Jim Grant Short Stories #1

by Colin Campbell

  “Sorry if I made you jump.”

  He held the Pepsi up.

  “Confrontation always makes me thirsty.”

  He took a drink and let out a refreshed sigh. “You ever notice how popping a Pepsi can sounds exactly like opening a tube of tennis balls?”

  The guns settled into one pointing at each.

  Spider’s was aimed at Grant. “Do I look like I play tennis?”

  Grant took another drink. “No. But I bet I know which side of the Pepsi versus Coke debate you come down on.”

  The gun hand twitched and shivered.

  Grant kept his eyes locked on Spider’s. “Come down being the relevant term.”

  Spider’s eyes began to water from staring too hard. “Get to the point.”

  Grant nodded toward the door to the kennels. “Point is, this is a pet shop. You want shit, there’s plenty in the back.”

  He rubbed the fingers and thumb of one hand together. “You want money? There’s plenty of that in back as well.”

  Spider slitted his eyes as he tried to understand. “They got a safe back there?”

  Grant smiled. “They’ve got dogs back there. Pampered little pricks owned by the rich and famous. People who’d pay anything so their little Shih Tzus don’t get hurt.”

  Spider’s eyes widened. “Ransom the fuckin’ dogs?”

  Grant clenched his fist, then extended one finger at a time until he got to five. “Lots of dogs.”

  He raised his voice so that Posey could hear him.

  “But if them guns go off, they’ll get loose and you’ll be chasing tail for half an hour getting ’em back in their cages.”

  Spider jabbed the gun at Grant. “You saying not to shoot you?”

  Grant shrugged and held both hands out. “I’m saying not to shoot anyone.”

  He turned toward Monica. “How many dogs you got back there?”

  “Lots.”

  “And how much they worth?”

  “Lots.”

  He turned back to Spider. “See? Bet they’re worth a lot more than a dead drug dealer.”

  Dagreuter got to his feet. “Retired.”

  “A dead drugs counselor, then.”

  Grant paused and looked at the shop window sign in reverse.

  ZEN DOG CHASING TAIL

  PET BOUTIQUE

  Long name for a small shop. Not where you’d expect to find a drug dealer–turned–rehab counselor or a Yorkshire policeman– turned–Boston cop. A strange place for a bank robber–turned–bounty hunter too. Grant hoped the bounty hunter was paying attention. He looked at Spider, then jerked his head toward the kennels.

  “Point is, if we stay calm, there’s money to be made out of this.”

  Grant could see Spider thinking, the cogs turning inside his drug-addled brain. The gun wavered, then firmed up when his decision was made. He stepped back and waved it toward the kennels.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  Grant didn’t move. Dagreuter put his hands in his pockets.

  Spider raised his voice. “All of us.”

  Dagreuter shuffled toward the right-hand door. Lightweight number two kept him covered as he moved in behind him. Spider jerked the gun again. Grant and Monica moved to the end of the counter.

  Spider nodded at the big fella near the front entrance. “Lock the door.”

  The big fella dropped the latch and brought up the rear. Three captives and three drug addicts going to see the dogs in the Zen Dog Chasing Tail Pet Boutique. If things went according to plan, the dogs wouldn’t be the only ones chasing their tails in the next couple of minutes.

  Dagreuter neared the doorway. There was no movement through the opening. The second gunman followed. Grant edged Monica to one side and pressed his thumb over the can’s drinking hole. He was six feet behind the vanguard. Spider was three feet behind him. The big fella was a couple of feet behind that. Muffled yelps sounded from the kennels. The cages rattled. Grant held the Pepsi can close to his chest and began to shake it upside down.

  Spider cleared his head. “Let’s see what these little fuckers is worth.”

  Dagreuter and the gunman stepped through the door. There was a loud rattling bang from the back room. A sudden burst of noise and activity. Dogs barked and yelped, and tiny paws scampered across the floor. Monica dashed round the corner as Grant and Spider entered the room. Then all hell broke loose.

  There were dogs everywhere. Small ones. Fluffy ones. Dogs that had had facelifts and dogs dyed every shade of pink. There was even one painted red, white, and blue like the stars and stripes. They got under the intruders’ feet and tangled between their legs. Spider yelled his frustration and raised the gun.

  Grant aimed the Pepsi can and removed his thumb. Fizzy drink sprayed into Spider’s eyes, and he yelled again. Grant dropped the can and came up under Spider’s gun arm. He grabbed the barrel and yanked upwards. With the slide locked in Grant’s fist, Spider couldn’t fire. Grant twisted up and sideways, and the butt came out of Spider’s hand in reverse. Grant’s other hand grabbed a fistful of overcoat and jerked Spider forward. A headbutt to the face ended Spider’s resistance, and he dropped to the floor.

  Dagreuter was as confused as the kidnappers. Posey stepped from beside the cages and disarmed lightweight number two in one swift movement. The ex-bank robber was big and heavy. He’d faced down more dangerous men in his time on the street and in prison. A pimply drug addict was no problem at all.

  Two men disarmed.

  Two guns swung toward the third.

  The big fella braced himself to charge.

  Grant fired one shot into the ground between the heavy’s feet. “Really? You want to do this?”

  The big man stopped in his tracks. All the fight went out of him. Surrender was swift—confrontation over. The dogs continued to run amuck, but the danger had gone. Posey corralled the big fella and lightweight number two as Grant turned toward Spider.

  Grant let out a howl of disgust.

  Posey followed his gaze. “I said it liked you. Guess it likes him better.”

  The rampant French poodle was mounting a prone Spider in front of its cage. No amount of fending off the beast was going to protect Spider’s virginity. Monica began to gather the other dogs. Grant sucked in his breath. “Balls like a buffalo and a wang like an ox. Damn.”

  He clicked his fingers. “Rafael. Please.”

  Dagreuter restrained his dog, and Posey sat Spider against the wall with his partners in crime. Slowly the kennels returned to normal. Lots of whimpering. A little barking. A few yelps, and a bit of tail wagging. Monica locked the cages. In the relative quiet that followed, the music drifted panpipes and waterfalls from the hidden speakers.

  Grant indicated the three men on the floor and turned to Dagreuter. “What do you want to do about them?”

  The slim Latino who used to run the biggest drug empire in the Bay Area looked at them with pity in his eyes. “I can get three places at the clinic.”

  Grant considered Dagreuter through hooded eyes. “You’ve really put all your money into a rehab facility?”

  “Every last penny.”

  “This your dog’s last pampering, then?”

  “Nearly every last penny.”

  “So you’re skint?”

  “What?”

  “Without funds.”

  “Just about.”

  Dagreuter stopped and glanced at Posey, then back to Grant. The cogs turning in his head weren’t as obvious as Spider’s, but something had suddenly occurred to the dog owner. Grant could see it on his face.

  Dagreuter tilted his head as he spoke. “What were you two doing here?”

  That brought things back full circle. Grant had never liked death warnings, even back in his uniform days. Telling a man his mother had died wasn’t a pleasant thing.
>
  He took a deep breath and said it the way it was. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

  Granted

  The door went in with one kick. It was a good solid door but the lock was council cheap and the frame had been repaired so often it had been screwed more times than the prostitute living next door. Any other part of town at two o’clock in the morning and the explosive splintering of wood might have aroused suspicion, but in the litter-strewn alley behind the Big Snack all-night café violent noise was a way of life.

  The smell of piss and three-day-old burgers was overpowering. Jim Grant took a small aerosol from his shoulder harness and gave the darkened room a healthy dose of green apple and water lily. He slipped the miniature Air Wick spray back into the pouch where his CS canister should have been and ignored the lack of handcuffs or a police radio. This arrest was off the books.

  A police siren howled along a street somewhere across town. Grant paused for a moment, waiting to see if the siren was coming his way. It wasn’t. The siren faded as it sped into the distance. A dustbin was knocked over further down the alley. A dog barked. An unknown man shouted at his unknown wife, and the unknown wife screamed back. In this neck of the woods there were no victors, only victims, and even the victims weren’t exactly innocent.

  This neck of the woods was Ecclesfield Division, Bradford, West Yorkshire. This part of those woods was a potholed back street off Lumb Lane, formerly the red light district of Bradford but now just a rundown collection of terraced houses and corner shops frequented by rundown shitbags and drug addicts. The prostitutes still hung out on the street corners but were less blatant than in the good old days, when they could practically hang a sign outside and the police would turn a blind eye. Modern policing was run by target figures and crime statistics. One of this year’s target figures was to get prostitution off the streets. The only thing that had achieved was to drive them underground, or more accurately drive them onto the Internet. In-call massage and out-call escort services were all over the World Wide Web. In-calls were at crappy shitholes like the one next door.

  Grant ignored the crappy shithole next door and concentrated on the darkness inside the ground floor flat. He knew the layout from previous visits but wasn’t sure if the furniture had been moved around since the last time he’d dragged Chusan Palm out of bed. There were no streetlamps in the back alley, and the curtains were closed anyway. Grant didn’t think they were ever opened, even during the day, and the lack of ventilation only made the stench worse. A small black-and-white TV flickered in the corner, part of the twenty-four-hour broadcast culture that provided late-night repeats of programs that were rubbish during their first run. The television threw out enough light for Grant to check any obstacles.

  It only took five seconds.

  There was a two-seater settee in front of a battered three-bar electric fire. Next to that was a coffee table overflowing with Big Snack food containers and empty beer cans. There were no ashtrays, but there were plenty of ashes and cigarette butts. The settee was covered with more food cartons, a second television, and a green plastic garden waste bag large enough to hold a small fortune. The far wall was the kitchenette area, and beyond that was a door to the bathroom. Grant knew better than to brave a search of the bathroom. He also knew where the unkempt single mattress was and gave it a hefty kick at the same time as he reached for the light switch beside the splintered door frame.

  A dirty, low-energy bulb blinked twice, then came on.

  A dirty, low-energy body moaned beneath an even dirtier bedspread.

  Grant kicked Palm again. “Come on, fucknut. Hands off cocks and on with socks,” his company sergeant major’s favorite wake-up call. Grant’s military training always came to the fore at times like these. The police force had tried in vain to drill it out of him but soon realized that the toughness instilled in him by the army was one of Grant’s strengths as a cop. His inspector didn’t entirely agree, tagging him as a loose cannon and somebody to be watched at all times. Inspector Speedhoff’s climb up the political ladder depended largely on keeping out of the shit. With Police Constable Grant on his team, shit was never very far away. The trick was to not let any of it splash on him. Grant stepped over the coffee table and turned off the TV. His hand brushed the screen, and he realized it wasn’t a black and white set after all—it was just so dirty that no color showed through.

  He kicked the bed again. “Up. Now.”

  A tousled head emerged from the blanket. “Officer Grant. What the fuck? I ain’t done nowt. Honest.”

  Grant stepped back out of Palm’s fighting arc but kept his legs flexed and shoulders hunched. Years of experience told him that the most dangerous time was the first ten seconds, when a rudely awakened prisoner was most likely to kick out and try to escape before the cuffs went on or the gas was deployed. Palm saw the broad shoulders towering over him and immediately chose pleading his innocence over physical action.

  “Honest.” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “I’m going straight.”

  Then, just in case Grant missed it the first time, “Honest.”

  “Straight to jail.”

  Grant had learned in the army and the police that when somebody tells you honest, it behooved you to pay attention to what they were saying. Because they were inevitably lying.

  “You ever watch Porridge?”

  “Ronnie Barker. Yeah.”

  “Remember when Fletcher—that’s Barker—gets asked by Lennie Godber…”

  “Richard Beckinsale. Yeah.”

  “Godber asks him what he’s in for. And Fletcher says, ‘I got caught.’”

  Grant leaned over and reached for the green plastic bag on the settee. He unfurled the neck. An ornamental lampshade poked out of the top. There was also a Roberts portable radio, a set of ornate silver cutlery, and a tortoiseshell jewelry box.

  “Well, you just got caught.”

  Chusan Palm held up his hands in surrender.

  “That’s not mine, officer. Someone must have left it while I was sleepin’.”

  The hulking ex-soldier picked up a delicate glasses case and clicked it open. A pair of horn-rimmed spectacles glinted in the light.

  Grant fixed Palm with his hardest stare. “There are none so blind as those who cannot see.”

  Palm gulped down his protest. He’d seen that stare before and spent six weeks in the Bradford Royal Infirmary before being sent to prison. Grant spotted a grubby pair of jeans on the floor and kicked them expertly across the room.

  “Get your pants on, chief.”

  Palm obliged, whipping the bedspread off his skinny body to reveal stained underwear and bruised ribs. The big toe of his left foot stuck out of a hole in his sock. He shuffled into the faded blue denims lying on his back, then pushed a pair of already laced Nike Air trainers on his feet. He didn’t think this was the time to explain that Chusan wasn’t an Indian name, like in cowboys and Indians, although Grant could have passed for Clint Eastwood’s Arizona sheriff in Coogan’s Bluff.

  Palm didn’t realize that this was no ordinary arrest until he reached the car. It wasn’t the lack of handcuffs—Grant’s reputation meant very few prisoners tried to make a run for it, so he didn’t bracelet them—and it wasn’t the fact that the plainclothes detective hadn’t read him his rights. The big, ugly cop had arrested him so often, they both accepted that Palm knew what his rights were. It wasn’t even the unmarked car that didn’t come from the CID pool, because Grant often used hired cars or personal vehicles to disguise his presence on the streets.

  It was when Grant opened the boot instead of the back door.

  The cobbled alley was deserted. The only illumination came from a security light three doors along that reflected off the wet cobbles and threw harsh shadows across the crumbling backyards. Tangles of rusty wire atop the low walls ensnared torn newspapers and empty crisp packets. A wheel-less bab
y pram lay on its side in the middle of the alley. A bent pushbike with two flat tires was wedged in a gateway that had no gate. The security light was a farce. There was nothing here worth stealing. This was where shit that had been stolen ended up, not where you took it from.

  The rain had stopped, but the remnants of the overnight storm puddled along the gutters. The drains were as clogged as the dregs of society that lived here. Raindrops stood out on the Ford Sierra Sapphire like beads of sweat. The kind of Sierra with a boot, not a hatchback. The undercover cop quickly skirted the rear passenger door and opened the boot. Palm stopped in his tracks, expecting Grant to get something out. Instead Grant jerked a knee into Palm’s gut, doubling him over, and bundled him into the luggage space. The boot lid slammed shut.

  That was when he knew he was in serious trouble.

  Straight north from Bradford was the quickest route to the countryside. South was too industrial. East and west were too developed. Grant drove north, and within half an hour civilization faded into the night. There were pockets of domestic housing and even the occasional village or market town, but for what he had in mind north was the way to go.

  He didn’t dwell on the implications as he sat calmly behind the wheel of his battered old Ford. He didn’t look back on his police service and consider that this might be a career-ending decision. What he did think as he drove the burgling scumbag to his fate was that this had been a long time coming. You don’t serve your country in the armed forces and then lay your life on the line in defense of the citizens of West Yorkshire without developing an acute understanding of right and wrong. Some things were just plain wrong, like robbing and stealing and picking on the weak. Some things were wrong but for all the right reasons, no matter how wrong that wrong thing was.

  Grant reckoned this wrong thing fell into that category.

  He glanced at the green plastic bag on the back seat. Recovered stolen property. Procedure dictated that it should be cataloged and booked into stores at the Ecclesfield police station. It should be handled with care to preserve any prints and SOCO requested for the following day. The Scenes of Crime Officer would powder any suitable surfaces and lift latent prints using adhesive tape and clear acetate sheets. Rough surfaces would be ignored. The bag itself would be sent to headquarters for tech process and fingerprint development.