Quite Ugly One Morning (21 page)

Darren eyed the shotgun, harnessing all his powers of arithmetic to put two and two together.

‘Youcun,’ he growled.

‘No, Darren,’ Lime whimpered. ‘He’s, he’s . . .’

‘Golden rule of assassination, Darren,’ Sarah added throatily. ‘Kill the assassin.’

Darren suddenly screamed and lunged erratically at Lime with the knife. The gun went off as they collided and tumbled to the ground, fingers and flesh raining down about them, the blade skidding across the deck.

Lime had blown the remainder of Darren’s other hand off, but with the shotgun trapped between their struggling bodies, he couldn’t pump it to get another shot in.

They rolled, tangled together on the floor, Darren pinning Lime down with his weight and flailing his head around in a
manic attempt to butt his opponent, now that he had nothing left to punch him with.

Parlabane spotted the butt of the shotgun sticking out from between their waists and grabbed it with both hands, Sarah lunging across to wrest Lime’s struggling, sweaty fingers from the handle. She got one finger free and bent it back until there was a loud snap and a scream, upon which all the other fingers suddenly relaxed their grip.

Parlabane yanked the shotgun free from the writhing mass of bloody flesh, took a step back and loudly pumped the next shell into the chamber.

‘RIGHT!’ he bellowed, eyes flashing. ‘Enough of this pish.’ The two combatants ceased their struggle and looked up to see him standing over them, the gun aimed in the vicinity of both their heads.

‘On your fucking knees,’ he barked.

They rolled apart and climbed to a kneeling position.

‘Hands in the air.’

Lime complied timidly. Darren gave a whimper, attempted to raise his two stumps, then closed his eyes and collapsed. His face slammed noisily into the floorboards and he remained motionless.

‘Right, spunk bubble,’ Parlabane said with malicious delight. ‘Open your mouth.’

‘B-b-but . . .’ Lime mumbled fearfully.

‘OPEN YOUR FUCKING MOUTH!’

Lime opened his fucking mouth. Parlabane forced the barrel roughly into the hairy aperture, breaking a front tooth in the process and eliciting a muffled yelp from his captive.

Sarah looked on in confusion. The relief at escaping their predicament had barely had time to register before another horrible possibility had presented itself.

Parlabane looked mad as the proverbial bag full of mad things.

‘Calm down, Jack,’ she stated softly. ‘It’s over. He’s not worth it.’

Parlabane didn’t take his eyes off Lime for a moment.

‘Don’t worry, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Stephen and I are just talking here, aren’t we? Stephen’s an important and busy man, so you have to make the most of it when you’ve got his undivided attention. I do have your undivided attention, don’t I, Stephen?’

‘Mmm-mm.’

‘Good. Because I want to tell you a wee story. I was hoping to get around to telling Sarah this soon, actually, but you interrupted us. Now, are you sitting uncomfortably? Then I’ll begin.

‘I used to live in Los Angeles, Stephen. Until very recently, in fact. But I had to leave in a hurry, because one morning I came home and there was a man in my house, waiting to shoot me to death with a silenced automatic. A man I had never met, never even seen before. A hired killer, hired to kill me for reasons I didn’t even know. I was snooping – that’s what I do – and I guess I must have made someone very nervous that I might discover something they’d rather keep under wraps. Can you see where this is going?’

Parlabane stared deep into Lime’s eyes, penetrating into a well of confusion, disbelief and growing fear.

‘He was outside my bathroom, waiting to murder me when I finished having a piss. I saw him through a wee slit that was under one of the hinges. So it wasn’t going to be a surprise. I knew I was about to be killed, a bit like Sarah and I knew we were going to be killed, just a few minutes ago. It’s not a nice feeling, Stephen. Don’t recommend it.

‘Despair. Terror. Anger. Helplessness. No fun emotions in that list, I’m afraid. But as I’m standing here now, I think even you must have deduced that I didn’t get killed. How? Well, very fortunately I found a gun in my bathroom, left there by a friend who had tried to warn me my life was in danger. A friend to whom I owe my life. And a friend I can’t even phone up to thank because he’s a policeman, and it would acknowledge his complicity in what happened next. Can you guess what happened next?’

Lime let out a whimper and tears began to run from his screwed-up little eyes.

Parlabane nodded.

‘I shot a number of holes in the bathroom door, and what do you know – when I opened the door, some of those holes were in the hitman too. I killed him, Stephen. Stone dead before nine in the morning. I had no choice. I didn’t
want
to kill him. But can you guess who I really, really, really
did
want to kill?’

Parlabane was attracted to some movement below him, and glanced down to see yellow liquid begin to seep from around Lime’s knees

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You got it in one. The smug, arrogant, conceited, worthless piece of dogshit that thought my life was worth no more than a few grand for a contract. The prick who would pay to have people murdered without being around when the screaming started, when the knives went in or the bullets ripped through the flesh. The prick who was maybe kidding himself on that he wasn’t a murderer because he wasn’t the one pulling the trigger. And the prick who got such a big hard-on at the thought that he could just order someone’s death like he was ordering a fucking pizza.

‘Now, once I had recovered from the fear and the shock, once I was able to calm down and get my head straight, I wanted to kill him so much my brain ached. I didn’t even know who he was, maybe hadn’t met him, maybe hadn’t even seen him, but I wanted to put a big fucking hole in his world.’

Lime’s mouth began quivering around the barrel of the shotgun, his tearful eyes mesmerised, unable to look anywhere but into Parlabane’s.

‘Unfortunately, I couldn’t. For one, I had to get the fuck out of the country. For another, more practically, how could I ever find him? And anyway, this was LA: big-scale. The guy who ordered my death was probably not even the guy my death was intended to protect. The guy my death was intended to protect probably paid a big salary to the guy who ordered my death to make sure that such problems got solved without him even knowing about them. Kids himself that he’s not a murderer because he never even gets to hear about the deaths that are necessary to – how might you put it – protect his investments.

‘So I could never get the guy who was really responsible, and that was something I was just going to have to live with. But what do you know? Here I am in Edinburgh a little while later, once again moments from being murdered by a hired killer, paid for by another despicable toley who thinks his business plans are more important than the lives of, what, thirty people? Except this time I know who’s behind it, this time it’s not so big-scale, this time it’s just some greedy wee shite with his fingers in the till. And this time, I’ve got him kneeling on the floor in front of me with a shotgun in his mouth, waiting for me to blow that hole in his world.’

Sarah gently, tremulously put a hand on Parlabane’s shoulder.

‘Don’t do it, Jack. Look,’ she implored, indicating the window. ‘There’s cops swarming across the square. They must have heard something.’

‘It’s too late,’ Parlabane said, in a chilling, breathless hiss that froze Sarah and made Lime crap in his already damp trousers.

Then he pulled the gun out of Lime’s mouth and backed away.

‘There’s already a hole in his world,’ he said with that grin, which Sarah was for once comforted and reassured to see. ‘It’s between your legs, Stephen, and there’s going to be a fucking lot of traffic through it when you go to prison. But hey, don’t think of it as rape – think of it as their way of “touching base”.’

McGregor surveyed the room before him. There wasn’t any furniture this time, but that hadn’t proven an impediment to generating more inventively wreaked havoc.

There were several fingers – more fucking fingers – scattered about the bare floor, and blood smeared all over the place in what was becoming a familiarly liberal fashion.

Some pathetic, bubbling, bearded nob-end kneeling in a puddle of piss, having his rights read to him. A semi-conscious cro-magnon with a face that looked like someone had been over it with a lawn mower, who they couldn’t handcuff because he had no fucking hands.

And that Parlabane bloke again, which was simply the last straw.

He shook his head, turned and walked back down the hall as Dalziel was returning from the close.

‘I don’t want to know,’ he said before she could open her mouth. ‘I don’t want to fucking know, Jennifer. I’m away hame to get pissed. I don’t want to see or hear anything about this case ever, ever again.’

Jenny walked over to where Parlabane and Sarah were standing together against the wall, back from the official activities taking place in the living room. She, McGregor, Gow and Callaghan had arrived about ten or fifteen minutes after the vanguard of cops from Maybury Square.

‘You make a lovely couple,’ she observed. ‘Matching facial wounds – how romantic.’

‘Glad you like them,’ Parlabane said. ‘We were going to get tattoos, but that’s so passe.’

Jenny smiled.

‘So what kept the cavalry?’ Parlabane asked.

‘We radioed the station to get some bodies over here as soon as we realised Lime was loose with a gun, but I understand the fun was already over by that time.’

‘And what fun it was,’ said Sarah dryly.

‘Don’t knock it,’ Jenny replied. ‘I think I’d rather be under
armed siege than face the paperwork that’s waiting for me after this.’

‘Well, Jenny,’ said Parlabane, ‘if we’re catching the bad guys for you, you have to be doing something for your money, right?’

She sighed. ‘Aye, I suppose. So are you two OK?
No offence, but neither of you quite looks peachy.’

‘Nothing a shower and half-a-dozen beers wouldn’t cure,’ Sarah said.

‘Well I’ll be buying whenever I’ve finished sorting out this wee pantomime. So I’ll see you in the Barony in about August.’

They sat outside on a wall, blankets wrapped around their shoulders, drinking coffee from plastic cups handed to them by the paramedics, as Lime was led handcuffed across the square and Darren was poured into an escorted ambulance.

‘So,’ started Sarah. ‘Where do we go from here?’

‘Well,’ Parlabane said, touching the Elastoplast on his cheek, ‘I was thinking of going to the pub and getting well and truly blootered, then making a pass at you shortly before I collapse.’

Sarah shook her head apologetically.

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Jack. Sorry.’

Parlabane looked like he was trying hard not to appear too crestfallen.

‘Well, I could omit the pass bit. It’s not obligatory. I was just . . .’

She put a finger to his lips.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think it would be wiser to go back to my place, go
straight
to bed and then see if there’s any pubs still open by the time we’ve had enough.’

Parlabane nodded.

‘Yeah. That probably is a better idea.’

Then they kissed, a moment of memorable tenderness, release, passion and romance, spoiled only partly by their plasters sticking together and Parlabane’s coming off completely when they pulled their heads away.

Stephen Lime was given three concurrent life sentences by a judge who was not impressed by his lawyer’s attempts to colour his offences as ‘white collar crimes’. His brief’s plea
for early transfer to a low-security or even open prison on the grounds that his client – while having been found guilty of paying assassins – was not himself personally a dangerous or violent man, was summarily rejected, the lawyer reminded by the judge that threatening people with shotguns and blowing people’s hands off was still considered – even in these liberal times – dangerous and violent behaviour.

Nonetheless, Lime still took inspiration from his heroes in top-level British management, and is right now attempting to convince anyone who will listen that he has Alzheimer’s disease.

The
worst
day of Stephen Lime’s life was the first day he and Big Boabby ‘touched base’ in Saughton.