Sealfinger (Sam Applewhite Book 1)

by Heide Goody

  “I need to walk,” said Wayne, feebly.

  Sacha pulled a nakedly honest face. Vets didn’t have to put on a brave face for their patients. “Yes, but you have no foot. At least not one I can see...”

  Wayne was having none of it. Even in his weakened state he fought to sit up.

  “Can’t you knock him out?” said Jimmy.

  “With this kind of trauma, the risk of shock…” Sacha injected Wayne swiftly and unfussily. “Methadone to take the edge off. Hold him.” Sacha ripped away what remained of Wayne’s lower trousers, then went at the wound with a number of scissor-like clamps.

  Sacha loosened Jimmy’s tourniquet, showing no panic when blood spread across the table and onto the floor. He fixed a superior rubber tourniquet and put further clamps on the wound. “Janet or Esther?” he asked.

  “What?” said Jimmy.

  “Which alligator was it? I’ve treated both.”

  “We didn’t stop to ask questions!”

  Wayne groaned loudly. Sacha gave him two further injections. “Fentanyl for the pain and antibiotics. There will be a high chance of sepsis.”

  Jimmy couldn’t tell if Sacha was informing him or narrating his own actions.

  Sasha produced several clear bags of what Jimmy assumed was some sort of intravenous fluid. One by one he broke them open to wash out the wound.

  Wayne gasped. “What will I have?” he whispered.

  “Pardon?” said Sacha.

  “Will it be like a bionic leg?”

  Sacha hesitated. “Sure, but you need to heal first, my man. Afterwards there will be options—”

  “No!” yelled Wayne, throwing Sacha’s arms aside and lurching upright. “I can’t wait around like a cripple. I gotta have something I can walk on. What can you do?”

  “Let’s talk about this when—”

  “No!” Wayne pitched himself off the table and crashed to the floor, tipping over a set of drawers as he went. Metal instruments and kidney bowls of blood-stained cleaning materials cascaded everywhere. He unbalanced a metal and plastic half-gun, half-funnel device, and Sacha dived to save it.

  “Careful! This is expensive.”

  “You need to do something I can use right away,” Wayne whined. “You gotta!”

  Wayne proceeded to drag himself across the floor, levering himself along with his stump, attached clamps clanking on the floor with every movement. Jimmy looked on in something closer to amazement than horror, wondering how he could stand the pain.

  “I don’t get this with the horses,” Sacha muttered.

  “Fuck’s sake. Just tell him he can have a bionic leg,” hissed Jimmy.

  “Yes, but of course,” said Sacha. “Back on the table first.”

  They wrestled him back up onto the table. It was doubly hard the second time around as the floor was slick with Wayne’s blood; littered with dressings and equipment. Sacha swept them aside and hit Wayne with more painkiller injections. After cleaning the soiled wound once more, Sacha set to the edges of the wound with a scalpel, slicing away chunks of flesh. Here, here, here… A pile of meat built up in a dish to the side. Jimmy suspected he wouldn’t be able to face diced ham again any time soon.

  “Debriding non-viable tissue,” Sacha said. “Avoiding possible necrosis.”

  Sacha fell into a simple, quiet rhythm. Wayne was still conscious but calmer, muttering something unintelligible except for the occasional utterance of ‘foot’. From scalpel to needle and thread, to soft dressings and bandages, Sacha sealed up and contained Wayne’s wound.

  After what felt like no time at all, but measured by the debris on the floor and surfaces around them, was clearly more than an hour later, Sacha stepped back. “He is stable,” he said.

  “My foot,” said Wayne.

  “Is no more, my man.”

  Wayne rumbled deeply. “My bionic foot.”

  “Rest is what you need.”

  Despite the pain and the drugs, Wayne pushed himself up once more.

  “There might be something,” said Sacha hurriedly. He stepped into a back room and returned with something that looked like a cross between a surgical support and an umbrella stand. He held it up and smiled wanly at them both. “Here we have the answer, my friends.”

  “What is it?” said Wayne.

  “I have used this in procedures where it was necessary to provide emergency support to the patient,” said Sacha. He sounded a little evasive to Jimmy’s ears, but Wayne was loving it, a grin spread across his pale face.

  “So, I can use it straightaway?” he asked.

  “Yes, but only because you insisted,” said Sacha.

  “Where on earth did that metal contraption spring from?” said Jimmy. “I’ve seen it before.”

  Sacha patted the thing proudly. “Do you remember Miss Frost’s favourite stud, Horn of Plenty?”

  “Yes,” said Jimmy. “Oh. Oh right.”

  Horn of Plenty had been an outstanding stallion, Jacinda’s long-standing favourite. He had broken a leg in a steeplechase and Jacinda had gone berserk with grief. Jimmy didn’t have much to do with the horses on a day-to-day basis, but he had heard whispered accounts down the pub about the multiple attempts to save Horn’s leg. None of them had been successful, so the horse had been fitted with some kind of leg brace. From what Jimmy could recall, the horse had trouble lifting it, and could barely walk. But he could still service the mares, which became his full-time occupation. Jimmy had often wondered what sort of a life that was for the horse.

  “It is my own invention,” said Sacha proudly.

  “But if this is Horn’s leg brace, what’s he wearing now?”

  “This was mark one,” said Sacha. “The spring clasps kept unspringing, so I made mark two. Not that we need Horn of Plenty anymore.” He picked up the funnel-gun apparatus he’d saved from Wayne’s delirious rampage. It had a little TV screen mounted on the trigger end.

  “And that is…?” said Jimmy.

  “Insemination gun,” said Sacha. “With endoscopic camera for precise delivery of sperm.”

  Jimmy blinked at the thing. The barrel was eighteen inches of pointed steel. Jimmy imagined Sacha would have to sing some fucking charming opera before most mares would let him come anywhere near them.

  Sacha put the gun aside and showed the leg brace to Jimmy. “This one will be fine for your man though. He won’t need it for long.”

  “Cos I’ll get better, right?” said Wayne.

  Sacha gave Jimmy an easily readable look.

  “Er, yeah,” said Jimmy.

  “That’s right,” said Sacha, equally convincingly.

  It was a good job Wayne was pumped full of drugs. And stupid. It was a really good job Wayne was stupid.

  27

  Sam parked her Piaggio van outside Seal Land and sipped the drive-thru coffee she’d picked up on the way over. It was definitely coffee, but didn’t taste of anything recognisable. It was basically the liquid version of a picture of a coffee. But it was scalding hot, and the touch of it against her lips and tongue was enough to wake her a little more. She and Marvin and Delia had been toasting the sadly departed drone long after midnight. Sam thought she recalled they’d even attempted to mix another pitcher of All Glory Is Fleeting, but they’d definitely got the measures wrong.

  She did not want to get up that morning but, electronically prodded and poked by the DefCon4 app, Sam had dragged herself up to contend with the day. The calendared items on her app consisted of a team briefing and a number of residential property inspections. There had also been an unkillable alert regarding the security systems at Seal Land; even a message from the client that they needed someone to attend. Thus, hungover and with scalded lips, Sam got out of her tiny vehicle and walked to the Seal Land entrance.

  A police car stood outside the open double gates. Sam wandered past it on her way inside. A searing orange sun was rising over the far wall of the zoo compound. Sam’s unhappy brain winced enough to make her shield her eyes.

  “
We’re not open yet.”

  She blinked and saw it was the Seal Land guy from the other day. She fumbled for her ID, quickly giving up looking for it. “DefCon4,” she said.

  “Oh, God, it’s you. You’ve not come to kidnap one of our other seals?”

  “Ha ha,” she said, deadpan. Hangovers and humour didn’t mix. “The alarms. They keep tripping.”

  “I think it’s just a system fault, but the police are here anyway and doing a general check.”

  There was a sudden and urgent shout from across the site. Swiftly followed by another loud voice. A woman emerged from a building marked Frogs, Etc.

  “Guy, you need to see this,” she called. Sam realised that the Seal Land guy was also the Seal Land Guy.

  “So maybe not a system fault,” Sam said to Guy. She could hear the disappointment in her voice. A system fault would have allowed her to just prod a few buttons on the alarm controls, maybe put in a call to a maintenance contractor, then head to the office and let Doug Fredericks assume command for an hour or two. If there had been a break-in, there might be actual work to do.

  As they walked towards the reptile house, Sam scanned the site, recalling what she knew. The place had no CCTV. Seal Land had only forked out for trip alarms on the exterior doors, gates and the largest outward facing windows. In the event of an investigation, she’d be able to provide no information other than where and at what time the break-in had taken place.

  She followed Guy through to a humid windowless space, a cheap attempt to recreate a twilit rainforest. Sergeant Cesar Hackett was leaning over the side of a pool and fishing around with the handle end of a mop.

  “What’s going on?” said Guy. “Those are sensitive creatures.”

  “Hoop-la!” declared Cesar as he hoisted something out of the pool. Below him, a five-foot alligator swished its tail in irritation at the disturbance.

  Cesar carefully swung his dripping catch round to the crazy paving pathway. It was a trainer, ripped and ragged around the heel, but definitely a trainer. It had a Morse code dot-dash tread and the manufacturer’s logo stamped into the sole. “Someone’s been a bit careless with their shoes,” he grinned.

  “Did someone fall in?” said Sam.

  Cesar looked round and realised he had a small audience. He gave Sam a comforting look. “I’m sure nothing so dramatic.”

  Guy approached the pool and studied it thoughtfully. “We would know if a visitor left with only one shoe, wouldn’t we?”

  “Maybe it fell out of a shopping bag,” Cesar suggested.

  Pool water trickled down the mop and onto the dressing around Cesar’s seal-mauled hand. He picked at the damp bandage.

  “And no one’s been eaten, have they?” asked Sam.

  “An alligator can’t eat a human that quickly,” said Guy, but turned to his colleague. “We might need the vet out again.”

  “Not to cut them open?” said Cesar, horrified.

  “What?”

  “Like that bit in Jaws. Maybe we’ll find a licence plate in one of these guys.”

  “What? No! If they’ve eaten a shoe or clothes… It could make Janet or Esther seriously ill.”

  Sam crouched beside the trainer. “Perhaps someone dropped it in. Deliberately.”

  Cesar scoffed. “An Adidas Yeezy Boost 350? What kind of person would throw away a shoe like that?”

  “As opposed to the kind who would feed themselves to an alligator?”

  “I’ll call Sacha,” said Guy. “He’ll need to check them over. Are we okay to open today, sergeant?”

  “Hmmm?” said Cesar.

  “Is this a crime scene?”

  Cesar laughed. “No. Of course not.”

  Guy and his colleague stepped out to prepare for opening. Sam took out a pen and prodded the shoe.

  “You can touch it if you like,” said Cesar. “It won’t bite.”

  “Fingerprints,” Sam replied and tipped the trainer upright. “It’s heavy. I think there’s something in there.”

  “Waterlogged probably,” said Cesar and picked up the trainer. “It is heavy,” he agreed. “A good shoe, the Yeezy.”

  “And how do you know so much about trainers?” asked Sam. “You don’t look the … athletic type.”

  Cesar drew himself up. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to puff out his chest with pride or pull in his considerable gut. “Can’t a man be a servant of the law and a follower of fashion?” he said. “There is something in here, you’re right.”

  He jammed in his fingers and wiggled them about. “Seems stuck.” He up-ended the shoe and rapped it sharply against the floor. Something, pink-white and lumpy flew out of the heel, bounced limply on the ground, and rolled down the short slope into the pool. A sinuous alligator – Janet or Esther, Sam didn’t know – shifted in the water and snapped it up.

  Cesar looked at Sam with the expression of a man who hoped she hadn’t seen what had very obviously happened. “That was nothing,” he said.

  “That was a piece of foot and at least three toes,” said Sam.

  “It’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

  28

  The alarm at Seal Land had been set off by the double gates being opened in the night. The only additional sign of a break-in was the central latch on the gates had popped from its socket, an act that would have been easily done by only a moderate amount of force if the L-shaped ground bolts weren’t secured.

  “Could have been the wind,” said Cesar. “A strong off-shore gust.”

  Sam thought of the drone test flight. “There was no wind last night.”

  It didn’t matter to her. She disconnected the gate zone from the site’s alarm system and said she’d have it reinstated once the gate was fixed. Cesar had bagged the ripped shoe (telling no one there had probably been the rest of a foot inside) and declared he would be making an appropriate investigation. Sam assumed that would involve making himself a cup of tea and forgetting all about it. In all honesty, Sam didn’t care. The power of the purely nominal cup of coffee had already worn off. She needed a recharge.

  She drove back into Skegness with every intention of getting a fresh cup of caffeine from Cat’s Café before tackling the rest of the day. This plan was slightly derailed by the sight of an Odinson waiting outside the DefCon4 office door.

  Even before taking the DefCon4 job, Sam had heard of the Odinsons. Their name was a byword for low-level criminality in the town, a universal local scapegoat for every petty anti-social act. They were invoked so often, used as an answer for the otherwise unanswerable, that they had become a slice of folk belief. They were, in the minds of most, as real as the tooth fairy; as nebulously defined as the bogeyman.

  Since then, Sam had met several of them in the flesh. Their slapdash attitude to parentage, their fluid attitude to family structure and general uniformity of appearance meant even with official records to hand, it was not easy to tell them apart. On the noticeboard upstairs, behind an OS map of the local area, Sam had built up a visual family tree of the Odinson clan with photographs, string and drawing pins. It had a lot of gaps in it, and the string was forced to travel in genealogically unlikely loops and swirls in some places, but she wasn’t aware of anyone else making such an effort.

  For once, she half-suspected she knew this Odinson. The leather jacket and stained T-shirt were standard Odinson uniform. The crimson harem trousers and plaited beard were not. He looked like a Hell’s Angel extra from Aladdin.

  “Morning,” she said. “Ogendus, right?”

  He jutted his chin in greeting. Silver ornaments woven into his beard jiggled. “Ah need to talk ta thee.”

  Ogendus was one of Ragnar’s sons. Definitely – almost definitely – one of the patriarch’s oldest offspring.

  “I need a coffee,” said Sam. “But I need to step in the office a second.”

  Ogendus nodded. Sam unlocked the door, ran up the stairs to the office and waited for her DefCon4 app to buzz and automatically tick off the morning team meeting. She saw the
loose carpet tile had sprung up again.

  “Back in a bit!” she said to Doug Fredericks, then went down and locked up again.

  She led Ogendus into Cat’s Café. “Americano, please,” she said to Cat.

  “Coming right up,” said Cat. “How are you today?”

  “Coping,” said Sam. She didn’t reciprocate the question. Asking Cat anything would turn into an excuse for Cat to talk about the play she’d been working on ever since Sam had known her. “A drink?” Sam asked Ogendus.

  “Aye, a tea would be grand,” he said to Cat.

  Cat looked at him with worried disdain, clearly glad there was a serving counter between her and him.

  “And some toast would be champion?” said Ogendus, turning it into a question for Sam.

  “I think I can stretch to toast,” she nodded.

  “An’ toast then.” Ogendus looked at the menu board. “An egg to go on it. And some bacon on t’side. Tha got black pudding?”

  Cat shook her head.

  “Tha’s no way to run a café, is it?” he said. “I’ll just have a couple of sausages an’ all, then.”

  Cat looked to Sam. Sam didn’t have the energy to argue. She waved her assent, ordered a sausage roll to go for herself, and sat in a window table. Ogendus sat opposite her, putting his hands together on the table in front of him, as though he thought that’s how people should behave in proper meetings. The tattoos on his knuckles, now interlaced, spelled out LHOAVTEE. Sam didn’t bother to start the conversation. She could wait him out or wait for her coffee. Whichever came first.

  “Ah just had to tell thee,” said Ogendus. “My lads didn’t do it.”

  Sam nodded. The coffee and the tea arrived. Cat retreated rapidly to her kitchen to cook a breakfast. Sam sipped the coffee and it was good, proper, cleanse-the-soul coffee. “Do what? You might need to narrow it down a bit.”

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “What are you saying? What haven’t your lads done?”

  “The burglary at t’seal place.”

  Sam was surprised. “How did you know…? Burglary?”