Bad Blood

by David Bussell

  ‘Yeah, he, uh… sounds really great.’

  ‘Any boy who pays me attention, any boy I pay attention to, Layton will knock aside and trample underfoot. His love is boundless.’

  ‘Any boy?’

  ‘Any. Layton is very protective.’

  Huh. How protective, I wondered. Was that something to pick at? The Galoffis had three kids, and the only one left was a girl. Could he really be twisted enough to take his own boys out of the picture for getting too much of his wife’s attention? Was Layton really upset, or were those only glycerine tears he was crying?

  Maybe things were even more twisted around here than I’d already thought.

  The following day I met Lana at Codrophenia, Brighton’s premier fish and chip shop. The walls of the restaurant were covered in memorabilia from the 1970s, and a genuine old-time jukebox cranked out hits from The Who and The Lambrettas. The place was busy with lunchtime trade, so much so that people were queuing outside to pick up their takeaways despite the winter rain pissing on their upturned faces.

  Lana is my cousin, and my anchor to the normal world. She’s also the closest link I have to my family, being the only one of them I still talk to. She’s a couple of years older than me, blonde, with a perfect ski slope nose and smiling eyes. In short, she’s cute as fuck.

  A man in a white apron and a mesh fedora placed two cups of tea, a couple of battered cods, and a good five kilos of deep fried chips in front of us.

  ‘I’ll get these,’ I said, but I hadn’t even finished my sentence before Lana handed him her bank card.

  ‘My treat.’

  I thanked her and dug into my fish, crispy on the outside, white and flaky in the middle, just the way I liked it. It was good. Too good. I multi-tasked as I chowed down, reaching into my bag, pulling out a flask, and unscrewing the cap.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Lana, a crease furrowing her brow.

  ‘What does it look like? I’m Irishing up this cuppa.’

  She shook her head and tutted.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you can knock my job or you can knock my drinking. You can’t do both.’

  ‘I think we both know that I can,’ she replied, smiling.

  Lana knew what I did for a living, which made her what we call an Insider, a member of the public who knew about the Uncanny world. Not that she had anything to do with it. Lana was far too busy with nappy changes and naughty steps to worry about ghosts and goblins. Good. The last thing I wanted was to drag her into my world. What she didn’t know, not fully, was the real reason I drank so much, or the fact that the booze was often chasing a fistful of pain pills. My tattoos, the magical runes grafted onto a body that they weren’t meant for, well, they hurt. Always. They were agony to have applied, and for as long as they were effective, they caused my flesh to ache, my bones to throb. My life was lived with a constant background noise of pain. But tough titty, that was just the price I paid for working in the world I did. Without them I’d have been dead a long time ago.

  ‘I told your dad that you were out of jail. Has he been in touch?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, taking a swig of my electrified tea. ‘Surprised?’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to needle around in old wounds.’

  No matter how many times I told her to stop reporting back to my parents, she did it anyway. It made me angry, but I knew why she did it. Knew she had this stupid dream that one day the family would heal and everything would be all puppies and roses again. That I’d be happy enough to finally walk away from the dangerous life I’d elbowed my way into.

  ‘Talking of foul, decaying things, I went back to our old flat the other day.’

  ‘You did? How is the place?’

  ‘Haunted. There’s a ghost squatting there. Nice lady. Bit muddled.’

  ‘I see,’ replied Lana, not at all perturbed. ‘And she’s what, part of a case?’

  ‘No. Maybe.’ I refilled my cup. ‘There’s a chance the thing I’m working on is connected to James.’ I said it as nonchalantly as I could, but my heart was beating against my chest like a jackhammer.

  ‘James? Are you sure?’ asked Lana, her eyes so wide she looked like she’d fallen out of an anime.

  ‘Well, no. But there’s a chance. I mean, I know the case is cold, but at this point I’ll grab for any ember that flashes past.’

  Lana gave me a smile full of sisterly concern. ‘You need to be careful, Erin. Embers burn.’

  I nodded, tired, my eyelids sinking to half-mast.

  ‘How late were you out until last night?’ asked Lana. ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘You too,’ I snapped. ‘Must be those two migraines you call kids.’

  ‘Don’t be like that. I only mentioned it because I care.’

  ‘I’m all right. I just need a bit of kip and a new lick of paint, that’s all.’

  I had to see Parker and get my tattoos redone. The ones he gave me last time were almost burned out after the shoeing I got from the Galoffis’ goons. I wasn’t born Uncanny, which meant magic only stuck to me for so long, and if I was going to carry on with this case I was going to need a full tank of petrol.

  Lana pointed past me, up in the air. ‘Um, what is that?’

  I turned in my chair to see a winged baby hovering over my shoulder. ‘What are you doing here, Cupid?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Lana, ‘but why is no one else mentioning the flying child?’

  She gestured to the rest of the restaurant's patrons, who ate their battered cod and sausages, completely ignorant of the supernatural visitor.

  ‘They only see me if I want them to,’ Cupid explained, pulling down the back of his nappy and mooning the oblivious diners. He turned to me with a filthy look in his eye. ‘Who’s your fit mate?’ asked the grubby bugger, before he fluttered over, took her mitt in his, and kissed the back of her hand. ‘Charmed.’

  ‘I’m Lana,’ she said, giggling like a schoolgirl.

  ‘All right, that’s enough of that,’ I said, breaking them up. To me, Cupid looks like a bag of spoiled mayonnaise, but he was the God of desire once, and he still knew how to turn on the charm when he wanted to. ‘He’s a baby for crying out loud,’ I told Lana. ‘Get involved with this one and you’d literally be a cradle snatcher.’

  ‘That wasn’t a very nice thing to say,’ said Cupid. ‘Now I don’t know if I want to tell you what I found out about your missing boy...’

  I grabbed him by one of his chubby ankles and dragged him to eye-level. ‘If you know something about the kidnapper you’d better tell me right now, because I’ve got a knife here and plenty of salt and vinegar.’

  ‘All right, all right, keep your hair on!’

  A few of the other patrons turned our way, no doubt keen to know who the madwoman brandishing a dinner knife was arguing with.

  I lowered my voice to a hiss. ‘Talk.’

  ‘There was a bloke seen lurking in the area of the Galoffi mansion the night their son went walkies. A bloke with a bad reputation.’

  ‘Does he have red eyes?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ he replied, yanking a picture from his nappy and handing it over.

  I grabbed it to see a man with a shaved head, his face tattooed with a skull. His eyes weren’t red. I felt myself deflate a little, but pushed the disappointment aside. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Hired muscle. Goes by the name of Sharez Jek. He’s like you.’

  ‘How is he like me?’

  ‘Likes his magic ink,’ he said, pointing to my tattoos. ‘Covered in the stuff, only his are a bit more lively than yours. Come to life, apparently. Quite the party trick.’

  Sharez Jek. His name wasn’t on my shit list, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t working for someone whose was. Could he and the Red-Eyed Man have been working this thing?

  ‘You’d better tread carefully round this feller,’ said Cupid. ‘You might think you’re bad news, but this guy…’

  Lana put her hand over mine and leaned in. ‘Erin, be careful, please.�
��

  ‘Don’t worry about me, cuz,’ I said with a grin, ‘I shit bad news for breakfast.’

  ‘You do what?’

  I sucked my teeth. ‘That sounded a lot better in my head, it really did.’

  8

  The sign pointing foot traffic in the direction of Parker’s tattoo parlour was a placard held by a scruffy-looking young man in a string vest and slashed leather trousers, presumably because it was cheaper to pay a dropout to hold a sign than it was to hammer a stake into the ground.

  Black Cat Ink was a shabby little affair just off of Western Road. Not one of your chic, sophisticated tattoo studios built like an East End art gallery, but a traditional, unpretentious basement that looked like the set of a Meatloaf video. So yeah, pretty awesome.

  I pulled back the curtain to the back room. There, in the middle of a chequerboard floor and reclining in a reclaimed dentist chair, was Parker.

  ‘Erin, girl, why you been a stranger?’

  ‘You know me, Parks, been busy dressing up as a vampire and attacking naked old men.’

  Parker laughed as he swung his feet off the chair and made his way over. He had no trouble navigating the distance, despite being as blind as a tin can. I asked him flat out once if he’d always been full-on Mr. Magoo, or if something had happened to make him that way, but he changed the subject. I got the impression that it wasn’t his favourite topic of conversation, so I’ve stopped asking questions since. These days I just go with the flow. There are crazier things in this world than a blind tattoo artist that can graft magic on your flesh. Crazier things in this city, even.

  Parker was lean and clean-shaven except for a crop of short dreadlocks perched on top of his head. His skin was dark as a hole in space, his teeth as white as chalk. He seemed to study me with his milky eyes, though in reality I knew he saw by some other means. Exactly how he saw and what it was he saw I’d never really got to grips with. Parker liked to say he could see into a person’s very soul; not entirely sure if he was being serious or creepy.

  He ran his hands up my arms and across my shoulders. If any other man had tried that without asking they’d have felt a mean kick in the conkers, but Parker’s intentions were pure.

  ‘This ink’s almost washed out,’ he said, tracing his delicate fingers along my faded tattoos. ‘You’ve been busy.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m due a top up. You got time to do me a fix?’

  ‘Depends, am I getting my ten percent?’

  ‘Aw, come on, the Galoffi gig didn’t even come through you.’

  ‘Girl, so long as you’re using my tattoos, I’m part of every gig.’

  I crossed my arms over my chest in a huff. He was right, and it’s not as though I didn’t owe him. If it wasn’t for Parker, I wouldn’t even know the Uncanny world existed. Still, I’m a greedy, stroppy bitch.

  ‘Five percent of the Galoffi cash,’ I said.

  ‘Ten percent.’

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘Seven percent, and that’s my final offer.’

  ‘Ten percent.’

  ‘Eight percent is my new and actual final, final offer.’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘You drive a soft bargain,’ said Parker as he shook my hand and showed me all of his teeth. Like I say, I could hardly begrudge him. He gave me the Uncanny power I needed to walk in this world. Set me up so I could work. Got me more jobs than I could count. Still, we did this dance every now and again, and I think we both got a kick out of it.

  He gestured to the chair and I stretched out on the still-warm leather. Parker dragged over a wheeled workstation, positioned his cushion armrest, and peeled the sterilised wrap from a fresh needle.

  ‘What’ll it be today, Miss Banks? Something tribal? A barbed wire armband? How about a nice smiley face on your gut that looks like a frown by the time you’re fifty?’ He laughed, his dreadlocks dancing, his head tipped back so far that I could see his gold fillings.

  ‘If it’s okay with you, Parker, I think I might go with some ancient runes that leach magic from my surroundings and make me stronger, faster, and more resilient.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ he shrugged.

  He dragged across an anglepoise lamp and positioned it over me, a habit he’d developed to appease his more skittish customers, some of which saw his cloudy, sightless eyes and experienced an understandable attack of buyer’s remorse.

  I gritted my teeth as Parker stepped on a pedal and his enchanted tattoo gun came alive with a buzz. As the scratchy sting of the needle met my forearm and dragged across my skin, his eyes blazed white and pure. I felt my fingernails dig into my palms as the silvery light from Parker’s eyes snaked around his arms and entered the tattoo gun, where it blended with the ink inside. The electrified concoction was punched into my flesh, pinching, burning. Each time he reapplied them it felt as though my bones were having their own private earthquake. By which I mean it always hurt like a motherfucker.

  While I trembled beneath his needle, Parker traced over the murky lines of my faded runes. I talked to him through gritted teeth, questioning him about the lead Cupid had given me. ‘I’m looking for a man called Sharez Jek. That name mean anything to you?’

  Parker stepped off the pedal and his tattoo gun went dead. ‘Where did you get that name?’

  ‘You know him?’

  Parker frowned and got back to work. ‘Gave him a tattoo once, years back. Just once.’

  ‘That bad, eh? What is he, a talker?’

  Parker shivered. ‘Yeah. He talked. Talked mad shit that got stuck in my head for weeks.’

  ‘I don’t get it. Why didn’t you just kick him out? You always say you only give your tattoos to those who deserve them.’

  ‘Maybe because he had a gun to my head.’

  ‘I see. And if I do that next time, do you think you’d cave to eight percent?’

  ‘I’m serious. This guy… steer well clear.’

  ‘Parks, I’ve gone up against werewolves, golems, demon spawn, what’s so special about this guy?’

  The needle stopped its assault for a second as Parker’s sightless eyes met mine. ‘You ain’t bad like this.’ The corners of Parker’s usually cheery mouth turned down. ‘There’s a story I heard about someone who tried to fuck Sharez Jek over. A story about what Jek did to him.’ Parker stepped on his pedal and the needle came to life again, hammering into my flesh, filling in the gaps of my exhausted runes. As he worked, he talked. ‘I heard about it from a guy I know, a street kid called Screws. He found the body of one of Jek’s victims. Found him under the arches on Madeira Drive. No eyelids, holes through his wrists, skin like minced beef, all torn up and mangled.’ Despite his deep black colouring, Parker visibly paled.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I think he was murdered.’

  ‘Hilarious. Specifically, what happened?’

  ‘I got the skinny from a copper who comes in here from time to time. Told me they knew it was Jek, but they didn’t have enough evidence to pin it on him. Says it wasn’t the first time Jek had done that to someone. The last body they found was the same way, only they found that one in situ. Holes in the wrists were from meathooks hanging him from a rafter. The eyelids had been sliced off with a razor blade.’

  ‘And what about the rest of him?’ I asked, fairly certain I didn’t want to know. ‘The mangled skin.’

  ‘They found the answer to that lying on the ground under the dead guy’s swinging feet. A pair of boxing gloves wrapped in barbed wire. See, Jek isn’t just a sadist, he’s an artisan of pain. Used the poor bastard for a punching bag, and he did it slow. Did it long. Enjoyed it. I tell you, Jek ain’t no joke.’

  ‘Bloody hell. What did the bloke do to deserve that?’

  ‘According to a witness the fuzz questioned, he got what he got for interrupting a joke Jek was telling.’

  I felt a chill in my veins. ‘No one likes their punchline getting ruined.’

  ‘Bad, bad news. You get on the radar of a g
uy like that and you never get off their radar, you know what I’m sayin’?’

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be spiked through the wrists and beaten to death with razor wire. Watching your body turned to ribbons, your organs peeking through the gashes, unable to look away because your eyelids had been peeled off. I’d put a tenner on this Jek sicko being a big Hellraiser fan. Probably had a Pinhead poster on his bedroom door when he was a teenager.

  ‘Anything else you know about Jek?’ I asked. ‘Hangouts, acquaintances, that kind of stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know where he lays his hat,’ Parker replied, finishing up a rune on my tricep and moving on to the next one, ‘but I know he’s had dealings with your current employers.’

  I jerked away from him so violently that I almost ended up with a stray line of permanent ink licked across my arm. ‘The Galoffis? Are you serious?’

  ‘Ain’t that why you were asking about him?’

  ‘Yeah, sort of.’

  It almost seemed too neat. Too tidy. Thanks to Parker’s tip-off I could now draw a clear line between the guy seen lurking around the Galoffi mansion and the family of the missing boy. Was Jek working alone though, settling some old score, or did Layton have a hand in this? Could the Galoffi patriarch have been dealing with him again? Hiring Jek to kidnap his boy so he could have Millie all to himself? That would explain why his name wasn’t on the list Layton gave me. Was that piece of paper really just a menu full of red herrings?

  Something about that theory didn’t feel right, but it was a theory I couldn’t ignore. Still, I decided to backburner that line of enquiry for the moment. Stick to what you know, I told myself. Stick to tracking down Jek. Find him and the rest will come into focus. And where did the Red-Eyed Man fit into the puzzle anyway? I couldn’t say, but if I managed to find Jek, maybe I’d have a lead on the man who took my brother.

  Parker took his foot off the pedal and towelled some blood off my shoulder. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked, inspecting his handiwork.