Read Partners in Crime: Two Logan and Steel Short Stories for Free Online

hell.’
    She patted him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t know about you, but I’m gasping for a pint.’
    DI Steel froze in the doorway. Her eyes bugged, mouth pinched into a chicken’s-bum-pout as she stomped towards Logan. ‘I told you to wait outside!’
    The Jura Hotel’s bar was a sort of elongated bay-window-shape. A handful of people sat around small circular tables, eating crisps and drinking beer, while an old woman in a grey twinset hustled her grandson at pool.
    Logan paid for his pint of Eighty Shilling. ‘It’s raining.’
    ‘Go!’ She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the exit. ‘Out: before Susan sees you.’
    ‘I’ve ordered food!’
    ‘I don’t care if you’ve ordered three strippers and a tub of cottage cheese – if Susan sees you she’ll chew me a new hole. Aye, and no’ in a good way. Supposed to be here on a jolly, no’ police business.’ She gave him a shove. ‘Out, out. Go sit in the car.’
    ‘I’m bloody freezing, and there’s—’
    ‘Laz: it’s her work’s team-building, OK? She thinks I’m off reading books and scratching my bumhole in quiet contemplation of nature’s island splendour. You want to upset her? That what you want? You want to ruin the only time we’ve had off together since Jasmine was born?’
    ‘You dragged me all the way across the bloody country! I’m cold, I’m wet, I’m hungry, and I’m having my bloody lunch inside in the
warm
, whether you like it or not.’
    DI Steel knocked on the steamed-up car window.
    Logan scowled at her from the passenger seat, then took a mouthful of Eighty from his half-empty glass. The MX-5’s cloth roof buckled and groaned, rain bouncing off the bonnet, making a noise like a thousand angry ants playing a thousand angry drums, fighting against the background drone of the engine and the roar of the blow heaters.
    Craighouse was a tiny village, strung out along a single-track road. A mini stone-walled harbour, a community hall, a restaurant, a wee Spar shop, and an old-fashioned red telephone box. A collection of whitewashed buildings loomed in the rain – opposite the hotel – ‘ ISLE OF JURA ’ painted in big black letters on the distillery wall. Steel’s MX-5 sat in a roped off car park marked ‘ STAFF ONLY ’.
    She clambered in behind the wheel and handed Logan a plate piled high with langoustines, some salad, and little curled red things that looked worryingly like oversized boiled woodlice.
    He poked one of them. ‘I ordered the steak pie.’
    ‘Seafood platter. Good for the brain. And don’t get fishy fingerprints all over my car.’ She turned off the engine and the heaters went quiet.
    ‘Hey!’
    ‘I’m no’ made of bloody petrol.’
    Logan twisted the tail off a langoustine and clicked it out of its pale pink carapace. Dipped it in the mayonnaise. ‘Did you get me a room?’
    ‘Course I did. Got you one right next door to Susan and me, that way you can bump into her and let her know I’m hunting down villains when I’m supposed to be on holiday.’ Steel pulled out a glass tumbler wrapped in a paper napkin. The smoky scent of malt whisky curled through the car. ‘Badger and Weasel are in there playing pool like good little woodland animals, so I nabbed the bugger’s glass. Where’s the fingerprint thing?’
    ‘Don’t you think Susan
might
just notice something’s up when she tries to get her bags back in the car and finds the boot full of drugs?’
    ‘Oh...’ Steel’s eyebrows drooped, taking the corners of her mouth with them. ‘Sod. Well ... er... Fine: we solve everything today, you bugger off back to Aberdeen with our druggie friends, and Susan never needs to know.’ A nod. ‘Right – that’s officially the plan.’ Steel pointed at the tumbler. ‘So come on, fingerprints.’
    The beer slipped down, cool and dark. ‘Don’t nag.’
    ‘You know, if it really is Jimmy Weasdale then we’ve just caught Scotland’s eighth most wanted man,
and
turned up a massive