Last Rites

Twenty-nine

The morning was beautiful: the sky was a flat, bright blue, cloudless and seemingly pure, and the sun, when he stepped out through the back door, was instantly warm on Resnick’s face. Here and there, the shrubs that bordered three sides of the garden were showing pink and white and shiny red, and the cherry tree was still clinging to much of its bloom. Only the shed in which he kept the aging mower, tins of crusted paint, and his small array of garden tools was an eyesore. Past the stage of easy repair, what it needed was demolishing and burning, a new one purchased in its place. Bonfire night, perhaps, Resnick thought, he’d drag the planks off and add them to some communal blaze.

Away to the south, he could see the two sets of floodlights at either side of the Trent, Forest and County, and then, closer at hand, the tip of the clock tower marking the old Victoria railway station, the dome of the Council House catching the light at one end of the Old Market Square.

Standing there on the back step, he caught himself thinking about Lynn Kellogg, the sadness, the slow anticipation of grief that had hovered behind her eyes. He remembered his own father’s passing, lingering and slow, the richly sweet smell of dying that had permeated the room. Skin like graying paper, nails like horn. The priest’s words. The sacrament. His mother’s prayers. The rest of his father’s family had been Jews, practicing, devout. He had never properly understood the circumstances that had led to his father’s Catholic upbringing, a catalog of changing homes, of largely faceless uncles and forbidding aunts.

Turning back into the house, he thought about ringing Hannah. By the time he had poured himself a second cup of coffee, he had thought better of it; if she’d wanted to talk to him about the visit to her mother’s, she would have called.

There was an uneven slice of pepper salami lurking near the back of the fridge and he folded it around a chunk of ripe Blue Stilton, dipping them both into a jar of mayonnaise before popping them into his mouth and washing them down with apple juice from a carton whose best before date had long gone. He would walk to work: the exercise would do him good.

Lynn was in the CID room when Resnick arrived and his first impulse was that something had happened at home in Norfolk, but she stood chatting easily enough with Kevin Naylor, laughing even, and he realized it was probably something to do with the ongoing investigation. “Checking a few leads on Finney,” she said. “These links with Cassady. I thought I might call round on Cassady, come at it sideways, see if I can weasel anything out of him.” She gave him a quick smile. “I thought you should know.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Anil, he’s on to Finney himself. Likely report to you direct.”

“After Siddons.”

Lynn grinned. “Of course.”

“Any news about your dad?” Resnick asked.

Lynn shook her head. “Not really, no.”

“Okay. You’ll let me know? If anything …”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” And she was on her way, out through the door.

As she turned into the landing, Sheena fought to hold her breath against the usual stink of stale piss and vomit, and even worse. Though there hadn’t been as much as a breeze down on the street, a wind cut along the eighth floor and she pulled the zip of her leather jacket up to the collar as she sidestepped the sheets of old newspaper and broken polystyrene food containers, hurrying on past three boarded-up flats, another with the door kicked in and hanging from a single hinge, fresh graffiti up and down the hall. When finally she got to Diane’s, the top half of the door was reinforced with hardboard, a sheet of which had also been nailed to the wall alongside. The time before last the place had been burgled, unable to break through the actual door, whoever it was had simply smashed a hole in the wall and crawled through. Though, as Diane said, what the fuck they thought there was left to steal after they cleared her out five times this side of Christmas already, fuck only knows.

Sheena hammered and yelled, and after an eternity Diane, bleary-eyed, opened the door to let her in.

“What the hell d’you look like?” Sheena said.

“Fuck you, too.”

Sheena followed her through into the living room, a single light bulb burning bare from the ceiling, old sheets tacked across the window. Butt ends and beer cans cluttered the stained carpet; piles of old magazines and free newspapers littered the corners. Aside from a sagging two-seater settee, the only items of furniture were a green plastic milk crate topped with a cushion and a television set Diane had bartered from one of the blokes who lived on the floor above, who’d almost certainly nicked it from the old lady on the floor below.

Diane’s little boy, Melvin, was wobbling around precariously, face smeared with jam, dummy sticking from his mouth, nappy hanging low.

“Who’s in there?” Sheena asked, nodding toward the kitchen.

“Just Lesley,” Diane said. “Shooting up.”

Sheena reached for her cigarettes, lit up, then wandered into the other room. Lesley was just lifting the heated spoon away from the gas ring.

“Here, fuckin’ hold this.”

Sheena steadied the spoon while Lesley, eyes narrowing in concentration, bit down into her bottom lip and drew the contents up into the syringe. With her free hand, she lifted up her skirt and, still squinting, slid the needle into a vein high in her bruised inner thigh.

“Oh, Jesus,” she cried, eyes closing. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, yes. Oh, oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck! Oh, sweet fuck!”

She pulled the needle out and tossed it in the sink, a thin ribbon of blood running down her leg.

Great, thought Sheena, now that’s over perhaps we can get round to sorting out what we’re going to do about this fucking gun.

It had been chaos: bloody chaos. Blood down the side of her skirt and top, smeared across her face-and Diane freckled with it, gobs of it tangled in her hair. Jason and Valentine cursing and moaning.

Valentine had dropped the gun when Jason stabbed him and it had fallen inside the car; Sheena, not thinking, not thinking clearly, scrabbling on the floor to pick it up. Pushing the door open, one foot on the ground, she had been about to fling it out into the dark when she realized her prints were now plastered all over it. The toilet block was less than fifty meters away. Running hard, almost losing her footing not once but twice, she barged open the outer door and lunged into the dark. Whenever the council replaced the overhead bulbs, they were smashed within the hour.

Sheena kicked off her shoes and tugged down her tights, wrapping them around the gun before jamming it behind the cistern in the last cubicle, where it had remained, undiscovered, until Lesley, alerted by a phone call, had slipped in to collect it.

Now all Sheena wanted to do was get rid of it-but at a price.

Sheena knew Raymond Cooke through her younger brother, Nicky, who had used Raymond as a fence for much of the stuff he burgled round the neighborhood, Raymond ever eager to replenish the stock of his shop at knock-down prices. The shop, a single-story place in Bobber’s Mill, with a storeroom up above and a flat over that where Raymond lived, had belonged to Terry. But in the terms of Terry’s will, both shop and flat were Raymond’s for as long as he wanted. And Raymond, whose only previous work experience had been hauling great tubs of offal and bone around an abattoir, had very much wanted to stay where he was.

So on that Monday afternoon, when Sheena pushed open the shop door and went in, it was Raymond who glanced up from behind his copy of the Mirror and wondered if he didn’t recognize her from somewhere.

“Look around,” he said, ever the smooth businessman, “take your time. Any questions, be only too happy to oblige.”

Sheena surveyed the array of electrical goods piled high, everything available for a small down payment, easy terms, generous discounts for cash. There were car radios, mobile phones, microwave cookers, binoculars, cameras, laptop computers; CDs arranged alphabetically from Abba and Aphex Twin, by way of Oasis to The Verve and Warren Zevon.

Sheena fidgeted with the hem of her halter top, several inches of bare flesh between it and the belt that ran round her little black skirt. What she’d do, next chance she got, have her belly-button pierced like Diane. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” she said.

Raymond set down his paper and smiled. “Should I?”

“Ray-o, that’s what Nicky used to call you. Used to be dead skinny, didn’t you? You’ve filled out; grown up, I suppose. Handsome.”

Sheena was standing close to the chair, almost within reach, but not quite. Raymond, with his check shirt loose outside his jeans, a thin band of sweat darkening the faint mustache along his upper lip.

“Sheena, right? Sheena Snape?”

Sheena nodded and smiled.

“How is Nicky?” Raymond began, then realized. “Oh, no, look, I’m sorry. I forgot, I …”

“S’all right.”

“Shane, then. Is he …?”

“Still inside, yeah.”

Raymond looking at her, starting to weigh up his chances, no bra beneath that top, he was sure of that. Eighteen’d she be now? Maybe not that. A year or so younger than he was himself. “So,” he said, “you just happen to pop in by accident, like, or was there something, you know, you wanted?”

Not looking at her now, staring; the end of his tongue like a bit of lamb’s liver flopping between his lips. If one of us has got to fuck him, Sheena was thinking, I’m buggered if it’s going to be me. Besides, she remembered, if what Nicky had said was true, Raymond only fancied them really young; rumor was he’d knocked up his cousin when she was not long out of junior school.

“I might have something,” Sheena said, “you’d be interested in.”

“Yeah?”

“Something to sell.”

“Oh, yeh?”

“Only, you know, I’d have to be certain.”

“How’s that, then?”

“You could handle it, of course.” She gave him one of those smiles and thought poor Raymond was going to wet himself there and then.

“Try me,” he said. If Sheena came any closer, she’d be sitting in his lap.

“Okay.” She slipped the bag off her shoulder and snapped it open before holding it toward him.

“Fuckin’ hell!”

“Exactly.”

The pistol lay among lipstick-smeared tissues, a foil-wrapped condom, sticks of sugar-free chewing gum, a strip of instant photos of Sheena and Jason they’d had taken in a booth down by the bus station. A chromed Beretta; most likely, Raymond thought, a.38. He reached his hand toward it and Sheena swung the bag away.

“So? You interested or what?”

“I might be, yeh.”

“Might’s not good enough.”

“Okay, then, say I am.”

“How much?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

Raymond shrugged. “Where it’s come from, how hot it is.”

“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”

“Say it’s been used, right? Some blag? Shooting, even. Got to be worth a lot less’n if it’s clean, nothin’ the law can tie it into. See what I mean?”

“So?”

“So where’d you get it?”

“It ain’t mine. Belongs to a friend.”

“Where’d they get it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s have a look at it again.”

This time when she stood next to him, Sheena let her hip brush against his upper arm.

“Seventy-five,” Raymond said.

“Bollocks!”

“Hundred, then. Here y’are.” Leaning forward, he slid a roll of notes from his back pocket and peeled off five twenties, holding them toward her. “Take ’em, go on.”

“Two hundred,” Sheena said and Raymond laughed and shook his head. “It’s gotta be worth at least that much.”

“Not to me.”

“How much, then?”

“I told you, a hundred. Tops.”

“Ray-o.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile and touched his shoulder with her hand. Through the thin material of his shirt, his skin was slippery and damp.

“Okay,” Raymond said, shifting less than easily, “I tell you what I’ll do. You give me till tomorrow, let me ask around.” He broke off, reading the expression on Sheena’s face. “Don’t worry, I won’t use no names, nothin’ like that. But if I can come up with a buyer, anything over the hundred I’ll split it with you, fifty-fifty. How’s that sound?”

Sheena wasn’t sure how it would sound to Diane or Lesley. But the last thing she wanted to do was go traipsing around all over town with a bloody gun in her bag, chatting up every crooked bastard in the city.

“Let us have the hundred now,” she said, “and it’s a deal.”

Grinning, Raymond put down two twenties, one on each knee. “There. Forty. Gesture of faith. For now. Less maybe you want to figure out some other way of earning the rest?”

Sheena snatched the notes and stuffed them down into her bag. “Tomorrow, right?” she said, opening the door. “You better have somethin’ sorted.”

Raymond was on his feet now, staring at her, not bothering to hide the bulge in his jeans. As Sheena told Diane and Lesley over Bacardi and Coke in the pub, she’d as soon go down on the Alsatian dog next door as give Raymond Cooke a blow job.

Raymond, back from the bathroom and still giving himself a good scratch, weighing up the implications of what he’d just seen: Jason Johnson’s picture, all snuggled up, lovey-dovey, with Sheena Snape, a strip of them, there in her bag; Jason, who everyone knew was stuck up in Queen’s, after nearly getting his brains blown all over the Forest by some shooter who was rumored to be Drew Valentine; and, nestled up next to the photos, this gun that somehow Sheena had laid her hands on; Sheena, who’d been sitting there in the car, knickers round her neck the story went, when the gun went off against her boyfriend’s head.

Raymond chewed on the fleshy inside of his mouth and wondered what the odds were on the gun in Sheena Snape’s bag and the one that’d nearly killed her boyfriend being one and the same?

Like his Uncle Terry would have said, whatever the situation, Ray-o, what you have to do, think careful, figure out how you can make things work out best for you. Least risk, most profit. Most times that’s the way. Once in a while, though, what it pays to do, up the ante, risk a little more, capitalize on what you’ve got. Nothing ventured, Ray-o, nothing gained.

Standing there, Raymond could feel the damp gathering in the palms of his hands.