by Anton Marks
No talking was involved, just body language.
It was clear she recognized the aura of sophisticated menace he emanated and the connection between them was unquestioned. Earlier the beauty never took her eyes off him as he had stood purchasing a Coke from the concessionary. Unfortunately, before he could go over to her and get a number she was gone but from the ferocity of his erection, not forgotten.
An look now!
What will be, will be, because here she was, he told himself.
Minty was too experienced in the ways of these things to be surprised. He just knew a certain percentage of the world’s pussy you didn’t have to do any work to capture. Law of averages. He had bedded too many stray pum-pum not to know that as a statistical fact. So why did he feel that nothing about this woman obeyed the law of averages?
Fuck it!
Flashing a grin in her direction she winked and crooked her finger his way, beckoning him over to where she stood but the crowd was dense. As best as he could with some subtle hand movements he tried to tell her to ‘hold tight’ and proceeded to shoulder his way to the entrance. Two minutes tops to get to where she was standing and she was not there. Peering through the glass facade, he saw her turn right along the Haagen Daz promenade. Leroy broke into the fresh air wondering, what the fuck, is she dealing wid? He looked up to Piccadilly in the distance, easily distinguishing her short red dress amidst the street performers, artists and audiences. She walked backward for a while still beckoning him with a smile and a curl of her finger.
She then turned left into Soho.
His scowl fell away.
A freaky chick, turned on by the chase and the excitement.
He could live with that.
Stepping up his pace he kept on the trail, impeded by the amounts of people just aimlessly milling around but gaining on her nonetheless. The streets looked somehow shinier up here. Like showers had been limited to just these streets. Mist was clinging to the shop fronts, drifting down the streets and mingling with the smells issuing from the restaurants. She disappeared in the bellowing fumes of a car exhaust for a moment, her image suddenly illuminated in a cocoon of hazy light. He made to cross over to the other side when a garbage truck drove across his line of sight, tickling his nose with its stench. Stooping, Leroy peered below the trucks under belly and caught sight again of those long stocking legs, head down a side street he imagined could accommodate only two people shoulder to shoulder. He had a feeling this was where she wanted him.
Taking his time, he regulated his breathing, popped his collar then slowly walked down the alley.
Light filtered from the window of a restaurant, a grill, planted at street level, leaked pale mist and his shadow stretched ahead of him until it died into the gloom.
Through the thin curtains of mist, he could see the silhouette, an indistinct figure, half way along the length of the alley, with her back against the wall. A red glow hovered away from her mouth, followed by a stream of smoke.
Calmly walking over, re-enacting the swaying gait of one of his movie idols, Minty stopped abruptly like a ‘B’ actor who had forgotten his lines. He scrutinized her carefully, before he leaned forward, placing the palms of his hands on the wall at either side of her head. He drank in her smell of honeysuckle and those molten brown eyes had not lessened in intensity.
“This running up and down ting,” he whispered, “Gets you wet don’t?”
Her arms arched around his waist in reply pulling him closer.
With a sigh he interpreted as anticipation, he started caressing her thighs. His coarse hands slid along her stocking legs until he felt the silkiness of her panties. Minty gripped onto the sparse G-string and ripped it off. Inviting him further she lifted her skirt and parted her legs some more. Leroy undid his fly with one hand and released his spring loaded penis from his trousers with the other. Leaning up from the wall to fish into his pockets for Jimmies, he felt a sharp prick to his neck again.
He bunched his broad shoulders, the bite reminiscent of the one he felt in the foyer and briefly thought how strange that was while he fumbled with his erect member.
It got stranger.
Suddenly a cold chill razored across his shoulder blades almost making him feel as if he had been stripped naked. A mound of gooseflesh rose at the back of his head as he turned. His eyes registered the blur of motion some distance away and before he could complete a breath, a hand that felt like a steel vice, gripped his jaw and squeezed. He felt a tremendous power in the man, vibrating from inside like he was hiding some huge internal turbine under his dark clothes. The hand holding his jaw twisted his head this way and that as if examining him and he could vaguely see the lady in red sashaying away in the distance. With no effort he was lifted off his feet, the overpowering rawness of the sea in his nose and the cold clamminess of the man’s touch on his skin. Minty squirmed; the sensation of his touch was strange. It was as if it had no true consistency, a semi solid, not certain if the state it existed in was really solid or liquid. He was struggling for breath, the man’s hand covering his face and for the briefest of moments, he felt flesh breaking down, transforming like little viscous feelers crawling into his nose and mouth, gagging him. Minty tried to scream but instead bit down on what was invading him, the man’s flesh coming away in his mouth.
A sour loathsome taste exploded over his palette.
Minty heaved, leaving a trail of dark fluid from his mouth just as a force he was hopeless to defend against sent him flying through the air and smashing into the opposite wall. He fell to a crumpled heap and ever so slowly raised himself to his knees, retching, expelling the foul tasting substance from his guts and mouth.
Strings of regurgitated food hung from his lips as he looked up to see the hazy figure of the lady in red, looking at him from a safe distance and then walking away.
Anger or survival spurred him on, making him try to crawl out of harm’s way but the impact with the wall must have broken bones because every move was excruciatingly painful.
His pathetic attempts to flee ended violently.
To his numbed senses gravity began to react differently and he found himself floating above ground, not realizing he had been lifted and pinned once more against the wall.
Minty was looking wide eyed and straight into the face of the person who had jumped him but for the life of him he could not discern his features. It was like looking into a black and white TV set filled with jagged static. His feet were dangling off the street, the man’s hand was pressing against his chest with such force he felt like an insect pinned to a display board. The pressure was unbearable but he struggled to stay conscious.
He thrashed left and right, his nostrils flaring as he breathed in that distinctive rank marine odor of his assailant.
Minty tried to concentrate on the man’s face but even at such close proximity, the only thing he could be sure of was the fucker was tall, wore a long black coat and a broad rimmed black trilby and his face was sunken into oily canvas of visual static. Minty feigned limpness, not wanting to alert him to his lucidness before he was ready but the smell was making him swoon.
“Deh drug running through your veins is called the demon weed, star. A real versatile mix that right about now is making you more open to my suggestion.”
That voice.
God almighty!
Minty’s innards froze as if Freon was being pumped through his veins. His body stiffened in immediate shock.
“Yuh look surprised? No jail can hold me, pussy. No prisons a guh keep me from you.”
The voice from his past rebounded off the inner caverns of his skull like an errant echo.
Enoch? Darkman?
His panic could not be more complete.
Desperately his fingers foraged around the inside of his trouser waist, searching, ignoring the pain in his chest and the man’s words.
“I heard…….”
Survival.
Nothing more occupied Minty’s tormented thoughts.
>
“… a little bird seh…”
His fingers kept reaching.
“…you where looking for me.”
The muscles of his elbow extended and could stretch no more.
“I was looking for you too, pardy.”
The pain shot through his hand as the pads of his finger tips touched the smooth handle of his switch blade.
“Glad I could mek your acquaintance.”
With a bellow like some rabid animal, Minty ejected the switchblade free from its housing and plunged the six inch stiletto into the mad man’s ribs.
A stray beam of light brought his face into view for a second.
The look of agony he expected was instead a smile. An abomination of a grin which was impossibly wide, his face, seal skin black wildly stretching and distorting as if it was a sheet of elastic, being kneaded out of shape by some powerful internal force.
“I have two questions feh you. Do you want to tell me about Deacon’s plans while you are alive…?”
Minty screamed his brain on the verge of overloading and his senses sharper than he ever knew they could be. He felt the stickiness of his fingers and with a soft tearing sound he pulled the knife out of Darkman’s ribs.
An uncontrollable shiver of revulsion shook him.
He tried to stab him again.
“…or I can drag deh answers from yuh stinking corpse.”
The Darkman’s hands encircled his and squeezed. Leroy’s fingers shattered.
Blood trickled along what remained of his knuckles and dripped to the pavement. Every neuron exploded simultaneously, blurring his vision with its suddenness. But even as he stiffened with shock, the sound of the broken blade falling to the street was clear as if that was all that existed.
A lonely isolated sound of defeat.
Minty knew he was dead.
The shock revelations of Darkman being here now, fully present, no drug trip but reality. The pain exploding all over his body like minute depth charges ripping him apart was real enough too and so was that aching despondency in his gut of regret. The talisman – that reeking concoction of herbs, pungent oils, animal carcasses and incantations, that talisman that he was meant to wear everywhere he went. The one he had left because he had reasoned the smell would turn off any interested females.
That had killed him.
Darkman clamped his hands over Leroy’s wails, his tar skin starting to spread away from his fingers, pulsating black pseudo flesh like a giant unicellular organism engulfing his victim’s skull. With his undamaged hand Leroy frantically groped at the man’s flesh, trying to tear it from his face but it simply replaced itself, getting denser and tighter. Then the throbbing mass of oil slick colored living matter began to constrict, tightening, filling every orifice, suffocating him. The sutures in his skull made gross popping sounds as his head caved in. His struggling became sporadic twitches as the life left him.
Darkman let him fall.
In mock reverence he took off his trilby, stooped beside him, Darkman’s chiseled and gaunt features unshielded for the first time and whispered to the convulsing body of Leroy ‘Minty’ Thelwell.
“By an by, we will talk. Deh teeming dead hold no secrets from me Minty. You will tell me what I want to know.”
He stood up and spat on the corpse. Then as if he never existed, he disappeared into the mist.
6.
Metal Works Gym
Tuesday, July 10th
12.15
“It can’t get any worse can, it?” Y lamented.
“Shit, we alive ain’t we?” Patra said.
But no matter how it was processed, either through Y’s sense of black and white or Patra’s optimism filter, it seemed life was conspiring against them, cracking some cosmic joke at their expense and maybe hoping they were evolved enough to appreciate the mirth.
Y was on the verge of either receiving a criminal record or a police caution and was facing a definite eviction from her home. She had been so eager to get to Sandy Brewster, her part time employer, who had shopped her to the Housing Association the two Housing officers in her way ended up with a fractured jaw and a sprained ankle. The Community Officers were also injured slightly, due more to clumsiness – grabbing onto someone as supple as Y was fraught with dangers - but unfortunately that wasn’t considered when the reports were handed in.
Patra was the only light amidst the forest of bullshit and had returned home early from a model shoot in Nice, not in the best of moods. She had a tendency to devolve to a more savage representation of herself when she was without a partner for extended periods of time. And for the dawg ugly shoot director and not one of the models to make a pass at her was just too much for her to bear. Her day job at the Pink Kitty Kat was far less challenging and that’s how she preferred it.
Today the only person who was making any sense was Suzy, and she was quiet, allowing one of her profound philosophical solutions to emerge.
It was just after lunch time and the posse was as relaxed as possible in the lair at Metal Works. The smoke from Patra’s lone cigarillo curled up to the ceiling extractors.
Eyes were blank, tired.
Y’s voice was edged with sarcasm.
“So, you think we should forget about everything,” she repeated. “Relax, enjoy ourselves, kick back for a week or two and return with a fresh perspective.”
Suzy nodded.
“And how the fuck are we goin’ to do that?” Y spat out. “We have limited cash and we’re worrying about our situations. How?”
Y lowered her head and used her left hand to slowly massage her temples. A soft “sorry” drifted up from where she had leaned forward giving Suzy’s inevitable response a chance.
Instead of saying anything, Suzy’s eyes fell on Patra who, strangely, in view of the circumstances, had a smile on her face.
Patra shrugged.
“Okay! Great idea. Take a breather and chill for a while. Question is how and with what?”
Suzy threw an envelope into the middle of the table and said brightly.
“Dis is a start.”
Y glared at it firstly then as if it was a gargantuan effort, reached over and took it up. Her action seemed to attract Patra’s attention as she leaned forward too, curious.
Y opened it and slowly said.
“Three VIP tickets to the MOBO awards After Party.”
“You’re shitting me.” Patra squealed.
“I shit you not.” Y said as both their eyes converged on the tickets again then on Suzy.
“He remembered.”
Suzy shook her head smiling.
“Come on, Mr. P doesn’t make idle promises. You know that.” she said to an unanswered question. “He wanted to cheer us up. Oh! And by deh way him seh we can order a limousine of our choice on him.”
“Man, that is one cool dude,” Patra commented.
Mr Guresh Patel was an enigma in his own life-time or so the girls viewed him.
A Hindu multi-millionaire whose beginnings were shrouded in mystery to everyone other than maybe only his family and closest aides and who treated the girls with the respect he afforded his family. Ever since they had prevented a possible kidnapping attempt in the car lot of Metal Works, he had made sure whatever he could do to make life for them more trouble free he would - without his wife’s knowledge that is.
His benevolence aside what made him much more than a middle-aged Asian businessman was his mysterious contacts in the music world. For a boy born in Mumbai he had knowledge of all the black music luminaries and referred to them with an uncanny sense of familiarity - as if he knew them very well.
Signed autographs of visiting superstars, backstage passes and front row seats at the most sought after concerts was his mystery sideline.
Now this.
These tickets were for the most prestigious music Awards ceremony in the UK and could easily change hands on eBay for five hundred pounds a pop. They’d all given up asking, “How the hell does he do that?”
> Y was looking into middle distance as if she had been stunned into silence but she was actually groping for a relevant description of herself adequate enough to describe how childish she had been acting.
In her panic it had been easy to forget that the girls had as much to lose as she did. Their underlying motives were different but their commitment to an ideals and one another were solid. Y had to keep reminding herself, that with life, health and good friends the direction her life took was still under her control.
“I don’t….” Y began as a prologue to an apology.
“Forget it!” Suzy pre-empted again. “I understand sis.”
“Yeah she understands alright.” Patra butted in with one of her less than subtle evaluations of human nature. “She understands you’re tripping.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Y said.
“Hey, what are friends for?”
“I ask myself that sometimes.”
“Then I think it’s my place to remind you girlfriend, if you forgot. And yow! You must have forgotten because we are all in this bitch together. To-ge-ther. You feel me?” Patra was out of her seat staring wistfully at a poster of a water soaked and densely muscled body of Usain Bolt. She unconsciously licked her lips and walked over to Y, putting her hands on her shoulder and massaged it gently. “These last few months have been hell for all of us and even when I tend to say stuff like, ‘Hey we’re fucked’, I’m mouthing off and you expect that from me, right? But if you start tripping and really meaning that shit, we screwed. Suzy can’t take care of business by herself and you know me. Being subtle ain’t my thing.” Patra grinned. “We know we were meant to be, so why fight it. All this bullshit around us is nothing, it’s all about getting some, and if it means we have to bust some balls along the way, hey, bring it on.”
Y leaned forward and shook her head, smiling weakly. Recovering from the shock of Patra’s impromptu pep talk took some minutes and she allowed the truth of what she said to sink in. Lifting her head from her slumped position she looked in Suzy’s direction.