‘That’s a lot of money to be handling so…. casually.’
‘Let’s get rid of it then,’ he said, with a grin.
It came as no surprise to Vidmar to see Crystal Purcell and Lek Gorski walk out of an underground car-park two streets down from the Shangri-La. As soon his original suspicion had been confirmed, when he saw them leaving hand-in hand from her high-rise, Lek Gorski’s intentions revealed themselves to Vidmar like an easy cipher-square puzzle in the newspaper. He was sitting in a window seat of the Mash-Up on Upper Street, the harsh afternoon sunlight against the plate glass masking his presence completely from the couple, so they walked past within feet of him, ignorant to the danger they were in. Gorski even looked cheerful, although he did glance back over his shoulder a couple of times to check they weren’t being followed. Don’t these people know who they’re dealing with? thought Vidmar. He sucked on the straw of his papaya echinacea shake and watched the sway of Crystal Purcell’s hips as she sauntered down the road, brushing her hand through the tall wild flowers sprouting from the cracks in the pavement. Stay focused, he told himself, and traced a finger down his scar. He paid and walked in the opposite direction from his target, checking his watch before disappearing down the ramp and into the car-park.
Chapter 14
A thin sliver of light broke through the depths of the tar pit where Delić was drowning and his mind swam up to breathe again. So deep was the induced slumber of the sloth extract, he had felt he was dreaming within his dreams, sleeping within the sleep, pinned beneath the weight of a thousand fur coats laid on top of him, and the faint drumming of his blood pulsing in his ears was the bass beat of the music playing at the party downstairs. Delić opened his eyes and saw an unfamiliar ceiling. It was several minutes before the leaden stupor in his limbs lifted and he was able to finally move again. He slowly swung his legs off the oil-bed and sat up, holding his bowling ball head in his hands. He ran his fingers his scalp, but couldn’t find any fresh lumps or bleeding. His thoughts trickled gradually into lucidity like treacle from a spoon.
What had they done? Drugged him? Possibly. Who are they? The Scientist. The… Doctor. Gorski. Yes! Gorski. And somebody else? Can’t remember. Maybe. But Gorski definitely. Hold on to that one. And why are you looking for him again? For the money. Yes. No. For Pechev. No. There was something else. Why am I looking for Gorski?
Something tickling his subconscious, like an ant crawling over his cortex, something on the tip of his tongue, a taste….
The recipe book.
Delić had to move, but his legs refused to comply. He fell face first on to the bedroom floor and had to drag himself commando-style into the lounge. He saw the smashed lock and splintered wood of the front door and finally his memories of the meeting earlier that day broke through the dam of his drug-induced haze. He pulled out his iHound and sent out the signal for the iHare. The coordinates came back in a fraction of a second. Delić looked at them with doubt for a moment, but let it go. He didn’t feel he could sit on a motorbike just yet, so he stumbled to the kitchen, struggled to open the fridge and pulled out a litre of Limpopo Mineral. He sat back against the wall and drank it dry while the grogginess wore off.
***
‘We’ll take the back-stairs,’ said Crystal, ‘There’s no need to let the bouncers know we’re here.’
‘He will be here, won’t he?’ Lek asked, suddenly unsure of his plan.
‘Oh yes, he only goes home to sleep. Otherwise he would never leave. Come on.’
‘Wait!’ said Lek, trying to keep his voice down.
‘What’s the matter?’
He stared around, his eyes wild, before breathing out, ‘Nothing. I just.... I just keep getting this feeling that we’re being followed.’
‘We probably are, hon. Come on.’
They climbed a rusted wrought-iron flight of steps at the back of the building, up to the top floor where Crystal thumbprinted a Smarte-bell and a heavy security door clicked open. The air in the corridors of The Swinging Hammocks was heavy with the smell of sex. Crystal was used to it, having survived her teenage years in one of the many cells, but to Lek the rank smell of blood and sweat was almost too much. He fought back the urge to gag, trying not to think of the thin Eastern Europan girls laying back, bending over, kneeling down in the rooms behind the thin plywood doors. He heard a deep groan of pleasure from one of the customers, but otherwise no other sound. The corridors were quiet.
‘It’s still early,’ said Crystal, as if reading his mind, ‘This way,’ and she led Lek back down to the floor below, via the staff staircase to the thumping bass of the Shangri-La day-club and the tiny office where a puffy faced man seemed to be peering over a pile of dirty laundry. In truth, it was Danny Calabas, slumped in his swivel chair, staring intently into the middle-distance with a lascivious grin playing on his lips. It took a moment before his glazed bloodshot eyes registered the presence of other people in his office.
‘Crystal.’ He croaked. ‘How’s the scars baby? Healing nicely?’ He turned his head slowly, licked the back of his hand, and tried to focus on Lek’s face through a field of poppies. ‘Gorski. I heard your name on the grapevine today. What a surprise. So what can I do for you two lovebirds?’
‘How much would it cost to buy one of your girls, Danny?’ Lek began, without preamble, and he felt Crystal’s eyes turn on him.
‘Ha! Which one you got in mind, doc? Lara? Sirita? Aija? It don’t matter. They ain’t for sale. None of them.’
‘Oh come on, everything’s for sale, Dan, at the right price.’ Crystal heard that same cold tone in Lek’s voice again.
‘I’ll drink to that!’ Calabas replied ‘Shit, I want that line on my headstone!’
‘So how much? For Crystal here?’ Lek asked.
‘You two planning on…. running away?’ said Danny, with a glint in his eye that suggested he knew more than he was letting on.
‘Well, Crystal could run away any day of the week, but some twisted sense of loyalty keeps bringing her back to you. Maybe because you told her that if she didn’t play the game, rather than burn her nipples, you’d put one of her eyes out next time she stepped out of line. Isn’t that right Dan?’ Lek paused for effect. He stood up, closed and locked the office door. ‘Somebody once told me a good deal is only a good deal when everybody walks away happy.’ He picked up the telephone from the desk, and in one fluid movement, wrenched the cable from the socket. Crystal gasped and even Danny snapped out of his trance. ‘So here’s the deal: I am going to give you this 5,000 cred,’ he said, pulling one of the bundles from his pocket, and Calabas’ toadish eyes bulged even further out of their sockets. ‘That figure is non-negotiable, by the way, and in return, you’re going to let Miss Purcell here walk out of this filthy cess pit you call The Shangri-La – what a joke that is – and never come back.’
Calabas gave a dry nervous laugh. ‘The thing is Gorski, she may be older than the rest of the girls and sure, she hasn’t got many miles left in her...’ Lek stole a glance at Crystal, who looked like she might stab either of the men in the room at any given moment ‘... but she’s worth at least four times...’
‘Oh wait, Danny,’ said Lek coolly, ‘I haven’t finished yet. Hear me out. So, C5,000 for Crystal, which you’ll happily accept, because if you don’t...’ Lek reached into his other pocket and pulled out a handful of vials and hypos ‘... then I’ll personally mix you some brand new scions right here and now, and jab them into your eyeballs.’
At the sight of the needles, Danny Calabas recoiled like a vampire from a crucifix. He broke out in a sweat, which stood out on his warty forehead like oily bubbles, and his already greenish skin turned ashen.
Lek laid it on thick, ‘I don’t even know what I’ve got here,’ he joked, picking up the vials one by one, ‘let’s see, swordfish... bear... pig... crab.... worker-ant.... what a range. Think of the possibilities.’
‘Put... them... away! Please.’ spluttered Calabas. ‘Just get the fuck out of h
ere! Take that whore with you!’
In a flash, Lek leaned over the desk, grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him off his chair. He picked up a single hypo, flicked the cap off and held it to Calabas’ neck. ‘Don’t make me angry Dan. I wouldn’t want our deal to turn sour. You wouldn’t want to find one of these sticking out of your pillow in Mummy’s house, would you?’
Lek managed to push Calabas away just before he vomited bile down his shirt front. Calabas wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and swore violently.
‘Get out of my club. You and your... woman. And keep your money!’
‘No, I insist’ said Lek, and threw the bundle of banknotes at Danny Calabas’ head. ‘A deal’s a deal.’
Chapter 15
Apart from a few hairy moments when he had tried to take the odd corner too quickly and nearly lost the bike from under him, Delić was feeling better. The afternoon heat was fading and the cooler air against his face was helping him stay awake. He had stuffed in a handful of goji berries before leaving the flat, and his belief alone in their cure-all properties had done wonders for his groggy head. He changed gear and gunned the throttle on his Suzuki Plasma, roaring over Blackfriars Bridge. The biorg, wrapped around the motorbike engine beneath him like a fat yellow octopus, responded to the change and throbbed against his thighs. Delić felt the bike and its biorg were part of him, a single being on the chase. All he could think of was Gorski and the recipe book. He dipped his head against the wind and pushed the bike even faster through the traffic, the tails of his raincoat flapping out behind him and revealing the twin Meisters strapped against his naked torso.
***
Crystal pushed Lek through a fire door and into the Shangri-La day club. In the pitch darkness, he strained to make out the forms and faces of the nocto-goggled clubbers, high on Dolphine and grinding against one another in their kinetic-sound-suits, each producing a different vibe or pitch which made up the cacophony of so-called music. Lek hadn’t been to one of these places in years, and he still found them bizarre, if not a little disconcerting. Groupthink Music started in San Francisco in the early thirties, when experimental jazz club owners put the onus on the audience to provide their own entertainment and gave everybody at the door a cheap musical instrument to bang or blow for the duration of the evening. Anybody not playing was summarily kicked out of the club. It wasn’t until Zimmer Zimmer, a German DJ vibing in a small club in Hamburg designed the first sound-suit, which created its own noise based on the rhythm and speed of his movements, that the genre really took off. It was an explosion in the clubbing world, and sounded the death knell for the Cowell Inc. chart-based superclubs and dancehalls, where DJs only ever played the new wavs of flash-in-the-pan wannabes covering old classics. Groupthink was something else, pulling collectively on the crowd mentality to create a new-clubbing experience. Every night was different, the music constantly evolving, depending on the mood in the room. Instigators were the new DJs: individuals who could single-handedly change-up the tempo or cool it off as the day wore on. They were often the ones seen doing lines of Border-Collie off the toilet cisterns, and on more than one occasion in recent months, dance-floor wars between heavy-hitting instigators had boiled over into violence, as two or more had struggled to be the one controlling the crowd.
It was five o’ clock and although the siesta crowd had mostly left, the dance-floor was still packed, moving like a single homogonous cell of humanity to music that sounded like it was being beamed down from outer-space. Lek turned to say something to Crystal, but received a hard slap in the face instead.
‘How dare you?!’ she screamed at him over the music. ‘Do you think I’m just a piece of meat that you and that wanker in there can fight over? How dare you?!’ she screamed again.
‘It’s not like that!’ Lek tried to explain.
‘And 5000 creds! A lousy five grand! Is that all I’m worth to you?!’
‘There’s more than that at stake here!’ Lek shouted, grabbing at her arms in the dark, as she struggled to smack him again. ‘More than your pride! Can’t you see that?!’
The fight went out of Crystal, and Lek spoke as softly as he could above the music. ‘I couldn’t put a price on your head. Don’t you understand? I just can’t leave you behind. And I can’t take you without at least trying to make sure you’ll be safe from him.’
‘I know. I know.’ Crystal sighed and Lek felt the tears on her face as he kissed her. She turned him around slowly and held him against the wall, pressing her body against his. The music swelled and pulsated in their ears and for a moment they were alone in a sea of obscurity, existing only for one another.
Lek pulled her over to a nearby sofa, where they joined a couple of semi-conscious Chillaxed clubbers. Crystal slipped their nocto-goggles from their heads and handed a pair to Lek. When he pulled them on the entire room appeared before him in shades of green, infrared and ultra-violet. And there was Crystal, smiling at him seductively in the half light. There, hidden in the darkness from the rest of the world, Lek had a fleeting feeling that they might just make it out alive. She turned around on the sofa and curled her body against his, and he buried his face in the nape of her neck, kissing her softly and breathing in the very essence of her. He thought about her perfect genes, thought about grafting her DNA on to his and feeling her, part of him, on the most fundamental level: in his bones, in his blood, on his tongue and under his skin. He wanted her there and then; could have stayed on that sofa forever, with the strange music and the soft glow of the mood-lights washing over him like the Aurora Borealis.
But Lek knew better, and he touched his lips against Crystal’s cheek one more time and reluctantly pushed her away. ‘We have to go,’ he said, ‘someone is coming.’
***
Roma Bruce stood on the steps of her high-rise in the warmth of the October sun and called the pack. Her strangled howl - half wolf, half human - echoed off the walls of the housing estate and from the doorways of the tower blocks across the way, a group of five hooded figures loped into view. These were the top echelon of Roma’s gang - the Brixton Wolves. There were scores of soldiers spread throughout this part of South London, but Roma, as alpha–female of the pack, dealt only with these five, her lieutenants. One by one they approached her, bowing in respect before offering their necks as a sign of deference. Roma stood before them, saying nothing at first, letting her yellow eyes bore into them all and revelling in her power. Some people are born into greatness, others have it thrust upon them, but Roma Bruce had earned her stripes on the mean streets of Brixton, fighting hard and killing ruthlessly when necessary. She was the worthy leader of the human-wolf pack and would fight tooth and claw to hold on to her position until somebody tough enough, or lucky enough, ripped it from her.
‘How is our stash?’ she growled, focusing her gaze on Zevon, her right hand man.
‘Low, Roma. We’ve been pushing it hard lately and there hasn’t been a chance to…’ Zevon began, by way of an apology.
‘Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time before the pack-clash tonight.’ Of all of them, she knew that Zevon would never betray her. She stared into his golden eyes and felt something stirring inside her. She could smell the lust in him. Maybe later, she thought, I’ll give him the honour of climbing on to my back. Maybe.
Roma had known Zevon all her life: they had mugged their first kid together in a back alley near The Academy on a hot summer night in 2032. She remembered how the kid had pissed himself when they appeared and how they had taken his creds, leather vest and signet ring and then beaten him senseless just for the thrill of it, just because they hadn’t imagined that he would have handed over all his possessions without a fight. Good times, she thought. It was even Zevon who, two years later, when just the sound of heroin sizzling on a spoon was starting to upset her stomach, suggested they try something new, and offered her a vial of Lupinex. They had never looked back. Six years on: no family, no job, no fixed abode, and no belongings to speak of, and yet Rom
a Bruce was a queen, with no regrets.
‘Show me then,’ she ordered, and the five turned out the pockets of their hoodies and shorts to reveal what little cash and drugs they had between them. ‘We are low,’ she murmured. ‘Give me one each and fight amongst yourselves for whatever’s left.’ Dahlia Ortega, the only other female in the pack, a tall grey-haired girl of seventeen, who would have been beautiful had it not been for the long sideburns and patches of rough fur on her cheeks, curled her lip at the order.
‘Problem, bitch?’ snapped Roma, aggressively, and Dahlia lowered her eyes and joined the others. Roma lay down on her front in the doorway while the pack prepared their hypos. If the pain in her legs was excruciating, she didn’t show it.
‘Where would you like it, Roma?’ asked the twins, Ronnie and Reggie, in unison.
‘One in the back of each knee, one in my spine, two in the neck,’ she replied, and her five loyal lieutenants rolled up her clothing and obediently eased their needles into her flesh. She growled in pleasure and ran her long tongue over her teeth, allowing herself a moment to think about Zevon slipping himself into her before she felt the drugs working in her muscles.
The band of five were scrapping on a grass verge over the remaining gel-caps, catching each other with sharp canines and pointed nails, drawing blood if need be, to make sure they got their share. ‘Hold back,’ shouted Roma. ‘We’ve got three hours to sunset, five to curfew. Save your energy for the hunt.’
Chapter 16
Danny Calabas was so shaken up by Gorski’s needles, that no amount of licking himself could draw him from his waking nightmare: he needed something else. His dragged his sorry figure upstairs to the Swinging Hammocks and unlocked the door of one of the cells. He’d had his eye on one of the new Eastern Europan ‘exchange students’ since the day she arrived. Her name was Beatrise, but Danny didn’t know or care. She had been studying to be a clinical psychologist in Riga, when she had been approached by one of Pechev’s associates in the mafia, who lured her to London with the promise of a budding career in a mental institution in Camberwell. Here she was, however, cowering - more like patient than doctor - in the corner of her cell. She looked like she hadn’t slept, eaten or washed in days, but Calabas didn’t mind. He even preferred his girls that way, and grabbing her viciously by the wrist, he swung her petite frame on to the bed. She tried to protest, crying out in her own language, but Calabas only gave her a few light slaps around the face to shut her up. Beatrise whimpered as he pulled up her filthy dress, ripped off his jacket and undid his belt and zip with one hand, awkwardly pushing his denim shorts down to his knees. She wasn’t ready for him, would never have been, but Calabas pressed the weight of his bloated body against her and forced himself inside, blotting out the sickening thoughts of Gorski, his bitch and the sordid deal as he did so. The whole sick affair lasted only a matter of minutes before Calabas grunted in pleasure, broke wind poisonously and rolled off Beatrise. ‘Get out,’ he mumbled, and when she didn’t move, but instead lay sobbing next to him, still half-trapped underneath his bulk, he screamed the words in her face, spittle flying from his lips, and she pulled herself away and ran from the room. He didn’t care where she went, or even if she tried to escape. He pulled the grimy sheet over his head and fell into a fitful sleep.
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