And When I Die

by Russel D. McLean

  ‘What was left of him.’

  ‘Get to shite.’

  ‘Way I understood it, he was so badly burned that identification was tough.’

  ‘It was a big explosion.’

  ‘Still no suspects.’

  ‘Why aren’t you harassing that arsewipe, Buchan? We all know he was the one did it.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Crawford says. Like this is just a normal conversation between two old friends. ‘Why are people saying Ray’s the one killed your father?’

  Crawford keeps looking over at me as he speaks. How much does he really know? Has the wee doctor gone and cliped on me? Is Crawford here for me, not Tony?

  I should walk.

  But I stay.

  Because it’s clear from body language alone that this isn’t about me. These two have history Crawford’s putting on a show for Tony’s benefit.

  When I first started working for Crawford, I figured there was something else going on beyond the basic business of cops and robbers. Crawford’s crusade against the Scobies always had an air of the personal about it. A little research gave me answers. Crawford’s father was killed during what later turned out to be a gangland shooting gone wrong, back in the ’80s. Possible – read definite, but not proven – connections to Derek Scobie. Maybe this was all an elaborate revenge for Crawford. Soon as the SCDEA was formed, given new powers, he applied for a transfer to the new unit, worked hard to establish a strike force dedicated to taking down the Scobies by any means possible. Made a good enough case that he got his wish.

  But Derek Scobie is dead now. So it’s his surviving son who’s about to get it in the neck.

  ‘You just come here to harass me?’

  ‘No. To express my condolences. Ask if you can think of anyone who –’

  ‘You already said it was my dead brother. Revenge from beyond the fucking grave.’ Tony raises his arms and waggles his fingers like a kid playing at ghosts.

  ‘That true?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be sitting behind a desk somewhere?’

  ‘Right now,’ Crawford says, ‘This is just gang on gang violence. Arseholes killing arseholes. I’m here to tell you, Tony, if this gets out of hand, we’ll come down on you like your old man could never have dreamed. You’re wearing the big boy pants now. You have a responsibility.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Don’t pretend like I’m an idiot. Don’t lie to me.’ He leans forward, opens the top few buttons of his shirt. ‘I’m not wearing anything.’ He pulls out his mobile, throws it on the table. ‘No-one’s listening. This is just you and me here.’

  ‘Just you and me?’

  ‘I came in my own car.’

  Tony grins. ‘Then why don’t you drive back? It’s bad enough without this harassment. You go catch whoever it was killed my dad. I don’t know who he was. I was… I’d gone home.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Tough day. I couldn’t take the bullshit of the wake, know what I mean?’

  ‘Guess so.’

  Tony looks at me. ‘Want to show the DCI here the door?’

  ‘I can find it myself.’

  ‘I’d rather know you were gone.’ Then, to me: ‘Think you can manage that?’ Rebuking for letting Crawford in the door at all.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Crawford stands. Looks me up and down as though it’s the first time he’s ever noticed me. ‘Like this streak of piss could stop me, even if he wanted.’

  I follow him out into the corridor. Crawford says, loud, ‘Going to walk me to my car too.’

  ‘If it means you’ll be gone.’

  We walk down the garden path, not saying a word. I stop at the gate. Crawford walks to his car. Stops with his hand on the door, looks at me.

  ‘You need to come in, John.’

  I want to look back, see if Tony’s watching us out the window.

  ‘It’s going to be a bloodbath,’ I say. ‘Anthony’s not his old man. He doesn’t give two shits about the cops or anyone. The only thing that ever kept him in check was fear of his father.’

  ‘And what about his brother? We started looking into your reports, John. Asking questions. We talked to the doctor who signed the death certificate on the poor crispy-fried John Doe got buried this afternoon. You told him to lie? Told him that the force sanctioned –’

  ‘I… I needed time.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘I was panicking, okay? I was just trying to sort everything out. Take some responsibility.’

  ‘Good job, John. Bra-bloody-vo. That’s why you need to come in. You need to come in. Look, we can work this out. Not just the deception… But…anything else you might have done too. There’s nothing we can’t get in front of here. If that’s what’s been under your collar these last few months…’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I can keep Anthony under control. Play this out right, hand him to you on a fucking platter.’

  There are things we can’t get in front of.

  Like my part in the attempted murder of Ray Scobie.

  ‘You’ve done enough. The whole affair is screwed. We can take it from here. The Scobies are over. Your boy Ray may not have flipped on the family, but if it really was him shot his old bastard dead, he’s destabilised not just the family, but the organisation.’

  ‘He wants me here. What the fuck am I supposed to say?’

  ‘Think of something,’ Crawford says, ‘Or when this is over, I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to protect you.’

  I shrug. He opens the car door, gets inside. Drives off.

  When I get back inside, Tony says, ‘You two seemed pretty cosy out there.’

  ‘He wanted me to come in, talk about what I knew.’

  ‘What does he think you know?’

  ‘He was on a fishing trip. That’s all.’

  Tony laughs. Long, loud, hard. ‘Fuck me, but you’re a hard man, now, eh? Little fucking number-boy’s getting his first pair of balls.’

  I relax a little.

  Tony plants his hands on my shoulders. Firm. Like the prelude to a massage. Or a strangulation. ‘Just remember, you’re as fucked as anyone else. Ray gets to me, I’m telling him who planted the bomb, whose bloody fingerprints are all over that piece of shite incendiary. Don’t think that just because Kat loves you and just because you used to be a citizen, it’s going to stop him blowing your fucking brains out.’

  I make like I understand.

  Try not to think that I just made a huge mistake, giving Crawford the brush off.

  Fool myself that all of this is part of the plan. That I can make everything all right again. Somehow. If I can just keep myself together.

  At the back of my mind, something chuckles. And I know that I’m deluding myself, but what other choices do I have left?

  KAT

  Lesley bites her lip as she cleans the wound. Working slowly, taking her time.

  She never took the blood or the death to heart. The reason I left the course, moved into administration, was that I always let my own empathy get in the way of treating the patient. I couldn’t help but think about their pain. Lesley cared – she’s always cared – but she was able to put that to one side in order to do what she had to help them. I admired that about her.

  Even now, she has to be scared. But she hasn’t hesitated once.

  I wonder, once this is over, if she’ll understand why I brought Ray here, why she was the only person I felt I could trust with this.

  More importantly, will she be able to forgive me?

  She takes care not to tug at the wound, to make it worse. She doesn’t make an effort to actually remove the bullet. Without specialist equipment, you’re just as likely to kill the patient as remove the obstruction. She cleans the wound, closing it as best she can, using plastic squares from an old bag and parcel tape to simulate a dressing. Placing the plastic over the wound and the tape around the plastic to hold it closed. One side of the square is open, allowing his skin to breath. This is detail work. Needs a steady hand and a clear mind. She goes at
it slowly, conscientiously. All the time, biting gently on her lower lip. Something she always did when concentrating. Occasionally she straightens, takes a breath. Sometimes she stops for a moment, tries to convince Ray that he needs to go to the hospital.

  His response is always the same: ‘Just stop the bleeding.’

  He’s a machine. Driven. His singular purpose blinding him to anything else, including his own wellbeing.

  I think about everything he’s done. Everything I know. What made him this way? When did he become this thing that killed his own father, that took me hostage at gunpoint?

  I’ll kill you.

  I can’t equate that with the man I knew killed for me.

  No, he didn’t kill for me. That’s what I failed to understand for all those years.

  He killed for family. The only thing he had been raised to believe in. And now he’d been betrayed by that, and nothing mattered anymore.

  I wonder if his blind focus had something to do with the fact he doesn’t understand pain in the same way other people do? I want to ask him. To know the truth. There are bits and pieces of the puzzle. I know that he was home-schooled as a young child, that he was disruptive in mainstream schools. He never officially had any employment, other than the positions his father gave him in the legitimate Scobie businesses. Positions that often involved little real work. No-shows and joke jobs. Taking pity on a son who could never have a normal life? Or something else? Something darker? Creating a plausible deniability?

  Raymond Scobie, who are you?

  Lesley looks unsettled as she works. Concentrating. Treating this like an exam. Except there’s more at stake than pass or fail. The blood has rushed from her face. She’s deathly pale. She pauses every few seconds, catching her breath, looking at him, forehead creasing. Not concern. Not in the personal sense.

  He doesn’t flinch or gasp or as she works the wound. Lesley’s good at her job – I remember watching her at the hospital, the way she let nothing and no-one throw her off the task at hand – but she knows that something’s wrong.

  My cousin. The unfeeling killer. Literally.

  But while he can’t feel what’s happening to him, the big question is: how long can he last? It’s a question none of us can answer. He’s still standing. That’s more than most. He should have died when they burned him.

  So what is keeping him alive? Hate?

  Is he acting on a principle? Some code of ethics, twisted as it might seem? Is this attempt to kill his father, his brother, merely a balancing of the books? They tried to kill him, so he has to kill them. Is that how his world works?

  Lesley stretches. Stands. Not easy working on her living room floor without proper equipment. She says, ‘You do what you have to do. But too much exertion, you’re going to… If you don’t bleed out first, that bullet’s going to dig in deep. Worm its way inside. Do some real damage. All I can do just now is patch you up. If I try to actually remove the bullet, you’ll die. You know that. And I think you also know need to be in hospital.’

  Ray nods. He stands up. It takes a bit of effort.

  Lesley looks surprised. But she doesn’t say anything. Maybe because she just lied to him. A hospital’s no good. Not now. We both know that. The Golden Hour is long gone. Those sixty minutes where you can save a man’s life have expired. All we’re doing now is trying to delay the inevitable.

  Ray pulls on his jeans. Moving slower, more clumsily than before. Does doesn’t feel the pain, but that doesn’t mean his body keeps functioning regardless. Bit by bit, he’s breaking down. He has to know that.

  He slips on a jumper that belonged to one of Lesley’s old boyfriends. The material stretches. The blood-soaked shirt he was wearing earlier is discarded behind the sofa.

  ‘What happens now?’ Lesley asks.

  Ray slips his gun into the waistband of his jeans. ‘Now…go to bed. Sleep. Don’t tell…anyone.’

  ‘And if I do?’

  Ray shakes his head. Walks out of the room. Moving stiff, limbs in need of oil. The Tin Man on the road to Oz squeaking, oil can. We hear the bathroom light click on. The sound of water running.

  Lesley looks at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Your bloody family,’ she says. ‘Always said, soon as you could, you were shot of them. Thought you’d gone and done it too. That arsehole John maybe doing you some good, opening your eyes to the truth. Good for you, I said. And now? What’s this?’

  I don’t have any rejoinder. When I speak, I sound almost pathetic. ‘I’ve said a lot of things.’

  Lesley says, ‘I know what you’re like with family, but this is bad. This is beyond… Look, we can try and do something. You distract him, I’ll call the police. Bloody hell, the state he’s in, we could –’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘we really couldn’t.’

  I think about earlier. The sound of the gunshot that killed my uncle. The expression on Neil’s face as he collapsed onto his knees, then crumpled to the floor.

  I take a deep breath. What comes back is a sob. I swallow, but it won’t stop and I have to collapse into the closest chair. Lesley just looks at me, her expression blank. Nothing there for me to read or understand. I don’t know if she’s scared, angry or afraid. Maybe she doesn’t even know, trying to work it out for herself.

  She lets out a long breath, sits down on the couch. Her eyes are heavy. The last hour or so has taken it out of her. But she’s made no move for the phone. Hasn’t tried to make an escape or double-cross us. She’s done her job, and now she doesn’t know what to do.

  ‘Will he hurt you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Not, will he hurt me? Will he hurt you?

  I swallow back a strange, bitter anger.

  ‘He needs me,’ I say. ‘If he’s going to see this through. He knows that he’s hurt. He can’t deal with that, though.’

  ‘I’ve never met anyone able to ignore pain like that. He should have been screaming the building down. Can he feel anything at all?’

  ‘He says he’s never been able to.’

  Lesley nods. ‘You think that’s why he does what he does? Kill people, I mean?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I looked in his eyes. Saw an absence. I’ve seen it before. The police brought in this drug dealer who killed three of his customers, ones who’d gone back on what they owed. Cut them up with a bloody samurai sword, you know, one of the ones with the curved blade? Thought he was King Cool, in the midst of a Tarantino movie. Except instead of Royale with cheese, people talked about chips and gravy. He’d been hurt, and I was the lucky one on night shift. When I was treating him, he told me his story, voice never rising, never falling. All in one flat monotone. Like your cousin there. He told me about how he killed the guys. In detail. More upset that he’d been caught so easily by the police than by what he actually did.’

  ‘Ray had the same look?’

  Ray comes back through. His face is wet, like he hasn’t dried it properly. Looking closer, I see is not water, but sweat. Whether he feels it or not, he’s hurting bad. Like he told me earlier, he got lucky with his condition: at least he can sweat.

  I know enough to realise he might not make it through the night. Even with the bleeding temporarily abated on the outside. It’s what you can’t see that usually winds up killing you. Lesley’s been telling him that since we arrived. And I think he knows it. But doesn’t care.

  ‘Phone?’

  Lesley nods to where it sits near the window.

  Ray grabs the handset, dials a number from memory.

  Five seconds.

  ‘It’s me.’

  He listens to whoever’s on the other end of the line.

  ‘Shut up. You know why. You fucking know. This ends tonight. Just you and me.’

  He listens again. Leans against the wall, and had this blank expression like he’s just waiting for the voice on the phone to just shut up. Then: ‘Name the place. We end it all tonight. You. Me. The fat bastard… The traitor.’
He smiles, then. ‘Aye. The traitor. Undercover cop. Devious wee…prick.’

  Ray hangs up. He comes over to me, puts a hand on my shoulder. The weight nearly puts me on the floor. ‘You know…who he is?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The…traitor?’ I shake my head. Not like I have any interest. Not my concern. One of the family wants to break ranks, it’s not my business.

  ‘Your…ex.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘John.’

  ‘No.’

  He nods. ‘I’m sorry. Always… He…was a cop.’

  ‘No, he was an accountant.’

  ‘Cop. Undercover. I’m sorry.’

  Does he mean it? Hard to tell. He can’t look me in the eye. Never could. Ray was never a person for those intimate human moments.

  But he wasn’t lying. I knew that much.

  * * *

  ‘How come I never met your family?’

  ‘Huh?’

  He wasn’t really asleep. I knew that. There was a difference when he dropped off, a change in his body, a slackening that signalled he was finally lost to the world. He would pretend, sometimes, I knew. Ignore when I touched him, tune out my voice. There were nights that he would seem tense, even after we’d made love.

  ‘Your mum and dad. I don’t even know if you have a brother or a sister. You just –’

  ‘There’s no-one.’ In the dark, his voice sounded small, as though he was speaking from somewhere far away. ‘Just me. No family.’

  * * *

  Was that even true? I had to wonder.

  Was anything John told me true? Was there a family somewhere? Not just a mum and a dad, but maybe a wife and a child.

  He’d proposed to me. I’d said yes.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Came to…see me in hospital. Get me to…turn evidence. Against Dad. The family. His idea…revenge.’

  ‘But you thought it would be better to kill everyone?’

  ‘Principle.’

  ‘That’s your dad speaking. No, it’s not him. I’m sorry. It’s your fucking brother. The sodding psychopath!’ I want to shout and scream and hit something. I want to break things. But what I do is start punching at Ray. He doesn’t say anything. I might as well tickle him.