Death & the City Book Two

by Lisa Scullard

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asks me, and I nod. “I’ll get you a t-shirt.”

  “I’ve got optional aspirin if you want help sobering up,” he says, putting the packet down next to a cup of tea on the bedside table. “I didn’t put it in your drink this time. The only one I did tonight was the vitamins in the orange juice.”

  “Thank you,” I say, sitting up in bed with the duvet pulled tight round me, feeling very conscious of wearing nothing under his t-shirt. I take a couple of aspirin out and swallow them with a gulp of tea as he gets into the other side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve been worse,” he chuckles. “Anyway, that’s what we were supposed to be catching up on. The subject of your feelings, about being single.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I recall, aware of a dark area of my mind that I had been avoiding stepping into, in conversation earlier. “How far did I get with that?”

  “You were feeling a bit insecure about discussing it in public. No. Not insecure. I think I said vulnerable.”

  “Sounds about right.” I drink some more of my tea and put the mug back down. As I lean back again I feel his arm go around me, and I feel about as vulnerable as I’ve ever been, in an under-dressed sense. I realise the only defence I have is to keep up with the discussion, as his hand moves up and down my arm absently. “You know that amber paperweight in the office. With the chrysalis. Is it yours?”

  “Yeah, it’s from South America somewhere.”

  “I was thinking about what’s in a chrysalis. A caterpillar goes in, and it’s lived all its life as a caterpillar. It doesn’t mate, it just becomes an adolescent, and then it makes a chrysalis, and dissolves into nothing. Just liquid stuff. Which eventually rebuilds as something new, emerges as an adult, and finds a mate and all that. It feels like I’ve had a really long stage of being stuck in a chrysalis, being nothing. Not even knowing what’s expected of me when I emerge, or what I’ll be capable of, or anything like that. Like the teenage identity is redundant, but nothing has come along to replace it yet. It’s all just random potential with nothing material or real happening to define it.”

  Connor sighs thoughtfully.

  “I guess it’s hard to describe when you don’t even know yet what it is that you’re supposed to have feelings about,” he concedes. “Don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “I think I had an idea of what a relationship was meant to look like, from what everyone else I knew did and said in theirs,” I reply. “But I didn’t know what it felt like to experience one, so I couldn’t really identify with it. Just tried to imagine instead.”

  “You used the past tense,” Connor says. He puts his empty tea mug down on the side table, and rubs his eyes, before dropping his hand to pick mine up where I was resting it on top of the covers, locking his fingers through my own, playing with them distractedly. “You said you didn’t know what it felt like. What does that tell you about how you’re feeling now?”

  It’s awkward. I’m worried that if I say the wrong thing, whatever’s happening now might still be nothing. When in spite of everything I thought about him earlier, I want it to mean something. Not just that I’m a scenario he’s figuring out how to crack.

  “I feel like I should be sober before I say anything else about it,” I say, and I mean it.

  “Yeah,” he agrees. “Me too.”

  I wake up with my memory in pieces all over the place. My brain just isn’t accustomed to dealing with that amount of alcohol. As I try and pull together a coherent chain of events in my head, I hear Connor groan next to me.

  “Can you pass me the aspirin, please?” he asks, and I guess he’s not feeling so good either.

  I prop myself up on my elbow, and find the box on the bedside table where I left it. Connor takes it out of my hand, and fumbles to open it, trying to get the tablets out.

  “Damn it,” he says. “I think one got away.”

  I sit up, and feel down the bedcovers, my fingertips finding the small round button of a pill, skittering along a fold.

  “Here.” I pass it to him. “Don’t you need a drink with those?”

  “Don’t think I could stomach one. I’ll chew them, it’s okay.” He puts the box aside, and rubs my back. “Thanks. How are you feeling?”

  “Blurry,” I reply. “In all meanings of the word.”

  His hand slows down to stroking pace, tracing my spine with his fingertips.

  “I didn’t try anything,” he reassures me. “Probably wasn’t capable, if that’s any help.”

  “I wouldn’t have known the difference, if that’s any help,” I joke.

  “Careful,” he says. “Don’t kid yourself that I don’t know you’ve got nothing on under my t-shirt. I still might feel tempted to show you what I am capable of, even with a hangover.”

  My skin starts to tingle under the t-shirt, sending neurological messages deeper from his touch. It’s so strange I wonder if my nervous system can actually read intention like that, gaining an impression of what he’s thinking about without saying it, as if the contact means my body responds to his thoughts as much as my own, completing a circuit. Just like telepathy, or instinct.

  I’m used to tuning in to whether someone’s about to do something stupid or dangerous at work, on my gut instinct, and take it for granted that I’m usually accurate. But anything like this is new. I doubt that reading him the riot act over the licensing laws would make any difference in this case. Disregarding the fact he most likely knows them all already.

  “Not to mention it’s still early and that aspirin will kick in sooner or later,” he adds. “I think you should lie back down and have a cuddle, while my hangover says it’s still safe for you.”

  I do as he suggests, cautiously snuggling closer to him under the covers, and although my nerve endings still respond residually from my spine being tickled, his body heat feels safe, and not in the least bit threatening. But he’s still in a teasing mood, hung over or otherwise.

  “Want to make a bet how long it takes me to get that t-shirt off you?” he asks, kissing the top of my head.

  “No.”

  “Spoilsport. I’ve got a stopwatch, you can call it in hours, minutes or seconds. Or milliseconds.”

  “No.” I stroke his shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Give me a kiss first.”

  I raise my head briefly and kiss him. I draw away before the sensation pulls me in further. I have a feeling there’s a point of no return out there somewhere, waiting to catch me off guard, or for me to stumble and fall into.

  “You taste of aspirin,” I say.

  “Good,” he grins. “Should be working soon. And if you’re not asleep either, I’m getting that t-shirt off you. I reckon in about twenty minutes.”

  Chapter 27: A Plot Full Of Holes

  When I wake up again later, the first thing I check is that the t-shirt is still on. We’re still cuddled up together, and as I move, Connor stretches and looks at me.

  “Hmm,” he says, thoughtfully. “No headache.”

  He turns towards me, onto his side, and over, pulling me underneath him.

  “How long do you reckon it would take me now?” he asks.

  As our lips meet, his hand skims down my side under the covers, and I realise the point of no return was a lot earlier than I thought. Probably at the point he turned up at my house, on a driving errand for head office, several days ago.

  He gets my dry clothes for me, saying he’d rather I wasn’t stumbling around the house on my own, short-sightedly, and takes the mugs with him to make tea. I sit up in bed wishing I could see so that I could get up and have a wander round safely, but he’s right - in an unfamiliar place with minus ten vision, I’d make Mr. Magoo look observant, sophisticated and well co-ordinated.

  And I’ve still got the t-shirt on. Seems he wasn’t trying to win a bet with anyone after all this morning. He didn’t exactly break the rules.

  He’s just a lot more familiar with bending them. And wit
h what’s underneath the t-shirt.

  I’m glad he’s out of the room for a little while, because it means I can continue blushing in private while I think about it.

  Strangely, I don’t have any commentary or post-analysis running in my head. Just a movie reel of memory. A REAL memory, for once.

  “Head office are sending you over some new lenses,” he announces, reappearing and putting my clothes on the bed, and a cup of tea next to me. “Should be here in about half an hour.”

  “Oh, cool,” I say. “Thanks.”

  He sits on the bed and sips his own tea. He seems to remember something, and reaches into his pocket.

  “Should put some more of that on before you get dressed,” he advises, giving me the fungicide tube.

  “Did they get any results back yet on that Justin guy?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Just the skin infection, as Adam Grayson diagnosed in the ambulance. Nothing in his blood so far, lucky for you. Still testing the other two. I think they want you at interrogation later on the girl. Profiling for them. And Logistics have impounded another car, a Ford Mustang. It’s got remote voice recognition software that they want to put in yours, like the kind for security, video gaming, voice dialling and mobile voicemail retrieval. So you should expect a call from head office, and one from Warren or Yuri later.”

  “Where did they find the Mustang?”

  “In the car-park, out back of Half Moon Inn. It was Van Helsing’s from last night. By the sound of things, he only picked it up yesterday, so it was obviously meant to be deployed fairly soon on whatever targets he had lined up.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine him driving a Mustang, in his fancy dress get-up,” I muse.

  “Apparently he dresses like that all the time. Got a bit of a fixation. Not like you.” Connor gets to his feet, and goes to pull the curtains open, across a set of glass doors. They lead out onto a balcony, overlooking the garden below and deer park. “Hmmm. No deer this morning.”

  “Do they get shut in somewhere at night?” I ask, as he sips his tea before putting it down and opening the drawer in the bedside table between us, taking out a set of binoculars.

  “No,” he says, adjusting them, before taking a second look outside. “It means they’ve been spooked.”

  I reach for my clothes while his back is to me, although the eyes tattooed on his shoulder-blades are definitely watching. They’re big enough and scary enough even for me to recognise, without my own eyesight functioning properly. I doubt anything has tried to sneak up on him in the wild. They look alien, like tiger meets giant King cobra.

  “What usually spooks them?” I ask, untangling my bra straps. “Besides you.”

  “Well, not usually two guys with shovels and a white van, which is what I’m looking at now, over by the edge of the woods,” he remarks. “Faking site maintenance. Would you get head office on the phone for me?”

  He throws his phone onto the bed as I recall mine is in my jacket downstairs. I pick it up, squint closely at the screen, go straight to Calls Received, and find head office at the top of the list, pressing dial.

  “It’s Lara,” I say, as they connect. “You know people like us don’t need keeping an eye on? Connor reckons about now would be a good time. Got an unknown white van on site. Two guys with shovels.”

  “Okay,” they respond. “Looking for back trace.”

  I put it on Speaker on the bedside table, just as the background voice confirms: ‘No scheduled maintenance today’. Connor hears it. He turns and drops the binoculars on the bed also, before crouching down and reaching under the bed, pulling out a sniper rifle with telescopic sights.

  “I’ve got to open the door onto the balcony,” he says. “Range at point six kilometres.”

  “You’re clear,” they tell him. “No reflections this time of day.”

  He opens the balcony door a chink and stands just inside against the curtain, putting the rifle up to his shoulder, and waits.

  “Okay, in four,” head office report. “Two on the ground, one in the driver’s seat, and kill the engine.”

  I hear four shots in rapid sequence, dulled by a silencer.

  “Job done,” says Connor. “Confirm.”

  “All good,” they reply. “Special Unit en route. As you were.”

  “Yeah,” Connor lowers his gun. “Standing by.”

  He turns and presses Disconnect on his phone, then picks up his cup of tea and swallows a mouthful, putting the gun back on the floor and nudging it back out of sight under the bed with his foot. He straightens up and pushes the balcony door open a bit wider, letting in a slight breeze.

  “Nice day today,” he quips, then looks back down at me while I’m still trying to establish how my bra appears to be half inside-out, not being able to see it properly. “Give it to me, I’ll fix it.”

  “You get a lot of trespassers here?” I ask, handing it over with a defeated sigh.

  “No.” He flicks it straight, and unwinds a strap before handing it back. “Too much on-site security. They were probably under invitation. We’ve got a suspect among the owners of the apartments in the main house here. Usually they’re away, 95% of the time it’s empty. One of my privileges is to report any comings and goings. Strange holes being dug in the woods being just one of them.”

  “Must have been up to something naughty for head office to want them taken down on the spot,” I remark.

  “Yeah, or just so they could get someone down there for a proper look before they got away,” Connor shrugs. “My job mostly is to stop people, not play with them.”

  “I can see why you prefer it to up close and personal,” I nod.

  He puts his mug down and leans down towards me.

  “Most of the time,” he agrees, and gives me a kiss. “I better let you get dressed. Before Special Unit come knocking, wanting cups of tea and screwdrivers and plastic bags, and any other excuse to get in and plant their little listening devices I always find after they leave.”

  “Nice to hear some of us don’t change,” I remark. He’s still close, and moves to kiss me again, but his phone interrupts with a text. He picks it up.

  “Satellite image from head office,” he says. “There you go.”

  He shows me, and I look closely. Aerial view of white van. Two crumpled heaps near the rear of it. And twelve rectangular holes in the ground just visible within the perimeter of the woods.

  “You’ve got to wonder who those were waiting for,” he says.

  I get dressed, back in last night’s top and skirt, glad that now I can’t see any telltale bloodstains up close. I decide to make my own way back downstairs, by feel and memory, guessing there’s not much I’m likely to encounter on the way down challenging to a lack of 20/20 vision. I’m preoccupied with the pictures in my own head at the moment anyway, trying to imagine how Connor deals with having work so close to home. And whether his changes of identity are more to do with his job, than for personal reasons. Whether the personal reasons, like so much else, are just another form of camouflage.

  I just about avoid tripping over my cowboy boots in the living-room, where I left them last night.

  He’s sorting through mail on the kitchen table, and hands me a packet with a recognisable graphic eye logo, no name or address on the outside, labelled simply Optical Labs: Customer Sample, which head office evidently managed to slip in via the regular post. I sit down to open it, and find the mass-market lens box wrapped in a print-out slip, just saying Trade Use Only. Not For Individual Re-Sale.

  “Hey,” says Connor, as I tip out the contents. “Wash your hands first.”

  “God, yes all right, Dad,” I mutter, too late before recalling that it winds him up. But he just tickles my waist as I get up and pass him to go to the sink, doing as he says. When I turn back round, drying my hands on a paper towel, he has just put a bottle of saline on the table next to the lenses, out of the First Aid kit. “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” he says shortly, and passes me an apple from th
e bowl on the back of the worktop as well, taking one for himself and rubbing it on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I told Special Unit on the phone, if they come across asking to borrow anything, they better have brought food. Compensation for work last night.”

  I put the new lenses in, having dubious memories of what Charlie and Sparky consider to be Food. Generally, stuff wrapped in tinfoil and left under the bonnet of the van, with the engine running, was their idea of eating a decent meal while on a stakeout when we were teenagers. I daren’t think how many different carcinogens found their way into our bodies back then. I recall Sparky once saying, probably not as bad as stuck making fireworks in his shed, breathing in chemicals and magnesium dust the rest of the time.

  I dry my eyes with another sheet of paper towel and let my eyesight adjust. Connor’s back in his more familiar off-duty clothes, wearing a blue cyber skull-robot t-shirt under his black hooded sweatshirt, and dark jeans with a skull patch sewn onto one leg, in an oddly random position. I wonder abstractly if it was used to repair a hole.

  “Have you ever been shot at?” I ask him.

  “Maybe,” he remarks. “If I have, they all missed so far. There was a chimp got hold of a ranger’s gun once out of his jeep. Shot the windscreen and the petrol tank before the stupid thing decided to see if it was edible as well, blew the back of its own head off. That was probably the most dangerous thing ever happened.”

  I guess Connor’s a little more de-sensitized and detached regarding his job as runner than I am, due to his previous working experience. Contract hit-men aren’t much more than animals to him. Pests to be dealt with. It makes me realise, I have at times felt it was a bit too personal to me, probably because of my mental ability to engage, or identify with, or psychologically read a target. Tell myself stories about them. Whereas when I deal with customer issues at work, I don’t spend that long thinking about it.

  Just another example of my personality assigning job roles to my disorders inappropriate to type. Nightclub customers to me are like shoals of fish. Some bright and exotic, some out spawning indiscriminately, some predatory, some snapping pike, and some the old trout variety. All variably either hungry, horny, in distress, or following each other around short of anything better to do. I know for a fact that I can identify with the mentally disturbed as individuals, better than those ‘enjoying themselves’ under the influence of alcohol.