The Gated Trilogy

by Matt Drabble

  He tried to roll out of the way but they followed him and a small part of his brain, one that he didn’t listen to very often, told him that karma could be a bitch.

  A foot shot down hard towards his groin with a spiked heel and he just managed to catch it in time before it ruined him. He shoved the girl’s leg hard and sent her tumbling into her accomplice. He rolled sideways and clambered back to his feet. Checking his neck, his fingertips came away bloody but none of the wounds seemed too serious.

  He staggered to his right just in time to catch a haymaker swinging his way from a large trucker who’d been at the end of the bar. The man was as round as he was tall and his eyes were black too.

  “You could have been a prince at my side,” the trucker spat.

  “Bullshit, Tolanson. I’d have been wiped from your boot like dog shit the second I wasn’t necessary,” Donovan retorted as he staggered, trying to keep upright.

  “And now you’ll die like the rest of them.” The trucker grinned.

  Donovan lost his temper at that point. Up until now he’d been trying to escape, but now this fuck comes into his place? His club? To kill Malcolm Donovan?

  He rushed the trucker, driving him backwards over one of the plush leather sofas that surrounded the stage. The trucker fell heavily and Donovan leapt over, landing hard on the trucker’s face, knocking him unconscious or maybe dead or maybe what the fuck.

  A stripper schoolgirl ran towards him with her outstretched hands curled into claws. He backed away, keeping the sofa between them, and noticed that the first two girls were now back on their feet, bloody but still dangerous.

  His back hit the DJ booth and he prepared to fight. But strong hands reached down and grabbed him from behind as Eddie the DJ joined the fight.

  Eddie was a squirrelly man but now his arms were possessed with a strength that he couldn’t possibly have owned. A bony arm snaked under Donovan’s chin and started to choke him in a vicelike grip.

  He was on the verge of passing out now as the three girls joined in the attack, striking at him with hands and feet. Apparently one of them knew some moves as her shoe caught him firmly upside the head with a roundhouse kick.

  Eddie’s grip was strong and Donovan couldn’t get any leverage under the man’s arm and fight off the girls at the same time.

  He took several heavy blows and started to slump as the club grew dark around him. Soon the music’s heavy pounding beat even began to fade as he drifted into unconsciousness.

  Suddenly the frontal attacks faltered as one by one the girls were dragged away. Donovan looked up in time to see Sutherland prying Eddie’s arm loose from around his throat and then the grip was gone.

  He fell forwards coughing and spluttering as he gasped in grateful air to his lungs again. He could now see that Sutherland was holding the baseball bat that he’d dropped earlier.

  “I leave you alone for 5 minutes,” Sutherland scolded him.

  “It’s Tolanson,” Donovan just managed to gasp through his scorched throat.

  Sutherland looked around the club nervously.

  “Not here, them!” Donovan pointed at the strippers and over towards the trucker. “Give… me… the bat.” He coughed.

  Sutherland looked down at the three strippers on the ground and they were already starting to rise.

  “It’s not them! It’s him… we can’t hurt them!” He pointed at the girls.

  Donovan snatched the bat from his hand while the cop was struggling with his conscience. He turned and swung the bat hard at Eddie, who was clambering over the barrier to get to them, and caught him squarely across the face, knocking him back into the booth.

  “Wait, there was another guy,” he managed to say before the second lush from the end of the bar leapt from the darkness and into Sutherland.

  The two men rolled across the floor struggling for supremacy, and Donovan enjoyed the scene for a moment, wondering if Sutherland had leapt into action straight away when Donovan was under attack.

  He finally stepped forwards only to have his ankle grabbed by one of the strippers on the rise. Her fingernails dug deeply into his flesh, and as he yanked his foot away, a whole bunch of skin came off.

  He remembered what Sutherland had said and the man was right. It wasn’t the girls attacking him, it was Tolanson, but that fact wouldn’t make him any less dead if they had their way. In a show of what passed as mercy for him, he swung the bat down across the girl’s wrist and even over the music he heard the sound of shattering bones.

  He kicked the next girl in the face as she was on her knees and the third, who had climbed back to her feet, he struck across the knee dropping her back down.

  He looked over to Sutherland who had managed to squirm out from under his attacker and now had the biker pinned with his hands behind his back like he was under arrest.

  “Find me something to tie him up with,” Sutherland barked.

  “We have to go before Tolanson sends someone else to finish the job,” Donovan called back.

  “Then find me something quickly. I can’t leave him here like this.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got just the thing,” Donovan said as he stepped forward and hit the biker across the head with the bat. “Job done.”

  Sutherland leapt back to his feet angrily and ran at him, but Donovan was in no mood now. He lifted the bat so that it was pointing outwards, directly at Sutherland. The cop stopped in his tracks and looked at him warily.

  “We don’t have time for this bullshit,” Donovan said tiredly, his throat still red raw from almost being strangled to death. “You may be on some kind of redemption kick, I don’t know. But I do know that your hands are every bit as dirty as mine, Sutherland, and if you want to stop Tolanson and maybe even live, then they’re going to have to get a lot dirtier.”

  CHAPTER 27

  A RARE ACT OF CONSCIENCE

  Steve Marine was out from behind his desk for once but it did not feel good. The station was not running on full power after the arrest warrant having been issued for Sutherland and his subsequent flight, and now Jimmy Horton was missing as well. When the call had come in that there was a major incident at the ‘Teasers’ club, it was all hands on deck and he’d been pulled out of his warm office to attend.

  He’d barely finished reading Sutherland’s text message before the call for the club had come in. As a result, he was now driving to a crime scene with several police files copied from the station, any one of which would cost him his job if Superintendant Chambers found them.

  Sutherland had requested a bunch of reports all seemingly unrelated, but he’d been very insistent about the case numbers. As he’d been making copies, Steve could fathom no idea as to their relevance but his friend was in trouble and that was enough.

  He knew that he wasn’t a hero or even a particularly good cop, but Sutherland was, whatever his faults. He was sure that his friend broke the occasional rule here and there, but in a station like theirs, it was a rare man that didn’t and he was sure that Sutherland’s heart was in the right place.

  His wife always told him that he was too soft for his own good, but he believed in loyalty and he believed in his friend.

  The details were sketchy, and as he pulled up to the club, it was with no little distaste in his mouth that he walked inside. He had two daughters at home and wondered just what a father had to do wrong for his little girl to end up working in a place like this.

  Although he was a desk sergeant, he was still a sergeant and he found to his horror that he was the ranking officer at the scene.

  “What have we got?” he asked in his deepest voice as he approached a PC standing by the club entrance.

  “A right mess, Sarge,” the young man replied jovially. “Can you believe that I got the short straw and have to stand outside while those lucky bastards are in there interviewing… you know.” The young man held both hands out in front of his chest, presumably to illustrate female cup sizes.

  “I wanted a report, son,” Steve tried
again, knowing that it was a rare cop that took him seriously.

  “Oh, right.” The young PC shrugged. “Assaults in the main, a couple serious, and one guy who’s not looking like he’s gonna make it if you believe the doc in there.”

  “Customer?”

  “Not likely! I can’t afford those prices, much as I’d like to.” The PC laughed.

  “Was it a customer that committed the assaults?” Steve asked patiently.

  “Dunno.”

  “Brilliant, keep up the good work,” Steve muttered under his breath as he moved past the kid who barely looked old enough to shave, let alone wear a uniform.

  The inside of the club was a hive of activity as detectives interviewed dazed-looking witnesses with the strippers receiving the most attention. No one had had the foresight to shut the music off and Steve moved around to the DJ booth to find the off switch but only found a paramedic tending to what appeared to be the DJ.

  Steve leaned past the two men and hit the off switch and the club was plunged into blissful silence.

  “Thanks,” the paramedic sighed.

  He was working on the DJ whose face was smeared with blood from a nasty gash across his forehead and whose nose was squashed across his cheek. The man’s dyed black hair was now hanging limply over his face and his heavy mascara had run and mingled with the blood.

  “How is he?” Steve asked.

  “Half fucking dead,” the DJ replied before the paramedic could answer for him.

  “He’s half fucking dead,” the paramedic confirmed without looking up as he patched the DJ up.

  “Can you tell me what happened here, son?” Steve asked as he took a notebook from his pocket.

  “Nope,” the DJ snapped irritably.

  “Someone attacked you, Sir?”

  “Obviously,” the DJ sneered.

  “Can you tell me who? Or perhaps why?” Steve pressed.

  The man’s face went blank for a moment before straining for an answer that either wouldn’t or couldn’t come.

  “I… I don’t know,” the DJ said, shaking his head hard enough to make him wince again.

  “Head trauma?” Steve asked the paramedic.

  “Definitely; concussion, too, would be my guess, but…”

  “But what?”

  “None of them seem to remember anything,” the paramedic said, a little unsure.

  “This part of town, no one ever hears or sees anything,” Steve explained.

  “No, I’ve worked down here before, this is… different,” the paramedic said in a low voice so that only the two of them heard it.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The head trauma, fine - you take a heavy blow to the head and it’s going to screw up your short-term memory. I’d expect them to be confused, unable to focus, but one of the women only got whacked across the knee and she has the same blank expression on her face when she starts to explain what happened.”

  “Oh,” Steve replied, unsure what to say next.

  “I caught a call last year, a house party that went bad over in Broad Haven. Some snotty rich kid’s parents went out of town for the weekend so he had a party and yada yada yada it got out of control as those things do. Anyway, we got a call from some freaked out teenager and when we showed up it was like a house full of zombies. The whole place was full of kids staggering around like someone had wiped their minds clean.”

  “And this is the same?” Steve asked excitedly, thinking that he was about to catch hold of something important.

  “Doubt it, turned out two different people had spiked the punchbowl with two different drugs and the combination wiped all of the poor sods’ memories. Somehow, I doubt that everyone here got dosed with the same thing but it just reminded me of it.” The paramedic shrugged.

  “Well thanks for that, you’ve been no help whatsoever,” Steve muttered to himself.

  “Hey, man, you’re the detective - go detect!” The paramedic grinned as he finished up with the DJ before helping the man onto a wheelchair and pushing him down the slope and out of the club to a waiting ambulance.

  Steve took a quick circuit of the club and got the same message from every interview either completed or still in progress. No one could remember a damn thing, not what had happened or who had done it.

  Although the music was off, the lights were still set way too low and he had trouble finding his way around the club. He stopped a barman being helped towards the exit and asked him where the lights were. The burly man pointed towards the bar and Steve gratefully turned up the lights and dispelled the club’s soft and sexy allure. Under bright illumination, the carpeting was dirty and stained, and the walls were in need of a fresh coat of paint as nicotine stains marked the wallpaper.

  He was looking up, wondering what to do next, when he spotted the CCTV cameras located discreetly in the corners of the room. The lenses were small so as to not spook the customers but no doubt had been installed in order to catch what must have been regular infractions to the club’s policies.

  He quickly found the private office through a door marked as such and headed up the stairs. He found a small office and a cabinet that held several TV monitors covering the club from different angles. A further quick search exposed a couple of DVD recorders and he found a remote. He clicked back to the start of the recording and found a time stamp on each camera and skipped forwards until the action started.

  Sounds below in the club told him that someone had arrived to take charge and he immediately recognised Superintendent Chambers’ voice directing traffic.

  He returned his attention to the screens and saw the unmistakable face of Malcolm Donovan fighting with his own staff. The violence wasn’t surprising with a man like Donovan but what was surprising was that he was only defending himself.

  Steve watched on as Donovan first struggled with the barman and then some strippers. He couldn’t blame Donovan’s staff, given the man’s reputation, but the violence seemed extreme and unprovoked.

  He watched on as Donovan looked just about done for and he started to assume that this was going to be a murder investigation and that the club staff must have stashed the body somewhere. But then someone stepped in to save the little punk. He was wondering just what would pass for a friend in Donovan’s world when Sutherland’s face loomed into view.

  “Oh, Jez, what the hell have you got yourself into now?” he whispered to himself.

  His mouth suddenly ran dry as he watched the screen and he rewound the images to check that what he’d seen wasn’t an optical illusion.

  At one point in the fighting, one of the strippers had looked directly into the camera and her eyes had been completely black. He recognised the girl as the one receiving most of the attention from the cops downstairs and her eyes had been a beautiful green, but viewed on the screen in front of him now they were completely black. He would have put it down to a fault on the screen, maybe a bad reflection, but the problem was that Donovan’s eyes were clearly viable and normal.

  “What have you got there, Sergeant?” a voice demanded from behind and Steve turned around to find Chambers staring at him hard with naked suspicion in his beady eyes.

  “Security footage, Sir,” was all he could think of to say, wishing that he was capable of thinking quicker on his feet.

  “Just from tonight?” Chambers asked, way too casually.

  “Amongst others, Sir,” Steve replied, wondering if he wasn’t quite as slow on the mental draw as he’d previously thought.

  Chambers looked like a worried man; no, more than that - he looked like a guilty one.

  “Is there anything… I need to know, Sir?” Steve asked, relishing the sudden reversal in authority.

  There was a long silent pause between them and Steve knew that Chambers was on one of the recordings - maybe not from tonight, but the man was obviously a patron.

  He knew that his boss could easily order the discs turned over to him, but Chambers didn’t know what Steve had already seen.

 
; “The images are crystal clear, Sir,” he said, pushing his luck a little further. “I’ve already checked those ones,” he lied, pointing to a stack of discs marked with previous dates, “if you wanted to take them in for safe keeping.”

  Chambers stared at him long and hard as if trying to figure out where he’d grown a backbone from all of a sudden.

  “Very well,” Chambers said eventually as he picked up the discs from the box at the side of the cabinet before he left the room.

  “Holy shit, Jez, you owe me big time,” Steve moaned aloud as his heart beat way too fast in his chest.

  He took the incriminating disc from the DVD player and slipped it into his jacket pocket, wondering just where the hell his career was going. He didn’t trust Chambers one little bit and Sutherland had always been the best of a bad bunch, but now he felt like he was sliding down into the mire with the rest of them.

  He thought about his daughters, and how he hoped they still viewed him, and his late wife who had always thought the world of Sutherland.

  It was Lucy who had always assured him that there was a good man inside Sutherland and that it was his job to hold onto that man. When Lucy had been dying from cancer, it had been Sutherland who had metaphorically, and often quite literally, held his hand. It had been his friend who had kept him afloat and given him the strength to stand for his daughters and only fall apart in private.

  He’d owed Sutherland a lot, but the debt was getting dangerously close to being paid he thought as he took the back stairs out to the parking lot outside.

  He took a quick look around before opening his car’s back door and tucking the disc into a box on the seat containing the files that Sutherland wanted.

  “Those for me?” a voice called from the shadows behind a large commercial dumpster.

  “You know that you’re doing too much wrong shit when a voice from the darkness doesn’t make you jump anymore,” Steve answered. “How are you Jez?”

  “Been better, mate, I won’t lie,” Sutherland said, moving forward slightly and quickly taking the box from the car before slipping back out of sight.