with assault.
Delia herself had been sent down to the plaster room to have her ankle set and immobilized. The cop we'd both landed on was being kept in for observation with a double concussion, two unlovely black eyes, and a missing front tooth. You couldn't get near the coffee machine in recep¬tion for uniformed cops.
When the nurse had finished with the bandages, I walked down to the plaster room, taking it slowly to avoid jolting any part of my protesting body. I'd only just pushed the swing doors open when I heard a familiar Scouse accent. Alexis's cheerful raucousness was to my headache what Agent Orange is to houseplants. Delia's head swung around with all the belligerence of a punch-drunk boxer who's gone one round too many and we cho¬rused, "Go away."
"Well, that's a charming way to greet your friends. Soon as the news desk hears there's a bit of a fracas involving DCI Prentice and a private eye called Brannigan, I say to them, I'll take care of this, the girls need to see a friendly face,' " Alexis said self-righteously.
"If you're here as a journalist, go away, Alexis," I said wearily. "If I said this has not been a good night, it would be the understatement of my life. Things have gone so wrong in the last hour that I'm desperate to hit some¬body. Now, we might be in the right place for the after¬math of that sort of thing, but I really don't want it to happen to you."
"Me, I'd just settle for somebody to arrest," Delia said, her voice sounding as emotionally exhausted as she had every right to feel. "So as Kate said, Alexis the journalist can take a hike. Alexis the friend, however, is welcome to stay provided she has a set of wheels that can take us all home after this little fiasco has run its course."
"I'm sorry," I said.
Delia shook her head. "It really wasn't your fault. I should have had the sense to realize he'd be walking around with armed minders. We should have let them all walk out of there then picked Lovell up in the middle of the night when he was on his own. I misjudged it."
That should have made me feel better. Instead, I felt infinitely worse. Delia's on the point of being promoted to superintendent and an operation like this that can be painted as a screw-up wasn't going to help. Add to that the pariah status automatically granted to any police offi¬cer who puts other cops away, and it looked like my bright idea might have put Delia's next promotion into cold storage. "You'd better come back and stay with me," I offered as the first stage in what was going to be a long apology. "You won't be able to manage the stairs at your place for a few days."
She nodded. "You're probably right. Won't Richard mind?"
"Only if you try to arrest him for possession."
Delia managed a tired smile. "I think I can manage to restrain myself."
"So what actually happened?" Alexis chipped in, unable to rein herself in indefinitely.
"Gun battle in Manchester's clubland," I said. "Police officer held hostage. Man helping police with inquiries, two gunmen sought. Club owner seriously injured, two police officers with minor injuries. One private investiga¬tor who wasn't there."
Alexis grinned. "I hate it when you come home with half a tale."
Later, a lot later, when Delia was asleep in my bed and Richard in his, I sat in the dark in the conservatory with a strong mixture of Smirnoff Black Label and freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and contemplated the capital D of the moon. Tony Tambo hadn't made it; one of Delia's colleagues had rung to tell her not ten minutes after we got home. I sipped my drink and thought about how far reality had diverged from the simple little sting I'd envis¬aged. I'd gone in all gung-ho and full of myself, and now a man was dead. He'd had a girlfriend and an ex-wife and a little daughter who was the apple of his eye, according to Richard. He wasn't supposed to behave like a hero, but then, I hadn't imagined there was going to be any need for heroics.
If my life was like the movies, my character would be plan¬ning vengeance, putting the word out in the underworld that she wanted those guys so bad she could taste it. And they would be delivered to her in such a way that she could decide their fate. But