“Not recently, why? Is "I see you, cunt!" their standard threat these days?”
“You tell me?”
“And how the hell should I know?”
“You're saying this is the first threat you have received from these people? No phone calls? No letters with the words cut from old newspapers? They just break into your flat and smear most of their insides over the walls? It doesn't sound very likely, even given the circumstances. Not if you ask me.”
Kristy stared at him.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell do you want me to say? Oh, Sorry. I felt like wasting a bit of Police time so I raided a laboratory, and nailed some rats to my bedroom wall after taking a crap on my new sofa?”
“Well, did you?”
“Don't be so FUCKING stupid!” That had the attention of everyone in the room. Devlin humoured her with a condescending smile. “And you can stop being so fucking patronizing while you’re at it.”
“Look lady, I'm just doing my job.”
“Christ, that's lame. I'm just doing my job. I’m sure you would have made a stellar Brown Coat.”
“If that's the way you feel, perhaps-”
“Jesus H. Christ on a fucking crutch. You're un-fucking-believable. I've had a bloody shitter of a day and come home to find some pervert’s broken into my flat to take a crap on my sofa, and you come out with something as fucking banal as “Just doing my job!” Un-fucking-believable, do you know that? Next thing, you'll be telling me to put the kettle on so you and your parasites can have a cuppa. You make me want to puke, you really do.”
“I'm sorry you feel that way, Miss. It is Miss, I take it?”
“Not that it's any business of yours.”
“Okay, Miss. Point noted. You've been frank with me. It's the least I can do to be as equally frank in return. In the main, burglaries are spur of the moment things. Opportunist attacks. An open window taken advantage of when the lights are out and no one is home. There aren't any three-storey men on my patch that carry rats in their swag bags. Can you see where I'm going with this, Miss?” Kristy didn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her mental nod. “Okay. You don't strike me as being stupid, so I'll assume you can. Nothing, so far as we can tell, has been stolen. Not the television, not the Hi-fi. I'd feel a hell of a lot happier if it had. But still, as you say, who the hell writes “I see you, cunt!” on the bathroom mirror, unless they're trying to scare the living crap out of someone?” Devlin let that sink in for a moment. “I think you are lying. I think you know, or you're pretty damned near sure, who did this. And until you open your mouth and tell me, the best you're going to get is “I'm just doing my job.” Now, do you want to start from the beginning?”
“I would,” the plain clothes detective behind Devlin, put in. “He can get very nasty.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
“No prob, Skip,” He winked at Kristy, and it was just about the most normal thing she had seen all day. She did her best to summon a smile. “That's better, love. Now, do you want to make that cuppa you mentioned? Joke, it's a joke,” he put in hastily.
The Scene of Crime boys were starting to wind things up, dusting the last few flat surfaces for any sort of decent fingerprint, taking samples from bloodlines of finger-painting and the excrement on the settee, and neatly bagging each. A WPC came back from questioning the block's other residents, told Devlin she had turned up nothing of use. Varying descriptions placing the intruder between 5'5" and 6'5", his clothing equally diverse in style and colour. She offered to help start tidying things up a bit. Devlin accepted on Kristy's behalf, suggesting that she might start with, “The mess on the bathroom mirror.”
Kristy was angry with herself for getting cranky with Devlin. Of all the people she had tangled with in the last few days, Devlin was the last one she wanted on her back, with or without an axe to grind. She nodded, managing a barely perceptible twitch of a smile for the young WPC, and then wiped a weary hand across her mouth - wiping the smile from her face before she had to start thinking about filling Devlin in on the nitty-gritty.
She could see Devlin was waiting, but for the life of her she couldn't bring herself to talk while she could see he was looking at her. And it wasn't down to the peculiar chemistry she felt fermenting between them, nor that her imagination had him undressing her with those humourless eyes of his.
Don't flatter yourself, girl. That's one man who hasn't got the time for anyone but his right hand, nine nights out of ten.
She went over to the window, hoping Devlin wouldn't get it into his head to follow. He didn't. She drummed out a mixture of Morse Code and frustration on the wooden sill, trying to marshal her thoughts into some sort of presentable order, while her mind was on the lookout for any viable distraction the night and the city had to offer her.
Kristy could see across the street into the backyard of a family of undertakers. An old hearse dominated a good part of the yard, collapsed on its rusted chassis. Weeds pushed up through the cement floor, wrapping and twining and smothering the drive-shaft and the rest of the underside. Seeing that old bricked up chariot left her feeling oddly sad. It looked strange, squatting on teetering half-bricks. A little shabby, almost forlorn, but more than anything else, a little sinister. Eerie was the word she was fumbling for. It captured the whole street in five letters.
The next two houses down were derelict, boarded up and left to moulder. The telephone box on the corner had been gutted. Glass chunks still peppered the pavement here and there. The street itself certainly wasn't beautiful, or magical. That was something Kristy was just coming to understand. The city she had hooked herself up with was no paradise. No utopia. Very like her beloved Liverpool, it had an underside that stank to high heaven more times than not. Devlin was just a man walking on a Chinese wall. Take away his badge and, no doubt, he'd be out on those shadowy avenues plying a completely new and ever more dangerous stock in trade. She saw and read all of that, and started to gauge the implications of her second sight, in the few seconds Devlin allowed her to hold his gaze. And for all of it, she wished to God she had looked away, just this once. Better ignorance to cynicism in the face of a would-be saviour.
But was Todd Devlin something as straight forward as a saviour?
He was calm, collected, strong-shouldered and stiff-backed, and could obviously weather a storm if he so chose, but complete with that hint of danger those five qualities alone didn't set him up for an indiscriminate confessional. Was he anything more than a man with a badge, or was he like Richards, a hook looking to haul her into deeper waters?
She nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard Devlin, close to her ear, say: “Do you know him?” and tap the glass. He had come up behind her without her realizing, and was looking out past Lafferty's Funeral Parlour to a man and a dog.
The man was wearing a 49'ers baseball cap, so she couldn't see anything of his face, but the dog stood arrogantly under the sodium light.
And the Doberman it was she recognized. Duke. Richards’ guard dog.
Either sensing, or more simply realizing he had been seen, the man sprinted between the adjoining yards of the derelict properties, the Doberman loping easily at his side.
“It never rains, but it pours,” Kristy muttered to herself, the first glimmerings of something beginning to click. “I.C.U. CUNT!” not “I see you. . .” Christ, Devlin. You've got to do something!”
* * * * *
Rain and pain. Two constants. They were the world according to Jack Kemp. Rain. Pain. In that order. An uncomfortable stitch made its presence felt, jabbing at his kidneys with its own brand of pain.
Coming up on the funeral parlour's cobbled together fence, Kemp was breathing hard and pumping his arms for that little bit more.
He wasn't stupid and he had been around the block enough times to know there was no point in kidding himself. He didn't have so much as a cat in hell’s chance of catching up with the joker in the 49’ers cap, unless he wanted to be caught. Devlin had called him across in time
to catch the back of his head and clean heels.
Take off the cap and he was just about as recognisable as Sunderland's latest bargain-basement striker. Still, Devlin had said jump, more than likely to impress the lady, Jack knew, and he was left to play role of barking dog to Devlin's tragi-comic, put- upon copper.
The streets in this part of Jesmond were a deserted warren of intersecting by-ways come the closing time curfew, only the sirens of the last Metro's to add sound to the night. A gaudy polystyrene burger box kicked its way through the gutter wash. Cars lined the curbsides, slick with the gloss of rain and sodium vapour light.
Treacherously dark smears puddled on both road and pavement. A window was open; three flights up, playing something loud. Metallica? Megadeth? Or whoever the latest heavy craze were. That sort of sound always sounded pretty much of a muchness coming through a fly window thirty feet away. Muffled down to two constants, bassline and drums.
Kemp's Shakespeare Street brogues weren't meant for running anywhere in the wet. Twice already, between Kristy's flat and the alley way less than two hundred yards away, he had come close to kissing the pavement face first.
A train thundered by, somewhere, its forlorn cry adding the ice to the already eerie panorama. No cars, he realized, not moving. The rain and the dark made it all but impossible to see more than a few feet. The shoulder-wide alley between the boarded-up tenements was all but invisible.
It was only the gutted call box that said he had missed it. Overshot by twenty yards. He backed up to the light, looking for the hole in the wall. Waited, expecting at any moment to hear the bray of the car engine coming from off to the left somewhere close by, but it didn't happen like that.
No heroics, Kemp told himself as he finally got a sighting on the gateway between buildings. Heroes always end up dead. And with that pleasant thought in mind, walked-ran into the tight alley.
The houses themselves were joined on the second level like Siamese twins, forming a tunnel inside which the acoustics were weird. The night was dead enough for the two house tunnel to be a sound trap plenty loud enough to announce his presence three streets down. Someone's dustbin had been turned over halfway through, and the rubbish turned out by scavengers. A cracked video cassette unravelled armfuls of magnetic tape. Magazines had been torn up, newspapers shredded around a bundle of rags. Broken glass from a beer bottle. A streetlamp offered the weakest of lights at the other end of the tunnel. Kemp kicked a labelless can out of the way as he picked his way through the litter. The clatter bounced back and forth between the walls like a roll of steel drums.
He was three steps further on when he saw the bundle of rags shift slightly; fidgeting.
“Gorra pund, Marra?” came from somewhere, a grubby hand pawing at Jack Kemp's chest as the derelict lurched to his unsteady feet. Alcohol oozed through his words, carried by foul breath. “Jussa pund, man. A havenna eaten in days.”
“Sorry, pal.'”Kemp said, patting his pockets with a shrug. “No change.”
“Too bad,” the tramp slurred, staggering back into the wall and slumping into a heap of worn-out coats and shit-stained blankets.
“Christ,” Kemp muttered, going back to help the man. “Here you go mate. Get yourself a bacon sarnie or something. Just don't waste it on booze, promise.”
He pressed a creased fiver into the tramp's filthy palm and closed his hand around it. The old wino lifted his head slowly, hawking to clear the phlegm from his throat, to peer up from the shadows. Kemp met the dark, washed out eyes with another shrug. Sallow skin, ridges and hollows of grey stubble, long lank hair, matted and filthy. The wino coughed and spat, watching the ground between his feet.
“Divint gan doon thur,” the wino mumbled, as he leaned forward and spat a wad of yellow phlegm between Kemp's feet, and that was all. He rooted around in his pockets, muttering something about his baccy tin, no time left for his generous Samaritan.
It wasn't until he turned that Kemp understood the wino's warning. By then though it was too late to do anything but walk on into the jaws of Cerberus.
A man blocked the alley, backlit and impossible to distinguish beyond the block of black and shadow, a jemmy hanging by his side, Doberman straining on its rope leash. Not for the first time in his life, Jack Kemp wished the British Police had guns issued as standard. The wish swiftly followed by regret.
“Hey, pal,” he called out, angry with himself for letting his fear show. “I don't want any trouble. Okay?”
“Too bad,” the shadow without a face said, hefting the jemmy. '”Coz you sure got yourself plenty.”
“Look, you really don't want to do this, believe me, mate.”
The shadow chewed his silence, slapped the metal crowbar against the flat of his hand once, for effect, before he stepped forward, the Doberman instantly at his heel.
Kemp swallowed down the fear and glared grimly at the aggressor. It didn't take a genius to understand just how close to fatal the situation really was. Say something wrong, make one move an inch too fast for the other guy's liking, and he'd have the insides of his head welded to the floor for his pains. He held up his hands defensively, backing off a step.
The alley contracted around Kemp. The sudden cold seemed to leech sight out of him as it did warmth. The palsy in his muscles threatened to unman him once and for ever. Traces of saliva leaked through his lips instead of words. His eyes flicked rapidly across the shadows, always centering on the hand wielding the jemmy.
“That depends on whether that fuckin' reporter knows when it's fuckin' well time to quit, don't it?” the guy with the jemmy said, and smiled. Actually smiled.
Kemp stared at him as if he could see roots of madness eating away at his mind. Clenching his jaw so hard it made his head throb he goaded, “Why the fuck don't you finish it then, pal. Come on. You've got that fucking tire iron. What have I got, huh? What the hell have I got?”
“Not a fuckin' thing,” the voice was soft, but pitched to reach him. The shadow's eyes glittered with a frightening intensity the darkness couldn't hide.
“Then go for it. Come on, why don't you? Otherwise get the fuck out of my way before I lose my temper. I wasn't looking for you, and I've never seen you before. It's up to you. How do you want to play it?”
“Do you have a death-wish?” he asked Kemp sardonically. “Or do you enjoy making people want to beat the crap out of you?”
“A bit of both,” Kemp replied, doing his utmost to sound as cocky and casually dangerous as he could, as he looked about for a potential weapon of some sort.
“Is that right? Then I guess you'll be wanting me to put you out of your misery pretty quick then?”
Kemp's eye caught on a length of wood that might have been a cut-off from a curtain pole, peeking out through the jumble of junk.
Please God, don't let him see what I'm doing, he prayed, hoping such a simple plea was enough.
“If you put it like that, I'm practically dead already. Hardly worth killing,” he was saying practically anything that came into his head. The words came from inside him, from what he was thinking and from what he feared most.
The dog growled low in its throat, bristling as the shadow moved to undo its leash.
“Woah, take it easy, pal. No need for that. If it's money you want, I've got it. Here, take my wallet, credit cards, cash.”
The other man laughed. “Sounds like you've lost your nerve, fuckface. That it, huh? Bottle gone?”
Kemp shuffled an uncertain step forward and to the right, keeping his hands up, palms out flat. “I guess.”
“Too fuckin' bad, shithead. ‘Coz you're dog meat now. Take him, Duke!”
The Doberman catapulted toward him, its bunched muscles and powerful stride eating the short gap in a split second. Instinctively, Kemp threw himself forward and into a crouch to present the smallest target possible.
The length of wood was tantalizingly close, but Duke's incredible, snarling pounce didn't give him the option of making a lunge for it. The Doberman took
him high, punching into his head and shoulder like a jack-knifing lorry, the dog's momentum carrying it on another five skittering strides.
The shadow laughed again, low and menacing, and applauded sarcastically.
Kemp didn't waste time taking a bow. He lunged forward, groping for the short stave, while the Doberman wheeled around for its second charge.
He had just about enough time to bring the wood to bear before the vice-like jaws champed down on his throat. Kemp rolled clumsily, jamming the stave out as the dog bit again. Saliva foamed from its slack jowls as the teeth came down, snapping at his face. Duke's eyes burned redly with a hunger that matched the intensity of its handler, his breath a foul, sour attar that had Kemp's eyes weeping so as the alleyway melted into damp tar.
The incisors came sweeping down again, full force, black eyes pin-points of unleashed fury.
“Wha-“
The question-scream stuck in his throat. Kemp threw up a hand instinctively to ward off the fangs, got a glimpse of black and tan claws raking at his face, and a jaundiced backsplash of the street lights stabbing as the Doberman darted in for the kill.
It happened in the fraction of a second it took to blink an eye. In that captured instant time in the Jesmond alley slowed and stretched out. The long syllable of Kemp's cry elongated, dopplering down as if the tape playing back the sounds had been slowed to a speed below hearing.
Duke's fangs raked a shallow gouge through his forearm. In front of his eyes, barely three inches away, those dreadful black claws were knifing in towards his chest. Kemp ducked his shoulder, throwing his weight behind the evasive manoeuvre as he brought the stave up to parry the slash.
He slammed the cut-off rod around for the dog's skull, cracking it hard enough to hear the bones in its jaw splinter, but even that didn't stop it completely. An impossibly high-pitched whimper hissed through Duke's flared jowls. Blood drooled, some his, most the dog's. A prong of jawbone had broken away to pierce the dog's fur, like a new, vampiric, fang.
At that moment there was an electric frission trapped within three square feet of the alley's confines, and within that area of effect anything was suddenly possible, even likely.
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