Cry Uncle Read online

  I tried not to sigh. At least, not obviously.

  Didn’t stop Kellen laughing as I stepped forward.

  She yelled something at me over the music. But I didn’t hear it. Didn’t need to. Whatever it was, it wasn’t exactly a compliment.

  I ran down on to the floor. Robert was on his tiptoes. He and Mr Angry were forehead to chin, testosterone leaking like a nuclear reactor in meltdown. People were giving them a wide berth. A few lads on the edge were shouting encouragement. They wanted to see blood.

  The main rule of any close protection gig is this: get between your target and any potential threat. Even if your target is the one causing the aggro in the first place.

  The guy was big. I’d seen that from the other side of the room. But up close, he was a truly solid bastard. The kind of chest that came from pumping weights. The kind of arms that would make Schwarzenegger jealous. Not that it mattered. When it comes to a fight, it’s not always the big man who wins. Witness enough punters kicking off on a Saturday night, and you learn that lesson fast. Size is intimidating, but it’s not an indication of superiority.

  The big guy said, ‘Who the fuck’re you?’

  ‘The one telling you to back off.’

  ‘You a bouncer?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Your friend was being a cunt.’

  Again, I kept quiet. Stood my ground.

  ‘Aye, well, so … right … tell him he dances like a queer.’ The big man backed down. Hesitantly. I could sense disappointment from the spectators hoping for a rammie. It was a physical thing. an oppressive and disappointing sensation. Maybe enough to encourage one or the other of us to give it a go. But drunk as the big man was, he knew he’d been beaten. More, he knew that I wasn’t playing hard man. He was pissed, but not enough to get into a fight he couldn’t win.

  Sometimes all it takes to win a fight is attitude.

  ‘Aye, run away, yah prick!’

  And sometimes all it takes to pick a fight is an attitude.

  Robert had barely finished yelling at the big man before he moved. Luckily drink made the big man sluggish. Like facing down a tank: he had size on his side, but no speed and no grace. I sidestepped him, brought my fist down low and into his balls. He doubled, stumbled, and collapsed.

  A dirty move? Maybe, but it ended the situation fast. Brownlie could clear up the mess. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there as fast as I could.

  I took advantage of the situation. Hustled Robert off the floor fast as I could. He was shouting over his shoulder the whole time. I got him out the fire exit, slammed him against a wall and pressed my hand over his face. ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  I let go. We were out in an alley at the rear of the club. The night air was sharp. The kind of sharp that could slice open a vein. It got to Robert fast. He struggled to catch his breath, then doubled up and vomited. His sick was the kind of bright orange that you only get late at night. Spattered my shoes and the bottom of my jeans.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Oh fuck me, I’m sorry, man. So fuckin’ sorry. I mean, fuck …’

  He shuddered and then collapsed to his knees. Started to sob. Like a wee boy who’s suddenly realized the very real trouble that he’s in. There was an apologetic tone to his tears, a forced realization of his own idiocy.

  The sad cry of the drunk.

  And I fell for it. I’d been young and stupid once. And for all his swagger, all his trading off his uncle’s name, he was little more than a guy trying to have a good time, not really aware of the consequences of his own actions.

  His friends, I noted, were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, offering my hand down to him. ‘We’ll go back to yours, get some coffee on, forget about it. Aye?’

  He took the hand offered. Let me haul him to his feet.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Robert held on to me as we walked. Barely able to manage a straight line. Not pissed, but also embarrassed. His breath came in short bursts. A panic attack, perhaps. A sudden realization of what he had done. An epiphany of sorts. Wouldn’t last long. Give him a night of sleep, he’d dismiss the incident as a momentary lapse: a drink-fuelled anxiety that he didn’t need to worry about.

  But these things always run deeper. I knew that better than most.

  ‘I always looked up to him,’ he said. ‘My uncle. Wasn’t supposed to, like, but who doesn’t love a gangster?’

  ‘He’s a businessman,’ I said. But even I couldn’t lie to a drunk man.

  ‘Piss off. You work for him. You know the truth. You … know … like …’ Beginning to mumble, trailing off at the end of sentences, thoughts fading before they completed themselves.

  I didn’t say anything. Just ensured that he stayed upright as we limped past the police station and down to the traffic lights. Just a short hop across the road and we’d be back at the car. Then I could take him home, tuck him up and get some rest.

  But I knew I’d be sleeping on his couch. Couldn’t leave him alone in this state. No matter how much of a prick he was or who his uncle happened to be, he was still a client. Which made him my responsibility. Something I took seriously.

  It would be easy to dismiss Robert Burns as not worth the effort. But repulsive as he was to me, he was still a human being. With all the flaws that implied. He was trying to live up to an ideal he could never match. He would never be like his uncle, and he knew it. He’d always be a wee boy playing at being a gangster, never with the balls to be the real thing. Men like his uncle were not made or created. They were born that way. They couldn’t help who they were. Just as a man like Robert Burns couldn’t help being a wannabe. He would always be running to play catch up with the big boys. His reality could never match his ambition. And in a way, I felt sorry for him because of that.

  The minute you stop trying to look for the humanity in people, you’ve already lost. I had known monsters in my time, people whose actions and perversions had made them into outcasts from the world. And yet every time, I had seen in them a glimpse of who they might have been, who they could have been, if they had not given in to the worst of themselves.

  Robert Burns was no monster. Just a guy with an inferiority complex and an uncle he admired. For all the wrong reasons.

  We crossed the Marketgait, waiting for the green man, not risking Robert’s slow progress on the roads that rushed up between the station and the old Tay Mills. We were in the very centre of the city and yet at this time of night, cars treated the road like a racetrack, bombing up and down with little thought for pedestrians or other road users.

  The irony of the police station’s presence was all too obvious.

  We walked down the roughly cobbled street at the side of the Mills, round to the car park at the rear of the building. A woman walked past us, smiling at me as she did so. Early forties or late thirties, tall, with bobbed blonde hair and an understated dress sense. She didn’t look like she’d been out on the piss. Maybe she was getting geared up. Or heading home after a late night at the office.

  ‘Your pal looks a little worse for wear.’

  ‘You know how it is.’

  She nodded. ‘You driving, then?’

  ‘Designated.’

  ‘Poor bugger.’ Smiling a little too much. Maybe she had been drinking, was just one of those people who hid it well. Some people, they get drunk, they only hint at it when they smile. ‘You, I mean.’

  ‘I’ll have a belt when I get home.’

  ‘Bet you will. You boys have a blast.’ She toddled past, throwing a wee wink. Flirtatious? Perhaps. It was that time of night. But still, I figured it was bold for a woman to stop and chat to two drunk strangers in a side street that was half-lit at best. Maybe the presence of the police station just a few feet away made her feel safe. Or maybe she just didn’t give a toss. Maybe we didn’t look that dangerous.

  I pulled Robert to the car. He leaned on the hood while I unlocked the door. Gulping in the night air.

  Something a
bout the woman was bothering me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And not in that way. Paranoid, maybe. Tired. Jumping at shadows. The work getting to me. When you’re waiting to be found out twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can be forgiven moments of unjustified uncertainty.

  ‘McNee!’

  I turned. Kellen. Following us. Feet clicking on the cobbles where we’d just walked.

  ‘I just want to have a wee chat.’

  ‘This isn’t a good time.’ I stepped away from the car. Leaving the key in the driver’s side lock. Robert was still leaning on the hood, drawing breaths, trying to convince himself that he really was alright.

  I didn’t want him to hear any conversation I might have with Kellen, no matter how pissed he was. How likely to forget.

  I met her halfway. Far enough from the car that Robert wouldn’t be able to earwig with ease. ‘What the hell do you want?’

  ‘We never finished our conversation.’

  ‘This isn’t a good time.’

  ‘Just wanted to let you know, you’re not getting off lightly.’

  Hammering the point home with a mallet. I graciously decided not to point that out to her. ‘He’s a client. Long as he doesn’t break the law in my presence, I have an obligation to—’

  ‘Don’t give me that, McNee. Just … just don’t.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m beginning to think you actually believe your own bullshit.’

  There had been moments over the last seven or eight months I’d just wanted to yell at someone, tell them the whole damn story. But I couldn’t. I was undercover. All the way. Walking a line where I couldn’t see how far the drop was on either side.

  Kellen had been riding me even before I agreed to work for Griggs. She saw only what she’d been told to see. Focussed only on what backed up her truth.

  If I was going to yell at anyone, I wanted to yell at her. Loud enough that there’d be no question of her not understanding. I wanted her to see the truth. Needed her to see it. She was a good cop. Her sense of morality was on the money. I needed her not to think of me as one of the bad guys. To know that I was doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

  But to tell her would be suicide. Professional. Personal. Maybe literal.

  ‘You don’t get it do you?’ I said. ‘That sometimes you don’t see everything. You don’t—’

  I heard the noise of a car door slamming. Turned round to see Robert in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Fucksakes!’ I took a step forward.

  The engine coughed. Of course it did. I’d left the fucking keys in the driver’s door.

  Again.

  The cough. The catch.

  He was going to drive home drunk. Last thing I needed was for a man connected to David Burns to be found in my car and incapable of driving.

  I made to run. Hands out, signalling him to just fucking well stop.

  Didn’t even manage the first step.

  It was the second time in my life I’d been caught in the path of a bomb. The second time I’d been unprepared.

  But I knew what was happening. Realized as the world slowed down. The punch in the centre of my chest, the feeling of rising heat, the sensation of weightlessness. Déjà vu all over again.

  I slammed back into Kellen. We tumbled. Landed hard on the dashed pebble surface of the car park.

  I closed my eyes.

  Exhaled.

  Inhaled.

  Tasted ashes in the air.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Ewan ‘Sooty’ Soutar was beside the bed when I opened my eyes. I’d been drifting in and out since the doctors checked me over. My chest was tight, skin stretched across bone. A reaction to what had happened. I was in shock. So they said.

  ‘Jesus fuck, Steed,’ Sooty said. ‘Every time we talk, you’re in the shite.’

  No kidding.

  Sooty looked the same as ever: dangerous. Big. More muscle than fat, although you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise in the wrong light. He shaved his head, had a goatee that gave his face a hard edge. Looked like a bouncer more than a cop. Used to moonlight as one, in fact. But since he got promoted to DI, he’d devoted his whole life to the force. Seemed happier for it, too. Happy as Sooty could seem, anyway. He wasn’t much of one for smiling. Not around me, anyway,

  ‘Guess I’m just unlucky,’ I said. Each word ripped the back of my throat. I wanted to cough up the lining.

  ‘Aye, right.’ He took a deep breath, pulled out his notebook. ‘So let’s have it, then. What happened?’

  ‘Kellen?’

  ‘She’s fine. Just had a wee chat with her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And now I’m having a wee chat with you. You know how this works, Steed. So answer the questions. Then we can catch up. But if you’re interested, she didn’t ask how you were doing.’

  Sure.

  ‘The question?’ I said. My memory was fritzed. There was a ringing in my ears. Somewhere just beneath that, I could hear the echo what might have been a scream. Sounded a lot like Rabbie Burns on fire.

  ‘Just tell me what happened tonight.’

  ‘The car blew up.’

  ‘Aye, we get that. You know that this is the second time you’ve been found in the presence of an incendiary device attached to a motor vehicle? Once is unlucky …’

  ‘Last time it was Molly came to see me.’ Meaning DI Molly Mollinson. Hard man, despite the name. Suffered from ‘Boy-Named-Sue’ syndrome, but still a good copper. ‘He’s given up on me, then? Or was it just that you drew the short straw this time?’

  ‘You always had an attitude. Lately it’s been worse, though. Something you want to talk about?’

  ‘Not really. We were never that close, Sooty. Even before you tried to rip my head off.’ Sooty’s temper could get the better of him. When he thought I was responsible for landing a senior officer in a coma, he hadn’t even asked me to explain myself.

  ‘Then let’s talk about the bomb.’

  ‘Someone placed it while we were in the club.’

  ‘Meaning they knew you were there?’

  ‘Guess so.’

  ‘Meaning they knew Robert was there?’

  ‘He’s the likeliest target.’

  ‘I don’t know, Steed. I can think of more than a few people who’d like to blow your arse into a million pieces.’

  ‘Most of them cops.’

  ‘Aye, that’s the problem.’ He shook his head. ‘But, for the sake of expediency and all that shite, I’m going to assume this wasn’t a copper.’

  ‘I wouldn’t assume anything. Wouldn’t even let you off the hook right now.’

  He looked ready to say something but held back. Maybe remembering how the last few times we’d talked, I’d been the man he blamed for fucking over other officers.

  Safe to say that me and Sooty were never going to be friends.

  ‘You need to tell me anything. Did you see anyone hanging around the car before the incident?’ He was keeping it calm. Professional. What’s it that they say about flies and honey?

  ‘Other than Kellen?’

  Again that catch in his expression. ‘Other than Kellen.’

  I thought about it. Back before the explosion. It was tough. My memory was caught in a groove, like an old vinyl with a deep scratch and the needle stuck in place.

  I jerked the needle.

  The track jumped back too far.

  In the club. Getting between Robert and the big guy. The hint of fear as everything was about to kick off.

  Jesus, the fucker could have broken my neck with his pinkie. Who would have thought false bravado and sobriety would win the day?

  I jerked the needle again. Caught another groove. Closer this time. Before the explosion. Before Kellen.

  The woman I’d thought was a little drunk. That smile playing around her lips. Flirtatious. But gently mocking.

  You boys have a blast.

  Don’t tell me there’s no such thing as a coincidence.

  ‘Anyone?’
/>   I shook my head. ‘No one.’ My voice sounded thick, and I was in danger of biting my own tongue when I closed my mouth. Like the first signs of drunkenness creeping in. But I hadn’t touched a drop all evening.

  The drugs kicking in. Finally. My body too light. My eyes too heavy.

  I said. ‘I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.’ Struggling to remember the words.

  Sooty didn’t believe me. I had this idea that I was a good liar, but anyone would be off their game when they’d just been blown off their feet by a car bomb.

  Still, he didn’t push it. Maybe wary after our last few encounters. Not sure if he’d want to murder me when I told the truth.

  ‘Play it your way,’ he said. ‘Watch the wall while the gentlemen go by. Pretend you know nothing. But don’t expect any favours from me.’

  ‘I never would.’

  ‘You’re playing a dangerous game. You know that much. Right?’

  ‘Aye. The game’s always dangerous.’

  He shook his head, closed the notepad and stood up. ‘We’ll talk again.’

  ‘I look forward to it.’

  ‘Oh.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I doubt that, Steed. I really do.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  I was discharged the next morning with mild bruising and no more than a few scrapes down my back. They burned when I pulled on a shirt. I didn’t mind. I was getting used to the pain. We were old friends, now.

  I took the bus to the city centre, gingerly spreading my weight across the seat, aware of every ache and tingle. The drugs don’t work? Aye, imagine how I’d be feeling without them.

  Back at the flat, I checked the second mobile, the one hidden behind the couch with the laptop. Six messages from Susan. I answered with one: ‘I’m OK.’

  Griggs had sent only one message.

  ‘Call me.’

  Aye, the very measure of concern.

  I didn’t call him. Instead, I ran the shower hot as I could and stood in the steam until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m a sucker for a strong shower. The pounding of the water. The white noise that becomes a haven. For a few minutes, I can be cut off from the world. I can exist as myself. Alone.