The Sister(184)

Miller felt terror tugging at his knees. Boyle had to be in his late sixties, but he looked no older than a fifty-year-old. An abhorrence; a freak of nature, muscular and lean, faced with a man like that, most people would have turned and run, but with Stella’s fate in his hands, he had no choice. Deprived of any semblance of his previous abilities, he didn’t know what to do. Four words came to him, pusty umys?…no mind. A blue flash of lightning illuminated the room. Thunder rolled. It started to rain.

He’d hesitated a moment too long. Boyle’s huge belt-wrapped fist hurtled towards his face, faster than a cannonball.

With only a millisecond to go until impact, the shadows returned, seeming to slow down time. The shadow-shape of a man formed on the wall opposite and dropped, spinning on the axis of his hands. Copy me, boy! Miller aped the movements of the shadow with lightning speed. He spun, palms down on the floor scribing a wide arc in a blur of movement anti-clockwise, his right leg like a scythe, took the other man’s legs out from under him. He crashed down hard onto his back. Winded, he raised his head off the floor.

Miller gave him no chance to recover. He shot up driving the heel of his foot with full force into Boyle’s face; his head smacked hard against the floor. He glanced at the shadow on the wall. It echoed his posture.

With his opponent out on the floor sprawled on the floor unconscious, Miller knew he had to work fast. No time to untie or dress her. He had to get her to the hospital right away. The nearest was five minutes away. He couldn’t risk the wait for an ambulance, so he scooped her into a fireman’s lift and ran, surrounded by shadows and darkness down seven floors of stairs, surprised at how weightless she felt.

Once he’d got her into the car; he drove at high speed. If she were to survive, every second would count. There was a bus in front. He caught it up and veering round to get past it, immediately pulled back. Two of them! He couldn’t risk overtaking both buses at the same time. Frustrated, he banged his hand down hard on the steering wheel and gauged the chances of forcing the oncoming traffic to let him pass. He indicated to overtake. The bus directly in front pulled in at a stop. Jubilant, he shouted, ‘Yes!’

The chance to get by the remaining bus had suddenly become a realistic prospect, and he edged out to overtake.

An elderly woman lurched unexpectedly off the pavement into the road. Hitting the brakes, he narrowly avoided her. The bus in front had stopped. If she’d only hurry out of his way – he could get in front of it before it pulled out again. She took what seemed like forever to finish crossing in front of him, staring balefully into the car, muttering something about inconsiderate drivers.

Come on! The bus indicated to pull out and started rolling forwards. Miller gunned the car like a kamikaze pilot, out around the front of the bus and into the path of the oncoming traffic, before swerving back into his own lane. He felt the adrenaline surging through his system. His neck felt hot under his collar.

Two minutes later, he arrived at A & E.





An hour later, Miller was at her bedside. It had taken two Naloxone injections to wipe out the effects of the heroin, she’d renarcotised after the first. Although she appeared stable, the doctors wanted her kept under observation.

The corners of her mouth lifted when she saw him, relieved to be in the hands of someone she trusted, but she didn’t feel much like smiling. She felt spaced out and peculiar and on top of that, more than anything, though she’d never ask for it, she needed sympathy. She yawned, long and loud.

‘Oh, Miller, I can’t stop yawning,’ she said. ‘I thought you'd abandoned me. What took you so long?’

‘Stella, you need to rest.’

‘What about the other girls – what happened to them? Are they okay?’

‘The police found one of them. The other one escaped. They haven’t found her yet.’

‘And what about him…they have arrested him, right? I was so scared when he tied me up like that – I thought – you know; I thought I would die.’ She blinked rapidly, holding back tears.

‘Come on now, you rest.’

Although she was still fuzzy and out of it, she needed to talk. ‘Those were the things I’ve dreaded the most in my life since Kathy went missing. Kidnap, rape, murder, tied up. I never expected to suffer all those things at once.’ She looked dejected and sad, but Miller beamed.

‘Why are you grinning at me like that? It’s not funny.’ Her shoulders slumped, deflated.

‘Well, unless something else happened you didn’t tell me about, you got away with at least two of the things you just mentioned.’

‘And injected with a drugs overdose,’ she added it to the list without emotion. He stopped her.

‘Okay, okay, you have every right to feel sorry for yourself. Did I tell you about the time I got murdered once?’

She poked her tongue at him. ‘He was going to rape me, if he hadn’t been bitten in the crotch by a guard dog, if he’d been functioning – it doesn’t bear thinking about. Miller, he was a complete schizo. By the way, you kept that one quiet, didn’t you?’

Miller looked confused. ‘What?’

‘Just before I passed out, that move…you didn’t tell me you could do that stuff! When I saw you do that, I knew we were going to be okay. I mean – what the hell was that?’