‘You can outrun them in this rocket van, surely?’ Reve’s face reflected sudden concern. Not a combatant, then.
‘Nope. Not in this. This maxes at about ton-twenty; they’ll get another thirty on top of that. And there’s not much traffic, either. Here he comes, riding like the lone deranger himself. They do love to pose, these lads. Makes me feel very old.’ Stoner’s voice was flat.
The bike was back; the same one from before, along with the original rider, judging by his crash helmet, painted to resemble an alien head. The back seat hero was now another man, open-face helmet, leather cut-offs and a swinging chain replacing the original woman and the Lycra legs. Stoner watched the mirrors as they approached . . . and as they passed, pulling into the path of the Transporter and braking hard ahead of them. Stoner swung out and accelerated past.
‘What’s this about?’ Reve looked more nervous than he sounded.
Stoner sighed again, glanced at the mirrors.
‘OK, they want to stop us, to shout and swear at us for driving on their road and somehow in some pathetic way they want us – me – to apologise while they push us around and scare us to death. This is because they are big scary boys and everyone is scared of them. It makes me sad to be a bloke, to be a biker, frankly.’
The bike passed them again, making a lot more noise from its open exhaust, while the passenger swung the chain against the side of the van.
‘They have no respect for my paint,’ rasped Stoner, watching as the bike pulled past once more. ‘Paint is important to some of us. Paint costs money. Some people spend a lot of money achieving the exact paint job that reflects their personalities. It’s a personal style statement. You’d know nothing about that, you being a cop. And a married man with kids, so forth.’
‘Are you like that?’ Reve sounded surprised.
‘No. But they don’t know that. They’re treating me with great disrespect, though.’
‘Does that bother you?’ Reve sounded concerned.
‘No. But they don’t know that either. But they’ve done this before. I’ll bet they’re the absolute scourge of other low-life tossers who drive their mates around in fucked-over hatchbacks with wrecked engines and great paint jobs. Here we go again.’
The bike had braked hard, slowing in front of them. This time Stoner accelerated hard at the bike and its riders, switching on his headlights and spotlights to suggest his intention. The bike accelerated again, but late, too late to avoid the onslaught of the heavy Transporter, and Stoner swung it out to overtake them again, missing them by only a metre or two. Reve clung to the grab handles, although the Transporter’s suspension matched its hefty engine and the van was track-car stable as it shifted lanes . . .
. . . and shifted lanes again, as the barriers and demands of highway maintenance closed the outer lane to traffic, cutting the flow to just a single lane.
Chain clattered and rang along the sides of the heavy Transporter as the bike carved through between the van and the barriers. Once again it slowed, this time to a stop, the rider swinging his motorcycle to block the lane and dismounting, standing behind his machine and folding his arms with unmistakable intent.
‘Can you drive over it?’ Reve sounded worried now. ‘Push it out of the way?’
‘Not easily. It would damage the van, and why would I do that?’
Stoner braked at the last minute, rolling the heavy Transporter right up to the motorcycle, and before Reve could say anything, Stoner was out of the van, running with astonishing speed at the passenger, who raised the chain ready to swing it. Before he could Stoner had hit him full in the face and as he tried again to swing the chain Stoner was on him, hooking his feet from under him grabbing and wrapping the chain around his right forearm, pushing past, causing him to fall, then turning.
Suddenly.
And stamping hard on his face inside the open-face crash helmet, cutting off a scream before it was properly born.
With no pause and no hesitation, Stoner vaulted over the leaning motorcycle, straight into the body of its rider, knocking him off-balance while screaming at him, ‘Die, die, die, dead man, die, die, die!’ He jammed the stiff straight fingers of his right hand with all the force of his upper body directly into the rider’s windpipe where it was exposed below the chinguard of the full-face helmet.
Then the chain was suddenly winding around the rider’s neck as he stumbled, clutching his throat and emitting a musical gargle all his own, falling to his knees and trying to swallow and to stop the chain. Stoner moved fast, so fast, around to the rider’s back, placed his left foot between his shoulder blades and pulled the chain, pulled it tight and pulled the struggling gargling man to the roadside barrier, where he wrapped the remaining length of the chain, holding its prisoner entirely captive.
With no pause, Stoner ran to the struggling fallen passenger, who was rubbing at his face and spitting blood and teeth and trying to stand while enduring not insignificant pain from his broken jaw and broken teeth. Stoner kicked him hard as he could in the side of his head, protected as it was by the open-face helmet, and when he fell he kicked him again, this time in his stomach.
Maybe a single minute had passed. Maybe two. Certainly less than three.
Stoner returned to the motorcycle. Wheeled it to the side of the road, removed its ignition keys and rolled it down the embankment, letting it overbalance and fall on its side.
He returned to the rider in chains, slotted the bike’s keys between the fingers of his right hand and smashed them into and through the polycarbonate visor of the full-face. The face of the alien bled red blood and bubbled.
‘Never, ever, ever again try that stupid shit with me.’ Stoner ran back to the heavy Transporter, its engine idling patiently, its occupant staring in silent disbelief at the display of unarmed combat, climbed aboard and drove off. Another car, just one other, had arrived, but its view of the altercation had been blocked by the black bulk of the heavy Transporter, and as that heavy vehicle pulled away, the following car followed it, driver oblivious to the carnage he was passing through, concentrating on the conversation he was enjoying with his cell phone. It’s a question of perspectives.
‘It’s a question of perspectives,’ Stoner remarked to his companion, who sat silent, staring straight ahead as the van accelerated again. ‘Consider it a public service. No fee. The only effective form of self-defence is an offensive self, which I believe I’ve mastered. The moment you recognise an attack is on its way . . . attack first and harder. If the enemy cannot attack you . . . they can’t hurt you as much as you can hurt them. The only alternative is running away very fast and very far. Being a target is never an option. Not for me. Not again. Never again.’
‘You could have killed them,’ Dave Reve finally found his voice. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’
‘Go ahead,’ Stoner was as unconcerned as he sounded. ‘They’ll have your number from the call, so they’ll come to see you, and you can explain what happened. It’ll make an entertaining coda to the swimming pool saga, and your status as a guy who gets half-killed by a naked lady but then beats a couple of hard-boiled bikers to bits will reach new heights.’
‘I didn’t do anything! You beat them up, man!’
‘I was nowhere near. I have a dozen witnesses who can place me anywhere else. Anywhere I like. Call your colleagues, an ambulance, a couple of priests, the AA, anyone you like. I’m sure you’ll make a great story out of it.’
‘This is your world, isn’t it?’
‘It is. And welcome to it. No fee.’
‘I feel sick. I think I’m going to throw up.’
‘No you’re not. You’ll be fine. I’ll open the window. And I’ll take you back to your excellently prestigious and suburban Jaguar. The body of evidence – where we were going – can wait.’
‘Does this happen a lot?’ Reve’s colour was returning through the pallor of his face. ‘And where did you learn to fight like that? Did they even touch you?’
‘If one of the
m had got to me, I would have fallen. Two fast men will always beat one fast man, all things being equal. But they weren’t fighters. They were fools. Noisy fools.’
‘Who taught you to fight like that, though?’
‘The army. The army trains hundreds of us to fight exactly that way. Remember this next time you feel like a scrap with someone you don’t know.’
‘I never feel like that.’
‘Then you’ll be safe. Always walk away. Leave fighting for fools like me.’
‘Are there lots of guys like you?’
‘Oh yes. More every year. Left-over warriors. Depend on it.’ Reve stared ahead through the windscreen. ‘You could have killed them.’
‘Yes. But I didn’t, so you can relax.’
‘And it just doesn’t bother you. At all. Really?’
‘It’s just how I am. Always have been, maybe, certainly since the army and Ireland, Iraq.’
‘Can’t believe that the . . . the violence doesn’t affect you. That’s . . . inhuman.’
‘Of course it affects me. Don’t be stupid. If I wasn’t affected I’d be dead. Long since.’
‘So you just control it? You . . . what . . . zone out?’
‘Not really. You can’t zone out in a fight. You’d lose focus and lose the fight. Folk do that, fighting folk. They’re all dead or out of the business.’
‘Doesn’t it build up, though?’
‘Aren’t we the profiler, now?’ Stoner’s amusement might have been genuine, though the dead gaze suggested otherwise. ‘But yes it does build up. We all have ways of dealing with it, of handling it. Nearly there now.’ He was swinging the heavy Transporter into the car park containing Reve’s parked car, pulled around it, pulled up, already facing the exit. Unlocked the passenger door.
‘Go on, tell me. How do you control it, how do you work it out?’
Stoner’s smile gazed ahead, through the screen. ‘Sex. Also rock ’n’ roll.’
‘Drugs?’
‘They have their place.’
28
LIE IN WAIT
‘It’s the demons, isn’t it?’ The woman who styled herself Amanda intercepted Stoner as he headed towards the bar. He stopped. Walked away from the bar towards an empty table and beckoned her to follow him. It was loud by the bar. People enjoying themselves. Good for business.
‘What’s that? Demons who force you to attack strange men in strange ways in strange places?’ He was smiling. It felt to him that this was his first smile of the day, which it may well have been. He looked over her head towards the bar and flapped a hand for service.
‘No.’ She returned his smile. ‘No, the demons in your head who make up the tunes you play. The demons who force you to play the way you do. Demons who drive everything. You certainly do know them. You’d be unable to play like you do without them. You even try to drown them, don’t you?’ She looked around, back towards the bar. No approaching refreshment rewarded her attention. ‘Don’t laugh at me. I’m not joking.’
‘I’m not laughing. It would take something really funny to make me laugh tonight, and that’s not faintly funny. I don’t think I do demons, though. I think . . . I think there are too many demons. I think my own music exorcises them. I think if I didn’t play the blues then the blues would drag me down. Drown me. The blues is the demon in me. I think that players are so much more lucky than everyone else. I think we’re a different breed. I think you can’t play unless you’re driven to it, and that everyone else wraps themselves in blankets of stupidity, dishonesty and distraction to keep their attention away from the demons. I think they succeed, too. I think that almost no one knows about the demons . . . recognises them. I think they waste the entirety of their lives avoiding the demons of their own realities; they just rattle around for the whole of their lives. No point, no purpose. They do nothing I can understand. They squander their one and only chance, because although Buddhism is a great and comfortable thing to believe in, none of us is coming back. The darkness is everywhere and the darkness is filled with the demons. It’s where they live. Inside the dark inside us all. I’m not laughing, Amanda. The opposite. The night is filled with crying tonight. I will break a head or two tonight. I have no wish to do this but I will need to do it.’
Drinks arrived. Water for Stoner, something frothy for Amanda.
‘Did you order that?’ She looked surprised. Stoner shrugged. Shook his head and glanced at the bar.
‘Everything is a message. The message here is that I should stay sober. The message is from Chimp, the guy behind the bar, the guy with the epic tats and the muscles. He is messaging that I look like a fight and he doesn’t want a fight and he is suggesting by subliminal secret messaging that I stay sober. That is unlikely, frankly.’
‘You saying that there’s a message in my drink, too? What the hell kind of message is in . . . this?’ She flapped capable strong fingers at the creamy concoction before her. ‘I mean, what the hell is it anyway?’
‘It’s a cocktail. Chimp likes making cocktails.’
‘I can see that it’s a cocktail. Thank you so much, Mr Stoner, sir, for sharing your sense of humour with a mortal. I know it’s a cocktail. It smells and it walks and it talks like a piña colada. I don’t care about that. It will taste great if he really can mix a drink. What I care about here is the message.’ She paused. Shrugged. Smiled in a minuscule way. ‘What message is here? For me, that is. Or is it a message to you?’
‘Both, at a guess.’ Stoner almost smiled again. A faint glow of comfort threatened to derail the deliberate darkness of his mood. ‘Could be he sees you for a frothy frilly tart, of course. Could be that he’s telling me not to waste time on an inconsequence. If that’s what you are. He doesn’t know that, and neither do I. I don’t actually know what you are. Or who. And don’t start telling me now. I have no patience for life stories. Not today.’
The transient experimental glimpse of happiness had retreated again.
Stoner’s phone shook in his pocket. He rose and walked to the bar, walked fast; folk cleared from him.
‘Has Bili left us any Stoli? Is there a drink left in here?’ He tried to smile at Chimp, but it was an obvious struggle. He gave up, banged both elbows onto the wet wood, shook his head and knuckled his forehead. ‘Feel crap tonight, mate. Want to drown something. Me, for example.’
An unopened bottle of supposedly genuine Russian vodka slid towards him. Chimp hadn’t moved. He did now; rolled his eyes to his left, towards the far end of the bar. A blonde woman raised her glass. Stoner nodded to her.
‘What’s she drinking? Fill her up when it’s her time, OK?’
He picked up the bottle, pointed it to the woman, nodded. She looked at him over the rims of her spectacles, nodded, made a pistol of her right hand and fired him a shot. She might also have said some words, but the ambient was too loud to allow passage to anything less lively than a full shout. Or a real shot.
‘Who’s your friend?’ Stoner was back at the table. Amanda stared with intent towards the blonde at the bar. ‘The smart blonde lady? Good hair.’
Stoner drank the entire contents of his glass of water and refilled it from the vodka bottle.
‘I’m not sure. She’s been here a few times. She asks after me, I’m told, but somehow we manage never to actually meet. But she’s good with her hands. It’s not easy to slide a bottle along a bar. Not and keep the thing upright. Takes practice. Maybe she’s after a job waiting bar. Who knows? Who cares?’
‘A fan, then?’ Amanda smiled a little. ‘Like me?’
‘I doubt that she’s exactly like you, Amanda. Really. If she was like you then she’d be sat at this table joining in, not sitting on her own at the bar, staring at the optics and the mirror and avoiding all comers. Strange behaviour.’
‘But she is a fan?’
‘You get used to this when you play. You brought your bellows? The big brass sludgepump? You want to wheeze some noise tonight? Is that the plan?
‘I thought you wer
en’t going to play? Going to have a fight tonight?’ She smiled some more. ‘Yes. The sax is in the car.’
‘In the car? It’s no use in the car. It’ll be lonely in the car. I feel sorry for it. Poor lonely sludgepump, alone in a lonely car. Makes me want to break something, the sadness. That’s what it does to me, sadness. Want to stop feeling sad? Break something.’
‘My dad always called trombones sludgepumps. Not saxes.’
‘Your dad sounds great.’ Stoner had drunk a full glass of the vodka and was relaxing. He looked up. Chimp leaned over him, carefully placed a litre bottle of sparkling water in front of him. Walked away. Stoner poured a glass of water, sank it. Poured more spirit. Sank that. Looked at Amanda. Sweat appeared on his forehead. His eyes remained entirely focused.
‘Your dad a player? Tell me about your dad.’
‘Jesus.’ Amanda walked to the bar, carrying the cocktail before her as though there was a danger of an explosion. Placed it in front of the blonde woman, who looked at her, expressionless, said nothing.
Stoner’s phone shook, rousing him suddenly from the approaching and welcome dullness. ‘Oh fuck off, Shard,’ he muttered as he flipped it open to read. But it wasn’t Shard. It was Dave Reve. Asking his whereabouts and if he could intrude. Stoner replied in the affirmative. Amanda had retaken her seat. She waved at the open phone.
‘More fans?’
‘Nope. A gentlemen of the constabulary persuasion, oddly. Not every night I find my company so in demand. The plod will come calling any time now. You OK with that? Where’s your drink? Did you throw it away?’
‘Gave it to your fan. She looks the sort to enjoy a good cocktail. Great wig she wears, too. I know wigs. That’s a posh one. Any chance she’s not an actual blonde? Who would have thought it?’ She turned to face the bar. The blonde woman raised the cocktail, shared with them an unreadable expression. ‘See. My friend.’
Amanda produced a shot glass and poured vodka.
‘Naz drovie!’ she said, and threw it back.
A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) Page 30