SuperJack by Adam Baron

Author:Adam Baron
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911591634
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2017-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

I left my car outside Nicky’s closed garage and walked towards his flat, my footsteps crisp on the wet concrete. The night was dark and damp and a gusting wind rattled through the guttering like someone trying to get a note out of a horn. I had my coat on but it was still very cold. A sharp half-moon cut quickly between massive, bulbous clouds like the dorsal fin of a great white in a heavy, grey swell.

No one jumped me.

Nicky had given me his spare key and I used it in the back door before calling the lift. The hallway was almost as cold as the street, and I stood, my hands buried in my pockets. Then, as the lift rose to five, I played over what had happened that day. Her body. Slim, malleable, her sharp elbows against my chest. Her smell. The look on her face, the determined tight look as she moved atop of me, the way her belly felt on mine. Jesus. I wasn’t in the habit of screwing the people I had gone to interview. It wasn’t the first time that the opportunity had presented itself – hookers will often offer a cop a blow job if he’ll turn a blind eye, so to speak – but I’d never yielded to such ‘temptation’. Nor had I taken advantage of any of the vulnerable women I’d sat across from over the years, the widows, sisters or girlfriends who were in some way connected to the cases I’d been on. All lost and confused, all in need of a measure of comfort that would bring life crashing into the instant, make the Big Black Reason why I was talking to them go away for a while.

I wondered if that was what I had just done – taken advantage of a confused and needy woman. I didn’t think so. Louise Draper had needed comfort all right, but it was she who’d chosen what form it arrived in. She wanted me to take the blame but she knew what she was doing. So I didn’t feel bad, exactly, about what had happened. Just confused. Confused as to why then confused when I thought of Shulpa, because when I did I didn’t feel any guilt, none at all. Nothing. This was a surprise to me but, I reasoned, it was just something that happened. I hadn’t looked for it, I hadn’t expected it to go the way it had. It was rounded off and contained, within and of itself. It wasn’t about Shulpa, of course it wasn’t.

But as the lift door opened I suddenly wondered if I’d have done the same thing had I still been seeing Sharon. Sharon was my brother’s fiancée. They were about to be married when he had the accident that left him, and still leaves him, in a persistent vegetative state, or coma. Some years after Luke’s accident Sharon and I had been unable to play down our feelings for each other, and

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