Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [84]
“I really shouldn’t tell you, but…”
“You’re a star.”
She checked through the list of in-patients on the desk, taking her time. Twice she looked down the hall to the double doors, looking up at me both times, and both times I smiled, counting the seconds. When she finally told me that there was no record of a Robbie Callaghan or an Eddie Rigby, I reckoned I had maybe two minutes grace.
“There’s nothing?”
“Nothing for the emergency ward, and that’s where they’d have taken him. I’d have known, it was my shift.”
“Maybe they wrote it up wrong. He was on E as well. A Detective-Inspector Galway brought him in.”
She checked again.
“Nothing like that. There was no Detective-Inspector Galway here last night.”
It didn’t make sense but then there was no reason it should have made sense, if it made sense it’d have been the first time in three days I’d have understood what was going on.
“Cheers,” I said, made for the exit.
“What about your cousin?”
She’d leaned forward, pulled the window all the way back.
“Thanks all the same, but I’ll see him tomorrow.”
From the bed beside him, probably, and the way things were going intensive care sounded like an attractive proposition. There’s not an awful lot more they can do to you once they put you in intensive care.
I drove out of the car park to a lay-by, a quarter mile away. Katie was shaking hard.
“Katie? Can you hear me?”
It took her a couple of seconds to turn her head and when she did her eyes were dead. She needed a lorry-load of morphine and a good therapist, and I hoped she got them. What I needed were answers, which was why I took her good hand.
“Katie,” I said, stroking it gently, “there’s something I need to know. I think you know what I’m talking about.”
She stayed blank.
“Last night, when I stayed at your place?”
Still no response. She was a million miles away, or maybe just half a mile, back in the projection room.
“It was comfortable, comfortable and easy. Call me cynical, but it was a little too easy.”
Recognition finally flickered in her eyes. She edged away from me, as far as she could go, which brought her up against the passenger door. Her mouth opened slightly, and she mouthed a word. No.
“They used your neck for an ashtray tonight, Katie.” It was probably the most superfluous thing I’ve ever said. “Why would they do that? Not for kicks, these people are pros, that kind of buzz they keep for Saturday nights. They were burning you for a reason, they wanted to know something you know. And I want to know it too. Difference is, this time there’s no cavalry on the way. No one knows you’re here. So – where is he?”
There was nothing in her eyes by then. No fear, no revulsion, no flicker of recognition. There was, if I looked hard enough, still a semblance of humanity, but it was fading fast. Her eyes were nothing more than opaque marbles, seeing nothing, inside or out.
“Where is he, Katie?” Harsher this time, squeezing her hand. I concentrated on the self-loathing, feeding off it. If I’d thought for a second about what Katie was enduring, I’d never had the strength to do what I was going to have to do. I reminded myself that, even though Dutchie had sold me out to Galway, the only person who knew Herbie had the pictures was Katie. I’d told her, she’d told Galway, and Galway had put the squeeze on Dutchie. I thought it only right that I should put the squeeze on Katie.
The pressure of my hand finally filtered through. She started to cry, quietly, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. I couldn’t blame her, she’d had a rough day, but my day hadn’t been what you might call a Sunday at Butlins and my day was far from over. She tried to pull her hand away. I tightened my grip.
“Where is he, Katie? That’s all I want to know. Where’s Galway?”
It took maybe ten minutes, and a few more broken fingers, but in the end she told me what I wanted to know. I dropped her at the driveway of the hospital. She could hardly stand up, fainting from pain, but I had other things on my mind. One was how to keep down the rising gorge of bile and self-disgust.