Steel City 03 - Justice For The Damned Page 2

  Jim entwined his fingers with Margaret’s but she drew her hand away. ‘I should get going. The doctor says you need to rest, and Ian will be getting worried.’

  To hell with Ian. Stay with me, please! Jim thought the words but didn’t say them. ‘Thanks for coming to see me.’

  Margaret smiled thinly. ‘I’m just glad you’re alright, Jim. Your phone call nearly gave me a heart attack too.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  Margaret shook her head in a way that said, Don’t apologise. ‘Just promise me you’ll listen to the doctors and do what they say.’

  ‘I’ll try, but you know me.’

  ‘Yeah. Stubborn as they make them.’ Margaret hesitated as if unsure whether to say anything else, but then she continued, ‘Have you got your phone? I’ll give you my mobile number in case… well, in case you need it. It would be best if you didn’t call my home phone again.’

  Jim opened his bedside cabinet and took his phone out of his jacket. Margaret told him her number and he entered it into his phone’s memory. He looked at Margaret with a hesitancy that matched hers. He knew he shouldn’t ask the question in his mind, but he couldn’t hold it back. ‘Will you come see me again?’

  Margaret gazed at him uncertainly. Then, with a quick nod, she stood and left.

  For the first time since regaining consciousness, Jim allowed himself to close his eyes. With Margaret’s face fresh in his memory, he felt able to confront the void of sleep. But as he drifted off, another face rose up to blot hers out. Edward Forester’s features paraded across the screen of his mind like suspects in a line-up. Brown eyes set in deep sockets. Straight, sharp nose. Pearly white smiling teeth. Ruddy, clean-shaven cheeks. Bald crown fringed by a natural tonsure of neatly cut grey-flecked brown hair. And like an echo in a cave, three words kept reverberating through his thoughts. Alive or dead, alive or dead…

  3

  From his driver’s seat, Reece Geary watched the woman get out of a car on the opposite side of the road. She was somewhere in her late twenties, almost painfully slim with shoulder length strawberry-blond hair. She was dressed in a white vest that provided scant protection against the chill night air, a barely there denim skirt and white stilettos that bumped her height up from five foot nothing to five foot seven. Her face was caked with makeup – already full lips made even fuller by glossy pink lipstick; matching blusher concealing the paleness of her high cheekbones; eyebrows pencilled in arching lines over intense green eyes. To her customers, the woman’s name was Ginger. To Reece, she was Staci.

  Reece’s eyes flicked to the man in the car. Balding, glasses, scruffy beard. Just some middle-aged nobody. But some middle-aged nobody who minutes earlier had fucked the woman Reece loved. It tore him up to think about another man being inside Staci. To imagine hands other than his own groping her breasts, lips other than his own touching hers. He shook his head. The picture in his mind wasn’t true to life. Staci didn’t allow any of her punters to kiss her. Not even her regulars. That was one of her rules. Kissing was an act of love, of passion. Fucking, fellatio, hand jobs, for her these were mechanical acts, acts of necessity. But even so, the image remained in his brain, stuck there like some sharp-clawed animal trying to escape its cage. The car pulled away. Reece fought down the urge to pursue it, pull it over and pound his heavy-knuckled fists into the middle-aged nobody’s face.

  Lighting a cigarette, Staci approached a man slouching in the shadows of a factory building locked up for the night. The man was dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and an oversized black leather jacket. His face was gaunt and skull-like. He had bad teeth, bad skin, tattoos of tears falling from the side of his right eye and a dark blue snake on his shaved scalp. His name, Reece knew, was Wayne Carson. He was a small-time pimp and drug dealer with maybe ten girls working for him. All of them were addicts whose need to work the streets was born out of a desperate craving for the next needleful of heroin. All of them, that is, except Staci. Reece had seen to that. He’d got her into a recovery programme. She’d been clean for nearly three months now. But the debt she’d worked up during the years of her addiction still needed to be paid off, and she’d never be free of Wayne until it was.

  As Staci handed Wayne a thin wad of banknotes, Reece’s expression leapt from anger to hate. He wanted to hurt Wayne more than he’d ever wanted to hurt anyone before. Every time he saw the scag-faced bastard he found it harder and harder to resist the urges that clawed within him for release.

  Staci teetered towards a nearby corner, where a couple of similarly dressed girls were leaning against railings that ran alongside Burton Weir. Behind them, palely illuminated by streetlights, the River Don cascaded in foamy brown torrents down the weir’s slope.

  Reece got out of his car and approached Staci. He could feel Wayne’s gaze following him. He didn’t return the stare, fearing that if he looked into the pimp’s poisonous little eyes he might lose control. He knew the feeling between them was mutual. Staci was one of Wayne’s best earners. She supplied him with a steady flow of cash and he supplied her with scag. That was, or had been, the basis of their relationship. The balance of power had lain firmly with Wayne. Reece had come along and shifted that balance. The equation was simple – the longer Staci remained clean, the more she regained control of her life. Every penny she repaid Wayne brought her closer to her goal – to get out from under her debt and get on with starting a new life. A new life. Those weren’t Staci’s words, they were Reece’s. He wanted them to be together, to have everything other couples had – a house of their own, children. All the things he’d never given a shit about until he met her.

  Staci frowned at the sight of Reece. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Reece shrugged. ‘I just wanted to see you. Can’t I come see my girl?’

  ‘Yeah sure, but…’ Staci cast an uneasy glance at Wayne. ‘I’m working. You know how Wayne feels about you seeing me when I’m working.’

  ‘I know how he feels about me seeing you anytime. He’d have opened my head up like a tin can if I wasn’t who I am.’

  ‘And you’d have done the same to him if you weren’t who you are.’

  Reece’s voice came in a low growl. ‘I’d have done much worse than that.’

  Staci’s frown intensified. Catching hold of Reece’s arm, she drew him to a spot where the gushing of the weir allowed them to speak without being overheard. ‘You shouldn’t talk like that in front of the other girls. What you say might get back to Wayne.’

  ‘I hope it does. I hope it makes the prick do something – something that’ll give me a reason to tear his ugly head off.’

  Staci dug her long fingernails into the hard-packed muscle beneath Reece’s grey suit. ‘For starters, Wayne wouldn’t do anything to you. He’s not that stupid. He’d do it to me. And you know how good he is at hurting girls who piss him off.’

  Reece knew alright. Always quick to brag about the control he had over his girls, Wayne had once told him how he kept an old-style police truncheon wrapped in foam to punish any of them who stepped out of line. He’d boasted that he knew how to hit them in ways that were excruciatingly painful, yet barely left a mark. He’d even offered to show Reece how to do it. Once I’ve given the bitches a couple of love taps with my truncheon, they never fuck with me again. Those had been Wayne’s exact words. A tremor passed through Reece’s arms as he recalled them. Ridges of muscle tautened against Staci’s fingers.

  ‘And for seconds,’ continued Staci, her grip and voice softening, ‘when I said you’d have done the same to Wayne if you weren’t who you are, I wasn’t only talking about what you do for a living, I was talking about what’s inside there.’ She pressed her palm against Reece’s chest, looking up into his dark brown eyes. ‘You couldn’t kill anyone. I know that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because you’ve got gentle eyes.’ Staci brought her hand up to stroke the skin around Reece’s eyes. Even in her seven-inch heels, she had to draw him down towards her to kiss his lip
s. He responded hesitantly, his gaze flicking towards Wayne. She trailed her hands down his square-cut cheeks, angling his gaze away from the pimp. Her tongue teased his lips apart. Reece’s hesitation dissolved like mist in the sun. The lines of anger fading from his face, he circled his arms around her back, crushing her thin but full-breasted figure against the slab of his torso. She smelled of strong, sharp perfume, cigarettes and something else, something faint yet muskily sweet that set his heart pounding.

  Staci pulled away with a ripple of laughter. ‘That’s what I like about you, Reece. You kiss like a hungry man at an all-you-can-eat buffet.’

  His voice came in a husky murmur. ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can be alone.’

  ‘I’ve got to get back to work.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’ Reece pulled a handful of banknotes out of his pocket. ‘There’s five hundred quid there.’ He jerked his chin at Wayne. ‘Give it to that prick. Tell him I’m buying you for the rest of the night.’

  Staci looked at Reece as if she wasn’t sure she liked what he was saying, but she accepted the cash and tottered across to Wayne. The pimp’s eyes alternated between it and Reece, narrowed with a mixture of suspicion and barely concealed hostility. Staci thrust the banknotes into his hand. As she turned away, he quickly stashed them somewhere on himself. Eyes fixed on Reece, he jetted saliva through his brown-stained teeth.

  Reece’s long powerful fingers slowly curled and uncurled at his sides.

  Staci took Reece’s hand and drew him towards his car. ‘We can go to the house,’ she said. ‘The other girls will all be out working.’

  4

  Stan tugged Bryan’s balaclava up over his mouth and gagged him with duct tape, whilst Liam jerked plastic handcuffs tight around his wrists and ankles. When they were done with Bryan, they turned their attention to Les.

  ‘Is he alive?’ asked the man with the bandaged eye.

  Stan felt for a pulse in Les’s wrist. ‘Just about. I don’t reckon he will be for much longer, though. Big boy here’s done a proper job on him.’

  ‘What else was I supposed to do?’ protested Liam, his voice surprisingly thin and squeaky for such a hulk of a man. ‘He had a gun.’

  ‘We needed him alive.’

  ‘He is alive.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s unconscious. He can’t talk if he’s unconscious, can he now, big boy? It kind of restricts the whole talking thing.’

  An angry flush rose up Liam’s cheeks. He opened his mouth to make a retort but before he could the one-eyed man intervened. ‘Enough bickering.’

  ‘Sorry, Tyler,’ said Liam.

  Sorry, Tyler, Stan mouthed mockingly at Liam as Tyler rifled through their captives’ pockets until he found Bryan’s car keys. Looking at Liam, Tyler motioned at Les. ‘Carry him to the car. We’ll take the other one.’

  ‘Aren’t we going to have a look and see who they are?’

  ‘Later. For now we just need to get them out of here.’

  With a grunt, Liam heaved Les’s limp body over his shoulder.

  ‘And try not to get any more blood on the carpets,’ added Tyler as Liam started downstairs. Motioning for Stan to get hold of Bryan’s feet, he reached for the gangster’s hands. They carried Bryan to the Range Rover and dumped him in the boot alongside Les.

  ‘Wait here,’ Tyler told his companions. He hurried back upstairs, tripping to his knees halfway up. A spasm of irritation twisted his face. He quickly smoothed it away. The loss of his eye had fucked up his depth perception, especially when it came to determining distances closer than a metre or so. But there was no point getting pissed off about it. As his training had taught him, he was simply going to have to adapt, and fast.

  He flipped open a knife and cut away the bloodstained carpet. Tucking it under his arm, he returned more slowly to the Range Rover. He tossed the carpet into the boot, before climbing into the driver’s seat. The air inside the vehicle was suffused with the warm, heavy smell of faeces.

  ‘I think one of the dirty buggers has shit himself,’ Liam said from the back seat, his words muffled by the hand covering his nose and mouth.

  ‘Either that or your nappy needs changing,’ said Stan.

  ‘Fuck you, Stan.’

  Tyler sharply shushed his companions, cocking an ear towards a portable police scanner on the dashboard as a constable called for assistance with a suspected burglary in Attercliffe. Without turning the headlights on, Tyler reversed out of the drive. He proffered Bryan’s car keys to Stan. ‘You follow us.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Liam, eagerly reaching for the keys.

  Stan snatched them up. ‘The fuck you will.’

  ‘Don’t be a prick, Stan. You know I’ve got a weak stomach. The stink in here’s making me want to puke.’ Liam turned to Tyler. ‘Come on, Tyler, let me drive—’ He broke off at the stony, silencing look Tyler gave him.

  ‘Stay close, but not too close,’ Tyler said to Stan. ‘If anything goes wrong, we’ll split up and meet back at the farm.’

  A smirk curling the corners of his mouth, Stan flicked Liam a wave and got out of the Range Rover. In reply, the big man gave him the finger.

  ‘Keep your eyes on our friends back there,’ said Tyler. ‘And you’d better not puke or I might be tempted to feed you to Kong along with them.’

  A slight shudder running through his muscular frame, Liam twisted around to watch the captives. Bryan was straining against his bonds and struggling to speak through his gag. Liam jabbed him with the baseball bat. ‘Lie still, unless you want a real taste of this.’

  Tyler waited for Stan to start the engine of their captives’ red Subaru before turning on the Range Rover’s headlights and accelerating away. He constantly moved his head from side to side to compensate for the reduction of his peripheral field of vision as they headed south through a sprawling suburb of Victorian terraces, inter-war semi-detached houses and boxy, homogenous new estates. When they hit open countryside, they turned west, skirting along the edge of the city, climbing steadily across a hump of moorland. To the road’s left a dark expanse of valley dotted with pockets of lights opened up. The road began to drop down, winding around a rocky escarpment. At the bottom of the valley, it passed through a picture-postcard village of stone cottages. A few miles further on, they came to another village, beyond which a bridge crossed a reservoir glimmering beneath the moon. The road began to climb again, snaking its way through a thickly wooded river valley. The landscape took on a more isolated, inhospitable look. Hills loomed up on either side, crowned by bleak, barren moors. Except for an occasional farm, there were no more houses.

  Tyler turned onto a dirt track, its edges overgrown with brambles and bracken. Trees leaned towards each other across it, interlocking boughs like embracing lovers. He pulled up at a farm gate, to either side of which a wire fence extended into the trees. ‘PRIVATE STAY OUT’ was written in white paint on a piece of wood nailed to the gate. Next to it was another sign that read ‘BEWARE! GUARD DOGS RUNNING FREE’. Tyler allowed himself the faintest of smiles at the warning. There were no dogs on the farm. But there was something else. Something much more effective.

  Liam unlocked a padlock, uncoiled a chain from the gatepost, and opened the gate. As he waited for Tyler and Stan to drive through it, he eyed his surroundings with quick glances. In many places, there were holes in the earth beneath the dark canopy of trees as if someone was searching for buried treasure, but there was no sign of whatever had dug them. He clicked the padlock back into place and climbed somewhat hurriedly into the Range Rover.

  After half a mile or so, they emerged into a grassy field. A drystone wall caked with moss ran alongside the track. At the far side of the field, a ramshackle collection of barns surrounding a two-storey stone farmhouse was pressed against a steep hill. They drove under the cover of a barn roofed with corrugated iron sheets that rattled and squeaked in the wind gusting down from the hilltop.

  Liam stepped warily out of the Range Rover, directing a torch beam into the
barn’s cobwebby corners.

  ‘They won’t be hanging around here at this time of night,’ Tyler reassured him. ‘They’ll be in the woods.’

  ‘Just making sure.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Liam, even if they were here they wouldn’t take a bite out of you,’ said Stan. ‘They’re not cannibals.’ His pot belly quivered as he laughed at his own joke.

  ‘You wouldn’t laugh if you’d seen what they can do.’

  ‘Shut up and help me carry our guests into the house,’ said Tyler.

  Once again, Liam hoisted Les over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Les let out a gurgling groan. Liam slapped him on the backside. ‘That’s it, pal, come on wake up. There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.’

  ‘This is the dirty sod who’s shit himself,’ said Stan, hauling Bryan out of the boot. A dark stain stretched from Bryan’s groin down to his ankles. Stan jerked his hands away. ‘Oh Christ, it’s coming out of the bottoms of his trousers.’

  ‘Stop fucking around and get hold of him,’ ordered Tyler.

  Liam chuckled. ‘Go on, Stan. Do as the man says.’