With his failing breath he grabbed tightly at Hunter, clutching the hand holding the knife around the wrist so that Hunter could not release him. Then he kicked at Hunter’s good leg, even as he swung out and over the edge of the roof.

“Shit!”

He heard Hunter’s expletive and it made him smile. He kept that expression with him all the way down until the crushing impact on the ground knocked it loose.

Chapter 49

49

My leg was threatening to collapse under me, my head full of fog from the pain and the loss of blood, and Luke Rickard was fully armored. It was a fight I should never have won. But I was driven by a rage that was almost overwhelming. No way was I going to let Rickard walk away from this alive.

Even though he was wearing a helmet, it was the first good look at his face I’d had since our fight in Colombia. He’d changed, but there were still enough of my features in his to give me the uncanny feeling that I was fighting my own personal demon. It sent me a little insane, I guess.

I went at him like something demented, and though our fight was short and brutal it was one of the most desperate I’d ever been involved in.

In my early days as a soldier in the British Army I was shot by a player in the Provisional IRA. I still bear the scar where his bullet cut through my chest and exited from my back. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to dying, but this was a close second.

Tubal Cain, the Harvestman, tried to cut out my heart, and a monstrous killer called Larry Bolan tried to carry me into an inferno, but I’d stopped both of them. Despite how good they were, it was Luke Rickard who almost ended my life. In his last moment on earth he tried to take me with him by pulling me off the roof.

Weak with the loss of blood, faint from my exertions, I couldn’t stop the tug of his weight pulling me over the balustrade. And the only epitaph I could come up with to sum up my eventful life was shit.

It was how I felt, I suppose.

I fell with Rickard beneath me, then we somehow turned in midair and I was under him. Lucky in a way. It meant that I crashed down on the roof of the annex wing, while he bounced off, somersaulted away and struck the ground headfirst another thirty or so feet below. His helmet didn’t help save him. Where I hit, the roof collapsed under me and I ended up lying on the floor of a ward that had fortunately been stripped of furniture.