Dead of Light by Chaz Brenchley

my six o’clock shift. Cutting it so fine brought its own punishments. No choice of cars, for a start. We drove white Fiestas with no markings, not to draw attention to the highly-marketable drugs we were carrying around in the boot; unfortunately, a fair few policemen also drove anonymous white Fiestas with whip aerials, just like ours. The local lads used to hot around the area in their stolen Sierras looking for cops to ram, and once a month or so they’d ram one of us by mistake. It didn’t do the cars too much good. They got serviced, of course, they got patched up as well as the garage could manage, but there were always one or two rogues in the pool, with erratic problems no one had sorted out yet.
    There were rogue doctors too, inevitably: that ‘dangerous’ tag wasn’t too off-target, in some cases. Others were terrific, working Medicall shifts on top of a day-job for the very best of reasons, but drivers couldn’t pick and choose. Turn up good and early and you might strike lucky, as I did on good days, having a favourite doctor ask for me specially. Turn up in the very nick of time, like tonight, and luck just wasn’t a feature.
    I was last in, and there was just the one doctor waiting for me, in a bad mood already with a hefty list of calls to make down the dodgy end of town. I’d driven this guy before, and spending six hours cooped up with him in the closest of quarters was some considerable distance from my definition of a good time. I sighed inwardly, as I collected keys from the desk controller. It was going to be a long night.
    His name was Devereux, Doctor Devereux to me and my kind, we common drivers; and if we existed on a lower social level than his own good self, then his patients for the night were so far beneath him he could barely be bothered to feel contempt for them.
    â€œScum of the earth,” he said, as we headed downhill towards the first of the night’s calls. “You can chart it, demographically. The closer you come to the river, the more inbred they are. And the more stupid, the more ugly, the more vicious...”
    I nodded vaguely, concentrated on driving. I’d heard it all before. And besides, I had my own experience of inbreeding, and of stupidity and ugliness and viciousness. There wasn’t much he could tell me about it, but neither was I on any safe ground to start an argument.
    o0o
    We’d been four hours on the road, we’d worked our way through that first list we’d started out with — the good doctor spending an average of three minutes and fifty-five seconds in each house, I was passing the time by counting — and we’d had as many calls again come in on the radio. Normally I brought sandwiches and a can of coke to tide me over, but I’d been too much rushed tonight; and while some doctors were amenable to refreshment breaks — one even bullying me back to his house a couple of times for a chicken curry if we were on top of the work — I wasn’t going to broach the subject with Devereux.
    Instead, I decided that the car was going to break down. Not badly, just enough that I’d need to pull into a garage and fiddle under the bonnet, and buy myself a pint of milk and a stottie while I fiddled.
    Not yet, though. I’d wait a little longer, and hope that things quieted down a bit.
    On the way from one call to the next, trying to find one small cul-de-sac in a dead-end estate that was all dirty concrete and no street-lights, every other window boarded up and not a street-name to be seen, I heard something that was neither the radio nor Devereux’s endless, grumbling voice.
    Instantly, automatically, I had the car stopped and my door open, to hear better.
    â€œWhat?” Devereux demanded. “What is it, why’ve you stopped? This isn’t what we’re looking for...”
    No more it was; but suddenly here it came again, somewhere close, a man’s voice screaming in