"Already?"
"Yep. He found an injured kitten, so I showed him where the vet was. Seems OK." Then he was gone, bounding up the stairs two at a time. I shrugged. I wasn't sure if it was the kitten that seemed OK, or if it was the neighbour.
"He's got a fab car too," shouted my typically male sibling from upstairs. I chuckled. Amazing how some things are important to some people, and not one bit significant to others.
Angus
The vet's receptionist phoned just after breakfast. I was driving back to my hotel. I pressed the speaker function on the phone set.
"Hello, is that Angus Byrne?"
"Yes." She paused, maybe waiting for me to go on.
"You brought the kitten in this morning?"
"Yes." I wondered, not for the first time, if I should try to be more talkative, but I had nothing else I felt I needed to say.
"Just to let you know that it's got a broken pelvis. Vet says it looks like someone's stomped on it." My knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Another pause. "Anyway, she's going to need a few wires to stabilise the pelvic fractures, if that's OK. We can do it for you this afternoon, and you can fetch her tonight."
"What time?"
"Between six and seven pm?"
"OK."
Pause. "OK. Bye then."
As I hung up I thought of the kind of person who would stamp on a small animal hard enough to break its bones. I wondered how anyone would ever be able to justify doing something like that, and yet I knew from experience that there were people out there who hurt animals for fun. They were one of my favourite targets. Them, and the monsters who abused children.
Fergus and I had developed a kind of partnership a decade or so back, when I realised that being a legitimate policeman was not a very efficient way of fighting crime. You'd hunt for a certain perpetrator for ages, and when you eventually found them, you would have to hand them over to what was essentially a deeply flawed system, and hope that justice would prevail. Yeah, right.
So Fergus hunted the crime online, looking on sites like youtube for video footage of cruelty of any description. He would send me the footage, and whatever information he could garner from the IP address. I did the rest, finding those deeply repulsive individuals who were responsible for such atrocities, and I hurt them. Sometimes I hurt them quite a lot. And then I would rewrite their mean little minds so they would feel physically and mental agony if they even considered being cruel in any way to anything ever again. Paedophiles were a bit more difficult to find, but find them we did, and they were the ones I usually killed. Sometimes a mind will be so dark and foul and evil that repairing it is just not an option.