Jamie folded his arms, placed them on his knees and leaned toward Thrawny. “Stop avoiding the question.”
“Jamie ye know this sort of information never comes without a price for somebody.”
Jamie didn’t so much as blink. “You owe me this Alexander, just answer the question.”
Thrawny winced. “Lower yer voice. Joan an’ yerself are the only ones that know my Christian name.” He shifted his bulk uncomfortably, sunlight threading in the nutmeg tufts of hair on his forearms. He pursed his lips and took a reluctant breath. “There was some money changed hands, lot of it actually, to make sure that boy didn’t make it to Girdwood. Truck was paid to go down a side road an’ stop. Someone was waitin’ to take him off there. That’s all I know, I swear to ye Jamie. If I was found to be talkin’ to ye my life’d be worth no more than a peckerless snake.”
“There were seven other men in that truck, why him?”
There was no mistaking the look Thrawny gave in response to his question. “Well as yer here askin’ the question I imagine ye know better than I why someone wanted him bad enough to pay that sort of money.”
“What sort of money?”
Thrawny drew his eyebrows down and began to give off distinct emanations of discontent. “Never miss a goddamn beat do ye?”
“I’ve been up roughly forty-eight hours and I’ve a house filled to its gilded ceiling with refugees so you’ll have to forgive me if my patience is wearing a little thin.”
Thrawny named a figure, which gave Jamie a moment’s pause.
“I’ll need a name.”
Protest formed in Thrawny’s face immediately. Jamie heard the excuses, could have recited them verbatim before they crossed the man’s lips, but he allowed him to finish his litany of the rain of curses that was likely to land on both their heads for this one name.
“Are you quite done?” Jamie asked politely when Thrawny came to the end of his hellfire monologue.
“This is no bloody joke Jamie,” Thrawny leaned forward until there was no more than an inch between their faces, his breath a fog of stale whiskey. “Have ye heard of the Trustees?”
Jamie gave the slightest nod.
“Alright, well they’ve got their own hired guns. Assassins who go in an’ out of the Catholic neighborhoods an’ kill who they’re told.” He pressed a meaty hand to his head, wincing slightly. “I’m goin’ to need a drink if ye want me to continue.”
Never a man to arrive unprepared Jamie took a bottle of Connemara Mist out from under his coat. Thrawny took the cap off and drank a long steady stream of the golden fire before returning to his story. “Boy,” he said emerging for air, eyes streaming, “that’s powerful potent stuff.”
“The name,” Jamie repeated calmly.
“The lawyer that was killed with the car bomb, that was their doin’.”
“These Trustees?”
“Aye, though ye’d be hard pressed to prove it.”
“Then how did you come by this information?”
“There’s four assassins that I know of alright. Two are drones, do what they’re told to, pick up the envelope of money an’ go home. ‘Tis neither here nor there to them who’s killed nor why. The other two are a bit of a different story.” Thrawny’s eyes darted quickly about the room as if he expected the faded wallpaper to have sprouted ears. “One’s got a mouth on him, gets liquored up an’ brags a bit. Times he’s partnered with the fourth man an’ this is where the story gets really frightenin’.”
“This fourth man?”
Thrawny nodded, tongue flicking around his lips nervously. “Two months back there was a murder, ye’ll remember—body was found in an alleyway off Wimbledon Street. Some poor sod stumblin’ home drunk got beat real bad, teeth’d been pulled, fingers broke, face cut up fierce from a knife?”
“I remember,” Jamie said curtly, the vertical crease between his eyes deepening.
“’Twas the fourth man that did it. Word is there’s no political motivation behind most of his murders, he just kills for the sheer joy of it. Name’s Kenny Murray an’ he killed a man in prison as well. Poisoned him before the poor bugger could take the witness stand against him.”
“Are you telling me this Murray is the man I want?” Jamie asked.
“Aye,” Thrawny clutched the bottle of whiskey tight to his belly, “unfortunately it is.”
“And how do I find him?”
Thrawny shook his head violently. “Ye don’t man, don’t even think it. This man is psychotic, he’s not just some Shankill tough, he’d slaughter ye for a lock of yer hair. Besides no one knows where he lives or what he does.”
“I imagine his partner does,” Jamie said quietly.
“Oh no, no, no, no,” Thrawny said agitatedly, “ye’d not get near him either.”
“You have.”
“Only when I’ve ended up in the same drinkin’ establishment an’ that’s The Club. Ye’d never get past the door an’ if ye did, ye’d not come back out it.”
“Not if I went with someone who’s known there.”
“Are ye feckin’ nuts?” Thrawny said, a slight squeak in his rumble. “Everyone an’ his dog knows who ye are man. That club is sacred Loyalist ground, they’d roast ye an’ eat ye an’ use me for toothpicks once they were done.”
“Can you be sober enough by—” Jamie glanced at his watch, “eight o’clock?”
“No,” Thrawny shook his head so hard that whiskey slopped over the neck of the bottle and trickled in a stream over the hummock of his belly. “No, you may have some crazed death wish, but I don’t. I’ll not go an’ ye’ve no way to make me.” He thumped the bottle against his knee for emphasis.
“You won’t?” Jamie asked lightly, and Thrawny felt the short hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up. He’d a miserable feeling that old debts were about to be called in.
“Now Jimsy,” he began in a conciliatory tone, but was cut off by Jamie’s raised hand.
“No, don’t waste your breath, I can see you’ve your reasons.” He stood as if to leave and Thrawny relaxed slightly, which was his mistake.
“Oh by the way Joan said not to forget to pick up milk before you drag your useless corpse back home.”
Thrawny, already an unhealthy gray, blanched visibly. “Ye went to see Joan first?”
“Did I forget to mention that?” Jamie smiled sweetly. “Odd that it should slip my mind. She worries about you a great deal, doesn’t she?”
“She’s my sister, ye know our family is tight man, or at least ye knew it well once.”
Jamie turned and came across the room, putting his face in Thrawny’s, hands on the arms of the chair. Despite the fact that he outweighed Jamie by a good eighty pounds he shrank back as far as the chair allowed.
“She worries too much, hardly seems fair, does it? But even Joan doesn’t know the extent of your troubles does she?”
Thrawny went deathly still, suddenly understanding where the conversation was heading. And knew the man wasn’t even going to give him the illusion of choice.
“I don’t know what yer talkin’ about,” he said, attempting to bluff it out.
“What I’m talking about, Alex, is gambling debt. Joan doesn’t know how shaky the floor under her feet is, does she? What do you think she’d do if she realized the house is mortgaged to a loan shark, who has every intention of kicking her out in another month.”
“I was goin’ to find the money...” Thrawny began in protest but Jamie merely raised an eyebrow.
“You’ve got thirty thousand pounds up your sleeve?”
“I had twenty,” he said angrily before he could stop to think what he was letting slip.
“Had being the operative word in that sentence,” Jamie said. “All gone on the horses. Twenty to win on Balmoral’s Whelp, am I right? Blew all twenty grand in an afternoon didn’t you? I find it interesting that you could come up with it in the first place. No overtime hours at the shipyard, no extra job and yet you had it certain enough.”
“Look, man—”
“No you look,” Jamie grabbed him hard under the chin, “I know, do you understand? I know where that money came from. Couldn’t believe it at first, said to myself you couldn’t do that sort of thing, wouldn’t get mixed up with those kind of people. Not the Thrawny I knew. But the facts kept piling up and I, not being given to blind faith, saw the picture. It made me sick, actually physically ill, Alexander. Realized I didn’t know you anymore.”
“Jamie please, ye don’t understand, ye don’t know how desperate I was.”
“I don’t care how desperate you were, nothing excuses what you’ve done. You could have come to me, did you even consider that? I’d have lent you the money, Christ I would have given it to you, you had only to ask. Or is Catholic money tainted?”
Thrawny shook his head slowly, tears moistening the pale oyster eyes.
“Ye know better than that. How long since ye been by, Jamie?”
“That has no bearing on this situation.”
“Oh but it does. We were family Jamie, we loved ye as our own, we wept when ye lost the bairns, we died a little when Colleen left ye. We loved ye an’ you abandoned us.”
Jamie took a deep breath and stood. “I couldn’t be there Alex, I just couldn’t.”
“Well neither could I anymore,” Thrawny said through gritted teeth. “An’ if ye bear me any fondness at all man ye won’t go to that club. Ye don’t understand how deep this thing goes.”
“I have to find this man Alex, do you understand? I have to find him now, alive and well.”
“Jamie, I can’t.”
Jamie sighed, wanting only his bed and oblivion. Thrawny had left him little choice but to make this last desperate move in the game. “The mortgage on the house is paid. Joan will never know the difference, she can go on believing her drunken brother is still capable of taking care of her.”
He watched as Thrawny’s shoulders slumped in relief and knew he’d broken a man as surely as if he’d sliced him in half.
“Are ye blackmailin’ me, Jamie?” Thrawny asked, though there was little question in the words.
“Yes,” Jamie replied coolly, “I suppose I am. Eight o’clock, be here and be sober—understand?”
“Aye, I understand,” Thrawny said, glaring out of bloodshot eyes, “yer not the devil, yer his master.”
In the street Jamie took a deep breath of the smoky air and shut his eyes for a second, banishing the memory of Thrawny with tears in his eyes.
Right now, he could not afford anyone’s tears.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Zorba and Company
CHRIST ON A PIECE OF TOAST, I don’t know how ye expect me to get through this sober.” Thrawny eyed the oddity before him with a great deal of worried skepticism.
“I’ll keep quiet and follow your lead,” said the vision in front of him, nimbly adjusting its greasy leather cap and bouncing down off the wall like an acrobatic Pan spotting a nymph.
“What in the name of all that’s holy is that?” Thrawny asked a moment later when confronted with their transportation.
“A chip van as you no doubt can see,” Jamie replied, blithely swinging up onto the driver’s seat and waving impatiently at the passenger’s seat.
Thrawny reluctantly took it, knowing he’d no choice in the matter. The lack of options, however, didn’t make this scenario more appetizing. He’d been in on escapades with Jamie before, had even been known to orchestrate a few, but the prey they were hunting tonight played for keeps and had the meanest set of teeth he’d ever seen.
The Club was a nameless establishment that was known only to those who drank and played billiards there. Like a secret society, you had to earn your way in through a process of initiation. Wedged at the end of a brick laneway that was accessed through a narrow crack between two buildings, it was a low-ceilinged, nondescript building with no sign above its door. The barred windows and metal door made certain that no hapless tourist ever made the mistake of wandering in to slake his thirst.
Standing in a hard rectangle of barred light, Thrawny thought there were likely very few doors in the world he’d less like to step through at the moment.
“How will we know the man?” Jamie asked, smoothing down the corners of a dense, oily mustache.
“There’ll be a space about him of two seats to a side, an’ he’s a face on him like a Netterjack toad. In fact he’s called the Toad, though no one’s fool enough to say it to his face.”
The place was harshly lit and about as inviting as a medieval dungeon. Cinderblock walls had been painted an institutional shade of green and were a perfect match for the dour expressions that were to be seen on each and every face as they entered the building.
“Friendly crew,” the Greek—aka His Lordship James Kirkpatrick—muttered out of the side of his mouth.
Thrawny hitched up his pants with a deep breath, “Don’t say I didn’t warn ye.”
The Greek threw him a sideways smile, causing his moustache—large, black and oily—to twitch alarmingly. Thrawny felt a jolt of worry; in the aftermath of previous excursions with Jamie his primary emotion was a fervent gratitude to still be in possession of his life.
The man called The Toad was obvious at once. There were the two empty spaces to either side of him that Thrawny had said there would be. And he did, most assuredly, bear a strong and unfortunate resemblance to a small brown amphibian.
The Greek, ignoring the societal rules of the club, went and hopped onto a stool adjacent to the Toad.
The Toad turned slowly, menace apparent in his every move. Several sets of eyes were trained on them now, unblinking and tense with the expectation of violence. The Greek seemed unaware of the heavy currents running toward him and smiled cheerfully at the stubby man, a gold tooth winking insolently under the heavy moustache.
Thrawny, a shade of pale that looked distinctly greenish, gave a nod to the Toad.
“E’s with me.”
“Is he?” The Toad’s eyes narrowed. “An’ who the feck is he when he’s not at home, eh?”
“Coo-zan,” the Greek said with the wide-eyed innocence of one who found the complexities of English entirely beyond him.
“Yer cousin?” The Toad lifted his tufted shelf of a brow. “Doesn’t look like no relation of yers.”
“Aye, well,” Thrawny shot a heavy look in the Greek’s direction, “he’s distant—second cousin, three times removed.”
“An’ does yer cousin have a name?” The Toad asked, eyes flat as stagnant water.
“Uh, his name,” Thrawny swallowed, corner of his mouth twitching in nervous hilarity, “is um, Zorba.”
“Zorba the Greek,” the Toad snickered, “is this some kind of feckin’ joke?”
“You think is funny?” said the Greek, thick brows lowering ominously, “I think not is funny.”
“Yeh, I think is funny,” the Toad replied with a sneer.
“Koutoc,” the Greek said and spat distastefully to one side.
“What the hell did he say?” the Toad asked, rising on springy legs off his stool, blunt pocked hands fisted up and ready to knock the insult—for the tone was clear—back down the foreigner’s throat.
“Ees Greek for stupid,” the dark man replied heatedly, oily mustache bristling in indignation.
The Toad eyed him for a long moment. “Well ye get points for stupidity anyhow. But maybe ye don’t understand how things work about here. That’s what’s wrong with this country, lettin’ greasy foreigners come an’ go as they like. Get him out of here, Alex, before yer short one coo-zan.” The Toad laughed at his own hilarity and sat back on his stool, dismissing the Greek’s presence in a most insulting manner, or at least that was how the Greek seemed to see it.
“Seenoeteekos proveeos,” the Greek said haughtily, arms crossed high on his chest, a dark look aimed down his nose.
The Toad cocked his head and blinked. “What’s he said now?”
“My Greek is no’ so good,” Thrawny cleared his thro
at delicately, “but chancin’ a translation, I think he’s called ye—roughly speakin’ ye understand—a sodomizer of sheep.”
The signal was subtle, fore and middle fingers lightly tapping the seam of his pants as he hopped off the stool. It would have, and had, passed without notice under many a set of ordinary eyes. The Greek, however, not possessing such mundane orbs, swung quickly into action.
“Yia va zoee!” the Greek bellowed and with a tornado-like swipe, dismembered the table of its contents. Glass and bottle alike, flew, spirit-winged, flinging liquid jewels in their wake. They arced, they tumbled, they head-over-heeled, landing with a glorious smash, one upon the next, in the glowing bed of peat.
For a shocked heartbeat, there was silence.
Then chaos, with a chuckling hiss, loosed itself upon the room in the form of thick clouds of creamy blue smoke. It spread quickly, like a fungus, invading throats, eyes and noses with impunity. Like moles under the summer sun, all were blind and stumbling. Profanity, of a wide and astounding range, vented the air as men fell one over the other, upended tables and chairs, upset bottles and barrels, knocked heads and knees.
Thrawny, as sightless and choking as any man present, felt himself to be in the midst of a hurricane. Furniture whirled past his head, the pungent smoke filled his senses with an oily reek, and over it all he heard a voice, distinctly lacking in Mediterranean nuance, declaim,
‘...as a bear, encompassed round with dogs,
Who having pinch’d a few and made them cry,
The rest stand all aloof and bark at him.’
The bastard, Thrawny thought to himself, the sodding sadistic bastard was enjoying himself! He tried to make his way towards the voice, but found that it seemed to move about in the smoke, as if it were the disembodied organ of a phantom. His ears, he knew, must be playing tricks on him, for the last line seemed to issue straight down from the rafters. Then suddenly he felt a charge and whirl of scented air at his shoulder.
“The devil,” said a honeyed tongue, sweet in the midst of chaos, “is betaking himself back to hell.”
And then the charge, the whirl, the devil were all gone and the smoke began to dissipate, rolling in no great hurry out the door that someone had left open in their departure. Thrawny looked about wildly. The Toad’s stool was empty, the Toad himself conspicuously absent in the milling, coughing crowd.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 44