Come Hell or High Water (DCI Logan Crime Thrillers #13)
JD Kirk
CHAPTER ONE
Herbert Gibson was a joke. And he knew it.
Truth be told, he always had been.
It had started in Primary One, when he’d come waddling into the classroom with his drawers around his ankles, asking the teacher to wipe his arse for him, because his mum wasn’t currently available to handle the task.
He could still remember the look of horror on her face. The stares of his classmates. The whispers. The giggles. The rising prickly heat that told him he’d made a mistake. That he’d messed up. That this whole school thing he’d been so excited about might not be everything he’d hoped for.
It had just sort of snowballed from there.
Being sick on Elizabeth Wilson on the school trip to Blair Drummond Safari Park in Primary Seven.
Being caught tugging himself off under the desk in Miss Bartholomew’s Maths class in the first year of high school.
Being convinced to run for School Captain in Sixth Year, only to receive just one vote. His own.
His whole life, he’d been laughed at. Teased. Ridiculed.
Today, though, things changed. Today, he was going to show them. He was going to show them all. They might have laughed at him before, but no one would be laughing after what he was about to do.
He might have spent the first nineteen years of his life as a nobody, but in a few hours, everyone would know his name. Everyone would be talking about what he’d done.
He just needed to figure out where he was first.
His phone had no signal out here. Luckily, he’d anticipated that, and had gone old school with a fold-out paper map. What he hadn’t been prepared for was just how large the map unfolded to. Nor did he have any idea how to refold it so that it fit back in the plastic holder it originally came in.
As a result, it was sort of bunched together in his hand so that it might spring open at any given moment. A rain shower earlier had helped take some of the fight out of it, but it now felt heavy and limp, like it might rip apart if he tried to spread it out again.
Fortunately, he was reasonably confident that he wouldn’t have to. His target was somewhere on the section of the map he was studying. He was sure of it.
Herbert raised his eyes from the drawing of the terrain and looked out over the real deal. He could see the coast from where he was standing. Water. Rocks. That sort of thing.
“So that’s… what? North?” he muttered, then he shook his head. “No, can’t be north. North’s up. That’s west.”
He was right. It was west. It was very west, in fact, given that he was currently less than a twenty-minute hike from the most westerly point of the United Kingdom. As west went, you didn’t get much wester.
“So, I’m…”
He glanced around at his surroundings, then back at the map, searching for some identifying feature with which to triangulate his position.
“…somewhere here,” he decided, narrowing it down to an area of some nine square miles. “And I want to go…”
His head rose and fell as it tick-tocked between the map and the real world. He raised a hand and made a vague sort of chopping motion towards where he could see water in the middle distance. If he was going to find a lighthouse, that seemed as good a place as any to start.
“That way,” he concluded, then he forcibly gave the map another fold, stuffed it into his backpack, and went trampling through the heather and bracken.
There was an argument to be made, of course, that he should’ve stuck to the road. It would’ve made finding the place considerably easier, and saved him several nettle stings, two panicky tick removals, and a six-minute chase with a demented cleg pursuing him like it was the fucking Terminator.
Not to mention the six billion midge bites.
But taking the road meant being seen. And being seen meant risking being caught. And he couldn’t chance that. Not now. Not yet. Not until the deed was done.
After today, they wouldn’t laugh at him.
After today, he’d be immortal.
The idea had first come to him a few months back, like a vision from the Lord Himself. He’d resisted at first, and tried to push the thought away. It was too risky. Too extreme.
It had proven too enticing, though. Try as he might, his thoughts kept returning to it, driven there by every rejection from the lassies at the pub. Every sniggered comment about the events of his past. Every regurgitated nickname from his childhood. They had all driven him to here. To now. To this.
They were the ones responsible for what he was about to do. Not him. They’d left him no choice in the matter.
The canisters clunked together in his backpack, and he felt a little shiver of anticipation. He could only be ten, maybe fifteen minutes away from the target. Quarter of an hour until his fortunes started to change, and he cemented his place in history.
The plan was elegant in its simplicity. He would head to the Ardnamurchan Lighthouse, one of the most popular tourist spots in this part of the country.
He would set the camera on his phone rolling, and clearly identify himself for the benefit of those watching. Ideally, this would be a live stream, but assuming he didn’t get a signal, he’d upload it to his YouTube channel later.
Then, when the coast was clear, he’d spray paint the biggest dick he could on the side of the lighthouse, and run like fuck before anyone caught him.
Herbert laughed out loud at the thought of it. Spray painting a reasonably well-loved tourist attraction so it resembled an enormous penis? That was gold. If that didn’t go viral, nothing would.
Twenty-four hours from now, he’d be up there with the best-known names on the internet. Rebecca Black. Charlie Bit My Finger. That fat lad who thought he was in Star Wars. He’d be bigger than them all!
And all it would take was a couple of cans of paint, a steady hand, and an extendable ladder.
Herbert stopped and drew in a breath so sharp he inhaled a score of midges. Even as he coughed them back out, he realised his error.
The ladder.
He’d forgotten the bloody ladder.
Herbert turned to look back the way he’d come, but the prospect of hiking all that way back to where he’d parked the van would’ve been a daunting one even if he’d known how to get there. Given that he had no idea of the van’s whereabouts beyond somewhere roughly in that direction, going back for it wasn’t an option.
“Fuck it,” he grunted, trudging on before the cleg from earlier had a chance to catch up with him.
How tall was the lighthouse? About thirty-five metres.
What was that in feet?
God knew. Ninety? A hundred? Something like that.
And what was he? Five-eight or five-nine, depending on footwear. At full stretch, with his arms up, maybe seven feet.