One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1) Page 8

Elton shrugged. ‘I said she was nice, not clever.’

  ‘I . . . uh.’ I’d asked her to get me another slab of resin. ‘I need her number then.’

  Elton fished his little black book from the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Phone boxes on the corner don’t work. And you’ll only get her crazy mother. Better to go over. She’s in the Miller blocks, building three.’ He took a pencil stub and wrote her number and address on a scrap of paper torn from his book. ‘Go past the tube station, left past the Red Lion. You’ll see the blocks from there.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I shoved the note in my pocket and blew into my hands to warm them.

  ‘I’ll watch your bike.’ Elton started back toward his door. ‘Better take it by tonight, though, or I’m selling the wheels.’ He paused. ‘Oh, and that trick with the dice. I’m going to need to understand that before next session. Can’t have you rolling whatever number you want.’

  I walked to Mia’s place, limping by the time I got there. Whether my growing nausea was nerves or the chemo biting I couldn’t tell. Either way it wasn’t good.

  The Miller blocks were four ugly towers, about fifteen storeys each. She lived on the eighth floor of the one furthest away. The plaza between the four sported two old sofas with their springs showing. Around the back of Mia’s building was a burned-out car that had been there long enough to rust.

  The lift stunk of urine and wasn’t going anywhere. I took the stairs. They smelled slightly less and were still fit for purpose. Someone had sprayed their initials on the reinforced glass at every floor. The same person. I had to admire their egotism.

  By the eighth floor I was winded and hurting. I hoped Mia liked her gentlemen callers pale and sweaty, because that was what she was getting.

  Generally, I like to know what I’m going to say before I say it. I tried to picture Mia opening her door to me. Even in my imagination I stood there stuttering. I paused to catch my breath at the fire door from the stairwell to the main corridor. ‘Hello’ would be a good start.

  The stairwell door sported a small rectangle of glass shot through with crisscrossed wires and badly fractured. It afforded me a partial view of the hallway beyond. I leaned in closer. A figure in a puffed-up black jacket was slouched against the wall about halfway down. It looked for all the world like Michael Devis.

  CHAPTER 9

  Fear is a strange thing. Along with its close friend, pain, fear is a vital part of the kit that evolution has furnished us with for keeping alive. Part of its effectiveness comes down to how hard it can be to overcome. If you have vertigo, then no amount of assurance that it won’t hurt will get you to step off the highest board at the swimming pool. If you’re scared of spiders, then ‘it’s a thousandth of your size’ and ‘they don’t bite’ are not going to make you pick one of the bastards up. Knowing that, in twenty-five years’ time, I would punch Michael Devis in the face and enjoy it could not remove the fear of confronting him alone there in that dimly lit hall. And so I stayed where I was, dry-mouthed, heart pounding, and watched. What the hell was he doing here? He should be in school. A sore mouth wouldn’t have got him off this long.

  I waited a good ten minutes. It felt closer to an hour. Devis paced, kicked a can around, then scowled at an old man who opened his door until he thought better of complaining about the noise and drew back his grey head. Devis returned to can kicking for a while. Eventually, he went to the door at the centre of his pacing and pounded on it.

  ‘I know you’re in there! I’m not going away.’ He strode off, turned sharply, and took to pounding again. ‘I called him. I said I would. You want to be ready and waiting downstairs with me when he gets here. He finds you’re still hiding in your hole, and that shiner I gave you is going to seem like a love tap.’

  I couldn’t see the number on the door, but it was obviously Mia’s. I had to step in. I had to do something. Instead I just stood there. Waiting. I tried to reach for the anger I knew should be inside me. Devis was the one who had hit her! And, at last, way later than my pride told me I should, I found the fury I needed in order to act.

  The fire door squealed as it opened and somehow Devis heard it even above the racket he was making. He turned to stare down the corridor, not seeming to recognise me. I stood with my fists balled, wondering how badly he’d beat me before letting up. Rage and terror appeared to be two sides of the same coin for me.

  In that moment, Mia’s door opened and she stepped out, white-faced even without her Goth makeup. She had a rounders bat in one hand and swung it hard at the back of Devis’s knee. He cried out, staggered, and began to turn while she landed a flurry of blows across his back. I started running toward them.

  By the time I arrived, Devis had hold of the bat, at the cost of taking a nasty hit to his hand. I did my best impression of the flying kicks that Elton was always demonstrating and connected with his hip, sending him sprawling down the hall, the bat skittering away. I went down too, though a little less dramatically than Devis.

  Both of them stared at me in astonishment. Devis from the floor, groaning and cursing. Mia from her doorway, wide-eyed. I got to my feet before Devis did and went to stand over him, panting with fury, fright, indignation, and all the other gifts a sudden surge in adrenaline gives us.

  ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ It wasn’t the cleverest of lines. A hero issuing it at the D&D table would be mocked. But Devis seemed to take it seriously and scrambled past me, limping toward the stairs. He wouldn’t have run from me on my own, but maybe Mia had really hurt him with her bat. Either that, or he was scared that Demus would show up to save me again.

  He stopped at the fire door and looked back, mouth bleeding, the side of his face still bruised. ‘He’s coming. I told you that!’ He looked frightened rather than pleased at the prospect.

  I took a stamp-step toward him and he vanished, footsteps echoing down the concrete stairs.

  ‘Christ.’ Mia went to get her rounders bat.

  ‘Uh.’ I stood there feeling awkward, and no doubt looking awkward. The corridor smelled of old cooking. Baked beans perhaps.

  ‘You should leave,’ Mia said.

  ‘I . . . uh.’ I looked back down the hall. ‘I’d rather come in. I had something I wanted to ask you.’

  Mia still looked worried. She sighed and motioned with her head for me to follow.

  ‘Keep your voice down. Mum’s asleep.’ She led through her front door, into the unlit hall behind, pausing to lean past me and put the chain on.

  I followed, wondering how anyone who could sleep through Devis’s hammering and shouting could be woken by mere conversation.

  Mia took me into their living room. There was enough room for a sofa, armchair, and TV, with a small coffee table squeezed between, buried under copies of TVTimes. The room stunk of cigarettes, and their smoke stained the ceiling. Two empty quarter-bottles of whiskey lay on the floor by the chair.

  ‘Sit?’ Mia flopped bonelessly into the armchair.

  ‘Thanks.’ I sat on the corner of the sofa. The covers were stained, and I expected to find them sticky to the touch.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come.’ Mia hunched in on herself, looking suddenly very thin. ‘And you should definitely leave. You don’t want to be here when he comes.’

  ‘Who?’ I tried to manufacture some confidence and sound reassuring. ‘Sacks?’

  She blinked at that. ‘Sacks wouldn’t come here. You get taken to Sacks.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Some new psychopath on Sacks’s crew. Young blood starting to cut himself a name.’ She reached for a cigarette pack on the table and, finding it empty, crumpled it. ‘He made a move on these blocks a few weeks back. Everyone expected Sacks to stamp him out, but he signed him up instead.’

  ‘Stamp him out?’ I snorted. ‘It’s not like this is Chicago. If people were being murdered left and right, it’d be in the papers!’

  Mia raised an eyebrow at me, unsmiling. ‘If a person goes missing, it’s not a murder; it’s a missing person. Peop
le run away from their lives every day. I think about it five times a week myself.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘They call him Sacks because if you cross him, he has you cut up, put into sacks, and hidden where you won’t ever be found. You’re not on the front pages as a murder victim. You’re just another runaway.’

  I swallowed and looked at the door. ‘So, who’s this new guy and what does he want?’

  ‘He wants money. Or rather he wants to use the fact I owe Sacks to make me work for him.’ She scowled. A fierce thing.

  ‘Work?’ I felt myself redden. ‘What kind of—’

  ‘That kind. The kind I won’t do. The crew are always trying to get new girls. I guess this guy wants his own string.’

  ‘Maybe the police . . .’

  Mia’s turn to snort. ‘Should I start by telling them I owe money for drugs, or save that for later?’

  ‘So, pay them. How much can it be?’ I patted my pockets unconsciously. She’d got the resin for me, and then I’d asked her for more. This was my fault.

  ‘It doesn’t work like that.’ Mia stayed hunched around herself. I wanted to take her hands, say it would be alright, do something useful, be the solution rather than the cause of the problem. ‘Once you owe them, it’s a loan. Loans have interest. The interest is whatever they say it is. It should have been a hundred quid. I gave that guy in the hall everything I could get together last week, eighty-six. He told me I owed two hundred.’

  ‘Well, we find out how much they want, then pay it.’ I had over three hundred in my building society account. I’d been saving since I was seven. And John could always loan us some. Money wasn’t anything to him.

  ‘How much do you think they’ll add on for being hit with a bat?’ Mia managed a half-smile.

  ‘Go to the new guy. Forget Devis.’

  ‘Devis?’ Mia shot me a narrow look. Even with a black eye and no makeup she still looked achingly pretty. ‘You know that creep?’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ It suddenly struck me how odd it was that I knew the thug hammering at Mia’s door after a drug debt. And how crazy it was that, rather than some street hardened criminal, it was an only half-successful bully from a private school. A schoolboy. ‘It’s weird.’ I stood, seized by an uneasy feeling. ‘You didn’t tell me what Sacks’s new guy is called.’

  Mia shuddered. ‘They call him Rust. I don’t want to know why.’

  The knocking at the front door made us both jump.

  We went into the hall, not hand-in-hand, but close enough together to know we both wanted that support. I could feel Mia trembling and my own hands shook. The knocking came again. A polite tap, tap, tap. Mia inched up to the spyhole and peered through. She pulled away as if bitten and motioned for me to look.

  The fisheye view distorted Ian Rust’s already weasel-like face into something from nightmare. A long, angular nose thrusting at the spyhole, his eyes dark beads to either side.

  As if sensing us there he tapped again, and called out in a faux-sweet falsetto, ‘Miiiiiiiiaaaaaaa! Oh, Miiiiiiaaaaaaa!’

  I jerked back and we both stood, paralysed, my heart pounding loud enough that Rust should have been able to hear it through the door.

  ‘Miiiiiaaaaaa!’ he crooned.

  A pause, then movement at the letterbox. Instinctively, we both wedged ourselves to opposite sides. A glugging sound followed and a familiar astringent smell rose around us. White Spirit, perfect for cleaning paintbrushes, or for arson. ‘Miiiiiaaaa!’

  ‘Fuck!’ Mia jumped back from the door.

  ‘How do we get out?’ I joined her and kept backing. We were on the eighth floor, and I doubted the flat had a back door.

  ‘I have to let him in before he lights it,’ Mia said. She raised her voice. ‘Wait! I’m coming.’

  Before Mia could move, a short, scrawny woman emerged from the opposite door in a nylon nightdress covered with cigarette burns. Her greying hair stood out in all directions and she had an empty whiskey bottle in one hand.

  ‘Mum!’ Mia made a grab at her, but the woman slipped by, swearing softly, and had the door open a moment later.

  Rust seemed unfazed, his malicious grin not slipping a millimetre. ‘So sorry to disturb—’

  Mia’s mother smashed the bottle on the doorframe and sliced the jagged stub across Rust’s face. It took me by surprise, Rust less so. He jerked back with unnatural speed, but even so one of the glass points managed to cut him below the eye from his cheekbone to his nose.

  ‘Bitch!’ He stepped back, hand clasped to his face, blood leaking between his fingers.

  ‘You want the rest?’ Mia’s mother followed him, raging, broken bottle held before her. ‘Little bastard!’

  Rust looked ready to spring, but the distant sound of sirens gave him pause. ‘Mia.’ He acknowledged her at the doorway. ‘And I know you.’ Fever-bright eyes found me. ‘Nicholas Hayes. I know where you live.’ His grin returned and, with his hand still pressed to his face, he hurried off to the stairwell.

  Mia’s mother shuffled back into the flat, ignoring both of us. She reeked of booze and seemed to have gone from raging to sleepwalking in moments. ‘Clear that glass up.’ Spoken to nobody in particular as she returned to her room.

  ‘Shit.’ Mia looked at me, looked at the fire door and the trail of blood drops leading to it, looked back to me. ‘Shit.’

  I opened my mouth, but could find nothing to add to her assessment.

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘I . . . uh . . . I’ve got someone you need to meet.’

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘Where are we going?’ Mia followed me, clutching a brightly patterned cloth bag at odds with her otherwise all black theme. She’d put on a jacket that was too thin for the season and she looked cold already.

  ‘I told you. I know a man who knows everything.’ I strode past the broken-down sofas, scanning the plaza for any sign of Devis or Rust. It seemed crazy that either of them should be here. I guessed that the drug dealing was Rust’s extracurricular activity, and that now he’d been expelled he had decided to make it a career move. A ‘normal’ Maylert’s graduate with a mind to try his hand at dealing narcotics would find a contact and sell on at a margin to their well-heeled friends, at public schools, at dinner parties, and the like. Rust, though, seemed possessed of the kind of crazy that wanted a more lucrative slice of the pie, joining the hard-core criminals at the source. And Devis, a born minion and too scared to say no, had been dragged in with him. ‘Come on. Demus will know what to do.’

  ‘You said he wanted to see me on Saturday evening.’ Mia stopped to adjust her shoe.

  ‘Yeah . . . Well, I figure he should know enough to know we need to see him now.’

  ‘In Richmond Park?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s miles away.’ Mia caught me up.

  ‘It’s a fair way.’ She had a point. We could collect my bike from Elton, but I couldn’t exactly take passengers and it was a good walk, especially in a cold wind with the sun heading down.

  ‘It’s my best shot, OK?’ I turned on her. We were in the street now, the four Miller blocks behind us. ‘You want to stay here for Rust to come back?’ I didn’t much want to go home either. I know where you live. That’s what he said. And nowhere feels safe with someone like Rust out there, biding their time. ‘Seriously, this guy knows everything. He’ll know we’re coming early, and he’ll know how to fix this. I can’t explain better than that. Just trust me on this one.’ I could explain better, only she’d think I was mad and wouldn’t come.

  Mia stopped again. I bit back a ‘hurry up’. ‘If he knows everything, and he knows we’re coming three days early, then why doesn’t he know to meet us here?’

  ‘I . . .’ She had a good point. ‘That’s a good point.’ A very good point.

  A black BMW with tinted windows rounded the corner from Station Road and roared toward us, squealing to a halt slantwise across the street.

  ‘Shit!’ I tensed
to run. Rust didn’t have a car. He was barely old enough to drive. Maybe turned eighteen. It had to be Sacks. He’d called in Sacks!

  The driver window rolled down. ‘Get in.’

  It was Demus.

  We didn’t drive far, just a little past Elton’s block. Demus parked in a side street.

  ‘That’s the guy!’ Mia hissed at me the moment she got in. ‘From the park.’ Then, realising. ‘This is the guy you wanted me to meet?’

  ‘Trust me,’ I hissed back. ‘He’ll be able to help. He knows everything.’

  Demus pulled up, turned off the engine, then turned to look at Mia over the back of the seat. For the longest time he didn’t say anything, just stared. I have to admit it was more than a little creepy.

  ‘What?’ Mia demanded. She’d had a rough day and Demus got the sharp edge of it.

  Instead of flinching he just smiled, a broad, happy, stupid grin.

  ‘Think of a number, Mia,’ I said. ‘Any number you like. He’ll guess it.’ It’s bad enough making a fool of yourself. Worse watching yourself make a fool of yourself.

  Mia frowned. ‘OK, diceman. I’m thinking of a number. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Demus said.

  ‘What? How can you not know?’ I pulled a stray D6 from my pocket. ‘Call it. Show her!’

  ‘That isn’t going to work, Nick.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’ My stomach lurched, the nausea returning after all the excitement. ‘Have we gone off-script?’ If he didn’t remember this, then my recovery wasn’t guaranteed anymore.

  ‘No.’ Demus said, not looking at me. ‘I don’t know what number you’re thinking of, Mia, and I don’t know what number that die would roll. But I know things about you. I know you don’t have a favourite colour. I know you had a rabbit called Mr Woffles when you were six. I know your Aunt May died of a heroin overdose, even though you tell everyone it was a car crash.’

  Mia reached for the door. ‘Get me out of here, Nick. This pervert’s been watching me. Going through my things.’

  ‘I know about Robert Wilkins under the holly bush, Mia. You never told anyone that. You never told anyone how the old leaves spiked your bum, or that you saw a big orange centipede on the floor of that little cave in the holly tree and Robert tried to convince you it was magic. How could I know that? You never wrote it down.’