Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3)

by Tilly Delane

  “Stop freaking out, Diego,” she says into the silence between us now, as she puts the second contact lens in and blinks a couple of times.

  Then she turns to me and beckons me closer.

  “Cup me,” she demands.

  “What?”

  Instead of answering, she takes my hand and presses the palm against her fake package.

  “Squeeze,” she says.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I answer, but she just lifts her eyebrows, so I squeeze ─ and withdraw my hand rapidly, as if it had been scolded, a second later.

  “Fuck me, that feels so real!”

  She laughs.

  “How do you know, big boy? Got something to tell me?” she teases, as she jiggles her butt around a bit. “That’s good, it didn’t come loose. Normally, I’d wear a harness, but since chances are he’s gonna try and feel me up, I thought I’d better go without.”

  “Normally?” I ask, astonished. “How often have you done this?”

  “Couple of times,” she answers nonchalantly then points at the bathroom door. “Let’s go, I can manage about eight hours in a binder before I get claustrophobic. Vamos.”

  Kalina

  It’s still hot as hell despite the fact it’s already seven in the evening by the time I push my bicycle up the stony path towards the entrance of the O’Brien’s farmhouse. I’ve been walking alongside the panels that shield it for a while now, and I can finally see the frontage of the brick building, breaking up the monotonous wall of weathered white panelling now.

  Cormac and Callum’s only neighbour’s house, a working farm, lies a mile behind me. In the very far distance across the hills, I can see them still out in their combine harvester, using the last of the evening light to bring in their crops. Their business, far away from the action, is a welcome bonus in a plan full of holes and potential failings. I reckon we have about a couple of hours before the light will fade and they’ll turn in. We’d best be gone by then.

  Maybe the gods are with us today.

  I hope so.

  I’m sweating like crazy under my binder, but the pressure it exerts also gives me a sense of calm.

  My characters always do. Maybe there is a weird sense that I can’t be killed if I’m not me. I don’t analyse it too deeply.

  “Nearly there,” I mumble into the mic, hidden in the earphone dangling in front of my chest.

  “I love you,” Diego’s voice comes back through its counterpart, sitting in my left ear, and my heart does a somersault.

  It’s weird to not be alone.

  I’ve never had backup before.

  Hell, I’ve never had to recover live ones before. I can’t decide if either is a blessing or a liability.

  Silas, Rowan and Diego are sitting in the van that brought us out here, parked up between the neighbour’s working farm and Cormac’s small holding, in a turning place where a path, carved by farm vehicles, goes up by the side of a pasture with cattle in it.

  When I left them there, they were sitting in the field, open lager cans that they weren’t drinking from by their sides. A bunch of city boys in black jeans, t-shirts and sunglasses, out on the Downs for a beer. The way they looked together, next to the black sprayed riot van, they could easily have passed for a band, taking a break from recording, or lost between gigs. They looked hot as shit. In both senses of the word.

  “Tell me that again when today is over,” I answer quietly, and then I fall silent.

  I’ve come to the door in the building. It’s a typical farmhouse frontage with five wonky stone steps leading up to a dark blue painted door with a timber canopy above it, and rows of windows in desperate need of cleaning. The paint on the door and the canopy is bubbling and starting to peel off. The flowerbeds left and right of the steps are unkempt, full of knee-high grass and pretty wildflowers. Butterflies and bumblebees are dancing in the air around them.

  I leave my bike lying at the bottom of the steps, ascend and knock on the door.

  I expect the dogs that the guys told me about to bark, but nothing.

  My heart sinking, I knock again, harder.

  After a few more minutes, I hear noises from the other side of the door.

  “We’re on,” I mutter, just in time before the door opens, and a giant of a man steps out, looking at me suspiciously.

  He’s almost as tall as Rowan is, but rather than muscled, he is fleshy, with a face that looks more Neanderthal than homo sapien. He seems to be made of a human and a spare somehow, and I wonder for a moment if this guy can really be related to the picture I know of skinny Callum O’Brien.

  Cormac doesn’t speak, just looks at me dumbfounded through light blue, glassy eyes that tell me the lights are on, but nobody’s home.

  “Hi,” I start, and run the back of my hand across my sweaty brows. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if I could maybe use your phone? I had an accident,” I explain, pointing down at my bike. “And my phone got smashed.”

  He doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, just stares at me in his food-stained shirt and jeans, and starts scratching his balls.

  I wait, and then I hear shuffling behind Cormac.

  “Who is it, Cor?” a voice says.

  It’s the same voice we heard a couple of days ago, while Piotr was screaming in pain off-camera. It’s a voice we’ve heard multiple times since. Diego sprang us more money to extend our ‘subscription’, because we needed more time to set things up, but we wanted to keep an eye on the boys. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. Blast them out that day and risk failing and putting everyone’s lives in danger or leave them at the hands of a sadistic rapist for another couple of days and come prepared.

  A small smile forms around Cormac’s mouth as he withdraws inside to let Callum step into his space. It’s then that I realise Cormac’s pleased with himself. Like a cat bringing its mate a live mouse to play with. An involuntary shudder runs through me.

  “A boy,” Cormac answers his brother, and moves away fully to let Callum fill out the doorframe.

  Well, as much as Callum can fill out anything.

  He looks nothing like he looked in the pictures I saw. Gone is the smooth, boyish face and the suit he wore for court. Instead, his bones jut out under translucent, spotty skin, and he’s wearing filthy jogging bottoms, combined with a muscle shirt, that shows off absolutely nothing to write home about. He’s weedy, and for a moment I wonder how come Zoltan has never taken him on, but then I take another glance at Cormac’s retreating form and the answer is obvious.

  My skin crawls as Callum’s eyes wander from my toes, up my body, to my head and over my face. His already unnaturally dilated pupils, saucer-like despite the bright evening light, grow even wider at the bruises he sees. He looks over my shoulder.

  “You’re on your own, mate?”

  It’s clever, his use of ‘mate’, making the boy he sees in front of him feel grown up.

  “Yeah,” I answer, and turn to pretend to look where he’s looking then point at my bike. “I got a flat and fell. My phone’s broken. Could I maybe ring my dad from your phone? He’ll go mad if I come home after dark.”

  I let it hang, letting him draw his own conclusions from the state of my face about my fictitious violent father. Callum’s eyes scrunch up suspiciously, snapping back to mine.

  “Where are you from? What’s your accent?”

  “Poland,” I answer.

  He opens the door wider.

  “You been in England long?” he asks. “You speak good English.”

  “We always come for work in the summer.”

  I’m just gonna trust the fact that old preconceptions die hard and that he has no idea that Poland has its very own deficit of migrant workers these days. He doesn’t look like the type to follow international politics.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Poynings,” I reply, naming a village about an hour’s bike ride from where we are.

  “That’s quite a way,” he sa
ys, visibly relaxing.

  I shrug.

  “Sometimes you need to get away.”

  Again, I let it hang, hoping I haven’t overdone it. But then he smiles widely, and I can feel the air shift in my favour. He steps outside to stand next to me on the top step and looks down the bank at the bike.

  “What happened?” he asks, eyeing it from afar.

  “Tyre burst and I crashed,” I reiterate. “I’m alright, but look,” I answer, producing a cheap-as-shit old, dead smartphone with a smashed screen, into which my pretend earphone wire is plucked, from my front pocket.

  He looks at it and then at my face again before he points at the door.

  “Come in. Are you thirsty? I can get you a drink and we’ll phone your parents.”

  “Dad,” I correct him as I slip the phone back into my pocket and start going inside. “It’s just Dad and me. That would be great. Thank you so much, sir.”

  Again, I wait to see if the ‘sir’ is too much, but he’s lapping it up.

  “What happened to your mum?”

  “Tactful fucker,” I hear Diego hiss in my ear, and nearly choke on my own spit.

  “Dead,” I answer Callum through a cough.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s almost believable. “That’s sad.”

  I shrug again.

  “I don’t remember her,” I tell him as we move further into the house and from a chaotic hallway into an equally chaotic living room.

  It smells of somebody vaping, popcorn and caramel flavour, mildew and stale food. But none of it can mask the distinct burnt-plastic-bathed-in-ammonia odour of meths. I understand now why Diego thought they were cooking up here, Callum is a bona fide meths head.

  The furniture in the room is old but not antique old, more like nobody-with-taste-has-lived-here-for-decades old. My guess is, Cormac got the house complete with everything in it. That, or he is a vintage Laura Ashley fan.

  It’s dark in here. They could really do with a window cleaner.

  They could really do with any kind of cleaner, full stop.

  There are food wrappers, empty cans and bottles, mugs with mould growing in them, dried up food plates and just stuff everywhere, all covered in a thick layer of dust and grime. A bunch of flies are buzzing around the lamp shade under the ceiling. I quickly scan my surroundings for cameras but can’t see any. It would be difficult to spot them, but then again, who would want to spy on this?

  Callum indicates a sofa for me to sit down on.

  “Wait there and I get you something to drink and my phone,” he says, already leaving, and then shouts at Cormac who’s disappeared to somewhere else in the house, as soon as he’s in the hallway. “Cor, get...”

  He reappears in the door to the living room, looking at me.

  “What’s your name, mate?”

  “Jakub.”

  He disappears again and carries on shouting his command at Cormac as he moves further into the house.

  “Get Jakub’s bike inside!”

  “You’re in, right?” Diego asks in my ear, and I jump.

  I’m really not used to having a team.

  I cough twice for yes.

  “Right, we’re on the move to point two. Don’t take too long, baby girl.”

  I don’t cough this time. The ‘baby girl’ gets to me, and I can’t allow anything to get to me right now. The next ten minutes are crucial.

  I watch Cormac go past the open living room door, carrying my bicycle through the hallway. I hear a back door slam shut somewhere and extract a small silver box from my back pocket, straining my ears to catch any noise. I open the box and take out one of the syringes I brought. This one is prefilled with enough morphine to kill a horse. I take the cap off, put it in the box, slip the box back into my pocket and hide the syringe up my sleeve, acutely aware of how close the needle is to my skin. Then I shuffle along on the sofa, so if Callum sits down, he has to sit on the other side of me.

  I feel eerily calm when he returns with an open can of Coke.

  “Here,” he says and puts the can down on the messy table in front of me. “Do you like Coke?”

  “Sure,” I respond but don’t make any move to drink from it or touch it.

  Instead, I slowly take my earphone out of my ear and hang it around my neck with the other one.

  “You have a phone?” I remind him timidly.

  Callum pulls a mobile out of his jogging bottom’s pocket while he sits down next to me, predictably close. His knees touch mine, and I suppress a revolted shiver.

  “How old are you, Jakub?” he asks while he keys in his security code and brings up the numbers keyboard on the screen.

  “Fourteen,” I answer.

  “Great age,” Callum says. “You got a girlfriend yet?” he asks by-the-by but doesn’t allow time for me to answer before he fires off the next question. “What’s your dad’s number?”

  This is so fucking cliché, I want to laugh. Instead, I hopefully manage to look crestfallen.

  “Oh no! I don’t know,” I say. “It’s in my phone, but...”

  “Your phone is dead,” Callum finishes for me, and then puts a hand on my knee, masking the move by leaning forward to put his phone on the table. “Don’t worry, Jakub, Cormac’s looking at your bike right now. He’s great at fixing things. He can probably fix your tyre and get you back on the road in a bit. Relax.”

  I sincerely doubt Cormac is good at anything, but that observation doesn’t belong in this charade.

  “My dad’s gonna kill me if I’m late,” I mumble, and grab Callum’s hand on my knee to squeeze it, while I keep my eyes downcast.

  As if I’m looking for comfort in a stranger. As if I’m about to cry.

  The latter is not too far off. I can feel the shiver of anticipation that goes through him as he leans back again, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see his dick stir in his jogging pants. I want to vomit. He squeezes my hand back as if to reassure me.

  “Does he beat you often?” he asks quietly, and I nod.

  His dick is even happier at that thought. I swallow my bile as I watch it twitch under the cotton and look sideways at him through tear-laced eyes.

  “He doesn’t like me,” I say with a wobbling bottom lip.

  “You know,” Callum says as his hand slowly creeps higher on my thigh. “You don’t have to go home. You could stay here, with Cormac and me. We’ll look after you.”

  Too easy. Way too easy. Has he not heard of amphetamine paranoia? What the fuck is wrong with this guy?

  I’m so stunned, I almost forget to make my move, but just then I hear the dogs bark in the distance. The guys are here, on the far side of the yard, if they’re sticking to the plan, and I don’t have time to contemplate just how fucking stupid Callum thinks Jakub is, or if his addiction has bypassed paranoia and has gone straight into megalomania territory.

  “Why are the fucking dogs barking?” Callum asks, irritated, looking in the direction of the noise, and squeezes my thigh, hard. I yelp in only half-pretend pain and his eyes snap back to mine, a hunger unfurling in them that scares the shit out of me.

  Time.

  I throw myself at his neck.

  “He whips me,” I whisper into his ears. “He whips me with his belt until I bleed. And, and...”

  I can feel him shudder in arousal, and then he suddenly snatches me by the hips with unexpected strength and pulls me onto his lap. He’s fast, I give him that. Before I know it, he’s slipped a hand in my neck and grabs hard, pinching and twisting my skin, like I’m a kitten he’s taken by the scruff. I make a pained noise and his other hand slings around my waist, holding me down in a vice, his hard-on pressing against my packer. Never have I been so relieved to have a cushion of silicon between me and a pervert.

  “And what?” he asks hoarsely into my ear. “You little, dirty shit. You like it, don’t you? You like it when your daddy beats you, don’t you?”

  This is sicker than anything I’ve ever been involved in, and I realise wit
h total clarity that I have no regrets about what I am about to do.

  I go into a complete Zen zone when I shake the syringe out of my sleeve behind his back, while he keeps giving me burns in my neck, keeps giving me glimpses into the soul of a true sadist I never wanted to have. I yelp each time he twists, to keep him occupied, plead with him to stop, which just gets him more riled up.

  It’s messy and vile, and then I’m ready.

  I have the element of surprise when I push up onto my knees, as if I’m trying to make a break for it, but then instead of drawing away from him, I come closer, cradling his head in the crook of my arm. In one sharp move, I twist him, so the side of his neck is exposed. I know I don’t have to hit a vein for the morphine to do its thing. Intramuscular will take a bit longer, but it’ll do just as well. But today, the gods are with me, and I manage to come in shallow to slam the needle right into his jugular. I empty the syringe without a second thought, while he’s trying to thrash in my grasp, but he doesn’t stand a chance. Between the meths already in his system and the morphine hitting his heart, he convulses, once, and then he stops breathing.

  For good.

  One down, one to go.

  Despite all the motion, the needle is still sticking in him when Callum stills, another freebie handed to us from the universe today. It blocked any blood trickle, one of the things I was worried about.

  I gently lower his head onto the back of the sofa, careful not to dislodge it now of all times. My knees are starting to burn from the position I’m in, but I can’t sit back down. I’d get his last ever piss all over my trousers.

  I dig in the side pocket of my combat trousers for my set of tactile gloves and pull them on quickly before I carefully separate the needle and syringe from one another. I swap the syringe with one from the box that has a small residue of morphine in it, and, just as importantly, no fingerprints on it yet. I gently slide it onto the needle still in situ. It’s a complete bitch of a job, but I manage. I can finally get off the dead man, only to pick up his limp hand and manipulate it to mimic the action his fingers would have performed on the syringe.