'You ...' Brooks coughed, a smear of blood on his lips. 'You sick f--' Wiseman punched him in the stomach and the old man collapsed to the ground. 'Those going to be your last words are they?' He pulled the boning knife out again and sliced through the thin plastic strips holding Brooks' wrists together. Then did the same with the ankles. 'Ffffff ...' The old bastard tried to get to his feet, but his legs didn't seem to be working. 'Here.' Wiseman took a handful of shirt at the back of Brooks' neck, then grabbed the old bastard's belt and hauled him up. 'Let me help you ...' Right over the wall and into thin air. A huge ball of red, green and silver lit up the night sky. For a moment the old man seemed to float, and then gravity got her claws into him. Brooks screamed: arms and legs pinwheeling as his body got smaller and smaller and smaller ... all the way down to the concrete car park, eighteen floors below. He hit the ground like a meat pinata, flying debris setting off car alarms. Wiseman peered over the edge at the smear of red, lit by the flashing orange indicators of wailing motorcars. Then he went back downstairs to the flat, picked up his empty beer cans, locked the door, and headed off into the night.
20
Logan waited in the pre-dawn gloom trying not to stand in anything red. Which was easier said than done: who knew one old man could go so far? The impact zone lay in the strip of concrete between the two tower blocks. Ex- DCI Brooks covered at least a dozen feet in every direction - tarmac, pavement, wall ... The cars were the worst: metallic paint pebble-dashed with shrivelled, crimson bubbles, glittering in the IB spotlights like dried-up ladybirds. Not the best accompaniment to a Monday-morning hangover. Someone from the Environmental Health team marched over, sipping tea from a polystyrene cup, her white paper oversuit unzipped to the waist. 'You going to be much longer?' 'Don't think so.' Logan watched DI Steel mooching about on the far side of the blue-and-white POLICE tape, mobile phone clamped to her ear. 'Think you'll be able to shift all this?' The woman shrugged. 'You should see some of the crap we have to deal with. She pulled a huge aerosol out of her pocket. 'Trychloroethylene: it'll bleach through pretty much anything. Don't fancy owning any of those cars, Christ knows what it's going to do to the paintwork.' 'Hoy, Lazarus!' Steel - shouting across Garry Brooks' personal Ground Zero. 'Get them going.' 'You heard the lady.' Logan skirted the taped-off scene as the Environmental Health team pulled up their hoods, strapped on their facemasks, and got to work with the trychloroethylene. Steel lit a cigarette, watching them spraying away, the thick stench of bleach oozing out in a fine mist, caught by the morning breeze, glowing in the building's security lights. 'No' exactly my idea of fun ...' 'How'd Insch take it?' 'How do you think?' She took a long drag. 'The guy you've looked up to for twenty-five years does a belly-flop off an eighteen-storey building. No' exactly ice-cream and balloons, is it?' A small crowd of onlookers had gathered on the outskirts of the car park. More peered out of the windows of the tower block, watching as the Environmental Health team covered everything in industrial bleach. 'He's coming in.' Logan hadn't expected anything else. Suspended or not, Insch wouldn't trust them not to screw this up. 'Wiseman?'
