Buried-6 by Mark Billingham Page B

sound’s real y pumped up loud. He can feel his heart going mental underneath his Puffa, but it’s excitement, not fear, and when he gets out of the car he gets the look he’s been dreaming about for so long.
    It’s the moment when power shifts.
    The tosser with the bat has obviously fancied it right up to that moment, because the bat gives him the edge, and he probably isn’t afraid to use it either. It’s made him braver than he’s got any right to be. But then he sees the gun, and he shits himself.
    He shits himself. Or he might just as wel have done, judging by the look on his face as he walks away. As he puts down the bat, and puts up his hands, and says, ‘Al right, mate, no harm done.’
    Of course, the gun was only a replica and, real or not, maybe it was the gun that was getting the respect rather than him, but stil . It didn’t matter. The feeling as he climbed back into his car was amazing, like nothing he’d known before, and it had stayed with him. Singing in his blood as he tore past the buses and ripped through the puddles, right up until the moment when everything had gone very tits up twenty minutes later . . .
    Across the room, the boy was awake beneath the hood. He could tel by the position of him, by the way his head turned and his face pressed against the material.
    ‘You hungry?’
    They’d had a long discussion about whether to use a gag and Amanda had decided against it in the end. It was maybe a bit over the top. Anyway, the kid was drugged up most of the time and, even when he wasn’t, they’d be on him like a rash if he tried screaming.
    ‘You want something to eat?’
    The boy said nothing, even though he could. Just ignored the question. He chose to keep quiet for some reason, like he was protesting or something; like he was playing a game with them.
    Trying to be clever.

    WEDNESDAY

    FOUR
    His father had taken to coming by in the early hours of the morning.
    Since the back problems, Thorne had been waking anywhere from 5 a.m. onwards. He’d lie there in the dark, in the only comfortable position he’d been able to find – his knees up to his chest – and think about his old man. Occasional y, he’d manage to drift back to sleep again, and then their encounters would be stranger, richer , as, in that hour or two before he would need to get up, he invariably dreamed.
    In the dreams, Jim Thorne would appear as he had been in the final stages of the Alzheimer’s; in the six months or so before the fire that had kil ed him. It was typical of his father, Thorne thought, to be so perverse, so bloody-minded. Why couldn’t he have moved through the dreams as a younger man? Or a man whose mind was at least firing on the right cylinders? Instead, his father came to him bel igerent and foul-mouthed, stumbling through their conversations, distracted, furious and lost.
    Helpless . . .
    Often, the old man would do nothing but sit on the edge of Thorne’s bed, eager to ask questions. This was how it had been towards the end. The disregard for social niceties had gone hand in hand with an obsession for trivia, lists and quizzes.
    ‘Name ten World War Two fighter planes. Which are the three biggest lakes in the world? That’s freshwater lakes.’
    Since passing on, he’d introduced the element of multiple choice.
    ‘Was the cause of the fire that kil ed me: (A) accidental or (B) started deliberately?’
    Often this would be fol owed by a question Thorne found a little easier to answer: ‘Whose fault was it: (A) yours or (B) yours?’
    This was usual y when Thorne would wake, and for a while the question would stay with him. The feelings it stirred were unmistakable, yet hard to name or pin down. Not quite shame, but a shade of it. Like the relationship which ‘coming down with something’ has to the il ness itself; to the symptoms that wil eventual y appear. He would move robotical y through the rituals of the morning – ablutions, breakfast, getting dressed – until the memory of