Ex - chapter 19 - bank robbers and buried noses part 2

“Get up slowly and make your way into the safety deposit box room” growled bank robber 2, his voice, a melange of contempt and desperation suffused with ferocious anger. The gun pressed harder against his cheekbone.

“Can you imagine me getting up anything but slowly?” Sergeant M struggled to find purchase until Daindridge helped him to his feet.

The safety deposit box room was the size of a large toilet and as the bank robber closed the door behind him M felt the walls and ceiling close in on him as if he were a wilting flower, pressed between two slices of wood by an avaricious child. They were motioned to sit down on the floor beside a small table , the electrical spaghetti of the dismembered CCTV hung from the wall and the contents of the safety deposit boxes had been piled onto the table where robber 2 now sat.

“When I pull this trigger” robber 2 leaned down and pushed the gun into Daindridge's eye socket “your brains will explode and even people who know you, who love you, won’t recognize you, they won’t even be able to look at you without vomiting.”

“That’s pretty much the story already” M could feel sweat pooling between the layers of his pulmulent lard. “Anyway a bullet from a little gun like that would just blow a hole through his eye socket and out through the back of his head. A glass eye and a bit of waddling stuffed into his brain cavity and he’d look better than he does now.”

Robber 2’s features were hidden behind his balaclava but his eyes were eloquent in their bitter antipathy for Sergeant M.

“How do they allow a rancorous fucking animal like you to become a policeman. You’re grotesque, like the kind of bloated, fly infested buffalo that wallows in its on shit in the far corner of the worst kind of zoo. You are fucking disgusting - how does a human being let itself get in to this kind of state?”

M wasn’t listening - the contorted mouth, framed in green patterned wool had become a huge glistening maggot, writhing and ruining on a hook.

“When my son died, when I heard that he had died, I waited at the hospital for his body to arrive. They show you into a room, a room about the size of this one and there is an empty bed for dead sons and an empty chair for doctors whose words defile you, who touch your shoulder like a cannibal because you are so much flesh to them. When they arrived with the body, the little body, swaddled as if he was being lifted out of his bath, I was invisible, because he was the best of me, he was all of me of any substance in this vile, shit infested world. What was left, what was left in that room, in this room, is raw sewage. So shoot me you execrable little pissant, shoot me in my guts where it is going to hurt the most and do it now before I rip you apart with my fucking teeth.”

Placing his hands on Daindridge’s shoulder and Robber 2’s knee, he levered himself up with surprising grace and punched robber 2 in the face with such force that for a moment it seemed that his head might depart his shoulders. He plucked the gun from a hand which was still clenching and unclenching and it was at that point he noticed the blood rose, blossoming on his shirt.

“You’ve been shot” Daindridge reached out a timorous finger and touched the hot red petals.

M, pulled open his shirt and traced his fingers around and in to the entry wound in the pregnant mound of his gut. A small calibre handgun, fired at close range into a 32 stone of blubber and kebab. If he still had any vital organs in there, this pea shooter wouldn’t have found them.

“I need this gun David. I need it to bring an end to the relentless horror, I need to use it to kill and I can’t be stopped. You’d stop me wouldn’t you David. You’d have to stop me, its what people like you do, put your finger in the dam of bestiality.”

“I ....” Daindridge’s vocabulary lay on the floor around his feet, he scrabbled around for words like “life ” and “mercy” but they were lost amongst the dust bunnies and crevices. All he could find was “please”, which as he uttered it became, perhaps had always been, an entreaty to do what he most feared yet most desired.

M raised the gun and shot Daindridge at close range directly between the eyes. The young man’s mouth formed into an O as he eased slowly backwards as if in slumber. Automatically M reviewed the crime scene. There would be no-one to gainsay the order of events, villain shoots young copper and fat copper, fat copper bravely snaps villain’s neck. Murder weapon and fat copper missing but that was just a footnote - it would read well, the brass would like it and reality, as ever, would fall off the page like an unwelcome footnote.

He had tried and failed to slay his own son and now he had killed someone else’s. He wanted to care, for it to hurt more than the bullet in his stomach but honestly - he had felt neither. This was a perfect storm and he had been drowning in it for years, the only question now was who he took down with him.