And When I Die Read online

  ‘The old man’s confused,’ Wayne said, still looking at the shelves.

  ‘About what you really want,’ Pete added.

  ‘Have to say, we are too. I remember you coming to our place the first time, talking big about she was the most important thing in your life.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Pete said, ‘The old saying? You love something, let it go?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Wayne laughed. Turned to face me. ‘You’re a bastard, you know that?’

  I didn’t say anything. Met his gaze. Gave nothing away.

  ‘We’re all bastards,’ Wayne said. ‘But we came here to tell you, you made a choice and now you’re in. All the way, man.’

  Pete nodded. Slow. ‘All the way.’

  ‘What we’re saying is your first mistake was breaking her heart. The old man, he takes family seriously. Anyone else…’ He stopped there, not finishing the thought. ‘But the fact is that you’re family too now. In a different way.’

  ‘Like us,’ Pete said.

  Wayne finally turned to face me. ‘You think it’s hard being the nephew-in-law? I mean, all he expected of you then was to be a stand-up guy when it came to Kat. Those favours, they were just, you know, little treats thrown your way, a little sideline to help you provide for her by doing something for him. But now…now things are different.’ He shakes his head. ‘We just kind of figured we’d pop by and let you know.’

  There was a part of me swelled up then. A little inner pride that knew I was another step closer to breaching the inner circle. I think I still believed in the operation, then.

  Pete giggled on the sofa. ‘Oh, boy,’ he said. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

  * * *

  ‘Fuck sakes, man! Get out the way!’

  The way Tony drives, it’s like he knows they’re out there. The police. He knows they’re following him. And maybe they are. But not for the reasons he thinks. He’s weaving between traffic on the carriageway with no regard for the speed limit.

  Tony’s paranoid at the best of times, but right now he’s running on powder and adrenaline. More importantly, fear. Of his own brother.

  ‘Anyone who can follow this,’ he says, skipping through Guns N Roses tracks on the stereo, ‘deserves to catch me.’

  I don’t say anything.

  He’s not that good, but I don’t think there’s anyone really following us. More than Tony, I know what I’m looking for, and there’s no sign of cars that belong to cops or anyone driving in any way that marks them out as trying to remain hidden. All the same, if he keeps this up, some innocent wee traffic cop’s likely to spot us, play have-a-go-hero. And then where are we going to be?

  As long as this remains contained, there’s a chance everything will work out. When you start bringing innocent people into it, that’s when things get nasty.

  ‘Fat prick,’ Tony mutters. ‘Fat fuckin’ prick…’

  Meaning Dunc.

  We’re on our way over to Dunc’s place. After Ray’s phone call, Tony’s determined to end all of this, and fast. He’s already called Wayne and Pete, told them to meet us there. Ray wants everyone together. In one place. And Tony figures that if they play along, that’s the best way to bring his brother out of hiding.

  ‘Try him again,’ Tony says.

  ‘Look, Tony –’

  ‘Do it!’

  Every two minutes he has me calling Dunc. Trying to raise him from whatever pit he’s crawled into. But there’s no response, and I have to wonder if Ray’s not yanking our chains. But I’m not going to mention that to Tony. No way. He’s on edge as things are.

  Besides, I’m just along for the ride.

  To Tony, I’m simply cannon fodder. He gets the chance, he’ll put me in the way of a bullet that’s meant for him.

  I dial the number again. Get the answer machine. Leave another message. When I hang up, Tony looks at me, his eyes hard. Like all this is my fault.

  And in his own way, I guess he’s right.

  KAT

  We park down the road from Dunc’s place. When I turn off the engine, Ray looks at me, as though I should be saying something. When I don’t speak, he just grunts and gets out the car. I join him. What choice do I have? We are bound. By blood.

  We walk to the front door. His left leg moves strangely. His body is shutting down. Piece by piece. Watching it happen is an odd experience. Is he aware of it at all?

  Still, there’s enough of him working to get the job done. Force of will keeps him on the move. He cannot leave the job unfinished.

  Ray knocks hard. When the door opens, Dunc doesn’t look surprised. Steps back and lets us inside. As if he’s expecting us. Doesn’t say a word.

  In the front room, Ray tells me to sit down. Remains standing.

  I take in the room. Heavy fabrics, dark wood coffee tables and units. DVD cases disguised as hardback books. The kind of thing people thought was sophisticated in the ’80s.

  Dunc says, ‘They’re coming over.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I can’t believe this.’

  Ray says nothing.

  Dunc walks over to a small oak table set out with decanters and glasses, pours himself a whisky. Offers Ray, who shakes his head. Dunc raises the bottle in my direction, arches his heavy eyebrows in a question. Normally I wouldn’t touch the stuff, but after this evening, a little bit couldn’t hurt. What, they’re going to arrest me for drink driving when this is done?

  It tastes as rough as I expect, burns a little going down. But at least I can feel it.

  I say, ‘Earlier, at the wake, you were trying to tell me to get out.’

  Dunc nods. Collapses into the large leather armchair near the window. He’s an old man, but right now he looks ancient. His large frame seems incapable of holding its own weight – just one moment away from collapsing completely into a congealed mass of flesh.

  ‘None of this should have happened,’ he says. ‘Least of all…’ He gestures towards me expansively. ‘You should never have come home.’

  ‘Family,’ I say.

  ‘You’re all the same. Touch of the old bugger’s madness.’

  Ray isn’t sitting down. He isn’t drinking. He’s standing there, watching us.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ I say.

  Dunc laughs. ‘Your cousin is what happened. Anthony. Always a bad ‘un. Tried to tell your uncle that, but he’d never hear a word against either of his boys.’

  ‘Except me,’ Ray says.

  Dunc looks down at the floor. Ashamed. But I don’t know what of. Ray says, ‘Tony always wanted…Dad’s power. I was in…his way. He was scared. I knew that. I was bigger. Could always fight back. Tony’s always been…a wee…scaredy-cat prick.’

  Dunc snorts. Maybe it’s meant to be a laugh. Sounds like he’s trying to dislodge something. ‘Jesus, that’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Tony told them…I was working…with Buchan,’ Ray says. ‘But…not true…is it?’ He looks at Dunc. The old man shrinks in on himself. Shame? Fear?

  ‘No, it’s not. Never was.’

  ‘Someone was, though.’

  Dunc shakes his head. Glances at me, and I swear he’s about to burst into tears. His skin is purple, and his eyes are watery, bloodshot. I wonder how much of that whisky he’s already had. ‘Your uncle was getting old and desperate. Tony had seen it for a while, that he was losing his touch. We all knew it. But he was the old man. Trouble was, if he lost it then it was his son took over.’

  I say, ‘Tony.’

  ‘Never hand…power to me,’ Ray says. ‘The freak.’

  Dunc mutters, ‘He wasn’t wrong,’ and then seems to remember where he is, looks up at Ray with wide eyes.

  But Ray either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care.

  ‘I figured I had to make a choice,’ Dunc says. ‘What I did was approach Buchan.’

  Ray shakes his head. He won’t look right
at Dunc.

  ‘Derek couldn’t see past Tony being his son. But anyone with any brains was going to look to Buchan after Derek was gone,’ Duncan says.

  ‘But you were stupid,’ Ray says. ‘You got caught.’

  ‘Aye.’ He barely even whispers the word.

  I begin to understand. Tony was the one who caught Duncan in his act of betrayal. And used the evidence he had on the old man to frame his brother, get him out of the picture. Smarter move than most people might give him credit for.

  But that wasn’t the whole story.

  ‘Ray came to me two days ago,’ Dunc says. ‘Your ex, our shiny new recruit, he’s a cop, you know that? Tried to get Ray to turn against the family. Covered up his survival in the explosion. Threatened him.’

  But Ray wouldn’t turn. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. He’d kill them for the betrayal, but he’d never turn them into the cops. You don’t involve outsiders. Especially the boys in blue.

  I say, ‘I didn’t know.’ Except maybe I did. On some level. John’s behaviour had been increasingly strange over the last few weeks we were together. Had he given something away? Had I just pretended not to notice? Wanting, on some level, to finally give in to my desire for a normal life, turn my family in without actually seeming to do anything?

  The human mind is a strange thing. How many decisions do we make without consciously considering them? How often are we motivated by impulses we never even notice?

  Ray says, ‘He’s dead too. John. The turncoat.’ He smiles. His face seems to crack. The grin is a monstrous leer.

  He’s a death machine. A monster.

  ‘Don’t feel sorry…for John,’ Ray says. ‘He’s no…innocent.’

  None of us are. ‘I never felt sorry for him,’ I say.

  There’s the sound of a car engine outside, slowing down, slowly cutting out.

  Dunc says, ‘That’ll be them.’

  Ray nods. ‘It ends. Now.’

  Part of me wants to ask if I can pull the trigger when Ray presses the gun to John’s head. It takes me a moment to realise I don’t feel bad about thinking it.

  Nature. Nurture. Whatever.

  Once a Scobie, always a Scobie.

  No matter how much you try to deny it.

  JOHN

  We pull up outside Dunc’s house.

  Tony kills the engine. We sit for a moment. Perfectly still. Zen.

  I look at the house.

  Lights on downstairs, orange, slipping through cracks in heavy curtains. The two stories enough for a family of four, maybe even five, but now belonging to one lonely man rattling around in there. When his wife left and the kids finally grew up, he refused to move. This was his house. He’d sweated for it. He was keeping it.

  Tony pulls the gun from the glove box. Checks the chamber, looks at me and grins. ‘Just in case,’ he says. ‘Fat boy’s getting twitchy, you know. Can’t trust him like you used to.’ He opens the door. ‘Can’t trust anyone these days.’

  I get out, shiver as the rain hits me. Dark’s coming in, and the temperature’s plummeted fast.

  Tony sends me up front. I knock hard on the door. Wait while he lingers a few steps behind and to the left. He’s not daft.

  When Dunc answers the door, unarmed, Tony says, ‘Bloody turncoat,’ and barges past, shoving the fat man out his way. I stomp after him. Dunc’s deflated. Knows that this is the end. His eyes are red-rimmed and I catch a whiff of something strong from him.

  Tony walks through to the front room, pulls up short so that I almost walk into the back of him.

  I need a moment to take in the scene.

  Fat Dunc’s living room is large, with bay windows that face out onto the front garden. The room is subtly lit from table lamps, the light absorbed by the dark colouring of the furniture and the wallpaper. A false fire sits in one wall, fake flames flickering gently.

  But all of that’s expected.

  What’s unusual is someone sitting in one of the armchairs. Back straight, expression neutral, eyes staring straight ahead, deliberately not looking at anything. And especially not at me.

  Kat.

  She looks tired. Blood on her clothes. I hope to hell that none of it belongs to her. But she’s alive.

  She’s alive.

  Tony hesitates just a second too long. Enough to allow his brother to step out from behind the door, press a gun to his head.

  Ray’s looking bad. Worse than I remember. Literally a dead man walking. Straight out of a George Romero movie. Skin washed out, blood drained from his face. Eyes sinking into their sockets, the whites now an off-yellow and road-mapped by red. Crooked, stooped over, unsteady. Even if he doesn’t feel pain, he has to know that something is very, very wrong.

  ‘How it ends,’ Ray says.

  ‘With a bang,’ says Tony, resigned, with the sullen air of a teenager. He drops the gun, then kicks it away, skiting it across the thick carpet. The weapon winds up at Dunc’s feet. The fat man looks down. Doesn’t react. He’s past trying to fight back. Old, unfit and tired.

  ‘You’re a hard one to kill,’ Tony says to his brother.

  ‘You’re…just not that good.’

  ‘Dad said you were a monster. You know that? He was scared of you. When you were a wee boy, you never laughed. That’s what he said, you never laughed. That fucking terrified him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I thought you’d have killed her,’ Tony says, nodding at Kat. ‘But you were always a sentimental prick.’

  ‘This is…between us.’

  ‘Aye. That it is. Goodnight, Gracie.’ Tony laughs.

  I look at Dunc.

  He’s not moving. The gun’s at his feet, and he’s not moving.

  All I have to do now is keep my cool. Choose my moment.

  It can end here. Three men dead. No-one to know what I did. Kat still alive. Maybe I can talk to her. Maybe she’ll understand why I lied to her. Looking at her, though, it’s hard to tell anything about what she’s thinking. If she’s thinking at all.

  She’s alive. No question. Unharmed, I’m sure. Banged up, perhaps, but no more than you might expect. That blood on her clothes, it’s not hers. I don’t care whose it is, but it’s not hers.

  Thing is, though, she’s sitting perfectly still. Not moving.

  Look at the brothers just inside the living room door. One with the gun to the other’s head. Happy bastard families.

  When Ray’s done with Tony, he’ll kill me. Not just because I helped set the bomb, but because I’m a copper, too.

  Bang, bang, you’re dead.

  I’ve seen dead bodies. But only ever the aftermath. The tragedy about being a copper is that you’re always reacting; showing up after the fact. I’ve seen the terrible things people can do to each other, but never this close, this raw. Never felt hatred manifest itself as some tangible, physical presence. Never had my muscles tense so hard I’m worried they might just snap.

  Never seen a man’s brains blown all over a richly expensive carpet.

  There’s been enough violence. Enough death, I’m not so far gone I can just let this happen. Even if Tony fucking well deserves it. Even if it would be doing the world a favour to let a man like him die.

  There’s a difference between what’s good and what’s right. Between what you think should be done and what your conscience will allow.

  Aye, fine time to become a philosopher.

  Ray has his gun pressed up hard against the side of his brother’s head. His trigger finger’s tightens. When you enter a heightened state, when adrenaline starts to course through your body, you sometimes see things you would otherwise miss. Little details stand out. There’s a reason in cop movies that they slow down the action when a fire fight begins or when a murderer enters the room.

  Little things. Details.

  Ray’s knuckles whitening as he prepares to kill his brother.

  Tony’s lips curving up to the left in this jagged half smile, like he knows he has nothing to fear. The origi
nal cocky bastard.

  He expects to be saved.

  The universe will not let Tony Scobie died. Not when he engineered the death of his father. Not when he is this close to getting everything he ever wanted.

  He knows it. The smarmy bollocks.

  I should let him die. Show him that he’s mortal after all. All I need to do is wait. One second. That’s all.

  But I can’t.

  For all I’ve done. For all the bad moves I’ve made over the last few years. For all that I’ve compromised myself since getting close to these men, I can’t let him die.

  Can’t watch it happen.

  I still believe in something. Some kind of order. Some kind of morality.

  Why else would I be here? Pretending to be the knight in shining armour. Endangering myself to save one person who doesn’t care if I live or die. Who probably hopes I wind up taking a bullet for all that I put her through.

  I don’t even think about it. I barrel forward, head down, knock my left shoulder into Tony’s back as I reach up with my right hand to grip Ray’s wrist, twist his grip on the gun.

  Suicidal?

  Sod it. I’m dead either way.

  The explosion from the gun reverberates through my body. My bones vibrate. The skin on my hand burns. Bubbles and blisters. I let go of Ray. The spark from inside the barrel is in my field of vision. My eyes burn. The world turns a dull white, and floating transparent bubbles bob around inside my head.

  I land heavy, right side hammering on top of Tony as he wallops to the floor. Something snaps, and I wonder if it’s his rib or mine. I roll off him, stay on my back, breathing hard, ragged, like I’m sucking in shards of ice.

  I can’t see a thing. I close my eyes. Squeeze them tight. Maybe it’s just a temporary thing. I pray it is. But even if God’s there, why would he listen to me when I never listened to him?

  There’s a low, constant roar in my head. No other noise. I could be floating face-up in the middle of the ocean, the sun beating down on me. Lost, weightless, far away from anything that matters.

  That’s where I want to be. Where I’ve always wanted to be. Somewhere still. Quiet. Undisturbed.