Hot Zone (Major Crimes Unit Book 2)

by Iain Rob Wright

She's wearing a wedding ring. I know her husband's dead, and she's a widow. Little things I notice. She isn't covered in assorted cat hairs, she doesn't wear eau de widow or anything like that. She bears herself like a widow...but not one who was ever embarrassed by her man. She exudes some kind of steely pride, sitting there with no stick and her crooked hands, her ring proud on her finger.

  Am I proud? Proud of feeling like the biggest idiot in the world?

  If he died...would I still wear the heavy ring on my finger that catches in my hair every time I wash it?

  My phone buzzes in my bag.

  It's her, I think. Or him.

  I don't want to look. I'm tired and the ring on my finger's so heavy.

  'Girls,' I say. 'Need the loo. Hold that thought.'

  I don't know what thought they're going to hold to, because I'm not listening, and I really can't take the embarrassment of showing them another photo of my husband's wayward ball bag.

  II.

  I pull the ring from my finger before I check my phone.

  Think you're smart? Bring the drugs. Bring them here. We have your husband.

  I stare at the phone for a long time. Peg-leg, for sure. How did he get my number? Some kind of drug dealer's secret gadget?

  Does it matter? I'm not thinking all that straight.

  I drop the ring, almost definitely more expensive than a ring from Argos, into the toilet bowl. It's not a particularly satisfying sound. I expect a splash, but it's louder when the heavy metal and stone hits the porcelain below the water.

  'Hmm,' I say. As good a eulogy as it deserves.

  I flush it, but it won't go down. It's heavy and just sits in the bowl.

  So I sit and pee, because I don't need a poo, then I put plenty of toilet paper in the bowl and try again. This time it's gone.

  Keep him.

  I smile, feeling light, at last. But peg-leg fires back a text immediately, like he was staring at the phone, thumb hovering.

  I'll keep him. In pieces. Bring the drugs.

  A second later, the phone vibrates again. There's an address with the text. Nothing else. No timescale, not covert instructions like in a movie.

  I really wish I hadn't left that note. Or...got married in the first place. Peg-leg's got my husband, who I don't want. In exchange, I've got to give peg-leg his drugs back...which I don't have.

  Shit.

  III.

  'Mandy...I don't feel well...the shock...the stress...would you mind if we just went home?'

  Nicola and Mandy don't argue. I'm basically bereaved. I could probably get them to do dirty dancing or something, right there in the Windsor Bistro. The old widow has moved on.

  So, too, have I.

  That's what I think as I step outside, into the frigid air, and hit something massive and immovable, like I'm drunk and I walked into a wall. But I'm not drunk, and he's not a wall...feels like one, though. I bounce off him and he catches me before I can land on my arse.

  'Dave?' Mandy, questioning.

  'Oh...you know each other?' He lets me go. He smiles, and even his face is a wall. Like Mount Rushmore, only close up his head seems even bigger than a carving on a mountain.

  'Mandy...Nicola.' He nods.

  'Are you...' Mandy sounds breathless, which I feel. The cold's steals my wind, too.

  He seems amiable, and they know each other. He smiles, and I'm not worried. It's the kind of smile people respond to.

  'No...nothing like that,' he tells her. I don't know what they're talking about, but then people listening to me and the girl's talk probably wouldn't know what we were on about, either.

  'Dave,' he says to me. 'The butcher.'

  'A pleasure,' I say, with a smile that I can't help on my face, because his is so god-damn big. Like Santa, but darker. And where Santa's fat...Dave, it seems, is made of bricks.

  IV.

  Home at last. Not where the heart is, but I least I keep the baking stuff there.

  The stuff I had in the pack looked like powder, rather than crystals. Fairly close to white, I remember.

  I figure peg-leg's going to know it's not the real thing as soon as he looks...but I can pass off flour, I think, as a first gambit.

  After that?

  He's going to do something horrible to me...if he can.

  I'm ticking over.

  My favourite handbag is big, bordering on huge. I could put two Pomeranians in there, maybe three, if I was so inclined. By the time I leave the house it's pretty heavy, too. It's got a kilogram of flour and a marble rolling pin in it.

  I feel like some kind of terrified assassin. Codename: The Baker.

  I smile, even though I don't feel it. Like Dave the Butcher.

  Big bugger, he was. I bet he's all fingers and thumbs.

  I turn toward the address on the text out of the driveway and think about Butchers and Bakers and Candlestick Makers and drug-dealers with peg-legs and my husband's balls, mashed into a carpet.

  V.

  I'm not sure if I'm thinking I'm Cagney or Lacey when I get to the door. I'm certainly not Rosemary and Thyme or some cosy female detective. I don't recall any of those preparing to brain a drug dealer with a marble rolling pin.

  I try to think like a police woman, or an assassin...but I can't. I'm comfortably middle-aged, I've never hit anyone, and the rolling pin is really, really heavy. I don't even know if I can swing it.

  I push open the door...it's been left open.

  I think about tumbling across the carpet, but if I do I see I'll crack my arse on the bed. Either way, there's no one there, so that'd be really daft.

  VI.

  There is a note on the bed, though.

  Dear Old Bird,

  You think you've got me pegged? Think I'm an idiot?

  Your husband's never coming home, and your stuff? Now it's my stuff. What, did you think I wouldn't figure out the shit in the kettle?

  Your stuff's gone, your husband's my bitch, and I'm coming for you. You won't know when, but I'm coming.

  VII.

  It's gone twelve when I finally get home. It's the sixth day of Christmas, freezing cold outside with a hint of ice and feathery snow coming from the black sky. It's freezing, but I'm still sweating.

  I open the door. But he's not there, waiting with a gun. Nothing like that. In fact, nothing at all.

  My home is entirely empty.

  The 6th Day of Christmas

  Stripped Bare

  I.

  On the sixth day of Christmas, I wake up from sleeping in the bath with my coat still wrapped round me, and three towels over my feet, and I find dad raising his eyebrows, sitting on the toilet. He's watching me as I open my eyes.

  'Dad? I don't need the eyebrows. I feel enough of a tit, thank you.'

  He nods to this, then he's gone.

  The bath's not a roll over and sleep it all away option, which is probably for the best. This isn't a roll over and go to sleep kind of problem. I could sleep on it and wake up dead.

  Wake up dead?

  What the hell does that even mean?

  My hips ache as I clamber over the side of the sunken bath. They ache deep inside, like I've been trying to do wheelbarrows with a porn star. Maybe I'll make that a career. Do mummy porn, or whatever it's called. MILF in the Tub, season one. Do porn movies have seasons, like Breaking Bad or the X-Files or something? Do you get holidays and healthcare?

  I don't know. It's not really an option, is it? But I'm up shit creek. I probably have something like ten grand's worth of diamond left to my name.

  Fuck...it's not there...I...

  Then I remember flushing the massive stone and the platinum and white gold setting down a toilet in a cheesy bistro.

  Genius.

  But I'm not skint, am I? I've got credit cards and my mobile phone.

  I've got friends, right? Good friends. Mum, too. Mum's handy in a pinch. I saw her knock a guy's teeth clean out of his head in her pub once. I must have been six or seven. I remember them flying through the a
ir, little white stones, and thinking of the confetti at Aunty Bab's funeral.

  Aunty Bab left that beauty in her will. Best funeral I ever did attend. I was five, and still remembered it well enough at six or seven to make that connection.

  Why am I thinking about bloody funerals? And confetti? And flying fucking teeth?

  I know why. Because I'm so deep in the shit Pantene's not going to get the stink from my hair.

  I'm glad I've got friends, got mum...I'm beginning to think I might need them.

  II.

  A big house when you're on your own isn't brilliant. Don't get me wrong, I prefer it to a cardboard box. It's warmer, for a start, and better at keeping the rain off. But now it's empty, it feels like a cardboard box. It's colder than I've known it. The heating's on, but with the house barren, like this? Must be that furniture holds some heat, or keeps it in the right place...I don't know.

  It's cold.

  I walk down the stairs, aching and shivering. The bath's pretty uncomfortable. Falling asleep in the bath, surround by warm water full of smells and bubbles, reading a book one-handed, the hand I try to keep dry...that's not a bad way to spent time in the bath.

  An empty bath's no friendlier than an empty big house.

  And thinking I'm going to have a cup of tea or a bottle of wine isn't going to get me far at all. He took everything. Literally. Pictures and mirrors are gone from the walls. Every single piece of furniture is gone. The heating is under the floor. He didn't take that, did he? And I don't think for a second the peg-legged man carried out every single piece of furniture alone, wibble-wobbling on his wooden leg with a sofa on his head.

  Everything gone, like it is, in about four hours? He had to have moving vans, and plenty of people. No one...no one, can move that fast.

  I've been stripped bare, right down to the last cup, spoon, the kettle, the milk in the fridge (and the fridge) and all the tea bags, too.

  When I say barren, I'm not joking.

  The wine cellar is empty. I don't even have a glass for water, so I cup my hands, drink water from the tap. Then I sit on the kitchen floor, my knees up to my chin, and dribble a tear or two while my phone rings and I don't answer. It's Mandy, not the psychopath with friends, but I still don't want to answer. The psychopathic peg-legged wankpot prefers notes to phone calls and text messages. It seems he's an old-fashioned kind of lunatic.

  Mandy's persistent, calling three times while I'm consoling my knees. I hang up the phone on her each time...she's perfectly capable of lending a shoulder to cry on, but I don't need her right now. What I do need is time to think. Really think, for the first time in years, about how the fuck I'm going to get this sorted without ending up shared equally between a few bin bags, sinking under mucky water in a London river.

  Peg-leg would do that. I'm under no illusions.

  After a while, I realise I haven't thought about my husband's predicament in the slightest. I know why, too. Because alive or dead, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference. He'd be useless either way, and I search my soul to see if I care about his continued existence in my life or anyone else's...and I can't find anything there at all.

  'I really don't care,' I say in the empty kitchen, trying it out for size.

  For the first time, that's something I tell myself that doesn't sound like a lie.

  III.

  My friends turn up on the doorstep an hour later. I ignore them, but they're far from daft. Nicola actually punches in one of the small panes of glass on the front door, like some seventies cop. It makes me jump, and when they find me in the kitchen, wearing last night's clothes with the last of my make up running down my face, Nicola's short lived manic joy at breaking things flees. My girls sit on the floor next to me and hold me while I cry some more.

  Finally, when we're all good and soggy, it's Mandy that asks the burning question.

  'Okay. You're not alone, we still love you...now lay it on us. What kind of shit are you in?'

  No sense in trying to cover anything up. Not sure I'd want to. I think my hanging up was just as loud a cry for help as one out loud would have been.

  Because they're my friends...but because they're good friends. The kind that don't ask who you killed, but where you want the hole dug.

  I tell them the one about the lonely housewife drugging then pegging the drug dealer with his own wooden leg. Tell them the exact words I used in the note. They don't want to laugh, but they do. But then when I show them the texts from the mad man, they're serious. Then I show them the crumpled notes, one from the empty hotel room, and one I found on the floor in hallway when I walked into my bare home.

  Old bird,

  Be back soon. x

  P.S. My peg's getting cold. :)

  'Bloody hell, he loves a note, doesn't he?' Nicola's bosom's trembling, like an early tremor before a big earthquake that wipes out a city. I wouldn't make Nicola angry.

  Maybe if he comes round, I'll sic my mate on him, like a schoolyard fight. But it's not school kid stuff, is it?

  'Well, I guess I only have myself to blame. I started it, didn't I?'

  Mandy laughs, loud, almost hysterical, making me and Nicola jump.

  'I'm sorry...but...you stuck his own leg up his arse?! That's just the best thing I've heard all day.'

  We all laugh for a while, and we're still laughing when Mandy drives us away from my home, toward hers, and Nicola sends a text telling their husband's what's going on. I don't really want a man's help, the girls are just fine. But Nicola promises me, as does Mandy, that their fellas will have an idea. They're good friends...I get the impression their husbands never liked my husband, though the three of them were colleagues of some sort, at one time. I know them...hell, we all know each other. Even mum knows the girls. It's nice, in a way. It's community, and there's a lot to be said for that. Knowing people, and knowing who you can trust when you really need to.

  IV.

  'Okay,' says Nicola, still texting while Mandy drives, weaving in and out of traffic like she's trying to kill us, like we're being followed by guys with guns or something. Of course we aren't. I think peg-leg probably has friends, but I don't think drug dealers really get into shoot-outs on slip roads that lead off the M4 and down country lanes.

  London's behind us, and we're driving south from the M4 into Mandy's village. She and her husband live in a great, sprawling house that's pretty much a mansion. They have grounds.

  All the way, the girls relay what's going to happen, and I let them take charge for a while. I'm too damn tired to do anything else.

  'New Year's Party is going to happen,' Mandy says. 'It's set in stone. But here's the thing...you're staying with me, and the place is going to be full of people. Right now, it's going to be the safest place on the planet.'

  I nod. 'What if this man finds me? He's got friends...it's dangerous...'

  'Honey, you'll be surrounded by people. Safest place you could be right now...right?

  'This guy...he's dangerous,' I say again. It's true, I know. A man that can have a house stripped bare in a night, that hides a gun in his false foot at an airport, probably? A guy that can write off a kilogram of drugs, and laugh about it?

  'Oh, Honey...that's why we love you...you think my husband earns his money in the bank? Nicola's?'

  I look at Mandy, and she swerves. 'We've got company,' she says.

  V.

  It distracts me for just an instant from what she said. I whip my head around, looking out of the rear window and see a big black Range Rover bearing down right behind us.

  'Good,' says Nicola.

  'Good?' Suddenly, inexplicably, Nicola's smiling. I'm shitting myself, and Mandy's slowing down and Nicola's smiling and they don't make their money from what now?

  'We're being followed...speed up!'

  'No, we'll lose him. He's a shit driver.'

  'What? What?'

  I don't have anywhere to go with this. So I say it again, in case she doesn't get it. I don't. I'm confused, like I've been dr
inking. I haven't been drunk for two days now...maybe. But maybe this is a cold turkey trip, like the DT's, like seeing spiders crawling from the walls, but instead of that, it turns out all your friends are nutters.

  'What?'

  Third time's the charm.

  'Nicola text Brian, honey. Brian told him to watch out for us. Don't panic.'

  'Brian called the Range Rover man?'

  Mandy laughs, but it's not a mean laugh. Just a laugh, like she's taking a breath.

  'Yes. Range Rover man is Colin. He can't drive for shit. He's a thug. Like a kind of tank, I suppose. We're good all the way back home. He's got us covered.'

  'Thug? Tank? Covered? Mandy...Nicola...what the fucking fuck are you talking about?'

  'Colin's security, don't sweat it. He's good at what he does.'

  'Security?'

  'He works for my husband,' says Mandy. 'You know...security.'

  'Oh,' I say. But I don't get anything at all. 'Oh...oh?'

  'Honey,' she says so softly I want to cry. 'Time to wake up.'

  She sounds just like my mum. Like everyone, in fact, that's called me honey...in exactly the same tone. This is the first time anyone's voiced the undertone that's always, it seems, been there.

  Wake up...

  VI.

  Wake up, I think, as I lay down to sleep that night. Bed after midnight for the second day in a row, it's New Year's Eve by the time I go to sleep.

  I go to bed confused on New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve, though, is also the day I finally wake up. All the way, like I should have twenty years ago.

  The 7th Day of Christmas

  The Sausage-Fingered Man

  I.