Rabbit. Maybe. Could’ve been. He couldn’t really tell at this distance.
Terry reached for the bat.
The lad turned a little, and then Terry saw it, the tattoo, the one of what Marto had called a Jew star. It was large and spindly and blue, and it covered the left side of Rabbit’s neck from shoulder to just under the ear. Couldn’t miss it.
And then he was gone, ducked inside the Addictions place.
Terry took another swig of water, a large one. No longer worried about needing a piss. This would be over soon enough. He felt the weight of the rounders bat and breathed through his nose. His heart threw itself against the inside of his ribcage, and he noticed a tremor in his arms. He didn’t know how long Rabbit was going to be in there, but he needed to get himself sorted for when the lad came out. He wouldn’t get many chances like this, not if the lad was a runner.
So he focused on the entrance to the Addictions. Pictured the lad going up the stairs to reception, taking a seat. If he was on licence, he was probably doing a piss test, and it didn’t take very long to drop off a sample. Terry watched a couple of blokes, same loose limbs as the rest of the smackheads who’d been in there this morning, and his gut lurched. He hadn’t thought about witnesses, had it all planned different.
The two blokes stopped by the entrance, their backs to the door. One of them, a gadgie with long black hair, lit a tab and passed the pack to his mate, who had the strong but fattish build of a doorman.
Fuck it, it didn’t matter if there were people around or not.
Three minutes by the clock in the dash, and Rabbit stepped out of the Addictions. Terry pushed out of the car in one movement, picking up the bat as he went. Kept his head down, thinking it was now or never, thinking about the missus, thinking about the kids, thinking about the broken conservatory window and the stolen jewellery, PS3 and DVDs. Thinking about that junkie fuckin’ scum, deserves everything he gets, and getting his blood up so Terry could do this, go back to his missus and tell her everything was okay, everything was sorted, that she could sleep tonight safe in the knowledge that the man who’d violated their home was twitching in the gutter outside the Substance Abuse Team office—
He heard a scream, and a car alarm went off.
“Howeh, the fuckin’ money, Rabbit, eh? You fuckin’ holding or what?”
Terry looked up. Saw the doorman with Rabbit thrown up on to the bonnet of an old-style Merc, and Rabbit was trying to yell for help through the blood in his mouth. The bloke with the long black hair had something in his hand, something wicked sharp that caught the light and flashed it across the tarmac, while the doorman went to work on Rabbit’s gut.
Terry ran towards them. Couldn’t help himself. He yelled at them, the words scrambling out of his mouth before he had a chance to stop and think. “Fuck off, the pair of youse, he’s mine.”
The doorman turned his head, the other bloke stepping back. Both glanced at the bat in Terry’s hand, then at the look in his eyes. Terry kept walking, couldn’t stop now. The doorman laughed and let Rabbit slide off the bonnet, then the pair of them started backing off.
“Fuckin’ hell, Rabbit, you’re popular the day, aren’t you?” The bloke with the hair grinned at Terry. “You’re welcome to sloppy seconds, mate.”
Terry raised the bat, and the two men moved a little quicker. The car alarm still shrieked, made his head hurt. Rabbit lay in a pile on the tarmac. Blood all over his face. Already beaten. There was a gash in his side, and his T-shirt was soaked red, but he was still breathing. Terry looked up at the Addictions building; people in the windows, looking back at him and Rabbit.
His arms buzzed with adrenaline, and he was aware he was breathing through his teeth.
Rabbit looked up. “Thanks, man.”
Terry felt the energy drain from him, and he lowered the bat. His brain screamed at him to use it, but his body had other ideas. He looked around him, and he felt like crying. He gripped the bat in both hands like handlebars, then threw it on to the tarmac. It clattered and rolled towards the Merc. Rabbit watched it, then looked back up at Terry. “I know you?”
Terry heard sirens through the wail of the car alarm. Probably an ambulance, probably for Rabbit, and probably called by the Addictions staff who were watching him right now.
“Nah,” he said. “You don’t know me, kidda.”
And he turned back to the car where he slept like a baby for the first time in weeks.
Slow Burn
Simon Brett
Murder rates always rise during the Christmas holiday period, and Greg Lincoln was determined to add to them. Just by one. The additional statistic would be his wife Shelley.
It’s not on Christmas Day itself that the bulk of the murders happen. Most relationships can survive the enforced bonhomie for sixteen waking hours (particularly when some are spent comatose in front of bland television). It’s in the days afterwards, the inert sag between Christmas and New Year, that’s when people turn homicidal.
The Lincolns had married because Greg had been attracted to Shelley’s money, and Shelley had been attracted to... Actually, Greg never knew exactly what it was in his character that had attracted her. He had reasonably good looks and suave manners, but even he recognized that he had no moral qualities whatsoever. Still, Shelley, a good Catholic girl, had agreed to marry him. Maybe he was the only man who had ever asked her. The fact had to be faced, she wasn’t that pretty. But she was beautifully rich.
She was also rather mousey, which suited Greg very well. He’d never wanted a wife who would be too assertive, or who might question the lifestyle choices he had made. In this sense Shelley was perfect. She never suggested — as some wives might have done — that perhaps he ought to do some work and thereby make a contribution to their mutual finances. Nor did she show unhealthy curiosity as to how he spent his time away from home. She accepted his mumbled excuses about “going off to play a round of golf”, without ever wondering why the golf bag in the boot of his BMW still looked as fresh as when it came out of the shop. Shelley’s lack of curiosity was convenient, as it was years since Greg had stepped inside a golf club. And the only “playing around” he did was in the bedrooms of bored Sussex housewives.
Perhaps, he sometimes idly wondered, Shelley was unsuspicious simply because she was so preoccupied with her two obsessions. The first of these was her Catholic faith. To Greg, who had never believed in anything except for his own superiority, this was no more than a puzzling eccentricity. Shelley’s second obsession he found equally inexplicable. Gardening. Greg Lincoln’s lips could not shape the word without an expression of contempt. To him one plant looked much like another, and none of them was very interesting. But to Shelley her inheritance from her parents, not Lovelock Manor itself but the garden surrounding it, was her raison d’être. She was never happier than when spending long hours with her gardener Dan in his shed, discussing their plans for the forthcoming season.
Though unable to understand his wife’s horticultural obsession, Greg concluded with a mental shrug that it didn’t do any harm. And, so long as the garden kept her from taking too much interest in his activities, it was all fine by him.
So that was the Lincolns’ marriage, no better and probably no worse than many another. Greg had announced early on that he didn’t want to have children, a decision that Shelley, though it challenged her Catholic principles, had greeted with characteristic meekness. They still had occasional sexual encounters, on days when Greg hadn’t managed to find a convenient bored housewife, but with decreasing frequency. Whether Shelley enjoyed these interludes, or regretted their dwindling away, Greg had no idea.