It’s not unusual for me to be standing at work staring into space knowing that I’m in the wrong job. In between throwing people out knowing that I’m in the right, at least regarding the licensing laws, because my lifestyle doesn’t mean I then spend every night I have off work getting hammered in a bar being a hypocrite. I know I’m not the best person to face off to, when an angry customer tries to appeal to my human side, and get me to identify with either their situation or their predicament. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that Connor has been trying to deconstruct me looking for a human background story as well.
If only I could tell how he goes about identifying with people himself in day-to-day life. And whether it’s still about finding the answers in books, or if he has an autopilot for it, hidden away in some other aspect of his identity, away from his forfeits-style games of interrogation and negotiation. Which he’s probably decided is what works on me because I’m not the type to talk openly all the time, what with my trust issues, or whatever he thinks I have.
“Have you?” he asks. “Been shot at?”
“Yeah, a bit,” I admit, making an effort to over-ride my habitual evasiveness. “From the beginning, I think. I’m not sure. My first job on a contract taker was very trigger happy. I think that’s what made me creative. And gave me the habit of disarming them, and stealing their guns. I used to put them in the amnesty bins - then I started keeping them, once the last amnesty ended, and they just seemed to stockpile around me. By the time another amnesty came around, I wouldn’t exactly have been able to sneak them down to the police station in a Scamways grocery bag. Would have raised a few eyebrows among Neighbourhood Watch, with me popping down there to dispose of stuff twenty times a day to clear the backlog, for a start.”
Connor laughs. I think it’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh properly.
“Yeah, we love Neighbourhood Watch,” he agrees. “They’re not bad. They mean well. I like you dressed like that, by the way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in just a skirt previously. Just fancy dress and uniforms, mostly. You even had jeans under your dress on our real date, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, well remember this was technically fancy dress too. I look like a Hollywood hit-man,” I tell him, but I’m not immune to the compliment so I try to suppress wanting to smile about it. “Your washing machine must be good, I can’t see any bloodstains from last night.”
“Industrial strength cleaning products. Trade secret stuff,” he says, grinning back. He looks out of the window down the driveway. “You don’t look like any Hollywood hit-man I’ve ever seen. Looks like Special Unit have brought their new toy.”
I get up from the table and go to look out of the window next to him. A long-wheelbase Mercedes van, re-sprayed matt black quite recently by the look of it, is on the grass by the driveway. Apparently Special Unit have learned some manners if they’re aware of leaving priority access clear on single lane routes nowadays. I remember the old former Dyno-Rod Transit, loaded with New Year’s Eve fireworks, being used to block a wheel-clamper up an alleyway for three days, while Charlie and Sparky demanded money with menaces to let him back out.
As we watch, Sparky gets out of the driver’s seat and jumps down, starting towards us. He’s wearing his baseball hat, a tie-dyed t-shirt I reckon is original, because I recognise the burn holes from fifteen years ago, and sweat pants cut off at the knee.
“I’m only guessing, but I think he’s going to be blagging overalls, and gardening gloves,” Connor smirks. “Does he sleep like that?”
“I’m happy to say I wouldn’t know,” I tell him, which is true. Connor gives me a sideways look and grins.
“It was rhetorical, but thanks for telling me,” he says, and looks back outside. “Hmm. Still think I might ask them to go back out for food, if it looks like a long job this morning.”
He opens the window and leans out.
“Oy, Ev!” he shouts. “Can you say ‘doughnuts’?”
Sparky nods the affirmative and points to the van, before gesturing at what he’s wearing and raising his shoulders and arms helplessly, palms skywards. Connor gives him a thumbs-up, and shuts the window.
“Overalls,” he confirms. “Come on, let’s go take a look.”
“I hope he doesn’t think you want to see the van do a doughnut,” I remark, heading back to the living-room for my boots. “Would make a real mess of the grass, or that gravel.”
“Yeah, Charlie reckons he’s already got it up on two wheels cornering on the road tests,” Connor chuckles. “Top right-hand drawer in the office in front of you, grab yourself a negotiator. Just in case.”
I pull on my boots and jacket, feeling in my pocket to check my phone for any messages, as I go into the office overlooking the park. Nothing. It’s been a few days now since either Cooper or Joel tried to text, or ring. Must have got the message that I’m not a negotiable myself.
I put my phone away, and open the narrow drawer. There’s a Beretta, some refills for Parker pens, and a block of coloured Post-Its.
I don’t think he meant for me to take notes.
I check the inside pocket of my jacket and find my old skateboarding gloves. You might think of it as paranoid, but I just feel that unless I’m confiscating it permanently, it’s rude to leave fingerprints on someone else’s gun.
Not when they might need to take credit for using it. Officially, that is.
We follow the Merc across the grass towards the woods on foot, eating what Special Unit now consider to be breakfast out of the paper bag, before we catch up so as not to leave sticky crumbs on the evidence site. It’s a combination of cheesy pickled egg and sausage pasties, cold Thai chilli fishcakes, and bear claw fruit Danish pastries. I’m quite impressed. I remember Sparky’s recipes for party food including dyed blue vodka-infused popcorn, and lemon jelly with olives in, so it’s not the most peculiar of combinations he could have come up with - and fills the breakfast hole satisfactorily. Luckily for us it hasn’t been warmed up on the engine block either.
Speaking of hole, we’re both glad we didn’t grab a lift in the van, when it clips a cluster of molehills and almost immediately a big rabbit warren, taking off and making a considerable bang when it touches down ahead of us.
“There goes the suspension already,” I remark.
“Either that or Charlie has finally shot himself in the foot,” Connor agrees.
Special Unit jump out when they stop at the border of the trees, and neither look as though they sustained injury.
“Loosened a bit of panelling surfing the grass?” Connor greets them as we catch up, while both Charlie and Sparky pull on the overalls he has loaned them. “Or did you break a door hinge?”
“Maybe the front bumper,” Charlie grins.
Connor throws the empty paper bag in through the window of the Merc, and trudges around towards the other van. I follow, with a very strange feeling.
I’m not usually the one visiting the site, post mortem. I’m the one leaving in the opposite direction, in a big hurry.
Connor checks his handiwork briefly. All three each took a shot to the head, with impersonal accuracy. He opens the driver’s door, leans in past the third corpse to reach under the dash, and disengages the bonnet catch.
“Pop it,” he says to me. “Make sure you stand to one side in case anything jumps out.”
“Cheers,” I say, and lift it up. Nothing nasty happens, and I check the battery connections for wiring infringements before propping it up. I scan the engine for damage.
“Should be spark plugs,” says Connor, walking round behind me.
“Yeah,” I nod. “Alternator would have done it.”
“Was on the far side, plugs was easier.”
“Do you reckon Warren and Yuri would want anything out of this crate?” I joke.
“Yeah. Warren would have all the mirrors, and Yuri, well - who knows what puts lead in HIS pencil,” Connor smirks. “I think he’s still holding out hope for a real live Flux Capaci
tor one day.”
“Do you know what, I really hope it’s got one. Just to see his face.”
We head after the other two, who have gone into the woods, and find them both trying out shallow graves for size.
“Smaller than my fucking bathtub,” says Charlie, with his head resting up on one end. Sparky has shunted his body the other way, so that his feet stick out, his ankles crossed and waggling them casually, head resting on his hands. Connor gets his phone out and takes a picture of them.
“Maybe that’s the idea,” I suggest. “Outdoor slow torture. Bury you up to your neck and put jam on your head to make the ants come for a quick nibble.”
“You’re the shortest,” Connor tells me. “Jump in.”
“I’m five foot eight in these cowboy boots,” I say.
“Cowboys don’t die with their boots on,” he reminds me, and I kick them off before jumping down into the hole and lying down. I can lie flat with a few inches of headroom. It’s oddly quite relaxing, lying on bare earth looking at the sky. “How tall are you?”
“Just over five six.”
“Reckon these holes were dug with women in mind,” he remarks, taking a picture of me as well. “Hopefully nothing smaller.”
“We could bury her right now and save time later,” Charlie comments suggestively, appearing behind him, and picking up one of the dropped shovels in a latex-gloved hand, to illustrate.
“Don’t need to. Got photographic evidence now, if anyone asks,” grins Connor, waggling his mobile phone.
I push my hands into the soil either side of me and flip over my own head, doing a lazy backwards roll out of the grave, landing on my knees on the edge and dusting earth off my hands.
“Nice panties,” Sparky quips, as I kneel up and straighten my skirt.
I give him a glare, but almost immediately switch my glance to Connor warily. I’m waiting for him to have some kind of smart-ass comment or lewd remark to follow, but he says nothing, putting his phone away, while Charlie merely gets interested in the shovel he’s just picked up instead. I’m grateful for that. Not all guys are like Animal, it seems - eager to drop reminders and hints about how well they know you, into casual conversation.
“Got a dead leaf in your hair,” says Connor, and smiles at me.
Sparky doesn’t seem to have any agenda either, as he produces a camera and heads for the white van, taking a picture of the rear doors, which are closed.
“Why am I being David Bailey?” he says, looking over his shoulder at me, and holding the camera up. “You should be doing this.”
“Today’s weapon of choice,” Connor remarks, as he gets out another camera instead of his phone, and heads back towards the bodies.
Yeah, I think, as I sit on the edge of the excavated ground and pull my boots back on. Many years ago it was me with a camera, and THEM playing with baseball bats and shovels. In the old days, most people were a bit funny about being spontaneously photographed. Nowadays, most people are photographed, most of the time.
But the reason I gave it up wasn’t the reason many people thought. It wasn’t the creeping around stalking Joe Public like a social paparazzo. It wasn’t sitting in trees at night wondering if it was possible as a human being to contract Dutch Elm disease. It wasn’t any kind of guilt trip or paranoia, no matter how much pressure I was under.
It was because when you’re stuck behind the camera lens, you miss 99% of what’s going on elsewhere.
I pull the leaf out of my hair and look at it. It’s oak. When I look up at the woods around me, there’s no sign of oak anywhere else. If it was in the hole where I was just lying down, it’s possible it was transfer from the white van, or the shovels, or the boots of the men digging.
“Charlie, you got any evidence bags?” I ask. “Got a foreign leaf. Foreign to the woodland here, anyway.”
“In the rucksack,” he says, pointing behind him, still examining the shovels. “Well spotted.”
I go and grab a handful of cellophane packets and a marker pen, and write Foreign Oak Leaf: hole#03EtoW.
“I’ll keep looking,” I say. I glance over at Sparky, who’s still photographing the outside of the van. “Is there any bird crap on the roof of the van? If we’ve got foreign leaf matter it might be traceable to trees it was parked under elsewhere.”
Sparky cranes his neck, to look over the roof of the white compact.
“Yeah, got some dried on,” he reports, and looks up at the trees overhead with some concern. “I’ll get a plastic sheet taped over it before it gets contaminated.”
He pockets his camera and returns to the Merc.
“I knew it was a good idea you came along,” says Connor, turning his attention to the soles of one of the digger’s boots, shooting me a quick look, and a reassuring wink. “Keep up the good work.”
“Have any of you got a laser pen on you?” I ask them, looking at the ground extending back into the sparse trees speculatively.
“Yeah, right here.” Sparky rummages in the back of the Merc, before approaching with his blue plastic tarp and roll of gaffer tape in one hand, throwing me the builder’s laser measuring sight with the other. “What do you need it for?”
I step back into the hole and crouch down, resting the laser pointer on the edge and switching it on so that I can sight along it, deeper into the woods.
“Looking for occupied holes like this one,” I reply, turning the laser slowly to read any bumps or undulations in the ground that might have the regularity of shallow graves. “Keep your fingers crossed that there aren’t any. There’s a lot of woods out there, and if they do them in blocks of as many as twelve, and are currently on this border of the woods, you better hope they were just starting - not just finishing filling up the available area.”
“Why does it worry me that you sound a bit too knowledgeable about that?” Connor mutters.
“Well, I’m guessing you don’t even bury yours,” I remark. “My guess is you got a good deal going on with the casino owner’s safari park, and their infamous man-eating tigers.”
Connor just looks at me, and says nothing. I’d guessed already, his experience of escaped tigers and keeping those incidents quiet, had some sort of mutual arrangement attached. But I didn’t feel he needed me to elaborate. And asking me to explain would be a bit too much like denial sounding like an admission. I try not to smile to myself. I think he’s getting to know me too well, and wonder if he’s currently thinking the same about me.
Sparky tapes down the corners of the plastic sheet on the van’s roof, and finally gets round to taking the key from the ignition and opening the rear doors.
“What you got?” Charlie asks him, starting to bag up the first shovel and labelling it.
“Just a few big mallets and a load of wooden tent pegs,” Sparky reports, taking pictures. “Couple of bush machetes. No tents though, so they weren’t planning on camping here. Not yet, anyway.”
“That’s lucky,” Connor grins. “We could have just caught them digging their cold storage and composting toilets in that case.”
“Also got a shoebox full of live rounds,” Sparky continues. “Got the bling factor. Not gamekeeper fodder.”
I finish my laser sweep from this angle, and find nothing conclusive, making a note of the distance and angular direction of any remarkable surface bumps, on the outside of a spare evidence bag.
I get out of the hole and walk to the first one, jumping in to do the same. If I find any corresponding readings, I could triangulate anything suspicious by taking a reading from the edge of each hole. Would speed up the process of a footstep search of the visible ground area.
“So why didn’t you join the police?” Connor asks me, evidently keeping one eye on - and guessing - what I’m up to.
“Failed the eyesight test,” I reply, hunching down to match the eyeline of the laser, resetting the angle to zero, and then checking the digital distance readout as I turn it. For some reason Sparky’s last observation echoes in my head, and the
thought of safari parks. Gamekeepers, I think. Maybe big game. Not tigers. Human shaped. That require wooden stakes, machetes and silver bullets. Shallow graves being dug, en masse, in preparation for something. I think about Jag Nut, upgrading from Paint-Ball to live action targets in the woods. “Is there a hunting permit right with the tenancy here?”
“No, because it comes under local livestock free roaming jurisdiction,” says Connor. “Some of the nouveau riche yobs who own apartments here have been trying to contend it, but it’s set in stone. What are you thinking?”
“Illegal sport hunting,” I remark. “Preparation to conceal the evidence. Possibly just after taking the trophy photos for the mantelpiece, like you just did of us three taking a nap on duty.”
The other three exchange looks.
“I think you should get these guys taken in and I.D.‘d,” Connor announces to the other two, standing up. “Need to do a back trace on who their other contacts might be.”
“I’ll get the body-bags,” Charlie replies, taking the bagged shovels with him back to the Merc. “Sparky, secure the van, and call Vehicle Recovery.”
“You carry on,” Connor tells me. “I’ll call head office. Give them your theory to run a diagnostic on.”
I continue with my laser readouts of the woodland surface area. It occurs to me that it’s the first time I’ve worked as part of a team, in my life away from door work. The nightclub job helped in that respect, because it’s not as difficult as I thought it would be, communicating and being communicated with. I always thought the antisocial aspect of me was the most controlling one in my life.
Hmmmm. Antisocial personality in the process of vanishing, while I’m already conscious of deliberately working on controlling the avoidant one. I wonder what could be up for the chop next, in my exopalingenesis of migratory personalities. And what I’ll be left with in the end - if there’s anything left to speak of.
Death & the City Book Two Page 13
