Quite Ugly One Morning

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  Lieutenant Larry Freeman had been nervous. Larry was about seven feet tall with shoulders ‘the size of a Kansas prairie’, as his wife put it, a frightening sight in black shades and a black, bald head. And Larry was never nervous.

  ‘Something in the air then, big man?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he had said slowly in that rumbling burr you could feel in your own diaphragm. ‘Remember man, cops like the sound of openin’ a fresh can of beer when the case is closed. The sound of openin’ a fresh can of worms don’t fill their heart with joy, know what I’m sayin’? Now I ain’t sayin’ there’s dirty cops in my precinct, but cops gotta talk to snitches and there’s gotta be some give and take. And no news travels faster than a secret.

  ‘You gotta be careful what yo askin’ and who yo askin’, Scotland. Somebody starts playin’ join-the-dots with a bunch of random stiffs and a whole lotta people get trigger-happy. Maybe you ain’t even connectin’ anythin’ to them or to stiffs they got anythin’ to do with, but they don’t know that and they ain’t gonna stop to ask if they get you in their sights.’

  ‘You’re saying I should back off? Forget it all?’

  ‘That’s up to you, man. Maybe it’s too late to back off. But you better be watchin’ your back. I was you, I’d get me a gun.’

  Parlabane shook his head.

  ‘You know how I feel about guns. I couldn’t carry one of those things around with me, forget about it.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’d have one all the same. Keep it where I could get to it in a hurry. I got a spare one in the john. In a plastic bag taped under the cistern lid. Someone catches me off-guard at home, I got a chance if he lets me take a leak or I can just make it to the bathroom. Mitch Gacy keeps one in his ice box.’

  ‘What, so he’s got a chance if the bad guy asks for a beer? You’re all fucking crazy.’

  ‘You ain’t from LA, Jack.’

  In a way, it was the hangover that saved his life.

  He had been at Tom and Juan’s place along on Melrose, and a few bottles of red with and after dinner had led to a single bottle of Glenfiddich, three glasses and total carnage.

  Once upon a time, whisky made him sleep, but not these days. It would set his mind in motion, counteracting the soporific properties of all that full-bodied Californian bottled blood, and he lay awake for a while on the couch after T and J had retired to their bedroom. He popped in a couple of their videos, looking for distractions to stop the room lurching long enough to let him lie back without feeling sick.

  Cheers guys, he thought. How unstereotypical. Gay porn and three hours of the fucking Golden Girls.

  He figured he must have dozed off some time after four, woken by the sun through the blinds at about eight. It was a chastising, unforgiving sun with a hard-on for Temperance, shaking him awake to face the consequences of his sinful alcoholic excess, and amplifying his headache with its malignantly cheery brightness.

  He grabbed his leather jacket and headed delicately out to the car, which he had no intention of attempting to drive. Instead, he retrieved his shades from the glove compartment and placed them gently over his eyes before engaging in the ill-advised, Bradburyesque deviance of walking home. It took about twenty minutes, and every step was a thudding, throbbing, echoing torture.

  He wanted water. Not LA’s desalinated pish, and not mineral water, but water water, freezing cold out a Glasgow tap. Waattur. His joints ached, his hands trembled, his throat stung and his head was undergoing an interior re-fit.

  There was a Scotsman, a Mexican, an American and a bottle of whisky.

  But it was no joke.

  He felt so ill, so delicate, that as he crossed Sweetzer he decided if a car suddenly pulled out he’d just have to let it hit him, as he didn’t have the energy or reflexes to get out of the way.

  That was what saved him. Not reacting, not acknowledging.

  He pulled out his keys and fumbled at the lock, his stomach lurching a little as if suddenly impatient at the thought of the proximity of a familiar toilet-bowl. He shut the door behind him and slouched half-blindly towards the bathroom.

  His limbs were too heavy to leap in fright or run, and his neck was so stiff from T and J’s couch that it had barely started to turn before he was able to stop it and carry on through the doorway. That was the moment that really saved his life, the real act of nerve and courage, not what happened next.

  Because there was a figure in his kitchen, a human shape he had sensed out of the corner of his eye as he passed that doorway on the way to the bathroom. A reaction, an acknowledgement would, he later understood, have killed him.

  Parlabane peered terrified through the tiny slit at the hinge and had his fears confirmed. There was a pot-bellied, middle-aged, balding and moustachioed white man in a crumpled dark suit and a sweaty white shirt standing now in the hallway before the bathroom door, looking down and tightening the silencer to the end of an automatic. He was just waiting there, silently and patiently, to kill him when he emerged again after his final piss, dump or whatever.

  He felt he might pass out but managed somehow to find some fraction of composure. He needed to work out his options but realised that he was on a rapidly ticking time limit: if the hitman got suspicious he’d shoot the door down or just shoot him through it.

  Before he had time to evaluate the wisdom of it, he started to sing to himself, to present the relaxed mood of someone just going to the bog in the comfort of their home, oblivious of the impending death that awaits after that last flush.

  ‘I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian hotel . . .’

  The song had been close to the surface in his mind on the walk home because of the stuff about the angry sun, but as the first line issued from his mouth he was panickedly analysing the remainder of the lyrics in case they contained some kind of give-away Freudian slip. ‘Save us from the powder and the finger’, for instance, would not have been a wise ditty to render. And ‘Thirty years in the bathroom’ might also have betrayed his true thoughts.

  He cursed the fact that his bathroom had no windows, but then realised that if it did he’d probably be already dead, as the hitman would have checked for possible escape routes beforehand and just shot him through the door rather than risk him getting away.

  ‘All the salty Margaritas in Los Angeles . . .’

  He was fucked.

  What was the saying? There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole? Something like that.

  Typical ignorant Christians. As if the non-belief in God was a posture, a luxury, some kind of decadent modern affectation, rather than a completely irreversible understanding. Truth was, you did get atheists in foxholes; they were just even more acutely, agonisingly aware of the inescapable reality of their predicament.

  ‘I predict this motel will be standin’ . . .’

  And this one knew that if you were down to your last hope and your last hope was God, then there was nothing left. But his last hope wasn’t God, not unless God was a seven-foot bald cop named Larry.

  ‘Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?’

  That night. That night when Larry had warned him, talking about guns and secrets and snitches. Larry had just shown up at the house, on spec, which he never did. And what had he said as he left, after a couple of beers and some pizza?

  ‘That gun shit, Jack. Forget it. You’re right. Just crazy LA cops. You don’t need to worry about getting a gun. Hear what I’m sayin’?’

  Larry had come round because he was worried, but left telling him not to.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about getting a gun.’

  One last hope.

  I Don’t you feel like desperadoes under the eaves . . .’

  He flushed the toilet to cover the sound and lifted the cistern lid, barely daring to breathe, almost unable to look.

  Jesus. His future – life or death – was metaphorically in his hands, but literally what was in his hands was part of a cludgie. There was an illustrative image about desperation in there so
mewhere, but he couldn’t really afford to think about that right then.

  He turned the lid over to reveal a blue plastic package, sealed firmly air- and watertight, taped to the underside of the vitreous china. He pulled it away and replaced the lid before the cistern began to refill, as that would have made too loud and too odd a sound.

  ‘I was listening to the air conditioner hum . . .’

  Parlabane turned on both taps and put the plug down in the wash-hand basin, the splashing sound and his humming covering the noise of him removing the 9mm Beretta automatic from the bag, clicking off the safety and chambering the first round, as Larry had taught him on the couple of occasions he had taken him down to the range.

  The water still tinkling and splashing, he delicately returned to the slit and saw that the intruder was still standing there, but now legs apart, gun aimed at the door at head-height.

  This was not a time for negotiations, and neither did he fancy his chances in a Mexican stand-off.

  There had been no God to save him.

  Neither would there be one to forgive him.

  He lay face-down on the floor, aimed the gun at an upward angle, closed his eyes and fired five times in a second and a half.

  He looked up at the door. There were no holes any further up than those made by his own gun. Remaining understandably cautious, he glimpsed through the slit again. The man was lying bloodstained and motionless on the floor. He couldn’t see the gun but he could see an empty hand, and that was good enough.

  Parlabane opened the door and emerged, unexpectedly alive, from the bathroom. The hitman, very unexpectedly dead, lay bleeding messily on to the hall carpet from several wounds in the chest area.

  Fuck this for a game of soldiers, thought Parlabane.

  He packed his essentials and whatever else he could fit into a large suitcase and made some long-distance phone calls. Then he called a cab, asking it to pick him up in front of the hotel round the corner.

  He snuck out the back door, over the fence, down an alley and on to Fountain.

  None of the direct flights to the UK left until four or five, flying overnight to arrive around the following lunchtime. He couldn’t afford to wait around LA – and certainly not LAX – until then, so he took the first cheap flight east, which was to Newark, and got a connection to London from there.

  He could lie low in Edinburgh, get his head together. Maybe work out how he might use his talents to make a living that did not involve the risk of being set up with drugs by bent cops or shot by hired killers.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Sometimes you could find yourself free-wheeling, coasting in neutral. Not dynamically going after something, no goals, not even striving to avoid a certain outcome. And it was fine for a while. Like free-wheeling, you could just let the wind blow through your hair and watch the view breeze past, relaxing, powered by the momentum of your previous efforts.

  Not worrying where you were going.

  She took her name back.

  Dr Slaughter.

  ‘You can’t be Dr Slaughter. What will the patients say? And your superiors certainly won’t see the funny side. Interviewing consultants can be nervous about the slightest thing.’

  The profession was noted for engendering a dark sense of humour, but the truth was that the laughter stopped if the joke was on medicine. Taking an open delight in the macabre inappropriateness of your name scored only frowns.

  She had never been Dr Slaughter. She had listened to Jeremy, she had swallowed it all. The over-riding need for respectability, professional dignity. The sacrilege of flippancy. It was one thing to be born Sarah Slaughter, but to retain the name after marriage would send out bad signals. And to retain the name when the alternative was the revered and door-opening Ponsonby would be an unthinkable perversity. An ingratitude even, for this privileged opportunity.

  As she was married before her first house job, she was Dr Ponsonby from the off.

  Becoming Dr Slaughter had been like re-starting her career, doing it this time all for herself, on her own terms. She had the flat to herself, no more worries and no distractions, allowing her to concentrate on her job, her career, and she had the energy of someone eager to make up for lost time.

  Her social life wasn’t exactly a whirl, as she soon discovered that people she had thought were her and Jeremy’s friends were really only Jeremy’s friends being polite to the good man’s wife. So she made new friends, real friends. But mainly she hit the books. Head down, working her way through the three-part FRCA, while picking up experience and respect on the job.

  So that was the career part worked out. It was the life part that would require pedal power when the free-wheeling stopped.

  For too many that she knew and had seen, the career was their life. Monastically dedicated to their profession, giving it priority one now and forever. Maybe marrying an obsequious wee nursie somewhere along the line to bear a couple of baby doctors to play with and be proud of when distraction was called for.

  For Sarah, there would have to be something else, she always knew. Another relationship, perhaps. What happened with Jeremy hadn’t made her forswear men or marriage completely (although medics quite definitely needed not apply); if anything it had often made her yearn for what a good relationship could be.

  However, it had been a problem she felt she had earned the right to procrastinate over, and for a pleasant time she had. But the pleasure of free-wheeling waned with the growth of her awareness of doing so, and she had found herself unsure of what the future held, insufficiently motivated to attempt to shape it, and suspecting that her inaction was inviting the intervention of fate.

  The death of Jeremy should have been an ending, of sorts, whatever questions it left unanswered.

  That it should be murder certainly marked the hand of fate, and she knew she had been willing to pick up whatever cards it dealt.

  But was aiding and abetting a guy like Jack Parlabane, complicity in the burglary of her employers’ offices (and the hacking of their computer system) in the pursuit of a ruthless white-collar crook and his anonymous hired assassin perhaps evidence of a life just the teensy-weensiest bit out of control?

  Yes, she thought. And about time too.

  She slung her jacket over the back of a chair in the anaesthetics base and sat down at one of its three computer terminals.

  Proof, Jack had said that morning, was the word made flesh. However it looks, however it seems, whatever you think you know . . . these were just your own thoughts, fleeting, subjective and insubstantial. You knew nothing until you had proved it to yourself. And unless you could prove it to someone else, knowledge was torture. Jack knew. Jack had been tortured – knowing who the bad guy was and what he had done, and watching him walk away because there was no way of proving it. Or rather no legal way of proving it. That was where the breaking in and ‘acquiring’ copies of compromising documents had come from.

  Proof.

  Finally, a practical advantage of the RVI’s enormously expensive digital-electronic bureaucrat. Medical records were being transferred on to the computer system, but as it would be a herculean task to input all of them, it was being done on a new-admissions basis. So if you had been admitted since about a year ago, your records would be on-line. Before that, down to the basement. The patients Sarah was interested in would probably have been admitted about the time computer technology involved reel-to-reel tapes and flashing red lights, but no matter. She didn’t have any names to call up at this stage anyway.

  What the computer did have, though, was a comprehensive record of bed usage, as that was the sort of thing that Trusts liked to pay a lot of attention to. She could find out who was in any given bed, any given ward right now, but more than that, she could find out who had been in each bed before that, right back until when the system was first up and running.

  She accessed the bed usage files and selected the GRH. The screen offered her the geriatric hospital’s six wards: Abercorn, Boswell, Currie, Dundas, Esk
and Fettes.

  Start at the beginning, Sarah thought, and hit A.

  List by Bed no. or Alphabetical by patient?

  She hit B and watched the information scroll down the screen, listing the bed number (GRH.Abe.1), the patient’s name, date of birth, the reason for admission and the date of admission. She scanned the right-hand side of the list, looking at the dates. One woman had been admitted three months ago, but most had arrived over the past four weeks.

  Sarah selected the first bed on the list, occupied by Theresa Sullivan, 3/5/17, since about a fortnight ago. She pulled down one of the menu bars at the top of the screen, requesting a list of all the bed’s previous occupants.

  The turnover was very healthy, from the Trust’s point of view. Plenty of names, longest stay about six weeks before death or discharge. But it was the first occupants of each bed that she was interested in, the long-stay crumbles whose ten-year-plus tenures Jeremy had truncated to free up the beds. She needed names, then she could get their records and investigate the nature of their discharges – and what happened next.

  The first bed was a non-starter. Its first occupant was admitted only a month before being discharged, probably pitching up not long before the computer system was rolling. GRH.Abe.2 looked hopeful for the second or so it took her to see a recorded admission date of 2/8/84 and then notice that the patient had died rather than been discharged.

  GRH.Abe.3 provided an irritating coincidence, its first recorded occupant also having snuffed it.

  GRH.Abe.4’s first patient had been discharged, but again only a couple of months after being admitted.

  GRH.Abe.5 reverted infuriatingly to the pattern of 2 and 3, and for a moment Sarah thought she and Parlabane might be enormously mistaken, and she felt an odd, fleeting feeling of relief at the idea of her ex-husband not being guilty of what she was posthumously accusing him of.