Free The Driver by Mandasue Heller Page B

those old black and white films who spent their lives scraping by – and trying to make out like they weren’t complaining about it. She was so far back in the dark ages that she didn’t even have a flat-screen TV.
    But that was for her son to sort, not Eddie. He might be soft-hearted but he wasn’t running a fucking soup kitchen.
    The lap dancers had woken up by the time he got back into the car and they spent the next ten minutes desperately trying to flirt a repeat of last night’s drugs fest out of him. Ignoring them, Eddie told Clive to drop him a couple of hundred yards back and on the opposite side from the flats when they reached Ardwick, in case they clocked where he was going and got any funny ideas about coming looking for him.
    Eddie waited until the car was out of sight, then crossed over and slipped through a broken section of fence. Bypassing his own block, he headed down behind the other blocks to the red one at the far end.
    The stench hit him as soon as he opened Patsy’s front door. It was always rank in there, but after sitting in the car surrounded by the tarts’ perfume it seemed way worse than usual, and for a moment he wondered if he was about to find her dead.
    Patsy was sprawled across the couch when he pushed the living-room door open. Approaching her with caution, he was relieved to see the flickering movement behind her parchment-thin eyelids.
    ‘Wha’?’ she croaked, snapping her eyes open when he shook her.
    Wiping his hand on his jeans, Eddie felt a shudder of revulsion ripple through him. Patsy was twenty-four but she could easily have passed for fifty with her body turning to skin and bone, and her cheeks sinking into the hollows where her teeth had started to disintegrate. And the smell was coming from her, he realised, trying not to inhale the rank odours of urine, BO and vomit.
    ‘Jeezus,’ he muttered, giving her a look that would have made any normal woman crawl away in shame. ‘Have you seen the state of yourself?’
    Grinning up at him as if he’d just complimented her, Patsy said, ‘Hiya, Ed. I’ve been waiting for you.’ Licking her lips now, she sat up and put her hands between her knees like an excited child.
    Eddie knew exactly what she was waiting for but she wasn’t getting klish until he was good and ready to give it to her. Leaving her, he went into the bedroom. The baby was lying in its cot on the far side. Roused by the harsh light spilling out of the bare bulb when Eddie flicked the switch, it made a pathetic mewling noise that lacked energy and conviction, as if it had already given up hope that anybody would respond.
    Sickened by the sound, Eddie squatted down at the foot of the cot and shoved his hand under the heap of clothes and dirty nappies that were stuffed beneath it. Glancing through the bars as he peeled the damp carpet back and dislodged the loose floorboard, he frowned when he saw how clearly the veins were showing through the see-through skin of the baby’s head.
    ‘When did you last feed the kid?’ he demanded when he’d pulled his case out and gone back to the living room.
    The look of confusion that flickered across Patsy’s face told him exactly what he’d suspected: that she’d forgotten she even had a baby, never mind remembered to feed it. He wondered if she’d even been into the bedroom in the three days since he’d last been here, or if she’d been sleeping, waking, pissing, sweating, and sleeping again right here with her beloved crack pipe.
    ‘You’d better get a grip,’ he warned her, sitting down and unlocking the case. ‘It’ll die if you’re not careful.’
    ‘I’ll see to it in a minute,’ she replied offhandedly, licking her lips again as she eyed the little white rocks inside the numerous clear plastic bags in the case.
    ‘ Now ,’ Eddie ordered her, lifting his gun out and pointing it at the wall. He wasn’t going to use it – he just liked the feel of it in his hand.
    The thought of her baby dying