I Love My Smith and Wesson

by David Bowker

  “Once.”

  “There are guys in there who could have been great world leaders if they’d only had a stable home life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No. But there are guys in there who could definitely open a can of beans after seven months’ intensive training.”

  “You haven’t got much heart,” observed Rawhead. “I like that.”

  Brando looked Rawhead up and down as if he’d made up his mind to like him. “Abraham. That’s your name, right?”

  Rawhead nodded. “But you can call me Stoker.”

  “Abraham was a prophet. You believe in God?”

  “Yeah. I believe in God,” said Rawhead. “What about you?”

  Brando shrugged. “Man, I sleep in a fucking car. I’ve got no money, no woman. I’m near rock bottom. But I’m not so far down that I’ll start praying to a fucking pancake in the sky.”

  “Have you considered going back to burglary?”

  “I can’t pretend it hasn’t crossed my mind.”

  “Would you like to work for me?”

  “What as? Your butler?”

  A great roar of laughter rose up behind them. Koo La Grace had just told a joke about asylum seekers.

  Rawhead never got round to answering Brando’s question. A taxi pulled up outside the club. Two drunken men staggered out, accompanied by two giggling women. On closer inspection the two drunks turned out to be weasel-faced bruisers in their thirties. They had similar red faces, nasty little eyes, and worryingly low foreheads. “Evening gentlemen,” said Brando, waving them through.

  “What a polite little nigger,” said the leading weasel. His brother guffawed. One of the women laughed. The other was embarrassed, but not embarrassed enough to walk away.

  “Why’d you let them in?” said Rawhead, watching the party laughing and farting their way through the entrance hall.

  “The Medina brothers. Friends of Chef’s,” said Brando.

  “Did you hear what he said to you?”

  “Don’t act so surprised, man. That’s nothing. Try six months in Strangeways. In there, even the prison chaplain calls you nigger.”

  Rawhead was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Are you working tomorrow night?”

  Brando nodded. “No rest for the poverty-stricken.”

  “Something might happen. I want you to stay at home.”

  “Yeah, great idea.” Brando thought it was a joke.

  “I’ll see you get your money, even if I have to pay you myself.”

  Rawhead smiled calmly. But as Brando looked, the man at his side underwent a subtle transfiguration. His eyes darkened and he seemed to grow in stature. The face, which until that moment had looked mild and friendly, became a mask of primitive evil.

  And there was something else. A sweet, sickening smell. It was the perfume of murder, like a fragrant breeze blowing through the hole in a man’s skull. Inexplicably, Brando tasted blood in his mouth and for a few seconds he forgot to breathe.

  “Did you hear what I said?” asked Rawhead.

  Brando stared.

  “Skip work tomorrow night,” said Rawhead slowly and deliberately, making absolutely sure he was understood. “There’s going to be trouble.”

  Five

  With how sad steps, O Moone, thou climbst the skies,

  How silently, and with how wanne a face,

  —“ASTROPHEL AND STELLA,” SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554–86)

  The Old Cow, a small, squalid establishment in Glossop, was renowned for its beer, its curries, and its gangland shootings.

  The yellow-toothed landlord, Snowy Rains, had a habit of standing at the bar and interrupting the conversations of his customers. Rumor had it that Snowy watered down the beer with his own piss. He didn’t. It just tasted that way.

  Snowy liked to think of himself as a face and quietly enjoyed the fact that small-time hoods came in to drink and occasionally kill each other on the premises. As long as the customers didn’t start on him, he felt the pub’s ominous reputation reflected favorably on his manhood.

  It was no exaggeration to say that Snowy’s worthless life consisted of butting in, boasting, drinking, sleeping, and farting. He liked to claim that he had rampant sex with young women whenever his wife Sheila’s back was turned, but this was untrue. The pub opened every day from eleven to three and seven to midnight. There was a lock-in every night, which meant the last stragglers would not be leaving before 2:00 A.M. This left little time for fornication.

  “We’ve had members of the Priesthood drinking here,” announced Snowy.

  Until then, the pub had been silent. It was a Sunday lunchtime after Christmas. There were only four customers. In the snug, an old man and his son were watching televised darts.

  Two thugs at the bar, Pest and Jammer, were working their way through a wad of stolen scratch cards to see if they’d won anything.

  Irritated by the lack of response, Snowy tried again. “The Beast used to come in.”

  “I knew him,” said Pest, without bothering to look up.

  Pest was a little hook-nosed scumbag. When he was stoned, which was most of the time, he had a habit of threatening anyone in earshot. His companion, Jammer, was a tall, angular man who said little and, to his shame, hadn’t had a fight since he was thirteen, when he’d been soundly thrashed during a dispute about a packet of jaffa cakes.

  Pest and Jammer were both grammar school boys from the seventies who had deliberately dumbed down in the hope of being accepted into the criminal fraternity. It hadn’t worked. Now they were middle-aged, bitter, and unemployed.

  “That’s right,” said Snowy, cig hanging from his mouth, pint of bitter in his hand. “Big bloke, quiet voice, horrible ginger hair.”

  “My wife’s ginger,” said Jammer.

  “Oh, sorry,” said Snowy. “Didn’t mean anything by it. Sometimes you can get very attractive red-haired people.”

  “Not my wife,” said Jammer.

  Pest nodded and smirked.

  “He knows,” said Jammer, nodding to Pest. “He’s fucked her.”

  “Several times,” said Pest, shaking his head to dispel the memory.

  Another customer came in, tall, wearing sportswear, ski goggles, and a woolly hat. Snowy glanced at him dismissively and continued his story.

  “Anyway, the Beast comes in, has a couple of pints. Nice chap, we have a chat about football. Next thing I hear, he’s dead. Apparently, he parked his car at the lights on Glossop High Street, up comes some little prick biker on a 125, and bang, shoots him fucking dead.”

  “I heard it was the public bogs in Stockport,” said Pest. “He’s having a piss; then the guy pissing next to him leans over and sticks a meat skewer through his neck.”

  “I’ve just won fifty quid,” said Jammer.

  “Half that money’s mine,” said Pest, peering at the card covetously. He looked up at Snowy.

  “The Beast wasn’t shot,” said Jammer. “You’re thinking of Mick the Lampshade. It was Mick who got shot in Glossop. No one knows what happened to the Beast. They never found his body. He disappeared along with Heidi, Doc, and Malcolm Priest. All dead in a fucking trunk somewhere.”

  “Yeah? I heard Priest isn’t dead,” said Snowy. “I heard he’d retired because he was getting too fat. They did liposuction on him, sucked off all the blubber. Now he lives in a French château with a gorgeous nineteen-year-old blonde. That’s what I heard, anyway. He’s a bit like Elvis. People keep getting sightings of him, but no fucker can pin him down.”

  “I heard Elvis was dead,” said the stranger in the ski goggles.

  “Fuck off,” said Pest. “Who asked you?”

  The stranger shrugged and inched farther down the bar. “What can I get you?” said Snowy. He eyed the man in ski goggles sternly, as if to warn him that if he was no match for Pest, he was certainly no match for the yellow-toothed landlord of the Old Cow.

  “Remy Martin. A double.”

  Pest and Jammer, overhearing the order, snigg
ered at its ponciness.

  Privately, Snowy was impressed by the stranger’s request. Normally he catered for the worst inhabitants of Glossop, punters that were one step up from the meths bottle. Few of them had heard of champagne cognac, let alone drunk it. Despite his bizarre appearance, the stranger was clearly a man of discernment. Snowy pumped out two shots from a bottle encrusted with dust and grease. But for the sake of appearances he slammed the glass down insultingly and snatched the proffered note from the stranger’s hand.

  Pest wasn’t about to let Snowy get off so lightly. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to … probably the cockroaches in your filthy fucking toilets. But anyone who’s anyone in Manchester knows that Priest’s dead.”

  “Yeah?” said Snowy. “Well, it’s facts that impress me. Not rumors.”

  “What’s more, everyone knows who fucking killed him,” continued Pest. “Rawhead. That’s fucking who. The Priesthood was the greatest gang in Manchester. The greatest gang anywhere in the globe—Leeds, Newcastle, you fucking name it. Rawhead was this fucking legend; the law couldn’t get near him.

  “Then Mal Priest does something to piss him off and Rawhead goes on the rampage. Next thing you know, the Beast, Heidi, Priesty all vanish off the face of the earth.”

  “Who the fuck was Rawhead?” said Snowy rhetorically. “No cunt knows.”

  “He always wore a hood. That’s what’s so bloody clever about it,” marveled Jammer, wishing he’d thought of wearing a hood. “For all we know, Snowy could be Rawhead. I could be Rawhead.”

  “No, you fucking couldn’t,” said Pest. “I could. You couldn’t.”

  Jammer went quiet.

  Pest wouldn’t let it rest. “Who’s number one? I am. Who’s number two? You are. Repeat after me, ‘I’m number one; you’re number two.’”

  “I don’t want to,” said Jammer.

  “Say it!” warned Pest, spraying spittle across the bar.

  Jammer shrugged. “I’m number one; you’re number two.”

  Pest pulled a Beretta. “You fucking what? Are you fucking saying you’re better than me?”

  “No,” admitted Jammer. “I was just repeating what you told me to say.”

  Pest held the gun to Jammer’s head. “Say ‘I’m a hairdresser.’”

  “Pest.” Jammer sighed. “What’re you pointing that at me for? You know as well as I do that gun ain’t real.”

  “Of course it’s real. It’s a real copy.” Pest placed the replica Beretta on the counter and shoved his empty glass over to Jammer. “It’s your round, dear.”

  “It was my round last time.”

  “And it’ll be your round every time, till kingdom fucking come, unless you stop behaving like my Aunty fucking Mabel.”

  “These are on the house, lads,” said Snowy, not wanting another death on the premises just yet. “You were telling me about the Priesthood, Pest.”

  “Now Chef’s in charge of the gang,” said Pest. “No one sees him.”

  “He’s shared the power out with Little Malc, Priest’s son,” said Jammer. “Chef lives out in Knutsford. Little Malc runs the club at Salford Quays.”

  “It all comes down to money,” lamented Pest. “Without capital, you can’t even set yourself up as a criminal no more. Little Malc inherits his dad’s club—what do I inherit? Me mother’s false teeth and the piss pot from under her fucking bed. Guys like me, with brains and balls but no fucking money, we’re caught in the poverty trap.”

  Pest thought he heard laughter to his right. He turned to ask the prat in the ski goggles what was so funny, but there was no one there.

  * * *

  It was after three on a dark January afternoon when Pest walked home to his lonely terraced hovel in old Glossop to sleep off the seven pints he’d drunk at lunchtime. A knackered-looking Ford Sierra was parked outside his front door. Pest didn’t own a car but resented people parking outside his house. He kicked in the nearside headlamp as he passed it.

  Pest entered his house, bent down to pick up the notice of eviction that was lying on the doormat, and felt something cold brush his left temple.

  “Don’t turn your head,” advised a calm, low voice.

  The warning was uttered with such quiet conviction that Pest froze, remaining bent over the doormat. In the corner of his eye he could see something dark, and he knew that a handgun was touching his skull. “If this is about the money I owe Phil Haye, he’ll get it back on Wednesday when I get me giro.”

  “Get up and walk over to the sofa. Don’t look at me. Just sit down.”

  Slowly, Pest did what he was told. Rawhead, standing behind him, noticed that he was shaking. “There’s an envelope on the sofa. Open it.”

  Pest peered into the envelope. It was full of ten-pound notes. “What’s this?”

  “One hundred. You get the same again when the job’s done.”

  “What job?”

  Rawhead dropped a Browning automatic over the back of the sofa. The gun had belonged to one of his victims. “Have you heard of Malcolm Priest Junior?”

  “Fucking hell!” said Pest.

  “Do you know what he looks like?”

  “Yeah, but … he’s in the fucking Priesthood.”

  “Used to be. Let’s just say Little Malc has passed his expiry date.”

  There was silence as Pest struggled to absorb and interpret this information. If this was a commission from the Priesthood, perhaps glory beckoned. “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

  “I’m not here to satisfy your idle curiosity.”

  “’Cause you don’t want to get fucking shot,” sputtered Pest.

  “Shut up and listen,” said Rawhead. “Little Malc is regular in his habits. He leaves his club every morning just after four. No one’ll be with him. He has a driver who picks him up in a Rolls.”

  “Does Little Malc carry a piece?”

  “No.”

  “What about the driver?”

  “No. A hairpiece, maybe.”

  Pest shook his head and lit a cig. “Maybe I’ve got a bad head for figures,” he said, “but two hundred don’t seem enough for a job like this.”

  Miraculously, a set of car keys fell into Pest’s lap.

  “Plus you get to keep the car that’s parked outside.”

  “That Sierra? Fucking hell! Why didn’t you tell me before? I just smashed one of the fucking lights.”

  “Should teach you to look after your things. As for the fee, it’s the same for all hit men. Shit money at first; then the money gets better on the next job, when we know we can trust you.”

  “You’re making me a hit man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For the Priesthood?”

  Rawhead didn’t answer.

  “Even so,” mused Pest. “Two fucking hundred?”

  “I don’t see you getting any better offers.”

  “And what if I say no?”

  “Then you’d better lie down. Facedown on the floor.”

  “No need, mate. I’ll take the job. I’m up for it.”

  “Lie down anyway.”

  Pest forced a laugh. “I said I’d do the fucking hit, didn’t I?” There was panic in his voice as he stretched out on the stained and ragged hearth rug. “I don’t want to fucking lie down.”

  “Facedown on the floor. Hands by your sides.”

  Pest lay there for a long time, waiting and listening, inhaling the stale piss smell of the rug under his nose. Finally, emboldened by the heavy silence, he raised his head and looked around. The room was empty.

  * * *

  There was a full moon that night. Even Pest, who never noticed a fucking thing, saw how bright the moon was and the way it washed the streets of Glossop and the surrounding hills with milky blue light. He was shocked—he thought he hated nature. In fact, Pest thought he hated everyone and everything. Yet tonight life was a magical thing.

  Just that lunchtime Pest had been the same old loser. Now he had a gun, not just a reconditioned copy. A genui
ne illegal firearm, with a full seven shots on the clip. Bang, one dead fuckface. Bang, another dead fuckface. Bang, bang, bang, three dead fuckfaces squealing in a row. Not only that, but he had wheels, licensed and insured until March. He had a hundred notes to spend on a single night out. In his own eyes, he had become a glamorous figure.

  He’d arranged to meet a woman in the Old Cow, a divorcée called Margaret. She was in her forties, hard-faced, with a pointed, argumentative nose. According to Jammer, Pest had fucked her once after a party. Pest had no memory of this event. But the bitch kept phoning for no reason, so he supposed it must be true.

  He ordered a chicken vindaloo for himself. As he was eating, he noticed Margaret was sulking.

  “What’s the matter with your fucking face?” he said.

  “‘And what about you, Margaret?’” she answered. Doing an impression of Pest as a considerate suitor. “‘Would you like anything to eat, Margaret?’ Yes, fucking thank you. Because I’m out with Pest, and he’d see me fucking starve before he’d offer me a meal!”

  At first, Pest didn’t know what she was talking about. Then the penny dropped. “What? You expect me to buy your fucking food?” He was so angry he grabbed her by the hair and tried to force her face down in his curry. It wasn’t easy. She had strong neck muscles. So it really didn’t look as good as Jimmy Cagney. But eventually he managed to thrust her argumentative nose into the vindaloo.

  She slapped his shoulder and ran out screaming.

  It was a Friday night. The pub was full. For a while, everyone stopped talking. When the chatter resumed, Snowy came over to Pest’s table and said, “Out.”

  “You fucking what?” said Pest, not understanding what the fuss was about.

  “Out of my fucking pub,” said Snowy. “And don’t come back.”

  “OK. But I haven’t finished eating. So give us me fucking money back,” said Pest.

  Snowy walked off to the bar and returned with four quid.

  “What’s this?” said Pest.

  “The meal cost seven ninety-five. You’ve eaten half of it, so there’s half your money back.”

  “What the fuck is the matter with you?” said Pest.

  “I’ll tell you, shall I? That woman you were with … her ex-husband is a fucking copper, you pillock. And you assaulted her?”