The Damage (David Blake 2) (26 page)

‘There’s something I need to show you,’ and he jerked his head toward his car. It was parked a few metres away. I followed him over even though I’d reached the stage where I had no idea who to trust any more. Palmer looked round, popped the boot and held it half open, just enough so I could see inside. There was a man in there. He wasn’t moving. I was no expert but, if I’d been forced to offer a diagnosis, I’d have said he had a broken neck.

‘They came after me too,’ Palmer told me.

‘What happened?’

‘I came home,’ he explained, ‘this guy was waiting for me, in the house.’

‘How did you spot him?’

‘I mark my door,’ he was evasive, ‘if someone’s in there I know about it.’ It seemed that was all the explanation I was going to get from him. I’d heard about people putting blocks or indistinguishable signs on their front doors and checking them when they came home each night but it was all a bit John Le Carré and I was wondering how a former solider had picked up the habit.

‘Figured I’d get rid of them both at the same time.’ It seemed there was still a lot I didn’t know about Palmer but, wherever he’d picked up his skills, it was clear he’d been too good for the bloke in the boot of his car.

I wasn’t really listening because a thought had struck me. Someone had been sent to kill me and another man to kill Palmer, at the same time, on the same night. Kinane hadn’t been home so they’d not been able to get to him, but what about the others?

‘Get on the phones to everyone,’ I said, ‘make sure no one else has had a visitor tonight.’ I picked up my own phone and dialled Danny. No answer. Where the hell was he?

It didn’t take long before we got the news. I was in Kinane’s car a few minutes later when my phone rang. It was Sharp, he sounded panicky. ‘Are you okay? Has something happened?’

‘You could say that,’ I answered, ‘but yes, I am okay. Why? What have you heard?’ I was wondering how Sharp could have known about this latest attempt on my life.

‘All hell’s broken loose. It’s like the Night of the fucking Long Knives. Someone got to Hunter. He’s dead.’

‘Hunter? Oh Christ, no.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Hunter had been part of Bobby’s crew since anyone could remember and now he was gone. I felt like our world was caving in around us.

‘There’s more,’ he told me, as if Hunter dying was the least of our worries, ‘it’s your brother, he’s been shot.’

.......................

I
should have known we wouldn’t get anywhere near him. The Police were down at the hospital already, a couple of uniforms making their presence felt, ensuring they were visible in case anyone tried to finish my brother off, but they let me talk to the guy on the desk about Danny. He told me my brother was having emergency surgery and it was unlikely there would be any news for some time. I would have to prepare myself for a long wait. I told him I didn’t mind. He also told me that my brother had been very seriously injured. He didn’t add that I should prepare myself for the worst. He didn’t have to.

I turned away from the desk to find DI Carlton facing me. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your brother,’ he said.

‘Like fuck you are.’

‘I am,’ he said calmly, ‘seriously. I’ve had a word with the docs because I thought you’d want to know. He’s been shot three times, back and arm, it doesn’t look good, even if he pulls through,’ which I took to mean that Danny would be permanently fucked up. I had a sudden urge to throw up.

I managed to walk over to the row of bright red plastic chairs at the opposite end of the room. My brain was picking out little insignificant details, presumably as a coping mechanism, like the fact that all of the red chairs were screwed onto one large metal frame, which in turn was cemented to the floor. I surmised it was safer than having individual chairs that could be picked up and thrown about by Saturday night casualties who were still fighting drunk. It would be heaving in here on a weekend, full of people who’d been stabbed, slashed or glassed, but it was quiet tonight. I sat down heavily, put my elbows on my knees and brought my hands up to my face to rub my eyes. It looked like I’d be here all night.

I’d killed a man less than an hour ago. Now I was waiting for news of my brother’s death or, if I was exceptionally lucky, they would come out and tell me he was paralysed or brain dead.

I realised DI Carlton had sat down next to me. ‘You know that whoever did this to Danny is not going to stop, right?’ he told me, in what he must have considered his most reasonable tone. ‘They are going to keep on coming after you. It’ll be you next,’ he said.

I took my hands away from my eyes and sat up, but said nothing.

‘Tell us who’s behind this and we can stop it,’ he assured me, which was a crock of shit. Even if I had a theory there’d be no proof, no evidence and nothing to go on. ‘Let us protect you,’ Carlton urged. ‘It won’t do you any good, this false code of silence, there’s no such thing as
Omertà
in Geordieland, you know. Tell me what you know now and I can help you. That’s the best offer you are going to get this century. You know that.’

‘You finished?’ I asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘Then can I please ask you, respectfully, to fuck off and leave me alone?’

He looked at me like I wasn’t worth the effort of keeping up the nice-guy façade, then he climbed to his feet and went.

I waited there all night, and he was still in surgery when I left. I made them promise to call me the moment the surgeon emerged. Only then would I agree to leave.

I got in my car and went to meet Sharp at the Angel of the North. I’d sent him a cryptic text from my pay-as-you-go mobile and it was as good a venue as any to arrange to bump into him. There was a biting wind that morning so no one else was waiting beneath its rusting wings.

‘What do you know?’ I asked, as soon as he reached me.

‘There’s a witness,’ Sharp said, ‘young lass, a student at the Uni. She saw the guy who shot your brother on the way out of the bar. They’re trying to get a photo-fit, but it’s tricky. He wore sunglasses and a hat so I’m not sure how much use she’ll be.’

‘Can we get to her?’

‘Course not, she’s under twenty-four-hour protection. She’s witnessed a shooting and clocked the hit man. They won’t let her out of their sight.’

‘Then you have to get me the CCTV footage for the place. I’m assuming it had cameras.’

Sharp snorted, ‘Yeah, course it did, but I can’t get it for you.’

‘You’re going to have to.’

‘How do you expect me to do that? Detectives are poring over it right now. I can’t just walk in and borrow it.’

‘I’m not asking, Sharp,’ I told him, ‘it’s an order. I give them from time to time, so you’d better start remembering whose payroll you’re on.’

‘Of course I remember – but I have to draw a line sometime or they’ll give me ten years. They’ll put me in the cell next to your man Toddy.’

I leaned forward and grabbed Sharp by the lapel of his coat, pulling him towards me. I didn’t hit him because I couldn’t trust myself to stop, ‘just get me the film!’ I shouted the words into his face, then I pushed him back hard and he fell to the ground with a shocked look on his face.

I didn’t hang around to watch him pick himself up. I strode back to my car, climbed in and drove away. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d been up all night waiting for Danny to open his eyes and I was beside myself with worry for my older brother. Hunter, a man I had known since I was a kid, was lying on a mortuary slab and I was certain someone in our crew was selling us all down the river. How else could anyone know about the town house, Hunter’s home address or Danny’s protection money collection? I was so fucking tired I just wanted to curl up somewhere and forget the world, but somehow I had to keep my mind straight and work this one out because right now I couldn’t trust anyone else to do it for me.

I suddenly realised I was driving at more than a hundred miles an hour, speeding past the other cars on the main road like they were standing still, and I hadn’t even noticed. I forced myself to brake. I realised I was in a panic because I had no idea how to fix things, but I knew I had to stay alive, and there was one thing I was clinging to that would keep me going. I wanted revenge. I wanted to get hold of the man who had done this to my brother and I was going to make him pay.

.......................

T
he waiting room outside an intensive care unit is the most hopeless place. The patients on the other side of those big, grey double-doors with their porthole windows are nearly all in a permanent state of medicated sleep, which means they can give nothing back to the people visiting them. I’d see the visitors traipsing out looking lost, ruined and guilty all at once. Every time the doors opened I’d peer in, hoping for a glimpse of Danny, but he was out of sight. I wanted to march straight in there, but I knew the detective on the door would never let me do that.

I waited an age until the consultant finally appeared. He was a tall, authoritative man with an evidently unbending faith in his abilities. He was determined to leave me with the impression that whether Danny lived or died might be down to my brother’s strength or the fates, but never the unquestioned skills of his surgeon.

‘It was a very difficult operation. Daniel is lucky to be alive,’ lucky wasn’t the word I would have chosen, ‘the position of the bullets made the procedure a particularly delicate one.’ He went on to outline some of those complications in detail, but I didn’t really take it all in until he ended a sentence with the words, ‘and there is spinal damage.’

‘We are far from certain that your brother is going to survive,’ he told me, with an honesty I craved, but at the same time hated him for, ‘however Daniel is a strong, fit man, which gives him a chance,’ how much of a chance he wasn’t prepared to reveal. ‘You must be aware though that, if he does make it, the damage to his spinal column is so extensive that it is unlikely he will ever walk again.’

It’s strange the tricks your brain pulls on you to keep you going. I heard the words, and instantly understood what they meant, but somehow I managed to rabbit on to the consultant as if it was all going to be alright. I wanted to thank him and his team for all of the work they had done to save my brother’s life, I told him, and he reminded me there was no guarantee of that outcome. Nonetheless, I assured him, I was eternally gratefully to them all and would never forget their efforts. I took hold of his hand to shake it while I was talking to him and forgot to let go. I just carried on pumping it like a lunatic, until he looked down at his hand in mine.

‘I’d like to see my brother now,’ I said.

He told me I could go in, but he had to clear it with the man on the door. The man on the door was the plain-clothes detective, positioned there in case the assassin should attempt to pay a visit and finish my brother off as he lay in his bed, and I had to prove that I was who I claimed to be before he finally admitted me.

My older brother looked helpless. He was wired up to a machine that monitored his heart rate, and another that was helping him to breathe. His face was partly covered by the tube of the ventilator and there was a drip hanging out of one arm. He wore a loose-fitting, dark-green hospital gown that covered the incisions the surgeons had made during an eleven hour operation to remove the three bullets from his body. The only sound was a quiet beep coming from the monitor, and the low, repetitive whooshing sound of the ventilator as it did his breathing for him, keeping my brother alive, one shallow breath after another.

And now here I was, looking down at Danny, lying there with tubes and wires in him, and telling myself over and over that this was all my fault, when it hit me; the combination of muggy, warm air, the sickly-sweet smell of disinfectant and the sight of my brother’s wrecked body before me. I felt the room sway and I had to reach out a hand to grab the metal frame of his bed to stop myself from falling. I sat down quickly on the hard plastic chair by his bedside and put my hand to my sweating forehead. I had to make an effort just to rise from my seat and walk out of there, feeling the nausea rising all the way along the corridor. Finally, I pushed open the last swing door, took the remaining yards across the waiting room at almost a run, and went out through the heavy glass door at the entrance. The cold air hit me and I gulped it into my lungs. I managed to walk a few more yards to a wooden bench and slumped down on it, putting my hands up to my eyes again so no one could see my face.

I went to a pub I’d never been to before. It was almost empty and I ordered a pint and a whisky. I had no plan except a vague notion I was going to sit there and drink until I fell off the bar stool and they called a cab for me, or the Police. Then I looked up and saw my ashen face in the mirror behind the optics on the bar. I realised that sitting here on my own, thinking about my brother and the fact that he was paralysed because of me, drinking myself sick in the process, was only going to make me feel worse. I needed company, but nobody from my crew would do.

It was raining hard when I pulled up outside the apartment block. I was drenched by the time I reached the communal front door. A woman of about thirty was just going in and she turned and held the door, then gave me a questioning look because she clearly didn’t recognise me. I just muttered ‘thanks’ and followed her inside, without waiting for her to enquire who I was.