Sun of the Sleepless

by Patrick Horne

  Sonny chuckled and held up his left hand, thumbing the wedding band.

  'No, no, I'm strictly a one-woman man now, but I was your age too, a few years back now admittedly but I kinda remember it.'

  'Were you a stud back then?' she chuckled, emphasising the word in a faux Texan accent.

  'Hell no, I was always the strong silent type, I guess the girls liked me because I was just so damn cool!'

  'How old are you now then?'

  'I'm thirty-nine in a couple of weeks time, 20th January,' he paused as he concentrated on negotiating the car in front as it pulled up sharply and attempted to manoeuvre straight into a space between parked cars at the kerb, 'we should try and get a few people out for a drink and maybe go somewhere afterwards.'

  'Oh yeah! We can go to a club I know, you lot can all be my biatches,' Rebecca enthused.

  Sonny laughed at the Jamaican patois and shook his head.

  'I only wear a dog collar for one woman!'

  They were now approaching the pub and Sonny slowed the car and indicated left, turning sharply as he palmed the steering wheel around and drove into the largely empty car park. Aiming for what he gauged to be a space marked out under the snow, he accelerated sharply and then braked heavily, feeling the car slide to a stop before quickly switching the engine off as he knocked the gear-stick into park in a fluid well practised motion.

  'Right, let's go!'

  Sonny held the door to the main bar open and let Rebecca enter before him. It had been a good couple of years since the senses could be affronted by the smell of tobacco smoke when entering a pub, the smokers ostracised and barred to the elements outside. Rather, since the law prohibiting smoking in enclosed public places had been passed the previously subtle nuances of the aromas of intoxicating spirits and beers had come to the fore, producing a much more inviting sensory effect.

  Rebecca paused at the threshold and looked around. The place was practically empty except for a couple of burly men chatting to the barman and two young office workers playing a slot machine in a corner, looking somewhat bedraggled in their ill-fitting and crumpled suits, the whoops, sirens and bells of the beckoning machine mesmerising them except when they glanced at the door as it swung open, immediately noting Rebecca as she entered.

  Wearing a shirt with a collar a couple of sizes too big and his tie at a skewed angle, one of them elbowed his compatriot gawker and nodded in her direction. She could not help but notice their barely disguised attentions, whispering together across the tops of their pints as they broke off from their play and poised their glasses ready for another gulp. Arching the left side of her upper lip into a grimace of exaggerated disgust, she gave a subtle shake of her head and rolled her eyes, displaying her disdain as she turned and walked over to the table where she had spotted Adrian and Patrick sitting.

  As she approached she heard Adrian bellowing in good spirits, 'I don't think you're a fish monger at all! I think you've done a plop in the wrong lavatory!' He proceeded to guffaw at his own line but Patrick smiled uncomprehendingly at the joke although he appeared amused by Adrian's obvious delight.

  'You've got to see it,' Adrian said, slapping Patrick's arm, 'it is so funny!'

  He looked up as Rebecca arrived at his side, Sonny following up a couple of steps behind, a bemused look appearing on his face.

  'What kept you? We had to start without you!'

  'What?' responded Sonny, looking at his watch. 'Its only ten past ten, you can't call that late! I suppose you're on your second pint already Adrian?'

  'Hah!' Patrick snorted, 'I'm still on my first drink, Adrian just gobbles it down!'

  'Hey,' wailed Adrian, 'we'll have none of those accusations; I'm a married man!'

  'Eh?' exclaimed Patrick, somewhat perplexed. 'What the hell are you talking about?'

  'Never mind! German you see?' he noted to Sonny and Rebecca as he nodded at Patrick. 'Anyway, I'm driving back home this evening to the warm bosom of my wife and the surly embrace of my kids, so I don't have to worry about coming into work tomorrow. I can roll straight out of bed into my home office!'

  Patrick dragged out a stool from under the table and pushed it toward Rebecca.

  'Here, sit down,' he offered.

  Adrian stood up and groaned as he stretched.

  'I'm going to take a leak and then I'll get your drinks in, what do you want?'

  Sonny looked at Rebecca.

  'Oh,' she said as she straddled the stool and placed her handbag down, 'I'll have an Archers please!'

  'A coke for me thanks Adrian,' Sonny nodded.

  'Urghhh,' Adrian gurgled, 'you should have got your missus to drop you off; you could have had a drink then!'

  'No, that's fine man, I've been trying to take it easy anyway.'

  'Patrick?' Adrian asked as he started to back away.

  Patrick shook his head to decline the offer as he took a sip from his drink and Adrian's voice trailed off as he turned to walk toward the bar. He started crooning to himself, launching into the opening lines of 'I'll Be Home For Christmas' before dodging into a side corridor to head to the lavatories, his baritone echoing of the walls of the narrow passage as he disappeared.

  Sonny picked up a beer mat and started strumming it against his thigh as he made himself comfortable at the table.

  'So what's everyone been up to then?'

  'Not much, today has been pretty boring really, nobody seems to be in the office,' sighed Rebecca.

  'Yeah, I had a bit of a rush on some documents for Hungary and Czech Republic last week but this morning I was just surfing the web,' Patrick chuckled.

  'You been surfing porn again?' Sonny laughed.

  'Hey, I was checking the news out, but I admit, I did have a look at YouTube, I was watching some videos about some weird witch thing flying in Mexico.'

  Sonny looked incredulous.

  'A witch? What the hell are you talking about?'

  'They've got this video,' Patrick enthused, 'it looks like a witch riding a broomstick across these hills somewhere in Mexico, then, she lands on the top of one of them and they have a close-up of her and you can see her legs running along before she takes off again.'

  'Awww man, that's just bullshit, probably just a bunch of balloons floating about,' Sonny said shaking his head.

  'Ohhh, my brother loves stuff like that,' Rebecca said excitedly to Patrick, 'he's really into UFOs and stuff, you'll have to tell him about that when we go back to mine.'

  'Whoaahh,' laughed Sonny, 'something you guys aren't telling me?'

  'No, doofus,' she mocked, 'we're just going to get a takeaway later and eat it back at mine, don't get too excited!'

  She fixed him with a stare and glared at him.

  Knowing the conversation that they had had earlier, Sonny winked at Rebecca and turned to Patrick, adopting a fatherly tone.

  'Patrick, if you need any advice, you know, about women, just give me a shout, you'll have her eating out of the palm of your hand I promise.'

  Patrick laughed as Rebecca spun her beer mat at Sonny and he fumbled to catch it as it cart-wheeled out of his grasp to the floor and rolled to a stop against one of the legs of the adjacent table.

  'Watch it Mister, I know where you work!'

  'Hey,' Sonny intoned seriously but with a broad smile.

  'I can't help it if I know how to charm the ladies; I just want to pass on my knowledge and its all good Karma.'

  'Yeah, but that is the kind of Karma that gets girls pregnant!' Rebecca laughed.

  Sonny smiled.

  'Plenty where that came from babe!'

  Adrian's tall frame loomed, and he banged two glasses onto the table.

  'Here you go, Archers - Coke - Sorry mate, they didn't have any little umbrellas for you,' he quipped, sliding the drinks across to Rebecca and Sonny and leaving a wet trail from the bottoms of the glasses.

  He settled on his stool and made an exaggerated sigh, lifting his glass in a toast.

  'Cheers!'

  Th
e four friends lifted their glasses and clinked the rims together, Adrian quickly slurping a good mouthful and wiping his upper lip dry with the back of his hand before placing his glass on the table.

  'What are we talking about then?'

  'Some freaky witch shit,' said Sonny, 'Patrick has spent the morning surfing the web while you were busy working,' he chuckled.

  'You bloody skiver!' Adrian blasted with mock affront.

  Patrick stifled a guttural laugh and caught his glass to his lips as he tried to swallow a mouthful of beer at the same time.

  'God damn! I spent a bit of time on YouTube but I was catching up on the news!' Patrick defended, shaking his head. 'I was trying to work out what is going on with your Prime Minister and all this talk about an election.'

  'I shouldn't worry too much about it,' Adrian said, slurping from his glass, 'nobody else does and those politicians are all cheats and liars anyway.'

  'Hey!' Rebecca suddenly interjected.

  'Sonny, did you see any UFO stuff when you were in the airforce?'

  Adrian sat alert.

  'Sonny? You were never in the airforce!' he exclaimed. 'Well, maybe the Queen's Own Deserters! Isn't their motto I Surrender? What's that in Latin?'

  'Adrian,' Sonny sighed, 'you may recall that we don't have a Queen in the US, we have a President, remember that whole Boston Tea Party thing? No taxation without representation?'

  Adrian shook his head derisively.

  'Typical yanks, always whining! Anyway, your parents come from India so how American can you be? Besides, the real Americans are totally different Indians, they have tomahawks and casinos, so don't be getting any ideas!'

  'Yeah,' nodded Sonny, smiling, 'so different that in fact they're not called Indians but Native Americans who belong to a number of indigenous regional tribes. You've seen too many cowboy films.

  'So, now that we have ascertained Adrian's grasp of American culture, let me make it clear. Firstly, my mother was born in India but my father is American by birth and I was born in California. Secondly, I wasn't in the airforce, I was a civilian working on IT projects for the US Air Force. Thirdly, since I have an American passport and train in martial arts, I have both the god-given right and the skills to kick your ass if you say any more shit.'

  Adrian placed a finger to his lips and overly acted a thoughtful pose before nodding in complicit agreement.

  'Alright, that seems fair - anyway, so when you were a paper shuffler in your man's airforce, did you see any weird shit?'

  'Well, anyhow,' said Sonny, 'to answer Rebecca's question, there were these fucked-up vegetables they had at an airbase I was working at a few years back. That was pretty weird.'

  They all went silent and paused before Adrian simply grimaced.

  'Vegetables?'

  'What the fuck?' asked Patrick with an expression of exaggerated disdain.

  'Shhhh!' Rebecca scolded, lightly slapping Adrian's arm. 'Tell us about the fruit and veg Sonny!'

  'Oh man,' said Sonny with a hint of resignation as he bowed his head, then, grinning and slowly shaking his head, 'there's not much to tell you, Adrian is just going to give me shit and I'm not even supposed to talk about it anyway!'

  She fixed him with a mock glare.

  'Just tell us - biatch.'

  'You know, you have some aggression issues,' Sonny chided as she grinned at him. He leaned forward and looked around the table.

  'Alright, about five years ago I was working on military software for the US Air Force, most of it boring shit like system integration but this one time we were on a visit to an airbase as part of a technical implementation.'

  'You were implementing vegetables?' Adrian interrupted quizzically, thinking for a moment. 'Where was that? Texas? Up the Chocolate Bayou? Putting in vegetables - in the Chocolate Bayou - You know, as in Chocolate River? Like logging in the Brown Hills of Virginia?'

  He nodded emphatically, checking that everybody understood but Rebecca frowned exaggeratedly.

  'Chocolate Bayou?' she questioned disdainfully. 'What?'

  'It's a real place in America, I kid you not!' nodded Adrian sagely. 'I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of humorous place names and road-side burger vans.'

  He started counting off on his fingers.

  'There's Bowlegs in Oklahoma, French Lick in Indiana, Monkey's Eyebrow in Arizona - I think - Definitely an Intercourse in Pennsylvania and -'

  Rebecca jutted her bottom jaw at Adrian and interrupted him, placing the palm of her hand to his face.

  'Shut it freak, talk to the hand.'

  Sonny ignored the comments and continued.

  'So, anyway children, we're being led from one building to another by a group of soldiers and they're marching, like, a squad of them either side of us and as we go in-between these huge goddam hangers there are these massive plastic greenhouses that have vegetables in them, loads of stuff, like cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, I'm telling you, these vegetables must have been fifty times normal size, like a tomato that was the size of a soccer ball!'

  Adrian rolled his eyes and banged the table top with his palm making the glasses jump and rattle.

  'It's not fucking soccer, it's called - football.'

  'Ahhh, whatever man, these things were big though, just rows and rows of them, I tell you, there was some freaky shit going on there.'

  'Big tomatoes?' mused Patrick with an arched eyebrow as he took a sip. 'Is that it?'

  'It was weird!' Sonny defended as he sat upright.

  'Come on, you're telling me it isn't weird for the military to be growing mutant vegetables at an airbase?'

  'What were they for though?' asked Rebecca seriously.

  'God knows man,' said Sonny shaking his head, 'but they weren't normal, like, if they're doing that to vegetables then maybe they're also doing it to animals; you know, freaky genetic experiments?'

  'Yeah,' continued Patrick, 'but there are some old guys who grow tomatoes the size of beach balls in their garden where I come from and they just use shit to grow them - horse shit.'

  'I believe', said Adrian as he sarcastically pontificated, 'that the correct English word is manure, Patrick.'

  He turned to Sonny.

  'So, mutant vegetables you say? What we're talking about here is Giant Killer Tomatoes, right? With teeth? An army of kamikaze-ketchup trained as mean lean killing machines?'

  'Ahhh, shit man!' Sonny sighed in resignation. 'They were probably experiments in genetically modified crops or some kind of super-fertiliser to feed the world's starving or something, I don't know, maybe they're growing giant cows too!'

  'Yes,' Adrian nodded, 'but what came first? The giant tomatoes or the giant cows to fertilise them?'

  Rebecca rolled her eyes as she picked up her drink.

  'Haa-Ha,' she sarcastically sing-songed. 'well at least it's better than 'Brown Log, Ohio' or whatever it was; unless you have anything else to tell us that is remotely interesting?'

  'Well,' Adrian said languidly as he thought for a moment and gazed at the ceiling, 'there was the time I was working in Frankfurt and I bumped into this strange looking guy in the street, all sweaty and flushed with a guilty expression on his face. The weirdest thing was -' he paused for effect and the others leaned forward expectantly -

  Chapter XXVIII

  Time, ladies and gentlemen -

  'ARMED POLICE!'

  The words had been coarsely yelled before Adrian could finish his sentence for the attentive group of workmates and there certainly was no time for any of them to comprehend that the main entrance door had been violently thrown open to the Eagle's Court public house, the oak frame shuddering and recoiling from the force and urgently yielding to four heavily armed men who stormed into the bar wearing black balaclavas, combat fatigues and bullet proof vests emblazoned with the white letters of police stencilled across their chests.

  'DOWN! Down on your knees! Hands behind your heads! NOW!'

  Simultaneous to the forceful entry via the main door, fo
ur other men in identical gear surged from behind the bar itself, evidently having entered via a rear access door, their repeated and insistent vocal commands decipherable even above the clatter of chairs being kicked out of the way, pint glasses crashing to the floor and the tremulous cacophony to be associated with eight firearms officers bursting in to capture a group of terrorist suspects.

  Within an instant, Patrick, Rebecca, Adrian and Sonny had been surrounded, implicated as the object of the C019 police firearms unit raid by the pointed barrels of MP5 sub-machine guns, a Benelli pump-action shotgun and a couple of Glock 17 pistols.

  As they sat in shocked confusion, completely disoriented by events, the moment was seized upon as four officers leapt forward and emphasised the meaning of the command to get down by shoving each of the dazed revellers to the floor, down onto their knees, man-handling their arms and hands behind their back, rapidly hand cuffing them and then pushing them to lay face down upon the floor.

  To complete the task, each officer quickly knelt down and clamped one shin across the lower legs of their designated suspect, effectively gluing them to the carpet and preventing them from wriggling about to any appreciable extent, capping off the restraint of their prone captives by efficiently threading a zip-lock plastic tie about the ankles.

  It was Rebecca who had recovered at least some of her senses first, starting to yell expletives back over her shoulder as she shouted for an explanation of what was going, her three male companions uttering cries of compliance in ironic contrast.

  Her long blonde hair was spilling over her head as she laid face down, spreading over the beer stained and snow dampened carpet, whipping back and forth as she jerked her head from side to side, trying to look up and comprehend what was happening.

  She could see that the bar was now heaving with a sudden swarm of assorted police officers that seemed to have come from nowhere, although the previous patrons had been hustled from the premises by the burly men she had seen chatting to the barman when she had entered with Sonny. They were obviously plain clothed officers detailed to clear the place immediately after the inception of the raid.