Theme Planet (5 page)

Dex holstered his D4 and walked
back towards their BMW PUF Battlecar.

He thought about his children. He
thought about his family. He thought about losing his family. He thought about
how the stakes seemed to get worse and worse, every single day.

Was it worth it?

Was it all
really
worth
it?

And he thought, as he
occasionally had, about
resignation.

What would Kat do if some
mad-crazed Anarchy Android bitch took his head clean off in the line of duty?

Shit.
Shit.

Thank God I’m going on holiday,
he thought. It would give him
space, and time to think. Time to talk. Time to make a decision.

~ * ~

Dex entered the
low-slung
dung-bar and the door slammed shut behind him with the sound of a loading
shotgun. The bar was military themed, and called
The Full Metal Jacket.
Dex
grinned. He fucking
loved
that film. Especially the bit where the Cong
Aliens attacked during the Tet5 Offensive, and the retro-panning during the
squeezy-boat journey up the Perfume Bottle River in LOS Los Angeles.

Pegg was at the bar, and gave him
a vague hand gesture. Dex’s grin fell as if he’d been knifed. Pegg was well on
his way to the dark side of non-sobriety. Shit. Next thing he’d be telling Dex
he was his father...

Dex moved to the bar, where a
small, bald barman with a skin ponytail was pulling Japachinese beer into
glittering diamond tankards.

“Can I help you, son?” he
drawled.

“I’ll have a pint of Dublin.
Anything for you, Pegg?”

“A half of PissWhiskey.”

Dex hopped onto a high stool,
which gave the
click
of a landmine priming.
Oh the comedy!
thought Dex. “You out to get drunk, mate?”

Pegg looked up then, and Dex read
the pain - the anguish - in his face. Here was a man not just betrayed, but
destroyed. Dex’s heart fell like a stone down a well, and straight out of his
arsehole. Shit. This was going to be a long night.

“Yes.”

Dex accepted his black beer and
sipped the thick stuff. It went down well. Too well. Like treacle through a
toilet pipe. “Kat said you caught Meesha.” His voice was gentle. “Want to talk
about it?”

“Talk about it? I’ll slit the
bitch’s throat.”

“What happened?”

Pegg stared at Dex through
bloodshot eyes. “I know you thought I was crazy. Paranoid. Fuck it, even
I
felt paranoid. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to
get you, right?”

“Hmm.”

“It started off with her working
longer and longer hours. Said it was the traffic. But the timings didn’t add
up. I mean, she was taking three hours to get home and I knew, fucking
knew
it was an hour and a half, max. Then she was leaving for work earlier and
earlier, but I was drinking too much anyway by that point, so it took me a few
months to notice. Turns out she was leaving for work early so she could
leave
work even earlier; and that’s when she was meeting him.”

“Who?”

“Smark.”

“Your best friend?”

“Yeah. That back-stabbing
wife-grabbing cunt.”

“Pretty low, that. To do that to
your best friend.”

“Wait ‘til you find out exactly
what she
did
do with the hairy bastard! I thought she’d got suddenly
more adept at sucking dick.
And
taking it from behind like a begging dog
in heat. What a
bitch.”

Dex remained silent. There wasn’t
much he could say to a remark like that. He knew he was in for a long night of
bitterness and hate. And all night he’d have to be careful, have to pick his
words with care - because, well, because if they, Peggs and Meesha, ever
made
it up
again (which was always a possibility, right? nothing more insane
than love or war) then Dex’s words would be regurgitated, examined, spun around
and re-contextualised. If Dex wasn’t careful, at some point further down the
line, at a distant spot of illumination towards which he was always travelling
like a runaway train in an eternity tunnel... well, one day Dex would become
the Bad Man in all this. He’d seen it happen before. Shit, he’d been blamed for
worse. And sometimes - sometimes it was just better to keep your big flapping
mouth well and truly
shut.

“She went to the gym for six
hours at a time.”

“Six hours? Christ. You’d think
she’d look like fucking Arnie Neggarschwartz!”

“Well that was one of the
giveaways, yeah mate.”

Dex scratched his chin. “So
things got worse? I assume they did, or we wouldn’t be sat here nursing a beer
and, er, sharing the fact that your cheating wife is a bitch.”

Pegg stared into his
whiskey-substitute for a while, lost in thought. When he spoke, he blurted it
out like a waterfall of disgorged words, as if eager to excise a cancer from
his dark, tortured soul. “I was suspicious. Suspicious for too long, and I kept
telling myself I was imagining things, but I let it go and let it go and let it
go, her rolling in at four in the morning after being at her cousin’s - and
that’s the worst bit, right? Smark and her, getting it on behind my back, behind
her cousin’s back. I mean, shit, they’re family, right? So I planted a BUG in
her handbag, started monitoring her progress. The wily clever cunning bitch was
constantly looking out for being followed, she was taking evasive manoeuvres,
really weird driving patterns, down back alleys and stuff. I didn’t get it at
first, until I realised she was parking up down back streets for five minutes,
getting out of the car, scouting around to see if somebody was following her.
Once, I saw a text she sent. She said she was far too clever to ever get
caught. The arse. Not clever enough to delete
that
message, was she? And
not clever enough to figure out the BUG. And that was her downfall - thinking
everybody else, and
me
in particular, were completely dumb.”

Dexter took a long, soothing
draught of Dublin. “You caught her, then?”

“Yeah. Last night. Using the BUG.
I saw her leave work early and then stop for an hour at a time, maybe two, in
Knightsbridge. Obviously meeting somebody. The I had a few night shifts came
in, and her nocturnal mobility went crazy. I mean, off the map. Well, off the
civilised map. All manner of dark and dingy back woods, plastic parks, places
without lights and with low population densities.” He stared gloomily into his
drink, hands clenched around the diamond tankard, knuckles white. It was then
Dex saw... no. It couldn’t be.

Blood? On his knuckles?

Dex groaned inwardly. Oh, God.
No. Not Pegg. Not Katrina’s
brother...

“I had a night shift last night.
But I couldn’t take anymore. I followed them on the BUG, down to Green Canary
Wharf, you know, the section built on the Thames Sludge. It was quiet. Three
AM. When I arrived, I saw her groundcar, all steamed up. I parked, crept over,
and there she was on the back seat with Smark. Her dirty whore legs open wide
as he pumped away at her. Her face was open in ecstasy - an ecstasy she never
bloody showed me, that’s for sure.”

Dex suppressed the glib joke
threatening to slip from his tongue:
You mustn’t have been doing it right,
mate!

“What happened next?”
Unconsciously, Dex had pushed his drink to one side. His hand slipped to his
hip. To his holster. To his Techrim 11mm. Suddenly, his throat was dry. This
was beginning to look bad; friend or no friend, brother-in-law or no
brother-in-law.

“I took an axe,” said Pegg, his
voice strangled. “A long-handled axe.” He looked up then, a sudden spasmodic
jerk. His eyes were red-rimmed, tears glistening like trapped sapphires. “I
didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t
want
to do it!”

“What did you do?”

“She got me in so much fucking
debt
as well, Dexter! I started getting these bills, cred cards, dollar cubes, even
bloody clothes catalogues - all in my name. Not only was she humping my best
friend, she was going to leave me financially screwed. I know it! Here!” He
clenched a fist to his breast. “And even worse.
Even worse.
She was
engineering the whole situation; my whole life! Setting me up. Cleaning me out
like some scumshit shitbag down in the dregs.”

“
What
did you do?”

The Techrim was out. Cool in his
hand. Held close against his thigh. A promise. A promise of...
justice.

“I deserved more than that!” he
said, tears coursing down his cheeks now. “I deserved more than being used like
that, deserved more than being stabbed in the back. Cheated on for months and
months and months. How could she do that to me, Dex? If she wanted somebody
else, fine, fuck off and find him... but to keep it going for so long, they
were laughing at me Dex, laughing at me even when I banged on the door of the
steamed-up landcar...”

Dex’s voice was low. “Did you
hurt them?”

“She stumbled out into the mud,
her stained knickers round her ankles. I lifted the axe up above my head and I
swear to you, Dex, I swear I didn’t want to do it - but something took hold of
my heart, drove splinters of ice through me, pushed me over the precipice of
reason and into a deep dark pit of hate...”

Dex pointed the 11mm Techrim at
Pegg. His brother-in-law. His wife’s brother. His
friend,
dammit, his
fucking
friend.
“You know I’m going to take you in, Pegg. I’m sorry. I
represent the law. You can’t be allowed to do those things.”

“Wait a minute!”

Dex was standing, plasticuffs
out, and within a heartbeat Pegg’s face was on the bar swimming in his own
spilt beer and sorrow. Dex cuffed him. Noticed more blood on the cuffs of his
shirt.
Shit.

“Wait, Dex, wait! I didn’t
kill
them,
oh my god, you really think I killed them?”

Sirens wailed above London.
Through the dark. Through the rain. Backup were coming, triggered by the act of
Dex using his plasticuffs.

“It’s up to the Boys in Blue now,
my friend,” said Dex, glancing up. Glass smashed distantly. He could hear boots
crashing across boards, even through the booming hearty military march playing
from the jukebox in the corner, and the slurping sounds of snogging jujunga
suckers.

“Wait, no Dex, I dropped the axe,
I let them run off laughing through the mud, I
didn’t do anything!
”

“What about the blood on your
hand and shirt cuff, dickhead?” snapped Dex. Pegg was glaring up at him through
watery eyes. Yeah, thought Dex. Tears of self-pity. Dex was hard. His eyes were
hard. His lips were grim. If you committed a crime in
his city
then you
paid the fucking price.

“I cut myself
shaving!”
wailed Pegg.

“Sure you did.”

The PUF squad burst in from three
different directions at once, and Dex holstered his Techrim and walked away as
they bound Pegg and kicked out his legs. He hit the ground with a grunt, and a
MuttBag went over his head, putting out the lights.

Within thirty seconds, he’d left
the building.

“You sure about this one?”
growled Sergeant Sanders, chewing on his cigar.

“Sue me if I’m wrong,” said Dex,
face hard as granite.

~ * ~

“Do
I
have
to?”

“Yes.”