His for the Holidays

by LB Gregg, Harper Fox, Z. A. Maxfield

  “Dee? The Glasgow lass? I thought she’d swung Christmas leave.”

  “She had.” Campbell tugged down the edge of her hat and looked more like a scrawny wee navvy than ever. “She came rushing in to join us when she heard our Andy was going undercover.” She smiled, stepping out of the way of a group of laughing hen-party girls, snowflakes melting in their feather boas. “All sorts of people trying to look out for their fellas tonight, eh, James?”

  “Och, Manda! I…I just met him, all right? He’s been good to me—so good I don’t know how I’ll ever pay him back—but…”

  “DI McBride?” The sound tech stuck his head round the door of the van. “I’m picking up a signal on Agent Leitner’s mic.”

  McBride almost bulldozed Campbell down. He stopped himself, mortified, putting out a hand to catch her. She waved off his apology, pushing him ahead of her into the van. “I know, I know. You just met.”

  The voice on the wire didn’t sound like Toby’s at all. McBride, settling onto a stool in the truck, bidding his hands not to shake on the headset, listened in bewilderment. A top undercover man himself in his Edinburgh pond, McBride wasn’t sure he’d last five minutes with Mossad. This was Viktor Maralek he was hearing. His intonation bore no resemblance to Toby’s Israeli lilt: Yossi was Slovenian, and so was Toby now. McBride was sure the accent was authentic. Not that Carlyle would know or care: he’d be happy if his client fell under his broad definition of foreign.

  And McBride could pick out Carlyle, even through the roar and clatter of the crowd. That was one voice he’d always know, and Carlyle had no thought of disguising it. There he was in the background, cackling and shouting with his mates. He sounded elated. A terrible chill seized McBride’s guts as he tried to think what might make a hard-eyed psycho like that sound so damn happy.

  Then, he wasn’t entirely a psycho, was he? According to his lights, he was a businessman. He wasn’t going to kill the goose. Amanda pressed a knee to his in the confines of the van, and both listened intently while Toby closed in on the target.

  It happened fast. So far all McBride had heard was background conversation, Toby chatting idly to the barman, then exchanging a word or two with other punters in the crowd. Then suddenly Carlyle’s voice was loud in the mic, and Toby—Viktor, a toneless stranger, the voice of a shark if one had decided to talk—was saying, “Hey, Sim. I hear you have merchandise.”

  Amanda almost dropped her notebook. McBride too felt his heart lurch into his throat. But after a moment’s terror, he understood what Toby was doing. Understood it was a brilliant move—perhaps the only one. To go straight in without preliminaries, with a grand assumption Carlyle would know exactly what he meant. That he had the right to be asking. Leave no time for suspicion, for wonder.

  A silence had fallen around Carlyle’s table. McBride could see it as clearly as if he’d been there—the ring of surprised faces, the suspension of activity. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Maralek. Viktor Maralek.” Perfect—just the right tone of disgust. Someone like Carlyle, someone with merchandise, should know him. There was a faint rustle, the sound of a powerful, confident man sitting down uninvited. “Well? I heard you had it. Did you make the deal already?”

  “What’s it to you if I did?”

  “No. What is it to you, Sim? I’ve heard of you too. You don’t hand over goods like that to the first bidder.”

  Another silence. Then Carlyle said, in tones of imperfectly hidden surmise, “You said your name was—what? Maralek?”

  “That’s right. Not gone deaf from all this shit music you play in your clubs, have you?”

  A smile in Toby’s voice. Not a nice one. And the bait was taken—McBride saw Carlyle’s throat gape helplessly wide. “What’s your budget, then, mate?”

  “Half again what your first man put down.”

  And that was right too. Double would have gone too far, triggered Sim’s alarms with its extravagance. Maybe smacked of desperation. As it was, all McBride heard after that was Carlyle’s flat instruction, “Come with me,” and the sounds of two men making their way through a noisy room to somewhere quieter.

  And sirens.

  McBride frowned. He clamped the headset harder to his ears, then saw Amanda was laying hers down. Doing the same, he listened. Three or four—no, five, another one lifting its voice into the wailing chorus. He wouldn’t have paid them a moment’s attention except they were so suddenly close. Coming closer. “Amanda…”

  “Don’t worry. Someone else’s party going wrong, I should think.”

  “Aye.” A punch-up, a jumper on the bridge, some other traditional festivity. McBride put his headset back on in time to hear Toby ask coldly if the package was intact. His stomach lurched at the implication, but Sim snarled back, just as frosty, “D’ye think I’m a fool? That’s what you pay for. There’s no’ a finger mark on it.”

  McBride let his brow rest for a moment on his hands. “Oh, Gracie…”

  “James!”

  He snapped upright. Amanda had seized his shoulder. He turned to look up at her. “What?”

  “Trouble.”

  He tore off his headset. Through the front screen of the van he saw Royston and Davies coming to attention. Snow was billowing past the windscreen, beginning to form spirals in the wind. Lit up in red and blue… “Amanda, what the hell—”

  “I don’t know. Squad cars. Four or five of them, pulling up just down the road.”

  McBride grabbed the back of the driver’s seat and leaned to look out. Christ, yes—Lothian and Borders bearing down in all its glory, all the racket and fanfare Campbell’s team had worked so hard to avoid. The sirens were a wolf-pack howl. He met Amanda’s eyes, watching her come to the same conclusion at the very same instant. “Oh no. Lila.”

  His discarded headset crackled. McBride snatched it up. Not a crackle—a thundery flutter, as if the cloth near the mic had been seized. A short, intense hush, the sound of the sirens coming through the wire. Then Carlyle’s panicky snarl: “What’s that noise, then, Maralek? What the fuck is that?”

  “How should I know?” Toby sounded unfazed. In his mind McBride saw him, lifting one broad shoulder in a shrug. His eyes would be calm. His mouth would be ghosting a smile.

  “Maybe you forgot to pay a bill.”

  Gunshots roared down the wire. McBride jerked back helplessly, the headset clattering to the floor. He yanked it back up and listened again—frantically clamping one earpiece flat to his skull—but Toby’s mic was dead.

  McBride leapt into the street. Once there, he fixed himself, a rock around which chaos instantly began to part itself and flow. The doors to the Black Cat were wide open, disgorging a stream of panicked bodies. The bouncers were trying to keep order, but the club was tiny; a gunfight in there would sound like the end of the world and put everyone into the crossfire.

  Police cars were still arriving. One of them skidded on the snow and screeched to a broadside halt three feet from McBride. He scarcely bothered to look. He was waiting, listening. The squad-car doors flew open, and somehow he was sharing the kerb and the blizzard with Lila Stone and the chief constable for all of Edinburgh, Lothian and Borders. He’d had bad dreams like that. Assuming this was real, he growled, “What have you done, Lila?”

  She ignored him. All her attention was fixed desperately on the brass she’d brought with her. The CC was watching her in his turn with an intense and hawklike interest. “I told you, sir,” she gasped. “This is an unauthorised raid.”

  “DI McBride? You in charge here?”

  On another night McBride might have been flattered the CC recognised him. For now he was just waiting, listening. “Nn-nn,” he grunted, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the van.

  “Campbell.”

  “Aye, and it was going fine until you lot came blazing in… Oh, Lila. I might have known.”

  McBride let Campbell and all the rest of them fade into static. The CC had brought serious heat with him: all the way up the w
ynd, police marksmen were taking position behind the open doors of their cars. To what end, McBride wasn’t sure, unless they intended to shoot their way through the frightened crowd still spilling onto the pavements. Still too many of them for him to make his move, and he didn’t yet know where to go. He was waiting, listening. Vaguely he heard the CC’s ominous rumble. “You mean you disrupted an operation set up by my division’s most trusted senior officer?” Then the gunfire came again.

  A short, sharp exchange. The marksmen crouched, cocking their rifles. The crowd surged, screams piercing the clamour, but McBride could see a gap. And he had a destination—the first floor.

  Amanda was in front of him. “James. No. Don’t you dare.”

  Everything I’ve got’s in there, Manda. My kid, my partner.

  Toby.

  He couldn’t say any of it. He put her aside—gently, almost into the arms of the CC. And then he ran.

  * * *

  The club was almost empty. The music boomed weirdly to a vacant floor, coloured lights and strobes whirling in dead air. A handful of terrified punters still crouched under tables, huddled against walls: he ignored them, scanning the darkness. Only one exit could lead to the upper floors. Unshipping his weapon from under the donkey jacket, he made for it, cautiously pushing wide the doors.

  There was a body on the stairs. For a moment McBride felt only distant rage, a copper’s grief for the civilian dead; this poor lad in his shiny suit had probably just been on his way back from the gents’. McBride bent to check for a pulse, found none and began to step over him.

  A strobing beam from the bar swept over the fallen man’s peaceful face. Air left McBride’s lungs. His damaged knee gave, and he grabbed at the banister to keep from falling. “Oh God, Andrew. Andy!”

  Another bark of gunfire from the floor above. For an instant McBride couldn’t take it in—couldn’t move for the stony paralysis of grief inside him. Then he heard Grace scream.

  He lurched to his feet. Christ, what a noise she made—like a cat picked up by its tail. Oh, she was Libby’s girl, all right, and his; she sounded, more than anything, pissed off. Like a flare in the dark, that cry. McBride briefly touched Andrew’s hair and ran again.

  * * *

  A narrow corridor ran from the top of the staircase to a set of double doors. The doors had porthole windows. Flattening himself to the wall, McBride took his Walther in both hands, snapping off the safety. He could see Sim Carlyle—panicked, pale, but not too much of a cornered rat to be enjoying himself. Worse things than coke and E got dealt around this club. That was a crystal-meth face, McBride reckoned, Sim not above sampling his own wares. His gaze was glittering and dead. His weapon—a dirty-looking Parabellum, adapted to take hollow points—was trained on Toby Leitner.

  Toby was unarmed. He was bruised and daubed with blood, but he looked utterly serene. As if he was playing out his life’s last purpose, finding his path and his peace… When Sim moved, he did too, just a little, always facing him. McBride saw why. Grace was behind him. She was at once clinging to his coattails and peering round them at Carlyle, her face creased like a wildcat’s. From what McBride could lip-read, she was giving Carlyle what-for in her ma’s best Glaswegian guttersnipe dialect. Toby kept pushing her back, one hand gently clamped to her bright head. He was shielding her—with his flesh, with his bone. Carlyle would have to shoot through him to get at her.

  McBride kicked the doors open. Carlyle swung round. And despite everything—despite even poor Andrew, discarded like a rag doll on the stairs—McBride gave him a moment. He said, soft and fast, “Put it down for me, Sim.”

  But Sim jerked the pistol’s muzzle up. McBride knew a moment of exquisite relief. No more reason in this world now why he shouldn’t shoot this fucker dead: he nodded, as if they had come to an agreement. “Fine by me. Toby, don’t let my bairn watch this.”

  Toby hoisted her off the floor. She fought him for an instant, then wailed and hid her face of her own accord. Toby wrapped an arm around her head. And McBride, once the girl’s eyes and ears were shielded, shot Sim Carlyle through the heart.

  Unsteadily he holstered his gun. He stood staring at the corpse he’d just created. What did he do, when the game was over? What did normal men do?

  “James!”

  He turned. He’d never heard that deep, warm voice with a break in it. Toby was holding out an arm to him, the one not wrapped round his wriggling child. Grace too was reaching out for him, leaning so far she was ready to fall.

  “Gracie!” He ran to catch. He grabbed the girl, and Toby grabbed him, pulling them both close and tight. “Oh God, Toby. Thank you. Thank you.” Grace’s arms clamped round his neck, a scrabbling, strangling-monkey embrace, the sweetest pain he’d ever felt. “Grace, you wee tick. Are you all right?”

  “Aye! Toby promised he’d no’ let them hurt me!”

  “I wouldn’t have, James. Not with a breath left in my body.”

  McBride raised his head to meet Toby’s eyes. “I know,” he said wonderingly. “God. Why?”

  “Because I—”

  The double doors banged suddenly wide. McBride and Toby reacted as one—coming shoulder to shoulder, dropping Grace to the floor behind them, closing ranks tight. The bloodstained figure falling into the room did not look dangerous, but McBride’s nerves were wound hair-trigger tight, and his gun was in his hand and cocked before he knew what he was doing. “No!” Toby snapped, bearing his arm down. “It’s Barclay!”

  “Jesus Christ!” McBride dropped the gun, reflexively snapping the safety back on before he let it go. He took a couple of strides forward and stood staring down at his poor partner, who had crashed to his knees a yard away and was staring up at him, propped on one hand, the other clasped to his stomach. “Andy, you bastard—I couldn’t find your pulse.”

  “Well, you couldn’t have looked very bloody hard!” Andrew bellowed. Then his supporting arm gave, and he crumpled facedown onto the carpet. “Oh, Jim. Help me…”

  Chapter Eleven

  Harle Street, an hour before midnight. Plenty of late shifts McBride had worked here: it should have felt ordinary to him, dull. He sat at his desk. From here he could see and hear—glass walls, open doors—a handful of small dramas playing themselves out. Half a dozen tableaux. McBride cared about all the people in them, but he wasn’t wanted onstage just for now.

  He rested his chin on his hands. Over in the corner, the two sound techs were crowing and high-fiving each other, so presumably the tapes from Toby’s wire were good. Royston, Davies, McKay and the others were grabbing their coats, waving at him distractedly as they scurried for the door: he nodded and lifted a hand in return. Outside Lila’s old office—and axes fell hard around here; even her nameplate had been stripped from the door—Amanda Campbell was pinned down under fire, making small placating gestures at her partner, Jennifer, who’d been waiting for them on their return. Enough of Jenny’s tirade drifted through for him to piece together the whole. “You swore to me it was a desk job! Then I phone to find out why you’ve not come home, and they tell me you’re on an armed siege in the Cowgate!”

  He repressed a smile. All sorts of lives finding their balance again. Andrew Barclay getting a bullet dug out of him in the Royal, expected to be fine. In an office over the hall, Toby Leitner with the duty sergeant, who was respectfully taking down his report.

  And right in front of him, Libby, clutching her daughter as if she would squeeze the marrow from her bones. She’d been waiting at Harle Street too, hand in white-knuckled hand with Jennifer. Libby had Grace on her lap. Her face was buried in her hair. The child’s limbs were sticking out at awkward angles with the force of her embrace. Her voice came, small and winded, out of Libby’s jumper: “Ma, I cannae breathe.”

  “I dinnae bloody care!”

  Two Glaswegian guttersnipes. McBride watched them in satisfaction. He would take to his grave with him the memory of carrying Grace up the steps of Harle Street and into Libby’s outstretched, frantic a
rms. He said, “She’s not been hurt. At least—I’ve asked her, and I think she’s old enough to know what I…”

  “McBride!”

  That was his daughter, blushing furiously, mortified by both her parents. “McBride?” he said. “You called me Daddy on those tapes.”

  “Aye, wi’ a gun to my head.”

  “Gracie! He did not have…”

  “No. It’s a figure of speech.” She gave him the shadow of her old wicked smile. “He just told me to make it sound good.”

  McBride shivered. That was familiar. He could hardly bear to think of Carlyle near her: he’d kill him again if he could. And debonair and bright with mischief or not, she’d been at his mercy for two nights and three days. “I think she’s all right, Libs. But I don’t know if she understands.”

  Libby raised her head. She said, her voice muffled with tears, “Och, we’ve had the talk.” McBride’s eyebrows went up. “Well, if we’d waited for you to do it, she’d have been at university.”

  He sighed. “Fair enough. Listen—Amanda’s asked Dr. Taylor to come up here. She’s one of the Royal’s top paediatricians. She can check Gracie over here so she doesn’t have to go to hospital, and then if everything’s all right, you can take her home.” He glanced up at movement outside. “Good. That’s her now. I…I’ll close these blinds for you, and I’ll clear out. Then—”

  “Jimmy.” He turned round from trying to unfasten the tangled cord. Libby was looking at him—not oddly, but in a way McBride hadn’t seen for a long time. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry for a lot of things.”

  “Jesus, Libs—you’re sorry…”

  “I know. A lot of blood’s gone under our bridge. But…when you get done here, if you want to come back to the house, you’d be welcome. You could come back for Christmas. Just if you want.”

  He stared at her. His mouth had dried out. His heart was pounding in his chest like something trapped and tearing at its bars.

  He loved her. He loved their child and would set down his life for either of them at a second’s notice. But there was nothing in him that responded to that look of hers, that smile. Family life had been a dream for him, a ready-measured suit he had struggled all his life to grow into. What had he wanted from it? Love, he supposed—and he’d got that, as a father, in the companionship he and Libby had achieved at their very best. But as for passion—the fire he had once been young enough to think would spring up and fill his whole life, revealing its point and its purpose—the nearest he had ever come to that was in a gunfight in the Freemason’s Hall and tonight in a seedy club’s upper room, defending Toby Leitner.