Heroes Don't Travel

by Roo I MacLeod

  ‘What about the mother? I’m not leaving her behind, eh? And she’s with a couple of friends of mine. They’d not think it fair if I left them behind. I can’t be doing that.’

  ‘Max don’t do, no. You owe him.’

  ‘How do you figure? My task was to find his daughter and I’ve found her. I need to give the child back somehow, but not to you guys. Plus, I’m owed some money. My two compadres are thinking this is a paid job.’

  ‘For what?’ Winston said. ‘You were to get Claudia to us. That was the arrangement. You don’t have her. But we’re prepared to talk about the child. I assume it’s Lucas?’

  Ben stepped back to the room and looked at the child patting the sheep’s coat and called to him. ‘You are Lucas, yeah?’ The child looked at him, the lick of blonde hair veiling large blue eyes. ‘Yeah, he’s Lucas.’

  ‘And where are you?’

  ‘I’m at a pub called the Hang Man’s Noose. It’s…’

  The phone went dead.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Black Hats Can’t See the Weeds for the Dirt

  Wynona, aka Wolf Girl, aka PSO Webster sat on the Blacksmith’s sofa with two hooded children. Harry and Tyson, self-appointed leaders of the Pittsville Punksters, lay sprawled on either side of her. A smaller child struggled with the bellows, trying to pump air into the bright coals. He wore a soiled nappy and grubby feet splayed in the dirt for leverage.

  Blacky’s shed leaned with the wind, the tin roof rattling and the door creaking and slapping at the jamb. Donkey stood with his nose to the wind, his whiskers quivering. He munched on straw in slow motion with his eyes closed. Children clad in rags bustled in the red glow of the furnace, sweeping with small brooms and collecting wooden debris to stack against the shed wall.

  Wynona tapped her phone on her knee.

  ‘Who you trying to get hold of?’ Harry asked. His black hoody had ‘breathing is cool’ stenciled across its front.

  ‘Like it’s any of your business,’ Tyson said. He leant over Wynona’s lap and jabbed Harry in the ribs. ‘You fancy her, don’t you?’

  ‘Piss off, Tyson, or I’ll do you.’

  Tyson jabbed him in the ribs again, and Harry dived across Wynona and applied a headlock on Tyson. They rolled onto the dirt, wrestling and yelling and threatening death and pain. Wynona walked away from the ruckus, the wolf at her side. Harry and Tyson stopped with the wrestling and sat back on the sofa.

  ‘You got no chance with her anyway,’ Tyson said. ‘Weismann says she’s got distracted by that Street Boy. He reckons they need to get their shit together so she can get back on the job and start robbing houses again.’

  ‘What’s bloody Weismann know?’

  ‘Yeah, Tyson, Weismann knows nothing,’ chimed in a new voice. The two boys looked at Alex standing by the shed with an armful of timber. She was a tall girl, getting taller by the minute. She pushed a strand of hair from her face and stuck her tongue out. ‘I’m just saying he don’t know everything.’

  ‘You guys done,’ Wynona said. They nodded and ran to fight with Spike over his piss poor effort with the bellows.

  Wynona pushed speaker on her phone and perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘Hello, Loubie,’ she said.

  ‘Wynona,’ the voice whispered. ‘I can’t get in touch with Ben. You got any ideas?’

  ‘I just spoke to Ben. He said everything’s cool.’

  ‘How does he figure that? We’re locked in a cellar in some big old white ranch style house on top of a bloody hill in the middle of bloody nowhere, for sure. And it’s dark. Buried coffin dark, but hey, it’s good to hear everything’s cool with Ben. Perhaps he could spread some of his happiness our way.’

  ‘So when did you lose Ben.’

  ‘At the Gypsy camp when we were helping Claudia get her kid back.’

  ‘Right, so I need to contact Ben.’

  ‘Make it quick, Wynona, please. These guys are well pissed with life. There’s got to be over a hundred dogs here and pigs. They keep threatening us with pigs. Pigs don’t bite, do they? Tommy says they eat people, but that can’t be right.’

  ‘So why they got you locked up?’

  ‘Who knows? They’re right pissed about losing some cargo and this Claudia is psycho about her kid. She beat up her boyfriend bad because he shook the child. Now she’s, well I can’t see her, but she was just rocking back and forth and moaning in the car up here.

  ‘Jesus, Wynona, she went for this Gypsy bloke like she had claws and he was dinner. I know our remit was to bring her back, for sure, but she isn’t going anywhere without that child.’

  ‘Get off the phone, Loubie. Keep your head down, and I’ll see what the boy wonder is up to.’

  Harry and Tyson sat in the dirt working the bellows. Wynona secured her phone in her combat trousers and slipped from the arm rest onto the sofa, stretching her legs to the furnace. Coals glowed red and Harry and Tyson had marshmallows toasting. Wolf sat in the dirt with his eyes half closed.

  ‘We doing that house tonight?’ Tyson said. ‘It’s getting late, and Weismann was hoping for some booty, he was. He gets a right sook on when there’s no goods coming in.’

  ‘I told Weismann there might be no booty in this house. We’re looking for clues.’

  ‘Right, but if we find booty, we can keep it,’ Harry said.

  ‘So long as it isn’t a clue.’

  ‘Who gets to decide whether booty is a clue or not? I mean your clue might be our booty.’

  ‘Or the other way round,’ Harry said.

  The two boys looked at each other and nodded.

  ‘I get to decide.’ Wynona had her phone to her ear, but Ben wasn’t answering. ‘Come on, let’s go rob a house.’

  ***

  Wynona and Tyson sat on her motorbike, helmets in hand, outside a four story house in Lower Ostere. A tall iron fence with spear heads and padlocked gates hid a forgotten building. The front offered an arched doorway, with a smaller entrance to the right. Bay windows curved into the semi-circular pebbled driveway.

  A flotilla of push bikes skidded in the strip of grass between the footpath and road. Rider four and five released a set of bolt cutters from the bike frame and set to the chains.

  ‘Where’s Wolf,’ Harry asked. He and Alex had shared a bike and stood with Wynona and Tyson watching the Punksters at work with the bolt cutters.

  ‘He’s minding Blacky’s shed. He likes the furnace and he knows it pisses off Dog.’

  ‘Yeah, Dog don’t like Wolf,’ Tyson said.

  ‘Where’d you get Wolf? Was he a stray like Dog?’ Harry said.

  ‘I was raised by wolves, Harry. When I left the pack Wolf came with me to make sure I settled okay in the Man’s world. He just never went back to the pack.’

  Harry and Tyson made no effort to hide their awe. Alex laughed at the boys. ‘Yeah, right, Mowgli.’

  A wee cheer erupted from the children with the bolt cutters. Wynona and Tyson alighted from the bike and joined the Punksters as they ran for the front door. Tyson’s brother Spike, a wee lad of three foot, climbed the guttering to the first floor. He scampered from window to window until he found a sash he could jimmy open. The thump of his body landing inside the house sounded loud in the night. It took an age, but the front door swung open and the gang of black figures entered the house.

  ‘Nothing leaves this house without my say so,’ Wynona said. ‘I will be frisking you all. I’m looking for guns, bullets, paperwork; anything that connects the Black Hats with Marvin Cooper and the two coppers dumped in the trash outside the morgue last Christmas.’

  The gang split on Wynona’s last word. Two bodies in black ran for the stairs. Tyson led Spike into the sitting room to tear the furniture apart. Wynona paired Harry and little Alex together, thinking there was a bond building. Alex was good for Harry, keeping the feral in the boy in check.

  Wynona stopped in the main foyer, turning on the spot trying to get a feel for the place. She knew a lot about the previous residents. They�
��d paid cash for the house and their references were bogus. The title was made out to an individual who’d died in the last millennium and had never saved enough money for a months’ deposit on a rental. Their sole purpose in buying the house was to have a secure base while they chased items stolen by their accountant. The booty stolen consisted of books, accounts, numbers and addresses and ledgers of monies owed and invested. The books chronicled the history of the Black Hats cartel going back decades.

  The Black Hats failed to retrieve their booty and died in a bloody massacre at Ostere Academy School. Harry and Tyson, and many others, led by Ben, Street Boy, Jackman, had wiped them out. The stains of blood still colored the foliage of the playgrounds. A secret monument of spent shells lay buried beneath the old elm tree in the woods bordering the school. The pupils felt it necessary to show their gratitude to the massacre and its participants for closing their school for a week.

  A complete cartel wiped out in one black, bloody night.

  Wynona pushed at the first door in the hallway and found a large bare office. One single scrap of paper sat in the top drawer of the wooden desk. She opened each drawer, dropping them on the floor. Her hand felt at the wood, rubbed at the back of the desk looking for guns, knives, cash and bullets. She needed hard evidence linking the Black Hats to the murders hanging on Ben’s head. If she could find a gun or a bullet and match them to the bullets found in the second copper she could get Ben exonerated.

  Upstairs feet pounded the floorboards. A fight broke out over a trinket and Tyson had to run upstairs to adjudicate. Wynona walked to the end of the hallway, past an industrial sized kitchen and unbolted the rear door. The blackest night greeted her arrival. Stars offered a sign of life, but failed to illuminate the gardens. Wynona flicked a switch on the door jamb and a power station’s worth of electric flooded the backyard.

  Harry and Alex joined Wynona as she stepped onto the cobbled patio. Grass, overgrown and wet from dew stretched into the night. Trees with crooked, bare branches bordered the property. Flower beds, grown wild, cut into the lawn, and a rickety looking garden shed occupied the bottom of the garden.

  The light lost its power as they walked the property. Wynona shone her torch on the ground, focusing on the shed. A spade leant against the weathered wood. The torch beam illuminated two long upraised humps with a thin, weed-strewn covering. Another oblong of turf sat above the natural contours further to the right side of the property

  ‘What’s up,’ Harry said. ‘It’s sort of cold, like.’

  ‘Grab that shovel.’

  The beam settled on the implement leaning against the shed wall. Harry ran for the shed and returned with the long handled spade. Wynona circled the mound of earth, testing the ground with her foot. She shoved the spade and stamped with her foot and scooped the first clod of turf.

  ‘You think there’s buried treasure here,’ Harry said.

  Alex clapped her hands. ‘Don’t tell the others.’

  Harry ran back to the shed and returned with a shovel and a gardening fork. They joined Wynona in her labor, digging in silence. After a new mound of fresh dirt lay piled in the grass Wynona held her hand up for a break. A sour stench pushed Alex and Harry back from the hole. Wynona shone the torch on the ground and brushed at the earth. Harry joined her, leaning into the hole and screwing his nose. He wiped perspiration from his furrowed brow.

  ‘That don’t smell so good.’

  He backed out of the hole and Wynona followed suit. ‘Get the Punksters together in the foyer. We need to leave.

  ‘Tell them they can have what they want: Just no guns.’

  ***

  Wynona stood outside the front door with her phone to her ear. ‘What you doing up there,’ she said. ‘Loubie tells me they’re being held as prisoners in a big old white house by a gang of angry Gypsies. And you’re telling me everything is cool. This isn’t right, Street Boy. I stuck my neck out for you on this job. This was about you taking some money from a rich man by finding his girl and grandchild.

  ‘And I’m breaking my arse down here trying to find evidence before Barney locks you away and loses the damn key.’

  She pulled the phone away from the torrent of expletives injected into her auditory canal. She smiled at the Punksters, clad in black, their faces darkened for the robbing.

  A pause and Ben spoke. ‘I’m sorry, but it could be better,’ he said.

  ‘So what you going to do?’

  ‘Get the girls back. And Tommy.’ There was a silence, and then a whispered voice. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Shit, why shit,’ Wynona said. ‘Ben.’

  ‘Winston’s here. He’s brought two friends, big guys with stupid beige pork pie hats and semi-automatic rifles. They—’

  The phone connection died, and Wynona pulled the phone from her ear. She looked at the device and shrugged before securing it in her black jacket.

  ‘Everything cool?’ Harry asked.

  ‘That was Ben.’

  ‘So he’s cool,’ Harry said. ‘How’s he doing? I haven’t seen Ben since my mum told him off for getting me shot. I was getting to like Ben, but my mum don’t take to blokes taking the piss out of me, like. No way.’

  ‘No, it’s not cool. Winston has turned feral and is threatening Ben with hired guns. It’s all gone wrong and this is my fault. This job was too big for Ben because Max, Mad bloody Max, Meldrum is a shithead.’

  ‘So we going to help Ben?’ Harry said.

  Alex pulled on Harry’s sleeve and shook her head.

  ‘Me and Ben look out for each other, mate. Serious.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wynona said. ‘The phone went dead.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to call the police.’

  ‘You is the police,’ Tyson said. His pockets bulged with booty and the pack on his back weighted his narrow shoulders.

  ‘Indeed, but what’s buried in the garden is above my pay grade. I’ll give you guys twenty minutes to clean all fingerprints out of this house then I’ll call. Then you got to scarper. We don’t want to be here when the coppers come.’

  ‘What about Ben?’

  ‘He’s sort of on his own, isn’t he? He needs to sort it out.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Winston is No Dad

  The front door slammed shut and Ben replaced the phones receiver, the ding of the cradle way too loud. Winston walked with measured steps, his long dark fingers caressing the worn wood of the bar. Ben fumbled with a cigarette, struck a match that broke in half.

  Winston stopped in front of Ben, picked a stray foreign body from Ben’s coat and flicked it to the floor. ‘Don’t believe in dry cleaning?’ He kept his voice soft, but the intent and the menace were clear to the bodies watching his discourse. He took out a gold, chunky lighter and flipped the lid.

  The striking flint caused Ben to twitch. The yellow flame wavered as Ben puffed on his cigarette. He took a long drag and held his breath, counting slowly, trying to gain some time and space. With a long plume of smoke exhaled he stepped back and relaxed as Winston sat his arse against a bar stool. Ben dragged hard and threw the butt into the red embers of the fire.

  ‘Yeah, me and Ivan have a daily collection. Just after the shoe shine boy has finished with our brogues, eh?’ He smirked at Winston. ‘You were quick.’

  ‘I was in the area. Where’s Lucas?’

  ‘Hang on, there was a deal. I’ve found your girl, and her kid, so I want my money. Actually, I’m looking at a bonus as I wasn’t asked to find the child, but you’re impressed, aren’t you? I’m adding the child as an extra, eh? But I want to see some money before I give up the little treasure.’

  ‘Your mission was to find Claudia.’

  Ben raised his hands and smiled at Winston’s effort to find fault on a technicality. He started to protest, but Winston placed a finger to his lips for silence. It felt cold and hard. Ben pursed his lips to stop himself from severing the finger and spitting the digit in Winston’s fa
ce.

  ‘So where is she?’ Winston removed his finger.

  ‘She’s with a load of Gypsies up the road in a big white house on a hill to be precise.’

  ‘So you haven’t completed your task,’ he said. ‘That’s what we call half a job. You’re new to this profession, but our parameters were quite specific. Bringing Claudia back to Ostere wasn’t negotiable. When you’ve completed the task to our satisfaction, we’ll talk.’ He stepped around Ben and peered beyond the chimneybreast at the child sitting on the floor with Griff and the sheep. ‘In the meantime, I’ll take charge of the child.’

  Ben stepped in front of him. ‘No. I have this child on behalf of the mother and you’ve got no authority to take him.’

  Winston reached into his jacket and removed a black gun from its holster. Ben froze and watched the gun turn and threaten his face. He was close enough to kick, to knee, to strike through his throat, but Ben stood mesmerized by his languid actions.

  ‘Me and my Glock 7 beg to differ with you. Do you know anything about guns, Ben? It is Ben, isn’t it? As we are becoming more intimate it seems wrong to call you Street Boy. My men behind me each carry an old Remington 870 Express, 20 Gage, Pump Action shotgun. They are capable of taking your head off your shoulders and they don’t have to be so good a shot to achieve that result. The Glock is a magnificent weapon. It is reliable; it is deadly, and from this distance will remove the back of your skull and embed it in the far wall.’ He tapped Ben on the sternum with the muzzle. ‘So stand aside, because we don’t need to be killing here, do we?’

  He pushed at Ben’s chest, the gun steering Ben back toward the Shepherds and Trev.

  Ben sighed and retreated.

  Trev stepped off his stool. ‘You going to shoot us all?’ He held a rifle and the Shepherd brothers stood as a line with their arms crossed over their chests. Before he could act the men guarding the front door turned their shotguns to face the back room. They stepped up to the chimney and loaded their weapons in synchronized precision.