Bad Blood

by David Bussell

  ‘Whatever floats your boat, love,’ I replied, ‘now tell me where I find Sharez Jek. He was here, I saw him.’ I looked about the hushed audience, hoping to find the tattooed man lurking somewhere in the crowd.

  ‘You’ll get nothing from me,’ said Neroni.

  ‘What are you talking about? We had a deal.’

  The angel grinned. ‘The cage might not lie, you demented mare... but I do.’

  She clicked her fingers and a gang of bruisers emerged from the crowd, four, five, six… way more than I could handle, especially since I’d only just walked away from one fight to the death, and my tattoos were already half burned out. No, this wasn’t the time for doing battle or engaging in witty repartee. This was time to run.

  I spun about and took to my toes, forcing my way through the throng towards the way out. A few brave souls summoned up the courage to try grabbing me and received complimentary nosebleeds for their efforts. With the whole of the monster mash hot on my heels, I punched a hole to the exit. I was met there by the gargoyle bouncer, who filled the doorframe like an ice hockey goalie. He shot out his arms and tried for a grapple, but I dropped to the floor and slid between his legs, slipping through the door and escaping the confines of The Shark Tank.

  Leaving the smell of fish and sweat behind, I was met with a bracing blast of salt air as I sprinted out across the port. The wind rasped at my skin as I fled, howling in my ears, whipping my hair into knots. I heard a noise like a backfiring car and felt a sharp punch to the thigh that sent me sprawling. Some fucker had shot me! A look over my shoulder confirmed it, revealing the club doorman with his arm levelled, a smoking shooter in his hand. Accompanying him were at least a dozen other thugs, all of them heading in my direction, all of them high on the smell of blood.

  I dragged myself up and started hopping on my one good leg, pain searing me like a branding iron. I only made it as far as a mooring bollard before I had to give up and prop myself against it for support. I was never going to outrun them, not until my leg was fixed. Neroni’s thugs were going to catch me, kill me, and bury me like the Cancel Account button of a first-month-free subscription service. Sweat dripped from my face, stinging my eyes. Gulls wheeled about overhead like vultures. I peered over the edge of the port to the sea below. I had been meaning to take up swimming again.

  I dived into the briny deep, the icy water knocking the air from my lungs as I struck it with an ungainly crash. I wasn’t able to kick my legs well, so I windmilled my arms, clawing my way along, desperate to put some distance between me and my pursuers. Another shot rang out, accompanied by a bright flash of orange. A moment later a bullet zinged by my ear and tunnelled into the water beside me. I had to get gone, and fast. I tipped my body forward and started swimming downwards, no plan in mind, just doing what I could to stay out of sight. I heard a couple of muffled cracks from above and saw two shafts burrow through the black tide, lit by strobes of muzzle flash.

  I was stuck. If I surfaced for air I’d get slotted, but if I swam any deeper I’d drown for sure. I can’t say either option appealed, but soon enough a third one presented itself as my body went into shock and my limbs seized up. I was staying right where I was, too battered to fight, too exhausted to run. Unable to hold my breath any longer, I tasted salt in my throat as the water rushed into my lungs. I felt the darkness envelop me. I was going down.

  What had I been thinking? I should have known better than to trust Neroni. I mean, what’s a fallen angel really but a demon with a halo?

  Yeah, all said and done, this had been a bit of a fuck up.

  10

  I woke up spewing brine and gasping for air. The thing that hit me next was the smell, which hummed like an upturned porta-potty. I was in a large, open cylinder made of clammy, moss-covered concrete. I couldn’t make sense of the place. My eyes were open and my body was moving, but my brain had yet to catch up.

  As I lay there, waterlogged, head spinning, I realised I was on a gantry of some sort. Up above I could hear a rumble of traffic, tyres on tarmac, echoing through the tunnel in a low, buzzing burr and travelling through the metal I was lying on. Down below me ran a magma of shit and stagnant water, bubbling and belching its wretched hot breath.

  ‘Rise and shine,’ said a familiar voice.

  Lurking in the gloom, I saw a person who looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid rescued from a landfill.

  ‘Cupid? Well, I’ve woken up to worse,’ I said, and really, really wished that wasn’t true. Booze is the Devil’s milk, children. Tasty, tasty Devil milk.

  ‘Saw you thrashing around and fished you out of the drink,’ he said as he flapped his wings by way of demonstration. ‘You should count yourself lucky I was out this way.’

  ‘You couldn’t hole me up someplace a little nicer than a sewer?’

  ‘Oh la-di-da, Your Majesty!’ he said, prancing about on the tips of his toes. ‘Too much of a princess for the sewer, are ya?’

  I tore a rip in my jeans to inspect for damage and was pleased to discover that my tattoos had made short work of the bullet wound. Where there should have been a gaping hole, I found a patch of healed-up scar tissue, which was just as well, as—and I’m no doctor here—I’m pretty sure an open wound and a sewer made for a bad mix.

  ‘Well, go on then,’ said Cupid, ‘what were you doing messing around in The Shark Tank?’

  I rolled on to my knees and spat the last of the seawater from my lungs. ‘Thought I had a lead on the Galoffi kid. Turned out to be a bust.’ Well, not totally. I’d laid eyes on Sharez Jek for the first time. I remembered his smile and shivered. He was close. It was only a matter of time before I turned over the right rock.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ve turned up anything new?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a sausage,’ Cupid replied.

  Honestly, if this day had a face, I'd have punched it in the balls.

  My visit to The Shark Tank had led nowhere. Even if Neroni did know where Jek could be found, there was no way I was paying her another visit to get anything out of her. I was just going to have to come at him from some other angle.

  Planting a hand on the gantry, I forced myself to my feet and stood up straight, making my spine crack back into shape. My head ached and my joints felt as though they were full of broken glass, but other than that I felt just amazing. Sarcasm. Dig it.

  ‘Look at you, back from the dead,’ said Cupid, impressed by my powers of recuperation. He ran his eyes over my ink. ‘Your tattoo bloke must be top notch. Maybe I’ll pay him a visit, get some of my own one day. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Sure, a tattooed baby, what could be cuter than that?’ I dusted off my jacket. ‘What were you doing all the way out here anyway?’

  ‘Fairies,’ he replied. ‘Shoreham fairies are the best in the land.’ He opened one of his podgy mitts to reveal the body of a dead fairy, the head of which he then bit off and ground up in his mouth. ‘Gorgeous,’ he said, chewing with his gob open.

  Don’t feel bad for his meal. Fairies were rotten little bastards known for laying eggs in the bellies of rough sleepers. Still, I’d never gotten used to the way some Uncanny folk gobbled them up like chocolate bars.

  I took off my jacket to wring the seawater from its pockets, and in doing so found my phone, once lightly smashed, now utterly drowned from my impromptu dip in the Channel.

  ‘Balls.’

  I shook some water out of it, but all the dry rice in the world wasn’t going to save the thing now. Damn. Then a truly horrifying thought occurred…

  ‘My hip flask…’

  I scrabbled around the jacket’s inside pocket until I found a comforting, solid lump.

  ‘Thank Christ.’

  But there was something else in there too. I tipped it out and it hit the gantry with a wet slap. I reached down to pick it up and found a sodden note, its ink running but still legible. Where did that come from? I opened it up and found a baby’s ear folded into the message.

  The signature read Sharez Jek.

&n
bsp; I set the severed ear down on the Galoffi’s dining room table. They were eating dinner at the time, and the sight of it did nothing for their appetite.

  Millie spat a mouthful of Foie Gras back on her plate. ‘My little boy!’

  Layton shot up, knocking his chair over backwards and turning to me. ‘What are you doing?’ he cried.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Sharez Jek?’ I fired back.

  ‘And just what is it we should have told you?’

  Layton gestured to his chief heavy to remove the ear from the table. Busey’s Stuntman growled at me like a broken lawnmower, then picked up the offending item and spirited it away.

  ‘I’m the one asking the questions,’ I said, ‘so maybe answer them before we get another special delivery.’

  ‘You think Jek is involved in this?’ asked Layton, sliding an after-dinner cigar from a humidor and snipping off its tip with a guillotine cutter.

  ‘You tell me, you’re the one who’s had dealings with him.’

  ‘I have had dealings with many people, Ms Banks,’ he replied, lighting his stogie, taking a puff, and exhaling twin plumes through his nostrils.

  ‘Yeah, but how many of them were seen outside your gaff on the night of the abduction?’

  Layton took a calming breath then turned a cold eye on me. ‘I haven’t seen Sharez Jek in many years, but I can tell you this much: the man is a mercenary. He is the fist, not the brains. If he has any part in this business it will only be because someone on that list I gave you hired him.’

  I still had questions. ‘Why did you end your relationship with Jek?’

  ‘Because he was too unpredictable. Too unpleasant.’

  That’s something, I thought, coming from the mouth of a sister-fucker who lived in a mansion that took the interior decor of The Addams Family and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as style guides.

  ‘My love, if Jek is involved…’ said Millie, her skin somehow turned paler than it already was. I’d seen her scared before, but this was something new. This read like terror. ‘You know what he… how he…?’ her words faltered as Layton took her hand in his.

  This Jek guy certainly played on people’s nerves. I thought back to the grin I’d seen at the Shark Tank. To the story Parker had told me. If this fuck thought he could get under my skin he had another think coming.

  I slapped the waterlogged note on the table. ‘The ear he slipped me came with a message.’

  Layton snatched it up and read it. I watched a lump travel up his throat and back down again.

  ‘Well?’ said Millie. ‘What does it say?’

  Layton turned to his wife, slowly. ‘It says I must cut off a finger and see it delivered to the address provided or…’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or Leo will die,’ I said

  Layton put an arm around Millie’s shoulder. ‘The note said I must do it as punishment for hiring Ms Banks.’

  Weird. Ordinarily, the body parts only went one direction in a ransom situation. Try as I might, I just couldn’t make sense of this case. My whole investigation was a mess, a jigsaw puzzle with bits of other puzzles jumbled into the box.

  ‘What if the kidnapper intends to make use of your missing finger?’ asked Millie. ‘What if he means to curse you?’

  ‘Do you think I care?’ said Layton. ‘Leo is my heir. To lose him would be the only curse I care about.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt yourself, Daddy.’ The voice belonged to their daughter, Sophia, who stood in the dining room doorway wearing a nightdress and rubbing her eyes.

  ‘Go back to bed, dear,’ said Layton, ‘you shouldn’t be up at this hour.’

  Millie showed the girl from the room, casting one last glance over her shoulder to her brother before heading upstairs. ‘Good night, dear.’

  Layton took a seat opposite me. ‘Would you be a lamb and pass me that cigar cutter, Ms Banks?’

  I slid it across the table to him.

  Eyes locked to mine, Layton placed the little finger of his left hand into the cutter’s hole and clamped down in it, severing the appendage in one quick action. The man didn’t even flinch. He placed the severed finger on a small serving plate and pushed it over to my side of the table.

  ‘On the bright side, you’re gonna shave valuable seconds off your nail care routine.’

  Layton made slits of his eyes. ‘Take that to the rendezvous point, give Jek what he wants, and find out who he’s working for. I want him dead. I want them all dead. Do you understand me?’

  I watched him swaddle the bloody stump in a silk handkerchief. If Layton was behind Leo’s disappearance, he was really going all out to throw off any suspicion.

  I wrapped the finger in a napkin and pushed my chair back with a scrape. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’ll get you your boy back.’

  ‘I do hope so. I’d hate to have to hire someone to come after you, too.’

  Great. Stuck between a Jek and a headcase.

  11

  I had a few hours to kill, time enough to head home before making the drop-off, which was lucky, as the clothes I had on stank of seawater and sewer scum. Not the most fragrant of combinations.

  I sighed with pleasure as hot water pummeled me from the shower head. Layton cutting his finger off like that was pretty messed up, but no more so than the rest of the things I’d seen since I started working in this world. Christ, I’d done worse myself, much worse. You don’t make money in my line of work by asking nicely.

  I killed the water and stepped on to the cool of the cracked tiles, wrapping a towel around me that could have done with a wash about three weeks ago. Laundry was never high on my to-do list. Lana, she was a to-do list kind of lady. Me, I was just a doer.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Go away,’ I said, not bothering to check who it was.

  ‘Girl, open up.’

  ‘Parker?’

  ‘Hurry up, it stinks like piss out here.’

  Well, that was a little weird. Not the piss thing, my porch was used as a urinal by half the tramps in Brighton, but Parker at my door? He wasn’t one for home visits.

  ‘Just a sec,’ I replied, tossing the wet towel aside and wriggling into a fresh pair of jeans and t-shirt. Okay, fresh might have been pushing it, but they didn’t smell like a sewer rat had been sleeping in them, so they were a step up.

  I opened the door and Parker hustled inside, white stick in hand.

  ‘If you’d called ahead I’d have laid on tea and crumpets.’

  ‘Funny. Is there a place to sit in here that won’t give me herpes?’

  I looked around the living area doubtfully, then grabbed a wooden chair that was only a little bit sticky. ‘Fit for a queen,’ I said.

  Parker frowned but took the seat anyway.

  ‘So what’s this all about?’ I asked.

  Parker sighed and sagged back in his chair. ‘This guy, Jek.’

  ‘I know, I know, bad dude, got it.’

  ‘We’re no angels, girl. People die ‘cos of us, and not all of them deserve it. Not all of them are bad, but if the money’s there, then so are you.’

  ‘Get to the point, Parks, I’m on a deadline.’

  ‘We’re bad. At least, we ain’t good. But this guy… something about him just makes me…’

  ‘Makes you what?’

  Parker’s sightless, white eyes met mine. ‘Makes me shiver. I never had nightmares, not for years, not since I was a kid. But after I met him, after I heard some of his stories from his own lips… I ain’t a coward, I’ve pissed off demons like it was nothing, you get me? But only Jek made me wake up sweating, and all he did was tell me stories.’

  Parker was clutching his cane to his chest now, his knuckles pale.

  ‘I’m not scared,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’re dumb.’

  ‘It’s been said before,’ I told him with a smile.

  ‘Maybe you’ll think twice about this one.’

  ‘Not gonna happen.’

  P
arker nodded and stood up from the chair. ‘I know, but I had to say it. I want you to know what this guy is before you go head-to-head with him.’

  ‘And just what is he, Parks?’

  ‘He don’t care. That’s what he is. You can’t reason with don’t care.’ Parker turned and headed for the door.

  I’d be lying if I said Parker’s little intervention hadn’t given me something to chew over. Clearly, this Jek guy was going to be a handful, but then so was I. I wasn’t going to step away. Run for the hills because things looked iffy. Jek might be a psycho, but he still bled. Still hurt. Still died like anyone else.

  At least, I really hoped he did.

  The plan was to give Jek the grisly package and beat him three-quarters to death. Once that little job was out of the way, I’d politely ask him who was holding the Galoffi kid and where I could find his supposed accomplice, the Red-Eyed Man.

  The designated drop-off point was a spot on the north lawns of The Level, a community green space behind St. Peter’s church. I was instructed to come alone. It was midnight when I got there, and chucking it down so hard it felt like the rain was trying to break my skin. I was stood under the sickly light of one of the park’s last unbroken street lamps, the dirt beneath my feet rapidly turning into gravy. In my hand I held a padded, plasticated envelope containing Layton’s severed finger, which I dangled before me like bait.

  Oh, I couldn’t wait to give Jek the finger.

  I scanned my surroundings, looking for signs of a visitor. Nothing. Just me and the raindrops. Hm. Erin & The Raindrops. If I ever started a twee indie band, I had our name sorted. An hour passed before I saw anything at all, just a flash of movement at first, a rustle in the darkness, then a figure emerging into the light. I hunched forward, but it was just a scrawny-looking cat.

  Damn it.

  ‘Get out of here!’ I hissed at the mog, shooing it away.