Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

ARNOLD AVERY WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE DIRECTION HE SHOULD take, but he was wrong about the ticking clock.

Because the governor wanted to keep morale up.

When Avery wasn’t recaptured by 5 P.M., the governor even got into his own two-year-old Mercedes Kompressor and cruised the drizzling moors, convinced that spotting Avery was just a matter of time and motivation.

And he was getting very motivated.

Every hour that Avery remained at large compounded his sin in not having called the police. And every hour that he didn’t call the police increased his desperation to get Avery back in custody without anyone knowing he’d ever been gone.

When Avery wasn’t captured by nightfall, the governor’s discomfort at not having called the police earlier turned to twitchy foreboding and—shortly thereafter—blind panic.

It was in that condition that he staked his entire future on Avery’s being in custody by morning.

Which meant that when he wasn’t, the numb, soon-to-be-jobless governor didn’t call the police until 7:09 A.M.—almost twenty-four hours after Avery went over the wall.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD PRIVATE GARY LUMSDEN DIDN’T LIKE THE army but—like his father before him—he did like guns.

The difference, thought Lumsden, was that his father had never been in possession of a gun quite as menacing as the SA80A2, with its thirty-round magazine, an accurate range of four hundred yards, and a muzzle velocity of just a shade under a kilometer per second.

Not that his father would have given a shit about any of the technical details, of course, thought Lumsden; Mason Dingle would only have wanted to know how cheap, and could it be traced.

But Gary Lumsden loved the technical details. Certainly, he wished the SA80A2 had a more glamorous name, like Colt .45 or Uzi. But it was the technical details that had kept his mouth watered through thirteen weeks of sweaty basic training, and his fists at his sides as Second Lieutenant Brigstock—all shiny and new from Sandhurst—bossed him about like a hated older brother.

The thought of the SA80 obsessed him. On drill his eyes swivelled illegally to watch other squaddies carrying their guns, and he felt rather than heard the dull metal-on-metal clicks and sharp slides of well-maintained weaponry. As he hung with screaming arms over a pit of mud on the assault course, his ears were attuned to the snappy cracks from the nearby range. At night, while the man in the bunk below his made them both shake to the rhythm of imaginary sex, Gary Lumsden’s skin thrilled instead to the thought of cradling his SA80 in his left hand, while his right forefinger twitched on a phantom trigger.

And now he finally held the culmination of all those technical details cool and heavy in his hands, it was all Private Gary Lumsden could do not to stand up, spin on his heel, and spray his platoon-mates with high-caliber bullets at a rate of seven hundred rounds per minute—just to see what it would feel like. He yearned to feel the weapon heat up in his palms, spit fire from his fingers, ring in his ears, commit distant murder.

Instead Private Lumsden breathed through his mouth as the moment of truth arrived.

The SA80 fitted him like another limb. They’d been separated at birth and now it was part of him again. He’d cleaned it and dismantled it and cleaned it and reassembled it and cleaned it again. He could do it blindfolded. Be good to your gun and your gun will be good to you. By that reckoning, Private Lumsden’s gun should have gone down on him every morning and then cooked him bacon and eggs.

But now—finally—it was his gun’s turn to pay him back.

Controlling his excitement, Private Lumsden drew a bead on a card target that didn’t even have a human shape on it—it was just five bull’s-eyes on a page. Fucking crap.

Still, he focused, relaxed, exhaled smoothly, and squeezed lovingly, and the single round kicked his shoulder and the card rippled briefly to let him know he’d hit it.

“Well done, Lumsden!”

Lumsden didn’t hear Brigstock. The shot had opened a gate of hot pleasure in him that made him wince. He had to bite his lip to keep from whimpering. Never in a million years had he imagined his gun would be that good to him.

In a rush, he thought of his father.

Lumsden’s father shared his DNA but not his name. Thank god. Life had been tough enough for the Lumsden boys without the added encumbrance of a name like Dingle. No wonder his old man had had a short fuse.

That short fuse translated into quick fists for young Gary and his brother, Mark. The boys did not complain; they had never known anything else. In just the same way, they had never had clothes on their backs that were not shoplifted, food on their table that had been legally purchased, toys they had not bought with stolen lunch money.

Even their mother did not really belong to their father—she was one of six on the Lapwing estate who had borne his children, the first offspring arriving just shy of Mason Dingle’s fifteenth birthday. Gary and Mark had a half sister they had nothing to do with, and knew who their half brothers were by their quick tempers as much as by the angelic blue eyes they all shared.

The eight boys aged between six and seventeen prowled warily around one another on the estate—aware of the tenuous bond they all resented. There were long periods of uneasy quiet, punctured by flurries of sharp but generally minor violence. Their father flitted between families, staying only until everything wasn’t going his way, then he’d move on and start again. He had no favorites—barely seemed to acknowledge the boys—and made no contribution other than drawing regular late-night or early-morning visits from the police.

Gary Lumsden was first taken into custody at the age of nine for stealing a tube of toothpaste from the corner shop. His mother had sent him for the toothpaste; she didn’t give him any money and Gary didn’t expect her to. The shopkeeper held his shirt so tight until the police came that Gary had red marks under his armpits for days.

He knew shoplifting was wrong, but only in an abstract way. At school it was wrong and at home it was all he knew. The thought of going to work somewhere, earning money, and buying stuff with it was alien to him; he had no experience of anyone in his family doing such a thing—and would have thought them foolish to attempt it. Toothpaste was in the shop; all he had to do was transfer it to his mother’s bathroom with the minimum of fuss.

The police came and took him home, instead of to the police station. The copper led him from the patrol car to the front door in a death grip that told Gary he’d like to do much more to him than this pointless exercise. Something inside the young Gary had understood that this wasn’t just about him; that the policeman’s rough handling had been primed by other, older experiences that Gary had no knowledge of. But for now he was at the sharp end.

His mother had been unable to muster the required sobriety to appear even vaguely interested in a policeman at her door and—apart from her later bitching about no toothpaste—that had been that. Given that Gary had been relieving the corner shop of its shabby stock since the age of four, his first brush with the law seemed a ridiculously small price to pay.

Mason Dingle occasionally “went away,” but he always came back and never seemed embarrassed, chastened, or changed by the experience, and Gary and Mark had no doubt that they would one day follow him into the family trade.

Until they saw Band of Brothers on a pirated DVD. Then everything changed.

Suddenly Gary and Mark Lumsden were the good guys—staunch, courageous, noble—if only in their own minds. They stopped being famous footballers and gangsters and started being soldiers.