Den of Snakes

by Damian Vargas

  ‘Where the fuck is it?’

  ‘It’s safe,’ said Eddie, knowing that he and Veronica were as good as dead if his brother believed anything else.

  Charlie stepped over the intermingled limbs of legs of several bodies. So intent was he on getting to his brother, he failed to notice that one of the men was still breathing.

  ‘Charlie,’ Eddie called out as the man, one of the East Enders, pushed himself up and reached for a submachine gun at his side.

  Unsure if this was some attempt at diversion, Charlie kept his pistol pointing at Eddie but risked a quick glance behind him. The wounded man was inserting a fresh magazine into his gun. Charlie swivelled around just as the Londoner pulled the trigger. A healthy individual would have mown all three of them down in seconds, but the man had a head wound and with blood trickling into his eyes, his aim was wayward. Fire spat forth from his gun, one of which grazed Charlie’s leg, but Lawson senior dispatched the wounded assailant with three rounds to the chest, and the Cockney slumped back down. Charlie spun back around, his gun pointing once more at his younger brother.

  ‘Eddie just saved your life,’ said Veronica.

  ‘And I’ll return the favour. If he gives me what I want’.

  ‘Look around, Charlie,’ said Eddie. ‘It’s over’. The brothers stood five yards apart, eyes locked on each other, saying nothing. Searching for a tell. Charlie lowered the gun, as if steeling himself for the task ahead.

  ‘Too many people have died,’ said Veronica. ‘You need to stop this’. Charlie cast his eyes towards her. They were stone cold. Remorseless.

  ‘And that,’ he said. ‘Is why I can’t stop’. He lifted the gun towards Veronica and shot her in the thigh. She screamed and fell to the floor, clutching at her left leg.

  ‘No,’ Eddie yelled. He hurtled at his brother. Charlie got another shot off, grazing Eddie in the forearm, but it failed to stop him and the pair smashed into each other like a pair of opposing prop forwards.

  Eddie grabbed Charlie’s hand that held the pistol and forced it towards the floor. Another shot rang out, the bullet heading off across the length of the vast room. Eddie landed a blow on his brother’s cheek, but it lacked the power needed to do any damage and Charlie slammed Eddie in the ear with a fist, turning his world dark for a moment.

  They grappled on the wet floor, each failing to land meaningful blows, all the time trying to gain control of the black pistol. Eddie scrambled on top of Charlie for a moment, but received a jarring knee to his groin. He winced, one hand still clamped onto Charlie’s wrist, and brought his open palm down onto his brother’s nose. Charlie groaned, and his hold on the gun failed. It slid across the water-soaked parquet floor. Eddie made a move to seize it but Charlie, showing a nimbleness that belied his physique, grabbed Eddie by the throat, his fingers digging deep, pushing his brother back away from the gun.

  They twisted away from it, Charlie on top of Eddie with two hands on his brother’s neck.

  ‘Charlie -’, Eddie pleaded, now struggling for air.

  ‘We could have done grand things,’ said Charlie. He had his knee on Eddie’s chest, directing all of his excess bulk upon his younger brother while squeezing his throat with all his strength.

  Eddie fought to dig his fingers into his brother’s tight grasp, but the lack of oxygen diminished his energy. He poked at Charlie’s face with one hand, scratching his cheeks, but Charlie lifted himself higher, out of Eddie’s reach. Eddie started to blackout and would have done so had a wooden chair not then crashed across Charlie’s head.

  Veronica stood shaking at Eddie’s side, her left leg drenched in blood before she collapsed back to the hard floor. Eddie gasped for breath. Charlie was on all fours to his left, clutching the back of his head. The blow of the chair had knocked the wind out of his brother, but he would quickly recover.

  The gun was close by him.

  Eddie rolled towards a broken Perrier bottle, reached for it, pushed himself to his knees, and up on his feet. Still dazed, he wiped the blood and blackened water from his eyes and took a step towards Charlie, but he was too late - his brother had recovered the pistol.

  Veronica lay moaning a few yards away to Eddie’s left. She was trying to drag herself away, leaving a trail of blood on the wooden floor. Eddie stumbled towards her but then heard the pistol being cocked. He twisted to face Charlie, who stood motionless, observing Veronica’s struggles.

  ‘Dad was right about you. You were too soft’. He lifted the gun towards Veronica. ‘Did she tell you about that porno she was in?’ said Charlie. ‘I made her recreate it. Just for me’.

  ‘Please don’t do this, bruv’.

  ‘Bruv?’ said Charlie, still aiming the gun towards Veronica. ‘But that’s the thing, Eddie. It’s just like you said. We ain’t really brothers, are we?’ He glanced back at Veronica, pure malice in his eyes.

  ‘Please don’t,’ Eddie begged, but his pleas fell on deaf ears as Charlie took aim and shot Veronica in the chest. She screamed and dropped flat to the floor. Eddie yelled. He started towards his brother, but the gun was trained back on Eddie. Charlie backed away, spitting blood to the floor.

  ‘I need what was in that case. I told you, I ain’t never going back to the slammer’. Veronica was still alive but was struggling to breathe. Eddie put his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out his hotel key. He held it up for Charlie to see.

  ‘Hotel El Pachucho. Room 44. It’s under the bed’.

  ‘Toss it over,’ said Charlie, training the pistol on his brother. Eddie did as he was told and Charlie caught the key. He examined it for a second, verifying it was real. ‘It weren’t supposed to end like this,’ he said. He took aim at Eddie, his finger curling around the trigger. ‘But if you ain’t my brother, then you’re a loose end’.

  Eddie stared at the dark inner barrel of the gun, waiting for the explosion. A peculiar thought occurred to him - would he see the bullet that killed him? He closed his eyes.

  He felt the pain in his shoulder before he heard the gunshot. The bullet’s kinetic energy spun him around, and he stumbled backwards. He grasped at the wound and sank to his knees, expecting the second shot any moment.

  But no coup de grâce was to follow.

  Charlie howled in agony and Eddie opened his eyes to see his brother grasping at a knife jammed into his calf, the hilt of the blade embedded in one side, the point protruding from the other.

  Daniel Ortega lay a few feet away, his white shirt stained red with blood. Despite the gunshot wound to his hip, the Spaniard was slithering away from Charlie, one leg trailing limp under the other. Charlie raised his pistol and fired twice, the first missing by an inch, the second catching Ortega in the heel of one foot. The Spaniard cried out but kept pushing forward.

  ‘You…fucking…dago…bastard,’ said Charlie, phlegm dripping from his open mouth. He reached down, grasped the knife and yanked it out, letting loose an agonised roar. He dropped the blade at his feet and stumbled towards Ortega. Despite the gaping wound in his leg, which was now oozing blood, Charlie caught up with the Spaniard and kicked him in the ribs. ‘Turn over’, he yelled. ‘Look at me, you piece of shit’.

  Ortega stopped crawling, paused for a moment, then rolled over to lay flat on his back, looking up at Charlie, smirking. ‘I know you, Lawson. I always knew you. I saw what you really were’.

  Charlie spat a ball of red saliva at the Spaniard and leaned over him. ‘Yeah, and what did you see?’ he said, the gun pointing at Ortega’s head, a look of delicious expectancy on his face.

  Ortega lifted his head towards the gun, his eyes locked on the Englishman’s. ‘I look at you, Charlie Lawson,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘And I see nothing’.

  Charlie pointed the gun at Ortega’s shoulder and fired. The Spaniard grimaced, but did not cry out. Charlie pushed the barrel to Ortega’s forehead. ‘What do you see now?’ he said.

  They were to be Charlie Lawson’s last words.

  Eddie, having picked up the knife
that Charlie had pulled from his leg, had rammed it forward with all his might through his brother’s rib cage and straight into his heart.

  The gun fell from Charlie’s hand, and he sank to the floor, pulling his brother down to his knees. He grabbed for Eddie’s hand and glared at his adopted sibling for a few seconds, blood trickling from his open mouth, then crashed to the floor. A pool of dark red grew out from underneath him, diluting with the water from the sprinklers.

  ‘Eddie,’ Veronica called. Her voice weak.

  Eddie backed away from his brother’s lifeless corpse and crawled over to where she lay on her back, one leg folded under the other. Her breathing was laboured now - like a series of rapid, lethargic hiccups. Eddie tried as best as he could to lift her, his body shaking from its own trauma.

  She somehow mustered the effort to raise a hand to his cheek. It was cold. He looked deep into her eyes. ‘We would have been good together, Eddie Lawson,’ she whispered.

  He wrapped his arms around her. Her blouse now sodden with the blood from the wound in her chest, her eyes closed, and she fell limp in his arms. The pain in his side from the bullet wound was excruciating, but he continued to hold her. Tears ran down his cheeks. He would have remained there, holding her surrounded by bloodied bodies, discarded firearms and damp smouldering furniture until the police had arrived if it had not been for a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said the man who had crept up behind him. Eddie looked up to see the sympathetic face of former Detective Constable Philip Metcalf. ‘We need to get you out of here’.

  Chapter Forty

  Family Come First

  Two weeks later

  Eddie stood under a bus shelter shielding from the incessant drizzle, the collar of his donkey jacket turned up to block out the autumnal chill. He peered at one of the grey, pebble-dashed terraced maisonettes across the street.

  A postman ambled past, thumbing through a bundle of letters, and shot Eddie a suspicious glance.

  ‘Morning,’ said Eddie before taking a drag from his cigarette.

  The front door of one dwelling opened and a girl with long blonde hair emerged from within, holding a satchel in one hand and a metal lunch box in the other. Eddie leaned back behind the scratched glass of the shelter. The girl wore a dark green skirt and school blazer. ‘Hurry, mummy,’ she shouted. ‘We’ll be late’.

  A woman’s voice answered from within. ‘We’ve got ten minutes, Mary. It’s fine’. The woman, a slender brunette in white jeans and a black woollen coat, stepped from the door and pulled it shut behind her. She opened an umbrella and reached for her daughter’s hand. ‘Come on, then’.

  Eddie observed from his vantage spot as his ex-wife and their daughter wandered away. Once they were out of view, he flicked the cigarette butt into the gutter, and cut across the road towards the front door. He reached into his pocket and removed a sealed white envelope, about the size of a paperback, and glanced at the message he had scribbled on it.

  This should cover the rent for a few months.

  I’ll send more when I can.

  Tell Mary I love her. Ed.

  He thrust the packet through the metal letterbox, then strolled away.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The Crown Jewels

  Chelsea Bridge, London.

  Eddie stood gazing out onto the dirty brown waters of the Thames as a rubbish barge throbbed by underneath, belching black smoke into the cold, grey London sky. A District line train trundled across the railway bridge a hundred yards to the east, heading towards the smog-stained hulking mass of Battersea power station. He watched, with a certain amount of satisfaction, the passing commuters as they strode past, oblivious to his presence, and he wondered if there could ever have been a different reality in which he could have been one of them.

  ‘Edward Lawson,’ a man’s voice called out. It was Jeremy Crampton. ‘I would have thought you would be more careful,’ he said. ‘What if I had been a policeman?’

  Eddie smirked. He had been well aware of the overweight TV reporter approaching for several minutes. Crampton, whose face still bore the evidence of his tribulations in Spain over the previous weeks, was lugging a Slazenger sports holdall over one shoulder, the exertion getting the better of him. The reporter wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, nodding towards the battered beige suitcase at Eddie’s feet. ‘Is that it?’ Eddie nodded.

  ‘You got the money?’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ Crampton replied and dropped the holdall to his feet. He wiped his face again, knelt down and unzipped the orange bag to reveal several bundles of banknotes. ‘Thirty thousand. Small denominations. Used notes, just like you said’. He pushed himself back up to his feet with a wince. ‘Now, show me what you’ve got for me’.

  Eddie nodded and reached down to lift the suitcase onto the stone wall at the side of the bridge. He flipped the latches and opened it. Crampton’s eyes lit up, and he took a deep intake of air at the sight of the myriad documents, notepads, wads of photos, videotapes and audio cassettes.

  ‘Is that everything?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Eddie. Crampton raised a hand towards the case, but Eddie seized it and fixed the reporter a firm stare. ‘You could do a lot of damage with this,’ he said. ‘All these people. Businessmen, bankers, celebrities, sports stars, pop stars, politicians, police officers. Other journalists. So much dirt. I reckon you could make television shows for ten years with all this’.

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Crampton, unable to hide his glee at the treasure trove in front of him.

  ‘It doesn’t bother you about the lives you would destroy?’ Eddie said.

  Crampton let out a disbelieving snort. ‘Like you give a shit,’ he said. ‘I brought you the money, give me what I came for’.

  ‘I don’t reckon I will’.

  ‘What?’ said Crampton in disbelief, only then noticing the gun stuffed into Eddie’s trouser belt. It was the deactivated, silver-plated Luger that his brother had given him. It was incapable of firing, but Crampton was not to know that and he froze. ‘We had a deal’.

  ‘I’m a fucking villain,’ said Eddie, grinning. ‘I lied. Now, smile for the camera’. He pointed towards the roadside to where a parked black cab sat parked on a double yellow line. The driver was holding a compact camera and took a series of quick photographs.

  ‘What is this?’ blurted Crampton.

  ‘This,’ said Eddie. ‘Is me putting an end to this whole fucking shit show’.

  ‘Now, wait a minute, Lawson. If you think I’m -’.

  Crampton paused mid-sentence as Eddie heaved at the open suitcase and pushed it over the edge of the bridge. It plunged into the murky water below, followed by a cloud of multicoloured paper. Eddie stepped aside as the TV reporter leapt forward in a pathetic attempt to stop it. ‘No!’ he screamed, spinning back to where Eddie has been standing only Eddie was no longer there.

  Eddie was already closing the passenger door of the taxi behind him, waving. ‘Thanks for the dosh,’ he shouted through the open window as the black cab pulled away. Crampton lurched after it in a fruitless attempt to get to the open window, but he could never have made it. Eddie chuckled as the TV reporter dropped to his knees at the side of the road behind him.

  ‘Enjoy that, did we, Edward?’ said the driver. It was Philip Metcalf. He glanced at Eddie in the rearview mirror.

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Eddie as he opened the holdall and examined the banknotes. ‘He will have a hell of a time explaining that to his bosses at ITV’.

  ‘That he will,’ said Metcalf.

  ‘Half of this is yours’.

  The former detective laughed. ‘That’s terribly kind of you,’ he said. ‘But I think I’ll draw the line at driving a wanted felon to the ferry port if it’s all the same to you’. He gave Eddie a fatherly look in the mirror. ‘Just make sure you put it to good use’.

  ‘That I will’. Eddie sat back, retrieved a packet of Benson and Hedges from hi
s pocket and flipped the golden carton lid open. He stared at the cigarettes inside for a moment, but closed the lid and flung the packet out the window.

  Metcalf raised an eyebrow in the mirror.

  ‘Figured it’s about time I quit’, said Eddie. He placed his hands behind his head and yawned. ‘How’s the new career suiting you?’ he asked.

  Metcalf grinned. ‘Extremely well, as it happens. And it’s certainly a lot safer’.

  It began to rain, and Metcalf switched on the windscreen wipers.

  ‘What about you, young man? What does the future hold for you now?’

  Eddie looked at the grey cityscape outside. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ve only been back in this bloody country two weeks, and I’ve already had enough of the weather. And besides, there’s a gipsy waitress in Salamanca I owe a meal to’.

  THE END

  Also by Damian Vargas

  Six Hard Days In Andalusia

  An Action Thriller

  A worn-out gangster who seeks redemption before he meets his maker. The prodigal daughter who has fallen from grace. A corrupt mayor bent on building a criminal empire, and who has the local police and politicians in his pocket. A bitter ex-pat who comes across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong. And an unfortunate English tourist who gets caught up in the middle of the whole bloody mess.

  Head to http://www.damianvargasfiction.com/stories/ for more information, or simply search for the book title on your preferred Amazon store.

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  Thank you for reading this story. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it. It was a passion project of mine for over a year and I would very much appreciate your support.