Graft (13 page)

And stops himself. It'd scuff the lev at best. His luck tonight, the bullet would bounce straight back at him.

Roy slaps the steering wheel. Sobering fast. “Bastard, bastard, 
bastard
,” he shouts, and brings the mark's stolen car into the kerb.

The lev pulls ahead and turns one-eighty, airstreams blasting rain from its cockpit shield. It hovers, thoughtful almost, before jerking forwards like a spidery marionette. Nose almost on the roof, the lev pauses again. Roy can see right into the fuselage, the rivets of its armour plating, the channels of its cannon.

“Thanks,” the pilot says.

Roy smiles sarcastically.

“Just stay there for me.”

The pilot angles the lev's bow-spot straight into the car. Roy covers his eyes as the beam runs its cycle.

“Hands on the wheel, please.”

Roy puts his hands on the wheel, leaving the revolver between his thighs.

The lev reverses and settles, keeping the bow-light in Roy's windscreen. The pilot drops the earthing cord and unsaddles herself. For a second she looks behind, and Roy squirrels the revolver under his seat.

Bastard
.

The pilot comes to his window, black suit lustrous, her visor sliding to one side. She motions for him to wind down his window. As he does, she reaches into her helmet to move a mouthpiece from her lips. Droplets of rain catch in her lashes.

“You're out late,” she says. “This yours?”

“Aye.”

“Good nick isn't it?”

He nods.

“Know why I've stopped you?”

Roy shrugs. “Curfew?”

The officer shakes her head. She seems puzzled. “Car's licensed.” Silence. She raises her eyebrows.

Roy checks the dash. No warning lights, and his belt feels tight across his chest. “Silly me,” he says, mock-cheery. “Forget I pay up front.”

The officer flashes another confused expression. “If they make you pay for a curfew licence, the system really is broken.”

“Have I got a bulb out?”

“Nope…”

“Then I don't have a clue,” he says. “Sorry.”

The pilot taps the roof. “To be honest, nothing's actually wrong. Just wanted to check everything's all right. Patrol doesn't just mean enforcement – or at least it doesn't in my eyes. Got to earn some trust somehow. Plus my breathalyzer isn't working properly in this weather anyway. Not that we'd need to–”

Roy can't believe it. If she can smell his breath – and he's pretty sure she can – she's pretending not to notice.

“Late-night supplies run, then? How many do you care for at the moment, doc? If you don't mind my asking.”

Care for?
Roy goes cold. 
Doc? 
The lev's lowered beam highlights the flecks of brown under his fingernails. He folds his arms.

“It's…” The sentence collapses. A gust of wind stipples his face with spray.

“Don't worry,” the officer says. Her cheeks look a touch redder. “Sensitive stuff, I get that. Just wanted to mention, because, well, I saw your name.” She points into her visor. “It all comes up on here. And your… I mean the people you look after… they're just like my sister, and it did her good. It's something to know there's places out there. Places to help out, right? Don't often get chance to say cheers, so I thought I'd at least start somewhere. Let's hope your other sons and daughters turn out as well as she has.”

“That's kind,” Roy says. He thinks of the mark. He thinks of the client. He thinks of the Reverend saying, “Darling, do this for me: never question who you've just killed.”

“What time do the border guys let you back into Didsbury?”

Blink.
Look normal.
“Ah, any time's good. Always coming and going.”

“Course. Well don't let me keep you, either. More than happy to see you into town if that's the way you're headed. I don't mean to patronize, but Chorlton's bad for run-ins at the minute.”

Roy nods at the lev. “Be tempted if I got to ride that beast.”

She smiles. “For that I'd have to arrest you.”

“Then I'm alright.” He strains for a smile. “Ta very much.”

“I'm sure you–” The officer's earpiece blips. “Sorry,” she mouths, touching a finger to her ear. She angles her hand over the mic and whispers: “One sec.”

Roy can't help earwigging – the only other sound a mild ticking sound from the lev's cooling powerplant.

~ Shots fired, Didsbury village. LUs optioned for RR. All LUs to respond for location check, over.

“On it, Ops,” the officer says. “LU6 on call.” Other units check in, distant ghosts.

~ I've got you up now, Six
. A rattle. ~
You on a traffic stop?

“Copy. Curfew check. I can be there in…” She looks at her wrist. “Three and twenty.”

~ Copy. Likely hot, so weapons live. First respond on scene. Reports one down, sus unknown. House fire.
A pause.
~ It's a bad one, Six.

“
Copy you. I'll move now.”

~ Copy, Six. I'll clear you with the gate. Stay warm.

The link blips out. The officer looks at Roy. She can tell he's heard the conversation. “Your neck of the woods.”

Roy nods. Roy knows. And any minute the car he's driving is going to be on every authority's screen in the north.

“Sorry again to interrupt your evening. Send my love to those kids, if that's allowed. Hey, what's it they say – when the old men are dead…”

The echo isn't lost on him. Twice in a night –

She turns, points at the lev. “Till then, we'll have to make do.”

Roy nods, eyes front. “All the best, officer.”

“You too. And doctor…” She mimes swigging from a glass. “Please think about drinking less.”

The officer mounts up in her creaseless suit, and the lev takes off. Roy sits there reeling as it fades away. As he watches, a tiny idea sparks, rolls, bursts to life.

He thinks:
Start walking.

He thinks:
I need my Lexus.

He pulls out his revolver, unscrews its wasted silencer. He slides out of the mark's car and leaves the door swinging. Sometimes you make mistakes. But you learn from them.

T
he early hours
, rain on the roof, and Sol's still up with the woman in the workshop's customer waiting room. He's taken his time to introduce himself – told her he runs this business, that he didn't expect to find her, and that he wants to help. And when he's finished – when he thinks he's said enough to reassure her – he adds, “Do you get what I'm saying? Nod or shake your head or something. Anything.”

The woman makes the slightest sound.

“How about we try the pen and paper again?” He's already drawn a series of hangman dashes, hoping she might be able to fill out her name. He's written out the alphabet, pointing to letters, but the woman has the same reaction to several of them in no particular order. Now the pen's just scratching grooves into the pad. “Let me get another,” he says.

In the main workshop, Sol opens a drawer of forgotten things in a cabinet filled with the waste of a failing business – expensively branded stationery, sticky-tape rolls, unreturned tax returns. He scrubs on a receipt with a few pens before he gets a line.

Back in the room, he sketches out a crude shape for her. Eventually it's a house, deliberately childish, with four windows, a door, a winding little path. A chimney releasing an unlikely cloud of smoke. Two figures by a car outside: one without hair, small and stocky. One a bit taller, shaded for clarity.

He holds up the picture and can't help but feel patronizing. And yet she seems to respond. He could swear her irises rotate like focus rings, that her pupils engorge.

He points to the house. “Home, sweet home. This is a car, here, like the ones in this workshop. Not the silver car. And that's you, there, and that's me.”

The woman hisses through her nose. Something in her throat clicks. She lifts a hand and snatches the pen and pad. Breathing angrily through her nose, she slashes out the car, tearing the paper, before she scratches bars on to every window, and an over-sized padlock on the front door.

“What?”

The woman tries to speak, frustrates herself, and continues to scrawl lines, her whole fist around the pen, over and over until the paper blackens and the house disappears and a new structure takes form. A thick, rounded base, with tapering lines that sweep into a rounded top.

“A tower?” he asks. “Is it? Is that a cooling tower?” Then, quieter: “Bloody hell.”

Underneath the crosshatched tower, the woman draws a thin caricature of a mouth, an approximation, really, that's filled with a set of tiny nubbins he guesses are teeth. She draws a line through the mouth, writes something beneath and passes the pad back to him.

Sol's eyes feel hot. A burning in his sinuses. A feeling of desperation, immense and glacial, crashes over him. He can barely look at her writing, its neat characters so obscure they could be alien hieroglyphs. “What happened to you?” he asks, voice thick. But when he takes in her expression, he's shocked. For the first time since he found and unmasked her, her sewn-shut lips are straining at the edges. She's trying to smile.

Sol drops the pad. The tower image lands face down. He feels he's staring into something so vast and frightening it's uncoupled him from everything that went before. In truth, he can't be sure the smile isn't malicious. He can't be sure he won't be enmeshed in this cycle of fear and helplessness and disbelief forever. Weighted down by his stomach, with a fizzing, a rancid taste, that persists in his mouth.

What was next on Mel's list again? What did she say?

You stupid, stupid prick.

Sol attempts to gather himself. “I'm taking you back to mine,” he says. “Need to get these things out of your lips. Cold'll only get on your chest if we stay.”

He cajoles the woman into standing, feeling her stiffen. “It'll be warmer at mine,” he adds. “Away from all these cold surfaces.” He guides her towards the front door, where she makes herself heavier; some expression of reluctance. Sol half-expected this – had already steeled himself. But when the woman sees a car through the darkness – a customer's saloon not far from the roller doors, ready for collection – she switches to active resistance.

The pair of them tangle, five arms wheeling. The woman isn't throwing punches this time, but she's no less strong. In the end, Sol drives his head under her thicker shoulder and marches her outside. She says nothing, a surreal adversary, as her body solidifies in the doorway.

Sol pulls away. “I'm not trying to scare you,” he tells her. He wonders if it's the associations she's made with the car's shape – a natural response to the saloon's boot. So instead he leaves her in the side entrance doorway and opens the roller doors, hearing the generator's hum in its enclosure behind the workshop.

“Wait there, you daft beggar,” he tells her. “
Wait
.”

The woman glazes, nostrils flaring. She's clearly deliberating whether or not to run.

Sol trusts his judgment and approaches the saloon. He opens the boot and turns to her with two thumbs down. Then he closes the boot and opens the passenger door. Points enthusiastically between her and the seat.

“See? Right? I'm not the bastard who took you.”

The woman edges outside, unsure on her legs.

“I'm sorry it's like this,” he says. “I'm sorry.” He can't stand how he sounds to himself – slow, deliberate, like an obnoxious holidaymaker trying to ask something of a local.

M
el lights
a cigarette on her empire's doorstep. She breathes in with the city and out with her youth. She looks out on neon holo-boards and dying brands; towers fading, washed out, as if they struggle to exist in the squall. The sky like wet concrete.

Mel feels she has something to sort. Problems often start like this – phone calls and angry words and cigarettes on the doorstep. It's a pattern she recognizes. She thumbs the edges of her cigarette lighter, the texture of its toothed wheel, and stares out at a city lost in lashing grey.

She drops her fag, scrubs it, heads inside. A couple of the women are sitting cross-legged on cushions in the foyer. On the wall it says THE CAT FLA because the P fell off. Owing to the rain, the smell of smoke clings to her.

“Something on your mind?” Cassie asks.

“Something's going on,” another woman says. Mel looks at her – Fatimah.

Mel pushes her fringe across her forehead. “I'd murder a brew.”

“No hot water this morning,” Fatimah says.

Cassie winces. It's rare and unnerving to see her boss rattled – and it makes her unpredictable. “It's him, isn't it?” she asks.

“Yes,” Mel says. “Have you fed him today?”

Cassie nods towards Fatimah.

“Good. 'Cos we might have to kiss and make up. How many days has it been anyway? Losing track of time. You think he's learned his lesson?”

Cassie frowns. “Doubt it. Got a cock, hasn't he?”

Mel blows into her cheeks. “I reckon we give him another chance.”

Cassie huffs in surprise. “Yeah?”

Mel senses Cassie's ire. “How many johns we got in?”

“Four or five,” Cassie tells her. “Slow-w-w day.”

“You two alright to keep an eye on the till for a bit?”

Cassie looks down at herself. Torn crop-top, rib and belly tattoos visible, stockings, shorts. “Let me grab a gown and I'll be down.”

“Ta,” Mel says. She passes along the mirrored corridor, hears the sound of fake laughter, muffled guests. The store cupboard's halfway. She takes a big deep breath and unlocks it.

Inside, Jeff's wedged between boxes of paper and condoms, antiseptic wipes and plastic-wrapped costumes. Mel kicks his foot until he acknowledges her.