Hot Zone (Major Crimes Unit Book 2) (16 page)

If he died...would I still wear the heavy ring on my finger
that catches in my hair every time I wash it?

My phone buzzes in my bag.

It's her, I think. Or him.

I don't want to look. I'm tired and the ring on my finger's
so heavy.

'Girls,' I say. 'Need the loo. Hold that thought.'

I don't know what thought they're going to hold to, because
I'm not listening, and I really can't take the embarrassment of showing them
another photo of my husband's wayward ball bag.

II.

I pull the ring from my finger before I check my phone.

Think you're smart? Bring the drugs. Bring them here. We
have your husband.

I stare at the phone for a long time. Peg-leg, for sure. How
did he get my number? Some kind of drug dealer's secret gadget?

Does it matter? I'm not thinking all that straight.

I drop the ring, almost definitely more expensive than a
ring from Argos, into the toilet bowl. It's not a particularly satisfying
sound. I expect a splash, but it's louder when the heavy metal and stone hits
the porcelain below the water.

'Hmm,' I say. As good a eulogy as it deserves.

I flush it, but it won't go down. It's heavy and just sits
in the bowl.

So I sit and pee, because I don't need a poo, then I put plenty
of toilet paper in the bowl and try again. This time it's gone.

Keep him.

I smile, feeling light, at last. But peg-leg fires back a
text immediately, like he was staring at the phone, thumb hovering.

I'll keep him. In pieces. Bring the drugs.

A second later, the phone vibrates again. There's an address
with the text. Nothing else. No timescale, not covert instructions like in a
movie.

I really wish I hadn't left that note. Or...got married in
the first place. Peg-leg's got my husband, who I don't want. In exchange, I've
got to give peg-leg his drugs back...which I don't have.

Shit.

III.

'Mandy...I don't feel well...the shock...the stress...would
you mind if we just went home?'

Nicola and Mandy don't argue. I'm basically bereaved. I
could probably get them to do dirty dancing or something, right there in the
Windsor Bistro. The old widow has moved on.

So, too, have I.

That's what I think as I step outside, into the frigid air,
and hit something massive and immovable, like I'm drunk and I walked into a
wall. But I'm not drunk, and he's not a wall...feels like one, though. I bounce
off him and he catches me before I can land on my arse.

'Dave?' Mandy, questioning.

'Oh...you know each other?' He lets me go. He smiles, and
even his face is a wall. Like Mount Rushmore, only close up his head seems even
bigger than a carving on a mountain.

'Mandy...Nicola.' He nods.

'Are you...' Mandy sounds breathless, which I feel. The
cold's steals my wind, too.

He seems amiable, and they know each other. He smiles, and
I'm not worried. It's the kind of smile people respond to.

'No...nothing like that,' he tells her. I don't know what
they're talking about, but then people listening to me and the girl's talk
probably wouldn't know what we were on about, either.

'Dave,' he says to me. 'The butcher.'

'A pleasure,' I say, with a smile that I can't help on my
face, because his is so god-damn big. Like Santa, but darker. And where Santa's
fat...Dave, it seems, is made of bricks.

IV.

Home at last. Not where the heart is, but I least I keep the
baking stuff there.

The stuff I had in the pack looked like powder, rather than
crystals. Fairly close to white, I remember.

I figure peg-leg's going to know it's not the real thing as
soon as he looks...but I can pass off flour, I think, as a first gambit.

After that?

He's going to do something horrible to me...if he can.

I'm ticking over.

My favourite handbag is big, bordering on huge. I could put
two Pomeranians in there, maybe three, if I was so inclined. By the time I
leave the house it's pretty heavy, too. It's got a kilogram of flour and a
marble rolling pin in it.

I feel like some kind of terrified assassin. Codename: The
Baker.

I smile, even though I don't feel it. Like Dave the
Butcher.

Big bugger, he was. I bet he's all fingers and thumbs.

I turn toward the address on the text out of the driveway
and think about Butchers and Bakers and Candlestick Makers and drug-dealers
with peg-legs and my husband's balls, mashed into a carpet.

V.

I'm not sure if I'm thinking I'm Cagney or Lacey when I get
to the door. I'm certainly not Rosemary and Thyme or some cosy female
detective. I don't recall any of those preparing to brain a drug dealer with a
marble rolling pin.

I try to think like a police woman, or an assassin...but I
can't. I'm comfortably middle-aged, I've never hit anyone, and the rolling pin
is really, really heavy. I don't even know if I can swing it.

I push open the door...it's been left open.

I think about tumbling across the carpet, but if I do I see
I'll crack my arse on the bed. Either way, there's no one there, so that'd be
really daft.

VI.

There is a note on the bed, though.

Dear Old Bird,

You think you've got me pegged?
Think I'm an idiot?

Your husband's never coming home,
and your stuff? Now it's my stuff. What, did you think I wouldn't figure out
the shit in the kettle?

Your stuff's gone, your husband's my
bitch, and I'm coming for you. You won't know when, but I'm coming.

VII.

It's gone twelve when I finally get home. It's the sixth day
of Christmas, freezing cold outside with a hint of ice and feathery snow coming
from the black sky. It's freezing, but I'm still sweating.

I open the door. But he's not there, waiting with a gun.
Nothing like that. In fact, nothing at all.

My home is entirely empty.

The 6th
Day of Christmas

Stripped
Bare

I.

On the sixth day of Christmas, I wake up from sleeping in
the bath with my coat still wrapped round me, and three towels over my feet,
and I find dad raising his eyebrows, sitting on the toilet. He's watching me as
I open my eyes.

'Dad? I don't need the eyebrows. I feel enough of a tit,
thank you.'

He nods to this, then he's gone.

The bath's not a roll over and sleep it all away option,
which is probably for the best. This isn't a roll over and go to sleep kind of
problem. I could sleep on it and wake up dead.

Wake up dead?

What the hell does that even mean?

My hips ache as I clamber over the side of the sunken bath.
They ache deep inside, like I've been trying to do wheelbarrows with a porn
star. Maybe I'll make that a career. Do mummy porn, or whatever it's called.
MILF in the Tub, season one. Do porn movies have seasons, like Breaking Bad or
the X-Files or something? Do you get holidays and healthcare?

I don't know. It's not really an option, is it? But I'm up
shit creek. I probably have something like ten grand's worth of diamond left to
my name.

Fuck...it's not there...I...

Then I remember flushing the massive stone and the platinum
and white gold setting down a toilet in a cheesy bistro.

Genius.

But I'm not skint, am I? I've got credit cards and my
mobile phone.

I've got friends, right? Good friends. Mum, too. Mum's
handy in a pinch. I saw her knock a guy's teeth clean out of his head in her pub
once. I must have been six or seven. I remember them flying through the air,
little white stones, and thinking of the confetti at Aunty Bab's funeral.

Aunty Bab left that beauty in her will. Best funeral I ever
did attend. I was five, and still remembered it well enough at six or seven to
make that connection.

Why am I thinking about bloody funerals? And confetti? And
flying fucking teeth?

I know why. Because I'm so deep in the shit Pantene's not
going to get the stink from my hair. 

I'm glad I've got friends, got mum...I'm beginning to think
I might need them.

II.

A big house when you're on your own isn't brilliant. Don't
get me wrong, I prefer it to a cardboard box. It's warmer, for a start, and
better at keeping the rain off. But now it's empty, it feels like a cardboard
box. It's colder than I've known it. The heating's on, but with the house
barren, like this? Must be that furniture holds some heat, or keeps it in the
right place...I don't know.

It's cold.

I walk down the stairs, aching and shivering. The bath's
pretty uncomfortable. Falling asleep in the bath, surround by warm water full
of smells and bubbles, reading a book one-handed, the hand I try to keep
dry...that's not a bad way to spent time in the bath.

An empty bath's no friendlier than an empty big house.

And thinking I'm going to have a cup of tea or a bottle of
wine isn't going to get me far at all. He took everything. Literally. Pictures
and mirrors are gone from the walls. Every single piece of furniture is gone.
The heating is under the floor. He didn't take that, did he? And I don't think
for a second the peg-legged man carried out every single piece of furniture
alone, wibble-wobbling on his wooden leg with a sofa on his head.

Everything gone, like it is, in about four hours? He had to
have moving vans, and plenty of people. No one...no one, can move that fast.

I've been stripped bare, right down to the last cup, spoon,
the kettle, the milk in the fridge (and the fridge) and all the tea bags, too.

When I say barren, I'm not joking.

The wine cellar is empty. I don't even have a glass for
water, so I cup my hands, drink water from the tap. Then I sit on the kitchen
floor, my knees up to my chin, and dribble a tear or two while my phone rings
and I don't answer. It's Mandy, not the psychopath with friends, but I still
don't want to answer. The psychopathic peg-legged wankpot prefers notes to
phone calls and text messages. It seems he's an old-fashioned kind of lunatic.

Mandy's persistent, calling three times while I'm consoling
my knees. I hang up the phone on her each time...she's perfectly capable of
lending a shoulder to cry on, but I don't need her right now. What I do need is
time to think. Really think, for the first time in years, about how the fuck
I'm going to get this sorted without ending up shared equally between a few bin
bags, sinking under mucky water in a London river.

Peg-leg would do that. I'm under no illusions.

After a while, I realise I haven't thought about my
husband's predicament in the slightest. I know why, too. Because alive or dead,
it doesn't make a blind bit of difference. He'd be useless either way, and I
search my soul to see if I care about his continued existence in my life or
anyone else's...and I can't find anything there at all.

'I really don't care,' I say in the empty kitchen, trying
it out for size.

For the first time, that's something I tell myself that
doesn't sound like a lie.

III.

My friends turn up on the doorstep an hour later. I ignore
them, but they're far from daft. Nicola actually punches in one of the small
panes of glass on the front door, like some seventies cop. It makes me jump,
and when they find me in the kitchen, wearing last night's clothes with the
last of my make up running down my face, Nicola's short lived manic joy at
breaking things flees. My girls sit on the floor next to me and hold me while I
cry some more.

Finally, when we're all good and soggy, it's Mandy that
asks the burning question.

'Okay. You're not alone, we still love you...now lay it on
us. What kind of shit are you in?'

No sense in trying to cover anything up. Not sure I'd want
to. I think my hanging up was just as loud a cry for help as one out loud would
have been.

Because they're my friends...but because they're good
friends. The kind that don't ask who you killed, but where you want the hole
dug.

I tell them the one about the lonely housewife drugging
then pegging the drug dealer with his own wooden leg. Tell them the exact words
I used in the note. They don't want to laugh, but they do. But then when I show
them the texts from the mad man, they're serious. Then I show them the crumpled
notes, one from the empty hotel room, and one I found on the floor in hallway
when I walked into my bare home.

Old bird,

Be back soon. x

P.S. My peg's getting cold. :)

'Bloody hell, he loves a note, doesn't he?' Nicola's bosom's
trembling, like an early tremor before a big earthquake that wipes out a city.
I wouldn't make Nicola angry.

Maybe if he comes round, I'll sic my mate on him, like a
schoolyard fight. But it's not school kid stuff, is it?

'Well, I guess I only have myself to blame. I started it,
didn't I?'

Mandy laughs, loud, almost hysterical, making me and Nicola
jump.

'I'm sorry...but...you stuck his own leg up his arse?!
That's just the best thing I've heard all day.'

We all laugh for a while, and we're still laughing when
Mandy drives us away from my home, toward hers, and Nicola sends a text telling
their husband's what's going on. I don't really want a man's help, the girls
are just fine. But Nicola promises me, as does Mandy, that their fellas will
have an idea. They're good friends...I get the impression their husbands never
liked my husband, though the three of them were colleagues of some sort, at one
time. I know them...hell, we all know each other. Even mum knows the girls.
It's nice, in a way. It's community, and there's a lot to be said for that.
Knowing people, and knowing who you can trust when you really need to.