Kill Bill
Title: Kill Bill (7/?)
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG - NC17
Warnings: AU, violence, blood, lots of unpleasantness. Casual attitude toward murder and other things of dubious morality. Character deaths very possible.
Summary: World peace is attained at a cost. The question is whose cost it was.
Note: Aliases/glossary.
JULY 24. MANCHESTER
Billy woke to the sudden click and squeak of the motel room door, the gun in his hand trained on the doorway before his eyes even focused on Dominic coming through it. “What are you doing?” he stuttered, looking over a carrier bag in his hand and lowering the gun.
“I was hungry,” Dominic shrugged, setting the room key and the bag down on the small chipped table before expanding, “I got some for you too.”
“Did you steal my money?” Billy stood, glancing around for his wallet, more angered by the fact that he had fallen asleep, and deeply enough that Dominic had given him the slip.
“It was only a few pounds,” Dominic insolently lifted his chin, “Cut me a break. I’ve hardly been able to eat for a week.”
He watched as Dominic pulled out two cartons of curry with some plastic forks, pushing one his direction before sitting down and starting in on his own. Billy shook his head, busying himself by checking the magazine in the gun yet again, trying to regain his bearings in his exhaustion.
It had taken couple of days to get back into the city proper, and then several more of reconnaissance to find out where in the whole of Manchester they’d find the sort of people they needed. This was made even more difficult by the state of Dominic, who’d taken his whinging to a whole new level by the morning after the chip had come out of his back, but by that evening he’d been so obviously ill that Billy considered just finishing him off and going on alone. But he also remembered the same thing had happened to him in the days after he’d got rid of his own, so instead, he’d risked Vince Sandhurst’s credit for the first time to check them into this seedy, filthy motel, keeping the curtains drawn and waiting for Dominic to ride out the vomiting and tremors, nightmares when he slept and panic attacks and hallucinations when he didn’t. For his part, Dominic came out of it faster than Billy had, if he was up and about now, though he still had the gaunt, bruised, hollowed eyed look of some kind of addict, even now as he inhaled his food.
He scrubbed his hand over his face again, a week’s worth of beard on him now. He had braved the launderette across the street a couple of times while Dominic was ill, so at least the few changes of shirts and jeans they had between them weren’t nearly so bad, and the benefit of a shower was worth risking the credits on the room. Still, Billy had been on edge the entire time, keeping the gun in his hand as Dominic cried with the pain wracking his body, certain someone would call the police. He’d barely slept at all, resting only if Dominic was quiet and incapacitated, keeping half his mind sharp to any sound out of the ordinary. Ever since Dominic had been chasing him, sleep seemed a far off concern, at least until now, feeling bleary and disoriented to have been woken up, and that made him nervous.
His stomach growled, and he finally set the gun on the table next to the carton to open it and shovel the food into his mouth.
Dominic pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket and pushed it over, which Billy snatched and counted before pocketing it. “Where’s the rest?”
“In your wallet,” Dominic said, eyes cutting from under lowered brows, resenting the accusation, “I only took enough for food.”
“We need all of it, you fuckwit. I don’t even think they’ll talk to us without seeing at least what I had.”
“Well if we don’t eat, we won’t need IDs anyway; we’ll be dead,” Dominic snapped right back. “I don’t see why you don’t just do what you did before, get money from someone. Steal it.”
“Do you not listen?” Billy countered, “There are cameras everywhere. On every street, in nearly every shop. Every single time we go anywhere, they can see. Add to that knocking over a store or summat, and they’ll be right back on us, don’t you see that?”
“I don’t-” Dominic stopped, frustration fierce on his face as he huffed, “I can’t remember everything you say, okay? I’ve been puking my guts out for a week, I’ve got you telling me constantly I tried to kill you, I don’t know who I am or who they are or why people are after us. And neither do you. Alright? You come in and turn my whole fucking world upside down, and I don’t-” He stood up and tossed his empty carton in the bin, tugging his shirt off over his head. “Quit fucking acting like I should know things. I don’t know anything about anything anymore and it fucking scares me.” He pulled a small package of disposable razors out of the bag as well, his eyes daring Billy to dispute such a lofty purchase. “I’m going to shower. Want to feel like a fucking human again, at least.”
Billy took in the fading yellow bruises, skinny ribs and the healed-over scab on Dominic’s back as he tugged the warped, sticky bathroom door closed behind him, chewing over Dominic’s words along with his curry, irritated that he was right. Everything was confusing right now, to both of them. Billy had very little to go on, and no plan, and nothing irritated him more than that. All he wanted was to get as far away from here as possible, as fast as possible, and they simply could not do that without functioning PIDs. So far, Vince Sandhurst’s identity had not brought him down, but until now he’d avoided using his credit and thus leaving a trail.
On top of that, he didn’t even have more than £80 in his pocket. He’d had to pay a lot more than that for Sandhurst’s memchip back in London, and the black market here was unlikely to be much different.
The motel was deep in the city, in walking distance of many of the old warehouses and canals, derelict areas where shady business was often conducted. All he had to go on was his previous experience in London, which he had fallen into by sheer luck and just as much to have come out of it with his throat intact. When Dominic had been quiet, sleeping through the withdrawal, he’d darted into the libraries for quick internet searches as well as simply walking about and listening to the goings on around him, catching bits of conversation between some less than wholesome looking people. One in particular tended to hang about on the same corner on the outskirts of a shopping district through much of the day, and Billy had observed a couple of deals done for some sort of small packets. More scouting told him that particular corner was strategically out of range of the city cameras, and the one that did cover it appeared to be broken and had fallen on the wayside of the city repair tally.
There was still the problem of the money, though. The biggest problem, really.
Dominic emerged from the bathroom with a dingy towel round his waist and nicks bleeding on his chin, but looking better for it nonetheless. He sat down on the end of the bed, a certain light in his eyes. “We don’t have enough money, you said. You don’t even think they’ll talk to us without seeing it, right?”
Billy nodded, wondering where this was going.
“How much credit do you have? The chip you’ve got in your PID right now.”
Billy pulled it out, thumbing into Sandhurst’s banking files to look, “Not a lot, maybe £400.”
“Then we’ll trick them,” Dominic concluded. Billy eyed him skeptically until he elaborated, “Find an ATM, withdraw it in large notes. We’ll find some paper, cut it into the right shape and then roll it with the real notes on top. If we don’t hand it right over first thing, just tease them with it…”
“Then what?” Billy asked. “What about when they do get it, and want to count it? These people want money first, that’s all they’re going care about.”
“We’ll distract them, then.”
“How?”
Dominic shrugged, his bad shoulder finally arching back into it, “Talk to them. We can’t just go in guns blazing. It’ll be better if we don’t go in looking like we’re a threat. Neither of us look it, do we? At least, you might not if you shave. We’ll look like a pair of bloody chavs in to get fake IDs so we can impress girls.”
Billy knitted his brows, shaking his head. It was a completely lousy plan, like as naught to get one or both of them killed.
“Well, it’s that or we steal some money, ‘s all I’m saying,” Dominic muttered, tugging off his towel and striding around the bed to find the cleaner pair of denims and tugging them on. “You don’t have a better one, or we’d be done with this already.”
“If I didn’t have to cart you around I wouldn’t have to do this in the first place.”
“Yeah?” Dominic spread his arms out, invoking a fight, “You might have mentioned that a week ago when I could have gone home and forgotten all about you instead of getting dragged through your batshit conspiracy theories. Ignorance is fucking bliss, isn’t it?”
Billy held back on the idea of bringing the remaining bruise under Dominic’s eye from sickly yellow back to vivid purple. He was more trouble than he was worth.
“The least you could do is take a nap, you know. It might make you a bit less of a prick,” Dom tossed behind him, pulling his shirt back over his head, “If I was still going to kill you, I would have done it by now, instead of bringing you curry.”
JULY 26. MANCHESTER
“Let me do the talking.”
“You said that already.”
“Aye well, listen for once,” Billy looking at him to drive home his point. “And hold on to that duffle, but don’t-”
“Don’t look like I’m guarding it with my life, I know, you said that already.” Dominic shot back, “Quit telling me. I know the plan. But I still don’t know why I can’t have the other gun ready like you do.”
Billy shook his head, their target coming into sight on the corner. He didn’t like this, any of it, one bit. But it was all they had to go on. He took a breath and plastered a smile on his face as they approached the man leaning on the corner.
“Oi mate!” Billy tried, “H’lo. We, ah,” he glanced at Dominic, who wore a ridiculous grin. “We noticed you seem to know how to get things.”
The man looked away down the street. “I don’t know you,” he muttered with a heavy foreign accent.
“No, not yet. Don’t know until you meet, eh?” Billy held out a friendly hand, “Name is Vince.”
The man ignored him, settling his eyes on Dominic. “I possibly know how to get things,” he said, taking in the sickly state of him, “Depends on if you have something for me.”
“We do,” Billy answered, “We’ve plenty of money, depending on what you’re offering.”
The man glanced down the street again, and Billy observed his line of sight, watching the cameras, watching the traffic, the people walking down the more well kept shopping district a couple of blocks up. This man knew his profession well.
“Reefer,” the man’s accent twisted his words in intriguing ways, his eyes moving to Dominic again, “Benzo. Cat piss. Special K. Microdot. That is my tenner fare.”
“Not for me, mate,” Dominic smiled. “Clean as a whistle, me.” The man smirked as if he didn’t believe this.
Billy stepped forward, “’S not what we’re after, anyway. We’re looking for chips.”
The man chuckled loftily, saying a word or two in another tongue, “Not my business,” he looked them both up and down again, “You could not afford it if it was.”
“Like I said, we have money. We need chips,” Billy muttered, pushing his hands farther in his pockets around his prizes.
“Mate, it’s like this, eh? I want to take my girl to the Continent,” Dominic leaned in to butter the man up, “But I’ve got a file, you know. Stupid shite. Stole a moterbike, got caught, got bracelets. So I got rid of that chip and now it’s a great big fuss getting anywhere outside Lancashire, you get me?”
The man leaned over to spit on the sidewalk. “And your clean cut comrade?”
“He’s harmless, nervous as fuck-all doing this,” Dominic glanced at Billy, and back, looking wicked, “He’s got a nice wife and a naughty girlfriend on the side. Never shall the two meet, eh? Keeps him up all night long, that one.”
The foreigner looked over the pair of them again, smirking at Billy, and then trained his eyes on the cameras again, “You have money, you say. You will need more than you think. Two or three hundred. Each. More if you want clean credit.”
“We’ve got that,” Billy supplied, and the man simply stared at him until he produced, just the end of one of Dominic’s handmade rolls of cash from his pocket before tucking it back in. They were crude, cuts of butcher paper Dominic had soaked with a dark shirt then dried and dirtied the edges, rolled with a real note on top and tightly wrapped with rubber bands. For all his trouble, all it would take was a closer look to see they were fake.
The man seemed to think it over again before striding off. Dominic walked confidently up beside him, leaving Billy to follow behind. “I am Mikael,” he told Dominic with a sleazy smile. “It is my name today. Tomorrow maybe Ivan, or Viktor, I cannot decide. I take you to people I know. After this, I will see you again. Yes?”
“Not if I can help it, mate,” Dom answered.
He led them through the shopping district and to an old brick storefront, which he bypassed and went down the alleyway to the back, knocking on the steel door beside a rusty loading dock. After a pause and a second knock, the door was cracked, and Mikael spoke to the occupant, again in his own tongue, a smooth rolling language Billy finally guessed might be Russian.
Mikael conversed with the man, a back and forth Billy took as the occupant being unsure and Mikael doing some convincing, gesturing to the pair of them while Dominic held onto the duffle and smiled stupidly. He tried to do the same, attempting to look harmless even as everything about this sparked every instinct he had to simply turn around and leave. The pistol he had tucked beneath his shirt and jacket felt huge and heavy; surely these people would search them.
“What is in bag?” the man at the door asked, as if reading Billy’s mind, and Billy could feel his pulse tripping.
“Just clothes,” Dominic supplied, even unzipping it to show the man, the mess of shirts and jeans inside thankfully covering the second pistol and the ammo inside. “Hoping to take my girl to the airport by afternoon, da?” he grinned, picking up on the word in their language.
The man shrugged and closed the door. Mikael smiled back to them, “He goes to ask his boss.”
Soon after they were admitted inside and led through shelves and boxes of goods to a dimly lit back room and a well dressed man sitting behind a desk, flanked by two huge hulking goons, as well as Mikael and the doorman. It was progress, getting inside, and yet made the situation six times more difficult, and he doubted Dominic even recognized the danger they were in. The room was an office of some kind, boxes piled in corners but little else, and only one way out. One of the goons and the doorman stood beside the boss behind the desk, while the other stood by the door near Mikael, blocking a quick getaway.
The man behind the desk was clean cut, older than his comrades though not elderly, perhaps not the boss of this operation but higher level than the rest; he had the confident arrogance of someone in a position of power as he shook their hands and questioned them, Dominic recounting their story as he had told it to Mikael. Billy recalled his bid to do the talking with some irritation. He didn’t know why they appeared to respond to Dominic better, but it seemed to work, so he let it play.
“…so we need new chips.” Dominic finished. “We have money.”
The boss looked to Mikael again, who nodded, speaking in Russian. Dominic listened intently, showing a certain innocent sort of interest.
“Okay, you give me money, and I give you chips,” the boss leaned back in his chair smugly.
“Oi, not so fast now,” Dominic grinned, “That’s our hard earned cash, you know, we’re not just going to hand it over before seeing the goods.”
“You doubt my product?” The boss eyed him from narrowed yet smiling eyes. “You are maybe too sharp for me,” he smiled, “Maybe you are from police, eh? A spy.”
Billy inhaled slowly, but Dominic was quick on the draw, “Do we look like cops? I got my arse kicked only last week, yeah? Big temperamental bastard didn’t like my attitude. Still look a mess. Feel like it too.”
“We have the money,” Billy put in, pulling out two of the rolls, waving them around enough for the man to see before pocketing them again.
The boss stroked his chin, shrugging and then sent the doorman out for something, “Okay. I give you chips. You,” he gestured to Dominic, pulling a camera out of the desk, “Maksim, take his picture.”
As the goon had Dominic stand up against a white backdrop tacked to the wall and he smiled widely for his photo, the doorman returned with a plastic box and netbook.
The boss chattered to them as he fed Dominic’s photo and thumbprint into the computer, speaking of the quality of his chips and how they were indistinguishable from the real thing due to his flawless program, to which Dominic fed his ego with interest and compliments. Billy found himself following the man’s keystrokes as he then selected a chip from the compartmented box, fitted it into the netbook and made several more changes.
“There,” the boss proclaimed, fitting the PID back together, “You are new man now.” He held the device out to Dominic, but lifted it out of reach. “Now you give money.”
“Thanks,” Dominic said, then grinned back and spoke to the man again. “Spasiba. Ya blaga daren Vam za pomashch.”
The boss’s eyebrows rose, and his goons stood up straighter, shifting their feet. “You did not say you spoke Russian.”
Dominic’s grin faltered, “Ah, yeah. Only a little, you know, from school.”
“Now why would you do this to me,” the boss muttered, and his goons moved in.
Billy was on his feet in a heartbeat, quickly incapacitating the first who came at him from behind with a blow to the throat. He pulled his gun and immediately shot the boss as he reached for a weapon, but with a shout the second goon pulled a knife, while Mikael and the doorman were all coming at him at once, with nowhere in the small room to move. He fought hard, landing kicks and a sharp crack to someone’s skull before three loud, quick shots had three heavy bodies landing atop him.
The goon’s bulk was shifted, and Dominic yanked him to his feet, the second pistol that had been hidden in the duffel in his grip. “You alright? Fucking hell, I shot them!”
“You fucking eejit,” Billy growled, darting immediately to the door, scouting the hallway, quickly taking out another that had come running from the storefront. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you spoke Russian?”
“I didn’t know!” Dominic spat back, looking wide-eyed and stunned at the pile of men and the boss sprawled back in his chair with a wound between his eyes. “You… Christ.”
Billy kept his gun trained on the hallway, “Where’s our stuff? You have it?” Dom lifted their duffel and came to Billy’s side, “No, get your PID! Take the chips too, take that box and the computer, take-” he stopped, shooting another man that came running from the front, “take it all and put it in our bag. All of it, Dom! Go!”
Billy left the hallway only briefly enough to search the drug dealer’s pockets and take his cash, working through the goons as well. “Search the boss, open the drawers. Hurry, we have to get out of here!”
Dominic stuffed the bag, pushing the pistol he’d used down into it as well, and Billy thrust him down the hall to the alleyway. Dominic turned in the direction they’d come, but Billy grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him around, “No, this way.”
He led Dominic through the alleys at a fast clip, tucking his own gun out of sight as they headed away from the building to another block altogether, pausing briefly as they came back to sunlight. “You’re alright?”
“Yeah,” Dominic said, panting heavily.
Billy led them away, shaking his head. “Why’d you fucking do that? You buggered up the whole thing! And since when d’you speak Russian?”
“I don’t know,” Dominic repeated, “I didn’t know, but when I heard them talking, I could understand it. And anyway, I didn’t bugger it up, you were the one making them nervous, all jittery the way you were. They liked me. They said so, Mikael told them we were a pair of dumb kids, just like I said.”
They paused in a doorway, catching their breath, and Billy looked him over, as well as himself. There was fine blood spatter on Dominic’s shirt, and more obvious stains on Billy’s clothes. “We need to change.”
He pushed Dominic along, down another alleyway and behind a rubbish bin where he dug through the duffle for a cleaner pair of jeans and made Dominic change his shirt.
“They didn’t have guns. Why didn’t they have guns?” Dominic asked.
“I don’t know,” Billy was just as confused by that. “The one had a knife, and I thought the boss was going for a gun. They didn’t search us for weapons either, I was sure they would.”
“Why wouldn’t they-” Dom started, but paused in fright as the sound of police sirens sounding from multiple directions. “What do we do?” he whispered.
Billy finished doing his fly and glanced around, taking the duffel on his own shoulder. “Buy some new clothes. Get train tickets away from here.”
“Where?”
Billy shrugged, shaking his head. “Shite, I dunno. Glasgow, maybe.”
“You said we were going to the Continent.”
“We told them that, and I don’t know if we left any of them alive in there, we’re not going to go that way if we did,” Billy countered. “But we’ve got to leave Manchester, and fast.”
Dominic nodded agreement and they strode out, a police car speeding passed them. “It worked,” he said eventually. Billy eyeballed him with disbelief. “Well, it did! We got what we needed.”
“Aye,” Billy finally chuckled, considering the situation, “We're lucky we're still alive, you twat. It was a massive mess. We left a pile of bodies back there, ‘s probably crawling with police by now. Speaking Russian. What other languages to you speak?”
“I have no idea,” Dom laughed, adrenaline still pounding through him as he punched the air in excited victory. “’S bloody cool though, innit?”
“Dunno about that,” Billy muttered, considering how many people had been killed since he’d met this man. “What’s your name anyway? The one they put your PID.”
Dominic pulled it out and looked, “Sasha Yelchin. Sasha? Bastards.”
“I like Dominic better,” Billy quipped. “Anyway, we can change it. We took that bloke’s stuff. I watched how he did it.”
“Dom,” Dominic said, turn around to walk backwards down the sidewalk to grin at Billy. “You called me that. In there, when you were… I like it. It’s weird, like. Familiar.”
Billy nodded, “Okay. Dom.”
“I think we used to do the same thing,” Dominic pondered, turning back around to walk properly. “Before we can remember. I shot those guys, three of them, all moving around you, and I didn’t miss. I didn’t think about it, I just did it.”
“You missed me,” Billy reminded him.
Dom grinned wide, “Yeah.” Then he frowned, his brows pinching together as if he was recalling something he couldn’t quite comprehend.
=26712datelog=logsecure
=27522wickerman::login
=attn::171244captain::
::27522wickerman:: Why is there a breaking report of a massacre all over my newsfeed?
::171244captain:: We are doing everything we can to erase it. Though I think it’s prudent to tell you, Iriny Svetlka was fairly high on our target list. It’s convenient.
::27522wickerman:: Convenient my arse, Hill, your rogue operatives left seven corpses for the local idiots to find. They’re the only ones even capable of doing this.
::171244captain:: It is a lead on them, sir. I have operatives deployed all over the area.
::27522wickerman:: Yet you have not caught them. In over a week’s time. There hasn’t been hit of this caliber in the public view since the wars! It’s going to be a madhouse if the press can’t be subdued... I’m going to have the whole goddamned Global Assembly breathing down my neck over this. Not only have you lost two malfunctioning assets, you’ve compromised our entire directive.
::171244captain:: In my defense, sir, Beesting was Lear’s responsibility.
::27522wickerman:: Lear has no responsibility now, that responsibility is yours. You had better scrub this so clean I can eat from it. And find those two bastards and annihilate them. Or I will find someone who can.
::171244captain:: Yes sir.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG - NC17
Warnings: AU, violence, blood, lots of unpleasantness. Casual attitude toward murder and other things of dubious morality. Character deaths very possible.
Summary: World peace is attained at a cost. The question is whose cost it was.
Note: Aliases/glossary.
JULY 24. MANCHESTER
Billy woke to the sudden click and squeak of the motel room door, the gun in his hand trained on the doorway before his eyes even focused on Dominic coming through it. “What are you doing?” he stuttered, looking over a carrier bag in his hand and lowering the gun.
“I was hungry,” Dominic shrugged, setting the room key and the bag down on the small chipped table before expanding, “I got some for you too.”
“Did you steal my money?” Billy stood, glancing around for his wallet, more angered by the fact that he had fallen asleep, and deeply enough that Dominic had given him the slip.
“It was only a few pounds,” Dominic insolently lifted his chin, “Cut me a break. I’ve hardly been able to eat for a week.”
He watched as Dominic pulled out two cartons of curry with some plastic forks, pushing one his direction before sitting down and starting in on his own. Billy shook his head, busying himself by checking the magazine in the gun yet again, trying to regain his bearings in his exhaustion.
It had taken couple of days to get back into the city proper, and then several more of reconnaissance to find out where in the whole of Manchester they’d find the sort of people they needed. This was made even more difficult by the state of Dominic, who’d taken his whinging to a whole new level by the morning after the chip had come out of his back, but by that evening he’d been so obviously ill that Billy considered just finishing him off and going on alone. But he also remembered the same thing had happened to him in the days after he’d got rid of his own, so instead, he’d risked Vince Sandhurst’s credit for the first time to check them into this seedy, filthy motel, keeping the curtains drawn and waiting for Dominic to ride out the vomiting and tremors, nightmares when he slept and panic attacks and hallucinations when he didn’t. For his part, Dominic came out of it faster than Billy had, if he was up and about now, though he still had the gaunt, bruised, hollowed eyed look of some kind of addict, even now as he inhaled his food.
He scrubbed his hand over his face again, a week’s worth of beard on him now. He had braved the launderette across the street a couple of times while Dominic was ill, so at least the few changes of shirts and jeans they had between them weren’t nearly so bad, and the benefit of a shower was worth risking the credits on the room. Still, Billy had been on edge the entire time, keeping the gun in his hand as Dominic cried with the pain wracking his body, certain someone would call the police. He’d barely slept at all, resting only if Dominic was quiet and incapacitated, keeping half his mind sharp to any sound out of the ordinary. Ever since Dominic had been chasing him, sleep seemed a far off concern, at least until now, feeling bleary and disoriented to have been woken up, and that made him nervous.
His stomach growled, and he finally set the gun on the table next to the carton to open it and shovel the food into his mouth.
Dominic pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket and pushed it over, which Billy snatched and counted before pocketing it. “Where’s the rest?”
“In your wallet,” Dominic said, eyes cutting from under lowered brows, resenting the accusation, “I only took enough for food.”
“We need all of it, you fuckwit. I don’t even think they’ll talk to us without seeing at least what I had.”
“Well if we don’t eat, we won’t need IDs anyway; we’ll be dead,” Dominic snapped right back. “I don’t see why you don’t just do what you did before, get money from someone. Steal it.”
“Do you not listen?” Billy countered, “There are cameras everywhere. On every street, in nearly every shop. Every single time we go anywhere, they can see. Add to that knocking over a store or summat, and they’ll be right back on us, don’t you see that?”
“I don’t-” Dominic stopped, frustration fierce on his face as he huffed, “I can’t remember everything you say, okay? I’ve been puking my guts out for a week, I’ve got you telling me constantly I tried to kill you, I don’t know who I am or who they are or why people are after us. And neither do you. Alright? You come in and turn my whole fucking world upside down, and I don’t-” He stood up and tossed his empty carton in the bin, tugging his shirt off over his head. “Quit fucking acting like I should know things. I don’t know anything about anything anymore and it fucking scares me.” He pulled a small package of disposable razors out of the bag as well, his eyes daring Billy to dispute such a lofty purchase. “I’m going to shower. Want to feel like a fucking human again, at least.”
Billy took in the fading yellow bruises, skinny ribs and the healed-over scab on Dominic’s back as he tugged the warped, sticky bathroom door closed behind him, chewing over Dominic’s words along with his curry, irritated that he was right. Everything was confusing right now, to both of them. Billy had very little to go on, and no plan, and nothing irritated him more than that. All he wanted was to get as far away from here as possible, as fast as possible, and they simply could not do that without functioning PIDs. So far, Vince Sandhurst’s identity had not brought him down, but until now he’d avoided using his credit and thus leaving a trail.
On top of that, he didn’t even have more than £80 in his pocket. He’d had to pay a lot more than that for Sandhurst’s memchip back in London, and the black market here was unlikely to be much different.
The motel was deep in the city, in walking distance of many of the old warehouses and canals, derelict areas where shady business was often conducted. All he had to go on was his previous experience in London, which he had fallen into by sheer luck and just as much to have come out of it with his throat intact. When Dominic had been quiet, sleeping through the withdrawal, he’d darted into the libraries for quick internet searches as well as simply walking about and listening to the goings on around him, catching bits of conversation between some less than wholesome looking people. One in particular tended to hang about on the same corner on the outskirts of a shopping district through much of the day, and Billy had observed a couple of deals done for some sort of small packets. More scouting told him that particular corner was strategically out of range of the city cameras, and the one that did cover it appeared to be broken and had fallen on the wayside of the city repair tally.
There was still the problem of the money, though. The biggest problem, really.
Dominic emerged from the bathroom with a dingy towel round his waist and nicks bleeding on his chin, but looking better for it nonetheless. He sat down on the end of the bed, a certain light in his eyes. “We don’t have enough money, you said. You don’t even think they’ll talk to us without seeing it, right?”
Billy nodded, wondering where this was going.
“How much credit do you have? The chip you’ve got in your PID right now.”
Billy pulled it out, thumbing into Sandhurst’s banking files to look, “Not a lot, maybe £400.”
“Then we’ll trick them,” Dominic concluded. Billy eyed him skeptically until he elaborated, “Find an ATM, withdraw it in large notes. We’ll find some paper, cut it into the right shape and then roll it with the real notes on top. If we don’t hand it right over first thing, just tease them with it…”
“Then what?” Billy asked. “What about when they do get it, and want to count it? These people want money first, that’s all they’re going care about.”
“We’ll distract them, then.”
“How?”
Dominic shrugged, his bad shoulder finally arching back into it, “Talk to them. We can’t just go in guns blazing. It’ll be better if we don’t go in looking like we’re a threat. Neither of us look it, do we? At least, you might not if you shave. We’ll look like a pair of bloody chavs in to get fake IDs so we can impress girls.”
Billy knitted his brows, shaking his head. It was a completely lousy plan, like as naught to get one or both of them killed.
“Well, it’s that or we steal some money, ‘s all I’m saying,” Dominic muttered, tugging off his towel and striding around the bed to find the cleaner pair of denims and tugging them on. “You don’t have a better one, or we’d be done with this already.”
“If I didn’t have to cart you around I wouldn’t have to do this in the first place.”
“Yeah?” Dominic spread his arms out, invoking a fight, “You might have mentioned that a week ago when I could have gone home and forgotten all about you instead of getting dragged through your batshit conspiracy theories. Ignorance is fucking bliss, isn’t it?”
Billy held back on the idea of bringing the remaining bruise under Dominic’s eye from sickly yellow back to vivid purple. He was more trouble than he was worth.
“The least you could do is take a nap, you know. It might make you a bit less of a prick,” Dom tossed behind him, pulling his shirt back over his head, “If I was still going to kill you, I would have done it by now, instead of bringing you curry.”
JULY 26. MANCHESTER
“Let me do the talking.”
“You said that already.”
“Aye well, listen for once,” Billy looking at him to drive home his point. “And hold on to that duffle, but don’t-”
“Don’t look like I’m guarding it with my life, I know, you said that already.” Dominic shot back, “Quit telling me. I know the plan. But I still don’t know why I can’t have the other gun ready like you do.”
Billy shook his head, their target coming into sight on the corner. He didn’t like this, any of it, one bit. But it was all they had to go on. He took a breath and plastered a smile on his face as they approached the man leaning on the corner.
“Oi mate!” Billy tried, “H’lo. We, ah,” he glanced at Dominic, who wore a ridiculous grin. “We noticed you seem to know how to get things.”
The man looked away down the street. “I don’t know you,” he muttered with a heavy foreign accent.
“No, not yet. Don’t know until you meet, eh?” Billy held out a friendly hand, “Name is Vince.”
The man ignored him, settling his eyes on Dominic. “I possibly know how to get things,” he said, taking in the sickly state of him, “Depends on if you have something for me.”
“We do,” Billy answered, “We’ve plenty of money, depending on what you’re offering.”
The man glanced down the street again, and Billy observed his line of sight, watching the cameras, watching the traffic, the people walking down the more well kept shopping district a couple of blocks up. This man knew his profession well.
“Reefer,” the man’s accent twisted his words in intriguing ways, his eyes moving to Dominic again, “Benzo. Cat piss. Special K. Microdot. That is my tenner fare.”
“Not for me, mate,” Dominic smiled. “Clean as a whistle, me.” The man smirked as if he didn’t believe this.
Billy stepped forward, “’S not what we’re after, anyway. We’re looking for chips.”
The man chuckled loftily, saying a word or two in another tongue, “Not my business,” he looked them both up and down again, “You could not afford it if it was.”
“Like I said, we have money. We need chips,” Billy muttered, pushing his hands farther in his pockets around his prizes.
“Mate, it’s like this, eh? I want to take my girl to the Continent,” Dominic leaned in to butter the man up, “But I’ve got a file, you know. Stupid shite. Stole a moterbike, got caught, got bracelets. So I got rid of that chip and now it’s a great big fuss getting anywhere outside Lancashire, you get me?”
The man leaned over to spit on the sidewalk. “And your clean cut comrade?”
“He’s harmless, nervous as fuck-all doing this,” Dominic glanced at Billy, and back, looking wicked, “He’s got a nice wife and a naughty girlfriend on the side. Never shall the two meet, eh? Keeps him up all night long, that one.”
The foreigner looked over the pair of them again, smirking at Billy, and then trained his eyes on the cameras again, “You have money, you say. You will need more than you think. Two or three hundred. Each. More if you want clean credit.”
“We’ve got that,” Billy supplied, and the man simply stared at him until he produced, just the end of one of Dominic’s handmade rolls of cash from his pocket before tucking it back in. They were crude, cuts of butcher paper Dominic had soaked with a dark shirt then dried and dirtied the edges, rolled with a real note on top and tightly wrapped with rubber bands. For all his trouble, all it would take was a closer look to see they were fake.
The man seemed to think it over again before striding off. Dominic walked confidently up beside him, leaving Billy to follow behind. “I am Mikael,” he told Dominic with a sleazy smile. “It is my name today. Tomorrow maybe Ivan, or Viktor, I cannot decide. I take you to people I know. After this, I will see you again. Yes?”
“Not if I can help it, mate,” Dom answered.
He led them through the shopping district and to an old brick storefront, which he bypassed and went down the alleyway to the back, knocking on the steel door beside a rusty loading dock. After a pause and a second knock, the door was cracked, and Mikael spoke to the occupant, again in his own tongue, a smooth rolling language Billy finally guessed might be Russian.
Mikael conversed with the man, a back and forth Billy took as the occupant being unsure and Mikael doing some convincing, gesturing to the pair of them while Dominic held onto the duffle and smiled stupidly. He tried to do the same, attempting to look harmless even as everything about this sparked every instinct he had to simply turn around and leave. The pistol he had tucked beneath his shirt and jacket felt huge and heavy; surely these people would search them.
“What is in bag?” the man at the door asked, as if reading Billy’s mind, and Billy could feel his pulse tripping.
“Just clothes,” Dominic supplied, even unzipping it to show the man, the mess of shirts and jeans inside thankfully covering the second pistol and the ammo inside. “Hoping to take my girl to the airport by afternoon, da?” he grinned, picking up on the word in their language.
The man shrugged and closed the door. Mikael smiled back to them, “He goes to ask his boss.”
Soon after they were admitted inside and led through shelves and boxes of goods to a dimly lit back room and a well dressed man sitting behind a desk, flanked by two huge hulking goons, as well as Mikael and the doorman. It was progress, getting inside, and yet made the situation six times more difficult, and he doubted Dominic even recognized the danger they were in. The room was an office of some kind, boxes piled in corners but little else, and only one way out. One of the goons and the doorman stood beside the boss behind the desk, while the other stood by the door near Mikael, blocking a quick getaway.
The man behind the desk was clean cut, older than his comrades though not elderly, perhaps not the boss of this operation but higher level than the rest; he had the confident arrogance of someone in a position of power as he shook their hands and questioned them, Dominic recounting their story as he had told it to Mikael. Billy recalled his bid to do the talking with some irritation. He didn’t know why they appeared to respond to Dominic better, but it seemed to work, so he let it play.
“…so we need new chips.” Dominic finished. “We have money.”
The boss looked to Mikael again, who nodded, speaking in Russian. Dominic listened intently, showing a certain innocent sort of interest.
“Okay, you give me money, and I give you chips,” the boss leaned back in his chair smugly.
“Oi, not so fast now,” Dominic grinned, “That’s our hard earned cash, you know, we’re not just going to hand it over before seeing the goods.”
“You doubt my product?” The boss eyed him from narrowed yet smiling eyes. “You are maybe too sharp for me,” he smiled, “Maybe you are from police, eh? A spy.”
Billy inhaled slowly, but Dominic was quick on the draw, “Do we look like cops? I got my arse kicked only last week, yeah? Big temperamental bastard didn’t like my attitude. Still look a mess. Feel like it too.”
“We have the money,” Billy put in, pulling out two of the rolls, waving them around enough for the man to see before pocketing them again.
The boss stroked his chin, shrugging and then sent the doorman out for something, “Okay. I give you chips. You,” he gestured to Dominic, pulling a camera out of the desk, “Maksim, take his picture.”
As the goon had Dominic stand up against a white backdrop tacked to the wall and he smiled widely for his photo, the doorman returned with a plastic box and netbook.
The boss chattered to them as he fed Dominic’s photo and thumbprint into the computer, speaking of the quality of his chips and how they were indistinguishable from the real thing due to his flawless program, to which Dominic fed his ego with interest and compliments. Billy found himself following the man’s keystrokes as he then selected a chip from the compartmented box, fitted it into the netbook and made several more changes.
“There,” the boss proclaimed, fitting the PID back together, “You are new man now.” He held the device out to Dominic, but lifted it out of reach. “Now you give money.”
“Thanks,” Dominic said, then grinned back and spoke to the man again. “Spasiba. Ya blaga daren Vam za pomashch.”
The boss’s eyebrows rose, and his goons stood up straighter, shifting their feet. “You did not say you spoke Russian.”
Dominic’s grin faltered, “Ah, yeah. Only a little, you know, from school.”
“Now why would you do this to me,” the boss muttered, and his goons moved in.
Billy was on his feet in a heartbeat, quickly incapacitating the first who came at him from behind with a blow to the throat. He pulled his gun and immediately shot the boss as he reached for a weapon, but with a shout the second goon pulled a knife, while Mikael and the doorman were all coming at him at once, with nowhere in the small room to move. He fought hard, landing kicks and a sharp crack to someone’s skull before three loud, quick shots had three heavy bodies landing atop him.
The goon’s bulk was shifted, and Dominic yanked him to his feet, the second pistol that had been hidden in the duffel in his grip. “You alright? Fucking hell, I shot them!”
“You fucking eejit,” Billy growled, darting immediately to the door, scouting the hallway, quickly taking out another that had come running from the storefront. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you spoke Russian?”
“I didn’t know!” Dominic spat back, looking wide-eyed and stunned at the pile of men and the boss sprawled back in his chair with a wound between his eyes. “You… Christ.”
Billy kept his gun trained on the hallway, “Where’s our stuff? You have it?” Dom lifted their duffel and came to Billy’s side, “No, get your PID! Take the chips too, take that box and the computer, take-” he stopped, shooting another man that came running from the front, “take it all and put it in our bag. All of it, Dom! Go!”
Billy left the hallway only briefly enough to search the drug dealer’s pockets and take his cash, working through the goons as well. “Search the boss, open the drawers. Hurry, we have to get out of here!”
Dominic stuffed the bag, pushing the pistol he’d used down into it as well, and Billy thrust him down the hall to the alleyway. Dominic turned in the direction they’d come, but Billy grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him around, “No, this way.”
He led Dominic through the alleys at a fast clip, tucking his own gun out of sight as they headed away from the building to another block altogether, pausing briefly as they came back to sunlight. “You’re alright?”
“Yeah,” Dominic said, panting heavily.
Billy led them away, shaking his head. “Why’d you fucking do that? You buggered up the whole thing! And since when d’you speak Russian?”
“I don’t know,” Dominic repeated, “I didn’t know, but when I heard them talking, I could understand it. And anyway, I didn’t bugger it up, you were the one making them nervous, all jittery the way you were. They liked me. They said so, Mikael told them we were a pair of dumb kids, just like I said.”
They paused in a doorway, catching their breath, and Billy looked him over, as well as himself. There was fine blood spatter on Dominic’s shirt, and more obvious stains on Billy’s clothes. “We need to change.”
He pushed Dominic along, down another alleyway and behind a rubbish bin where he dug through the duffle for a cleaner pair of jeans and made Dominic change his shirt.
“They didn’t have guns. Why didn’t they have guns?” Dominic asked.
“I don’t know,” Billy was just as confused by that. “The one had a knife, and I thought the boss was going for a gun. They didn’t search us for weapons either, I was sure they would.”
“Why wouldn’t they-” Dom started, but paused in fright as the sound of police sirens sounding from multiple directions. “What do we do?” he whispered.
Billy finished doing his fly and glanced around, taking the duffel on his own shoulder. “Buy some new clothes. Get train tickets away from here.”
“Where?”
Billy shrugged, shaking his head. “Shite, I dunno. Glasgow, maybe.”
“You said we were going to the Continent.”
“We told them that, and I don’t know if we left any of them alive in there, we’re not going to go that way if we did,” Billy countered. “But we’ve got to leave Manchester, and fast.”
Dominic nodded agreement and they strode out, a police car speeding passed them. “It worked,” he said eventually. Billy eyeballed him with disbelief. “Well, it did! We got what we needed.”
“Aye,” Billy finally chuckled, considering the situation, “We're lucky we're still alive, you twat. It was a massive mess. We left a pile of bodies back there, ‘s probably crawling with police by now. Speaking Russian. What other languages to you speak?”
“I have no idea,” Dom laughed, adrenaline still pounding through him as he punched the air in excited victory. “’S bloody cool though, innit?”
“Dunno about that,” Billy muttered, considering how many people had been killed since he’d met this man. “What’s your name anyway? The one they put your PID.”
Dominic pulled it out and looked, “Sasha Yelchin. Sasha? Bastards.”
“I like Dominic better,” Billy quipped. “Anyway, we can change it. We took that bloke’s stuff. I watched how he did it.”
“Dom,” Dominic said, turn around to walk backwards down the sidewalk to grin at Billy. “You called me that. In there, when you were… I like it. It’s weird, like. Familiar.”
Billy nodded, “Okay. Dom.”
“I think we used to do the same thing,” Dominic pondered, turning back around to walk properly. “Before we can remember. I shot those guys, three of them, all moving around you, and I didn’t miss. I didn’t think about it, I just did it.”
“You missed me,” Billy reminded him.
Dom grinned wide, “Yeah.” Then he frowned, his brows pinching together as if he was recalling something he couldn’t quite comprehend.
=26712datelog=logsecure
=27522wickerman::login
=attn::171244captain::
::27522wickerman:: Why is there a breaking report of a massacre all over my newsfeed?
::171244captain:: We are doing everything we can to erase it. Though I think it’s prudent to tell you, Iriny Svetlka was fairly high on our target list. It’s convenient.
::27522wickerman:: Convenient my arse, Hill, your rogue operatives left seven corpses for the local idiots to find. They’re the only ones even capable of doing this.
::171244captain:: It is a lead on them, sir. I have operatives deployed all over the area.
::27522wickerman:: Yet you have not caught them. In over a week’s time. There hasn’t been hit of this caliber in the public view since the wars! It’s going to be a madhouse if the press can’t be subdued... I’m going to have the whole goddamned Global Assembly breathing down my neck over this. Not only have you lost two malfunctioning assets, you’ve compromised our entire directive.
::171244captain:: In my defense, sir, Beesting was Lear’s responsibility.
::27522wickerman:: Lear has no responsibility now, that responsibility is yours. You had better scrub this so clean I can eat from it. And find those two bastards and annihilate them. Or I will find someone who can.
::171244captain:: Yes sir.
CHAPTER EIGHT