The Deep Dark Sleep

‘Pushy but persuasive,’ I said, still trying to measure the distance. I decided this was probably a no-sudden-moves-situation. ‘Okay, friend, what’s this all about?’

‘You’re sticking your nose into this Strachan business. I want to know why.’

‘I’m naturally curious,’ I quipped, and he quipped back by slamming a fist into my kidney. The impact jarred my cheek into the wall and drove every drop of air out of my lungs. I dug my fingers into the wall as I gasped in the tarry, damp fug. He gave me the time to recover.

‘I’ll ask you the same question, Lennox, but if you smart-mouth me again, you’ll end up pissing blood for a month. Got me?’

I nodded, still incapable of speaking and sucking air into tortured lungs.

‘You’re going to drop the whole Strachan thing, you got that? You’re going to walk away from it for good. If you don’t, you’ll end up at the bottom of the Clyde yourself. Now, I want to know why you’ve been asking about Joe Strachan. What’s he to you?’

‘Work,’ I said through tight teeth. ‘That’s all. I was hired to.’

The pain in my side was intense and nauseous. My pulse throbbed hard and sore in my head. This guy knew what he was doing but I knew that if I played along and didn’t do anything stupid, I’d probably walk away from this.

But the truth was that this guy was pushing my buttons. All the wrong buttons. The kind of buttons that made me want to play anything but nicely. The kind of buttons that stripped away ten years of civilian life and took me back to a place no one wanted me to be.

‘Who hired you?’ he asked, forgetting to give the r a celtic roll. Whoever he was, he was working hard at hiding it.

I let go a long gasp, clutching my side where he had hit me, and started to bend sideways.

‘I’m going to be sick …’ I leant away from the wall and down, my hand braced against it. I heard a muffled step backwards. He was probably trying to work out if I was genuine or making a move. I leaned deeper and began retching. I could see his shoes: tan suede with soft soles; the reason I didn’t hear him behind me. His feet were planted square and resolutely: there was nothing tentative about this guy. If I made a move he’d be ready for it.

But I made it anyway.

I heaved against the wall with the hand I had been resting on it and thrust myself at him with the loudest scream I could manage: it was he who had to worry about attracting attention, not me. I saw he was about my age and well built, and definitely not Gentleman Joe, ghost or otherwise. Fixing my attention on the gun, I didn’t have a chance to take in his face. He moved swiftly to one side, anticipating my lunge, but I swiped at him with a fist that skimmed his jaw. He swung a foot that caught me across the shins and I went sprawling on the cobbles.

I rolled as soon as I hit the ground, depriving him of an easy target, but he didn’t fire. Instead, as I struggled to get up, I saw the gun arc through the smog in a vicious slash at my temple. I took most of the power out of the blow by blocking it with my left forearm and made an unsuccessful grab for the pistol with my other hand, at the same time slamming my heel upwards into his groin. I missed but caught him in the belly and he doubled. When it comes to a fight with a gun, possession is more than nine-tenths of the law and I made another grab for it. Instead of pulling against me, as most people would do instinctively, he pushed into me as I pulled and slammed the butt of the gun into my cheek, using my own force against me. We had obviously gone to the same finishing school. I felt something wet on my cheek and felt the world take a brief but perceptible wobble.

He staggered back to his feet and I saw him raise the gun to take aim. I was halfway to my feet too and dived to one side, again rolling several times before leaping up and running. I had lost all sense of direction in the smog, but as there seemed to be an upward incline beneath my feet, I guessed I was actually heading further up the side street, away from the main road. I was hidden in the smog now. But so was he, and, unlike mine, his shoes made no sound on the cobbles.

I sprinted blindly a few yards then stopped, pressing myself against the wall. I eased forward slowly, making as little sound as I could. I found a bricked-up doorway, pressed myself into it and waited for the first shot to be fired, hopefully in the direction of where I had been, rather than where I now was. But there were no shots.

I had only managed a swift look at his face, and when I had seen it, the features had been twisted into a snarl. I had gotten just enough of a view to see that he had dark hair and a hard, angular face. I was also pretty sure I had seen an ugly scar on his forehead. He wasn’t someone I had seen before.