following the logic, but he’s intrigued as to where it’s going.

  ‘That’s the big point.’ The bartender’s smile fades. ‘He resisted the terrorists so much that he got his wife killed.’

  ‘I remember her body being carried out, but that doesn’t explain why you hit him.’

  ‘Because I think he was the one who killed her.’

  ‘Huh? Why do you think that?’

  The bartender explains his reasoning, and to Daniel it all makes perfect sense. He doesn’t know how, but the bartender has worked out what was really happening in the office, and what he says about the guy in the yellow shirt makes perfect sense.

  Daniel extends his right hand. ‘Thank you, sir. Without you, me, my mum and everyone else in here would be dead by now.’

  The man winces as Daniel grips his hand and shakes it, but he doesn’t let go. To Daniel, he looks sad, wistful almost. It’s like he’s somewhere else in his thoughts and that place is both comforting and distressing.

  He doesn’t know what’s troubling the bartender, but he knows he’ll come through it in his own way.

  Chapter 85

  I’m in the office talking to Alfonse via the desk phone when Captain Ogden bursts in. He’s a bull of a man and I can imagine him as a former linebacker, who always managed to blitz his way past the guards so he could sack the opposition quarterback.

  I gave him a rapid update on the events of the evening when I met him off the cable car. He listened to my report and asked the right questions at the right times. In my opinion, he’s the ideal man to deal with the fallout from this evening’s events.

  As soon as he entered the dining room, and slapped cuffs on Hannah, Swimmer and the guy in the yellow shirt, he got on his radio and started issuing orders at a rate similar to machine gun fire.

  Once Ogden had taken control of the dining room, I found a chair and borrowed a pair of tweezers from a female customer and pulled seventeen pieces of broken glass from the soles of my feet while they were still numb.

  Give Ogden his due, he waits until I’ve finished speaking to Alfonse before he talks to me. I’m not sure how someone can pace back and forth while tapping their foot with impatience, but he manages it.

  ‘Right, Boulder. A tactical team is sweeping the building and the area outside for any terrorists you didn’t kill or disable. Do you want to tell me what in Sam Hill this is all about?’

  I tell him everything that has happened in the last few hours, including my own actions. There’s not one part that I leave out. Confessing to multiple homicides isn’t the wisest thing to do, but with every admission, a weight falls from my shoulders.

  They say unburdening is good for the soul and I’m finding that to be true.

  Ogden doesn’t take any notes as I speak, but I can see by the way he’s focusing on me he’s taking it all in.

  ‘So, this was all about money?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The sums of money involved have boggled my mind, but after getting confirmation from Daniel that my theory was right, I couldn’t help but marvel at the ingenuity behind the crime.

  In a modern twist on kidnapping, Hannah and her gang had forced every one of the customers to pay their own ransom using digital banking. Not only had they moved the maximum amount of money per day, they’d had a second bite at the cherry by repeating the action after midnight. Once the ball had dropped, there was a whole new day, week, month and year, which let them double their earnings.

  Alfonse is on the case and in the short time he’s been looking at Hannah’s laptop, he’s found more than enough evidence to guarantee she will never walk down a street again.

  For Ogden’s benefit, I repeat what I’ve surmised about the guy in the yellow shirt.

  ‘When his wife was killed, he was brought out of the office within ten seconds of the shots being fired. If it was the terrorists who’d killed her, they didn’t have time to force him to transfer the money. That means they gained nothing from killing her other than the effect it had on the other hostages. Also, the man’s a braggart, and I heard him talking about how his company is one of America’s largest arms manufacturers. You don’t know it yet, but the terrorists had a rocket launcher, explosives and a military helicopter. That’s not the kind of stuff you can buy at a corner store; plus, through his company, he’d have contact with private security contractors, many of whom are best described as mercenaries. As I was about to burst into the dining room, the terrorists were getting ready to execute everyone and he was trying to sneak out. One of the terrorists was looking at him but was letting him go. For me, that confirmed his collusion.’

  ‘Why would he be robbing people here though? Surely he’s got plenty of money?’

  ‘To instil fear in people. With the outcry for tighter gun regulations every time there’s a school shooting, he wanted to scare people into buying guns to protect themselves. A terrorist attack is also a good way of getting rid of his wife without a costly divorce.’

  ‘Jeez, that’s twisted on all kinds of levels.’

  ‘It’s the modern way of it, Captain. He was just the first person to realise that in today’s world, provided they have their cell phone or tablet on them, a kidnap victim can pay their own ransom. The way he used this knowledge to also make money for his company, and get rid of his wife at the same time, was just him getting all his ducks in a row.’

  ‘Yeah well, you figured it out and you stopped them.’ Ogden steps forward and shakes my hand. ‘Damnit, Boulder, you’re a goddamn hero.’

  The grip he has on my hand is making my broken knuckles squeal in protest, but I manage not to yelp, even if I can’t hide the wince from my face.

  ‘I sense a “but”, Captain.’

  His face morphs in a flash from happy to annoyed. ‘You know?’

  ‘That you’re going to arrest me for homicide?’ I shrug. ‘Yeah, I knew that when I killed the first terrorist.’

  ‘Then why did you confess?’

  ‘Because, as we say in Glasgow, the truth will always out. A room full of people saw me gun down three men. There’s also a trail of bodies around here and I’m the only one who wasn’t a hostage all night. Therefore, it must be me. Plus, there are six terrorists still alive to testify against me.’

  ‘Dammit, Boulder, you know I don’t want to arrest you, don’t you?’

  ‘I know, Captain. I also know there’s no way that you can let me off with what I’ve done.’ I hold my hands out. ‘Do your duty, Captain.’

  Chapter 86

  My Mustang normally eats up the miles of road like a hungry shark, but today I’m playing it cool. The last two weeks have been interesting to say the least.

  After our conversation, rather than slapping a pair of cuffs on me, Captain Ogden had allowed me to get my things from my room and sent me down in a cable car with Sharon and two of his men.

  The FBI arrested Sharon and me when we exited the cable car, although it was the gentlest and most courteous arrest I’ve ever known. At every point in the proceedings we were cared for, and while Sharon was shipped off to hospital for the injuries to her face, I was put in the back of an FBI SUV and taken to their field office in Montpelier.

  Special Agent Riley had led the questioning, after he’d made sure a doctor attended to my wounds.

  As I’d done with Captain Ogden, I held nothing back. Unburdening myself a second time wasn’t as fulfilling as the first, but it still made a difference.

  Riley did what he was paid to do and kept questioning me about each part of my actions in a dozen different ways. He was trying to trip me up and find inconsistencies in my story, but he couldn’t because I was telling the truth.

  Because of the seriousness of my crimes, I found myself in court on the seventh of January. I’d expected my trial would have taken months to arrange, but, as I’d confessed, there was very little to delay the proceedings.

  The judge was a stern looking woman who, as my trial went on, appeared to be irritated by the prosecution counsel as she fixed him with one withering stare after another.

  I stuck to my policy of telling the truth.

  The lawyer representing me worked for one of New York’s top law firms, and he had a team of a dozen paralegals behind him. I would never have been able to afford such a lawyer, but one of the firm’s partners was a hostage at RidgeTop Resort and she had arranged pro bono representation for me.

  After two days of wondering if I’d ever taste freedom again, the judge ruled that all the homicides I had committed were either in self-defence, or at the defence of others, and had it not been for me, not only would the terrorists have been able to steal just over two billion dollars, but they would have killed one hundred and eighty-seven people.

  The vast sums were incomprehensible to me, but I learned from Alfonse that one of the customers, a Leslie Trouseau, was a big shot in finance, and from the accounts he managed, the terrorists had got more than half of their loot.

  Trouseau was shot in the shoulder during the evening but, from what I’d heard, he’d been a hero and had risked his life to give Sharon a clear shot at one of the terrorists.

  Thanks to Alfonse’s digital skills the money had been traced to its final destination: an offshore account owned by the man in the yellow shirt.

  Special Agent Riley had found digital tampering on the resort’s reservation system, which explains how Hannah and co had known how much to extort each customer for. With a full customer list, she would have been able to do research into their lives and wealth.

  I exit the turnpike on the freeway signposted for Miami and prepare to take a vacation.

  Before Captain Ogden had put me on the cable car, one of RidgeTop’s customers had come forward and handed me a beer glass stuffed with money. He’d gone round every customer and collected over twenty thousand dollars.

  I sent a third of the money to Alfonse and told him to treat my mother to a nice meal and the biggest bunch of flowers he could buy, and for him to keep the rest. Another third was given to Sharon. Without her help I’d never have succeeded in storming the dining room. Nathan had been the grateful recipient of two kegs of beer and a case of bourbon. As for the final third: me having enough money to take a break is good, having so much I’ll become idle and bored isn’t.

  I have one last thing to do before I consider myself to be on vacation, so I scroll through the names on my phone until I find Doctor Edwards. I don’t want to speak to him, but I know I need to. One way or another I need to deal with my guilt and get my head straightened out.

  As nice as bourbon is to drink, it’s nothing more than a short-term solution, and, while I have several thousand bucks in my pocket, I couldn’t afford all the bourbon it would take to eradicate my guilt.

  The End

 

 

  Graham Smith, Die Cold

 

 

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