The Gated Trilogy

by Matt Drabble

  The bouncer paused up ahead and Sutherland stopped to wait for the next door to be opened. As he stood in the foul dark hallway for the first time in a long time, he wondered just how the hell his life had gotten away from him so fast.

  He had never set out to line his own pockets. He was sure that somewhere back in the dim and distant past he had actually wanted to wear the uniform to help people. But that time seemed so long ago now that it must have belonged to a different person. And yet in spite of everything, he had saved the young girl from the lorry. He had saved all of those women and now he was here, threatening to try and pull Tolanson’s world apart despite the odds being severely stacked against him. Maybe there was a chance for some kind of redemption. He could never hope to settle his accounts fully before the end, but maybe - just maybe - he could make a dent in the red column.

  The bouncer opened the door up ahead and waved him through. The hallway split off in two directions: one leading out into the club and the other to a set of stairs leading upward. The bouncer motioned for him to take the stairs and he followed the directions.

  At the top of the stairs was an office door. He reached out and pushed the door open without bothering to knock. Tolanson might have the ability to make him drop to his knees but he was damned if Donovan was going to elicit the same response.

  “Jesus, man, don’t you knock?” Donovan demanded as one hand wiped a white trail away from his nostrils while the other flashed a silver revolver.

  “Jumpy are we?” Sutherland asked, nodding towards the gun.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “That shit won’t help,” Sutherland said, pointing to the small lines of white powder laid out on a mirror on the desk in front of Donovan.

  “Shit, man, at this stage it sure as hell can’t hurt.” Donovan laughed.

  Sutherland watched the young man’s eyes closely and didn’t like the wild look in them. Donovan had obviously been hitting the slopes hard which would mean that his bravado was up but what brains he had were way down.

  “You got a clean phone I can use?” he asked, looking around.

  Donovan opened a cabinet behind him and threw over a mobile phone still in the unopened plastic packaging.

  “You come prepared, I see,” he said as he took the phone out of the box.

  “You know me - I’m a fucking Boy Scout!” Donovan laughed wildly.

  Sutherland took out the phone and plugged in the charger that came with it. He slipped in the sim card and waited for the phone to boot up. The phone was a pay-as-you-go model, the kind that you bought without leaving a trail of information to lead back to you. Donovan had a cabinet full of them and Sutherland knew that the kid’s business must mean that he went through a ton of them.

  “Who you calling?” Donovan asked but Sutherland ignored him.

  As soon as the phone lit up, he punched in the number and waited for the other end to answer.

  “I said who you calling?” Donovan demanded again, this time standing up and moving around the desk.

  “Shut up,” Sutherland replied absently as he struggled to hear the phone through Donovan’s questions and the pumping music of the club below.

  “Don’t you fucking tell me to shut up!” Donovan exploded. “In my club, you’re going to tell me what to do? IN MY CLUB!”

  Sutherland switched the phone to his left hand as Donovan rushed at him, his head full of coke and anger. He side-stepped the kid easily and gave him a hard swinging punch to the gut. Donovan’s face went purple as he struggled to breathe. The coke was doing a number on his adrenaline and now his system couldn’t cope.

  “Sit down and shut up,” Sutherland ordered and shoved Donovan onto his backside with a sturdy boot to the groin.

  “Hello?” A groggy voice on the other end of the phone finally answered.

  “Steve? It’s me,” he replied.

  “Who?”

  “You know who, now wake up, you dozy prick.”

  “Suth…”

  “Don’t say it aloud, asshole!” Sutherland quickly interrupted.

  “Oh yeah, sorry, Suth…folk,” he covered badly.

  “I don’t have long, Steve. I just wanted to know what you know,” Sutherland said, knowing that if anyone was listening in on Steve’s line then his friend had already dropped himself into the brown and smelly stuff and it was pointless playing games now.

  “Is it true, Jez? Did you really do it?”

  “Depends. What is it they say I did?”

  “You shot a guy - Albert Patterson. Killed him.”

  “Jesus, Steve, what do you think?”

  “Look, mate, I know that not all of your life is strictly… well, strictly above board, but this… I don’t know.”

  “Why are they saying it was me?” Sutherland demanded, all the while trying to remember if he’d ever even heard the name Patterson before let alone met the man.

  “They found your gun at the scene. You know the force’s strict policy with police issue firearms - every weapon is accounted for and this one was signed out by you; they’ve got all the paperwork.”

  “Bollocks,” Sutherland sneered angrily. “Think about that for a minute, Steve; if I was going to kill a man, would I use my own service revolver to do it? And furthermore, would I leave the bloody gun at the scene?”

  “Well that’s great then, so you’ve got your weapon?” Steve asked hopefully.

  “My weapon was signed back in two days ago. Whoever took it out, it wasn’t me.”

  “Come in, Jez. Come in and I’ll stand for you; we’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise. Where are you?”

  While he was sure that the question was innocent enough, he also knew that he couldn’t take the chance that it wasn’t. He had watched on as Tolanson had twisted stronger men than his friend in pretzels and bent them to his will.

  “You can’t help me,” he finally said. “Take care of yourself, Steve. Don’t trust anyone in that place, you hear me? Trust no one and whatever you do, never stand up for me with anyone, okay? You join in the bashing along with everyone else, buddy; call me every name under the sun and promise to help with the hunt in any way.” With that, he hung up quickly.

  “Oh my balls, you bastard,” Donovan moaned from the floor opposite and Sutherland had to wonder just what kind of partner he’d saddled himself with.

  ----------

  “Bad day at the office?” Lomax greeted Avery as she sat with her back to the front door of Debbie’s apartment.

  “You could say that,” she replied shakily. “What’s with that?” she asked, jumping up to her feet.

  Lomax looked down at the gun in his hand. “You gave me a fright. I didn’t hear your car pull up,” he said, quickly slipping the weapon back into his pocket.

  “I had to leave it at the office. Is there… fuck me, I could do with a drink.” She sighed heavily. “What can you rustle up?”

  Lomax went hunting as she moved into the lounge area. She was met with several years of Lomax’s work covering the floor and table.

  “Sorry. I meant to clean up,” he apologised as he returned with a glass of something that didn’t smell too clever. “All I could find,” he apologised again, handing it to her.

  She downed the alcohol, not liking the melon taste but only really caring about the strength of the drink. It burned her throat on the way down, and although she grimaced, she flapped the empty glass at him for a refill.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” he asked when he returned again.

  She downed the second glass and felt the warmth spread in her stomach. Only then did she sit and explain what she’d witnessed.

  “You’re not surprised?” she asked when she’d finished, realising that Lomax had only nodded along.

  “Nothing about that… thing would surprise me anymore,” he admitted.

  “Jesus he really is… whatever the hell he is, isn’t he?”

  Lomax only nodded.

  “How in Christ’s name do we stop something
like that?” she asked. “I mean, really?”

  “If you’re looking for magic answers, I’m afraid that I don’t have any,” Lomax answered, taking a seat on a chair opposite her.

  “Yeah, but you’ve got something, right? A dagger, a sword, a silver bullet, something that can kill him, right? I mean, you’ve got to have something, Lomax, right?” she demanded, feeling herself on the edge of hysteria but Lomax only looked at her with deep regret in his eyes.

  “Tell me again about tonight,” he asked with interest.

  “Oh, man, I don’t want to have to talk about that shit in his office; if I do, I’m liable to puke!”

  “Not then, earlier - during the mock debate.”

  “What about it?”

  “You said that he lost his temper, ‘exploded’ was how I think you put it,” Lomax said thoughtfully.

  “Hey look, the guy went nuts. Even those who normally hang on his every word looked a little scared of him for the first time. But he is also under a lot of pressure. He’s got the real debate coming up and you’ve said yourself how important that is to him.”

  “But he’s a man who doesn’t lose control, Avery, and certainly not in front of other people.”

  “So?”

  “Screaming at you in a roomful of his disciples? He has to project his strength at all times to his followers. And then killing a man on his home soil? That’s not like him to be so… emotional.”

  “So what does any of this mean?” she asked, exasperated.

  “Maybe he’s closer to the edge than even I thought, and if he’s that close then maybe - just maybe - we can push him over,” Lomax mused.

  “Why do I get the feeling that you’ve got a plan?” she asked, but she could already see that Lomax was thinking heavily, and wherever he was, he couldn’t hear her now.

  ----------

  Tolanson sat in his room and tried to connect to his inner sanctum, but the well was dry, as he was afraid it would be. His mind was racing and there was little that he could do to stop it now. He had lost it in front of a roomful of people and they had gotten a dangerously close look at his real face. He had even spilt blood worryingly close to home and risked exposing himself to the outside world.

  McDere had assured him that the offices had been empty and that the body wouldn’t be found. But still there was a nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him the foundations on which his empire had been built were now shaky and under threat of imminent collapse.

  He truly despised the reminder that he had once been human. This bitter taste of fear in the back of his throat was a throwback to when he had been a child, helpless and fragile. He would have ripped the feeling from his mind if he could and torn it screaming to pieces, but all he could do was to sit and stew in his own thoughts and try not to drown.

  His mind now was a raging river that he couldn’t still, no matter how many people he killed with his bare hands. He could quiet the voices for a short while, but now he could not extinguish them entirely no matter what he did.

  He knew that he had to save as much energy as possible for the debate and that every action now chipped away at his ability to finish the job. But still he couldn’t help himself; the further he slipped, the more his power waned, and he was less able to control his own impulses. Like a junkie trying to go cold turkey, he couldn’t resist just taking a taste and telling himself that he could stop whenever he wanted.

  Horton had shown up at the campaign headquarters and he hadn’t felt him coming. He’d used one dirty cop to get rid of another and had never seen the problems arising. Now he’d pulled the man apart, unable to stop himself from indulging in a primal bloodlust and he had left another body that could come back to haunt him.

  He knew that Sutherland was out there. The man wasn’t stupid and would surely know by now that Tolanson had set him up. There was a small knot of fear in his stomach, and while he didn’t fear any mortal man, there was something dancing out of reach that told him to be wary. The trouble now, of course, was that he was having a hard time separating what was a real threat and what was only in his disintegrating mind.

  Unable to resist picking at the scab any longer, he lay back on the bare mattress and risked spending power that he could ill afford in tracking Sutherland down to see what the man was up to. Where his mind’s eye was once able to peer through crystal clear waters, now it could only drift through a dirty fog of confusion. Eventually he found Sutherland and could see clearly where he was and, more importantly, who he was with.

  His fingers curled into claws with anger as he spotted Donovan’s face in the club and he knew that he had one more traitor to deal with.

  ----------

  Donovan nursed his balls with one hand and drank heavily from a bottle of whisky with the other. He was still stewing on Sutherland putting his hands on him and was plotting revenge as the cop - no, ex-cop, he reminded himself - talked incessantly on the burner phone that he’d given him.

  He should have been having trouble understanding just why he didn’t put a bullet in the old bastard’s head, but he knew why: Tolanson. The politician, or whatever the hell he was, was far more dangerous than anything Donovan had ever faced before on the street and there was only one thing he knew for certain - a bullet would only piss the man off. Whether he liked it or not, he only had one friend, or at least only one ally and that was Sutherland.

  He pushed the bottle aside and motioned for the bartender to serve him a beer instead. It was time to stop drinking or at least stop real drinking if he wanted to keep his wits.

  Lana Del Rey’s ‘This Is What Makes Us Girls’ was playing on the sound system as the night wound down in the club. The sexy soft music was in keeping with the girls dancing on stage as they moved slowly in time with the song.

  He cast an appreciative eye across the stage and enjoyed the Catholic schoolgirl outfits. The dancers were a heady cocktail of a touch of innocence in their uniforms mixed with the rawness of experienced sexuality in their eyes. He watched them dance and felt sleepy. The low lights and booze already in his system made him want to go to bed and forget about all this shit for a while. Hell, maybe he’d reach out to Tolanson in the morning, see what it would buy him if he turned in Sutherland. While he had no doubts about Sutherland’s assertions that Tolanson would have to clean house soon, maybe Tolanson would turn his attention away long enough for Donovan to skip town.

  He had little interest in saving the country or any of the people in it, save for himself. If he could run and be safe doing it then he would jump at the chance. But he didn’t want to get shot in the back and besides, he had spent a lifetime building his world and couldn’t quite bring himself to give it up, not without a fight at least.

  He yawned and pushed the beer aside; even weak alcohol was making him sleepy now - he must be getting old.

  Lana Del Rey died away softly and was replaced by the instantly waking sound of a raw guitar riff. He looked over towards the DJ booth wondering what the hell the idiot was doing now as Metallica’s ‘Some Kind of Monster’ kicked in.

  The rest of his weariness suddenly evaporated as his instincts snapped him to full attention. He’d spent his professional life living by his gut and now it was telling him that something bad was about to happen.

  He looked around for Sutherland but couldn’t find the man. The club suddenly seemed to have fallen deathly still as the only sound was the music cranking up ominously.

  Donovan looked around the bar to find the couple of deadbeat drunks that were sitting at the far end had abruptly sat up as though pulled erect on puppet strings.

  His mouth ran dry and he eased himself off the barstool slowly, but before he could retreat the bartender’s hand snaked out and grabbed him firmly by the wrist.

  “Donny? What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded, but Donny’s eyes were glazed and only stared right through him.

  The big bartender suddenly reached down and brought out the metal baseball bat that he kept benea
th the counter. The club’s neon lights bounced off the weapon as Donny raised it overhead, still without making a sound.

  Donovan could feel that he wasn’t going to slip Donny’s grip, so instead of trying to pull away, he leapt forwards over the bar counter instead.

  He crashed into the larger man and they fell back into the large bottle display in front of the mirror at the back of the bar. Glass shattered, driving shards into Donny’s bare arms. Blood started to flow from the deep lacerations and Donovan hit him again and again in the face, feeling the man’s nose break beneath the second blow.

  Donny dropped the metal bat as his hands reached up to his flattened nose and Donovan snatched it up quickly.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded as he backed away, holding the bat up in a swinger’s stance.

  “I gave you everything and this is how you repay me?” Donny asked in a voice that wasn’t quite his own and now Donovan could see that the man’s eyes were completely black.

  “Tolanson?” Donovan asked.

  “I was a role model to you, a benefactor, a father!”

  “Yeah right,” Donovan said as he stepped forwards and cracked Donny across the head hard with the bat.

  The bartender staggered backwards but didn’t drop. Blood gushed from a split across his forehead and he swayed drunkenly.

  “Sorry, bro.” Donovan shrugged and hit him harder twice more until Donny dropped like a stone.

  The music in the club was now banging loudly, drowning out any other sound. Donovan started to turn around to look for Sutherland but hands with sharp talon fingernails grabbed him from behind and dragged him backwards, digging deeply into his neck. A second pair joined in and he struggled to fight them off as clumps of hair were about to be pulled out of his head.

  He was dragged out of the bar area twisting and turning but to no avail as he couldn’t thrash his way free. Suddenly he was spun around and fell over one of the tables and the bat fell from his hand and rolled across the floor.

  Feet encased in tall sharp stripper heels were suddenly raining down hard stamps on him and he looked up into the faces of two of the girls as they attacked.