A Cool Head by Ian Rankin Page B

sometimes I still do. But I always whisper the prayer so the other people in the house don’t hear me.
    ‘Benjy?’
    I placed my hand on his shoulder and watched as he fell forwards until he was face down on the pathway. I knew what that meant. And when I turned him over, his eyes were closed, his mouth wide open. I pulled up his shirt and saw the hole in his chest. Blood had stopped coming out of it. His skin was cold to the touch.
    ‘Bad,’ I said. It was the first word that came into my head. ‘Bad, bad, bad, bad.’ Five times for luck. There was a dog barking somewhere. Dogs like the graveyard. So do cats and foxes and rabbits. Birds, too, in the daylight. I’d never seen or heard an owl. Or a bat or a rat or a mouse. One old lady from the estate told me there were badgers nearby, but she couldn’t tell me where. She said she could smell them sometimes. I always wish I’d asked her what they smelled like, then I’d know.
    ‘Bad badger, badger bad,’ I said, liking the sound of it. Four more times for luck, then I looked inside the blue bag. It was a gun. It looked like a real gun. There was blood on the inside of the bag. The gun smelled of oil or grease. I’d hidden a knife for Benjy in the past, but never a gun. First time for everything, I thought to myself.
    Then I noticed the car. There was a light on inside it, and that gave me a shock. But the door was open, and that had to be the reason. When you opened your door, a little light came on. I walked over to the car and looked inside. More sticky blood on the seat and the steering wheel, and a balaclava on the floor. The key was in the ignition. The car smelled of leather, and there was a little green tree hanging below the mirror. Benjy had forgotten his other bag. It was the kind people carried when they were going to play football or visit the pool. It was red and shiny and, when I opened it, it was full of bits of paper. I lifted out one of the bundles and held it up to the little light in the car’s ceiling.
    It was money.
    The notes all had 20 on them. That meant each one was worth twenty pounds. I put the bundle back in the bag and looked through the windscreen. Benjy was still there. So was the blue bag with the gun inside. He wanted me to hide the gun. But what about the car? What about the red bag?
    And what about Benjy?

Chapter Two
    George Renshaw’s Scrapyard
    ‘I’m not happy,’ Gorgeous George said.
    This was true. But then he wasn’t gorgeous either. As Don Empson stared at his employer, he wondered how George had ended up with the nickname. Maybe it was ironic, a sort of joke. Like calling a glum bloke in the pub ‘Smiler’. Gorgeous George was as wide as he was tall, and he wasn’t exactly short. He always wore his shirtsleeves rolled up. His arms were hairy, with a lot of tattoos. The tattoos were from his days in the Royal Navy. There were thistles and pipers and naked women. George was completely bald. His scalp gleamed. There were nicks and scars on it, and more scars on his face and neck. He wore a large gold ring on each and every finger, right hand and left, plus a heavy gold ID bracelet on one wrist and a gold Rolex watch on the other. When he laughed, which didn’t happen very often, you could see a couple of gold teeth towards the back of his mouth. His eyes were small, almost childlike, and he had no eyebrows. His nose was red and pulpy, like an overripe strawberry. He sat behind his desk and drummed its surface with his jewelled fingers.
    ‘Not happy at all,’ he said.
    ‘You’re not the only one,’ Don told him. ‘How do you think I feel? Nice easy job you said. A simple delivery. I mean, someone sticks a gun in my face. I’m not happy either.’
    Okay, so it had been his stomach rather than his face, but Don reckoned face would sound better.
    ‘Time was,’ George muttered, ‘you’d have taken that gun away from him and slapped him about a bit.’
    ‘Time was,’ Don agreed. It was true, he was getting