Dead Money by Ray Banks

Author:Ray Banks [Banks, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery & Crime
Publisher: Blasted Heath
Published: 2011-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

14

Beale screamed like he was being attacked. The noise echoed out like a nightmare.

I was laid out against the cement, staring at the stars, my eyes as wide as the swelling would allow and my heart smacking against the inside of my chest like a Salvation Army tambourine. A sharp pain in the back of my head told me I'd hit concrete on the way down. I pushed myself upright and felt sick.

"Get him off us, get him off us, get him off us."

I wished Beale would stop screaming. It was dark down here, but it wasn't a bloody vacuum. People could still hear. I pushed myself down the slope at an angle. I thought I could make out movement down by the water's edge.

Beale screamed again.

"I'm coming. Shut the fuck up, will you?"

I hit the concrete footpath heavily, a step away from a nosedive into the canal. I steadied myself, waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Beale was on his back, the bin liners pinning him to the ground. He scrabbled at the concrete, trying to pull himself out from under. About all I could see of him was his frightened moon face.

I had to blink. Stevie writhed inside the plastic, jerked and spasmed. The thinner liners around his head sucked and billowed as he struggled for breath.

"Jesus." It was the only thing that came to mind, and oddly fitting given what I was seeing was a resurrection.

"Get him off us!"

I didn't want to move. Stevie was dead. I was positive he was dead. He'd looked dead.

"Alan!"

I dropped to muddy knees and rolled the bags off Beale, who scrambled off to one side and lay there knackered. He couldn't take his eyes off Stevie, his mouth open. "What do we do now?"

There was a horrible sucking sound, the plastic crinkling against lips, the jagged wheeze of a barely drawn breath.

"You said you killed him."

"I said I thought I'd killed him."

"You didn't take a pulse? Try and wake him up, something like that? Christ's sake, how hard did you hit him, anyway?"

All the time, the desperate underscore of whistling plastic.

Beale ran a hand over his balding head. "I don't fuckin' know, do I?"

I looked down at the bundle. Stevie had started to wind down. I thought about my steering lock. I thought about climbing back up to the car, retrieving the lock and coming down here to finish off what Beale had started. A couple of swift, sharp blows to the head should do it.

A muffled animal noise came out of Stevie. The black plastic puckered around his mouth and nipped in. The poor bastard was trying to gnaw through the bags.

Beale couldn't watch anymore. He turned away, both hands clutching fistfuls of his jacket.

A tooth ripped through the black plastic, white in the gloom. The ragged noise stuttered hard, short breaths rasping against the bags. Something wet poked through the hole, trying to make it bigger, get some more air in. His tongue.

And all I could think of was: Come on, Stevie, give me a great big lickery kiss.

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