by P. J. Adams
And in the meantime, I got to stand with the two Bulgarians.
We were in an alleyway at the back of the building. A short way to the left the track joined one of the main roads through central Puerto Libre. The contrast between the darkness of the alleyway and the bright lights and noise of the thoroughfare was marked, drunken groups rolling past, girls on high heels and in tiny mini-skirts, guys in jeans, shorts and muscle shirts.
How many people understood? These kids, away for a week of sun, sex and booze, partying 24-7, were totally oblivious to the fact that everything was built on the backs of people like me, gangs like Markov’s; that just around the corner from their drunken stagger home a gang of heavies might be waiting to take out some stupid kid’s kneecaps.
Stefan and Anton were chain-smoking, and the night air was heavy with their fumes. Neither had offered me one, not that I’d have accepted. The two had barely even spoken to me, and only occasionally spoke to each other in their own language. It was safe to say we were yet to build up a rapport.
I’d thought at first this must be some kind of joke, amusing to Hristo Markov, pairing me up with Anton. On reflection I wasn’t so sure: Markov was a bastard, but nobody got to his position by making bad decisions just because they were amusing.
The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this was a test for Anton as much as it was for me. There was probably nothing Anton would want more than to take the baseball bat I carried and apply it to my kneecaps. Only his discipline and loyalty to Markov prevented him.
That and the fact that his preferred hand was in a plaster cast.
14
Anton caught my eye and gave a slight nod. For a moment I thought he’d decided that now was the time for us to square up, then he said, “He’s coming.”
I glanced towards the fire exit just as the door swung open.
A young, skinny guy stepped out, his features almost luminously pale in the dark of the alley.
I slipped deeper into the shadows and moved around to the right.
The kid paused, fumbling for something in the pocket of his cargo pants. Cigarettes and a lighter – he clearly wasn’t in any kind of hurry.
You should be, kid. Oh, you should be.
Just as the lighter flared into life, Anton stepped out of the shadows. The kid looked up. Anton must have been an intimidating sight, but hardly threatening with his wrist in plaster.
The young dealer looked quickly left to right, seemed to decide Anton was alone, gave a visible shrug and turned as if to leave.
Then Stefan stepped into view, a slightly more intimidating sight at a good six inches taller and swinging a baseball bat from one hand.
Now the kid raised both hands, the unlit cigarette hanging briefly from his lips and then falling away to the ground.
My heart was pumping, my senses heightened.
It’s not that I enjoy the prospect of doing someone harm, but... there’s the sense of the perfectly executed trap, the altered state you get into when the action kicks in. The closest thing in my experience was MMA, when you’re in the cage and it’s only you and your opponent, and it’s not about hurting him, it’s about beating him, executing the perfect move, being the best.
Once you’ve tasted that buzz there’s no going back.
A mutter of words from Anton and the kid’s hands nudged higher.
“Whoa,” he said. “Let’s be cool, okay, man?”
I don’t know why I was surprised he was English, his accent from somewhere in the Midlands. Was that another thing that amused Markov, setting me on one of my own?
And all the time, the kid had shuffled sideways, careful to keep facing Stefan and Anton. He was young, but he wasn’t stupid, then: even as he delayed he was plotting his escape, making sure he was closest to the open end of the alleyway where he might be able to lose himself in the late-night crowds.
Only he hadn’t spotted me yet.
I chose that moment to step out of the shadows, but he had his back to me.
I scuffed a foot and his whole frame twitched.
He didn’t look back, though. Didn’t have to. He knew I was there, and by now he must know that the last guy to appear out of the shadows when the trap has been sprung is the one who’s really going to scare the shit out of you.
“You should be more careful, son,” I said, my voice softer than usual so he would have to strain. “You can’t go selling your shit just anywhere without protection, and as far as I can see you don’t have any protection.”
There’s a difference between being in the thick of a fight and doing something in cold blood, but in some ways it’s just the same.
In a fight you respond. You defend yourself and you’re always looking for the opening. You have a strategy and like a chess-player you’re usually several moves ahead in your brain.
In cold blood it’s the same. I knew exactly how this little sequence was going to pan out.
And right now I had a job to do.
Smash this fucker’s kneecaps and make sure word got around to all the other little toe-rags who thought they could move freely on Markov’s territory.
Nobody ever said I was one of the nice guys, and I would have done exactly that, except...
In my head I may well have been several moves ahead – the clinical execution of the assault, the rapid escape leaving him lying there screaming, the reporting back to Markov – but that night someone else was a move ahead of me.
Maybe it was that I’d been out of the game for too long, or that I was over-confident in an unfamiliar environment.
Whatever.
There was no room in that careful plan in my head for the dark SUV that pulled up at the end of the alleyway.
For the two guys in tracksuits and baseball caps who stepped out, the possibility that this spotty kid who’d gone even more pale as he finally turned to face me might not be operating alone, might not just be some kid out to earn a few euros to fund his holiday on the Costa.
For that brief pause when the kid’s look met mine, when the corners of his mouth curled up in a cocky sneer and he turned both hands with their backs to me, the middle fingers raised.
“Fuck you, dickhead,” he hissed, and then two gunshots – three – tore through the air and an impact on my upper arm spun me like a fucking ice-skater before I crumpled to the ground.
§
When I hit the ground I stayed down.
Did a quick run-through in my head. Only one impact, upper-left arm. A fair bit of pain but no grating of bones when I tested things by moving a little. Certainly no loss of feeling or response. A flesh wound, then; some muscle damage, some blood loss.
I’d taken worse.
I must have blacked out briefly, because now the kid was at the end of the alleyway, car doors slamming, a screech of wheels as the SUV jerked away.
Stefan and Anton stood nearby, still hiding back in the shadows where they’d retreated at the first sound of gunshots.
Was this a set-up, or were they just scared?
Don’t judge them: not scared, but sensible. Anton at least, I was sure was an ex-soldier: it would have been reflex for him to seek cover, assess the situation.
Even now I saw the glint of dark metal, a small pistol in his undamaged hand – although unless he was ambidextrous, he probably wouldn’t have been able to shoot well with it. But I’d heard at least three shots: it could easily have been return fire from Anton that had seen the attackers off.
They came to me. Hands on my shoulders, back, expertly checking for damage before turning me, raising me to a sitting position.
Only a few seconds could have passed.
Along the alleyway: a bunch of onlookers attracted by the disturbance, drunken eyes wide, hands pointing.
Anton barked something and waved his gun, and they backed away.
“You stand, yes?” he said to me.
I nodded, and leaned on his proffered arm as I climbed to my feet and then stood, swaying dizzily,
on the verge of blacking out again.
“Inside. We get you fixed up.”
§
They had a doctor of their own, which didn’t surprise me.
An East European, skinny and dark haired, only distinguishable from the hookers working the bar because she was a few years older. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she worked the club, too – if she was doctoring for Markov then he must have some kind of hold over her, and he was the kind of guy to get his money’s worth. She was certainly dressed for it, as her breasts came close to spilling out as she leaned over me.
“Can you save it?” I asked at one point and she glanced up from my mangled arm, surprised, until I added, “The shirt. It cost me a fucking fortune.”
Not even a smile.
The shirt was ruined, the sleeve torn by the bullet, soaked in blood, and then cut away by the doc, but at least the arm was going to be okay. The bullet had passed clean through, leaving a flesh wound in the meat of those hefty muscles I’d built up again in Fearless’s gym. It’d need cleaning up and a few stitches either side, and it was going to hurt, but the muscles would knit together again and I’d only be left with a couple more scars and some misaligned tattoos where the skin had been pulled together.
I winced as the doctor applied something cold and eye-watering to my wound and when I opened my eyes again a few seconds later Hristo Markov was there, studying my face closely.
Again, I wondered if this whole thing had been some kind of set-up, a lesson for me to learn. Gangs have all kinds of initiations, usually acts you have to commit to prove yourself – a robbery, a beating, a shooting; maybe you were nobody to Markov until you’d taken a bullet for him.
As if reading my thoughts, he gave a sharp shake of the head, and said, “We had no idea. Truly. The mangal, the punk... we did not know he was connected.”
“Then you need to up your game,” I said, through gritted teeth as the doctor continued to work on me. “That whole thing, it was...”
Sloppy.
Unprofessional.
I bit back on the words: he knew it already, didn’t need me criticizing him in front of his own people.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just a nick. But I can help you tighten things up, yes? I’m more than just an ugly bastard who can hit people.”
A pause, then a grin split Markov’s face and he laughed.
He came over, clapped me on my good arm, and said, “I like you, Lee. We get on, yes? You get fixed up. You have fun in the club, yes? Girls, boys, whatever it is you like.”
“That kid,” I said. “Who was he? Who were the ones in the car?”
He was clearly not operating alone. My guess was it was a deliberate ploy: send in a kid who looks like he’s fresh off the street, get him to suss the place out, push a few buttons and see how Markov’s crew responded. All the classic signs of a rival gang moving in on Markov’s territory.
Now Markov’s face changed again, as if a dark curtain had been snapped across it.
“I do not know,” he said. “Truly. But believe me, I will find out.”
15
When Hristo told Imelda the arrogant Englishman had been shot she had to do everything at her command not to react.
Not to let her jaw sag, her eyes widen; to let loose a stream of questions in a rapid-fire, incoherent torrent.
Not to give anything away.
“Who? Shot, you say? How bad is it? Was anyone else hurt? Did–”
He silenced her with a raised hand.
So much for being restrained, biting back on the flood of questions.
Lee... shot!
Killed. Hristo hadn’t said ‘killed’.
“It was nothing,” he said now. “A dispute at El Divino. A drug dealer getting above himself. It will be dealt with.”
“And the Englishman?”
“He takes a bullet well,” said Hristo, and Imelda was surprised at the hint of respect in his voice. “I think we use him. You know Fearless Lloyd, yes? They are friends.”
Hristo’s penthouse apartment at Casa Alto had a tenth floor roof terrace overlooking the harbor at Puerto Libre. Imelda hadn’t been there for weeks, but today the Bulgarian had summoned her.
Now she stood before him, like she was up for auction. Georgi stood over to one side in the shade, and another of Hristo’s men was by the elevator door.
She felt vulnerable.
She didn’t like the way he could make her feel this way. No other man had ever done that for long.
“Look at me.”
Her gaze turned on him, and she didn’t know if that was obedience or defiance.
He was hard to read behind those retro aviator shades he liked to wear.
He was on a sun recliner by the pool, wearing only a pair of long swimmers and those shades. His body was lean, on the borderline between athletic and heroin-chic wiry. At one time she had found that attractive, but now she found the long-buried recollection of that attraction uncomfortable, like waking from a dark dream.
What did he want? What did he know? Could he read the guilt on her face so easily?
“Where have you been, Conchita?” He used the nickname as a term of endearment, but also it meant ‘little cunt’. Hristo liked that kind of thing: talking and acting in ways that meant you never really knew where you stood with him. He could say the cruelest things in the most tender terms and tone.
She couldn’t work out if this question was the reason for her summons, or a lead-in toward something else.
“San Pedro,” she said. The best lies stay closest to the truth, and maybe he knew she had been along the coast for a couple of days. And the best lies also avoid any mistruth – she hadn’t made anything up to explain why she was there, or what she had been doing.
Hristo nodded, still impossible to read.
“Have you been fucking someone?”
“No.” And sometimes the best lies have to be blatant and fast, and 180 degrees to the truth.
“If you had I would know.”
And maybe he even believed that, which made it easier for Imelda’s lie to pass. Because she had. She’d been fucking someone. Hard and fast, in his bed and on the beach, and even up against a wall in the center of town if you called that first, urgent and dry encounter through layers of clothing some kind of a fuck.
She had tasted his dick, swallowed his juices, felt his tongue in every hole, given herself up to his strength. Been totally, utterly had.
“I know,” she said. “But for all that I know you like me when I act like a whore, I am not. I am a good girl.”
And he believed it.
At least, he always had so far.
“There is a gathering,” he said, dismissing the subject. “On Friday. You will accompany me, yes?”
The way he phrased it sounded almost like a question, but Hristo was never a man to make polite requests. It was an instruction.
“How long must this continue, Hristo?” she asked, surprising herself at her braveness, but still careful to keep her voice low enough that Georgi and the other guy would not be able to hear. “We are over. So over.”
“Seven in the evening. Georgi will pick you up. Wear the black Givenchy.”
“We are over.”
Slowly, Hristo pushed the shades up away from his eyes until they came to lodge on the top of his head.
Imelda looked down at the ground. She couldn’t help it. There was menace in those eyes. Sheer menace.
“And the Gianvito Rossi shoes.”
Meekly, hating herself more than she ever had before, Imelda gave a brief nod.
“Everyone knows you are mine, Conchita.” He loaded so much threat into that single word. Conchita.
And what he didn’t say out loud: to let her go would mean losing face, for everyone knew he would never choose to give up Imelda. Reputatsiya.
And, perhaps most disturbingly of all, she understood he clung on because buried somewhere deep in that cruel heart of his he still had feelings for her that extended
beyond a sense of ownership. Whatever emotion he had once had for her that came somewhere close to what a normal person called love still lingered on like a stain or a scar.
Because Hristo Markov was not a man to feel things in the way that normal people did.
“Take your clothes off,” he said now, and it took a few seconds for his words to compute.
What was he thinking? Was this to be some kind of revenge fuck? A marking of territory?
If that skinny dick of his came anywhere near her she would bite it off, regardless of any consequences.
“Undress.”
The cruel smile; the lack of any humor in the eyes.
Hating herself more than she’d thought possible even a few minutes before, Imelda reached for the loop of her halterneck dress, dipped her head to pull it clear, stood there clutching it to her breasts, her heart beating rapidly.
“Let me see.”
She swallowed, let it fall to hang at her waist, her full breasts exposed to the hot sun and Hristo’s cold gaze.
“The rest.”
The zipper at her hip.
Letting the dress fall.
Standing there, dress bunched around her ankles, tiny white thong contrasting sharply with her golden caramel skin.
His eyes crawled over her body like ants. Spiders.
Until finally he flipped the shades back down over his eyes, turning his head away as he reached for the bottle of beer on a nearby table.
“Swim,” he said. “You always liked to swim.”
And so she turned, took a step, another, and then dropped into the pool, a surge of cold after the day’s heat. Taking her, swallowing her whole, and she hoped it might never give her back.
§
And the very worst thing?
That so quickly after Hristo told her Lee had been shot she had moved on to her own petty concerns, put it behind her.
He’d been shot, Hristo had said it was nothing – she would get no more from him, so she compartmentalized it, put it in a box and closed it away while she dealt with her ex-lover.