Not Dead Enough

would take him back in the direction he had just come from. But there were roadworks and heavy traffic.
    He made his decision, pressing the pedal all the way down to the metal. The Audi shot forward, across the bows of a white van. Fiercely concentrating, Skunk continued accelerating along Marine Parade, past shops, then the flash Van Alen building. He checked in the mirror. No sign of the Vectra. Good. Must be stuck at the roundabout.
    Traffic lights ahead were red. He braked, then cursed. In his mirrors he saw the Vectra again, overtaking on the wrong side, making up ground, driving like a maniac. The car pulled up behind him. Right behind him. Like, one inch from his rear bumper. All shiny clean. Radio aerial on the roof. Two men in the front seats. And now, lit up in the glare of his own brake lights, there really was no mistaking one of them.
    Shit.
    In the mirror he saw Packer’s eyes, remembered them from before, big, calm eyes, that sort of locked on you like lasers. He remembered even when he’d bitten the fucker’s finger off, his eyes kept fixed on him, no surprise, no look of pain. Sort of weird, smiley eyes – almost like the man had been mocking him. And it was as if he was doing that again now, sitting there, neither cop making any move to get out of their car.
    Why the fuck aren’t you arresting me?
    His nerves were jumping about inside him, like there was some crazed animal on a trampoline inside his stomach. He nodded his head to the music. But he was jangling. Needed something. Needed another hit. The mean amount he’d taken was wearing off fast. Tried to think of the best route.
    Tried to think why the cops weren’t getting out of their car.
    The lights changed to green. He stamped on the pedal, accelerated halfway across the junction, then jerked the wheel hard left and slewed into Lower Rock Gardens, narrowly missing an oncoming taxi. In his mirror he saw, to his relief, the Vectra shoot over the junction.
    He accelerated flat out up the Victorian terraced street, which was lined on both sides with cheap bed and breakfasts and bedsits. As he halted at another red light at the top, he saw the Vectra approaching quickly. And any last shred of doubt he might have had that he was being followed was now gone.
    Checking both directions, he saw two buses were coming from his left, nose to tail. Waiting until the last possible moment, he accelerated, shooting across the front of the first bus, driving like the wind. He raced up Egremont Place, through a sharp S-bend, overtaking a dawdling Nissan on the wrong side, on a blind corner, but fortune was with him and nothing was coming from the other direction.
    Then he waited anxiously at the junction with busy Elm Grove for a gap in the traffic. Two headlights suddenly pricked the darkness a long way back. Forgetting about a break in the traffic, he turned right, across it, ignoring squeals of brakes, blaring horns and flashing lights, laying a trail of rubber, up past Brighton racecourse, then down through the suburb of Woodingdean.
    He debated about stopping to change the licence plates and revert back to the car’s original ones, as it almost certainly had not yet been reported stolen, but he didn’t want to take the risk of the Vectra catching him up again. So he pressed on, ignoring the flash of a speed camera with a wry smile.
    Ten minutes later on a country road two miles inland from the Channel port of Newhaven, with his mirrors black and empty, and his windscreen spattered with dead insects, he slowed down and made a right turn at a sign which read Meades Farm .
    He drove through a gap in a tall, ragged hedgerow on to a metalled, single-track farm road, following it through fields of corn overdue for harvesting, for half a mile, several kamikaze rabbits darting in and out of his path. He passed the massive derelict sheds that once housed battery hens, and an open-sided barn on his right containing a few shadowy pieces of long-disused and rusting farm machinery. Then, directly ahead, his headlights picked up the wall of a vast, steel-sided, enclosed barn.
    He stopped the car. No light came from the building and there were no vehicles parked outside. Nothing at all to reveal that an active business was being carried on in here at this moment.
    Pulling his mobile phone from his pocket, he called a number he knew by heart. ‘Outside,’ he said when it was answered.
    Electronic doors slid open just wide enough to allow him to drive in,