The Man Who Walked And Talked

Kenny jerked into consciousness and saw his wife, Lorraine, looking down at him. He was awake immediately, listening for the telltale sounds, the noises that meant they were not alone.
Silence.
Every creaking floorboard had been left unfixed and all the hinges un-oiled as back-up for when, not if, the alarms and pressure pads were by-passed. He strained to hear them betray the presence of intruders.
Silence.
Lorraine mumured what she'd heard - breaking glass in the kitchen - as Kenny, reaching for the phone, noticed that the clock/radio was dead. So was the phone. Lorraine slipped beneath the duvet with her mobile while, from under the pillow, Kenny pulled the last link to what he once was: his revolver. Everything else - name, life, job - was new as it was for his wife. He eased out of bed and listened.
Silence.
Lorraine's muffled exchange with whichever duty officer was on the graveyard shift would, Kenny knew, spirit squad cars out of the night and speed them on their way with the large, dark saloons favoured by his paymasters following on later.
He had a strong desire to move round, to make a noise and scare them off, but this wasn't some kid chancing his arm to nick the telly and the hi-fi, this was...what?...two, maybe three men? Two to do the job plus a lookout, he figured, probably in a car, possibly in contact with the others. He scanned the night air for the hiss and crackle of walkie-talkies.
Silence.
You must, his handlers had said, delay them to give us time to reach you. Make it hard, they'd said with a smile, make them work to get you. He had taken their advice.
Lorraine broke cover, shifted out of bed, whispered 'they're on their way' to her husband as he squinted out at the car-lined street, and then started pulling bin bags of clothes out of the built-in wardrobe. The moment they'd hoped would never come appeared to have finally arrived.
A cat padded along the pavement, stopped, looked at a doorway for what seemed like an eternity then carried on. Kenny kept watching the shadows, looking for signs of a shrug, a shiver or a simple flexing of legs on a cold winter's night.
Nothing.
Lorraine buried the bin bags under the bedclothes, praying that in the darkness they'd pass for bodies, then returned to the wardrobe. Kenny, at the bedroom door by now, tried to make sense of what he was or wasn't hearing.
Silence.
Deep down, he'd always known they'd come for him. Men like him, traitors to some, spent their lives looking over their shoulders, forever expecting that last fatal encounter. He'd seen the weary acceptance, the final surrender, in the eyes of those he himself had hunted down in the past: the men who had nowhere to hide and couldn't run any more; the men who were too old, too tired or too sick to fight one last time; and the men who had grown complacent and believed they'd been forgotten. Their mistakes had informed his own turncoat existence, making him stronger and preparing him for his own time of reckoning.
From the start both he and Lorraine had avoided keeping a regular routine: journeys to and from work varied; departure and arrival times differed from day to day; cars were replaced frequently; work patterns were subtly shifted; employment was churned up with jobs being discarded many times over. They had become a blur, forcing any watchers to conclude that the only chance of getting their man was at his home and at night. Just as he wanted.
He had resisted turning the house into Fort Knox but had opened it up at the front, exposing it to passers by and giving no cover for any assault. At the rear, the kitchen sashes had been replaced by one large window with security mesh embedded in the double glazing. The back door, however, had a glazed pane in it - Kenny's 'come on' - and he smiled as he pictured the gloved hand snaking through the shards of glass to reach the lock. He imagined the door not opening, the torch spotlighting the two padlocked bolts and the masked men arguing, Laurel and Hardy like, about what to do next. Cut through the padlocks? Too slow. Batter the door down or shoot the padlocks off? Too noisy. Go through the smashed window? There'd have been a shrug of shoulders, he guessed, and a muttered 'get on with it'. At this point, when the first guy was forcing himself through the window, Kenny had originally planned to run down downstairs and blow the guy's fucking head off but now...
Time was short. Once in the kitchen, they had only to get through the locked door leading to the hall and then up the stairs - a matter of seconds at most. Kenny shut the door and retreated to the built-in wardrobe. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, his greatest achievement in DIY swallowed all their clothes and shoes and now, as he pulled the door to, it swallowed him. He balanced an ironing board against the door then quickly scaled the aluminium ladder into the loft where Lorraine, dressed in fleece and jeans, was pulling on her trainers. As he hauled up the ladder and closed the trapdoor there came, from two floors below, quick but heavy thuds followed by a loud crack and the sound of splintering wood.
Lorraine, the fear rising in her, got to her feet and tiptoed across the joists to the chimney breast. Kenny slid the bolts across the trapdoor, grabbed his clothes, scrambled over and kissed her on the forehead, muttering 'for better, for worse'. He cut the torchlight as the killers raced up the stairs and tore into the room, emptying their shotguns into the bed before realising, with a torrent of 'fuck' and 'shit', that the bodies were fakes. The wardrobe door was yanked open. Something fell. A man shouted. Shots ricocheted round the room, piercing the ceiling. The window shattered. The firing stopped. A groan morphed into a sigh.
Silence.
Footsteps approached the house. A voice called out a name then 'shit, shit, fucking shit!' filled the air before stopping abruptly. Kenny looked up. There was a wail of sirens - distant but growing louder. The lookout ran, high-tailing it while he still had the chance.
Kenny clambered down into the bedroom. His torch picked out the blood splattered wall and traced the scarlet streaks down to where a man lay dead: his head damn severed by shotgun wounds; his chest had more holes than St. Andrew's. The second man was on his back, hanging out of what was left of the window, impaled on jagged pieces of glass. The body was twitching. The eyes were open but sightless.
They'd expected me to jump them, thought Kenny, so the ironing board falling onto the guy by the wall made him think he was being attacked and he'd shouted and started shooting, and the other guy, equally edgy, had fired back. Kenny allowed himself a grin: the simplest thing, the afterthought - the falling ironing board - had, in the dark, made them blast each other to kingdom come.
Fifteen minutes later, the house, now filled with uniforms, had become a crime scene. Outside, neighbours were ushered back behind the police cordon while detectives entered the house. From halfway down the street came the squeal of brakes and the opening and shutting of car doors. Freshly tipped off and roused from bed and bars, Fleet Street's finest had come to report and distort.
Two men got out of a black Ford. Both wore overcoats. Both looked ex-military. They normally were in Kenny's experience. The younger of the two peeled off into the house while the older man came to where Kenny stood with Lorraine, introduced himself and led them back to the car. Kenny settled onto the back seat next to Lorraine and the older man climbed into the front beside the driver. The car pulled away from the kerb and accelerated down the street.
Kenny looked at Lorraine. Their life here was over. Within a few months they'd be different people living different lives. But whatever came next, wherever they were settled, he knew the past would never leave them alone. Someone would come looking for him. They always did.