Eightball Boogie (17 page)

I shuffled through the slushy streets towards the taxi rank. Head down, hoping to be jostled, ears pricked for a catcall. No one spoke. No one looked in my direction. I was drifting.

When I got to the top of the street I hesitated, listening to a perverse instinct that wanted to see Gonzo, maybe touch his cold body. I made about a hundred yards up the Mall towards the hospital before turning back. There was no chance of seeing Gonzo, the body would already be in the morgue. Besides, the truth was that I didn’t want to see Gonzo, it was just that I should have wanted to see him. Gonzo was dead, end of story. I was alive, living happily ever after.

I trekked back down the Mall, headed for the quays. The taxi rank looked like every taxi rank looks at four in the morning, cold, empty and mocking. I stood around for twenty minutes or so, kidding myself, stamping numb feet. Then I struck for home, crunching through the discarded chip wrappers, heading out across the new bridge.

I jumped the wall on the far side, making for the wooden bench, the frosted grass crackling like Krispies. Looking back out over the bridge to the bay beyond, next stop Iceland. I rolled a twist, not caring about the wet soaking through, staring out across the sheer drop of sixty or seventy feet. It was quiet as a new hearse, only the litter moved. The lights changed from green to amber, to red and then back to green, for an encore. I sparked the twist and tried to remember why I should care that Gonzo was dead.

The cigarette was half-smoked when I heard the car, not really paying attention. Then I realised it was coming up fast behind me, roaring out of town along the river. It screeched to a halt. I stood up to get a better look and the passenger door flew open. Everything slowed, the last few seconds before the kettle finally boils.

The first thing I noticed, he was wearing a scarf across his face, a baseball cap with the brim pulled low. The second thing was, he was cradling what looked like a sub-machine gun. The third thing was, he was unslinging what looked like a sub-machine gun, kneeling down and taking aim.

The sheer drop into the river was right behind me, but I took the step backwards anyway, stomach churning. I laughed a dry, brittle cough that got stuck halfway out, put my hands out, palms up, to ward the gunnie off. Still not convinced it wasn’t all some kind of sick joke. And then a tiny voice in the back of my head confirmed it – yes, it is a joke – but the tiny voice didn’t laugh. Or maybe it did, and the clock-click of what looked like a sub-machine gun being cocked drowned it out.

I had one place to go and I couldn’t swim but if I didn’t learn fast I wasn’t going to learn at all. I threw myself backwards and heard two flat cracks, nails being punched into a biscuit tin. Then I was looking down at the oily-black surface of the river, wondering how I’d been spun around. Then I felt the branding iron in my gut.

The somersault crashed me feet-first into the river. I went deep and touched bottom, felt the mud give, sucking me down. I struggled, knowing I should, but I didn’t have much air in my lungs when I jumped and taking the bullet on board hadn’t helped. Hitting the water squeezed out the last of the cool, pure oxygen. My lungs burned hot and raw, began to melt.

The last thing I thought was, ‘O Jesus, this is it.’ Then my heart blew and a million needles shot into my brain. The blackness came down, and there in the shadows I saw a couple of friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, a lifetime. My father was there too.

All told, it wasn’t such a bad deal.

16

How you drown is, you’re underwater, not breathing. You lose consciousness. Carbon dioxide overwhelms the oxygen in the blood. The brain sends out a message that oxygen is required. You breathe. Water floods your lungs. You drown. It’s not pretty.

Not everyone drowns that way. Sometimes the involuntary breath causes a laryngospasm. The flood of water touches the vocal cords, triggers a reflex action. The throat seizes up. Nothing gets by the blockage. You suffocate. That’s no prettier.

That’s how people drown. But I’d been shot, too.

The branding iron in my side dragged me back to consciousness. I might have been down there five seconds or five minutes, ankle-deep in the mud, when I finally realised I wasn’t dead. If I’d been dead, I wouldn’t have known I had a branding iron melting my flesh. I wouldn’t have been able to wish I was dead, either.

Breaking point arrived. My brain shut down all auxiliary functions, focused on kicking my left foot free of the sucking mud. The mud gave. The Puffa did the rest.

I broke the surface like a porpoise in heat, felt the air on my face, body convulsing, coughing up a lungful of river. I was deaf and blind, the whole world pitch black. When I finally grasped that I was under the bridge, the current sweeping off the bend, carrying me across the river rather than out to sea, the panic subsided. That gave me a chance to think, to come up with a plan that might keep me alive.

The moment passed. I started panicking again.

I paddled for the far quay, frantic, battling the current to stay under the bridge, the Puffa buoying me up at the waist. Thinking that, whoever they were, they were pros. There were no shouts, no wasted bullets fired at imaginary targets, nothing to let me know where they were, what they were doing. Which was just as well, there wasn’t a damn thing I could have done to stop them and I had other things to worry about. Like, if I didn’t get out of the water quick smart, the cold was going to kill me quicker than any gunnies.

It took twenty minutes to reach the far quay, three yards forward and two yards back, every second a bullet in the back of the head. When I finally got there the stone was smooth, slimy. I let myself be carried downstream, buffeted by the swell between the dock and the huge coal-freighter moored just beyond the bridge.

The rusty ladder embedded in the quay came at me fast. I bobbed by, reaching. I didn’t make the same mistake the second time, crashing in on the ladder with a sodden clang. I clung to the rungs for a minute or two, until the branding iron seared into my side, and then I let go again. I passed the next six ladders. By the time I got to the seventh I was down at the deepwater, two hundred yards from open sea, and fainting. My fingers were numb, the ladder rungs icing over. Twice I fell back into the water. On the third attempt I hauled myself out onto the dock, giddy with achievement.

I limped across the quay on jelly legs, crawled into the doorway of an abandoned warehouse. Unzipped the Puffa, pulled my shirt up, stared at the second belly button that had appeared just above my right hip. Felt for the exit wound, praying there was one, walked my fingers around it, right leg kicking uncontrollably. Ducked under my elbow to find a raw hole the size of a squash ball where I had always thought my kidneys were supposed to be. The blood was thin and black against the blueish, goose-bumped flesh.

I dug my keys out of the Puffa’s pocket, unhooked the leather keyholder. Folded it over, bit down hard. Then I balled my handkerchief, twisted it into a knot, took a deep breath and poked it into the hole. An electric shock shot down through my leg and bounced back up to fry my brain. I gagged on something hot and sour, collapsed back into the doorway, waiting for sirens to sound on the clear night air.

Noises wafted past the outer limit of my consciousness, strange noises, sounds I had never heard before. I realised I was talking to myself in a guttural tone, the words chopped up, blocky. My eyes blurred and cleared, blurred again. Sweat poured down my face, soaked my back, warm against the chill. I wondered, idly, if I was shaking from cold, or shock, or septicaemia.

I imagined a blazing log fire, a mute television screening Willy Wonka, a Christmas tree blinking in the corner. Ben a warm lump sprawled across my chest. A black hole in the corner of the room that seemed to be oscillating, expanding and contracting, enticing me to investigate further; warmth came in waves from its core. The temptation was too much. I put Ben to one side, carefully, so he wouldn’t wake. Got off the couch, struggling towards the darkness, feeling my body starting to thaw. Something nagging at the back of my mind, something important, something I couldn’t afford not to remember…

Ben.

And then it was dark and cold again, and I was jammed in the doorway of a deserted warehouse. Dying, shivering so hard parts of my body were splintering, I could hear them shatter. Slowly, precisely, I started putting the pieces back together again. There were some parts left over when I was finished so I just left them out, pretending not to notice.

I sat up, eased my shirt back into my jeans, zipped up the Puffa, hands trembling. Peered around the corner of the warehouse. Four hundred yards away, the bridge was deserted under the orange streetlights.

I knew there were at least two of them and that they were pros. I knew they had a sub-machine gun and that they wanted me dead. That was all I knew but that was plenty to be getting on with, if they were still around I didn’t need the news to get any worse. All I had going for me was that they couldn’t be certain I’d made it out of the river, which meant they’d have to split up to search both shores. It wasn’t much, but I was alive, which just about gave me bragging rights over Gonzo.

A shiver passed through me, top to bottom, that had nothing to do with my sopping clothes, the biting wind. I didn’t indulge it, I had Ben and Denise to make safe. I was guessing that, if the pros knew I’d be crossing the bridge, they’d know that the bridge was taking me home.

There was a public phone-box in the industrial estate, on the far side of the docks, which gave me a simple choice. Cutting through the docklands would get me to the phone quicker, but also increased the chances of bumping into the pros again, and I was pretty sure I’d already used up all my nine lives. Avoiding the pros meant going all the way down to the end of the deepwater quay, away from the bridge, doubling back up the far side, coming into the industrial estate from the rear. Which was twenty minutes in a flat-out sprint, and I wasn’t even sure I could walk straight.

I thought of Ben, asleep in bed, his behind sticking up in the air. When I had him fixed in my mind I pushed myself up out of the doorway, took off at full tilt.

I was doused in sweat after fifty yards. After five hundred, my lungs were on fire again, the branding iron wiggling around in my side, legs useless stumps of marble. It was maybe five hundred yards more before I remembered Gonzo’s mobile, when it started ringing deep in the inside pocket of the Puffa.

I swore at my stupidity, slipped my hand inside the jacket, folded my hand around the phone to muffle the sound. It was a smart move. At that hour, down at the docks with no traffic, no one around, the chirping would have sounded like a twenty-one gun salute.

I didn’t take the call. I’d had enough bad news to do me for the rest of my life, and the call meant bad news. Whoever the pros were, they knew Gonzo – had known Gonzo – well enough to know his mobile number. When the phone stopped ringing I dialled a number, the phone buried deep inside the jacket. It took her maybe ten or twelve rings to answer.

“
Dee?”

“
Who’s this?”

Her voice thick with sleep, sounding nervous.

“
It’s me. Harry.”

“
Harry? What’s wrong?” She paused. Then, coming back stronger, accusation in her voice: “What’s wrong, Harry?”

“
I’ll tell you everything later. Right now you have to get dressed, pack a bag, get Ben out of the house.”

Silence.

“
Dee?”

A deep sigh, then: “Harry, I don’t know how long –”

“
Just take the car and get out of town. It doesn’t matter where.” A light bulb popped – Brendan and Maura had a holiday home about an hour north of town. “The bungalow,” I told her.

“
Stop it, Harry. You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”

“
I’ll explain it all later, Dee. Okay? Right now I need you to pack a bag and get out of the house. It’ll be alright tomorrow, I swear.”

“
What will?”

“
Jesus fucking Christ, Dee! Get Ben out of the fucking house now! Fucking now!”

“
Okay. Jesus.” She sounded sullen. “Where’ll I go?”

“
I told you, the holiday home. Tell Brendan our place flooded, that I’m staying behind to keep an eye on the place until it gets sorted.”

“
They’re away for Christmas, you know that. They’re gone to Dallas, to Marian and Jeff.”

“
Fuck.” I’d forgotten they were away. “Okay, that’s even better. You have a key, don’t you?”

“
Yeah, but –”

“
But nothing. I’ll come and pick you up tomorrow. Alright?”

“
What about the presents?”

“
What presents?”

“
Ben’s presents, Harry. Jesus.”

“
Fuck the presents, Dee! Just get out of the fucking house!”

“
It’s Christmas, Harry!”

“
Jesus H.” I took a deep breath. “Alright, grab something small and get out. I’ll bring the rest.”

“
Okay, okay. Harry?”

“
What?”

“
Where’s Gonzo?”

“
I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Okay?” I gave her the mobile number. “Ring as soon as you get there. And go now.”

She hung up. My knees buckled and I keeled over against the wall. Rolled a smoke, the tobacco still dry, buried deep in the Puffa’s pocket beside the mobile. Considered my next move. If I stayed out all night in my condition, hypothermia was the best I could hope for. And if the pros knew where I lived, chances were they knew where I drank, which ruled out Dutchie’s place. The office was a non-starter, if the Dibble could find me there anyone could.