Slaughter's hound

33

It hit like cold lightning. I buckled at the knees and staggered back, reaching for the countertop. For a split second I thought I was having a heart-attack, couldn’t breathe past the pain, the tectonic plates grinding in my chest.

From a very great distance I heard Herb say, ‘Harry, I’m so fucking sorry, man, Jesus,’ but faintly, very faintly, from the heart of some roaring storm. The world gone black, shot through with blood.

Then came a single thought, a question, piercing:

Would Ben have died had Gonz killed me?

The storm dropped away. The clarity was surreal. Herb, frozen in place, a helpless expression etched on his face. His lips were moving but I couldn’t hear a word.

My lips felt numb, throat locked shut. But from somewhere I heard, ‘Herb? It’s Ben?’

He nodded.

‘He’s dead?’

Herb closed his eyes. ‘That was Dee. She said,’ he swallowed hard, ‘that you might want to know.’

The tectonic plates began to grind again, some deep Antarctic fault line I’d never even suspected was there. Beneath, a poisonous lava bubbling up a vicious brew. A cold and savage rage.

It was just Jimmy’s bad luck he was there.

Bad luck that he felt moved to say, ‘Hard lines, Rigby. Sorry for your troubles.’

Bad luck he’d offered to light a candle for Ben.

‘How’d you know, Jimmy?’

‘What?’

‘About Ben being in hospital. How’d you know?’

He came up off the table with his hands out, palms facing me. Watching my eyes, the.38. ‘Wait a minute, Rigby. You’re not thinking-’

‘I wasn’t thinking, Jimmy. Too fucking worried about laptops and twenty fucking grands to think straight. I’m thinking now, though. So how’d you know?’

‘Back the fuck off,’ he said, and it was only then I realised I was moving. Something flickered in my peripheral vision, Herb raising the SIG, and it was Jimmy’s bad luck, again, that he let himself be distracted. By the time he came back to me I’d reversed the.38, was smashing its butt into the bridge of his nose. A squelchy crunch. He went down hard, as only big men can, bringing a chair with him, tangling himself up. I stomped his face, once, twice, blood spraying up my shins. Bone cracking. He tried to scream but it came out a choked gurgle, and I reared back and booted him up under the chin. His head flopped back, leaving his throat open, so I got myself a good grip on the table for leverage and stomped down on his Adam’s apple.

If Herb hadn’t pawed at my shoulder, dragged me off-balance, I’d have killed him where he lay. My heel connected too high, glanced off his chin and punched into his cheekbone. His face seemed to billow, then flatten out slow.

Herb was screaming something in my ear. It took a couple of seconds to work it out, and then I realised he was saying, ‘Not here, Harry, not fucking here.’

I stepped out across Jimmy, turned and hunkered down. Reversed the.38 again, clicked the safety off. His breathing coming now in ragged bubbles.

‘Jimmy,’ I said, ‘you have three fucking seconds before I blow your fucking head off. How did you know?’

His face looked a lot like a melting balloon. Nose busted, a cheekbone crushed, the mouth a raw hole, both eyes swollen shut. So I guess he was literally swearing blind, in words that came slow and gloopy, when he mumbled he knew nothing about running the Audi off the road. That he’d heard about Ben from Gillick.

How Gillick knew he couldn’t say, even after I cocked the.38 and ground the muzzle into his forehead.

‘He’s not worth it, Harry,’ Herb said, and he was right, but not in the way he thought.

Herb was trying to feed me the old line. How blowing a hole in Jimmy wouldn’t bring Ben back. That revenge might be sweet, but knee-jerk retribution wasn’t worth twenty years in a cell.

Sound advice, at least where Jimmy was concerned.

Gillick, though. Depending on how he’d heard about Ben, Gillick would be a different matter entirely.

I de-cocked the.38, put it away. Herb went to get a roll of masking tape. We got Jimmy nicely trussed, ankles and wrists, then Herb pulled the Phaeton around to the kitchen door. Jimmy wasn’t exactly a dead weight but he was a big man, no easy job to cram into the boot. He lay there half-blind and snuffling.

‘What if he chokes?’ Herb said. ‘On his own blood, like.’

‘That’s on me.’

‘Yeah, but-’

‘I’ll need some clean clothes.’ My jeans were spattered to the knee, shoes and socks stained red. ‘D’you mind?’

‘’Course not. Work away.’

‘And do me a favour. Find Gillick’s place, Google-map it for me.’

‘Will do. But Harry, listen to me.’ A hand on my shoulder, a faint squeeze. ‘You need to go see Ben.’

For a moment I found myself puzzling over how best to stand, where my hands should go. ‘I will, yeah.’

‘I mean, now.’

‘Not yet, Herb. Couple of things to do first.’

‘Harry …’

I shrugged off his hand and told him that there would come a time to mourn, for sure. When I’d sit myself down and acknowledge Ben was gone, and cry first for what he had been to me, the one and only good thing I’d ever known in my life, and then for Ben, for what he might have grown up to be, all the things he’d never get to do, the sights he’d never see, the music he’d never hear. For the sheer waste of it.

I told Herb that the world was already pointless without Ben in it. That in time his absence would metastasize into grief, a cancer hollowing me out from within, with no reason to go on other than my dying would mean Ben would have one less person to remember him.

I reminded him about the TV documentary we’d seen last week, the one about the Bronze Age, two guys making a sword, molten metal being poured into a mould, the fiery, viscous bronze that quickly dulled and hardened into a lethal weapon.

I told him all that with Jimmy lying there in the boot of the Phaeton, moaning, although how it sounded was, ‘I can’t see Ben like this, Herb. Not like this.’

That much he understood, so I left out the bit about pulling up at the hospital in a chariot, Hector’s body broken and bloody in my wake.

‘Don’t do it,’ he said.

‘It’s doing me, Herb. It’s doing me.’