Slaughter's hound

Friday
15

The sun was a diamond, hard and bright and more trouble than it was worth.

Herb looked nowhere as hard or bright but he looked like a whole lot of trouble. Somehow he managed to loom over the deckchair without blocking out any of the glare. I shaded my eyes and rolled my neck anti-clockwise to ease the stiffness, head no heavier than a baby grand.

‘What?’ I said, tasting the stale Jack wafting up off my shirt.

‘This shit with Finn. Where do we stand?’

Dutch, the dopey prick, had left the door unlocked going out. I made to haul myself off the canvas and realised some perverse vampire had been around during the night, swapping the blood in my veins for a sticky warm sweat. So I closed my eyes again and gave him the spiel.

‘Fuck that fucking idiot,’ he said about ten seconds in, which was good, because each word was taking a minute off my life. ‘What’d you do with the grass?’

‘It’s looked after.’

‘You don’t have it here?’

‘No.’

‘So where is it?’

I half-cranked an eyelid. ‘Why, what’re you going to do? Go get it?’

He stared. Then he said, ‘Are you drinking this shit or what?’

A beaker of hot black nectar from three floors below. I chugged the first half in two long swallows, going for the burn as much as the jolt, then subsided back into the deckchair again and studied the minor miracle that was Herb out and about in broad daylight.

‘You get my message?’ he said.

I patted my pockets, came up with the phone. Switching it on I tried to remember when I’d turned if off. For Tohill’s interview, probably. ‘Remind me,’ I said.

‘Christ.’ He toed the black Adidas hold-all at his feet. ‘You’re still on for Galway, right?’

Some chirps and beeps from the phone. Five missed calls. One from Herb, one from Dee, a punter looking to score, two I didn’t recognise.

Nothing from Maria.

‘You’re kidding, right? A run to Galway now? After all the shit last night?’

‘Last night,’ he said, ‘you said you’d do it. Which is what I told Toto.’

‘Yeah, well, you can tell him different now.’

‘Alright, I will. Just cough up the weed and I’ll square it away.’

‘The weed,’ I said, ‘is stashed in the PA. I can’t get to it while the place is a crime scene.’

Herb nodding along. ‘This is what Toto’s saying, yeah. So you’re on the hook for it until such time as he gets it back. Which means, Galway.’

‘Fuck that, Herb. Last night I was doing a dope run for you.’

‘Sure, yeah.’ Defensive now, fighting a losing battle on two fronts. ‘A dope run for someone you vouched for to Toto.’

‘I was vouching for Finn paying for the weed, not jumping off any buildings.’

‘Except he jumped, didn’t he? And I’m guessing he handed over no cash before he went all triple-back fucking flip into the cab.’

‘Fuck’s sakes, Herb.’

‘It’s not my call, Harry.’

‘Alright. Fuck.’ I realised why Herb was out and about, driving a spare cab into town to save me traipsing all the way out to Larkhill. Which was nice. I took a stab at escaping the deckchair’s tractor-beam, fell back. ‘Want me to run you back out home before I go?’

‘No go, Harry.’

‘No go what?’

‘Toto reckons you’re getting no more cabs until you’ve cleared the debt.’

I squinted up at him. ‘So what, I’m taking the bus to Galway?’

He shrugged, glanced away across the rooftops. ‘You can’t borrow Dee’s car?’

He wasn’t glancing away to admire the sooty chimneypots. Toto had told Herb to tell me to borrow Dee’s car. This to let me know, he knew who she was, what she drove. Where she lived, and who with.

A cold sweat starting to ice in the small of my back.

This’ll be a car I’m not insured to drive,’ I said slowly, ‘to go to Galway and pick up a score. What’re you on, PCP?’

‘She won’t loan you the car?’

‘If I swear I’ll drive straight into the first cement truck I meet, maybe.’

‘Tell her you’ve a regular fare, he’s flying out of Knock. You can’t let him down.’

‘That’s a two-hour round trip, max. I’ll be gone, what, five or six hours?’

‘So you get a flat tyre or some shit. Listen, Harry, it’s a ten grand score. There and back, you pay off on the weed. Simple.’

The torque started to bite, the inevitability of it all winding tight like some metal band slowly crushing my skull. Sparks flaring behind my eyes. Herb waited while I rolled a smoke and sparked it up, coughed out some lung I wasn’t using right then. ‘I’ll need a couple of hundred up front,’ I said. ‘I’m behind on Ben’s maintenance. And Dee’ll need some kind of sweetener if she’s to lend me the car.’

He thought about that. ‘Done,’ he said.

‘I’m making no promises. It’ll all depend on what kind of mood she’s in.’

‘Horseshit. She’ll be in a bad mood, she’ll be looking at you. Your job is work around that. A grand is a grand.’

If there was a flaw in his logic, I couldn’t see it.