by J. D. Weston
“Why should I tell you that?” the man answered.
“Because I just killed your friend here in less than two seconds and I’d like to see if I can kill you faster.”
“Dixon,” replied the man with no hesitation. “Del Dixon.”
“Take me to him.”
Left to his own devices, Tyler sat on the end of the bench press that John had provided. He let his head drop into his hands and fought back the hot tears that reddened his eyes. Ahead of him, thirty metres away at the far side of the room, the two double doors invited him to leave. But his fight had gone. While John Cooper had his mum holed up, he needed to do everything he could to get her back safe.
His fat fingers covered his face, but he opened his eyes and stared at the doors, then exhaled, long and slow.
“You can make a try for them if you want,” said a voice.
Tyler looked up. His eyes were foggy but allowed him to focus on a man of average build standing a few feet away.
“The doors,” he said. “You can make a run for it if you want.”
“What’s the point?” replied Tyler, and he let his head fall back into his hands.
“So stop thinking about it.”
“How would you know what I’m thinking about?”
“Intuition,” the man replied in a whisper.
“Where did you even come from?” asked Tyler. “I didn’t hear-”
“How could you have heard me?” the man replied. “You were too busy listening to the demons in your head argue over running for the doors or killing yourself.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” said Tyler.
“You will be when I’m finished with you.”
Before Tyler could respond, a hammer-like punch caught him on the side of his jaw, knocking him from the bench to the mat, where he rolled to his knees and held his face, working his jaw to test for damage.
“What the-”
A kick to his gut doubled him over and he rolled to his side sucking in air.
“Get up,” said the man. The order wasn’t barked or shouted. There was no emotion whatsoever in the words.
“Who are you?” asked Tyler, as he scrambled across the floor away from the man.
“You haven’t earned my name yet,” the man replied. “Come on. Fight me.”
Pulling himself to his feet, Tyler straightened. But he wasn’t ready for the three-punch combo to his kidneys. A crippling backache set in with immediate effect. Tyler tried to walk it off with his hands on his kidneys and his spine arched back, but another blow came from nowhere. The man’s fist connected with the side of Tyler’s head, rocking his vision into a dizzying swirl of white tiles and early morning sunlight beaming through the frosted windows high on the walls.
He dropped to his knees then fell to his side and assumed the foetal position, waiting for the world around him to stop spinning.
Not a sound was made by the man’s feet, but Tyler heard him from the far side of the room, talking on his phone.
“You’ve got yourself a dead boy, John.”
Tyler closed his eyes. A wave of nausea flowed through him and hung at the back of his throat, threatening to advance if he moved even a finger.
“No. There’s no fight in him. He might be big, but he’s soft,” the man continued to say.
But Tyler pushed his voice away and tiny roots pushed through the shells of the seeds of suicide the man had planted. It was the only way out. They wouldn’t hurt his mum if he was dead. She’d be taken into care.
“He wants to talk to you,” said the man.
Tyler opened his eyes to find the man standing beside where he was laying, holding out a mobile phone. He hadn’t made a sound. The man hit loudspeaker and held the phone at arm’s length.
“Tyler?” It was John’s voice. “Answer me, son. You’re testing my patience.”
“I’m here,” said Tyler. He heard how weak his own voice sounded.
“You need to fight, son. If you can’t fight, you’re no good to me. And you know what happens if you’re no good to me?”
Tyler let the words play over in his mind, but couldn’t respond without releasing the damn that held back his tears.
“You disappear, Tyler,” John continued. “You just vanish like you never existed. And your mum? Well, I haven't made up my mind yet. But you can guarantee the last few days of her life will be spent laying on her back earning all the money I’ve wasted on her sorry, waste-of-space son.”
The heat behind Tyler’s eyes drained to his face, sending a tingle of rage across Tyler’s skin. He felt his cheeks tighten. His eyes pulsed once as his heart fed a shot of adrenalin into his bloodstream.
“Don’t you dare lay a finger on her.”
“You don’t call the shots, Tyler.”
He got to his knees.
“Here we go,” said the man who held the phone.
“You know what I’m going to do, Tyler? Just to make sure you know I’m a man of my word. I’ve took your mum’s medication and hid it. How long before she starts to really hurt?”
“That wasn’t the deal,” said Tyler.
“So fight,” replied John. “There’s a man standing in front of you. He’s half your size, a third of your weight, and he’s ready to slap you around the room. He’s one of the toughest men I know. He’s going to put the phone on the bench. If you can put him down long enough to hit redial, I’ll give your poor old lady a dose of painkillers. If not, she suffers until you fight like a man and beat him. Each time you beat him and call me, your mum gets a painkiller. The next call I receive will either be from you asking politely for me to ease your mum’s pain, or it will be from my friend telling me you haven’t grown a pair of balls big enough for your mum to deserve a painkiller, and that she deserves to suffer.”
The call disconnected.
Tyler studied the man who turned his back and walked to the bench to place the phone down in clear sight. With casual indifference, the man stood opposite Tyler. He bounced a few times on the balls of his feet and threw a rapid combination of punches into the air before eying Tyler.
“I imagine, right now, your poor old mum is locked in a padded room with a bucket to piss in and only the memories of her dead son to keep her company,” he said.
The thought of his mum lying in a strange room, sweating and clawing at her skin, washed over Tyler’s mind.
‘Control it,’ Harvey’s words whispered.
But Tyler’s mind focused on his mother’s anguished face, wrinkled with agony and suffering.
“How’s she going to feel when she learns her own son wasn’t man enough to come to her rescue?” said the man. His taunts faded to a monotonous, heartless whisper.
Through eyes blurred by tears, Tyler focused on the callous and cruel grin that beamed from the man’s face, bearing yellowed teeth, broken and stained. Tyler felt rather than heard the rasp of the growl that emerged from his throat, its rhythm in perfect time with the blood that pulsed behind his eyes.
‘Use it,’ said Harvey.
And the man came for him.
11
Feed the Beast
“What do you mean you bloody killed him?” said John, sitting forwards in his chair and gripping the edge of his desk. “I didn’t tell you to kill the bloke, did I? No, I did not. Oh, Jesus. We’re going to have the whole bleeding who’s who of East bleeding London on my bleeding doorstep, and let me tell you something, Mick, it will not be me that takes the rap for it. I’ve got a lot riding on this fight tomorrow night and what I don’t need right now is enemies. Opponents, yes. Dixon is an opponent. But when you kill someone like Old Man McGee, you might as well go round to the neighbourhood villain’s house, wake them up, spit in their tea, and jump into bed with their wife, Jack. Do you understand the gravity of the situation?”
With both hands flat on his desk, John splayed his fingers and could feel the sweat from the antique desk’s fine leather inlay warming his hands.
“Mick said to go and
sort him out,” said Jack, and glanced across to Nobby for support.
“That’s right, John,” said Nobby. “He didn’t tell us not to kill him.”
It was too much for John.
“Jack, pour me a drink, will you?” said John. He pinched the bridge of his nose to try and stem the headache that was forming. “Tomorrow night, I have got every villain worth his salt in London coming to watch my number one fighter take on Mackie in a fight to the death. It just so happens that my boy was being trained by the old man himself and now he suddenly trains with me the day after the old man gets bleeding offed. These villains, Nobby, are not like you, mate. Oh, no. They’re intelligent men. That’s why they’re good at what they do, and that’s how they manage to stay out of prison.”
He took a sip of the brandy Jack had placed on the desk and pulled a tissue from a nearby box to wipe the ring mark from the leather.
“Another trait of these men, Nobby, is that they are extremely dangerous and not men that I want as enemies. Especially when I’ve invited them into my bleeding pub to watch the fight.”
“Can’t we just deny it?” asked Jack.
“Deny it, Jack?” A pulse of tension washed across John’s temple. “And how the hell am I supposed to do that when I’ve got the old man’s best fighter working for me? I’ll be bleeding slaughtered.”
He stopped, put his glass down on the wooden coaster beside his desk phone, and tried to make sense of the ideas that ran amok in his mind.
“Is that what this is about?” he asked. “Are you two trying to have me taken out? Is this some ploy to land me in hot water because I can assure you if it is-”
“No, John. I swear,” said Nobby.
“I didn’t ask you to talk. Shut up,” said John. Then he calmed. “Let me finish. It makes perfect sense. You get the entire community of villains to outcast me and you both get to go and work for who you want. Who is it? Who’s contacted you?”
“No-one, John,” said Jack. “Honest. We haven’t been anything but loyal. I’ve been with you from the start.”
“I know you’ve been with me a long time, Jack. That’s how I know your two weaknesses. The slightest sniff of a pair of panties or the alluring waft of banknotes and you’re away with the fairies.”
“We’re not trying to set you up,” said Nobby. His voice had calmed and he spoke with reason and without fear. “Mick told us to go and make sure the old man doesn’t stick his nose into the fight, being that he was training the boy. So we went down there, to his gym-”
“Okay,” said John. He sat back in his chair with his glass, admiring the way Nobby was handling the situation and wasn’t falling to bits like Jack. “And did you talk to the old man?”
“No, he was out the back.”
“So who did you speak to?”
“Some big fella. Black as they come, he was, and with a voice like a trombone.”
“Lloyd?” asked John.
“That’s it. Do you know him?”
“Everyone knows Lloyd, Nobby. He’s the old man’s able-bodied partner, and he’s just as well connected as the old man. He comes from a family of drugged-up yardies in Bow. He’s the only one in the family that doesn’t crush scrap cars for a living, and he was one of the old man’s first success stories until the booze and the pills got him.”
“He’s an alcoholic?”
“Que sera sera, Nobby,” said John, and took a sip of his brandy.
“Right,” said Nobby. “Anyway, he told us where to go, you know? Didn’t want us around and made it very clear we weren’t welcome there.”
“And then what?”
“Well, what would you do if someone insulted you, John? What did you expect us to do?”
“You torched the place?”
“Just the front door, but I guess the rest of the place just took off.”
“And what did you do?”
“Nothing we could do, John. It was out of control in seconds.”
“You ran?”
Nobby answered the question with raised eyebrows and tight lips, and he held John’s stare, aware of the immorality.
“Well, at least you’re honest, Nobby. Bleeding stupid, but honest.”
“So what do we do?” asked Jack. His voice was still trembling and stained with panic.
“What you two pair of clowns have done is start a war, Jack. There’s going to be fifty of London’s most fearsome gangsters in this pub tomorrow night and each and every one of them was friends with the old man, and that’s not to mention the family of angry yardies that will be kicking doors in looking for an answer to who killed their brother. And right now, all roads lead to the Golden Ring. So in answer to your question, Jack, we prepare for the worst, and you better get your backside out on the street and make it right.”
“How are we-”
“Just listen, Jack,” said John. He sank the remainder of his brandy and slammed the tumbler back down on the wooden coaster. “I want you to do exactly what I say. If you cock this up, everything I’ve worked for is going to come crashing down, and it’ll bury us alive.”
In an old power station in the heart of South London in the shadow of towering, concrete blocks of flats, and surrounded by pockets of small, green parks and old office buildings, a make-shift boxing ring had been put together.
Years of damp had tainted the stale air. It was flavoured by a history of under-paid union worker’s sweat, thick grease and heavy, iron machinery that had long since been sold for its scrap value, or reconditioned and sold to the highest bidding emerging market.
The rhythmic grunts of the two men in the ring echoed off the bare, Victorian, brick walls, accompanied only by the dull thuds of gloves on pads and the gruff, angry voice of a man in a sheepskin jacket and thick tortoise-shell glasses who leaned over the ropes, shouting at the larger of the two boxers. The bigger man sent a perfect hook through a poor defence, stunning the smaller boy, who rocked forwards then back.
“Don’t just bleeding stand there, Mackie, you big girl,” he shouted. “When you hit someone that hard, you follow up with more. Put him on his arse and don't let him up.”
The man Harvey had found at Tyler’s flat entered through the small side door and put his hand on Harvey’s arm. It was a move Harvey presumed was designed to inform his boss that Harvey had been forced to accompany him, as opposed to the truth of the matter, that Harvey forced the man to lead him there and into the jaws of death.
The hand was removed moments after Harvey had delivered a silent glare, and the two men walked towards the ring. They stopped behind Del Dixon with room enough to watch the sparring.
“That’s it, Mackie. Get in there,” the older man shouted, his enthusiasm fully supported by the ropes. A cigar was lodged between two of his fingers while the others gripped the rope. Both hands were adorned with an array of sovereigns, signets, five-row keeper rings and a heavy gold watch that rested on his angled wrist. “Now take him down and keep him down.”
Spittle shot from the man’s mouth and his cigar waved in the air as the larger of the two fighters took the advantage on his opponent who stood swaying in the centre of the ring. He delivered a wild but powerful hook that lifted the boy’s feet from the ring floor, causing him to land in an unceremonious heap with blood leaking from his mouth.
But the fight wasn’t over. Harvey expected Dixon to give his fighter a pat on the back and turn to see Harvey. But instead, Dixon leaned further into the ring.
“Now, Mackie, don’t let him wake up, son.”
The fighter was standing over his opponent, a tentative look of fear etched onto his young face as he locked eyes with Dixon, who leaned further into the ring.
“Finish him, you big dumb bastard,” he screamed. “If you don't finish that boy, I’ll wake him up myself and let him give you what for.”
The veins on Dixon’s temple were visible even from the distance of a few metres away, where Harvey stood.
The boy looked down at his opponent, whose eyes
flickered once and whose arms began to move.
“Now, Mackie,” screamed Dixon.
Mackie dropped to his knees beside the younger boy and placed his hand on his opponent’s head as if to offer a silent apology.
“Mackie,” screamed Dixon again, his voice rising several octaves.
It took Mackie three hard punches to the boy's head before the crack of bone could be heard.
“That’s it,” said Dixon, his voice quieter. “You’ve done the worst of it. Send him on his way.”
Mackie hovered above the dying boy as a pool of blood began to form by his knees. Then he brought his arm up for one final blow, raising it high above his head, clenching his gloveless fist and, with his eyes focused on the side of the boy's head, he delivered the fatal blow.
The crack of bones and grunt of Mackie’s exertion echoed in the vast room, but the sound faded as fast as the boy’s life. Mackie wiped the blood spatter from his face with his forearm and fell across the body at his knees. The man beside Harvey turned away and exhaled, long and slow.
Dixon nodded his approval, then straightened.
“Good lad,” he said, and took a long pull on his cigar. The ember crackled amid the smoke that swallowed Dixon’s wrinkled face. “It gets easier, Mackie. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Now get yourself washed up and go for a run. One more tonight then tomorrow is the big day.”
Dixon stepped down to the concrete floor using the three ropes for handholds and with his teeth clenching the cigar butt between his thin lips. Then he wiped his hands on a towel that was draped over the lowest rope and tossed it into the ring, catching sight of Harvey and the man beside him as he did.
Dixon’s head cocked inquisitively, and with a subconscious habit, he pushed his thick glasses onto his nose before retrieving his cigar. The soles of his brogues clicked on the concrete floor as he took five steps towards Harvey. His right hand found the fat sovereign on his left and turned it a full circle before positioning the coin flat on his fist as if he was readying for a punch using his rings for maximum results with minimum damage to his hands.
