And When I Die

by Russel D. McLean

  So how to explain Lesley? A girl who spent her life trying to help people? Who didn’t deserve what happened?

  He shot her in the face.

  Ray is a killer. Not a psychopath. But he is not afraid to take another person’s life. I keep thinking that he warned her what would happen and she didn’t listen. He’s a soldier in a never-ending war. He kills for a greater cause. The idea of guilty or innocent doesn’t enter into it.

  The only question: are you in his way?

  I guess I understood that. He warned me. I listened. I’m still alive.

  We’re heading out towards Newlands, via the M77. Close to the Barrhead Road exit, I get this sick feeling in my stomach and my arms spasm. The car seems to lose weight, lose the heft and control. I blink and imagine crashing through the barriers, flipping over and off the road.

  Is this what I want? I take a deep breath, grip the wheel tightly. Try not to cry as I slow down, take the exit too carefully, the cars following me blasting horns as they overtake, letting me know what they think of my abilities.

  Ray, in the passenger seat, doesn’t react.

  He’s been quiet since we left Lesley’s. All he’s done is reload the handgun. Pressing bullets into the clip with the practiced skill of a man who’s done it too many times before. As we exit the tunnel, he slams the clip into the gun’s butt and then sits back.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ he says.

  ‘You didn’t have to kill her.’

  ‘I told her what would happen.’

  ‘No. No, that’s not fair. She’s not…most ordinary people…’

  ‘I warned her.’

  What can I say? What can I do?

  Is it my fault?

  On Barrhead Road, near the road toll roundabout, I pull over, kill the engine. Shudder, drop my head against the wheel. We sit in the shadow of nearby multis.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just kill me,’ I say. ‘Just do it. I’m dead already, right?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘If you can kill her you can kill me.’ Is this what I want?

  Maybe.

  ‘No.’ Ray speaks with a finality that would at any other time end the conversation.

  I raise my head. He’s looking at me. In the half-light, he could be Frankenstein’s monster, peering out of the darkness. I guess he always was: created by family and circumstance. What he has become is not his own fault. It was all he ever could be. Maybe if people had treated him differently, if he had been raised by another family, if…

  If…

  If…

  Do we have any choice at all in life?

  ‘You know what you are?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you care?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  ‘What happens if I get out of the car?’ I ask. ‘What happens if I walk away?’

  Recklessness? Bravado?

  I can’t say for sure. The words are out before I have time to consider them. And I know that I can’t take them back.

  He doesn’t say anything. I take a deep breath, unclick the seatbelt and open the door. He doesn’t move. I get out. Close the door. Nothing.

  I think that I want him to kill me.

  At least that way this will be over.

  I walk down Pollockshaws Road. The urge to look back is overwhelming. But I resist. Keep walking. Listening for the footsteps. The click of the trigger.

  But I hear nothing.

  Is this how it ends?

  No bang. Not even a whimper.

  Just silence.

  There’s a guy walking towards me. Dressed in jeans and a dark jacket. A small dog trots just ahead, tugging at her lead. Little mongrel with thick black hair and a relentless enthusiasm. Barks when she sees me. The guy tries to tug at her lead. ‘Suzy!’

  I can’t resist a smile. Always wanted a dog. Don’t know why I never got one.

  Suzy doesn’t pay attention to her owner, starts tugging that lead, trotting on over to me. She’s strong, and the guy stumbles with her. Suzy places her front paws on my legs. Her tongue sticks out. I give her head a pat.

  I’m still alive. I walked away.

  Ray didn’t kill me.

  Why? Because he couldn’t?

  But I deserve to die. I’m just like him. Hope that all of this is a bad dream.

  Suzy’s owner says, ‘Really, I’m sorry, she’s –’ He stops, and I realise what I must look like. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t… Is that blood?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ He backs off at the aggression. Then sees something over my shoulder. ‘Hey there,’ talking to someone behind me. ‘I think this girl needs –’

  It feels like the inside of my brain is on fire. The roar begins intense before it dulls to a deep, aching throb that makes me want to drop to my knees and start crying.

  Suzy’s owner is gone, and it’s only when I look down that I realise he’s on the ground, face first. Suzy’s bouncing around him, nudging him with her paws and her nose, trying to get a response out of him.

  I look up and see Ray.

  He leans in to me. ‘You asked…what would happen.’ His voice sounds muffled. I know that it’s the trauma of the gunshot playing havoc with my hearing. All the same, it feels like the world is running away from me again. ‘One warning. Only one. You’re…family, after all.’

  I look at Suzy’s owner. At Suzy. Then at Ray.

  JOHN

  First time I ran for Tony, I thought that I could be working the shortest undercover gig in history.

  It wasn’t the fear of being caught. Long as I let Crawford know what was happening, he could arrange for the Jam Sandwiches to be rolling elsewhere in the city. The only way I’d find myself in jail would be through my own stupidity.

  But I was still afraid. There was no training to prepare me for the reality of a drop without backup. No step-by-step process to follow that would ensure the operation ran like clockwork. I had to endure all the nerves of a first time drop, coupled with the fear that someone knows something they shouldn’t. That you’ve been found out. That the entire enterprise is little more than an elaborate ploy to end your undercover career in the most painful fashion possible.

  I knew how the old man treated traitors. I’d seen the autopsy photos.

  At our final briefing, I’d jokingly asked Crawford if I could have cyanide pills. Just in case. He hadn’t smiled. And not just because I wasn’t funny.

  The run was simple. Pick up the bag from a third party at a spit-and-sawdust pub over on the Gallowgate. Walk a few streets away, the boozers were segregated by which football team you supported. But this place had no loyalties. To teams, political ideologies or supposed religious affiliation. It was a boozer where the only thing that mattered was money. And not the kind you used to pay your tab.

  The girl behind the bar didn’t say a word as she poured my pint. No eye contact. She took my money and slammed back the change on the bar. As I turned to find a table, an old duffer at the bar lifted his head and said, ‘You’re no from round here, son.’

  I didn’t respond.

  The swap came easier than the pint. I finished my drink sitting across the table from a young guy with a noticeable scar running from the bottom of his left ear to just above his mouth. The look in his eyes was hard. Made me think of lifers I’d seen in prison, the kind of who had no idea that there was a safer kind of life out there, who had given up all hope of getting out of the circles of violence and poverty they found themselves in.

  He could barely have been twenty years old.

  Once we were done, I left the bar, legs shaking. I thought the pint would settle me. Instead all it did was get my heart thumping. I needed to be sharp for this, all I could think about was how fuzzy I’d become. Just one pint, coupled with the adrenaline spike I was in danger of getting sloppy.

  I took a deep breath. Steadied myself. Still shaking. Thinking: what happens if
this goes wrong?

  Best-case scenario, I got picked up by cops who didn’t know to keep off the drop path, taken in and then we’d have to find a way of getting my story straight so I could get out again. I’d do time for the crime, no question, or it would be obvious that I wasn’t all I appeared to be.

  But worse than that, what if I gave myself away as a copper to the wrong people? Say the kid noticed something off about me in there, smelled the copper on me?

  What if they already knew? What if this was less a test, more of a trap?

  Jesus.

  I ran across the road, jumped in the car. Hands shaking, I fumbled the key into the ignition. Tried to drive naturally as possible, but my adrenaline levels were spiked, and it was all I could do not to hammer my foot down on that accelerator to increase the rush. There was no back up in this gig. No team nearby waiting to pounce if things went wrong.

  Crawford had told me I’d be on my own. This deep, backup and back doors were more danger than safety net.

  For the first time since going undercover, I experienced real fear. Sneaking from my belly into my extremities, working its way to the front of my brain. I’d been on the fringes so far, using my connection with Kat to draw myself ever closer to the inner circle. She was an innocent. But the family loved her so much, they took her word as being good as anyone else’s.

  She loved me, I could be trusted.

  Blood is thicker than water.

  Aye, and so’s porridge.

  But the Scobies believed in family. Or at least, paid it constant lip service. Of course the cracks were there. The familial tensions that would fuel Anthony’s self-serving betrayal were obvious to an outsider looking to find them. Only proving my own experience correct.

  But that belief made my job easier. Sure, at first I had pursued Kat with only the job in mind. But now when I really fell for her, it seemed to ease the minds of her family, as though they sensed the sincerity.

  Good for the job. Maybe not so good for me.

  A few months after me and Kat moved in together, I started going to the doctors with all sorts of complaints from the minor to the potentially serious. The medicine cabinet at the flat was filled with PeptoBismol, Rennies, medicines for ulcers, and pills I could barely pronounce, never mind remember what they were for. When Kat asked, I told her severe IBS. But it was the double life that had started doing for me. Psychological rather than physical sickness.

  And it would only get worse.

  That night, my first drop, it was the first time I got that sinking sickness that would only get worse as the months went on. And it seemed insane later, but as I kept driving, the idea that I might shit myself was somehow worse than the terror of being revealed as an undercover copper.

  I drove out to a pair of high rises just four minutes from the pub. Like the old Red Road flats, the twins had been a part of Scotland’s failed community living experiments. Tall buildings intended as symbols of hope for the post-war world, but soon became reminders of our worst economic failures. The close-together flats designed to create communities instead created fear when unemployment and a wave of drugs invaded these once close communities. The buildings themselves became less aspirational and more claustrophobic. Now they were scheduled for demolition, most of the tenants being rehomed or asked to leave. But there were still a few holdouts, waiting for the bitter end.

  The buildings glared down at me. Shadows spread across the street. Grass embankments looked more mud than greenery. Bottle shards and needles glinted in headlights.

  Our very own ghettos. Except in Scotland, we’ve always been equal opportunity about our poor. The poor, the disenfranchised, the lost, it didn’t matter where you came from, once you ended up here people tended to forget who you were.

  I made sure the car was locked, kept looking back as I walked to the front entrance of the block. I walked past what had once been a reception area, the watchman’s booth locked and abandoned for a long time. The interior smelt faintly of sweat and piss. Half-arsed graffiti daubed the walls. The lift was, of course, out of order.

  On my way up the stairs, the graffiti became more legible:

  FukPedrofiles

  Kimbo is a lesbo dike

  And more.

  Time was, I worked the beat in places like this. The sergeant who trained me up used to say that when the graffiti was that poor, there was no hope left. Right enough, it was hard to spot a future Banksy among the scrawls.

  The building was quiet, except for the distant hum of TV shows from somewhere I couldn’t identify. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting someone to jump me. When I came to places like this in uniform, most people would back off. Now, I was naked. An intruder. I stood out. With no protection. Carrying a bag stuffed with product whose street value I could only guess at.

  On the top floor, I found the door I was looking for, knocked hard. The man who answered wasn’t quite what I expected. For a start, he was half-naked, his lower half only just covered by the fluffiest towel I’d seen outside of a Malmaison.

  ‘Aye?’

  I held up the bag. ‘Anthony sent me. You’re Pete?’

  He shook his head. ‘Wayne.’

  I nodded. He stepped back. ‘So come in, if you’re going to.’ That odd accent – the mix of his Polish parents and his Glasgow upbringing – puzzled me the first time I heard it.

  He closed the door behind me. The sound it made had a strange finality. The heavy stone door of a tomb closing on a man who was still alive. No going back now. No chucking it all in and walking away.

  My insides scraped worse than ever. I’d be shitting out razor blades later.

  I was still holding the bag when we walked into the living room. Big screen telly, maybe forty inches, another guy lounging around. This one smaller, wearing a shellsuit with the top unzipped. His white chest was hairless and barely defined. He turned and nodded. ‘Seen this?’ he said.

  I didn’t recognise the image paused on the screen.

  ‘Fuckin’ amazing,’ Wayne said. ‘Baltimore, man, there’s a place a dude could earn a buck.’

  ‘Speak like that again,’ Pete said, ‘I’ll rip your fucking tongue out.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘Seriously, it was bad enough when he had an addiction to 24, kept talking about going dark and giving me ETAs on all kinds of things, like even how long he’d take to shite.’

  Wayne chuckled. Pete didn’t look amused.

  I tried to look uninterested. All business. Do the deal. Get out.

  Pete said, ‘Wait here,’ and left the room.

  Wayne said, ‘Want something? Drink? Got some brews.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’

  He smiled, stood up. Maybe five-seven or eight, he was a few inches shorter than me, stood with the kind of straight back that told me how aware he was of his own height. He came close to me. ‘You’re with Kat, then?’

  I didn’t say anything. But I couldn’t stop myself stiffening up. The idea that they knew anything about gave me the chills. All I’d been given was a pair of names and an address.

  He said, ‘You know she’s not involved in any of this?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘So what the fuck’re you doing here?’

  ‘I needed the money,’ I said. ‘Business isn’t doing as well as it could… You know how it is right now. And…and I need the money.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘Kat’s like a wee sister, you know? We’re not blood, not like her and Tony, but we’re close. I just don’t want her…involved…with the wrong man.’

  ‘I love her.’

  ‘Easy to say.’

  ‘When it’s true.’

  He nodded. For a moment I thought he might nut me one. Braced myself for the impact from the heavy looking forehead. But what he did was take a step back. ‘I’d think twice how deep you go, man. You don’t strike me being right for this. Know what I mean? You’re straight, got that scent about you.’

&nbs
p; I wanted to smile then.

  I’m not a citizen. I’m a copper. A copper worthy of winning a fucking Oscar.

  ‘I can handle myself. You know how it is, though, you love your girl, you have to love her family, too.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said a voice from the door. I turned to see Pete, now dressed in jeans and a grey t-shirt that fit snugly on his body-builder chest. ‘And this bawbag’s family are hard to love.’

  I relaxed. There was a feeling like I was visiting with friends. They weren’t out to screw me. Of course, I knew their reputation. If I messed them about, they’d show me what being fucked over was all about. Pete came over, passed me a new bag. Lighter colours. It weighed me down, heavier, it seemed than the drugs. ‘This is deep as you want to go, bud. Trust me.’

  ‘I’m a big boy.’

  ‘Sure you are,’ said Wayne. ‘But like I said, first person we’re watching out for is Kat. Always will be.’

  ‘Same with me,’ I said. ‘Same with me.’

  * * *

  First person I’m watching out for.

  Kat.

  Not me.

  It had been a lie, then. First person I was watching out for was me, because I didn’t want to die. And it was soon exposed as a lie when I got deeper and deeper involved in Tony’s world, going against everything Kat wanted.

  * * *

  I had a flat in Partick. Rent covered by the job, but all the cash came through back channels so no-one could trace it.

  The place was decent enough, but most of the décor consisted of gifts from Kat. She’d been the one to put her mark on the place. Left to my own devices, what I’d have had would have been best described as ‘Spartan’. Which might have been too generous.

  ‘Do you actually own anything?’

  Wayne looking at the bookshelves and the pictures. Pete was on the sofa, arm stretched over the back, looking like he owned the place.

  When I’d answered the door, I’d almost collapsed when I saw them. Thinking, at least it’s not Ray.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  Words you don’t want to hear.

  And now they were in my front room, not really talking, just looking around like they were trying to formulate a way of explaining why they were here.