A Fistful of Knuckles

by Tom Graham

  ‘They sprang up outta nowhere, boss!’ howled Chris. He was silenced by a clip round the ear. ‘OI! Watch out!’

  ‘The bastards rushed us,’ Ray growled, trying to staunch the flow of blood down his face. ‘They got us … all of us … as you can see.’

  Sam caught his meaning at once – they got all of us, as you can see …

  Annie’s not here. He’s telling me that they didn’t get Annie. She’s okay. She’s clear.

  That was something, at least.

  Sam turned sharply on Patsy and bellowed: ‘What the hell’s going on here, you moron! These are my officers your thugs have assaulted! Let them go – right now! We had a deal, Patsy!’

  And now, at last, Patsy became aware of him. He turned his nasty, misshapen, green-and-blue inked head, and bared his teeth in a vicious grin. His eyes flashed wickedly.

  ‘Patsy! I demand your monkey crew get their mitts off my officers!’

  ‘You’re in the arena,’ Patsy growled, his voice low and bestial. ‘My arena …’

  ‘The deal, Patsy! Remember the deal!’

  ‘No deals … Not here …’

  Sam turned towards Spider: ‘Back off, Spider! This isn’t the way!’

  But Spider couldn’t hear him. His entire will was fixated upon his enemy. His eyes were blazing. Every muscle was pulled tight. He was locked on, like a missile – primed, ticking, seconds from detonation.

  With his heart hammering and his mouth dry, Sam strode boldly towards the two men and planted himself between them.

  ‘I’m arresting both of you,’ he declared. ‘I’m arresting everybody!’

  Patsy held out his right hand and placed it on Sam’s chest, right where the bug was taped. But it didn’t matter about that anymore – the operation had gone to crock. Patsy’s small, bruised, scabby, painted hand rested on Sam for a moment – lightly, as if he were checking his heartbeat – and then, with a sudden show of strength that seemed to come out of nowhere, he shoved Sam back. Sam stumbled and fell, landing heavily on his backside in the churned-up mud of the arena.

  Looking up, he saw Patsy and Spider launch at each other like head-on express trains. They slammed together with a shocking impact, and then it was all fists, a firestorm of fists, so fast and frenzied that they became a blur of colour. Blood splattered against the side of one of the caravans.

  Sam clambered to his feet and scrambled away, like he was avoiding the spinning blades of some murderous machine run amok. He saw the faces of men pressing in at every gap between the vehicles, their eyes wide, their lips drawn back, their teeth bared as they lapped up the ferocious violence exploding and thudding in the arena. He even saw Ray’s face, streaming with blood, as he peered in. And for a moment he glimpsed Chris, trying to see what the hell was going on with just his one good eye.

  Turning back to the fight, Sam saw Spider hurling a series of truly monumental blows against Patsy’s face. His fists slammed into the bigger man like hurled mallets, flinging Patsy’s head back and to the side, over and over. Patsy flailed blindly, trying to defend himself, but he was retreating blindly. He slammed against the side of one of the caravans, struggling to keep himself upright against it.

  I don’t believe it! Spider’s battering him! He’s winning!

  As Patsy raised both arms to cover his face, Spider switched his attack, firing rapid blows one after the other into Patsy’s stomach and ribs. As Patsy doubled up, Spider switched again, blazing away at his face and head once more.

  Nobody can take much more of that – not even O’Riordan!

  Sam felt a sudden elation, an exhilarating joy in seeing so much violence up close. Or was it that? No – it was something else – it was the deep, vicious pleasure of seeing the Devil in the Dark being battered to a pulp. That enigmatic and nightmarish force which had been reaching out with such malice towards Annie, and which had found its expression in the tattooed body of Patsy O’Riordan, was being beaten into submission, mashed, smashed, battered, broken.

  Destroy him, Spider! Sam found himself thinking, his blood ablaze with fury. Rip him to pieces! For Annie! Do it for Annie! And me! Do it for us!

  In that moment, Sam wanted nothing – could think of nothing – except the ecstasy of seeing the enemy of all his happiness being systematically punched to death. He was dimly aware that Spider must be feeling exactly the same thing.

  Do it for Annie! Do it for Annie!

  Annie.

  Her name was like cold water dashed into his face, bringing him back to his sanity.

  Murder, he thought. I’m witnessing a murder.

  And then: You’re a copper, Sam. Act like one.

  And then: Annie would be disgusted to see you revelling in this violence. Stop this fight, Sam. Do it for her – do it for Annie – be a man – be a real man, not a bloody caveman – stop it, stop it, stop the fighting – do it for Annie!

  He ran his hand over his face, shook his head to clear, and moved forward to stop the fight. It had gone on long enough.

  But at that very moment, Patsy decided it had gone on long enough too.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: AN EVEN HOTTER SHOWER

  Patsy was sagging, slumped up against the side of one of the caravans, his head lolling as he absorbed a ferocious pounding from Spider – and then, without warning, he was battering Spider with his small, hard fists, lunging powerfully forward, driving Spider backward with bone-breaking strength.

  He was playing possum! Sam thought, aghast, keeping his distance. Patsy was swallowing all those punches whole – he was just toying with Spider, lulling him into a false sense of superiority … just like he lulled me.

  Spider was thrown hopelessly off-guard by Patsy’s sudden revival. He took a terrifying cannonade of fast, shuddering punches to the side of his head, his chest, his stomach, his rib cage, which sent him staggering and veering wildly until he slammed against one of the caravans and slithered down it, half senseless. He left behind him a huge smear of blood shaped uncannily like Australia.

  Patsy loomed over Spider and smothered him with his whole body, like he meant to absorb him; he clamped his arms around Spider’s body and squeezed, throwing his head back and roaring as he did so. Spider made no sound; his mouth opened wide, the blood vessels in his face and neck swelled and stood out. Sam saw the spider tattoo along his neck rippling and bulging, saw the veins thrusting out from beneath it, but the only sound that came from Spider was a muffled, sickening crunch.

  With a cry, Patsy hurled Spider to the ground, and at once he planted one of his heavy, steel-capped boots onto the back of Spider’s neck and drove his face down into the mud.

  Sam found he was frozen. An inner voice was screaming at him – get in there, you’re a copper, break that fight up, nick Patsy before he kills Spider, do something! – but his body refused to react. The horror of what he had seen had locked his joints, stiffened his muscles, unmanned him.

  All around, he could hear the bellowing of excited men as they jostled and clambered to get a better view of the action in the arena. They drummed their fists against the sides of the caravans, creating a deafening timpani in every direction.

  His foot still planted on Spider’s neck, Patsy flung his arms into the air and roared. The crowd of men roared back. The lights of the fairground flashed in the sky beyond the confines of the arena, but to Sam they seemed to be flames lashing and whipping against the night; the low clouds reflected the smouldering glow of great lava flows that spread sluggishly across the face of the planet; the city itself was on fire, the buildings falling, the pavements melting, the very ground itself erupting in shattering bursts of hot lava and fragmented clinker. A million black balloons bobbed against the sulphurous sky.

  Sam covered his eyes with his hands, forced himself back from this hellish vision, forced himself to be sane. Furiously, he opened his eyes again and glared about. The lights of the fairground were just that – coloured lights – and the city was no longer burning and dying. It had been nothing; another o
f the Test Card Girl’s phantom visions – indeed, would he now glimpse the brat’s face staring sadly at him from the men in the crowd?

  I don’t give a damn if she’s there or not. Spider’s under my protection, and Patsy O’Riordan will not kill him. I will not permit it. I will stop it – NOW.

  Before he had a chance to lose his nerve, Sam strode forward with the intention of – somehow – arresting Patsy and calling for police back-up.

  But now Patsy was glaring right at him, his massive torso rising and falling with every breath, his tattoos glistening beneath a sheen of sweat and blood. His eyes blazed. If he was still just Patsy O’Riordan, or if he had become some other creature, the Devil in the Dark itself, Sam could no longer tell. The two monsters had, in Sam’s eyes at least, become one. His heart quailed. He thought of Annie, told himself that it was he and he alone who stood between her and the evil intentions of this ogre. He was the thin blue line that defied the advance of chaos.

  ‘Patsy O’Riordan, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Denzil Obi. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence against you.’

  The men whooped, jeered, brayed, hooted. Something was thrown into the arena, landing heavily next to Patsy, but Sam’s attention remained on that inked and inhuman face.

  ‘You’re coming with me, O’Riordan. You’re nicked.’

  Patsy leant over and picked up the object that had been thrown at his feet. It was a white plastic carton containing a transparent liquid.

  ‘Get your foot off Spider’s head, O’Riordan. That man needs an ambulance.’

  Patsy unscrewed the cap of the carton and started sloshing the liquid onto Spider’s back and legs, dousing him.

  ‘Don’t make me use force with you, O’Riordan,’ Sam heard himself say. ‘Come quietly. I’m warning you.’

  Emptying the carton, Patsy cast it carelessly aside. It was then that Sam was struck by the chemical stink of liquid paraffin. Pasty began groping in his trouser pocket for something. The men gawping into the arena from all sides had fallen silent. Nobody moved. Nobody blinked. Distant screams and laughs and music reached them from the fairground as Patsy produced a cigarette lighter.

  ‘O’Riordan,’ said Sam, his voice low and even, completely devoid of emotion. ‘Patsy. Stop.’

  ‘Ten years he ‘ad this coming,’ said Patsy, his voice husky. Still panting, he fixed Sam with his pale eyes. ‘You know what ‘im and Denzil did to me.’

  ‘I know. But we don’t discuss it here, like this. We discuss it back at the station, like men.’

  Patsy shook his head slowly: ‘I knew what you wanted, right from the start. I knew you wanted to bang me up for Denzil.’

  ‘Of course I want to bang you up for Denzil. You killed him.’

  ‘Right.’

  Patsy was flicking the lighter, trying to get a flame, and Sam realized then that reasoning with him was hopeless. He didn’t give a damn if it was one murder he went down for or two, or a hundred, or more – it was all the same to him. For ten years he had nursed his hatred of Denzil and Spider; for ten years he had looked forward to his revenge; and not once in all that time had he given so much as a thought to the consequences of killing two men. No threat of prison would deter him, or even give him cause for second thoughts. Such thoughts failed to register on Patsy’s inner radar. All he knew was that he wanted payback, and that he would get it.

  ‘It’s what the underworld’s like,’ Stella had said, back in the Lost & Found Room. ‘Fights that get fixed, fellas making off with winnings what aren’t theirs, blokes paid to bust other bloke’s hands. It’s the way it is. Betrayal and revenge.’

  Betrayal and revenge. That was it. Nothing else. In Patsy’s simplistic world of men and violence, that’s all there was: betrayal and revenge, turning forever on a wheel, over and over to the end of time.

  As the flame sprang from the lighter and danced there, cupped by Patsy’s small, narrow, iron-hard, murderous hand, Sam all at once found his thoughts flowing very clearly through his mind:

  Nothing I can say will stop Patsy burning Spider in front of me. But my duty is to stop him. If words and reason mean nothing to him, then I will have to use force. Regardless of the odds ranged against me, I have no choice. I simply have no choice.

  Sam aimed a swift kick. It struck Patsy’s hand and sent the lighter flying. But at once Patsy lunged at him. Sam flung himself away, landing in the mud and scrambling frantically to his feet – or tried to. He felt his boots skidding and sliding on the boggy ground. The wet ground swallowed his hands and held them like glue.

  With incredible calm, Sam found himself thinking: will he kick me to death or punch me to death?

  Glancing round, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Ray and Chris, peering in at him between two caravans. Chris’s one good eye was wide and fearful. Ray spat out a mouthful of blood and bared his teeth, cursing his impotence to break free from the hands that held him and help his fellow officer.

  Helpless, thought Sam. We’re all helpless.

  He felt Patsy’s hands clamp like vices on his shoulders and haul him with terrible, inhuman strength up out of the mud.

  Ah – he’s going to punch me – over and over, like he did to Denzil.

  Sam was turned roughly around, and he found himself nose to nose with Patsy. He could smell the man’s breath, hot and cloying as it gushed over him. It reeked of excrement.

  This close, he doesn’t look like a human being at all. Every bit of him is disfigured – his nose is flat and broken – his mouth is misshapen and ragged – his ear’s just a scrap of flesh hanging from the side of his head – and his skin … it’s green … green and blue from all that ink … Is this the last face I’ll ever see? Will I manage to think, for one last time, clearly and precisely, of Annie, before this monster finishes me off entirely? And after that, what then? Will he go after Annie? Whatever that Devil is that has come out of the darkness for her, it has found its expression in the body of Patsy O’Riordan – and I cannot stop it. I cannot defeat it. It will kill me … and then it will go after Annie … and I cannot bring myself to imagine the hell it intends to drag her to …

  ‘I’m sorry, Annie,’ he said, just as Patsy clamped his hands around Sam’s throat. And as his windpipe was squeezed shut, and he felt the blood bulging in his tongue and bursting in his temples, he thought: Maybe the guv can do what I can’t … maybe the guv can do what I can’t …

  There was a blur of movement, and the sense of heavy impact, and all at once Sam found himself sprawled on the mud, gasping air greedily into his lungs. Beside him, reeking of paraffin, lay Spider, leaking blood into the damp soil.

  In the next moment, he was surrounded by shouting and rushing and violent action. Sam scrubbed at his eyes, tried to clear them of the swirling patterns that filled his vision, and blinked stupidly this way and that. He saw Patsy staggering strangely across the arena, lashing at something on his back. It took a moment for Sam to realise that the something was a man – very short, very stocky, with cropped grey hair and a fierce, lined face.

  I’ve seen that face before …

  ‘Dermot,’ he croaked out loud. ‘Dermot … from the gym!’

  The short but hard-as-nails trainer from Stella’s Gym battered Patsy’s head with astonishing force, rattling his skull, sending him lurching and staggering until he crashed against one of the caravans and toppled over. Patsy smashed into the mud like a chunk of falling masonry – but Dermot clung on, firing his fists with precision into the bullet-like head as if he meant to crack it open like a monstrous, ink-stained egg.

  And now Sam was aware of the arena shaking all about him. The caravans lurched and shuddered as men fought and struggled on every side. He saw Ray break free from the man who held him, turn sharply, and throw a punch. He saw Chris ducking behind Ray and defending himself from the flying elbows of fighting men. And then he saw the guv.

  Sam’s heart leapt. Gene strode magnific
ently into the arena, planting his patent leather loafers into the mud heedless of how it soiled them. He still looked like a circus clown, with half his face black from bruising – and yet to Sam he appeared as an avenging angel arrived in a cloud of wrath.

  Moustache-man loomed up behind him, balled his fist – and then went down as Gene’s elbow rammed into his solar plexus.

  ‘No time for playing mud pies, Tyler. We got a shout. Ain’t you noticed?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY: PRINCESS

  The caravans rocked on their suspensions as all around him big men clashed with other big men. Sam saw faces that he seemed to recognise.

  ‘The lads from the gym!’ Gene declared, reaching down and hauling Sam to his feet. ‘Better than the Special Patrol Group.’

  ‘The gym?’

  ‘Stella’s Gym, you dope. You didn’t expect me to turn up here empty handed, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t expect you to turn up here at all, Guv. How the hell did you know?’

  If Gene had felt inclined to respond to Sam’s question, he got no chance as two huge fairground roustabouts burst out of the melee and hurled themselves at him. Gene caught one with a bone-crunching haymaker, delivered square-on and pulping the brute’s nose like a squashed tomato. It was enough to send him slithering into the mud, senseless – but his companion, a huge brawny bastard in jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, dropped his head and charged like a bull, ramming into Gene at full speed and lifting him clear off his feet. Cowboy locked his arms around Gene’s body as the guv’nor, carried along, rained hopeless blows on his back. Together, the two men slammed into the side of one of the painted caravans. Gene’s bruised face grimaced. Cowboy released him, but only long enough to jab two rapid blows into the guv’s guts, knocking the breath clear out of his lungs. In the next moment, Cowboy clamped his hands around Gene’s throat – but instead of throttling him, he began twisting and straining, trying to snap Gene’s neck.