by Shock Totem
“He’s a sick bugger,” he told me in the pub when he floated the idea. “Even the bossmen don’t like him. No one will fuss if we lift his winnings.”
Of course, it’s not that simple. The Big Man does nasty things to people who cross him. They end up as part and parcel of those games he plays, games where the participants finish dead or maimed and the watchers place their bets and the Big Man makes a killing, in every bloody sense of the word. We are diving in at the deep end, but then times have been hard for a little too long to be cautious.
I hear engines after twenty minutes, if my watch is right. This road’s pretty clear most nights, and we’d reckoned rightly that the Big Man would be the first to come this way. When I peer out of the ditch I see lights and behind them two four-by-fours, a Land Rover up front and then a luxury model behind, both slowing to come down the slope. The bodyguards in the first car are probably ex-Army because they’re good enough to spot the saucepan lid which, covered in dirt and in the dark, looks for all the world like the kind of improvised landmine they saw too many of in Iran. They stop, and because they’re good they start reversing immediately, and the driver of the luxury car is good too because he realises what’s happening straight away and is starting to do the same thing when Jamie throws the real bomb.
It’s our one grenade, and he’s cooked it so that it explodes as it bounces from the reversing Land Rover. Then there’s fire and broken glass in the rain. I stand up in the ditch and put a burst into the fancy car. The carbine kicks my shoulder and the driver’s window shatters. Like a sensible man he stops.
I run. Then, down on my knee, closer, in the heather, and it turns out I’m not too wet to feel the sloppy mud through my jeans. A muzzle flashes on the road up ahead. Fuck that. My sights line up like a beauty on the wrecked Land Rover as the first bodyguard comes out shooting; I move with him and tap the trigger smooth so that he twists and reels and flops into the water on the road. Bang-bang from Jamie Cornfeld up on the hill, and an answering burst of fire from behind the Land Rover. Jamie is moving up to the very edge of the escarpment now, overlooking the road, and he fires down. I guess he kills the fellow, because that’s the end of it. I pull my balaclava on, and when I reach the fancy car, the driver is sitting and holding a hole in his shoulder, covered in blood and glass.
“You bastard,” he says, level. I pull him out and push him into the road, take away the pistol he hasn’t reached for and throw it into the gorse. Jamie comes down, all excited beneath his mask.
“Good work,” he says. “Pity we had to kill them,” but I can tell he’s high on the fighting. Then we pull the Big Man out of his car, shouting all the time. There’re two girls in the back with him, not overdressed because it’s a heated car, and we haul them out as well to shiver a bit in the rain.
“You stupid bastards,” says the Big Man. “You’ll catch hell for this.”
After all the stories and rumours I’m expecting him to be something else, but he’s just a fat man with a boxer’s flattened face. He goes on with the threats right up until Jamie puts the end of the rifle into his great bloated gut and knocks the breath from him so I can take his watch without fuss. The rain is washing all the blood away from the dead men in the road and I go through their pockets for their wallets. No hurry, after all, and no sense in leaving good money on the ground. Jamie takes the Big Man’s briefcase and opens it. There’s a lot more money there.
“Bingo,” he says, and starts transferring it into the waterproof holdall on his back. I get a necklace from one of the girls. She tries a sort of smile and asks if she can keep it, but although she looks pretty with wet hair I’m not one to fall for it, and she’s not one to make fuss without hope.
“You sit tight, sweetheart,” I tell her. “We’ll be gone before you know it.”
“I’m cold,” she says.
“Spare coat just there,” I say, and nod at one of the dead men. She’s quiet at that, and then she says “He’s a cop,” in a voice that’s halfway between an admission and a taunt.
“Don’t joke,” I tell her, but there’s a nasty lurch in my gut.
“Fuck you,” she says. “They’re Special Branch. He’s—” she jerks her wet hair at the Big Man “—he’s testifying.”
“You stupid slut,” says the Big Man. Jamie kicks him hard. Then he goes and looks at the bodies.
“They don’t have cop guns,” he says when he gets back. “But you don’t know which Special Branch.”
He sucks his teeth. If the dead men are coppers it’ll mean armoured car patrols and doors kicked in and houses searched. It might mean there’s backup on the way already. I look up at the road and imagine that I hear engines over the rain.
“We should move—” I start to say, but then there’s a crack of gunshot behind me and I turn around to see that Jamie has just shot the Big Man in the head. The girl gasps, and then she starts to cry. I reckon that it’s shock more than sorrow, but I don’t bother asking.
“You didn’t say you were going to do that,” I say to Jamie.
“I wouldn’t if it had gone smooth,” he says. He’s looking at the girls, wondering what to do about them.
“None of that,” I say. “They didn’t see anything, did you?”
I don’t get an answer.
“Did you?” I say, a little louder.
“No,” says the crying girl. She’s shivering, wrapping her arms around her little cocktail dress.
“There,” I say, stepping away. Jamie shakes his head, pulls me a little further off so we can’t be heard.
“I don’t like it,” he says. “Two witnesses—”
“Three,” I say.
“What do you mean, three?” says Jamie, snappish.
“The driver’s still alive,” I say.
“I know he is,” says Jamie, and he looks at me oddlike.
“And the two girls makes three,” I say. Jamie’s face is a real picture.
“There’s only one girl,” he says.
“The hell there is,” I say. His face isn’t funny anymore; it’s almost scary, and I turn, and there’s one shivering girl with wet hair standing in the road.
“Fuck,” I say, and I dash to the other side of the luxury car. The driver is sitting there, bleeding and looking bad.
“You bastard,” he says again.
“Where’d she go?” I ask him.
“You bastard.”
I go back the other side. Jamie is holding the briefcase in one hand and his gun in the other. He doesn’t look happy.
“Where’s your friend?” I ask the girl. Maybe I shout. I’m rattled.
“Please,” she says, and looks at Jamie.
“The hell’s wrong with you?” he says to me.
“She’s can’t be far,” I say. “She must be in the heather, she can’t be far—”
“Alex—” he says.
“It’s you shooting the man,” I tell him. “Scared her off.”
“Mister,” says the girl. “Mister, it was just me. Me and...” She looks at the Big Man’s body and gulps. The rain has washed all the tears and mascara off her face. “Me and him.”
“Get back in the car,” says Jamie to the girl. She doesn’t need telling twice. The door closes.
“There were two girls,” I say. “There was her, and—”
But I can’t remember what the quiet girl looked like. What she was wearing. What colour her hair was. I remember she didn’t have any jewellery.
“Christ,” I say. And although this is a horrible place to go mad, I see the funny side almost straight away and I giggle just a little. Jamie doesn’t like it.
“For God’s sake, pull yourself together,” he says.
“I saw her,” I tell him. “I must have eaten something weird.” Funny how that’s the first thing I think of, like my mum would have done.
“Come on,” he snaps, but then there’s an engine suddenly audible over the rain and the first police Land Rover comes over the hill with its lights blazing li
ke eyes.
We shoot at it. Then we run. It’s one of those things that needs no discussion at all. The Land Rover veers off to the side of the road and a second comes past it, breaks screaming, pulling over. We go off the road and they don’t risk following in the cars. Instead they spill out and chase us, and when the first shots are fired good soldierly instinct takes over and we cover each other in turn, shooting high to make them keep their heads down. Our carbines have them out-ranged, and we’re waist-deep in heather, hard to see in all this rain. We don’t panic. I’m a long way from feeling my best, but panic is what kills at moments like this, and I’m not planning to wind up dead.
I shout and point to Jamie and we cut downhill towards the village and the network of lanes and hedges and fields that will shield us for at least a while. I start to think ahead as I fumble for a fresh clip. They will have squads blocking off the roads before long, which means we’re in for a long walk tonight if we’re to make it home, and with no guarantee of safe haven at the end of it. But they’re not following us close and the rain’s getting worse. For once that’s good. Jamie points this time, and we go straight down the hill into the valley, running and then sliding on our arses when it gets too steep. A bullet smacks the mud near my hand, but it must be a fluke shot because nothing else I see comes close and as the slope levels out halfway down the police above are out of sight.
I get up. “Come on,” I say to Jamie, and he gurgles something because there’s a big hole in his neck, where a copper’s lucky bullet has gone through as we slid.
“Jamie,” I say. He’s left blood in all the muddy tracks we made, and he’s dead from the loss of it almost as soon as I’ve said that one word. I take the holdall heavy with money and ease the strap over his wet body and onto my shoulder. It’s a pity. It happens.
I run. I have to get off the slope, where any bugger with eyes can see me, but I’m soaked and weighted down and out of breath before I know it, and as I stagger back into the heather I’m trusting the night and the weather to keep me from being seen. It’s all close, the rain thick and burdensome. I’m freezing, but I’ve got the money and I’ve got the gun, and those two things make me feel like I can make it right up until the point when I bang my hand against something.
“Fuck,” I say, my knuckles bloody, and then I look and see the rough-cut whitewashed stone cross we passed before. I say the word again, and realise that I really am going mad because this cross was high on the moor, back the way we came, and I haven’t gone an inch uphill since Jamie died.
It’s a different cross, I think. It just looks the same. There are plenty up here. This is another good sign. But I know I’m wrong. It’s whitewashed in the same way, and those same offerings of food and flowers are laid out—I recognise the bright sopping wet plastic packaging, and oh God but I’m spooked by that. I walk quickly away, back towards the spot where I waited for Jamie, and the overgrown tarmac of the old road scuffs under my boots. The rain is heavy. I can’t hear the cops. I can’t even see lights from the road behind me, and this spot wasn’t far from there. My hand hurts.
This happens. I zone out. I probably climbed up here to throw the cops off and didn’t even notice, I was thinking so hard about it. The firefights in the desert used to work like that, during my service—all action and I couldn’t remember how it happened afterwards.
But I always remembered that it had happened.
This rain! And up ahead, lights appear out of it, car lights on the road—and it’s the road I left with Jamie, the road with the Big Man’s cars static in it and the cops just cresting the hill to come down on us.
That road is behind me.
I swear to God, that road is behind me.
I can hear my teeth chatter. No surprise, I’ve been in the rain too long. It’s cold. Not much visibility. I have walked in a circle; that is what I have done. It is not surprising in this weather. This weather is why I haven’t been caught yet.
Oh God.
I haven’t been caught because there are no cops on this road, no sign of them. And that’s fucked up, that’s all wrong: there were two cop cars when we ran, big Land Rovers with reinforced glass in the windows.
I turn my back on the road. They drove off, I tell myself. No they bloody didn’t, myself tells me right back. Then I catch a glimpse.
It’s her, the quiet one from the car. I know it’s her although I only get the briefest of looks at her, out in the heather up to her waist, standing still. Then I blink, or maybe I just don’t want to look any more, but anyway she’s lost in the night and I’m doubtful for a second that I saw anything.
I’m going fucking mad. I want more than anything to see a cop, so I must be mad. You know where you are with cops. I walk again. I probably walk in another bloody circle.
Next time I see her, she’s closer, and she’s different somehow. Something about her face. Her wet hair’s all against it, a tangle, like the gorse at my feet. She’s just there watching as I lumber through the heather with bag and carbine, and she looks down when I see her.
Screw this, I think, and I call to her.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say. “I’m only lost. Are you lost too?” I don’t know what she’s doing out here, and I tighten my grip on the carbine. But maybe she is only lost. “I won’t hurt you,” I tell her again.
She has something in her hand, and she flicks it around her fingers like a conker on a string. It’s the Big Man’s watch. I feel the pocket I’d put it in, and it’s gone. I must have lost it somewhere on the moors.
“Where’d you get that?” I say, and she looks at me straight. There’s something jagged about her face.
“Love,” I say to her. “Love, what the hell’s happening?”
She opens her mouth. Opens it wide.
I don’t want to talk about that.
So then I’m running again. I’m running and I’ve stopped caring that my lungs hurt and my soaked, tired body is aching, because I’m scared like I’ve never been scared by people just shooting at me. I have a sense now, an intuition, that I’ve crossed someone very old and very powerful, bigger than the Big Man ever was. The carbine swings on its strap, and it’s leaving bruises on my hip and thigh where it hits. It’s not a comfort any more. Bullets won’t make a blind bit of bloody difference to any of this. I feel as though I am the only human thing on this moor, alone, high above the valley with nothing but rain and blackness for miles and maybe across the whole world. I know even as I’m running that I won’t get anywhere, and when that squat ugly white-washed stone cross looms out of the heather again I know I’m done and I just stop.
She stands up from where she’s been crouched, where she must have been crouched, and now she’s short and stocky, and very very pale. I can’t tell what she’s wearing, or what her face is like; I just know that she’s the same, that she’s Her, the shape detaching itself from the whitewashed rock and making little steps towards me. I can see a smear of blood on the cross where my knuckle cracked against it. The rain should have washed it off by now. In her hand she has a piece of bright plastic, a supermarket chocolate bar left on the stone. She is eating it, wrapper and all, in small deliberate bites, slicing it with her sharp teeth and not really swallowing. A bite for Fat Betty, Jamie's nan used to say—and he's right, it is a stupid bloody name, because she's not fat at all. She's just eaten a lot.
I think there are tears soaking into the balaclava on my face, tears and rain and sweat. She eats the last of the chocolate and then reaches out and pulls the mask off me—right off, the material stretching and ripping as she tugs it. I’m almost too cold to feel it.
“Please,” I say. I take hold of the carbine, but I don’t pull the trigger. I think that nothing will happen if I do, and if I prove myself right that will be the end of me. She’s got a face like cut marble. It isn’t a human face. I don’t know how I thought that she was a person. When she speaks, her lips barely part, and her voice is like something that’s been dead a long time.
&
nbsp; “Didn’t your mother teach you not to steal?”
It’s a funny thing to say. I would have thought I’d laugh if anyone had said that to me in earnest. Laughing is the last thing I want to do now.
“I never took anything from you,” I say. “I swear to God—” and I hold up my hands, the bag full of blood money swinging off one arm and the murderous carbine off the other “—I never took nothing of yours.”
She steps towards me. I back away, scrabble in my pocket; the carbine slips and I let it fall into the heather so I can haul out the necklace I took from the other girl.
“This is your friend’s,” I say. “I didn’t take yours.”
I throw it to her. She treads it into the scrub. Then I’m opening the big bag and holding it out, full of the Big Man’s banknotes, rain smacking into the paper. I drop the bag and the money spills out to spoil in the wet undergrowth. She keeps coming, and I’m stumbling and wrecked.
“That’s it,” I say. “Please. What do you want?”
She stops, and it seems to me that she is at once high above me and very close. She isn’t anything I can describe. She holds out a hand. I don’t have anything to put in it, and I stand and shiver silent. She catches my belt and pulls me close, and for a stupid second I think the awful thought that she’s going to kiss me. Instead, she puts a hand into the pocket of my jeans and rips it so that the coins spill out, a couple of cigarettes worth if you add them up, tumbling into the dirt, the coins I took from her cross.
It’s traditional, Jamie Cornfeld said.
• • •
They find me just there, when it’s beginning to get light. Maybe police, maybe soldiers; it’s been years since I served and they look more and more like each other nowadays. I’m on my back, spread-eagled, the soaked, ruined banknotes strewn all about me, the bag empty in the heather a few yards off. I come awake when they kick me, feverish with cold and wet and my head aching something terrible.
