Sucker Punch (6 page)

Somewhere in this fucking town there's a place where a guy can light up. And I'll find it if it kills me.

Then
I'll phone Paulo.

“Sir?”

I shake myself lucid, one of the Marlboros hanging from the corner of my mouth. My hand's cupped round a small pink Bic lighter it took me a good half hour to find in a local supermarket. I couldn't bring my lighter, something to do with it being a weapon of mass destruction. The flame burns the tip of my thumb, so I kill the gas. “Sorry, what? I was miles away.”

“We don't allow smoking.” In case I'm as deaf or as stupid as he thinks I am, the bartender points to a sign nestled amongst the bottles on the back bar. It reads: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING!

You're welcome, I'm sure. And thank
you
for the exclamation mark. Very friendly.

I put the Bic down, look at the bartender. “This is a bar, right?”

He looks at me like I'm mildy retarded. He's an anorexic Beach Boy in a red waistcoat, his teeth too even and white. Manages to look utterly disgusted with me and smile at the same time. “Yeah, it's a bar.”

“And you're telling me I can't smoke in a bar.”

He holds his hands up. “If it were up to me—”

“I got these at LAX,” I say, tapping the Bic. “I've been everywhere since I touched down and not one single place allows smoking.”

“That's unfortunate.”

“Now why would they sell me these fuckin' things if I can't smoke them anywhere?”

“A cruel practical joke?”

“Tell me about.” I pull the cigarette from my lips, slide it back into the packet. Looks like I'll have to make do with the booze. I take a swallow of Budweiser, crave a full pint of it, but bottles look like the norm over here. “Is there anywhere I
can
smoke?”

“Outside,” he says.

“In the smog?”

The bartender's smile widens. “Yeah, it's not much of a choice, is it?”

“Nope.” I tap the Marlboro pack and order an Absolut. I should be more adventurous, but jet lag's crept up and smacked me across the back of the head. Doesn't help that there's a jazz band playing in here. I never could stand jazz. There's no point to it, no emotion in it. Nothing but musical masturbation and nobody likes a fucking show off. The bartender slides me my vodka on a paper napkin. I stare at the clear liquid, then take a drink. It tastes okay. It'd taste better with smoke in my lungs, but there you go.

“You're British,” says a guy further up the bar.

I look around the bar before I turn to him. Nobody else in here, it looks like, unless there's a party in the toilet I don't know about. He's smiling. They all smile here. Then again, so do rabid dogs. I turn back to my drink. “If you want.”

“I have a cousin in Birmingham.”

“Alabama?”

“England.”

“Right enough. I think I know him.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Ugly lad, right? Won't let people drink in peace?”

“That'll be him.”

The guy's ginger, but probably calls himself “strawberry blonde”. Has that face that looks like someone's taken a chisel to his cheeks when he smiles. He wears glasses with small round frames that seem incapable of staying on the bridge of his broken nose. When he pushes his specs back up, I notice the elbow of his tweedy-looking jacket is frayed. A second glance, and the jacket's a size too small. But what's bothering me is that he looks like someone famous.

“Nelson Byrne,” he says.

“Callum Innes.”

Nelson moves down the bar to shake. When he holds out his hand, I notice how big it is. Scar tissue on the knuckles, callouses on the palm.

“Good to meet you, Callum. What you doing in LA?”

“Babysitting.”

“Anyone famous?”

I crook an eyebrow at him. “Might be in a couple of years.”

“You must be earning a fortune,” he says.

“Ah, you know, whatever I can steal.”

“Sounds like a guy I used to know.”

“Lawyer?”

Nelson waves his hand and pulls a face. “Promoter.”

“Promoter?”

He finishes his beer. “Get you another?”

“Nah, I'm fine thanks.”

Nelson orders another beer, a Heineken. The bartender slides it across, grabs the empty bottle. Nelson tucks a fingernail under the bottle label, starts picking at it. “So how are you finding the City of Angels?”

“You people really call it that?” I say.

“No, but I thought you guys did.”

“We don't.” I sip my vodka. “It's okay, I suppose. Haven't seen that much of it, tell the truth. I just got in. I wish there were places I could smoke. Fuckin' Gestapo everywhere.”

“Yeah, it was hard when I smoked.”

“You gave up?”

“In this town, you kind of have to quit.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” I swallow the rest of my vodka. Nelson orders me another one before I get a chance to decline. It's a double, same as before. I nod my thanks.

“So what do you do for a living, Callum? Apart from babysit.”

“Nothing much.”

He stares at the label. “You must do something. Plane tickets don't just fall out of the sky.”

“The tickets were paid for. Part of the babysitting job. And I had some cash left over from my previous employment.” I can't help but hit that last word with a measure of disgust.

“And what was that?”

I sip the vodka and smile at him. “I was a private investigator.”

Nelson looks vaguely impressed, as if I've lied to him but he's too polite to call me on it. “I didn't know you had private investigators in Britain.”

“We don't,” I say. “Not really. We try.”

“Well, I was about to say, you're in the right city for it.”

“I don't do it anymore. I wasn't much cop, tell the truth.”

Nelson swigs from his beer, smacks his lips. “Not as glamorous as it's made out, so I hear. We got these shows, reality shows, I watched a couple. Mostly just sitting around in cars waiting for parole violators, cheating husbands. A lot of pissing in bottles. Marlowe's given up the ghost, Callum. He rolled back to his apartment and got drunk one too many times. They found him slumped over his chess set with a pawn in his mouth.”

I blink. “Sorry?”

Nelson smiles with one side of his face. “I better ease off on the beer, huh?”

“You feeling it?”

“No, I'm just bloated.” He orders a Jim Beam over ice. “I'm hungry. You hungry?”

“I could eat.”

“You want to get a hot dog?”

“They do food here?”

“Yeah, but it stinks. I know a place. How about we finish up the drinks, take a hike over there? You can smoke on the way if you want. And I'll tell you, Callum, this jazz band's annoying the hell out of me.”

“Man after my own heart.” As I reach for my vodka, my back gyps me hard. I suck my teeth.

“You okay?”

“I've got a bad back.” I get the bartender's attention. “Here, mate, is it alright if I take prescription pills in here or are you going to point to another sign?”

The bartender gives me a full on Colgate grin. “No rules against pills, sir.”

“Good.”

I should've guessed. I'm sitting in the Valley of the Dolls.

These pills. Dihydrocodeine. Ibuprofen. Prozac. A couple of others to take the edge off, names I can't spell, can't pronounce without taking a concentrated look at the little brown bottle. And every time I needed a repeat script, I had to see my doctor. Which wouldn't bother me, but my GP was a bastard.

The first prescription I had, I needed more than air. Dr Dick scrawled it out for me up in Newcastle after a high speed run-in with a Fiesta. Dick was a tall slab of Milk Tray hunk, a friend of a friend, looked like he belonged on the front cover of a Mills and Boon. Watching him, I thought he was more than just a friend, but I wasn't about to turn down medication because I was jealous. I was positive I was paralysed from the waist down. Something like that happens, you don't care if they start fucking in front of you and you certainly don't give a shit where the pills come from.

But my back was still killing me when I came back to Manchester. And without Dr Dick at my beck and call, I had to trust my friendly neighbourhood doctor. The whole situation was sapping my will to live. Even more than being stuck in the waiting room, thumbing through an ancient copy of
Hello!
.

“Mr Innes?”

I looked up. My name was scrolling across the board, started flashing. Very posh. The receptionist had a face on, like what the fuck did I think I was doing
reading
when I should've been watching the board? Maybe because I wasn't that desperate? I didn't think I was, anyway. I'd been trying to ignore the dull ache, throwing myself into a world of celebrities the country'd long stopped caring about.

“Sorry,” I said. I got up, dropped the magazine on my seat and headed down the corridor to where Dr Choudrey was waiting for me. I knocked on his door and stepped inside.

Choudrey didn't look up. “How are you feeling, Mr Innes?”

A lot worse for entering his office. The place was a dead air zone, the windows permanently shut. Choudrey was adamant that any sickness would be confined to those four walls.

“Not so good,” I said.

Dr Choudrey was a lump of greyish fat in a bad suit, the shoulders dusted with dandruff. Or it could well have been ash — Choudrey had the look and hacking cough of a diehard smoker. A perfect advertisment for Nicorette. And to be fair to the man, he was the only doctor who hadn't collared me about my smoking. No, he had far more to nag me about.

“Your back still playing you up?” he said.

“It's still murdering me slowly, yeah.”

Choudrey smiled at the notes in front of him. Another one who'd rather look at paper than me. “I don't think it's going to
kill
you, Mr Innes.”

“Well, you're not living with it, Doctor.”

“Right enough. I've been looking through your notes.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Mm.” Which I took for a yes. Choudrey removed his glasses, looked at me directly. Obviously grown a pair of balls. That was nice to see. “I think we'll ease off on your prescription.”

I didn't say anything for a moment. Let it sink in. He looked like he was waiting for a reply. So I said, “Right.”

“I don't think the codeine's working as well as it should.”

“It's working fine.”

He shook his head. “I'm not convinced medication's the answer here.”

“I think I'd disagree.”

“I knew you would.” Choudrey shifted position in his chair. “You've been on the painkillers for a while, Mr Innes. And yet you still have pain.”

“You don't know the half of it.”

“So the medication is not solving the problem.”

“It's solving most of the pain.”

Choudrey sniffed. “It's temporary relief, I'm afraid. Medication isn't a long term fix. It's not a long term fix I'm comfortable with anyway …”

Who cared about his comfort? His comfort wasn't the fucking issue here. I tried to keep my hands from balling. At the back of my head, scenes played out in a court room, Choudrey being struck off for gross malpractice.

“I think what we'll do is, we'll see if we can get you into physiotherapy.”

“Who's this we? You got a mouse in your pocket?”

Choudrey's grin became wide and yellow. “I must remember that one.”

“It's yours.” I put my hands in my lap. “You're cutting my medication.”

“Yes,” he said. Just like that. The smile lost its face on his face, ended up flipping to a concentrated frown. “The dosage you're on at the moment, it's not doing you any good—”

“It feels like it's doing me plenty of good.”

“In fact, Mr Innes, the current dosage may well be exacerbating your situation.”

“Exacer-what?”

“It may be doing you harm. So what I propose is we cut back on the codeine, replace it with cocodemol, keep the ibuprofen, and book you in to see the physio.”

“What's cocodemol?” I said.

“It's a painkiller.” Choudrey was nodding to himself.

“Right. Okay.”

He started writing a prescription, then stopped mid-scrawl. “Actually, you might be best just buying the cocodemol over the counter, save yourself a few pounds.”

“Hang on, this is over the counter stuff?”

Choudrey shrugged. “It'll cost less than the prescription. I'm doing you a favour.”

“You're prescribing me fuckin' headache tablets and that's a favour?” I paused, tried to control my voice. It had almost crept to a yell there. “Look, if the dosage isn't working, then you up the dosage.”

“You don’t understand,” said Choudrey.

“You're right, Doctor, I don't understand. I can't sleep at nights. I need pills to get me asleep,
keep
me asleep, else I wake up in the middle of the night screaming.”

“I'm sure it's not that bad.”

“Your bedside manner's pish, by the way. And you're not living with it.”

“If it's so bad,” he said, “then physiotherapy's the only way to make it better. Really. It's the only way forward.”

“Tell you what, you just write me a repeat script and I'll get out of your hair.”

Choudrey leaned back in his chair, closed his hands together and stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“Mr Innes, I want to make this perfectly clear to you: I'm not going to write you a repeat prescription.”

“Why not?”

He waved the question off, leaned forward again. “I'll book you in for a session at the hospital. If you honestly find that the physiotherapy isn't working, then we'll talk about some weaker medication for you.”

I shook my head. “That's not going to be possible.”

“And why's that?”

“I'm going away.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm going to the States. It's a business trip.”

“I wouldn't recommend you fly.”

“Well, I'm not about to fuckin' swim it, am I? I don't have a choice.” I was about to steam on, tell him exactly why I didn't have a choice, but he'd already figured me for a twat, so I caught myself. Took a deep breath. “Look, Doctor, I appreciate the thought, but right now all I need is a repeat. When I get back from the States, I'll come and see you, you can book me in for the physio, drop the script down to fuckin' aspirins or whatever and we'll see how it goes. Does that sound fair?”