Country of the Blind (13 page)
Read Country of the Blind Online
Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Tags: #Mystery, #Contemporary, #Thriller, #Humour
"Don't call him Spammy. That's cruel. The boy's name is Cameron," Tam had told Paul sternly when his son was about nine, not wanting him party to the pack-instinct weirdo-baiting that kids enjoy and anthropologists enjoy even more.
69
"Call me Spammy," Spammy insisted, when Paul brought him along as the fourth member of the team.
He was a gangling, hairy galoot whose face always seemed to be saying
"I'll be back in a minute" and who could probably contrive to look sartorially dishevelled in just a pair of swimming trunks. Tam and Paul
had
to do this job. Not an issue. Bob had agreed out of friendship, loyalty and a desperate old man's need to ride out and taste the action one more time. But if anyone knew why Spammy had signed up then it sure as shite wasn't Spammy. For a while Tam had assumed Paul must know - some bond, some friendship thing, a debt, a favour - but when asked, Paul euphemistically explained that Spammy "kept his own counsel", quietly confiding that the Yeti's recent and most radical drug experimentation - abstinence - had made him even more inscrutable than anyone was used to. "If he gets hold of some acid and gets a handle on this situation from a perspective he's used to, he'll probably freak out and we'll never see him again," Paul warned, the morning before the job.
"Riding along in an army truck / In a humpity bumpity army truck," Spammy sang to himself, then giggled. The scrotey polisman/guard glared at him with a mixture of contempt, bafflement and wariness, which reminded Tam of Spammy's mysteriously protected status on the scheme in Meiklewood. "It's like a force-field," Paul had explained. Not even the hard-cases, psychos or the Meikle teeny "Kick to Kill Krew" hassled him. "He's just too weird."
Without conversation or a view it was impossible to track time or distance as the bus continued its journey, only the frequent halts, gear changes and turns suggesting that the surroundings must still be urban. Even speed was difficult to gauge, as the metal cabin seemed consistently shoogly regardless of velocity.
The vehicle took a very slow, strainingly sharp left turn, and failed to pick up momentum afterwards, which made Tam suspect they were climbing a hill until he felt two bumps underneath and heard more bleeps and radio interference outside. The bus slowed still further, each of them glancing fervently at the others, uniformly unprepared for whatever the next chapter might bring, reluctant to lose the comparatively easeful limbo of transit. It would be time for deep breaths and once more withdrawing into the self, pulling down the mask, hiding scared behind a stone face.
There was an excruciating, extrapolated moment of purgatory as they realised the bus had stopped and awaited the silencing of the engine, with all it would herald.
It never came.
They heard a door open ahead, and saw PC Clipboard hop out. More voices. Authoritative tones. Posh accents. Crap jokes. Sycophantic laughter.
70
Then the rear door was opened and the Wee Shite climbed in, cuffed and smirking, a cocksure erection of sinewy limbs. Tam clocked him right away, one half of a fight, impatient and unfussy about finding a partner.
Keelus Glas-
guensas Vulgaris
, the lesser-brained Glesca Keelie. A specimen so archetypal he should be in a zoo, where he could be exhibited for educational and instructional purposes. No, thought Tam. Make that a museum. They're infinitely less bother deid.
"Woah-ho," the Wee Shite announced, taking his place on the backmost seat, relaxing as if it was his own personal stretch-limo. "I'm in the presence of greatness. Yous kill't that Dutch cunt, didn't yous."
"Fuck off," Paul snapped as the door was slammed to once again. The Wee Shite put his hands up.
"Awright. Nae bother, chief," he said, all mock gravity. "I'm not messin' wi'
yous cunts. Yous are fuckin' mental. Fuckin' hard bastarts, eh? Better watch my fuckin' mooth, eh?"
"Just ignore him, Paul," Tam stated flatly.
"Aye, that's right, faither," the Wee Shite yelped. "Don't be consorting with the likes of that scruff," he added with theatrical articulacy. "You might end up in the jile."
At this he cackled throatily for a while; then, content that he had reaffirmed his status as the world's wittiest man, he sat back in his seat, cuffed hands behind his head, and began to whistle
The Sash
. PC Clipboard clambered back into the cab, minus the eponymous article, and looking rather distraught for the loss of it.
"Bloody circus, so it is," he told the driver. "Waving orders from on high, and you've to jump when they clap their hands. As if it's no stupid enough comin' over here to pick that wee shite up, they've took my records off me. Comin' out with all this Top Secret, Need To Know shite."
"So what happens to the order, the file?" the driver enquired.
"Fuck knows, Davie.
He
's away with it. I says I need a copy as well, but he gie'd me more shite about orders from above. I tell't him, I says if anythin'
happens, I've no record of who's on this bus. Prick just says 'Well you'd better not let anything happen then.'"
"But he's got record of it, hasn't he?"
"Aye, but. . . "
"Well it doesnae matter if you haven't."
"Aye, but it's the principle."
"Aw, haud your wheesht, Alec," said the driver with a small laugh, putting the bus into reverse and pulling away.
After that, time seemed to dissolve. Tam could see less through the tinted 71
panel and guessed the light was starting slowly to fail outside. The jolts of junctions and the pull and drag of turns had ceased, he realised, gradually appreciating their absence. Open road, maybe even motorway. There had been a syncopated beat beneath the wheels - ka-clomp, ka-clomp, ka-clomp
- which he took to mean they were crossing a bridge, and he guessed at the Forth. After that, the disorientation was complete, with nothing to suggest change in direction, speed or distance. They could have been circling Knockhill race-track for all they knew. The numbness of it was frightening. It fuelled paranoia, like you had a bag over your head and your hands tied behind your back, and you had been forced through a door into a room that might be full of boxers or might be full of nothing at all.
All thoughts turned inwards and backwards. That was when Paul had started to panic, and Tam had tried to comfort him.
"Aw, that's dead touchin', so it is," offered the Wee Shite, who had temporarily given up baiting his travelling companions in protest at their concerted policy of ignoring him.
"That's like, hingmy, the softer side of the beasts or somethin'. Cold-blooded killers wi' hearts of gold an' that, no?"
"We never fuckin' killed anybody, right?" hissed Paul, shooting him a furious glare.
"Aw, it's an injustice case, is it? We'll have to get a campaign goin' well. 'Free the Dutch Cunt Four'. That's got a ring to it, eh? Free the Dutch Cunt Four. Free-the-Dutch-Cunt-Four," he started chanting. "Free-the-Dutch-Cunt-Four."
The Wee Shite began stamping his feet and clapping his hands in rhythm with his chant.
"Now see what you've done?" Tam muttered. Paul rolled his eyes apologetically.
"THAT'S ENOUGH OF THAT," the guard yelled, throwing down his newspaper and standing up, hands on his weapon, upon which the Wee Shite desisted. "Christ's sake," the guard mumbled, sitting back down. "Like a bloody school trip."
The sound of the engine and the passing cars outside filled the bus, seemingly louder as a wordless vacuum grew.
"I'm bored," Spammy suddenly and loudly decided, probably an hour after everyone else had arrived at that position. "Anybody for a gemme of I-Spy?"
Tam, of course, shook his head.
"Aye," shouted the Wee Shite, thus declaring that he was the only one not to get the joke. "I spy with my little eye, somethin' beginnin' with. . . hingmy, M C."
72
Bob sighed loudly and turned to the black window, pretending to stare out of it, then began banging his head against the glass.
"A muwllyin green bottles, hangin' on the wall," sang Spammy. Bob banged his head harder.
"Do yous give in?" asked the Wee Shite, ignoring the fact that none of them had given any indication of actually taking part.
"Awright," he announced triumphantly. "I'll tell yous. It's. . . "
"Miserable Cunts," said everyone else, including the guard, in monotonal unison.
This had the satisfying effect of shutting the Wee Shite up, but obviously made it unclear whose go it was next, had anyone wished to continue the game.
The driver and PC Clipboard, being in the cab at the front, were not included, but just out of interest, what they saw with their little eyes - for all of a quarter of a second before they hit it at sixty miles an hour - began with C. What Tam would mainly remember was the noise, a single, percussive, metallic BANG that seemed to boom at them from all four walls of their steel chamber, imploding upon them with a fury and ferocity he'd never known sound could possess.
The room
had
been full of boxers.
With the eruption of terrifying sound came a rapidly accelerating lurch to the left, which threw all of them to the right. Tam was cushioned by Paul's body between him and the window, and he gripped the handrail on top of the seat in front, pulling against the G-force to prevent his bulk crushing his son against the wall. Bob was thrown towards Spammy, but slammed into the side of the seat opposite rather than directly across the aisle, as the angle of swerve altered erratically.
The guard was thrown like a teddy in a tantrum from his rear-facing folddown seat, flailing along the front panel and meeting the outside wall mercifully below the glass. The Wee Shite, with both cuffed hands gripping the rail and his right foot wedged hard against the base of the seat in front, was the only person sitting on the left not to leave his position.
The driver's consciousness returned from a terrified moment's suspended animation, and he turned the wheel furiously against the swerve. This had the inevitable effect of throwing everyone in the bus back towards the left, although with less force and, vitally, less suddenness. Feeling the gut-shifting lurch as his innards suffered whiplash, Tam clenched his fingers tighter around the rail and jammed his left leg into the aisle, keeping himself in position and forming a barrier to prevent Paul being thrown past him. In fact, all of them managed to get a grip on something as the bus 73
swung back against its previous momentum. Unfortunately these measures weren't quite so effective when it tipped over on to its side. There was a scream like a thousand steel-gauntletted fingers down an old blackboard in an echo chamber, the soul-piercing shriek of a hyena with its balls cut off - in fact possibly at that very moment of deep personal and physical loss - as the bus skidded grindingly along the tarmac. When it came to a halt, there was a fleeting moment of intense silence, just long enough for Tam to appreciate the pitch and volume of the ringing in his ears, a moment of stillness and paranoid anticipation, as if they each suspected a further unseen onslaught.
Then came the sighs and exhalations of the relieved, and the strained moans of the injured.
They had all finished up corralled on the side of the bus, partitioned off from one another by the rows of seats, squatting or crumpled amidst the fragments of black glass. Facial cuts seemed to have come as standard. Paul was nursing his upper arm, which was bloody and raw-looking through a rip in the sweatshirt the cops had given him. With the window shattered, his shoulder had been scraping along the hard road surface for a few seconds before he could drag himself clear of the gap.
Tam had rattled both thighs off something metal, probably a seat-back, when the tipping motion sent them all into the air. The dull ache was like having the whole weight of the bus rested on his legs, but he knew he'd be all right to walk - albeit painfully - after a few moments. He had taken whacks to the same place in his footballing days from centre-halves carrying more bulk than the bus. He just wished someone had a magic sponge. Spammy was the first to stand. He shook his shaggy black locks and a small shower of glass fragments precipitated from them, like fairy dust, giving him an even more ethereal appearance. Apart from the basic minimum of a small cut on his right cheek, he seemed completely unharmed. He didn't even look any more dazed than usual as he opened his eyes wide and took in his upturned surroundings.
Tam remembered a theory that a man would sustain fewer injuries from a crash or a fall if he was asleep at the time, as his relaxed state would make him more supple. Spammy's general unscathedness seemed to bear this out rather convincingly.
The Wee Shite was clutching at one knee with his cuffed hands, swearing and muttering, but apparently out of annoyance more than distress. It was as if he was furious that you couldn't get through a high-speed crash these days without hurting yourself.
"Aw, fuck's sake," mumbled Spammy ominously, stepping over to squat beside Bob, who was grimacing and spluttering, his hands tentatively feeling 74
their way down his leg. His foot was trapped amidst a tangle of bent metal, a long splinter of wood from the wrecked seat-back jutting into his calf, from where blood was steadily trickling.
"Want to give us a hand here?" Spammy said, not taking his eyes off Bob's foot, but waving a hand above his head in case anyone was in doubt as to who was talking.
Tam and Paul trod delicately across the hazardous surface, watching where they placed each step amongst the newly formed stalagmites of glass and twisted metal.
"Aw Jesus," Paul said, but he wasn't looking at Bob.
Beyond the last double seat, the guard lay slumped, contorted and broken. His blank eyes stared forward above a smashed and gushing nose, his head twisted at an impossible angle to his shoulders, his neck snapped like an expired cheque card by the strap of his gun, which had snagged on a loose bolt as the bus tipped on to its side.
Paul crouched before him, automatically feeling at the polisman's wrist for a pulse despite not really knowing how to find one. He released his grip on the limp arm and let his head fall into his hands, taking deep breaths and swallowing hard.
