One Good Turn

17

Jackson woke in the tailspin of a nightmare. Someone, a shadowy figure he didn’t recognize, had handed him a package. Jackson knew that the package was very precious, and if he dropped it something unspeakably awful would happen. The package was too heavy and awkward, though, it had no fixed center of gravity and seemed to move around in his arms so that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t hold on to it. He woke up with a start of horror at the moment that he knew the package was about to slip out of his arms forever.

He hauled himself up and sat on the edge of what passed for a bed. He felt dog-rough, as if his body had been fed through a giant mangle during the course of the night, and his eyes seemed to have been poached-or possibly fried-while he slept. His ribs ached and his hand was throbbing, it had swollen up nicely, the imprint of a boot clearly visible on it.

The seawater that had sluiced through his body yesterday had diluted his blood, and it was going to require gallons of hot, strong coffee to restore its viscosity, to restore Jackson to some semblance of life. He wondered what kind of toxins and pollutants swam around in the water. And sewage, what about sewage? Best not to think about that.

He remembered the dead woman-not that he was about to forget her-and wondered if she had washed up somewhere overnight.

If he was in France he would be going for a swim in his piscine round about now. But he wasn’t in France, he was in a holding cell at St. Leonard’s Police Station in Edinburgh.

He had never been in a jail cell before. He had put people in them, and taken people out of them, but he had never actually been locked in one himself. Nor had he journeyed from a holding cell to the Sheriff Court in the back of a Black Maria, which was like traveling in something that was a cross between a public convenience and what he imagined a horse box would be like. Nor had he been up before a court on the wrong side of the rails, and he had certainly never before been pronounced “guilty” and fined a hundred pounds for assault and gone from being an up-standing citizen to a convicted felon in the slow blink of the reptilian eye of the sheriff. From moment to moment the novelty just grew. He remembered thinking when Louise Monroe was ques-tioning him that it was interesting to be on the other side. “Inter-esting”-there was that word, he had obviously activated the Chinese curse yesterday.

When he came out of the court, he phoned Julia on her mo-bile to tell her he was a free man again. He’d expected to get her voice mail, he thought he remembered her saying that she had a preview at eleven-but she answered, sounding sleepy as if he’d woken her up. “Oh, gosh, sweetie, are you okay?”This morning there was genuine and touching concern for his welfare in her voice, whereas last night there had been un-Julia-like defeat when he phoned to tell her what had happened.

“Arrested? What a wag you are, Jackson,” she had sighed.

“No, really-arrested and charged,” he said. Wag? What kind of a word was that?

“For brawling?”

“I believe the technical term is ‘assault.’ I’m up before the sher-iff in the morning, I have to stay in jail overnight.”

“For God’s sake, Jackson, do you have to go looking for trou-ble?”

“I didn’t go looking for it, it found me all of its own accord. Are you going to ask me if I’m all right?”

“Are you all right?”

“Well, my hand hurts like hell, and I’m wondering if I’ve got at least one cracked rib.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you go in for tomfoolery.”

Tomfoolery? His predicament seemed to have brought out the (even more) bizarre elements of her vocabulary. He thought she would be sympathetic, but she had more or less put the phone down on him, although he supposed he had woken her up in what was the middle of the night by the time he’d been charged and processed. He thought that perhaps she might have left him a nice message on his phone while it waited for him, with his other belongings, but there was nothing.

He knew that whatever happened he mustn’t mention the dog to Julia.

“You killed a dog, Jackson?”

“No! The dog just died, I didn’t kill it.”

“You killed it with the power of your thoughts?”

“No! It had a heart attack, or a stroke, maybe, I’m not sure.” He heard Julia light up a cigarette and drag hard on it. Her accordion lungs going in and out, wheezing their sickly tune.

He had watched in paralyzed horror as the snarling dog had lumbered toward him, like an overweight gymnast going for the vaulting horse, and thought, Holy Mother of God, because divine intervention seemed the only thing that could rescue him. He steadied himself, reminded himself of the drill, Grab its legs, pull it apart, and, lo and behold, the Virgin Mary herself must have interceded on his behalf, because just as the furious beast reached him, it dropped at his feet like a balloon that had been pricked. Jackson stared at it in dumbfounded astonishment, waiting for it to pull itself together and carry on ripping him apart with its teeth, but there wasn’t even a twitch in its tail left. Honda Man roared with some horrible inner dog-loving pain and fell to his knees next to the animal, and even though the guy was a crazy, enraged psychopath, Jackson couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for someone in the throes of so much grief.

He scratched his head, Stan to Honda Man’s Ollie, and wondered what to do. Running seemed like a good option, but somehow it didn’t seem right to just walk away. Before he could decide on the right course of action-kill Honda Man or comfort him- a policeman arrived on the scene. They may have been in a dark backwater of an alley, but they were close to the Royal Mile and had been making enough noise to wake poor old Greyfriar’s Bobby, sleeping the big sleep no more than a stick’s throw away. So shouting did work, he must remember to emphasize this fact to Marlee. And Julia.

Jackson supposed that, through a policeman’s eye, it didn’t look good-Honda Man on the ground, his nose a mashed-up mess, sobbing over his dead dog, Jackson standing over them both, scratching his head in bemusement, his mouth almost dripping with blood that wasn’t his own. Perhaps he should have just put his hands up and said, “It’s a fair cop, you’ve got me bang to rights, officer,” but he didn’t, he protested a great deal (“It was self-defense, he attacked me, he’s insane”) and ended up being cuffed and forced into the back of a squad car.

His appearance in court this morning had been swift and bru-tal. The arresting officer read out a statement to the effect that he had come across “Mr. Terence Smith” on the ground in a pool of blood, sobbing over the body of his dog. The victim accused the defendant of killing the dog, but there were no visible marks on the dog. The defendant appeared to have bitten Mr. Smith’s nose.

“Mr. Smith” himself made an almost credible victim-sharp-suited in Hugo Boss, his nose purple and swollen in a way that clearly incriminated Jackson. He had been a man going about his own business, walking his dog. Walking his dog-was there any more innocent pastime that a citizen could indulge in?

Jackson had refused to see the police doctor last night, claiming he was “fine.” It was stupid male pride that made him reluctant to admit to injury. “You are a visitor in our city, Mr. Brodie,” Sher-iff Alistair Crichton admonished him, “and I am only sorry that this isn’t the good old days when you would have been run out of town.” Instead he fined him a hundred pounds for assault and told him to “watch his step.”

“Why didn’t you plead ‘not guilty’?” Julia asked. “You’re an idiot, Jackson.” She no longer sounded sleepy, quite the opposite in fact.

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“And so, what now?” she asked.

“Dunno. Guess I’ll try to go straight from now on.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Unless you like the idea of being a gangster’s moll.”

“It’s not funny.”

Jackson could hear a door opening and closing and then voices in the background. A man asked a question that Jackson couldn’t catch, and Julia turned her mouth away from the phone and said, “Yes, please.”

“Are you in a shop?”

“No, I’m in rehearsal. I have to go, I’ll see you later.” And she was gone. She couldn’t be in rehearsal, her venue was so far under-ground that no phone signal could penetrate the rock. Jackson sighed. Hard times in Babylon.