Music. He rifles through some CDs, smiles wanly at the irony of his choice. Jim Morrison. Plucked guitar notes growing, reaching out of silence, like a living thing, like a plant reaching towards the light.
Exotic. Eastern. The rattle of a tambourine. He loves Jim Morrison. “This is the end,” he hums low, “beautiful friend. The end.” But for whom, he thinks?
He turns the music up. He takes his overcoat from the cupboard in the hall. Drums beating like the pulse in his temples. Rolling like waves of his own blood. He always feels music inside him, like it’s growing from the inside out.
He puts his coat on and lights the fire, turns the chair towards the door. He strikes a match and lights the cigarette, drawing on it, pulling the smoke deep inside himself. It’s the last cigarette he’ll ever smoke. He blows out the match, puts one hand in his pocket for warmth and tilts his head, blowing smoke upwards, narrowing his eyes against the fug, letting it settle round him, letting the smoke and the music curl round him, inhabit him.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
She doesn’t believe it. Not any of it. Stella looks at her sharply then continues packing.
“What?” Stella says.
Danni doesn’t reply.
“Danni?”
“Johnny texted. Parker called. They moved on all of them but …”
“They’ve got Pearson?” Stella says so eagerly that Danni realises fully how frightened she is of him.
Danni shakes her head.
“Everybody but him. They got Coyle but not Pearson. They can’t find him.”
“Shit.”
“The police car’s on its way here. Johnny says it will reach us before he does. He’ll come later to the safe house.”
Stella starts throwing things into a case.
“Fuck it, Danni, I want out of here. I hope they get here soon.”
“I’m going over there,” Danni says suddenly.
Stella freezes. “Over where?”
“Johnny’s flat.”
“No way. Johnny will be on his way over and you could get stuck between here and there. The police will be here any minute. Just do what he says.”
“I want out of here before they get here,” says Danni. “There’s something going on over there. He’s waiting for Pearson.”
“Danni you can’t …”
“I’m going.”
“Shit Danni …” says Stella, throwing her hands in the air. “You can’t go over there on your own.”
Danni picks up her bag, feels the heavy thump of it against her leg, knows the gun nestles inside. It’s time.
“See you later, Stella.” Stella kicks the suitcase on the floor savagely with the toe of her scuffed white stilettos. Mad bloody cow. She grabs her handbag and runs out into the stairwell after Danni, banging the door behind her. Danni is already at the bottom of the steps.
“Oi!” Stella shouts.
She grabs the handrail, tries to run down the stairs as fast as her tight skirt will allow, legs flailing out to the side, heels clip clopping on the stone stairs.
CHAPTER FIFTY
In the fug of smoke, it is Danni’s face he sees. That look when she demanded the gun from him. It haunts him. In that moment, she wanted him dead. He knows it. He closes his eyes momentarily as it to shut the expression out but it looms clearer than ever in his imagination. Clear-eyed. He did not see her confusion, only her coldness.
She is brave enough, his instincts tell him that much. She could do it. With the right heat … the right moment … the swell of desperation. He nods to himself silently as the music fills him. You get to recognise that capacity. That night all those years ago, when Devine asked what road he wanted closed, where his body should be dumped, Johnny came close to dying. He knew it, saw it, felt it, like he does now. A wrong word, a wrong move …
He knows something else too. He will kill himself before he allows her to kill him. She is focused entirely on the action, and not the aftermath, and he knows what that does to you. You have to wash the blood off fast or it stains you forever. She has no idea what it is like, the black hole that opens up, the search for soul, the terror of immortality. The questions, drumming incessantly in your brain. He will not allow her to find out. He will kill himself before he allows her to kill him.
He fingers the trigger of his gun reluctantly, trains it on the open door as if Pearson is here already. Then he hesitates. Perhaps … perhaps the answer is simply to let Pearson shoot him. End everything. Become her altar. How else can it end now? He can’t go back.
He lowers the gun, the music enveloping him still. Beautiful friend, the end. Johnny pulls another chair over beside him, places the gun where he can see it. He will not touch it. Let Pearson pull the trigger first.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The taxi smells of artificial air freshener with an underlying note of staleness. Like someone has been sick in here, Danni thinks, wrinkling her nose. The hire car is still outside Stella’s flat, where she’s left it, frightened it would identify them. If Pearson showed up, he would see it outside and assume they were there, which might delay him for a bit. But she doesn’t think Pearson will go there. He’ll be drawn to Johnny. Like she is.
“Can you go any faster?” she says. The taxi driver says nothing but she feels the surge as he puts his foot down. The car slows as he rounds the corner, slap bang into a long queue of traffic behind a jack-knifed lorry.
“No,” she wails.
“It’s okay Danni,” Stella says quietly, reaching out a hand to her arm.
Up ahead, a car driver blasts its horn and a chorus of toots begins. The taxi driver jumps out, peers into the darkness.
“We’ll be here a while,” he announces, as he slams the door shut again.
The heavily perfumed atmosphere of air freshener is making Danni feel sick. She opens the window a crack.
Johnny made the bomb that killed Marco and Angelo. Over and over inside her head. It makes her hold her breath.
Outside, a few cars inch forward. “Make it move!” Danni explodes, leaning forward. “Go up on the pavement and round! Go!”
Stella’s hand reaches out and slips through her arm, her thumb drawing small, quiet, soothing, circles on Danni’s arm. The driver’s eyes flick up to his mirror and meet Danni’s, and then he glances away again, too unwilling, too embarrassed, to meet her distress head on.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
He is here. Pearson is here. He didn’t hear him because of the music but he can feel him without opening his eyes.
“Careless of you Johnny, leaving your door open.” Pearson says.
“I was expecting you,” Johnny says.
He sees immediately Pearson resents that. He does not like to feel he can be predicted. He is too smart, too cunning.
“You’re taking a chance,” Johnny adds. “I knew you’d take a chance.” He see the gun, hanging at Pearson’s side like an extension of his arm.
“Those who take chances win. Y’know?”
Pearson preens himself, seeming to grow an inch in his navy pinstripe suit.
“Closing your eyes, Johnny. Caught without your gun. You’re going soft.” Pearson takes off his jacket, transferring the gun from one hand to the other, and throws the jacket on the back of the chair. He loosens the tie round his lilac shirt with one hand, his gold rings flashing in the overhead light, the gun still in his other hand, flat against his thigh.
“The police will be here soon.”
“Yeah? But I got here first, didn’t I Johnny? I can have you blasted to kingdom come before they arrive.”
Johnny smiles, picking up his cigarette that has been resting on an ashtray. He offers the packet to Pearson who shakes his head.
“No, you don’t any more, do you?”
He relights his own, watching Pearson above the flame as he strikes a match and lifts it to the cigarette in his mouth, cupping his hand protectively round it.
“Blasting to kingdom come isn’t your style, though, is it? Too quic
k. You need play time. Cat and mouse. How fast was it with Myra?”
“How would I know Johnny?”
“The police will know soon enough.”
“There will be nothing on Myra that links her to me.” He smiles. “What do you think I keep Coyle for?”
Johnny look at the curve of his belly beneath the lilac shirt, the slight paunch, the soft flabbiness of indiscipline. That’s always been the trouble with Pearson. Johnny breaths out a soft mist of smoke. Smart enough. But not so smart he doesn’t need other people to know it.
“How do you feel afterwards?” He’s genuinely curious. Do other people feel like him? “To be responsible for a person’s death …” Johnny continues.
“Your hands are dirty, same as mine, Johnny.”
“That always made you feel better, didn’t it?”
“You’re too emotional. It’s business. You kill or you get killed. It’s not complicated. Why would I feel anything? You know what Myra was. She was a whore.”
“You always had trouble with women.”
“And you always had trouble with your big mouth, Johnny. Maybe you should just shut the fuck up.”
“Can you kill us all? Myra. Jim McConnell. Stella. Me.”
“You missed one.”
“What?”
“You missed one. The Scottish dame. What’s her name?”
“Danni.”
“Danni, yeah.”
He hates hearing her name on his lips. Curious. Just the sound from those thin lips makes him want to break Pearson’s neck. There is something in Johnny’s manner that Pearson picks up on. Animal instinct. Pearson folds his arms and perches on the edge of the sofa opposite Johnny and leans forward, the blue river veins visible in his neck.
“You know what I think Johnny?” His voice is dangerously civil. “I think you’re a bit sweet on this Danni. I knew she was your type. Lively. And you know how it is when you get involved like that. You develop weak spots. Like Roisin.”
He can feel it like a rush of wind in his ears, the rustling of leaves, an old familiar anger, dark inside him, deep inside him. A physical force, wooshing into his lungs with the nicotine, making his heart beat faster, giving a second’s blackout, a brief power cut, inside his head. Steady. Steady.
“You can’t get rid of us all, Pearson.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll go down anyway.”
“Yeah but I’ll take you with me.”
They are silent now, him and Pearson. Too much to say and not enough. The landscape of all those years stretching between them. And maybe there’s a sliver of regret that things have to be this way, that things couldn’t be different. Because there’s something, Johnny knows, that binds the two of them, even if it’s just childhood when differences between you don’t matter as much. It doesn’t matter that you’re different and incompatible and maybe even hostile because you’re bound by something bigger, bound by being kids in a world that you are only just beginning to understand.
Back then, character was only a tendency, an instinct. It wasn’t rigid; it morphed, took shape, changed shape. But that’s before the choices were made. That’s when life stretched ahead, possibilities glittering like lakes on the horizon. And after the choices were made, tendencies and instincts solidified into hardened traits. The glittering lakes were dull and barren now, dry bedded, lined with cracked mud and silt. And now, things can only be the way they have to be, with regret but without choice.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Johnny pours two glasses of whisky, Pearson watching silently.
“They’re looking for you, Pearson.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to kill me or what?” asks Johnny, sliding one across the small table beside him.
“I need to get out of here,” Pearson says. It’s cold in the flat but there are beads of sweat on his thin, upper lip. When he moves, Johnny notices the darker lilac of damp patches under the arms of his shirt.
“I’m not going down,” Pearson says, lifting the glass and taking a gulp. “I’m not going inside. I’ll shoot you and I’ll shoot me before I do that …” His voice drops. “We were a good team, Johnny.”
He looks into Pearson’s eyes and is shocked. What is that flickering there like a light bulb, making and breaking connection repeatedly? Something from childhood. An appeal. He saw that look once, such a long time ago. With Pearson’s auld man.
“A good team?” he says.
“We could move off, start up again,” Pearson says. “Business opportunities everywhere Johnny.”
Jesus, he’s mad. That’s why he’s come here … Johnny says nothing and Pearson understands that silence, the rebuke of it, and the light goes out as if it had never been on.
“You never saw things very clearly,” Pearson says.
“We were never a team.”
“We could have been.”
“You’ve always worked for yourself. That’s why I went down.”
Pearson shrugs.
“They knew about a job.”
“So you swapped my freedom for yours?”
“That’s business, Johnny.”
Business.
“Remember Jimmy Gillespie?” Johnny says suddenly.
“No. Who’s he?”
Johnny rolls his eyes.
“He was a cleaner at an RUC station. You wanted me to shoot him.”
“Oh him … yeah.”
“Fuck, Pearson, you don’t even remember him properly do you? You wanted to shoot him! You said he was a traitor. But all the time you were squealing to the Brits yourself.”
“Oh don’t talk shit! I let them think I was working for them. I had a foot in both camps and we needed that. It was useful. I manipulated them. You went down for the Lands Road bomb but you’d have got a lot longer if you’d gone down for Glasgow.”
Johnny shakes his head. Always an explanation. Always a self-justification. The trouble with Pearson was, he always ended up believing his own fantasies.
Johnny hadn’t wanted to be part of the whole nutting squad thing; it never appealed to him to be part of “internal discipline”. But the night they went to Gillespie’s house, Pearson had made sure he got pulled in from above. He knew how was it going to look if he didn’t go. An order was an order. There had been three of them, him and a guy called McGill that he’d never met before, led by Pearson. They had knocked on Gillespie’s door, armed with guns, ready to force entry when it opened.
Pearson wouldn’t tell them what Gillespie had done but Johnny couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw him. An old guy in carpet slippers. His wife had answered the door, screaming like a child when she saw masked men on her doorstep. Gillespie had rushed out instinctively when he heard her, then froze in the hall, unsure which way to turn. Johnny had looked at the old guy with the grey stubble and cardigan and wondered what the hell was going on.
“Inside,” Pearson ordered Gillespie’s wife, pushing her in and slamming the front door behind him. But she remained rooted to the spot in the hall.
“In there,” he screamed, nodding at the sitting room. She moved fast then, collapsing onto the sofa beside her daughter and her seven-year-old grandson, who cowered, howling, beside his mother.
“It’s okay,” Johnny said to Gillespie’s wife and daughter, as calmly as he could. We just want a chat. Nobody’s going to get hurt. He kept Gillespie out in the hall and closed the door.
“What is this?” he said to Pearson.
“Shoot,” Pearson ordered. “Back of the leg.”
Gillespie’s eyes were darting everywhere, Johnny noticed, trying to look for an escape. Just as he had himself all those years ago in the warehouse.
“Pearson, what the fuck’s going on?” he hissed.
“You don’t need to know that. Follow orders.”
“Please,” said Gillespie, grabbing hold of Johnny’s arm, “it’s only a few hours cleaning a week. It’s the only job round here. I won’t go back. I swear I won’t go
back.”
“Shut the fuck up!” shouted Pearson, lashing out with his closed fist. Gillespie fell back against the door with a thump.
“Grampa! Grampa!” The screams rose hysterically from behind the door, followed by the child’s fists battering against the wood before being dragged away.
“Get on with it!” Pearson yelled at Johnny.
“Come on, come on!” Jim had been muttering through the whole exchange. He looked hyped up, Johnny thought. Trigger happy.
“We need to get out of here! I’ll do it!” McGill shouted now.
Will you fuck, Johnny thought, throwing open the sitting room door and pushing Gillespie through. A shot rang out, followed by screaming.
“Out,” Johnny yelled at the others, and they ran through the front door and into the car.
“Why did you push him into the room?” demanded Pearson belligerently, removing his balaclava as they drove off. “You got him?”
“You know me, Pearson” said Johnny dryly. “Not much of a shot. Think I might have got the floor in all the confusion.”
Pearson had been furious. He could easily have put the bullet in Gillespie himself but he had wanted Johnny to do it.
“You were useless that night with Gillespie,” Pearson says now, gulping back his whisky. “You always bottled it. You always let us down.”
“Let you down!”
“We could have been a good team.”
“He was an old guy, with no job, trying to make a couple of pounds as a cleaner. Was he really worth our attention because he happened to be cleaning an RUC station?”
“You know your problem, Johnny? You always try to take the moral high ground.”
“Yeah, I’m a convicted bomber with a prison record. Most people’s idea of the moral high ground right enough,” says Johnny, stabbing his cigarette out. He shakes his head at Pearson. “It’s certainly not something anybody could accuse you of.”
Kiss the Bullet Page 25
