Like Father, Like Son

by Sarah Masters

  “Must be painful. To think about him,” Lee said.

  “It is a bit.”

  “I mean, Damien’s old man was a right wanker in his day, so Starky was telling me. I can see how things went as they did.”

  “What’s Damien’s dad got to do with anything?” Robby sniffed. Not because of resurfacing emotions tied to his father. No, it wasn’t that at all. He must be getting a cold or something. Maybe a big dose of the flu was on its way. Or maybe he’d caught something in the hospital. He’d read about that happening. People going into the one place where you were meant to be safe from harm and leaving after contracting that thing that began with M. MS…? MRS…? Oh, bloody hell, an infection of some kind.

  “Damien’s dad—he used to be The Hardarm leader’s right-hand back in the day, didn’t he. Stood to reason Damien would take his place, really. Once Starky’s old boy popped his clogs and Starky took over, then Damien’s dad died—well, two sons doing the work of two fathers was always going to happen, wasn’t it?”

  Robby had never thought much about that kind of stuff. It was just how it was, how things were. He’d grown up knowing two older men had run The Hardarms, then as a teenager, when he’d first joined The Jugulars, he’d been aware of Starky and Damien, forces to be reckoned with, taking over from their fathers. Blokes you wanted to give a wide berth if you knew what was good for you, especially since Starky was even madder than his old man.

  “Is that why you’re wanting to get out?” Lee asked.

  “Is what why I want to get out?”

  “Your dad. You know, what happened to him. You worried it’ll happen to you?” Lee unscrewed the cap from a bottle of water then took a long sip. His overly prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

  Robby didn’t know what the hell Lee was going on about. “Why would my dad pissing off with some slapper have anything to do with me wanting out? It has nothing to do with it, all right? The reason I want out is because I should never have joined up in the first place. I should have listened to my ma and got myself into college, gone to uni, learned shit instead of poncing around acting hard for a hundred quid a week. I thought I knew better, though, and I’ve realized I don’t.”

  “Oh, it’s just that…” Lee shook his head. Screwed the water lid back on. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, obviously it does, otherwise you wouldn’t have started this conversation.” Robby bristled at feeling cornered, at having to discuss with some spotty kid what his dad had done—a kid who probably wouldn’t know emotional pain if it slapped him across the face. To get the focus off himself, he asked, “Why do you want out?”

  “Because things are getting nasty. Or they will do once Starky realizes what I’ve been doing. I’ll be dead, simple as that. He’ll not think twice about having me offed. I defected—that’s what he’d call it. I went behind his back and was willing to help Damien take over. That kind of bollocks won’t be tolerated, you know that.”

  “No, you’re right there. Starky’ll be pissed off if the coppers pick Damien up. Starky wanted to wait to kill him, and it looks like that chance will be whipped away. Might even end up in the nick himself—Starky, I mean. Who the hell will take over The Hardarms then?”

  Lee shrugged. A tiny flake of pasty clung to the side of his mouth. It flapped as he breathed through his nose. “No idea. Don’t suppose it matters now. Not to us, anyway. For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re getting out. I don’t reckon you’d have lasted long as right-hand, and if I’m being honest, I wouldn’t have, either. And your ma, my mum, too—they wouldn’t have been able to cope with it if we’d turned out bad. At least this way they know we’ll be safe somewhere, living a normal life, whatever the hell that is. I’ve forgotten what normal is already.”

  “What does your family think of it all? I imagine they were dragged into the gang by association because Katrina married Starky.”

  “Yeah, something like that. I was given a job because Katrina insisted. Didn’t have much choice but to agree, what with Starky being her husband and the leader. You don’t say no to him.”

  Robby thought about that. At least he’d had a choice when joining The Jugulars.

  “And if Damien’s half as bad as his father,” Lee went on, “I decided it was better to be his right-hand after he’d taken over from Starky, whether it upset Katrina or not. But she’s out of the picture now so… Shame, that. She was a nice auntie. And if Damien followed in his dad’s footsteps and did the kind of shit his father did… Shit like he did to your dad. Well—”

  “What?” Christ, Robby’s frown hurt. Lee was talking in riddles and it was doing his head in. “What did he do to my dad?”

  Lee turned to look at him, pimples even rifer than they’d been the first time Robby had clapped eyes on them. Lee raised his eyebrows, and a flush crawled up his throat to swamp his face.

  “You don’t know?” Lee asked.

  “Clearly not, you knob, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.” Was it acceptable to punch this little scrote in the face? Man, he was seriously getting on Robby’s tits.

  “Jesus. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.” Lee shrugged, but it didn’t seem the usual kind of shrug. More like a gesture that was a result of nerves. Like he’d realized he’d put his foot in it and Robby wasn’t going to let it go.

  “Well, you needn’t think you can leave it there. Come on, out with it.” But did Robby want to hear whatever it was Lee knew? It would open old wounds, wouldn’t it? And what Lee hadn’t said was poking at Robby’s brain like a tongue at a bad tooth.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger, all right?” Lee raised his hands, the water bottle in one of them held at a tilt.

  “I’m in no position to shoot anyone, mate. One, I have manky hands, and two, I don’t own a gun. Just get on with it.” Robby held his breath.

  “That woman your dad was fucking about with. Or young bird, should I say.” Lee puffed air out through pursed lips. “She was Damien’s older sister. Granted, she was much older than Damien, but she was his sister, all the same.”

  Robby didn’t have it in him to even shout “What?” All the air went out of his lungs, and he gasped for breath. Shit. Shit! How come he’d never heard about this? How come her identity had never publicly surfaced? Anyone he’d ever asked while growing up had just said she was ‘some chick from The Winchester’ and he’d received a filthy look for his trouble when he’d pushed for more information. Why was it he’d never had to suffer by paying some kind of price for what his father had done? He’d buggered off with the woman—a bloody woman associated with The Hardarms—so why hadn’t Damien’s dad taken it out on Robby and his ma? That was what usually happened in circumstances like that. The family of the wrongdoer—a wrongdoer who had scarpered—had to pay the price. Why not them? Why had they had a reprieve?

  The reason was there, skulking out of a lockbox in his mind, a spider coming out to snatch the fly. He didn’t want to acknowledge it, face it, but the lid of that box was well and truly open now and there was no shutting it. He hadn’t reached it in time. His head flooded with the truth, and his bones seemed to go brittle, ready to snap if he moved a muscle.

  “Damien’s dad,” Lee said. “Man, the story goes he was more than pissed off. Before his daughter and your dad could get away, he caught up with your dad.”

  I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know.

  “Chopped his head off with a machete or something like that. Then he chopped the rest of him up.” Lee shook his head. “Suppose the saving grace is that he wouldn’t have been in any pain. A quick whack to the neck with a blade like that and it would have been over pretty sharpish.”

  Shut up. You need to shut up.

  “And it was all swept under the carpet, as usual. Probably why you didn’t know. Like, Damien’s dad didn’t want anyone talking about his precious little girl being with an older man. So it was put about that they’d run off together. But your dad didn’t run anywhere. His bones are all over t
he outskirts of the city, and as for her, she’s off living somewhere hot, I heard. Got a family with some foreign bloke and everything. She won’t ever come back here. Don’t blame her, either. Doubt she wants to bump into your mum, does she?”

  That was it. Robby lost the battle with the bile. It and his sandwich came roaring up, spewing out between his open legs to splatter onto the carpet. He retched continuously, until nothing else emerged, his stomach cramping, his throat closing, emotions raging through him to the point where he wished he’d either faint or just die, just be done with this whole living crap.

  “Blimey, you all right?” Lee asked.

  Robby ignored him. If he said what he wanted to, did what he wanted to, Lee wouldn’t ever ask anyone that question again.

  “Anyway,” Lee said, “I think that’s why Damien thought it was fitting to chop your fingers off and scatter them about. Yeah, he’d said he’d put them in places special to him, but I reckon it was him copying his old man. You know, getting rid of your body parts the same way his father did with your old boy’s. Messed up in the head, he is, so you can see why I chose to follow him and not Starky.”

  And I can see how Starky and Damien can kill people, especially ones like you, who don’t know when to shut the fuck up.

  Rage, so much rage rippled through Robby. He had to remind himself it wasn’t Lee’s fault. Lee shouldn’t be the recipient of his anger. Like he’d said, he was just the messenger. But this kid was young, and he hadn’t had enough life experience, and clearly not enough social interaction, to know when to zip it.

  Oh, God. Did Ma know any of this? Should he ask her? Was it better to let her continue to think her husband had left her for someone else? Or would knowing he’d been killed ease her mind somewhat? All right, finding out his father had met a wicked end meant Robby wasn’t faring too well at the minute, but he had to admit that in some ways it made him feel better. All those years he’d thought himself and Ma hadn’t mattered—okay, they hadn’t mattered to some degree, otherwise his father wouldn’t have shagged that bird in the first place—but maybe, if his father had been given the chance, he’d have dropped that woman and carried on living at home.

  Things would have been so different.

  Robby stared at the vomit. Couldn’t stand to leave it there for someone else to clean up. He left the office and found a toilet. He gathered up a load of blue paper towels and returned to the room, where he busied himself clearing away the mess as best he could, despite the pain flaring up in his hands.

  Thankfully, Lee didn’t say another word.

  Finally, the kid had realized it was time to stay silent.

  Robby was glad about that. It had frightened him that he’d been prepared to smack the crap out of him, sore hands or not. To take all his hurt out on an innocent young man.

  He never wanted to feel that way again. Ever.

  Chapter Thirteen

  To be honest, Matt was shitting himself. Any number of people could be inside the warehouse along with the caller, and the amount of coppers hiding in strategic places surrounding the building might not be enough to overwhelm them.

  Aaron was with him—like Matt was ever going to turn up here alone, for fuck’s sake—and they stood either side of the door. Matt slowly turned the handle. He looked at Aaron in the darkness, knowing he was using all his senses just as much as Matt.

  The door opened a crack, and through the gap there was nothing but darkness.

  What a surprise…

  Matt shook his head. He’d been stupid to think anything about this was going to be easy. Whoever had called clearly wanted the element of a shock appearance. Attention. A big reveal. Or maybe he wanted to keep himself hidden. Was it a gang member? Someone who wanted to give information but not be seen so Matt couldn’t identify him later down the line? If all the caller aspired to be was a grass, that was fine by Matt, so long as the information given helped them to find Fox and lock the man up. Starky wasn’t a problem—he was being watched twenty-four-seven and had been doing nothing out of the ordinary. So it wasn’t him inside the warehouse. If it was, a report of his new whereabouts would have come in. No, Starky was at home, playing the grieving husband.

  Aaron’s sigh of impatience brought Matt to attention. He couldn’t allow himself to be caught off guard, wallowing inside his head the way he tended to do. Someone potentially dangerous waited to speak to him. To top it off, they were late for this meeting. It had taken time to arrange for a team to come with them, and Matt could only hope the caller was still inside.

  He tapped the Taser attached to his belt to reassure himself it was still there. He’d only recently learned how to use it. The damn thing was good for taking a suspect down, not that he’d had that pleasure yet, and first-time nerves kicked in at the prospect of deploying the wicked volts of electricity to a real person.

  He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

  Opening the door wider, he then slipped inside, Aaron close behind him. Matt’s urge to switch on his torch was strong but he resisted. For now. Letting the door close, he shivered, his nerves pinging at the snick of the keeper gliding into place. All his training, everything he’d learned swarmed into his mind. He shouldn’t be in here like this. Neither should Aaron, in the darkness, with no backup other than the officers outside.

  Shit.

  “Why, oh why don’t coppers ever listen?” a man said.

  He sounded like the caller, but Matt jumped nevertheless. He hadn’t expected anyone to speak, had thought the caller would be in some room off the back of the main space, or not here at all.

  “I said to come alone. And you’re late.”

  How the hell could he see them both?

  “You must know I can’t do that,” Matt said. “Now, what do you want?”

  Being forthright, even though he didn’t feel like he was up to it, was his best option here. Act as though this man—could he hope it was Fox?—didn’t bother him one bit.

  “What I want is for you to be standing there by yourself. What I want is for your bent sidekick to fuck off. But what I want and what I get is never the same thing, obviously.”

  Bent sidekick. Instant hot button pressed.

  “It’s a shame, but we can’t always have things our own way,” Matt said. “What I want is to be in bed with my sidekick, tucked under the covers watching a film or whatever. What I want is to not be here, but what I want and what I get isn’t always the same fucking thing, either. So say what you have to say or we’ll leave. You’re eating into my private time here.”

  Christ. For all he knew, the caller had a gun trained on him. He should have allowed a negotiator to handle this, shouldn’t have insisted on going in gung ho to save the damn day. One of his downfalls, that.

  “Private time.” A laugh. “I doubt you have much of it with the likes of me around.”

  Matt refused to answer that. To toe the caller’s line. Instead, he offered, “You have information? I was told you know about the fingers.”

  Another laugh. “Of course I fucking know about them. I was the one who chopped them off.”

  So it was Fox, then. Weird how the local police had been waiting for Fox to slip up at some point, and Matt had been on the lookout for him for years, yet he’d never seen or heard the man in person. It happened that way sometimes. A known, always-up-to-something criminal never being seen, apprehended or giving the police a solid reason to bring them in for questioning.

  Matt did a mental celebration. He was after Fox, and Fox was here. Tonight wasn’t a waste of his time after all. The overtime would be well-earned.

  “Apart from you wanting to make a point about fingers in pies,” Matt said, aiming to throw him off with that knowledge, “why did you do that to Zeus?”

  “So someone’s talked. Thought they would. Lee, was it? Bit of a test, that, to see if he blabbed. See if I could trust him. That’s a no, then. And as to your question… Why does anyone do anything?” Those words were delivered as though a shrug ac
companied them. “We do things because of what we’re taught. We do things because our father’s footsteps need walking in. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? I mean, your old man… You don’t know the half of it.”

  What the hell’s he blathering on about?

  “Get it off your chest,” Matt said. “You’re clearly in this for the long haul. The boring reveal that most criminals tend to want to wallow in.”

  Christ, if Matt had to count the number of times this had happened in his career, he’d have lost it at around one hundred.

  “Your dad was a copper, too, wasn’t he.” Not a question.

  “You’ve obviously done your homework.”

  “Yeah, it pays to do that, so I’m told, although if I’d have done that with school I doubt I’d be where I am now.”

  Ah, a snippet of nostalgic remorse. Fox was slipping?

  Losing his grip on his objective just a bit? Good.

  “Where would you be now if you’d done well at school?” Matt asked.

  Aaron tapped him on the base of his spine. Yeah, Matt knew he was doing well, doing it right. Keep the bloke talking. Keep him engaged. He waited for the telltale click of Aaron pressing his walkie-talkie button. There it was. Someone would listen in, knowing that while Matt talked, they could work out when the appropriate time would be to come in and take Fox down.

  “Dunno. Never gave myself a chance,” Fox said. “I had to be a chip off the old block instead, didn’t I?”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah, like you. We’ve both copied our fathers. Ever go into why that is?” Fox asked. “I mean, why do we want to impress them so much, eh? Even when they’re dead, here we are, still trying to live up to what they wanted from us.”

  Matt didn’t enjoy the way he felt about that. How Fox had tapped into the one thing Matt disliked about himself. And he hated having something in common with scum like Fox. Still, most people had this very same issue. It wasn’t anything special. The need for parental approval even if that parent was an arsehole. And if not approval, just some rueful acknowledgment with regards to their abysmal behavior—like the word ‘sorry’—or an explanation as to why they’d behaved as they had, why they’d made you feel like you were a piece of shit, someone not worthy of their time and attention.