Sanctus

Chapter 51

The Cat, Pet and Canine Clinic sat on the corner of Grace and Absolution in the heart of the Lost Quarter. A vet’s presence in such a sleazy and down-at-heel section of the city was surprising enough, but the fact that a light now burned behind its frosted-glass frontage was even stranger.

In the circles in which Kutlar moved it was generally referred to as the Bitch Clinic — testimony to the work that went on here during the hours of darkness. Most of these procedures, where medical records weren’t required and the bills were paid in cash, were performed on women. There wasn’t a pimp in the city who hadn’t used the clinic at one time or another for anything from a hastily arranged backstreet abortion, to a cut-price sterilization job done under the guise of fitting a contraceptive device. IUDs and slow-release hormone pills were relatively expensive, so it was more economical to sterilize them. Most of the girls didn’t even know about it until years later.

The clinic also offered other, more specialist services; ones that commanded a much higher premium due to the steeper prison sentences that resulted from discovery.

Kutlar had never used the place before. He owned no pets and until recently had been fortunate enough, considering his line of work, not to require any of its under-the-counter arrangements either. This had all changed on the rain-lashed airport service road when the nine millimetre round had flattened on its way through the van door and split in two as it entered his right leg. Part of the slug now lay in a stainless-steel tray. Kutlar looked at it now, felt his stomach lurch and turned away. He caught his reflection in the door of a medicine cabinet. His close-shaved head was varnished with sweat and shone in the overhead lights that made hollow shadows of his deep-set eyes. He realized he looked like a death’s-head, shuddered, and looked away.

He lay on his left side, propped against a raised part of the examination table while a fat man with a white coat and grey skin continued his delicate search for the second half of the round. Occasionally he felt a tugging sensation or heard a wet, tearing sound that made his stomach roll, but he fought back the nausea, forcing himself to breathe steadily — in through the nose, and out through the mouth — while focusing on a picture of a black Labrador slobbering happily from a large poster pinned to the opposite wall.

Kutlar had heard about the clinic from an acquaintance who specialized in the import and export of various items not generally advertised in the classifieds. He’d told him the doctor was generous with the painkillers, provided he hadn’t fallen off the wagon and snarfed them all himself. The clink of metal on metal announced the reunion of the second piece of the slug with its twin.

‘That appears to be most of the hardware accounted for,’ the fat man said in a voice that would not have sounded out of place coming from the mouth of a consultant. ‘I need to irrigate the wound now, flush out any smaller fragments that may still be there. Then I can seal the veins and start closing you up.’

Kutlar nodded and gritted his teeth. The doc picked up a clear plastic bottle with a thin spout and squeezed it with a doughy hand, carefully directing a stream of cold saline into the red chasm of his upper thigh. Kutlar shivered. He was still wet from the rain. His damp clothes, coupled with the blood loss, had started to shake him up a bit, probably with a little post-traumatic stress thrown in as a chaser. He looked back at the poster of the happy dog, realized it was recommending some kind of worm treatment, and felt the nausea rise again.

He thought about the ambush on the road, trying to work out where it had gone wrong. He’d dropped the first two guys at the car-hire place outside the main airport, then headed off to the other airport with his cousin Serko to drop off the skinny Hispanic so he could catch his red-eye to the States.

They’d spotted the dark-haired player in the trench coat just after they’d dropped him off — by the arrivals gate, holding up a sign with the girl’s name on it. He looked like police, but was alone. They’d held back, watching until the girl suddenly appeared on some half-full flight out of London. Kutlar had weighed it up and figured there’d be a nice bonus if he and Serko could jump the guy and come back from the drop-off with the girl in tow, so they’d followed them outside. They almost had a chance to grab her straight off when the chaperone headed for the car while she’d held back for a smoke. Only there’d been some security guys across the road, rousting vagrants from the bus stop. So they’d waited. Followed them in the van. And decided to spring the ambush on the service road.

The plan had been simple. He was to take care of the babysitter while Serko transferred the girl to the van. Nice and easy. Except the driver had come flying out so fast he’d been knocked backwards and dropped his gun. By the time he’d recovered, a shot had been fired. He’d thrown himself at the man, kicked his gun from his hand, then scrambled back to the van and taken off. Except the girl hadn’t been there. Neither had Serko. As he sped away he’d looked in the rear-view mirror and seen something lying in the road. He’d nearly spun round and gone back until bullets started chewing up his side panels and punched out his window. He only realized he’d been hit when he tried to apply the brakes and his leg wouldn’t move. Going back would have been suicide. He’d had no choice. Dead men couldn’t settle scores. Cousin or no cousin.

A phone started ringing in the waiting room. Kutlar knew who it was. Wondered how much time he had before they caught up with him. He’d done odd jobs for the Church in the past, mostly low-level acts of intimidation and delivering messages with menaces. Never anything like this. Never kidnapping. Never anything that required a gun. But the money had been too good to turn down. Even so, as soon as the doctor was done he was out of there, pay-off or no. He didn’t want to go down for this. He listened to the phone ringing and wished he hadn’t told them about the clinic. Not that he’d had much choice. The older guy had specifically asked where they should go if there were any casualties. That was the word he’d used — casualties. They should have walked away then. Too late now. Too late for Serko, at least.

‘I’ll give you some antibiotics for the fever,’ the fat man said in the voice he’d salvaged from a previous lifetime. ‘It’ll also act as a prophylactic against infection.’

Kutlar nodded again, felt sweat prickling his scalp and running down his neck and back. Rumour had it that the good doctor had practised proper medicine at one time in his past, before lack of willpower and unfettered access to morphine had been his undoing. ‘You need to go somewhere and rest,’ the doc said. ‘Take it easy until this heals.’

‘How long?’ Kutlar croaked, his mouth dry and woolly from the Novocaine or whatever it was he’d had pumped into him.

The doctor dropped his eyes back to the ragged red hole and examined it like it was some kind of rare orchid. ‘A month, maybe. Couple of weeks at least before you should even try walking on it.’

The voice from the doorway made them both start. ‘He needs to be good to go when we leave.’

Kutlar watched Cornelius walk into the room, the waxy patches on his face glistening under the surgical lights. Johann followed close behind. Their red windcheaters were slick with rain. They looked like they’d been dipped in blood.

‘OK,’ the fat man said. He knew better than to argue with his clients. ‘I’ll strap it up tight and give him some heavy-duty painkillers.’

Cornelius stopped by the table and leaned in to examine the wound with a connoisseur’s eye before the doctor started bandaging it up. He looked up at Kutlar and winked, a smile creasing the corners of his eyes and pulling at the pale patches of skin on his cheek. Somewhere within the cold numbness of his leg, Kutlar felt something stir. His friend had been right, the doc had been generous with the meds; but the walls of Novocaine were beginning to crumble and an army of pain was starting to invade.

The doctor finished dressing the wound and reached for a syringe. ‘I’ll give you some morphine now and some tablets to take with you.’

A blur of red flashed across the room as Johann grabbed the doctor and covered his mouth. Bloodshot eyes went wide and frantic behind greasy spectacles and snot bubbled from his nose as he started to hyperventilate. Cornelius plucked the syringe from his pudgy fingers and jabbed it through the white sleeve and into his arm. He depressed the plunger and the magnified eyes passed from panic to glassy resignation as the opiates flooded his system. Johann dragged him to a chair and dropped him into it while Cornelius found another ampoule and re-filled the syringe. He stuck it in the same area as the first jab, pushing the plunger until it was empty.

‘Tabula Rasa,’ he whispered, glancing over at Kutlar. ‘No witnesses.’

He withdrew the syringe from the fat man’s arm and stepped closer.

Kutlar would have run if his leg had been up to it, but he knew it was futile. He wouldn’t even make it out of the room. He thought of Serko lying on the wet road. Hoped these ruthless bastards, whoever they were, would at least catch up with the guy who’d killed him and return the favour. He watched the syringe coming nearer, dangling loosely between Cornelius’s thick fingers, the tip stained pink with the doctor’s blood.

I hope he’s going to use a different needle, Kutlar thought, before realizing that it didn’t really matter.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Cornelius said. He reached over and took a paper towel from a box on the side table and wrapped the syringe in it. ‘You good to go?’

Kutlar nodded. Breathed again. Cornelius dropped the syringe in the pocket of his windcheater then grabbed him under the shoulder and helped him to his feet. Kutlar felt the swollen flesh of his leg expanding against the tight bindings. The room began to swim. He tried to take a step but his legs wouldn’t obey him. The last thing he saw before passing out was the image of the dog on the poster, bright-eyed, healthy and ecstatically worm free.