by Steve Aylett
I gasped something about it being a sex thing. I could feel my skull beginning to splinter and at this most crucial of moments a customer chugged into the gun shop. As Brute went to serve him I fumbled for the handle and loosened the grip enough to release my head and stagger upright. I had a poison headache, but at least it was portable; I stumbled groaning through the store, knocking everything over in a blind bid for the cops. Citizens with a downer on the cops are always the first to run to them when danger erupts - especially in places where citizens are not allowed by law to own firearms for personal protection. Elsewhere they are numbered among the erupters. Running, I thanked my lucky stars I was only the victim.
Before I could change my mind I was in a back room at the cop den, tied to a chair. A cop regarded me, his face a mask of disapproval. He said he didn’t like my kind and I was filled with the delirious expectation that he would identify me as a common species - that there were others like myself. I controlled my excitement, but he seemed to sense it - his gaze wavered uncertainly.
Before either of us could speak a door opened and Chief of the Cops Henry Blince entered with difficulty. ‘This the clown, Benny?’ he said, gesturing at me with a cigar, and I plaintively explained what had happened at Parker’s. The part about Ramone made them shout with incredulous laughter. Bleach had told me that reality was fiction in another shape and I told them this, but it only made them laugh all the more. Benny was having to turn round and kick at the wall, and Blince cried. At least I was making an impression. Then they sniggered something about provocation. Growing indignant, I related Bleach’s theory that there is a parallel universe containing a Beerlight in which the cops behave impeccably and that next to that is a third in which they are only human. Benny ran out abruptly with a hand to his mouth, having laughed so much he had coughed something up. Blince intercepted his tears with both fists and gasped at me to stop. He went outside to collect Benny, and after more distant, reverberating hilarity they re-entered, wiping their eyes.
‘I like you, you goddamn astro-monkey,’ Blince told me, chortling, and proceeded to relate how essential it was I assassinate Brute Parker in order to avoid arrest and imprisonment for whatever they could stand in the perjury room. They couldn’t be involved and it was common knowledge me and Parker were at throat-punching odds. All the cops would do was carry out a legitimate blaze-raid on Parker’s premises during a lunch break. Finding his store and home a scorched silhouette, Parker would storm unarmed toward the cop den, during which storming I would economise his breathing with an Uzi 9mm, right there in the street. Blince said it was time I repaid my debt to society.
They left me in an overnight cell with Parker’s file. Tomorrow was the day. The file said that Brute had spent his early childhood among priests who taught him that it was necessary to suffer to obtain happiness, and wishing to bestow such happiness upon those same priests, Brute had tortured them beyond all recognition. Today no such goodwill existed in his heart. Mistaking it for a burglar, he had shot his guardian angel. Brute went about the dealing of cod eyes with a rage which was commendable when compared with the desultory violence exhibited by the mob and cops. I once asked him why he was so unhappy and he looked into the horizon and said, ‘Instinct.’
That night my nightmare was back to normal. Flagging him down and stopping everything, I asked my usual monster what had happened to Ramone. He lit a cigarette and said he’d never heard of the guy, but that last night he’d found himself in some place like Jerusalem. ‘Look what I found there.’ And he showed me a handful of sand and 7.62mm slugs.
The next day there’s a grey funnel of smoke above the Beretta Triangle. I stand on Sunday Street with a cop Uzi semiauto under a black full-length, leaning against the wall. Parker marching calm up the street toward me. I stand away from the wall. Brute looking beyond me. I draw the semiautomatic. Brute doesn’t flinch or slow, though he sees the gun. I hand it to him as he passes and continues on to the den. I walk home. Several controlled, emphatic shots ring out as I round up Bleach, load the car and drive.
I remember Chief Blince’s remark about repaying my debt to society. I don’t believe in revenge.
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... Beerlight books in chronological order of events:
THE CRIME STUDIO
Some stories in TOXICOLOGY
ATOM
One story in SMITHEREENS
SLAUGHTERMATIC
NOVAHEAD
Table of Contents
SOLITARY
GUILT COMPLEX
EXTERMINATOR
HIT
SENTIMENT
TURNAROUND
MOTORCRASH
BLOCK WAR
INTERLUDE
HARPOON SEASON
BACK AND TO THE LEFT
NO MORE SORRY
DONUT THEORY
GEPPETTO
AUTO EROTICA
FAIT ACCOMPLI
AWKWARD INSTANT
LIKE HELL YOU ARE
DEBUT
REPRISE
PERFORMANCE
AMBIENT
AUNT MAGGOT’S LEGACY
ROPE AND RICTUS
STACKED
STRESSWORLD
FALL OUT
