Runaway Town (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 2)

by Jay Stringer

  But right now I’m only four years old.

  My home is burning.

  It starts here.

  FORTY‐TWO

  I stood in the car park of the Apna Angel and looked at the darkened pub. It was in full lockdown; there were no lights on and no noise came from inside. There was only one car on the car park, the same black four-wheel-drive I’d seen Letisha driving at the sports hall when she’d picked up Boz.

  A pub being closed on any evening was a bad sign. On this evening it shouted out about the things being done inside. But at least it confirmed I was right about where to look.

  I rapped on the front door and waited. After a couple of minutes I rapped again. This time I heard the sound of the bolts being slid aside, and a hooded face appeared in the crack as the door opened. When he saw me he pushed the door shut for a second, and I heard a couple chains being taken off. Then he opened up wide enough for me to step in.

  Boz.

  He was wearing the purple and black colors of one of the Birmingham gangs, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “But—what about the job?”

  He shrugged. “Wouldn’t give me an interview, man. No experience. I guess that’s how it works.”

  “So you’re back with Channy?”

  “Nah. I’m with a new crew. We’re working with Channy, helping out.”

  “But we had a deal.”

  Boz looked at me like I didn’t understand the world, and he shook his head.

  “A deal? Gyp, we don’t get to make deals. We don’t get to choose. That’s the one fucking thing I learned from my brother.”

  I took heart from the fact that they’d left Boz to watch the door. It meant he wasn’t involved with the grunt work. Somewhere deep down, I hoped that meant something important. I nodded over my shoulder at the closed front door and told him to go.

  “Uh, I dunno, man. I been told to stay here.”

  “Trust me, Boz. I say when you go.”

  He stared at me for a while, trying to judge whether he could trust me or not. He nodded and made for the door.

  I opened it and waved him off. Then I bolted it completely and stood in the darkness.

  There was no sound coming from the bar or the restaurant. I stepped into the bar and took a look around for any signs of activity, but I already knew I wouldn’t find anything. I turned and walked through, into the restaurant. The smell of freshly cooked food hit me, and in the kitchen I could see that work had stopped halfway through the evening’s food prep. The pub had been closed in a hurry. I stood at the door to the wine cellar and paused for a moment, thinking that I still had a chance to turn back.

  I pulled out my gun and opened the door, walking down the steps before I could talk myself out of it.

  The room was as I remembered it, the single bulb throwing an unforgiving light into the soundproofed space. The workbenches that lined the walls were covered with neatly arranged power tools. Standing along opposite walls were Marv and Letisha, both holding cricket bats; Marv had a gun tucked into his jeans. They were staring at me like I’d just taken a shit in their coffee.

  Channy and Gaines were in the middle of the room. The single bulb overhead. Gaines was on her knees with her back to me. She was breathing heavily and looked to be favoring her right side. Channy was standing over her. A cricket bat of his own was held high in the air, at the apex of a swing, with his shoulder tensed and ready. The bat faltered and stopped as he stared up at me.

  “What you want?” Letisha barked. That girl was all charm.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was looking for the bathroom.”

  Channy smiled. It had a nervous edge to it. Gaines turned to look at me, but I couldn’t read her expression. Her right eye was already showing the beginnings of a bruise.

  Marv nodded at the gun in my hand and then cocked his head to one side. He didn’t raise his own gun, but he did move his hand a little, enough to make the message clear.

  I smiled at him.

  He didn’t smile back.

  Channy dismissed me with a nod of his head. “Leave,” he said. He turned his attention back to Gaines while Marv and Letisha kept their eyes on me.

  Gaines tried to call out, but before the full sound formed Marv stepped forward and kicked her in the gut. She fell onto the side she’d been favoring and coughed into the floor. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger.

  My arm recoiled from the kick, and my wrist burned. Marv fell back against the workbench and then forward onto the floor; my bullet had turned his left shoulder into red pulp.

  Channy turned toward me, but I was watching Marv. His face was white, and his eyes were glazed. He was heading into shock fast. I hadn’t heard the sound of the gunshot, but for a couple of seconds I didn’t hear much of anything.

  In a blur of movement Gaines had Marv’s gun. She pointed it at his face and pulled the trigger, and what was left of Marv quivered and then went still in a broken heap.

  Gaines had the gun pressed to Channy’s right knee when she pulled the trigger again. He screamed and fell, landing on the broken knee with a sound that went straight through me. Neither shot had sounded like Boz’s gun. The noises were sharper, like rusty bolts sliding home on a gate.

  Gaines climbed to her feet in a manner that would have been graceful if it wasn’t terrifying. She turned the gun to point at Letisha’s chest and held it there for a second before speaking.

  “Do you work for him, or for me?”

  Letisha didn’t need any thinking time. “You.”

  “Good. Go and spread the word. Make sure everyone knows there’s been a change in management.”

  Letisha nodded and ran past me and up the stairs, pausing for a second to look back at Marv. All the color had drained from her face.

  Gaines walked over to me, and for a second I thought she was going to end it right there. Instead, she touched my arm and said, “Thanks.”

  I looked down at the gun in my hand. I hadn’t noticed until then just how badly my hands were shaking. The world seemed like a distant dream. She eased the gun from me and slipped it into her waistband. Her hand lingered over mine for a second, and she peered into my eyes.

  “You still there?”

  I nodded after a pause. I wasn’t sure how to answer. Then she turned to where Channy was whimpering on the floor. She knelt down in front of him and waited until he looked up at her.

  “All that shit you said”—her voice was cold—“about me not earning my place? Well, how’s this?”

  She pressed her gun against his other knee and then paused and looked up at me.

  “You don’t need to stay for this.”

  I thought of Noah, and of Mike Banaciski. I thought of Boz, and Kyng, and all the anger I was carrying around.

  I shrugged, and I stayed to watch everything.

  FORTY‐THREE

  I was back where all of this had begun. Sitting in the Legs nightclub with Gaines. After convincing Channy Mann to give up his business details, she’d made a couple of phone calls. We’d waited there until her “family” doctor had come to see to her wounds and clean up the mess. Then she’d walked with me to the club.

  Inside, the place looked desolate. If there’s any place sadder than a brightly lit, dismantled strip club, I haven’t seen it. Most of the furnishings had been carted away, and almost all the stock had been removed from behind the bar. It looked a far cry from the dark and seductive nightclub it had been on my last visit there. Gaines explained that the building was going to be having an accident later that night, removing any chance of the police raiding it as part of the immigration investigation.

  She told me to take a seat, and I dropped onto a stool at the bar. She fetched a bottle of vodka and a bottle of Maker’s Mark from the few bottles that were left and set them on the bar with two glasses. She poured large measures for each of us, and for a long time we sat in silence. I stared at the liquid and thought of reasons not to drink. Then I ignored them all and put the glass to my lips. Th
at first whiskey in five months burned its way down to the pit of my stomach, and it felt good. She poured me a second, and I drained it in one gulp.

  My eyes watered a little, and I was taken by familiar warmth. It was followed by an eerie falling sensation, like my soul was no longer anchored to my skin, it was hovering a few inches above me.

  After an age, Gaines looked down into her glass and spoke to me. “Thanks,” she said again. Almost quiet enough to miss it. I knew I hadn’t earned it.

  We were silent again for a minute or two. I noticed my hands were still shaking, but not as bad as they had been.

  “First time you shot someone?” She’d noticed my hands too.

  “Yes.” I nodded for a while before finishing the thought. “First time I’ve ever fired a gun, to be honest. You?”

  “Fired one? No. My daddy taught me when I was younger.”

  “First time you’ve killed someone?”

  She didn’t answer. Then she changed the subject. “So, you’re coming to work for me, then?” She smiled that dark smile of hers. I’d never been able to read it before, but now I saw it for what it was: certainty. “I’ll need someone I can trust.”

  “After I set you up?”

  “No. After you came back for me.”

  “There’s going to be a war, you know. One of the Birmingham gangs were striking a deal with Channy. They’ll come for your turf now.”

  She shrugged, and the confidence seemed real enough. “Let them come.”

  “You sound like you want it.”

  “Everything’s changing. One or another of those gangs was going to come for me either way. Maybe more than one. Now it’ll just be sooner.”

  Gaines sat in silence for a while and poured fresh drinks. As she passed me mine, she looked at me over the glass. “Daddy didn’t get it. He never understood drugs. He thought it was like everything else, like selling more sex or booze, just another business he could take on. He didn’t know that drugs would change the game.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m doing my best. The business suits, the whole thing, it’s all just playacting, trying to live up to my dad. I had a whole other life laid out. A lawyer, you know that? Got my degree, did postgrad work. Everywhere I went, though, people only noticed my surname.”

  “Daddy’s little lawyer?”

  She snorted but didn’t take offense. She just shrugged and nodded—that was how everyone saw it. “But when he needed someone to step up, get more involved in the business, it had to be me.”

  I asked why her little sister, Claire, couldn’t have taken over. She gave me a look that said I was the stupidest person alive.

  “Claire? Jesus. Well, I’ll have to bring her into it now, all hands to the pump and all. But she’s a nightmare. She’s not got the head for it; it drives Daddy wild.”

  She pulled a photograph from her jacket pocket and placed it on the bar in front of us. It was frayed and torn; it had the look of a postcard that had been folded and carried in a lifetime’s worth of pockets.

  “What’s this?”

  “Daddy’s got this thing; he carries an old coin. He says it’s the first penny he ever stole. Likes to show it off when he’s giving a speech about history and hard work. It’s a symbol, you know? Something that ties him to who he is and where he comes from. His father did it too, he says, had a coin that he brought across with him from Ireland. Family tradition.”

  I thought of my own father, his hands on my shoulder, telling me to never forget. Na bister.

  Gaines toyed with the photograph, and I got a good look at it for a second. Ransford Gaines as I remembered him from two decades before, with a young girl on his knee and a woman at his side. They weren’t looking at the camera; they were wrapped up in one another, lost in a moment. A family.

  I pointed at the woman. “Your mother?”

  “Yes. She died ten years ago. Cancer. Never smoked a day in her life. I guess guilt will eat at you one way or another.” Her eyes watered with tears as she looked at me, then back at the picture. “She made me promise never to go into the business. Said she wanted different for her girls, a different life. But then my dad, when he got sick, he made me promise to take over. You tell your parents things just to keep them happy, but somewhere along the line…” Gaines placed it facedown on the bar and looked at me. “So the coin is my dad’s and this is mine. What’s yours?”

  I stared into the mirror behind the bar for a long time before turning to look at her. “Anger.”

  A lifetime spent running away from who I am. From who I’ve always been. At least my brother understands himself. For all his faults, he admits what and who he is. I felt like my whole life had been leading me away from, and then back to, this exact moment. Sat beside a Gaines, talking about family and fights that nobody could win.

  Gaines picked the photo up off the bar and turned it over in her hand. I caught a handwritten note on the back but couldn’t read it. I heard a metallic click, and Gaines lifted her other hand to show a Zippo with the top flicked open.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m sick of carrying it.”

  She sparked the Zippo into life and let the flame eat at the corner of the photograph. The flame took a long time to take hold, but eventually it did and the young family began to fade to black as the photograph rumpled beneath the heat. She dropped it into an ashtray and watched it burn. She turned to smile at me, and the flicker of darkness was back in her eyes.

  “Why did you come back for me?”

  I lied and said, “I don’t know.”

  She laughed. “You’re a bad liar. But that’s okay. It means I can trust you.” Her smile again. “Come and work with me.”

  I put my hand on her thigh, and she didn’t flinch. I looked at the smoking remnants of the photograph and thought of doing something stupid.

  What I like about you is you’re rock bottom.

  —Joan Graham

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book is easy. Writing the acknowledgments is hard. Thanks go to friends and family in both the Midlands and Glasgow, for their support, their patience, and the many hours of drunken debates that filter through into my writing.

  Key moments of indecision have been solved with wise words from Steve Weddle, Ray Banks, and John McFetridge, with Stacia Decker there at every turn to keep me on the right track. Thanks always go to my wife, but in this case she made one of the more important criticisms of an early draft, and thanks also to Kate Chynoweth for making the right suggestion at the right time to get the book across the line.

  The book is a total work of fiction, but there are small Easter eggs in there for friends past and present—if you spot a reference, then it’s there for you. Thanks to Robin for volunteering.

  I owe this lovely little package that you hold in your hands to the hard work of Andy B., Jacque, Patrick, Kate, Reema, and everyone else at Thomas & Mercer. They do me proud.

  Thanks to the George Orwell estate for letting me borrow his words.

  Thank you to Rory Connell.

  Finally—and always—thanks to Bobby, Paul, Tommy, Chris, and Slim. I can reach for them every time I feel stuck.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Lisa-Marie Ferla, 2012

  Jay Stringer was born in Walsall, in the West Midlands of England. He would like everyone to know he’s not dead yet. He is dyslexic, and so he approaches the written word like a grudge match. His work is a mixture of urban crime, mystery, and social fiction, for which he coined the term “social pulp.” In another life he may have been a journalist, but he enjoys fiction too much to go back. He is the author of Old Gold, the first novel in the Eoin Miller crime series, and Faithless Street. He lives in Scotland.

 

 

 
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