To Die For by Phillip Hunter Page B

seen by the two in the car.
    I still had Kendall’s mobile phone in my pocket and I used it to call King again. When he’d finished swearing at me, I told him what I wanted him to do. He called back a couple of minutes later.
    ‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘Can I get some fucking sleep now?’
    I pulled my coat tighter around me and stepped back into the alley. I put my hands in the coat pockets, placed my feet evenly and fixed my eyes on Moore’s place. I was perfectly balanced, ready to move quickly in either direction. I settled down for a long wait.
    I’d done this many times over the years, one way or another – bodyguard duty, casing a place, sentry duty. I always liked it. I liked the darkness, the silence of the night. I could let my mind go blank, let the world slip away. I could live, for a while anyway, in nothingness. The darkness around me was like a blanket to me. It was comfortable.
    But as I waited, the silence seemed to slide into my guts, the darkness sank in on me and closed around. I took a deep breath. In everyday life, there was so much clutter that you got used to it. Silence, stillness, these were foreign things. It seemed to me a long time since I’d felt the peace of nothingness. Had I ever? I fixed my eyes again on the building opposite and shook my head to clear it. I was tired, and I ached from the earlier beating I’d taken, and I couldn’t keep my mind concentrated. Images flitted through my head. I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists and tried to block out the thoughts.
    Still I stood immobile, my eyes unwavering, dead to see, if anyone could have seen them, not flickering, not moving, not blinking. The cold bit into me. I ignored it. The sound, far away, of traffic carried through the still, thin air, and droned. I smelled the woollen mustiness of my coat.
    My mind began to wander again, slinking back like a dog to its own vomit. I saw Kendall’s wife flop over, her white flesh wobbling. I saw my dad, too drunk to stand upright but still able to smash my mother’s face with a right hook.
    How much time now had passed? A few minutes? Half an hour?
    I tried to blank my mind, shake out the thoughts, but they buzzed around and caught.
    And then I was on a hill and the air was biting cold and the fog was all around me and I was alone. The boy stared at me, his eyes sunken, his cheeks hollowed so that it looked as if he’d been dead for many days, but he’d died just a few hours earlier. I knew this. I’d killed him. And he lay there, with eyelids lowered so that, if it weren’t for his mouth, he would have had a sleepy mask. But it was that mouth, that rictus grin with the lips pulled back, the teeth bared in a mocking snarl, that I couldn’t stop looking at. It drew me in and held me. It was just the two of us, me in the foxhole, wet and frozen stiff, gripping my SLR with hands that I could no longer bend, and the boy a dozen feet away, staring at me, laughing at me.
    Maybe it was the blow to my head. Or maybe I’d fallen asleep for an instant and had dreamed. That happens. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that boy for a long time. There was a time when I’d thought of nothing else. I call him a boy, but I was probably younger than he was when I killed him. I got older. He didn’t. That was all there was to it.
    A light came on in Moore’s place. Someone had made a phone call. The light was good. It gave me something to focus on. After another few minutes, I saw a figure, a man, far off to my left, coming towards me.
    The man was tall and thin and, in the neon glow of the street lights, he had a sickly white face. He looked, from a distance, to be old, bony and bent, but as he came closer, I could see that he was young, early twenties at most. Despite the cold, he was wearing a thin canvas jacket in which he’d planted his hands. He walked with his head down, shuffling along with the look of someone going to do a job he hated. He looked dopey and might’ve had a hit of