Lottery Boy (14 page)

He turned round and screwed up his eyes and stared back along the path through the tourists, but there was no strip of leather lying on the ground. He started running back, dodging round people at the last minute because he had his head down, yelling at them to get out the way. One man didn’t. He came wobbling straight at him and they both dodged the same way.

“What the…?” yelled Bully, scrambling up onto his feet.

“Sorry, sorry…” said the man, holding his hand up like he needed help and waving and shouting at Bully to come back. He could wave all he wanted, thought Bully, and then he heard a familiar
jingle-jangle
.

“I saw you… I saw the dog…”

Bully ignored him and snatched the collar out of his hand. He examined it
just
in case the guy was trying to rip him off.

“We were just getting ice creams and I saw it on the ground and then I looked back – and my wife said she’d seen…” He paused to substitute a more suitable word than his wife had used to sum Bully up. “
Someone
. Someone with a dog—”

He stopped his explanation then, to wipe his forehead. Bully could see way back down the path a blurry line-up of three or four suspects that might be a family waiting for this man to rejoin them.

“I’ll give you a million quid,” he suddenly said to the man. He wanted him to have it.

“Ha ha. Well, thanks. I could do with that,” said the man awkwardly.

“I will! I’ll give it to yer! When I get
my
money! I’ll give you a million quid, mate!”

“Ha ha,” he laughed nervously. And the man noticed Bully didn’t have any shoes and thought perhaps his wife’s description of the boy had been pretty accurate after all. “It’s really OK. I’m just glad you got it back.”

“You can have it! In a couple of days! I’m on my way!”

“Thank you. It’s fine. Really. Whatever it is, you keep it.”

Bully watched him turn back into a zombie. He could see in his face that getting-away look that zombies gave you, regretting the good thing they’d done if you started trying to talk to them too much like they were human beings.

“Don’t worry. I’m just glad I could help,” he said.

“Your loss, mate,” said Bully, watching him trot back to his family like he didn’t want to be seen running. And Bully shrugged to show everyone that it
was
the man’s loss. And having just saved himself a million quid, he knelt down and carefully put Jack’s collar back on.

“Sorry, mate,” he said. “I won’t take it off again.”

He carried on further along the grass, drinking and thinking and keeping an eye on his compass, following it west but getting ready to go north the moment the lake ran out of water and he could get across to the other side of the park. He couldn’t hear the noise from the demonstration any more and he saw between the trees a white stone bridge and then, right in the middle of nowhere, the queen’s house. He’d been meaning to come and have a look one day and now it was
this
day.

He had to give it to her: it looked
big
, way bigger than on TV. He tried counting all the windows but lost interest when he got past twenty. He liked the flag on the roof best but there was no helicopter up there or swimming pool that he could see. His place would be better than this. He’d have slides coming out of his windows down to the ground – not water slides just slidy slides – so he wouldn’t have to take the stairs or the lift. It got on his nerves in every block he’d ever lived in, always taking so long to get
out
.

He went closer, stepping out of the park and onto the pavement towards the great big wedding cake roundabout outside the palace gates. He tried to mix in with the day-tripping zombies but wherever Jack went she created a little circle of fear, marking them out from the crowd. He stood there for a good five minutes, curious to see the queen. A lot of the zombies were doing the same thing, just staring and taking pictures of what they couldn’t see.

His mum loved the queen. All the diamonds and fur coats she had, all those spare bedrooms that didn’t get taxed. Phil wasn’t so keen: the princes were all
flyboys
, not one of them had taken a bullet for his country
on the ground
.

He gave the queen a few more minutes but she didn’t turn up. Probably her day off, he thought, being a Sunday. And with his last look at the palace his gaze dropped down to a silver car going round the roundabout. He noted the plates, the last three letters –
REX
– looking like a dog’s name from olden times. The window was down. In the driver’s seat was a guy in sunglasses and a brown shirt, his arm out, resting on the door, a ciggy cupped in the palm of his hand so that it didn’t blow out.

A big old-fashioned double-decker bus with the top ripped off was coming up to the roundabout. It stopped at the zebra crossing for the zombies. And Bully watched the car go round the roundabout for a second time, the ciggy still cupped in the man’s hand … too busy looking around to take another pull on it…

Probably nothing. Still:
Better safe than dead
, Phil always said.

Bully waited until the open-top bus began to pull away and then ran along beside it. And then, when he saw there was no conductor downstairs, he picked up Jack, sped up as best he could with his ankle, and holding his dog under one arm, he made a grab for the pole.

The car turned off the roundabout away from the palace and was heading along the Mall when the Snapback spotted the boy, saw him jumping on the bus with a whole dog under his arm.

“That’s him! There, there! There! On the bus. Quick, quick, he’s going to Piccadilly! Don’t lose him! Do a U-ey!”

“All right, Snapback. I heard you first time.” Terry flicked his fag onto the road, did a U-turn.

“Punch it then! Punch it!” said the Snapback. And Terry stepped on the
loud
pedal … lurched forward and stalled. A policeman began walking over to have words just as he got the car going again and pulled away.

“He didn’t get the number, did he?” whined the Snapback.

Terry shrugged. He didn’t care. It was the Snapback’s car. He’d teamed up with this guy for the job because he
had
a car. A friend of a friend of Janks. He didn’t like his stupid name, so he called him
Snapback
because his stupid baseball cap said
Man U
. And Terry didn’t like his football team, either. He’d already told him this a good few times today. Terry could do that because he was the muscle. He could say whatever he liked.

“You sure it was ’im?”

“Yeah, yeah. It was definitely him. He was carrying a dog. I saw it under his arm!”

“Under his arm? You sure?”

“Yeah!” And he got out his phone and showed him the picture that had come with the reward message as if that proved something.

“You’d better be right. Make me
happy
,” said Terry.

Last night he
had
been happy with a few drinks in him, thinking about this big reward money, but now the drink was draining out of him it was beginning to feel like a long shot. And that was making him
un
happy. And when he felt like that he liked to threaten people so that they weren’t happy either. Why did Janks want the boy, though? He wasn’t saying, but Terry had an idea. He’d heard a few whispers on the grapevine about a
prize
ticket. Now if this was
the
boy with
that
ticket, then it was a long shot worth risking anyone’s happiness for.

He put his foot down, accelerated until he was almost touching the bumper of the car in front. The bus was three cars away, so Terry overtook them in one go, making the oncoming traffic brake. The car behind him beeped and Terry leaned out the window, swivelled his head and stared at a spot on the windscreen where the driver’s head would normally be, until the car stopped beeping and slowed right down.

“OK, Snapback, you listening?” said Terry. “At the next traffic lights, you jump out and get on the bus and get him
off
. And I’ll pull over and grab him and stick him in the boot. Right?”

“Won’t someone see us?”

“Yeah, but so what? He’s a nobody.”

The Snapback twitched a little while he thought about all this jumping out of cars and onto buses. And then he said, “Why don’t I take over driving and you get on the bus?”

Terry took off his sunglasses. He leaned over and gave him the same look he’d given the car behind, but without sunglasses blanking out his eyes it was much meaner and nastier and
closer
.

“On your left you can see Buckingham Palace Gardens where the queen hosts her many garden parties during the summer months…”

Upstairs the conductor was giving a guided tour to the zombies. It sounded packed up there, feet clomping about, everyone wanting to see out on a nice day. Bully was sat at the back, out of sight of the bus driver’s rear-view mirror. No one had noticed him jumping on. The seats at the back were empty and there were just seven or eight wig heads sat at the front, not able to get up the stairs.

He settled down. According to his compass the bus was going north and that worked for him, for a while.

When he heard the beeping he looked round and saw the silver car up the bus’s backside. He couldn’t see the driver until the big man in the brown shirt poked his head out. And then he didn’t want to see him because his eyes were popped white full of dollar signs.

“On your right is Green Park … once common ground and a swampy burial ground used for lepers. It was enclosed in the seventeenth century and bought by Charles II…”

He willed the bus to go faster but whenever he looked out the back by the stairs, the car was still there.

The bus slowed… A skinny guy in a red snapback jumped out of the silver car and ran for the bus, his legs going faster than the rest of him. Bully got ready to kick at his fingers if he made a grab for the pole. He could see the snapback working out the distance he had to jump … but the bus sped up and the snapback slowed down and banged on the side of the car to get back in.

They were going to rush him, grab him at the next set of lights – that’s what they had planned, he thought. And without thinking too much about what he was going to do, Bully grabbed a pushchair from among the luggage tucked under the steps that wound up to the top floor. And then he threw it off the bus.

It bounced once on the tarmac, opened up and the air got into it and it flew over the roof of the car. The car swerved but didn’t slow down. Bully pulled out a big grey suitcase half his size and trundled it to the edge of the step … and pushed it off. It ricocheted off the kerb and under one of the wheels, making the car jump but it carried on driving.

He needed to aim better. The big suitcase had been too heavy to throw at the right angle, so he grabbed a couple of smaller pieces of luggage and threw them, one after the other, with a straight arm like he was lobbing grenades. The first missed but the second one
exploded
onto the windscreen. He thought that might do it. The glass cracked up and pushed in but the wipers started going and the snapback was leaning out the window, like an extra windscreen wiper, pulling off clothes, shouting to the driver…

“Stop it! You naughty boy!” The wig heads at the front of the bus were looking at him, one of them standing, shouting at him. He ignored them all and yanked out a big green rucksack like the one Phil had in the army. But he held on to it, didn’t throw it. He looked back under the stairs. He was down to light ammunition – a couple of umbrellas, a coat – but then he saw collapsed up against the side one last thing…

The bus driver braked hard when he saw the wheelchair bouncing off the back of his bus. And when he did, he felt a thud as the car behind went straight into the back of him.

Bang!

Bully saw it coming, was holding on to the pole, but Jack wasn’t and she skidded down between the seats. The silver car started whining away in reverse and Bully grabbed the rucksack.

“Was that you?” said the conductor on the stairs. He was just standing there as if waiting for Bully to say
Yeah!
and own up to it. Instead he jumped off the bus, dragging the rucksack with him.