Dead I Well May Be (46 page)

Drop it, I say, and he spins wildly around. The Glock smiles and shoots him in the chest four times. He goes down, and I take a breath.

Thank you, Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, I say to the statue in the hall. It’s a joke Ganesh and I share and he grins with his elephant head. For the obstacle is not them, or me, it’s the past that cannot be unwoven.

I do a thorough scout, and this time there are no more surprises. They were five of them. But, like eejits, they split themselves up. You’ve got to hand it to her, after all this time and after all that’s been happening on the earth. But don’t go cheap, love, get pros. Come on, you’re in New York, and I’m in L.A., my dear, isn’t that punishment enough? Ha.

Will there be a next time? There will. I know you. I know you now, not then, but now I do.

I hobble to the fridge and crack open a Corona. I take a big gulp. I pick up the phone and dial a number I’ve memorized these ten years. Ever since they took out that slug and saved my life and came and threatened me and I made a deal to save my sorry ass. I give my code name and then my handler’s.

They put me all the way through to his mobile. He’s outdoors somewhere near water. It’s lapping but it’s not breaking; he’s on a lake.

How’s the fishing? I ask him.

How— he begins, but I have to interrupt him; I’m going to need help quick before the peelers show and there’s not much time for idle chatter.

Listen, you were right, my mistake, I want back in the program, I say.

Ok.

Somewhere you get seasons.

Seasons, he says. You get seasons in L.A. It’s just that they’re all good.

Ok, somewhere with more rain.

More rain? he asks quizzically.

Yeah.

I think that can be arranged, he says.

I’ll need to go to a hospital.

Are you hurt?

Just a burn. I’ll live.

Lucky us.

Lucky you.

Are there casualties?

Yeah, it’s messy.

How many?

Five.

Shit.

Yeah.

Don’t worry, we’ll keep you safe, he says.

That would be nice, I say. The lie going down as easily as the booze.

I hang up. I pull in Paddy. The smoke alarm goes off and I play around a bit with the fire extinguisher. I make my way to the kitchen and put salve on my burned neck and scalp. I look at the scorch mark in the mirror; it doesn’t seem too bad. I grab another Corona. I get a bottle of gin and some aspirin. Shouldn’t really be drinking. I limp into the backyard and sit next to the pool.

Omar comes bounding over and barks at me through the gaps in the fence.

Good boy, good boy, I tell him, and he wanders off, pleased.

I finish the Corona and let the bottle drop. I sit up, swallow two aspirin with some gin and water.

I take a long look around….

A south wind is stirring the slender stems of pines. The hawsers bend, and there are murmurs in the clay figurines as the sun dips behind the fence. The evening star waits, beguiled, while airplanes and birds mark boundaries in all that blue abandonment.

The cars sing, the grass creaks in parks and cemeteries. I am calm, erased of all extraneous emotion. Collected. Easy. I feel the pine needles, the warm roads, the scent of butterflies, the sniff of coyotes in those teeming hills.

These are my last days in this town. And when the heat’s cooled down and I am safe and far away, I’ll disappear. Find you easier than you found me. I can see it. You and I, my honey love. Oh yes, Bridget, I can see your face. You and I in the still of the dark together. And in that moment, and in that place, Death incants a name and, somehow, it doesn’t sound like mine.

I close my eyes.

It well may be.

David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

Nineteen Seventy Four

‘Breathless, extravagant, ultra-violent…Vinnie Jones should buy the film rights fast’
Independent on Sunday

‘Peace has found his own voice – full of dazzling, intense poetry and visceral violence’
Uncut

‘Peace’s storytelling may be unrelentingly dark, at times even nightmarish, but what impresses most about the books…is the author’s literary ambition. Peace uses prose like a blunt weapon. His sentences are hypnotic, repetitive, incantatory. Pages seem to fly by. Sharpened dialogue jostles with drifting thoughts. Snatches of pop lyrics wrestle with the fractured ravings of the killer. Victims swirl through the text, alive, dead, alive again…Peace is at the forefront of a generation of hard-boiled crime writers pushing the genre into new and difficult territory’
Sydney Morning Herald

‘David Peace’s stunning debut has done for the county what Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy did for Los Angeles…This is a brilliant first novel, written with tremendous pace and passion’
Yorkshire Post

Nineteen Seventy Seven

‘Quite simply, this is the future of British crime fiction…the finest work of literature I’ve read this year – and its ending is as extraordinary and original as what precedes it’
Time Out

‘With a human landscape that is violent and unrelentingly bleak, Peace’s fiction is two or three shades the other side of noir’
New Statesman

‘One hell of a read’
Crime Time

‘Peace’s Boschian landscape of West Yorkshire’s all-out dystopia began with
Nineteen Seventy Four
and a young girl’s murdered body, found in a ditch with swan’s wings sewn to its shoulder blades. While atmospheric with ’70s music and ads, that first installment set the quartet’s bleak Orwellian tone, though with echoes of the complex modes of Dos Passos’
USA
and the demonic grimness, violence, corruption and conspiracies of James Ellroy’
Kirkus Reviews

Nineteen Eighty

‘A bleak portrait of those times, written in a stylised prose that takes a few pages to attune to but which admirably suits the subject matter. It’s black and moving’
Observer

‘His best yet, a top-drawer thriller which grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck and doesn’t let go until the last page…unmatched…his writing these days stands in comparison with American masters like Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Walter Mosley…Another winner from David Peace, whose name on the cover is these days a guarantee of existence, a must-read thriller of originality and style that confirms him to be one of the best crime writers anywhere’
Yorkshire Post

‘He has found his own, equally experimental, approach and it further enhances the oppressively sombre tone…an impressive addition to the noir genre’
Metro

‘Read a book by David Peace. If you want to know what Leeds was like in the 70s and early 80s then David Peace is the authority’
Leeds Guide

Nineteen Eighty Three

‘Will undoubtedly stand as a major achievement in British dark fiction… the pace is relentless, the violence gut-wrenching, the style staccato-plus and the morality bleak and forlorn, but Peace’s voice is powerful and unique. This is compelling stuff that will leave no one indifferent’
Guardian

‘This is fiction that comes with a sense of moral gravity, clearly opposed to diluting the horrific effects of crime for the sake of bland entertainment. There is no light relief and, for most of the characters, no hope. Peace’s series offers a fierce indictment of the era’
Independent

‘British crime fiction’s most exciting new voice in decades’
GQ

‘Peace is a manic James Joyce of the crime novel…jump cutting like a celluloid magus through space and time, reciting incantations and prayers, invoking the horror of grim lives, grim crimes, grim times’
Sleazenation

‘Beautifully crafted, almost poetic prose isn’t what you would expect from a crime novel, but David Peace isn’t an ordinary crime writer’
Big Issue

‘The novel’s power lies in its poetic depictions of violence and in its flawless period detail, which grounds it convincingly in the Eighties. Fiction and history merge, and the personal and the political mirror each other, creating a disturbing portrait of social decay. Rarely has the crime novel managed to say something more serious and enduring than in Peace’s masterful quartet’
New Statesman

‘If you like your fiction to be vicious and chaotic, the Red Riding Quartet reveals Peace to be one of the masters of the form’
Sunday Herald

‘This is the final instalment, and it is magnificent. The three years since his debut have seen Ossett-born Peace grow into one of the most distinctive and compelling crime novelists in the world…
Nineteen Eighty Three
is Peace’s best yet’
Yorkshire Post

‘A raw and furious wade through the Valley of Death that understates its big sweet hell of pages chock-a-block with violated corpses and red rain running with blood’
Kirkus Reviews

‘Nineteen Eighty Three
is a profound piece of British crime fiction that howls with the horror of its subject matter’
Leeds Guide

‘The final instalment of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet arrives with a sickening thud, the flutter of leathery wings and an ominous darkening of the skies…terrible. And magnificent’
Big Issue in the North

‘A gripping read, written in short breathless sentences – at times a sort of hardcore poetry…Not for the faint-hearted, this is as hard as a Leeds pavement on a Saturday night’
Birmingham Post

‘
Nineteen Eighty Three
is every bit as powerful as the books that have preceded it’
Flux

‘David Peace is the obvious successor to Derek Raymond’s title of King of British noir…Dark, depressing but important fiction from a very fine writer’
Time Out

‘Stunning…Each novel powerfully evokes the period surrounding the crimes and capture of the Yorkshire Ripper’
Crime Time