by Jay Stringer
ALSO BY JAY STRINGER
OLD GOLD
RUNAWAY TOWN
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Jay Stringer
All rights reserved.
Epigraph taken from “Peggy Sang The Blues” by Frank Turner © 2011 Xtra Mile Recordings Ltd. Used with permission.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781612183404
ISBN-10: 1612183409
Cover design by becker&mayer! LLC
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913819
CONTENTS
START READING
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
In dream, in…
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
In dream, in…
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
FIFTY-SEVEN
FIFTY-EIGHT
FIFTY-NINE
SIXTY
SIXTY-ONE
SIXTY-TWO
SIXTY-THREE
Every traveller has...
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“It doesn’t matter where you come from, it matters where you go. No one gets remembered for the things they didn’t do.”
—Frank Turner
I fucked up.
When my boss rang, I was in bed with her younger sister. I would have ignored any other call, but ignoring Veronica Gaines was not an option. Claire recognized the ringtone and laughed. She stayed on top of me and didn’t stop rocking as she picked up the phone from the bedside table.
She pressed the green button to accept the call and then held it next to her ear without saying a word, smiling at me as she ground away. Turning anything between us into a three-way with her older sister was just one of the many little games Claire liked to play. Was she messing with me or with Veronica?
Did I care?
I pushed up onto my elbows and made a grab for the phone. She let me take it on the second attempt, rolling her eyes and sliding off me.
“Who’s there with you?” Veronica Gaines’s voice was carrying more of an edge than usual. She never panicked or worried, she just got tense.
“Nobody.”
Nobody cocked her eyebrow at this. Then she bent down and slipped me into her mouth.
“Uh huh. Right.” Veronica knew I was lying. I just hoped she didn’t know the reason.
“Well, you’ll have to drop whatever you’re doing. We’ve got a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
My voice went up an octave mid-sentence as Claire squeezed. She held eye contact with me, keeping the game going.
“We’ve got a dropout.”
Code. Someone had dropped dead. There was a time when nobody outside of Hollywood movies worried about secure phone lines. That was before we realized our newspapers were just as likely as our police to be listening in.
I paused to breathe out between clenched teeth to regain control, and then played my part. “You need me to fill in?”
Claire squeezed even tighter at that.
“I need you at the hotel. Last minute changes like this make me nervous. Where are you?”
A hundred lies ran through my head before I decided I’d stand a better chance with part of the truth. “I’m in bed.”
“Yeah, I got that. Whereabouts? I’ll send someone to pick you up.”
I didn’t answer straight away. I was too busy trying not to react as Claire brought me close to climax. “I’m in town,” I said after swallowing a couple of times. “It’ll be quicker for me to drive there myself. Get someone to meet me.”
She hung up without another word. At the same time, Claire stopped what she was doing. My stomach was tight and I was ready to blow. I couldn’t keep the hint of panic out of my voice. “Hey, c’mon.”
She stuck her tongue out and smiled. “Nah. I’m bored now.”
She wanted me to break down and beg. I wasn’t going to give it to her so I swallowed the frustration and lay there for a moment, calming down. Claire shrugged and slipped her knickers back on, stooping next to the bed for her bra.
“What did your lord and master want?”
I wasn’t imagining the edge in her voice. There was something else going on in our game, but I avoided thinking it through. When we’d first met, Claire had been a problem teenager and I’d been a cop. She’d been all about big blonde hair and jewelry, clothes that pushed her body in all sorts of strange directions. Dressed up shiny like a chocolate bar. These days she played the businesswoman: dark suits and sleek auburn hair. She dressed like a tribute act to her older sister’s professional persona. She’d never shown any interest in me until I’d started working for the family. What was she getting out of it?
“We’ve got a stiff. I need to go take a look.”
“Well, you had a stiff.” She laughed as she pulled on her skirt. “Now you’ve not got much of anything.”
I rolled onto my side, away from her, and reached for my clothes. By the time I turned back, she was fully dressed and snorting a line off the bedside table. She tapped with an expensive fingernail at the second line she’d left for me, but I shook my head. I wanted to feel less, not more. I pulled a plastic bottle from the pocket of my jeans and slipped a pill onto my tongue.
“Did she say what kind of stiff?”
“No. She’s sending someone to meet me at the hotel.”
“She calls and you go running.”
Again there was that edge to her voice.
“What’s up?”
Her turn to shrug. “Nothing. Let yourself out.”
I heard her snorting the second line as I closed the door behind me.
&n
bsp; It didn’t look like the blonde was happy to see me. It also didn’t look like she was a real blonde. I hadn’t seen her before; she must have been fresh off the boat.
Or truck.
Whatever.
The hotel was called The Hound. A run-down building of faded bricks, it sat on the southern edge of Wolverhampton’s city center. It was a fire hazard and a death trap, to say nothing of the asbestos in the roof, but health and safety certificates were only ever one bribe away, and I’d gotten good at knowing which palm to put the money into.
Until a couple of years ago, the Gaines family had run their smut and vice out of a club behind Broad Street, but that place burned down shortly before a police raid, and the operations spread out to hotels and pubs scattered around the edge of the ring road that circled the city.
There was illicit gambling most nights in the basement of The Hound, with off-the-books alcohol sales routed through the hotel bar on the floor above. The mess I’d come for was on the third floor, in a room overlooking the back of the building. A mixture of smells hit me as I walked in, but the strongest was the coppery odor of blood. The blonde was leaning against the cracked plaster of the bedroom wall. At the sound of my footsteps, she turned from staring out of the half-open window to stare through me. She’d made an effort at getting dressed; her underwear was back on and she’d pulled her dress up to her waist. Her hands hung at her sides; her left hand was flexing, opening and closing into a fist, and in her right hand was a butterfly knife slick with blood. Her arms were lined with scratches. I turned to Tony, the fixer who’d bought me up to the room, and asked him to give us a moment. He’d been with the family longer than me, and I’d learned to trust him. He stepped out, leaving me alone with the woman.
And the dead body on the floor.
“You okay?”
She didn’t answer. I stepped in closer and tried again, but her eyes barely flickered with life. You know those guys in the movies who slap a woman to get her attention? I hate those guys. I touched her hand, and she stirred. Then I lightly rubbed the end of her nose with the tip of my finger, and she was back in the room.
“You okay?”
She nodded. “You’re the Gypsy. I’ve heard about you.” Her accent was thick and heavy, like Russian vodka. She said Gypsy as if it meant danger. “You’re here, I’m in trouble.”
“What’s your name?”
After she told me, I took a wild guess that her name wasn’t really Maria, but figured that was the least of my problems as I knelt down next to the body.
The guy was naked. There were scratch marks across his chest, angry red marks crossing the swollen pale skin, and a couple of large jagged cuts, one just above his breastplate and one across his neck. There was very little blood around the wounds, and I wondered how much cleaning had already been done.
Finally I looked at his face, and felt all the air run out of my lungs.
I knew him.
He was a small-time local hustler who went by the nickname Jellyfish. He’d never worked an honest day in his life, and now he never would. Straight out of school he’d learned to be a professional good time, always knowing where the party was and always turning up with drugs to sell. We were never friends but I’d known him long enough to feel a jolt at the sight of his corpse.
There was a time he’d been sharp and good-looking, always wearing shades and a cheap leather jacket, always trying to be Jack Nicholson. But like a lot of things in town, that had faded. The last few years had changed all of us.
I stared into his dead eyes for a few moments. I tried to close them, but he’d already been dead too long, I couldn’t get the lids to move. His face was caught in the same expression every corpse wears, muscles relaxed into a neutral death mask, mouth hung open. Death is the great leveler of moods; happy or sad, we all look the same afterward.
“Yeah, no, I don’t think he’s up to talking right now. Did he do that?” I nodded at the scratch marks on her arms, the skin swollen and red.
She nodded. “Yes.”
On the floor beside the mattress were his clothes. The items at the top, his socks and trousers, were thrown in a heap, but the items lower down were folded neatly. He’d started off with enough concentration to carefully fold his clothes, and then had gotten excited and flung them off. Or someone else had finished the job in a hurry. In the corner, next to a wastepaper bin and an unused electrical socket, lay his cheap leather jacket. I went through the pockets until I found his wallet, and then started flipping through it.
There were no pictures of children, no phone numbers or signs of any loved ones. His driver’s license was fake, and he had credit cards in two different names. One sounded familiar enough to be real: Jeremy Fish.
I felt relieved to learn his given name. I’d once let someone die without a name, and it almost broke me. I don’t know if it’s some residual trace of religion in me, but I think everyone has the right to die with a name and a few words spoken. I touched his forehead and whispered a few Romani phrases under my breath. I wanted to pop another pill, but I avoid doing that in front of people and I could feel the blonde’s eyes on me as I straightened up.
She raised her dark eyebrows just a little, as if lifting them all the way was more effort than she could bear. “You suspect foul play?” She waved at the body.
I took a moment to leave my mouth hanging open. “What?”
These imports, they pick up their broken English from customers and daytime TV. Maria here had been watching too much Quincy. I was a Rockford man myself.
“Well, you clearly killed him, so, yes, I suspect foul play. The question is, why?”
“He had this—” She held up the knife, and only now seemed aware that she was holding it. Her expression changed as she moved her hand, double-taking at the blade. “He pulled it out while we were fucking. He started attacking me.”
That sounded nothing like the Jellyfish I knew. He was a kinky little bastard who would do almost anything to get his dick wet, but I’d always trusted him around women. I didn’t see that he had this kind of violence in him. I looked again at the pile of clothes. If someone had stripped him after he’d been stabbed, I’d see blood on his clothes.
My eyes went back to the blonde. Was I making excuses for a man after he had attacked a woman, just because I’d known him some years before? We do have a way of closing ranks. That was when my brain finally kicked me with the other smell that was hiding below the blood—there were drugs in the air. I caught the thick, sweet lingering smell of weed, but something else more pungent was cutting through it, like vinegar.
“You let him light up?”
She shook her head slowly. It took too long for my questions to hit her brain.
“Any girl working for us should know the rules. You been warned against the junkies, right? They’d sooner rob you than fuck you and, worst case, this happens.”
“I told him we don’t sleep with users. He said it was okay, it was just speed.”
“Speed doesn’t do that.” I pointed down at him. “He might have talked to you for hours, but there would have been no sex. And he wouldn’t have lost it and gone on the attack like that, either. Meth, maybe.”
She pulled her dress up around her arms, slipping it back into place. I took another look at the scratches, and then down at Jellyfish’s fingernails. There was blood on them, just a little bit.
“He say anything else?”
She traced over the scratches on her right arm with her left hand without looking at them, her eyes drifting away again. I needed her to stay with me. I stepped in a little closer and looked at her pupils.
Shit.
There was a reason it was taking so long for my questions to register with her.
“You’re using too.”
She started to shake her head but I held up my hand.
“Don’t,” I said.
“An A-bomb?”
She was shaking a little bit, scared of what could happen to her. She wasn’t here on a work visa, but she had rules to obey just the same and breaking them could lead to far worse than deportation. I’d had to clean up similar messes for Gaines over the last two years. But the drug use was a problem. If one girl was using, what was to say others weren’t? And where was it coming from?
“Doesn’t look good, Maria.”
“But—”
“You want the truth? You fucked up here. You got a dead john on the floor, probably got enough drugs in him to resurrect Keith Moon, and your blood is under his fingernails.”
“But—”
“And on top of all that, I reckon you gave him some of your own stash, right?”
She stopped shaking and nodded. When she looked up at me, it was with the eyes of a lost child. I wondered how far she was from home.
“He was nervous, yes? I gave him some of this, calm him down.”
“Okay. So he was already on speed maybe, like you said, god knows what else. Then he got nervous and you gave him a few tugs on that thing. And that’s what, heroin and skunk?”
She nodded again.
“And then he made love to you till his face turned blue.”
“What?”
“I can never remember those lyrics quite right. Never mind.”
I looked into her eyes again. “Look, aside from all this, you being straight with me? If you are, I can help. If you lie, I’ll know.”
She looked back into my eyes and nodded.
I stepped back and took a moment to smooth some imaginary creases out of my clothes, thinking things through. Then I nodded at the body. “Did he pay you?”
“Yes, I got it before, just like they told me.”
I opened his wallet again and pulled out all of the notes that were left, handed them to her. “Here. You’re in his will.”