“Sure. I guess how you handle that one is up to you.”
The clinic was fluorescent white. I wore a uniform of unwashed blue, sensible shoes, too much lipstick, not enough coffee. I’d been watching the TV until the knock at my door. The screen showed poker, a camera pointing straight down at a green table, hands moving in and out as cards were flipped, chances lost. I let it play. A small reception area stood empty. The light of a vending machine glowed in a shadowed corner; the shutter was down across the desk. Little rooms led off either side of a corridor, within them plastic beds draped with white. I checked doors until I found the most secure, patted down my pockets, found a bunch of keys. Lady Luck smiled on me that day–the door was all bolts and levers, not a combination to be found. Three of my eleven keys fitted the locks; the door opened.
The room beyond was a paradise of nasty drugs for nasty diseases. French pharmacies; nowhere in the world can you find as many potentially toxic formulas so readily available. The painkillers weren’t hard to find–the most secure box in the room once again yielded to a heavy-duty key. The clinic’s blood supplies were a bare minimum; the packs already had their intended destinations written on, for this old gentleman who can’t make it to the hospital for his transfusion; for that young lady whose DNA turned against her before she was born. I stole a couple of pints, stuffed a plastic bag with saline, needles, sterile wipes, fresh bandages, sedatives and the long-hooked edge of a suture needle.
On the TV a player had folded, his last few chips taken by a rival. The crowd cheered, the presenter whooped as the broken contestant walked away to the swirl of golden lights. I let myself out, leaving all as I had found it.
Coyle sat where I had left him, and I was surprised.
The gun was in his lap, his head against the side of the staircase, his breathing long and ragged. He half-turned his head as I approached. “Find… what you need?” Words came hard and slow. I helped him to his feet, supporting him gingerly, my hands either side of his chest.
“Yes. Put the gun away.”
“Thought you wanted… me to shoot someone.”
“I’ve been this nurse for less than five minutes. People lose five minutes all the time. It’s late, the dead of night. She can imagine that we came, imagine that we went, imagine that she imagined it. It’s better that way.”
“You do this a lot?” he asked, tucking the gun beneath the jacket draped loosely across his shoulders.
“Not habitually. Hold this.”
He took the plastic bag I offered, out of instinct rather than choice. Offer a hand to shake, a bag to hold; do it fast enough, people don’t think. As his fingers closed about the handle, my fingers closed about his and with a deep breath I
looked up into the nurse’s eyes as she staggered and swayed.
Felt the pain pound through my body, nearly knocking me down.
Gripped the plastic bag tighter in my hand, turned and walked away.
In the clinic upstairs the TV played, the clock ticked, the lights burned, and nothing had changed between this minute and the last.
Back in the van.
I cut the man down who I’d suspended by his hands from a coat hook, and as his fingers came free, I jumped, faster than he could swing.
Coyle slumped to the floor as I spluttered dirty wool and pulled the balaclava from between my lips. My arms ached, my wrists were stung from a silent fight I’d had against my restraints. I eased Coyle on to his back, pulled the blanket over him once again, breathed, I have sedatives. I have painkillers.
Fuck your drugs, he replied, though I didn’t think he felt the bravery in his words.
I drove a few miles, parked in an empty car park behind a shuttered warehouse where the CCTV cameras would not roam, settled down to work. I slung the first bag of blood from the same hook on the ceiling to which I had been tied. Peeled back the dressing from his wound, shone a torch into the bloody mess. Entry wound only, low calibre, I could still see the crunched-up end of the bullet gleaming near the surface of the skin. In the dark Coyle’s hand grabbed my arm by the sleeve, then remembered its repulsion and slowly let go. “You… know anything about medicine?” he asked.
“Sure. Somewhere there’s someone with most of a degree I earned.”
“That doesn’t comfort me.”
I swapped the bandages, left the bullet there. “Morphine?”
“No.”
“It’s your body.”
I felt his glare at the back of my neck as I climbed into the driver’s seat.
Chapter 74
A service station on a winding motorway through the mountains.
Coyle didn’t sleep, but neither did he speak, wrapped in blankets in the back of the van.
My body didn’t carry money. Guns, knives–no cash.
I went into the service station anyway, ordered black coffee, two croque monsieurs. When I reached the bleary-eyed woman serving behind the counter, I put my coffee down, caught her by the hand. My former host swayed, dizzy and confused, and I opened the drawer of the till, grabbed a bundle of euros, pressed it into his fist.
His eyes had just about regained their focus, enough to look at me, to register my skin on his, before I jumped back.
I handed the cashier a twenty-euro note, and she seemed surprised to find her till already open, but looking into my smiling face she shook herself and asked no questions.
I perched on a cold metal bench beneath a red slate awning and let the coffee cool, untouched, by my side. A wet yellow sun was beginning to push up from the horizon, tiny and angry against a drained grey sky. It seemed a morning into which no colour could creep, try as it might. Low mist clung to the grass at the edge of the tarmac. Fat lorries grumbled away from the petrol pumps, engines roaring up to speed as they slipped on to the motorway.
I finished my sandwich and turned the mobile phone back on.
It took a while, settled down, showed a text message: Do you like what you see?
And then another, sent a few minutes later, its sender unable to resist: This one’s for you.
Smiley face.
A many-chinned driver, his padded red jacket flapping around his belly, passed me by. I asked him for the time, and as he made to answer caught his wrist, jumped, took the mobile phone from the proffered, unresisting hand, dropped it into my pocket, jumped back.
Less than five seconds.
Three, at a pinch.
I still felt my host’s dizziness from my last departure.
Six thirty a.m., the driver told me when he stopped swaying. Better get moving before the traffic thickens.
In the gents’ toilet I slipped into a cubicle, rolled up my sleeve, found a vein and pushed ten millilitres of sedative into my veins. This done, I stepped out, walked up to a man at the urinal and, speech already slurring, said, “Hit me.”
He half-turned, so I grabbed him and
switched
trousers still around my knees, I hit him as hard as I could.
I was a big man, and what I lacked in regular exercise, I made up for with mass. Besides, the other guy was sedated.
He really didn’t stand a chance.
Dawn in a French service station.
I look for a car.
Not a lorry–too many people have vested interests in lorries making it to their final destination. Night staff coming off shift are ideal, but it takes switches through
truck driver, breath stinking of mints, to
policeman, back heavy, an ache all down my left side, to
cleaning lady
ah, the cleaning lady. Blue apron, dyed black hair, pale skin, thin arms, she’s finished mopping the floor, and as I pause and check her pockets I find that I am the owner of a wallet with forty euros in, I have no pictures of family or loved ones, my mobile is off, ancient and unloved, and I am–blessed be–carrying a set of car keys.