Beast of Burden (22 page)

“Get the fuck off my property, Sergeant.” Paulo's pointing at Donkey, and I can see the blood on his knuckles. “I see you around here again, I'll beat fuck out of you.”

“Can't do that,” says Donkey.

“I can do whatever the fuck I want to do.”

Then Paulo drops his finger, moves in closer to Donkey. For a second, I think Paulo's going to kiss him, the way he smiles. But then he says something quietly to Donkey, and Donkey's face goes even paler under the bloodstain. Paulo backs off a couple of steps, the remnants of the smile still pulling his lips tight. He raises both eyebrows at Donkey.

“You get me?” he says.

I lean against the wall, press a knuckle to one nostril that refuses to stop bleeding, wheeze through battered lungs. Then something rattles that I have to cough up. The sound brings Donkey's attention. We stare at each other.

“Go home,” Paulo says to Donkey.

Donkey snaps back a glare at Paulo, then gets into his car, slamming the driver's door as he gets behind the wheel. There's a brief swell of muffled music as Donkey turns the ignition. Sounds like Annie Lennox, which would be weird if it wasn't Donkey at the wheel.

I watch him roar off, spit blood at the ground. The gob hits and splatters, and I'm reminded of Mo Tiernan again. Paulo turns away from the road, heads my way, shaking his head at the state I'm in.

“You hit him,” I say.

“It's okay.” Getting a closer look, he says, “Jesus Christ. That fuckin'—”

“It's not okay.” Shake my head. “He's a copper. He's a cunt. The two don't mix … with a punch.”

“Really, it's fine. Let's get you indoors.”

Paulo puts my arm around his shoulders and hunkers down, puts his arm around my waist. He squeezes my side too hard and I flinch away from him, grunting in pain.

“Sorry,” he says.

“He'll be back.”

“No, he won't.”

I cough and it hurts like fuck. What's the point in me doing everything I've done, if Paulo's just going to plant one on Donkey and ruin it all. “He
will
. I know how—”

“He's not going to do anything, Callum.”

“He won't stay … scared.”

“He's not scared.” We reach the office. Paulo nudges open the door and eases me over to my chair. Then he goes to retrieve my walking stick.

“Then how?”

He appears in the doorway again, breathes out. “I had my suspicions.”

“About what?”

“He's not on duty,” says Paulo.

“That doesn't matter—

“I called the police station, thought it was odd that he backed down so quick when he was around, y'know. And I was going to put in a complaint, anyway.” He hands me my walking stick. “Fucker's been suspended, hasn't he?”

I look at Paulo. Doesn't look like he's pulling my leg, and this would be a weird fucking joke if he was. But it can't be right, either. Donkey's never been suspended his entire career. Doesn't matter what heinous shite he's been accused of through the years, nobody's ever had the balls to call him on it, or do anything about it.

“What for?” I say.

“Don't know, they wouldn't tell me.”

No, they wouldn't, right enough. I shake my head, still can't believe it. There's me, willingly giving Donkey information when he's not in any position to do anything about it. Not officially, anyway. Which makes him fucking dangerous to my situation. Extremely dangerous.

“You going to be okay?” says Paulo. “Look like you could use a once-over at the hospital.”

“Nah, I should be … alright.”

“He break anything?”

“Don't think so.”

“You sure?” Paulo's pulling that old familiar face again. The worried look, the one he reserves for whenever I get my arse kicked. I'll admit, it's been a while since I've seen it. Not since he saw me the first time in the hospital after the stroke. And I'll admit this, too: I've kind of missed it.

“Yeah,” I say. “I'm fine. A brew … would be good.”

“Course, right,” says Paulo.

And off he goes. Soon as he's out the door, I pick out my mobile. Turn it on, and it seems like it still works, which is good. I stare at the display, scroll through my contacts and think about what damage Donkey's already done.

Time to put an end to it.

Used to be, you wanted to speak to Morris Tiernan, you had to call the Wheatsheaf and wait for Brian the landlord to get his arse in gear, pick up the phone. Then you had to put up with him swearing blind that Tiernan wasn't on the premises when it was patently fucking obvious that wasn't the case. Then, once you'd managed to threaten your way into a conversation with the man himself, Tiernan would be full of hell, because the last thing he liked doing was talk on the phone. His mood was a throwback to the party line days, when they were still trying to pin the scally Godfather tag onto him.

But I'm above all that now. Now, I have a direct line to the man. And as I punch the numbers, I don't know if that's a sign that it's already too late for me.

“Yeah?” he says after two rings.

“We need to talk.”

“Urgent?”

“Yeah.”

“Northside tonight. Seven sharp.”

And he hangs up.

DONKIN

Fuck.

Fucking
stupid
. Fucking idiotic fucking thing to do.

Hindsight kicked in, my blood settled to a low simmer, and the only thing I could think of was how fucking daft I'd been. I needed to watch that. Christ, I'd been told enough times. It was like calling your mother a cunt — soon as you said it, you wished you could take it back.

Anyway. My point was, I never got any warning when I lost it. The counsellor, that jumped-up, pot-bellied little prick with a degree and that expensive-looking ballpoint he kept clicking when I talked, that little fuck said that I'd see something, I'd hear something, I'd
feel
something when I was about to lose control.

“When you hit your wife …” he'd start.

And that was usually the moment I got up and left the room.

Because if I'd just been able to talk to Annie after it happened, if she hadn't up and disappeared for a month after, took the kid with her, then we might've been able to sort stuff out. The problem was, she was jittery about shite like that, and I knew it. Bad history, worse boyfriends, and back in the day, I was a bloke like a knight in shining armour, took care of a couple of them ex-boyfriends for her. She didn't know when she met me that I was a copper on account of my nose was burning with some seriously nasty coke a wog dealer'd try to palm off on us. Winston never found out I was blue until much later on, never suspected a thing until I caught him on the back end of a steep coke slide, nudging into OD territory, and then I turned him into a prize grass. But when Annie found us with frosted nostrils and
then
clocked that I was a copper, well, that was her wet as a Manc summer.

According to her, she'd always had a thing for the bad boy.

But apparently the bad boy shite wore thin fast as you liked. People got older, and it became too much of an effort to keep up the drama when you spent most of your working day arse-deep in the filth of the city. She got bored and we had a kid, thought that would sort it. It didn't, just bolstered her side of the fucking argument, because it turned out to be a girl who grew to hate us just as much as Annie did. Shannon didn't get the whole copper thing, didn't realise that I wasn't oppressing her and her middle-class Goth mates.

No, wait, I remembered. They weren't Goths. They were something else:
emo
. Like Goths but without the commitment.

Anyway, my home life wasn't great. That should've been a sign. But when you're in it, you don't
see
it. I mean, it was only in fucking hindsight that I saw the cables fray, but it was all I could do to keep my work head on.

Then I hit her.

Once, but that was all it took, and as soon as I did it, I saw all those bad memories dredged up in a second. And she looked at us like she was shocked to see us turn into a mixture of every single bad-beat boyfriend she ever had.

She went round her sister's that night, took Shannon with her. I sat and decided to drink myself comatose with whatever we had left in the kitchen cupboard, which turned out to be half a bottle of Gordons and some Pimms.

And that was the fucking start of it all.

She only came back once, and she cleaned the place out — anything she could lift and carry was gone. Got off shift one night, come home to find the place gutted. Only the big items of furniture left, but they were still her taste, so it looked like someone'd burgled us, ripped the heart out of my home.

I got angry. Yeah, that was bound to happen. Called her sister's, called her mam's, didn't talk to her at either place. She'd moved out, gone on and got herself a new flat with Shannon. Hadn't took her that long, either.

So I got angrier, and then that subsided into “good riddance to bad rubbish”. Because then I got to do all the shite that married men couldn't do. I could eat kebabs in the front room, drink as much as I fucking wanted without the eye-rolls and the tuts. I got to smoke big fat cigars in the house, instead of shivering my balls off in the back yard, and I got a whole big bed to myself at nights, instead of creeping upstairs to find out she'd gone all diagonal on us.

Then it turned into me sitting at home and staring at a dead telly. A habit of watching the screen even when the thing wasn't turned on. After a while, I heard noises in the house that I'd never heard before. At first, I thought it just the telly next door: the bloke who lived next to us was old and deaf as. But I didn't do anything about it, thinking if I had the energy to turn on my telly I wouldn't hear
him
.

The truth was, I liked hearing the noise from next door. It was something I couldn't control. Made us feel like there was someone else in the house, almost. And it made the drinking I was doing seem less desperate. Otherwise it was us pissed in the front room with the big light on because the bulbs'd gone in the lamps and I couldn't be arsed remembering to replace them.

I was wrong to hit Annie. I knew that. I wasn't fucking daft. But the problem was, I didn't know I was doing it until it was over.

I knew what people called us down the nick, knew what they thought about us. It never really bothered us before, because I always knew that however I did the job, it got results. Brass didn't bother with us because of that, and fuck the rest of them — they never had any fucking imagination.

It was easy enough to figure out — if you had enough grasses working the streets for you, you didn't need to do much to keep your collars up. It was the same mentality behind those big time dealers, the ones clever enough to keep their hands off the product. You had enough people out there doing your grunt work for you, then all you needed to do was tour once or twice a week. And right enough, all I had to do was bring 'em in and sweat 'em down, maybe put a slight beating on them to stop the lip, remind 'em who the gaffer was. It was dirty every now and then, didn't involve all the doorstepping that some of the others did, but it meant I could sit back and watch the top cops head straight for the cardiac ward.

But then — too many looks. Too many background sniggers, words pointed at us that I didn't always hear, but caught the fucking gist. It wasn't the usual shite anymore — “Donkin, yeah, you wanna keep an eye on him, he spends too much time with his grasses, you know how dodgy that looks, eh?”

No, it was that my collars didn't mean anything. Because, according to the desk sergeants, I was bringing in the same people time and again. Didn't matter that they were criminals, fucking stone-cold recidivists who went on a crime spree the second they were left unsupervised. It was like I needed to what, keep it fucking fresh for the sake of appearances?

Bollocks.

In the end, though, you hear something enough, you start to believe it. And it got so's that was all I could think about. That I wasn't a real copper. That I was just a chauffeur, ferrying in the usual suspects every week or so.

So I took some of the leave I'd built up, spent it drinking away the insecurities.

And now, maybe I got to thinking that I hadn't done the right thing. It was entirely possible I was wrong. I mean, I was wrong about Annie. Mind you, that hadn't exactly been a rational fucking thought.

I looked at the road. It was raining again. The sky looked like it was going to open at any moment. A rumble in the distance woke us up properly.

Annie wouldn't come back to us, not the way I was. She was best off out of my life at the moment. Because it was obvious I wasn't a bloke to be around, couldn't be trusted to hold my fucking temper. And if I wanted her back, it couldn't be like I just told her I was better. There had to be a real change, a hard change. It had to be visible, actions louder than words, all that. I'd have to clean the house out, bring in new furniture, show myself capable of being domestic if I was going to promise her a stable home life. And I'd have to go to that counsellor, share my fucking feelings, get well, get shot of whatever the fuck it was that had made us throw that punch in the first place.

Before I did any of that, though, I had to sort this case out. Because there was no way she'd take us back if I didn't have a job, especially if I lost that job because I beat someone up. I had to make it up to the fucking job before I ever made it up to her, which meant I couldn't go around half-cocked.

So even though I knew Innes had killed Mo Tiernan, I couldn't just go back there and beat a confession out of him. That was the old Donkey.

No, what I had to do was gather evidence. And when I had enough evidence, I'd find some way of arresting the bastard properly.

That was it, like. Thinking. Because I needed to be clever about this.

I pulled my baccy tin, rolled a nice fat one and licked the paper. Sparked it and eased my seat back a notch.

I couldn't afford to give up, not now. And certainly not over Callum fucking Innes. There was no way I would allow that little bastard to be involved in my final days on the force. I especially wouldn't let the fucker walk on murder, not when he'd dangled it in my face like—