by Ken Preston
“Sure,” Coffin said, the towel still pressed against his cheek. “Come on, Doc, I’m bleeding all over the floor, here.”
Shaddock lifted the lager bottle to his mouth and drained half of it in one go. He smacked his lips together, and said, “For you, Joe, I’ll stay. But dickwipe needs to leave. I’m not doing anything until he’s gone.”
“Clevon, go help Kirstin check the stock,” Craggs said.
Clevon glowered at Shaddock some more, then turned and left.
Shaddock ripped packets open on the table.
“Fucking wash my fucking hands, who the fuck does he think he’s fucking talking to?”
“You’re right, Frankie, kids these days they’ve got no respect for their elders,” Craggs said. “You and me, we were born at a time when society had values. We spoke out of line, we got a good pasting from the old man, right?”
Shaddock filled a syringe from an ampoule. “Damn right.” He shoved the needle into Coffin’s left shoulder. “Giving you a shot of antibiotics, Joe, and I’ll give you a tetanus jab, too. Whoever or whatever bit you, no telling what germs they might be carrying around. The mouth’s a filthy fucker, Joe, full of nasty shit. Then I’ll give you a local anaesthetic, before I sew you up.” He stepped back and regarded Coffin’s wounds. “I’m gonna have to give you a fair few shots of local, enough they might knock you out a bit.”
“Forget that, Doc,” Coffin growled. “I’ve got things to do today, I need to be sharp.”
Shaddock filled another syringe with the tetanus shot. “All right then, you’re the boss. But sewing you up’s gonna hurt like a bastard.”
Craggs handed Coffin a glass of whisky. Coffin swallowed the drink in one and slammed the glass down on the table. “I already hurt. Hurting some more isn’t going to make it any worse.”
Shaddock gazed at Coffin’s face, at the blood and the ripped flesh. “Fucking hell, Joe, one of these days you’re going to get yourself killed. And then I’ll be putting tight little stitches in a dead man’s face, making you look nice and pretty for your funeral.”
* * *
Emma Wylde held the ice pack to the back of her head and gazed at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. It was just a shame that Halloween had already been and gone, as the battered face that stared back at her would have been perfect for trick or treating. Dark, heavy shadows encircled her bloodshot eyes, and there was an angry bruise across her forehead, from when she had delivered her Glaswegian Kiss. How the fuck she would explain this to Nick, she had no idea. Especially as they were supposed to be meeting for lunch in another ten minutes. She had already shoved her shredded clothes into a black plastic bag and, apart from the evidence on her face, and a few light scratches across her stomach and shoulders, there was nothing else to show for her misadventure at the house.
But that was more than enough.
Standing in her bra and knickers, she examined the scratches across her abdomen. They were shallow, had hardly bled at all, but still, Emma was worried about infection. She should go to a doctor, but then there would be questions, and Emma wasn’t sure she had any answers.
Not ones that made sense, anyway.
Emma opened the cabinet and rooted through the packets of paracetamol, creams, lotions and Nick’s eye drops. She found a packet of antihistamines. Weren’t they supposed to be good for infections? Or was that allergies?
“Oh, fuck it,” she muttered, and split the silver foil open, and popped a tiny tablet in her mouth.
What she really needed was a course of antibiotics. Or maybe a tetanus jab.
Emma shuddered when she thought of the hideous creature in that house. It was difficult to think of him as being human, more like a crazed, rabid animal. Those teeth, and his eyes. If Emma had held any belief in the supernatural, she would have considered the possibility that he was possessed.
Whatever. She’d been lucky to escape with her life, that was for sure. Emma knew that thing would have ripped her to shreds if Joe Coffin hadn’t turned up when he had. After it’d shoved its big cock in one or more of her orifices, first though.
Emma suddenly felt faint and sat down on the edge of the bath. She dropped her head between her knees and took some slow, deep breaths.
“Come on, keep it together. You’re the big, bad reporter, remember? You don’t take no shit from anyone. Wylde by name, wild by nature.”
Giggles burst out of Emma’s stomach, which was busily turning over and threatening to regurgitate her breakfast. What was happening here? Was she suffering some kind of hysterical fit?
“Oh, shit,” she whispered, and lunged for the toilet.
When she’d finished throwing up, she sat on the floor, grabbed a towel, and wiped the sheen of sweat off her face.
Emma reached out a trembling hand and picked up the ice pack and pressed it against her scalp again. From a tentative finger exploration, Emma was convinced she had a lump the size of an ostrich egg on her head. She imagined it throbbing and pulsating with a red glow, like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. The last thing she remembered was being grabbed by the hair and dragged across the room.
From that point on it was one big blank until she came to in the silence of the house. That might have been the scariest part of the whole ordeal, wondering where that monster was, if Coffin was still alive, and was she a prisoner, now?
As it turned out, it appeared Coffin had simply forgotten about her. He was nowhere to be seen. Emma had climbed painfully to her feet, holding onto the wall to steady herself. She had a piercing headache, which spiked down from the top of her skull to right behind her eyes. Her vision swam in and out of focus, and Emma had to stand by the wall, using it as support for a minute, before she felt well enough to walk unaided.
It was clear where the fight had happened. Emma followed the trail of blood to the passage leading to the back of the house and the kitchen. Huge, arcing sprays of blood decorated the damp, mildewed walls, like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Emma wondered whose blood it was.
She followed the trail to the top of the cellar steps. There was a splodge of blood and hair, and some other stuff she really didn’t want to think about too much, on the wall there. But no sign of a body anywhere.
Emma stood at the top of the steps, peering down into the darkness.
Did she really want to go down there and investigate?
She had decided not.
Then she’d heard the police sirens in the distance, but definitely growing louder.
Emma had got the hell out of that house as quickly as possible.
She shifted the ice pack slightly.
Joe Coffin.
Terry Wu’s murderer, at least according to Steffanie.
But now Emma’s rescuer.
Okay, so he pulled a rabid, possibly possessed schizoid with a boner the size of a donkey’s dick off her, but where was he when she woke up? And why was he there in the first place? Did it have anything to do with Tom Mills and his mysterious companions?
The front door slammed shut downstairs.
“Hey, Emma?” Nick shouted.
Emma reached across the bathroom and shoved the door shut.
“I’m on the toilet!” she shouted.
I can’t believe this. Earlier on this morning I was hiding in Tom Mills’ bathroom, and now here I am, hiding in my own.
“Sorry, Ems, but I can’t make our lunch date today,” Nick shouted up the stairs. “I’ve just had a call to go into work, looks like those two missing kids have been found.”
“That’s great!” Emma shouted and winced at a spike of pain lancing through her head.
“Yeah, it is, but the house where they were being kept? Apparently it’s a bloodbath. I’ll try and phone you later, let you know when I’m coming home.”
“Okay.”
Emma listened for the front door slamming shut again and then breathed out.
A house that looked like a bloodbath? Was it the same house? Was that why Joe Coffin was there, l
ooking for Jacob?
But what did Tom Mills have to do with any of this? Jacob was his kid. Surely he wouldn’t have been keeping his own son a prisoner in an abandoned house with a violent madman?
Emma hauled herself upright and gazed at her ruined face in the mirror again. Was there any chance that makeup might hide those bruises? Not that she had ever been a makeup kind of girl.
Deciding to forget about trying to hide her bruises with makeup, Emma opened the bathroom door and walked stiffly into her bedroom.
She dressed quickly and hurried downstairs, grabbed her bag and her laptop. As she headed for the front door, she saw Nick had left the study door open. She could see his desk, and his chair, and she smiled as she remembered last night, how they had both managed to forget work for a short while at least.
And then another thought occurred to her.
The file he had been looking at.
Joe Coffin.
Emma put her bag and laptop down in the hall and walked into the study. The file was still lying on the desk, in front of the computer monitor.
She stood over it, looking at the manila cover, afraid to touch it. Would it be a betrayal of Nick’s trust if she opened the file and looked inside? If he found out, he’d go crazy.
But if he never found out, what did it matter?
Without moving the folder from where it lay, Emma flipped open the cover. Now that she had time to examine it, she could see it wasn’t an official police document.
What was going on? Did Nick have a personal vendetta going against Joe Coffin? Nick had been instrumental in getting Coffin prosecuted for the assault that sent him to jail, but with Craggs’ lawyers involved, Coffin was sentenced to far less time than Nick had been hoping for.
Emma leafed through the folder. It was a catalogue of extortion, money laundering, drug supplies, and killings, that Coffin was suspected of having been involved in.
But with no evidence to support any of it.
At the front was a report on two young men who had been found murdered in their flat. The murders looked like an execution style killing. Nick had scrawled one name over it.
COFFIN?
maybe superman
Jacob Mills lay in the hospital bed, eyes closed, tubes snaking from his frail body, leading to drips and a heart monitor. His mother sat by the side of the bed, holding his hand, his arm heavily wrapped in bandages. She gently stroked his fingers with her thumb, her eyes fixed on his pale, drawn face.
Tom Mills, sitting on a stiff, plastic chair on the other side of the bed, felt like shit. He had to sit on his hands to stop from fidgeting, and he had to use every bit of willpower he could summon, to stop himself from leaping out of the chair and stalking up and down the hospital room. Pain flared through his chest every time he took a breath, and his head and neck felt like someone had pounded at him with a metal bar.
Fortunately for Tom, by the time the emergency staff had discharged him, the police had finished with their questions for Laura, and already gone. They’d be back, of course, but the longer Tom could keep out of their way, the better.
Tom hated hospitals. The smell of antiseptic, mixed with the stink of old, sick people, which seemed to be ever present in hospitals no matter what ward you were on, made him feel ill. The reek of sickness and death reminded him of his father, and his final days as the cancer ate away at his body. Tom hated that old bastard, and hated every moment spent looking after him while he took his time dying, but he wouldn’t wish a death like that on anyone.
Well, maybe he could think of a few. But as for himself, he’d rather eat a bullet when the time came, than spend his final months on earth lying in a bed, pissing and shitting all over the sheets, and having his arse wiped by some gorilla who was too fucking stupid to get a proper job.
The kid, though, he hadn’t deserved any of this. Poor little bastard shouldn’t have gone exploring in that house. Bloody typical. That house was cursed, it had to be. No wonder it had drawn a maniac like Abel to it. Tom should have moved them on, first chance he got. There were always people breaking in to it, having a look round, or some homeless guy dossing down for the night.
But not Jacob. Why the hell did he have to choose a career in breaking and entering all of a sudden? Any other time, Tom might have been proud of him. It was that Peter Marsden’s fault. If not for him, Jacob never would have dared break into that house. And then none of this mess would have happened.
Tom wondered what the doctors were making of Peter’s condition. His wounds, in his throat and the back of his head, the blisters. And then there was the fact that he kept trying to take a bite out of anyone who got close enough. He was like a wild animal. No one was taking any chances, and they were keeping him sedated, and strapped in the bed, just to be on the safe side. He’d already bitten one nurse in the Emergency Room and then made a grab for the bag of blood on his IV drip.
Even that miserable old bint that passed for his mother was keeping away from him.
At least Jacob wasn’t in that condition. Whatever else they had done to him, they hadn’t tried turning him into one of them.
Tom ran his fingers through his hair. Felt like the walls were closing in on him, like he was going to scream if he didn’t get out of here soon.
“Hey,” he whispered.
Laura dragged her eyes away from Jacob. Her face was lined and pale, dark shadows under her eyes from worry and lack of sleep. She stared mutely at Tom.
“I’m just going to go outside, smoke a fag. This place is killing me, I feel like I’m going crazy. I won’t be long.”
Laura said nothing, just turned and looked at Jacob again.
“You want anything from downstairs? I could get you a coffee, or something to eat?”
Laura shook her head.
Tom stood up, wiped his hands, clammy with sweat, down his trouser legs. Looking at Jacob, swamped in the big hospital bed, Tom wanted to cry. He had a sudden urge to tell Laura everything, spill his guts to her, to the police, just get it all off his chest and out in the open. Maybe that would be for the best. Confession was supposed to be good for the soul, right?
Tom walked out of the room, down past the nurse’s station, and out into the main corridor.
Tom stood in the car park and lit up a cigarette. The late afternoon light was slowly fading as the sun set behind the cloud cover. A long line of cars waited to get moving, queueing up to leave the car park. Someone sounded their horn, impatient to get moving.
A hand closed around Tom’s upper arm, the grip strong, and Joe Coffin said, “Enjoying your cigarette, Tom?”
“Oh, hey, Joe, I—”
“Come with me,” Coffin said, glancing around.
He began walking, guiding Tom out of the car park and past decorative bushes, into a corner of the hospital building where they were hidden from view.
Tom’s eyes widened as he saw the blood-stained dressings on Coffin’s face, and over his hands. “Fuck, Joe! What the fuck happened to you?”
“Never mind that,” Coffin hissed. He snatched the cigarette from Tom’s mouth and threw it away. “What the hell’s going on, Tom?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
Coffin leaned in close, towering over Tom. “Have you seen the state Jacob’s in? Poor kid was being kept prisoner in a cellar by a maniac, looked like a fucking vampire. You know anything about this, Tom?”
“No, of course not,” Tom said.
“Where the hell did you run off to?” Coffin snarled.
“It was seeing that Peter kid, staggering towards the house like a zombie. I just had a flash, like a premonition or something, and I knew where Jacob was. You found him at the house, right? The one we broke into as kids?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Where the hell were you?”
“I was in such a panic, I just wanted to get to Jacob as fast as I could, you know, and I wasn’t concentrating. I fucking totalled the car, Joe, lost control and skidded smack into a brick wall on the way over t
here. I was out, for like, ten minutes or more, and then the ambulance turned up, and they brought me here.”
Coffin stared at Tom, his eyes narrowed, like he didn’t believe him.
“I’m being fucking straight with you, Joe,” he said. “My chest is black and blue from when the airbag hit me, look.”
With trembling fingers, Tom unbuttoned the top of his shirt and pulled it open. His chest was a mass of bruises, just like he’d said.
“Where’s your car now?” Coffin said.
“Fuck knows, I got taken away in an ambulance, I don’t know, it’s probably been towed away by now.”
Coffin eased back a little, not so much in Tom’s face anymore. “How’s Jacob, you seen him yet?”
“Yeah, yeah, me and Laura, we’ve been sat by his bed all afternoon, you know. He’s in a bad way, but the doctors are keeping him sedated for the moment. They say he’s in shock, and he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“That maniac at the house, I think he might be the one who killed Steffanie and Michael,” Coffin said.
“No, Joe, you got those guys, remember?”
Coffin got in Tom’s face again, up close. “Those two punks? I don’t know where you got your info from, but they probably couldn’t have stolen sweets from a baby, never mind kill someone. No, that bastard at the house,” Coffin pointed to the dressings on his face, “he did this to me, chewed me up like a slab of beef at the butchers, he’s the one killed Steffanie and Michael, I know it.”
“All right, Joe, whatever you say.”
Coffin stuck his finger in Tom’s face. “Yeah, that’s right. Whatever I say.”
“What happened to the other guy, Joe?”
Coffin stepped back again, relaxed a little. “I killed him.”
“Good,” Tom said. “The bastard deserved it.”
“There was a woman there, too.”
Tom stiffened up, felt his insides clenching. Not Steffanie, she was with me.
Coffin glanced behind him, at the cars in the car park, an ambulance, lights flashing, pulling into the emergency department entrance. He seemed on edge, wanting to keep out of sight.
