Joe Coffin Season One

by Ken Preston

  He started dragging her towards the park, into the trees. As she kicked out, one of her shoes flew off her foot and landed on the grass. Her attacker paid it no attention, relentless in his determination to get her under the cover of the trees, and out of sight of the main road.

  Julie, realising he was too strong for her and that it was futile to try to peel his hand off her face, let go and jabbed her fingers up behind her, trying to scratch at his eyes. Her fingers encountered the soft fabric of the parka’s hood, and she jabbed harder, trying to find his face. She heard a revolting giggle, and she screamed.

  Suddenly they were in the darkness of the wood. He let go of her, and she fell on the ground, covered in wet leaves, sobbing.

  Her attacker stood over her, a dark, hulking shadow against the gloom of the woodland. Julie realised her situation was hopeless now. She watched in terror as the man reached up and pulled his hood back.

  “Please, please,” she sobbed, “let me go. Please don’t hurt me any more. Don’t kill me.”

  The man bent down over her, and she could just make out his face in the gloom, his long teeth and his eyes narrowed down to slits.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” he said quietly, his voice just audible over the rain falling on the cover of trees. “But my little boy needs a playmate, and, I’m afraid, once he’s finished with you, you’ll be wishing I had.”

  Julie took a deep breath and screamed.

  But everybody was indoors, sheltering from the storm, and nobody heard her.

  evil woman

  Coffin stepped through the open doors, into a wall of sound, the speakers pumping out Evil Woman by the Electric Light Orchestra. The club was in darkness, only the round stage lit up in glowing red from the spotlights, illuminating a single figure, tied to a chair.

  It was Mortimer Craggs, a gag around his mouth. He was straining at his bonds, staring at Coffin, his eyes bulging from his face. He was working his jaw furiously, like he was trying to shout something, or force the gag off his mouth.

  “Go on,” Tom said, and prodded him in the back with the gun.

  Coffin walked on, around the empty tables and chairs, towards the stage. He saw a body lying on the floor, between an upended table and chairs. In the shadows beyond the spotlights it was difficult to make out too much, but he could see the body was a woman, that she was naked, and she was obviously dead.

  Tom prodded him again. “Go on, Joe, up on the stage with Craggs.”

  “What have you done?” Coffin said, ignoring Tom’s order to join Craggs, and turning around.

  Tom stepped back, out of Coffin’s reach, his eyes wide and panicked. He bumped into a table behind him, but kept the shotgun trained on Coffin the whole time.

  “Just get the fuck on the stage, Joe, or else I’m going to blow your fucking head off right now.”

  Coffin regarded Tom coolly for a few more seconds and then began walking towards the stage again. Craggs stared at him, eyes bulging in their sockets. His face was streaked with blood, but it didn’t look like his.

  The song was coming to an end, fading away. As the last notes disappeared and were replaced with silence, a door opened at the back of the club, next to the bar, and a woman stepped through.

  “Fuck me, it’s Lois Lane!” Tom said, and grinned.

  “Emma?” Coffin said.

  Emma looked behind her, then back at the others.

  “Come and join the party, Lois!” Tom shouted.

  Emma walked past the bar, looking from Tom, to Craggs, to Coffin.

  “I see you found Tom, then,” she said.

  “Yeah, it was easy,” Coffin said. “I just followed the sound of whining and complaining.”

  Emma glanced uneasily at the woman’s body on the floor. From where she stood she had a better view than he did, and when she looked back at Coffin, something inside of him turned over uneasily at the expression on her face.

  “Hey, Lois, grab a couple of chairs and put them on the stage. I want you and your boyfriend up there with Craggs, all in one place where I can see you.”

  Emma looked back at the body on the floor again and then picked up two chairs and carried them onto the stage. Craggs watched her, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. She sat down, and Coffin joined her.

  Tom grinned as he looked at them, the shotgun aimed at Coffin the whole time.

  “This is fun, isn’t it?” he said. “All the gang together. We could have a party.”

  “We’ll party all right, when I’m dancing on your fucking corpse,” Coffin growled.

  Tom leaned back, his grin growing even wider. “Ooohh, the big boy’s getting angry. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Joe, but you’re not exactly in a position to be making threats.”

  “This is a mess, Tom,” Coffin said. “Just what the hell is going on?”

  “You’re right, this is a big, fucking, stinking crap heap of a mess, but I’ve finally got the situation under control. And what the fuck, I might as well tell you all about it, before I kill you. That way, at least you’ll know why you’re dying.”

  Tom’s head snapped around at the sound of a clatter, something falling from behind the bar. Coffin tensed, ready to pounce whilst Tom’s attention was diverted, but before he could make a move, he was staring back down the barrel of the shotgun again.

  “Stay there, big boy,” Tom said. “Don’t worry about him, he’s harmless.”

  Coffin watched as a shambling, skeletal figure staggered into view, like a zombie in a horror movie. It saw them, and started making its slow, painful way over to them.

  “It’s all that fucking stupid bitch’s fault,” Tom said. “If she’d just done as I fucking told her, when I told her, none of this crap would have happened.”

  Who’s he talking about? Coffin thought.

  “But nobody ever fucking listens to me. All my life I’ve been walked over, stepped on, fucking pissed on, by everybody I ever knew. My shitty parents, the Mob, that fucking stupid bitch of a wife who wouldn’t fucking shut up about having kids.”

  “Is that what this is all about?” Coffin said. “The people who have died, that man you assaulted on the M6, your boy, Jacob, locked up in that cellar and tortured, all because you’re pissed off that nobody will listen to you?”

  “You’re going to fucking listen to me now, Joe,” Tom replied, holding the shotgun up to emphasise his point.

  “Let him talk,” Emma said. “I’d like to hear his excuses.”

  Tom glanced at her, like he didn’t have an answer for that.

  “All my life, Joe, you’ve been fucking laughing at me, taking the piss with the rest of them. When we were at school, we were both fucking outcasts, but even then you wouldn’t give me the fucking time of day.”

  The shotgun dipped slightly as Tom let go of it with one hand and wiped his arm across his face.

  He looked up at Craggs. “And you, too, you wouldn’t listen to me, either. I would have done anything for you once, Craggs. Anyfuckingthing. But still you had to come and scold me like a naughty schoolboy, with your pet poodle Coffin behind you. All because I’d taught that bitch wife of mine a lesson.”

  Tom wiped at his face again. Was he crying?

  “She needed teaching a lesson. Fucking bitch had been lying to me, not taking her pill when she said she was. Why would I want another kid? That fucking snotwipe of mine was sucking the life out of me all by himself, I didn’t want another one. My old man was a fucking nasty bastard, but he taught me one thing at least, you have to keep your family on a tight leash, and you have to use your fists if need be. Maybe if I’d given Jacob a good fucking pasting when he was younger, he might have listened to me more. He might never have gone and broken into that house.”

  Keeping the gun trained on Coffin, Tom reached behind him, his fumbling fingers closing around a bottle of whisky. He picked it up and took a deep swallow from it and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “But then I met some people who did listen to me. Down a
t the Headless Lady one night, about a year ago. Two of them, night after night, willing to listen to me.”

  The old, skeletal creature in the filthy suit bumped into a table. Coffin noticed it was staring directly at Tom the whole time and was making its way towards him.

  “Pretty soon it was like they were there every fucking night, not just listening to me, but buying my drinks, getting me pissed, and I was spilling my guts to them. Not just about Laura and the kid, but about the Mob, about Mortimer Craggs and Joe fucking Coffin.”

  Coffin watched as the thing in the suit navigated its way around the table, dark eyes still fixed on Tom. It had a way to go yet, before it made it to where Tom was standing, but there was no mistaking its intent.

  “I should have known they weren’t interested in me, they just wanted to know about the Mob, they wanted a way in. All along they were using me, probably laughing at me behind my back, just like everybody else. Turned out they were members of a fucking Triad gang, the fucking Seven Spooks, or some shit like that.”

  No, the Seven Ghosts, Coffin thought.

  You shouldn’t laugh at the Seven Ghosts, Joe.

  Terry Wu, threatening Coffin with retribution if he killed him.

  “But we cooked up a plan together,” Tom said. “The Triads, they wanted Craggs out, finished with. But they wanted it done cleanly, without broadcasting their involvement. Not until after, when they could move in and take over ownership of the clubs and the bars, and all the other businesses left behind. Especially Angels. They were fucking mental about Terry Wu paying out protection money to Craggs. And then I heard that you’d been given the job of putting a bullet through his head.”

  Coffin glanced at Craggs. He was straining against the bonds holding him to the chair, trying to say something beneath the gag. He looked angry, ready to kill Tom, if he hadn’t been tied up.

  “I came up with the idea of shopping you to the cops, Joe. I was in Craggs’ office once, when Wu was Skyping him. Where he had that computer positioned, fuck, you could see the entire room behind him. I knew if I could just rig up the video camera built into his computer to record you murdering Terry Wu, that’d be all the coppers needed to put you away for a long time. And with you off the scene, I could deal with Craggs myself.”

  Coffin could see the old man shuffling towards Tom, behind him. He still had a little way to go, yet.

  “How did you get into Terry Wu’s office? He just open the door and let you in to mess around with his computer?”

  “That was the easy part. Turned out, after every performance on stage, Steffanie was giving Terry Wu his own private little dance, before shagging him stupid on that big fucking desk of his.”

  Coffin stood up, couldn’t help himself. “You’re lying.”

  Tom lifted the shotgun, aiming at Coffin’s chest. “Sit down, Joe, I haven’t finished.”

  Slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on Tom the whole time, Coffin sat down.

  “Terry Wu was fucking Steffanie after every show. Had been long before you showed up. That’s why she got paid so well, so much better than all the other dancers. She was my way in, but I didn’t tell her anything about the Triads. I said we could take the evidence to the newspapers, get a shit load of money for exposing the Slaughterhouse Mob, and putting you behind bars. She went for it like a hungry baby after its mother’s titty, Joe. You think she loved you? She fucking despised you.”

  “You’re lying,” Coffin said again, through gritted teeth.

  Tom took another swig of the whisky. “Ah fuck, don’t feel bad about it, Joe. That cold-hearted bitch despised everybody. So I told her what to do, how to set up the computer so that the camera was always on, but Terry wouldn’t know about it. Told her how to set it up so that it saved the video feed onto a folder on the hard drive. After you killed Terry and left, Steffanie went back in and loaded the file onto a USB stick. She was supposed to hand it over to Lois Lane, but the stupid bitch started haggling for money.”

  Coffin looked at Emma. She hadn’t told him any of this. She stared at the floor, head bowed, refusing to meet Coffin’s gaze.

  “It was about that time I met Abel, in a back alley, sucking the blood out of a dead cat. I didn’t really think he was a vampire, not then. But he needed blood, and I knew a way of getting him some. I said I could get him plenty of fresh blood, if he did a favour for me.”

  “You murdered Steffanie and Michael, not those kids you told me about,” Coffin said, his voice low.

  “Nah, not me. Abel Mortenson murdered them. I just told him to do it. But he wasn’t meant to kill your kid, Joe. What kind of sick fuck do you think I am? I never told him to kill the kid.”

  Coffin concentrated on staying still, regulating his breathing, his heartbeat. If he made even one move, he would lose control and he would leap out of the chair and right at Tom, ready to tear him limb from limb. But Tom had the shotgun trained on him, and at that close range, Coffin would be dead before he hit the floor.

  “I thought Steffanie had handed the USB stick, with all the evidence on it, including a shitpile of digital files I’d downloaded off Craggs’ computer that would send him away for the rest of his life, to Lois, but she hadn’t. She’d fucking hidden it somewhere, and now she was dead, and I couldn’t get my fucking hands on it, could I? But then I realised she wasn’t dead, after all. At least, not dead like she should have been.”

  Coffin was barely listening. A thunderstorm was raging inside his head, obliterating all rational thought. He gripped the sides of the chair, forcing himself to remain still, his muscles bunched up, painfully tense, and his jaws clamped together so hard it was a miracle he didn’t fracture his teeth.

  “She’s dead now, though, proper fucking dead, and she isn’t coming back again from the looks of her. But none of that matters anymore. I don’t need the USB stick, because I’ve got you and Craggs right where I need you. I’m going to do you first, Joe, and then I’m going to do Craggs, and then Lois Lane. I might fuck her first though, it’s been a while since I’ve had some nice, warm pussy.”

  Emma kept her head down, said nothing.

  “What, no fancy comeback? No smart Alec reply? I should have fucking dealt with you when I caught you snooping around my house.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Coffin growled.

  “I don’t think so, Joe,” Tom said.

  He raised the shotgun, training it at Coffin’s head. Craggs began leaping up and down on the chair, looked like he was trying to break it apart, but he was too weak.

  Coffin tensed, his gaze focused on Tom’s trigger finger, waiting, watching for him to start squeezing. Tom was weak, had no backbone for the dirty work of killing people. That’s what had always held him back, kept him from moving on up through the Mob, and what was keeping him from pulling the trigger right now.

  But Coffin knew that he was only delaying the inevitable. Tom had no other way out. It was kill Coffin and Craggs, and Emma too, or be killed.

  “Goodbye, Joe,” Tom said, softly.

  There was a clatter from behind Tom, and he swung around, startled. The cadaverous old man was up close to him, had banged its hip against a table. Its clawed hands were outstretched, reaching for Tom’s neck, its jaws snapping open and closed.

  Tom screamed and pulled the trigger. The blast of the shotgun was deafening in the confines of the club. The ancient cadaver was flung backwards under the impact of the shotgun blast, landing on its back on a table, and then falling onto the floor. Its chest and stomach were a mass of ripped flesh, where the pellets had torn through its frail body.

  In one, swift bound, Coffin stood up and leapt off the stage. He landed on top of Tom and had smashed his fist into Tom’s face before they even hit the floor. Tom screamed again, began squirming and struggling beneath Coffin’s weight.

  “Please, dear God, please, Joe, don’t kill me!”

  Coffin raise his fist again and ploughed it into Tom’s swollen nose. There was a crunch as warm blood exploded against Co
ffin’s knuckles. Tom howled and started sobbing. Coffin grabbed his ears, scrunching them up in his big hands, and lifted his head off the floor. Tom screamed again as Coffin slammed his skull against the floor.

  “Stop!” Emma shouted.

  Coffin looked up. She was standing right beside him, looking down at him, her eyes wide and dark.

  “You’re killing him.”

  “That’s the idea,” Coffin said.

  They both looked down at Tom, who was quieter now. His eyes had rolled up into the back of his sockets, and his whole body was twitching in a spasm. Coffin stood up, flexing the bloody hand he had punched Tom in the face with. He looked around, his eyes fixed on the shotgun, lying under a table where Tom had flung it when Coffin had collided with him.

  He walked over and picked the shotgun up.

  “No, no,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Joe, you can’t shoot him, you can’t.”

  Coffin cracked open the gun. “You’re right, I can’t, he fired both shells.”

  Coffin snapped the gun closed and flipped it around so that he was holding it by the barrel. He walked over to Tom, still lying on the floor, his body rigid with spasmodic movements. Coffin lifted the gun up high and then brought it swiftly down.

  Emma turned away at the last moment, but she still heard the wet smack of the stock as it smashed into Tom’s face. There was another, then another, and with each impact, it sounded like Coffin was hitting a piece of rotten fruit.

  When the sounds finally stopped, Emma turned around again. Coffin was standing still, his breathing heavy and laboured. In his hands he still clutched the shotgun, the stock dripping with blood and scraps of flesh and hair.

  “Joe?” Emma whispered.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Didn’t want to look at the shape on the floor, too scared to see what damage Coffin had inflicted. Tom was surely dead by now, his head like a squashed melon.