White Rage (37 page)

‘You awright, Sergeant Perlman?'

‘Fucking not awright, can you no see he's bleeding like a pig?'

‘Call an ambulance somebody.'

‘Where'd that bitch go?'

He was no longer conscious of his shoulder. He was going down into a steep dark place. He struggled to stay above it. With a great effort, he raised his face up. The woman was gone.

Somebody he didn't know helped him stand. He glanced at the man, thick dark eyebrows, a doleful face that might have made John Knox look like a stand-up comic. He wasn't one of the local vigilantes, some of whom were thundering through the house into the small yard at the back in pursuit of the woman; only one of the locals – Dunn, snub-nosed, chubby, effervescent – had stayed behind to help Perlman. Dunn's shirt was soaked with Perlman's blood.

The man with the dejected face said, ‘No sense in waiting for an ambulance. You could bleed to death. I've got a car outside. Can you make it?'

‘I've got a choice?' Perlman said.

Assisted by Dunn on one side, the stranger on the other, Perlman hobbled down the hallway and outside into the street. He was dopey suddenly, due to blood loss and shock, and the realization of how close he'd come to shuffling off on a permanent basis.

Easy easy, Dunn kept saying. Go easy.

Like there's another way I could go, Perlman thought.

Somebody draped his coat round him. A thoughtful touch.

He was led, very carefully, to a car parked in front of his Mondeo, and then lowered into the passenger seat.

I'll bleed in your car,' he said.

‘Plastic seat covers,' the stranger said.

Perlman still held one hand to his wound. He thought: I've never been shot before. He felt the car move. Dunn remained behind outside the house.

The man said, ‘The Royal's the nearest hospital.'

Perlman couldn't think. The Royal's the nearest, whatever. The man drove hard into Shettleston Road, turned west, raced towards Biggar Street. Perlman shut his eyes. He had no sense of direction. He was trying to imagine that candle in the deeps of his brain, but he couldn't get it to light; all he could see was the woman's face, the gun in her hand, the lethal determination in her eyes.

‘Hang on. Not much further.'

‘I don't know you, do I?' Perlman said.

‘No.'

It was too much effort to engage in talk. Perlman let his head sag back. He tried to envisage the route: Duke Street, High Street, Glasgow Cathedral, Castle Street, the Royal Infirmary, the ancient core of the city. The car stopped. Perlman heard the driver get out and come round to open the passenger door.

‘Grab me for support, Perlman.'

Perlman reached for his Samaritan. He was always moved by unexpected kindness.

‘A few yards, okay?'

‘I can make it,' Perlman said.

They entered Emergency. The man led Perlman to a desk where a nurse was bent over a file. She looked up. She was West Indian. ‘Oh my my my, what happened?'

‘He's been shot.'

She glanced at Perlman's wound and she picked up a phone. ‘Dr Gordon, can you get out here quickly?'

‘I'll leave you now, Perlman,' the man said.

‘Wait. I didn't get your name.'

‘Take this.' He pressed a wadded piece of paper into Perlman's hand. ‘They'll clean the wound and give you painkillers. You'll be okay.'

The nurse led Perlman to a wheelchair. He watched his benefactor walk towards the exit door. He wanted to call the fellow back and thank him for his generosity, but he didn't have the energy. The wad of paper he clutched in his hand was damp with blood. He managed to stick it in a pocket of his trousers.

And then he was exhausted.

The man paused at the exit door as if he meant to look back, but changed his mind and went out. Perlman gazed at the image of his benefactor passing through the black space of the doorway and out into the night. And then the thought struck him for the first time that something must be wrong with the fellow's eye.

He wore a patch the colour of skin.

43

She was running through narrow dark streets of small houses. The men had been in pursuit of her for a while, but now she no longer heard their shouts or their hoarse panting. She passed windows with drawn curtains and bright TVs glowing behind the drapes. This is the life, ladies, your own little house and telly, you settle into the deadness and dread of it all and you die, smothered. She couldn't live like that … Forty, abandoned one night by the hubbie, used up, hung out like a limp old wash-rag on a line to dry and wither, the way her mother had been treated. Husband upped and gone. O Canada. No future. Just men she fucked and drinkies she drank.

It was a kind of a life, she supposed. One you lived in the silt of things.

Fuck that.

She kept running. She wondered if the men had telephoned the cops and whether there were patrols searching for a female in jogging gear in the east end of Glasgow. Okay, right, she was noticeable. She stood out. When she passed under lamps her blonde hair shone. She had to get away from here. She needed a street where taxis ran.

Then there was the question of where to go.

She could return to one of the several rooms she rented throughout the city, and change her clothes, dye her hair again, do what she had to do. She clenched her hands in anger. Bastard Perlman had slipped away from her, blessed by luck. Weren't the Jews said to be the Chosen People? God's favourites.

She stopped running now. She was whacked, out of breath. She'd dropped the gun somewhere along the way. And the Walkman. The loss of these possessions panicked her a little. Especially the gun. It could be used in evidence.

What did it matter about the gun? Perlman knew where it had been fired and who it had killed. Maybe he'd die too. Loss of blood. His age. Didn't look to be in great shape. Maybe he couldn't be saved. But he had the face of a survivor. Oh, she was furious with herself for failing to get one in his heart, and the way she'd shot without pause, her aim shite, and how she'd lost control when the door was kicked in, firing wild, stupid stupid stupid –

She knew better. She knew how she should have done it. With cool, with detachment. She'd allowed herself to become flustered.

She walked across a patch of wasteland. She saw lights in the distance. The green neon of a petrol station, pale white streetlamps floating in midair. She moved towards them cautiously. First priority: a place with a telephone. When she reached the forecourt of the petrol station she saw a woman through the plate glass of the shop feeding a roll of paper into a cash register, and a man filling his car at one of the pumps. There was a public phone situated close to the door of the shop.

She took some coins from her pocket. She dialled a number. It rang and rang and no answer. She hung up. Okay. Think. Phone for a taxi. Logical. There was no directory attached to the phone. If there ever had been, it was long gone. The absence of the phone book unnerved her – little things like this jangled her suddenly, things she'd have sailed past before.

Maybe a taxi would come.

She punched in another number and Swank answered.

She said, ‘There's been a fuck-up.'

‘How bad a fuck-up, love?'

‘I don't know how bad. Is Pegg there?'

‘You only ever talk to Pegg,' he said. Swank could be petty. He wanted to own her.

‘Is he there with you?'

‘He left a while ago. Why don't you tell me what's wrong?'

‘Just tell Pegg I called.'

She hung up, walked to the edge of the street. She wasn't sure of her surroundings. Somewhere east of Perlman's house, maybe north-east. Spring-boig? Carntyne? She stared the length of the street, noting the scarcity of traffic.

The man who'd been filling his car walked over to her. He was fortyish, short, drinker's nose red as the flesh of a blood orange. ‘You lost, hen? Are you wanting a lift?'

‘Piss off.'

He said, ‘This is what kindness gets you. Try to help and what happens?'

‘A kick in the teeth, buster. The world's like that.'

‘Your world mibbe. No mine.' He stalked back to his car and slammed the door. She watched him drive past very close to her. He flashed her a vigorous V, then he was gone. What did he think she was – a hoor in jogging gear? She watched his car vanish and then, thankfully, a taxi appeared in view, vacancy sign lit. She hailed it, got in the back.

‘Where to?' the driver asked.

‘Govan,' she said.

‘Govan it is.'

He looked at her in his rearview mirror and winked.

44

Perlman woke sweating. He wondered where he was. When the pain kicked in he remembered: he'd been shot and survived.

Shot
. You never think it's going to happen to you. You come across firearm victims in your work, you never
dream
you might become one of them. Maybe he should pray, offer up a word of thanks.
Dear God
. He stared at the pale blue curtain stretched round his hospital bed. A lamp burned beyond, and an oval of light was trapped in the texture of the curtain, like a spirit emerging from a nether world.

Death waits for me. G Reaper, Esquire, extends a willing hand.

He was hooked up to a drip. He raised his face to look at the bottle that contained the intravenous liquid, whatever it was. He followed the line into his arm and saw an Elastoplast covering the spot where the puncture had been made to accommodate the needle.
I want out of here
, he thought.

Scullion appeared like a magician's assistant conjured from a concealed cabinet. A parting of curtain and there he was. He drew a chair up to the bed and smiled at Perlman. ‘Couldn't get out of the way in time, eh?'

‘Not nippy enough on the old feet,' Perlman said. His voice was hoarse, his mouth stuffed with dry balls of saliva.

‘Must be a funny feeling being on somebody's hit list.'

‘You see me laughing?'

‘We're still looking for her, Lou. Your concerned neighbours, a really concerned gung-ho crew, gave us a description.'

‘Which she'll have changed by now.'

‘Naturally,' Scullion said.

Perlman moved. A flash of pain in his shoulder caused him to suck air. ‘We don't even know her name. Celia Liddell. Magistr 32 –'

‘Or Yan Yomomata.'

‘She's Glaswegian,' Perlman said. He struggled for speech. ‘It's the only thing I don't doubt. Her accent.' He drifted a moment, remembering the guy with the eyepatch. But that seemed faraway to him now. He thought of the bullet that had gone into his flesh; something he shared with Indra Gupta and Nat Blum, an intimacy he hadn't wished for. He was bonded with the dead. They'd all been victims of the same gun.

‘Pass me that water, Sandy.'

Scullion filled a glass from a pitcher on the bedside table. Perlman, who noticed a telephone on the table, sipped through a double-jointed straw. ‘Have the reports of her so-called sightings been checked out?'

‘The ones that weren't silly hoaxes, sure. Nothing so far. How are you feeling?'

‘I need painkillers.'

‘You want me to call a nurse?'

‘Mind? What time is it?'

‘Six a.m.'

‘I must have slept for hours.'

‘They shot you up with morphine.'

‘Very nice it is too. I recommend it.'

Scullion vanished beyond the curtain. Perlman tried to raise the damaged arm. It was bandaged and stiff; he winced at how it hurt. He closed his eyes. Sleep floated close, wraithlike.

Scullion came back. ‘Here, one painkiller.'

Perlman looked at the capsule in his hand. ‘What is it?'

‘I didn't ask.' Scullion sat again. ‘Take it.'

Perlman swallowed it with some water, which tasted stale. He laid his head back on the pillow.

Scullion said, ‘You'll be bedridden for days.'

‘Who says?'

‘I was talking to your doctor.'

‘I don't plan to lie here, Sandy.'

‘Superlou thinks he's going to just
bound
out of bed? Your arm's useless, for Christ's sake, and you're on painkillers.'

‘So I walk tilted to one side and my thoughts get fuzzy. Is that such a big deal?'

‘Forget the bloody heroics.'

‘Sandy, she came
that
close to making me permanently inactive. I want her.' Perlman felt drowsy. Heroics, my arse, he thought. Somebody tries to kill you, you're supposed to stay in a hospital bed and suck narcotics? He'd find a way to get out of here. But it's not a fucking movie, Lou … it's not where the hero, like Lazarus, picks himself up and comes back to life, eager for conflict and confrontation.

He drifted away again. He remembered the cowboys of his matinee mornings, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy. They wouldn't lie in a hospital bed. Despite all the gunplay in which they were involved, they never even got
shot
. And then there were the G-Men, the Feds who came and went in shadowy black and white serials, brushing wounds aside as casually as men flicking flies off their skin.

Scullion said, ‘It's frustrating and I sympathize. But the muscles in your upper arm and shoulder sustained damage. Some bone is splintered there. The doctor removed the slug, but that doesn't mean you can hop out of bed, Lou. Let's be realistic. Your system's in shock. You don't move. How come you never want to do what's best for you anyway? What is it inside you that makes you think you're invincible? Twenty years younger, maybe you could've been released from this place within twenty-four hours. Even then, you wouldn't go straight back to work, you'd convalesce.'

Perlman was tired listening. His brain darkened. Going down the gutters of no return. He must have slept, because when he opened his eyes again Scullion was gone. A little hop-skip in time. He had the strange feeling that Miriam had been sitting by his bed. A dream? He remembered opening his eyes and she was watching him with a look of concern but then she'd faded into shadow. He wondered if Scullion had told her about the shooting.