Shooting Sean

Shooting Sean Page 17

by Colin Bateman

  'You're killing my family!' I shouted.

  He shook his head, reversed the cab, then drove off. The car with Sean in it followed behind. The other one had already driven off. In a few moments there was only the lap of the water and the rhythmic hum of the bicycles meandering along on either side of the canal. I stared into the water.

  I had saved myself. Even if the gun wasn't loaded, I could still have clubbed Sean to death with it. But I'd surrendered, thrown in the towel, put up my hands without so much as an angry word, let alone a fight.

  And condemned my family.

  Perhaps they were already dead.

  Or they were crawling across the floor of some freezing concrete bunker, skin and bones, too weak to even suck at the brackish water in the hamster pipe. Too slow to catch an insect and gobble it up. Too tired to fight off the rats.

  Selfish.

  I tramped back to the hotel. I asked if there were any messages. There were none. I went up to my room and ordered drinks from room service. Four bottles of Amstel. It was early to be drinking, even for me. I took out the Polaroids and stared at them.

  My wife, and the hell I'd put her through over the years.

  My son, not my son, but nevertheless my son.

  Tony. He wouldn't even know what was going on. He would read it for the first time in the newspapers, or hear it on the television news when he was having dinner with his wife. Nobody but his wife knew he was the father. He would come to the funeral alone. We would look at each other and not know what to say. We had shared a beautiful woman and I hated him for it. They had made a beautiful child, and I hated him for it. And now we would bury my wife and his child, and I would give anything for her to be alive and living with Tony, and for Little Stevie to be alive, and living with them.

  I looked at his Polaroid. Being held down on a table. Screaming.

  In the background ANGER scrawled across the wall.

  Anger indeed.

  I would never get to do his homework for him. Never take him to the cinema. Never go out drinking with him or clear up the mess of his first drinking session. Never kick a ball with him in the back garden. Or take him to his first match – scarves and cold hot dogs and screaming curses at the referee.

  I stopped. I flipped through the photographs again. The fourth. Patricia bruised. ANGER behind her. Except beside the last letter, the merest hint of white. The beginning of another letter? Cut off by the edge of the photograph.

  I stared at the word.

  A clue, Sherlock?

  Could it mean something beyond anger? I raced through the alphabet, adding letters: angera, angerb, angerc, angerd . . .

  S. The only one that made a word, and yet still no sense. ANGERS . . .

  Why would some vandal write ANGERS on a wall?

  Because there was another letter missing, at the start of the word, cut off by the edge of the photograph in exactly the same way as the last. And in looking at it, it was immediately obvious what it was.

  RANGERS.

  Glasgow Rangers. The Scottish football team worshipped by hardline Protestants everywhere.

  Republican Michael O'Ryan had chosen to hide my wife and child where nobody would think to look for them, in the heart of enemy territory.

  It wasn't an address, but it was a narrowing of the possibilities. It was the merest pinprick of light at the end of the Channel Tunnel. I phoned Mouse. There was nobody in. I left a message on “his answering machine. I phoned Sam. He wasn't in either. I left another message. I called Mouse at work, but he couldn't come to the phone; I left the information with his secretary with the strict instruction that she deliver it immediately. Frustrated still, I pulled out my laptop and plugged into the Internet. I posted an appeal on as many newsgroup sites relating to Ireland and Rangers as I could. It wasn't much, but it was something.

  I sat on the bed and drank my four bottles.

  There was nothing more I could do. Maurice had advised me to go home. Big of him. He was prepared to look the other way. Big of him. Because I'd led him on to bigger things. Sure.

  Bigger things?

  Like what? What had I done but burn down a building and fail to murder someone?

  Something, or why say it? Something to do with Sean, and probably something to do with drugs. Sean had seemed genuinely surprised when I'd mentioned the money he'd ripped off from the Colonel. But then he was an actor, and an addict, professional liars both. Yet they'd rushed him away, and surely not out of fear for his safety. I had been defused. Where had they taken him? To a police cell to flush out names. But could you do that to a movie star? More likely they'd give him a lift to rehab and shepherd him through cold turkey, then charge him with something minor in return for some information. He wouldn't serve any time. He wasn't stupid. Nothing was written down, nothing was in his name. He didn't even venture out to get his own fix, he sent his wife to do that, sent Alice into the heart of the red light district to buy heroin from Nigerians.

  Or the Irish, if you believed a shop-front hooker.

  I rolled off the bed.

  33

  I tapped on the glass and said, 'Any chance of a wank?'

  She lowered her book, recognition dawned and she raised it again. She was reading The Eagle Has Landed. She said, 'Fuck off,' from behind it.

  I tapped again. I now had my credit card out. 'Please,' I said.

  She rolled her eyes. She opened the window a fraction and asked me what I wanted. I asked what had been happening across the way. She said why should she care. I said she was bound to be curious after we'd spent so much time watching the place. By way of encouragement I told her I hadn't really come in her kettle. She said she knew I hadn't, and by the way, she didn't have credit card facilities, unless I wanted her to run it down her crack.

  I said no thank you. I gave her what few notes I had left and she opened the door. 'You look like you've gone downhill,' she said.

  'I have.'

  'Drink or drugs?'

  'Both.'

  'I don't do neither.'

  'Neither do I. Apart from drink, and then not much.'

  'So what the hell are you talking about?'

  'Do you really want to know?'

  'It's your money.'

  I stood by the window, peering across at the Irish or Nigerian drugs den. The curtains upstairs were open now, but there was no sign of life. She lay on the bed, resting her head on her arm. She wore a black bikini and heels. 'My wife and baby son are being held hostage at home in Belfast,' I said. 'An Irish gangster called Michael O'Ryan is starving them to death. He won't give them up until I kill somebody for him. I'm not a killer, but I have no choice. Actually, I think it doesn't really matter any more, I reckon they're dead already.'

  'How old is your son?'

  'Three.'

  'Oh,' she said.

  I glanced back at her.

  'Are you shitting me or what?' she asked. I opened my wallet. I showed her the Polaroids. I don't know why. She studied them intently. 'You can buy pictures like them in any of the sex shops. Maybe you'd have to pay extra for the kid ones, but you can. You could still be fucking me around.'

  I delved further into the wallet. Folded way in the back behind the autobank receipts and the cinema stubs was a picture of Trish and me on our wedding day. I looked younger and healthier. Patricia looked alive. 'Satisfied?' I asked.

  She shrugged. 'Lot of people coming and going,' she said, 'across there.'

  'What sort of people?'

  'People. That girl you followed, two or three times. Others.'

  'Any, like, internationally famous film stars?'

  'No. You asked about that before, didn't you? Who're you expecting, Robert Downey Junior?'

  'Sean O'Toole. That's who they want me to kill.'

  'Really? You should do us all a favour then. Light Years from Home was a crock of shit.'

  'It did well at the box office.'

  'So did Mission Impossible, doesn't mean it's any good. Special effects, that's
all; the acting was shit.'

  'You a movie buff?'

  'Kind of. Do some acting as well. Been in some movies.'

  'Seriously?'

  'Seriously.'

  I watched the house silently for a couple of minutes. She watched me. There were guys on the canal bank in yellow overalls testing the purity of the water. Some of the girls were shouting come-ons at them from their windows. Maybe they could have done with testing the purity of the girls. Their souls and what this life did to them. I glanced back at what's-her-name. 'These are the sort of movies where you keep having to put coins in the slot, right?'

  'Right, but it's a start.'

  'Fair enough.'

  'Last year I was at Cannes.'

  'The film festival?'

  'The porn film festival. Happens at the same time. It was brilliant. I met Candi Stripper and Debbie de la Crutch. You don't meet them every day.'

  'No. Indeed.'

  'Would you like a cup of tea?'

  'Sure.'

  'Okay. This time I'll fill the kettle.' She smiled. It was a nice smile. Pleasant, though I didn't doubt she was as hard as nails. We talked. Hours passed. It got dark. Every time I got back to it, she steered the conversation away from my dying family. It was nice, and quite skilfully done. I looked at my watch. She looked at a little alarm clock she kept beside the bed.

  'I know,' I said, 'I've run out of time.'

  'You've been on a freebie for the last half-hour.'

  'Is it my scintillating company or my sad story?'

  She laughed. She shrugged. 'I should get back to my book.' She picked it up. 'I have to see if Churchill gets killed in the end.'

  I cleared my throat. 'He's from Belfast, so he is.'

  'Winston Churchill?'

  'Jack Higgins.'

  'Oh.'

  'Like anybody else with talent, he left. Brian Moore, he left too.'

  She nodded thoughtfully. 'Well, I suppose he had to.'

  'Yeah.'

  'I mean, there can't be much football in Belfast.'

  'No, I suppose not.'

  'Sean O'Toole, he left too, didn't he?'

  'Yeah.'

  'I suppose he's the exception to the rule.'

  'What rule?'

  'About talent.'

  'Oh, right. Fair enough.'

  A light flipped on across the road. I'd been distracted discussing literature and Jack Higgins with the happy hooker and missed whoever it was approaching the house. At first I wasn't sure what I was seeing. There were one, two, three figures moving, but I only caught brief glimpses of them as they passed the windows. Two men, one woman, and then the woman paused for a moment, framed, and I knew it was Alice: the hair, the shape, the profile, all lovingly memorised. She was gesticulating at the men, and then she was rifling in her handbag and where in other people's lives it might have been a brush or a compact she produced, in mine it could be nothing less than a gun, which she raised and pointed at men I couldn't see.

  'Fuck,' I said. The girl joined me at the window.

  'Fuck,' she said.

  'You read the thrillers,' I said, nodding across. 'Read that.'

  'Usually when I get to this point, beautiful woman in distress, the pages are stuck together. Occupational hazard. She's either protecting herself, or she's pulling a fast one.'

  I nodded. 'Either way I have to go to her.'

  'Why?'

  'Because.'

  Because I'd slept with her and she was in danger.

  Because she was a direct line to Sean.

  And Sean was a direct line to my family.

  She pressed my arm. 'Is there anything I can do?'

  I shook my head. 'Unless you happen to have a gun handy.'

  I have a fourteen-inch dildo which is pretty deadly, but I guess that's not what you mean.'

  'I want to help her, not give her an orgasm.'

  'Believe me, you wouldn't.'

  There was a lot of talk across the street. Alice was waving the weapon; the men, with their backs to us now, seemed frozen to the spot.

  The girl hurried across the room, bent and reached under the bed. She pulled out a small vanity case and flipped it open. She removed something, closed the case and pushed it back under with her foot. She came back and pressed the object into my hand.

  'Switchblade,' she said. I pressed the switch. The blade shot out. 'The last line of defence.'

  'Thanks,' I said. I bent to kiss her, but she pulled away.

  'We don't kiss, ever.'

  I smiled. 'You don't know what you're missing.'

  'Yes, I do.'

  I retracted the blade and slipped it into my jacket. I pulled open the glass door and stepped out.

  34

  I hesitated at the bottom of the steps, to all intents the shy sex tourist, riddled with guilt and insecurity. The girls on either side of the door invited me up. One was black, one was a Thai or Filipina. I stood fingering the switchblade; it was woefully inadequate, and so, usually, was I.

  What the fuck was Alice playing at?

  I was trying to do what might one day be construed as either the noble or foolhardy thing. I would barge in in my usual foolish way and hope to cause enough of a distraction to ensure that no harm came to anybody, that Alice was protected and so, indirectly, was my search for Sean. She had a gun, but what did that say except that poor innocent love-struck Alice had been sucked into the sick world of celebrities and their drugs.

  Except she'd never come across as being either poor or innocent.

  What if Sean wasn't the only addict in their partnership? What if she'd been lying to me all along? What if she needed the drugs as much as he did, and now she was in the midst of an argument with her suppliers? They were haggling over money or purity and a gun had been pulled. Paranoia and violence, they went with the territory.

  There was a smell. It shouldn't have distracted me, but it did. Any excuse, perhaps, not to go in. I turned. There was a man standing behind me. At least, I think it was a man. It was difficult to tell under the mass of matted hair and twiggy beard. He was wearing a trench coat that had once been black but was now so slimed and grease stained that he must surely have stolen it from the floor of a chip shop where it had been employed to sop up the drips from the extractor fan. He was the man who had successfully organised that piss-up in a brewery, then fallen in. His blood-red eyes stared into mine with a frightening intensity.

  'English?' he growled. He was Scottish. All the clues had been there. I nodded. 'Could ye lend me a coupla quid for a cuppa tae?'

  'No,' I said. I looked back up to the house. The black girl was wriggling her tongue; for my benefit, I presumed, since exchanging spit with him would surely invite bubonic plague. I smiled. She smiled back. It could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but the dank Braveheart beside me wasn't giving up.

  'Go on,' he said.

  'No,' I replied.

  'Please. Just a few guilder.'

  'No.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because.'

  'Go on.'

  'No.'

  'Whaddya want me to do, beg?'

  'You are begging.'

  'Whaddya want me to do, kiss your fuckin' arse?'

  'I'd rather you didn't.'

  'I hate you, you fucking cunt.'

  'Thanks,' I said. I took a deep breath, making sure I was downwind of the decomposing Jock, then mounted the steps. The black girl got off her stool. She opened her door, her inviting smile, ahm, inviting. I rang the doorbell. The black girl frowned.

  'Sorry,' I said.

  'Fuck you,' she said.

  'You fucking cunt,' said Hamish from below.

  'Look, I'm sorry. I've no money,' I shouted down to him, and then to her: 'And I think the chances of me getting an erection are few and far between.'

  'Fuck you,' she said.

  There were footsteps from within.

  'Fuck off then,' she spat.

  'Look . . .'

  'Just fuck off from
my door.'

  'I'm not at your door . . .'

  'Yes, you are, now fuck off.'

  'I'm not . . .'

  'Do you want me to lick your fucking hole?' the beggar shouted.

  Locks were going back. 'Will youse fuck off?' I hissed.

  'You fuck off!' the black girl and the tramp shouted together. My hands nervously gripped the switchblade. Too hard. I pressed the switch and the blade shot out, cutting through my jacket pocket and protruding half an inch. I was trying to retrieve it when the door opened and a familiar face looked out.

  'Oh,' I said. 'I think I have the wrong house.'

  'No, you don't, Starkey, come on in. We've been expecting you.'

  He was big and he was Irish and he had once tried to drown me in the back of a car. One of Michael O'Ryan's men. He had a beard now, plus a scowl and a gun. I turned to wish a fond farewell to my Scottish chum. He was still mouthing off, but the effort of it all seemed to have been too much for him; his head had dropped and he was now aiming urgent curses at the footpath. I used the brief moment of the turn to complete the retraction of the blade without O'Ryan's man seeing. As I turned back I realised that although I had fooled him, the black hooker hadn't missed it. Our eyes met. She opened her mouth; O'Ryan's man grabbed me by a lapel and pulled; she spat, 'Fucker,' as I was dragged through the door.

  It slammed behind me.

  'Nice area,' I said.

  'Fuck up, Starkey,' O'Ryan's man said and prodded me up a short flight of stairs. At the top I was pushed into a lounge, although lounge was probably too grand a word for it. Bare floorboards, a couple of plastic crates, the blond wife of an international superstar and a second thug, who'd also once tried to drown me. Not just me, of course, the blond wife of the international superstar as well. I looked at Alice. She didn't look well. Beautiful, but not well. Her eyes were tired and her skin was white where it wasn't blotchy.

  'Hi. I came to save you.'

  'From what?'

  'You pulled a gun.'

  'So far so Fatal Attraction, Dan.' She smiled. 'You mean this?' She waved the gun at me. 'If you must know I was just asking for something smaller. Something more lady-like.'

 

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