Slaughter's hound

44

I shuffled back in from the balcony hollowed out and ready to drop. Preparing a little speech for Grainne, how she’d be needing her passport and a big wide smile for Maria whenever she tracked her down in Cyprus, this presuming she was interested, given her piss-poor experience to date, in trying the whole family malarkey again.

Too blitzed to realise the screaming had stopped.

She was gone.

Yeah, and I needed to be gone too. One last thing to do.

So I dragged myself down the long hallway, past the gallery of staring eyes. Out the front door and down the steps.

The Rav4 was gone, but there was still enough cars out front, and plenty enough petrol to be siphoned off. A jerry can in the boot of the Land Cruiser.

I made three trips, splashed the petrol through the hallway, the drawing room, the living room. Smashed some bottles of brandy.

Stinking of petrol and cordite and blood.

Back out to the steps, where I rolled a cigarette and got it sparked, tossed the Zippo in through the open door. Then I went down the steps and across the manicured lawn and took a pew on the rim of the fountain, watched the flames take hold. Panes cracking, glass splintering.

The smoke in one hand, tasting foul. The.38 in the other, and it probably wouldn’t taste any better.

Something blew deep in the bowels of the house, a generator maybe, and a million sparks went rocketing off towards the stars, heading back home, and as they glowed and dissipated and faded away I conceded that it didn’t really matter either way if I ate the gun or sat on that fountain rim for the millions of years it would take the sun to go cold and wink out, because life was nothing but a pointless bloody farce, just this impossibly brief flaring between being nothing and dead matter, everyone who ever lived just a constellation of atoms stuck together for long enough to realise it’s just that bit too aware for its own good, and how it didn’t really matter, not when you lean back and have a good long look up into that endless night, that Ben had only lived twelve years instead of surviving to shamble into a hole in the ground, deranged and broken, leaking sticky stuff from every orifice that counted.

But even if it all meant nothing I still wasn’t entitled to put myself away. Didn’t have the right. I could point the finger at Finn or Saoirse Hamilton or Gillick or anyone else I chose, it didn’t change the fact that it was my fault Ben was dead. And the very least I owed him was to live with that, to suffer that torment.

The Grange was burning so hard now my skin felt singed. The roar of the flames so loud that it took me a second or two to realise the phone was ringing.

Herb.

‘Yeah?’

‘Harry? Where are you?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Listen, Harry.’ Maybe my hearing was still off from my eardrums being blasted by the.38, or maybe it was the popping and crackling from the house. But he sounded different, something choking his throat. ‘Dee rang, there’s been a development with Ben.’

A surge of irrational hope. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. She said, uh, fair warning, she’s filing charges against you, reckless endangerment, some shit like that.’

‘Aye, right.’

‘Harry, maybe you should, y’know, take off.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘If you need anything, let me know. I can bring it anywhere.’

‘Appreciate that, Herb. I’ll be in touch.’

I hung up and heard her coming, the angry whine of an engine in reverse, then the crunch of gravel as she emerged from the trees. A gear-change, and the Rav4 came roaring around the fountain, braking hard, the tyres spitting stones.

The.38 like an anchor in my hand.

I thought she might come on raging about how someone had parked a Saab across the road, boxed her in. Instead she simply opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel.

She was her mother’s daughter, alright.

The ice-blue eyes, the iron will. The SIG pointing at my chest, both hands braced on the butt.

‘Just put it down,’ she said softly. ‘Just let it go.’

The.38 hit the grass with a muffled clunk.

She’d played me from the start. Letting me think she was a crazy, scared kid. Because we’ve all seen the same movies, haven’t we? Read the same books.

Grainne Hamilton was seventeen going on seventy and about as crazy scared as a marble slab.

Not once did she glance at the blazing house.

‘I can’t get the Saab started,’ she said. ‘So let’s go. You drive.’

I got in. She crammed herself back against the passenger door, the SIG pointed at my ribs.

We drove into the forest. She hadn’t killed anyone yet and I didn’t know if she had what it took to go that far. So I asked, just to gauge where she was, when she’d realised Finn and Saoirse were ripping off her trust fund to start all over again in Cyprus.

‘Just drive,’ she said.

‘Was Maria in on it?’

‘Maria, Jesus.’ She shook her head. ‘All she had to do was play the game, sit tight, marry Finn when the time was right.’

‘Which’d net him a Cypriot passport.’

‘Except she couldn’t help herself. Started screwing around with you. Thinking she’d teach Finn a lesson.’

‘And then she gets pregnant.’

She shrugged. ‘He couldn’t be told. Couldn’t go without taking you out too.’

‘He was here all along,’ I said, ‘wasn’t he?’

She nodded. ‘In the boatshed, yeah. I thought, yesterday morning, you’d worked it out. When you went for a stroll down to the cove.’

‘Which is why you started on about the will, Finn making changes to the trust fund. Just to see how much I knew.’

‘Pull in here,’ she said. The Saab looming large in the headlights. I eased the Rav4 to a halt, careful not to make any jerky movements. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘get it out of the way.’

I got out and went around to the Saab, sat into the driver’s seat. She came and stood by the driver’s off-side, the SIG still braced. I reached under the dash, found the wires. A couple of sparks, then a low hum. I gave the accelerator a nudge, let the engine roar.

‘Now get it off the road,’ she said.

I put the Saab in reverse, went bumping down into the undergrowth.

She waited on the verge of the road as I climbed back up the incline. When I was close enough so she couldn’t miss, she said, ‘Far enough. Down.’

Not so much as quiver in those delicate hands. I went down on one knee, then the other.

‘Grainne,’ I said, ‘think it through. Right now you’re walking away clean. You want to give them a reason to hunt you down?’

She took it onboard, a faint glitter in the ice-blue eyes. Hunkered down so that we were on the same eye-level, the SIG in one hand now, resting on her knee.

‘And you’ll do what?’ she said. ‘I mean, when the cops ask you what happened here, what’ll you say?’

‘I won’t even be here. I’ll be gone.’

‘Chasing Maria?’

‘There’s a good chance the kid is mine.’

‘And you wouldn’t be even slightly interested in the money.’

Seventeen years old and neither woman nor girl nor fully human, but flesh drawn tight over the machinery of greed.

A survivor, this one. She’d do okay.

‘I’ll do you a deal,’ I said. ‘I find you Maria and you get the money. She has Finn’s flash-drive, the codes.’

She nodded slowly, pursed her lips. ‘Y’know,’ she said, ‘I’d probably be just as quick tracking her down myself.’ Then squeezed the trigger.

Not a knee-capping, exactly. She wasn’t all that precise. But she was so close she couldn’t miss and the round punched through my thigh.

No pain at first, just the shock of the impact sending me into convulsions as I keeled over into the dead leaves. I was vaguely aware of her standing up and dropping the gun, swearing as she cradled her wrist. Then a spurt of flame and pain bolted through my thigh, set my bones on fire. Screaming made it worse, every nerve scraped raw. And no one to hear anyway, not after the drone of the engine finally faded away.

I lay still in the leaves with my eyes closed and teeth clenched, trying not to breathe. After a while the pain dulled and I began to get cold. I heard a whoo-whoo, the sound faint, its tone curious. Then the shakes started, just a shiver at first, but soon I was shuddering all over. Numb below the waist and faintly damp, the artery pulsing slow now, draining out.

This motionless ease, measure me by …

It could have been minutes or hours. No way to know.

Just as it all started to fade away, the world bleeding dark from the edges in, I had one last glimpse of a shadowy Ben, those hopeful eyes peering up from under his fringe, but when I reached to brush the hair from his eyes I found he had no eyes, no features at all save a raw hole of a mouth twisted into a leer and it was Gonzo, yes, Gonz waiting for me and saying put it down, just let it go, you can’t go on, you’ll go on, and the leaves faintly rustling, whispering, yes, I will, yes, yes