Barnard needed to go upstairs and finish this.
He looked back toward the patrol car, saw it brake, skid, and fishtail as it avoided an SUV that had reversed out of a driveway into its path.
The moment he needed.
Benny Mongrel was at the top of the stairs. He knew he would be silhouetted against the light from outside. He knew the cop would have a perfect target. He didn’t care.
He launched himself at the stairs, and the bullet smashed into his shoulder. It was his knife arm, and he heard the knife clatter as it fell from his grip. He had been shot before, but it wasn’t a feeling you got used to, the smack of the bullet into your flesh. The deadness. No pain at first. But you knew it was coming.
He managed to twist and throw himself backward and sideways, so that he landed away from the stairs, shielded by the low wall. Benny Mongrel lay on his side, waiting for the fat cop to come up the stairs. His right arm was useless. He could feel the blood flowing from the shoulder, down his arm, pooling onto his fingers.
He reached out his left hand and found a half-brick. At least that was something.
He heard a car in the distance, driving fast, racing through the gears. He heard the cop, coming up one step. Then another.
Barnard climbed the stairs. He looked down at the street. The patrol car burned rubber as it started toward him again. Two blocks away. Barnard made up his mind. He turned and ran, moving as fast as his huge frame would allow.
He burst from the building site, hurtled across the planks, and took off for the road, legs pumping, heart threatening to explode from within its housing of fat and cholesterol.
The Ford was ahead of him. Not far.
He looked over his shoulder. The patrol car wasn’t there yet, hidden from sight, around the corner. He could hear it, though, screaming through the gears.
He was at his car. Unlocked it, dropped inside, feeling it sag under his weight.
Key in the ignition. Smashed gears into reverse and took off, away from the house, away from the patrol car, clutch burning.
Then he was '›He looke rise and reversing down out of sight.
When he heard the planks bounce as the fat cop ran away, Benny Mongrel dragged himself to his feet, the brick still in his left hand. He went down the stairs.
Bessie lay on the landing below. She wasn’t moving. Benny Mongrel stood over the dog, dropped the brick, and slowly knelt down. He knew she was dead before he touched her. The streetlight shafted onto the landing, and he could see her mouth drawn away from her bloody teeth in a rictus of death. Blood matted her coat and spread like a dark stain away from her body.
Benny Mongrel knelt down in the blood, and with his good arm he cradled the dead dog. Then he did something that he hadn’t done since he was thrown on the garbage dump all those years ago.
Benny Mongrel cried.
CHAPTER 18
When Burn saw the flashing lights of the police car, he felt a moment of blind panic. His first urge was to drive straight past his house and get the hell out of there.
Then he saw the cops were at the building site next door. An ambulance was parked in front of the cop car and an armed response vehicle up on the sidewalk. He saw the night watchman, the man with the disfigured face, being led to the ambulance. The watchman’s shirt was open, and Burn could see his arm was in a sling and his shoulder bandaged. The cops eyed Burn incuriously as he stopped outside his garage door and pressed the remote.
He nosed the car inside the garage, and the door rolled down. He sat for a moment and enjoyed the sense of relief. He was safe. For now. And he wasn’t going to leave tomorrow. Maybe, just maybe, once their daughter was born, Susan, awash in the sensation of motherhood, would change her mind. Give him-give them-another chance.
Burn remembered the birth of Matt, Susan digging her nails into his palm hard enough to make him bleed. He hadn’t felt a thing, so caught up was he in the drama of this new life.
Now it seemed impossible to him that he had thought of saying good-bye to his son.
He climbed the stairs up from the garage and came into the house through the kitchen. The familiar mayhem of the Cartoon Network blared from the living room, and two plates were laid out on the counter in the kitchen.
“Matt?” Burn dropped his keys on the counter and walked through toward the TV. That’s when he saw Mrs. Dollie lying sprawled on the tiles near the front door, her head at an impossible angle, eyes staring at nothing. The living room was empty.
Burn was running. “Matt!”
He ran through every room in the house, checked under the beds, in the closets. Knowing that his son was gone.
At last he returned to Mrs. Dollie, went through the futile exercise of feeling for her pulse. He let her lifeless hand drop to the floor. Burn checked his watch. He had been gone less than an hour. Whoever had taken his son would already have lost themselves in the sprawl of the city by now.
They were in the wind.
There were cops outside. He could walk out and ask for their help. Step back and let them handle it. He knew it would probably mean that he would be exposed. He didn’t care. All he cared about was his son.
But he knew that going to the cops could get his son killed.
Someone had taken Matt because they wanted something. This was no home invasion. Nothing had been stolen. Mrs. Dollie had been killed so she wouldn’t be able to identify his son’s kidnapper. Burn believed that somebody would contact him with a demand. He would wait for that.
It was the best chance Matt had.
Maybe the only chance.
They took Benny Mongrel down to Somerset Hospital. No fancy clinic for him, just the public hospital. It was underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded.
The paramedics left him sitting in the emergency room amid accident victims, men bloody from brawling, homeless people in distress, and, most memorably, a man who walked in with an ax embedded in his skull. Even the jaded ER staff took notice of that one.
A duty sister cast a disinterested eye over Benny Mongrel’s wound, saw that it wasn’t life threatening, and told him to wait.
Benny Mongrel waited. He had nothing better to do.
When he’d heard Ishmael Isaacs come pounding up the stairs like Clint Eastwood, his pistol in his hand, he had stopped crying, laid Bessie’s head down gently, and stood up. He had wiped the tears from his good eye. Isaacs was on the landing, pistol out in front of him, raking the area like he was auditioning for one of those fucken action movies they showed them in prison.
“They gone,” said Benny Mongrel.
Isaacs lowered the pistol, like he was disappointed he couldn’t shoot somebody. “What the fuck happened here?” As if whatever shit had gone down had to be Benny Mongrel’s fault.
“Two guys came in.” Benny Mongrel was pressing his fingers to the wound in his shoulder. It didn’t feel too bad. He tried to keep his eyes away from Bessie. He didn’t want Isaacs to see him crying.
“Who were they?”
Benny shrugged his good shoulder. “Pair of rubbishes. Lighties, little shits. Wanting to steal tools and go score tik, probably.”
“You okay?” Isaacs asked grudgingly.
Bennie nodded. “My dog went for them. They plugged her.”
Isaacs grunted and gave Bessie a disinterested kick with the toe of his boot. “Saves the vet the work.”
