The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  He couldn’t let the man get away, which meant incapacitating everyone inside and outside the building.

  He clambered off the moped, dropped it to the ground a small distance from the building, lit a cigarette and took another swig of gin from his hip flask. The unwelcoming party at the door looked on, scowling.

  Shoop walked up to ten feet from them, all the time scanning the area for unseen threats. It looked as though these were the only four for the time being. He half expected for more people to come out of the doorway, but it didn’t happen. Whoever was inside must have had confidence in the doormen’s ability to deal with just one man.

  That was the first mistake they made.

  It was a scene from an old western as Shoop stood in front of his opponents, stock-still, cigarette hanging out of his mouth as they fanned out across the street. Shutters closed noisily. Some old men that had been playing chess further up the street bustled to get inside before the tension exploded. Doors were bolted, everything went deathly silent. The very air sensed that there was trouble coming and tried to make a run for it. Air doesn’t have legs though, so it stayed where it was.

  Everything was still; even the one cloud that hung in the sky stopped itself from moving through the hot, sticky Singaporean atmosphere and waited for the danger to pass.

  Shoop was un-phased by the scene. He’d been in far worse situation and wasn’t in the least bit worried. Once you’ve gone head to head with fifteen rabid Bigfoot, which he had, most other dangerous situations are mild by comparison. The most worrying situation he’d ever been in was outside a nightclub in Glasgow when he’d met a group of Rangers football hooligans. He’d barely got away with his life. The rabid Bigfoot were kittens in comparison; the four chunky henchmen in front of him were a walk in the park.

  “Afternoon gentlemen!” said Shoop. The men said nothing, they just stared, trying to intimidate Shoop and failing pathetically. “I think I should warn you!”

  “About what?” said one of the larger men with a sneer.

  “I just thought that I should let you know that I’ve come up against bigger, uglier, harder things in greater numbers than you, and come out without a scratch. I just thought that it’d be fair to let you know before we start.” His hat had been casting a shadow over his eyes up until that point. He tipped it back, giving each of them a soul-shattering grimace.

  The men didn’t move but instantly lost ninety percent of their threatening demeanour. One of them even stepped back.

  “I’m giving you all a chance,” said Shoop through his vicious features, “I’m going through that door! You cannot stop me! Back away now! This is the only warbnig you will receive!”

  The men were clearly worried. They looked at each other. They all saw that each of them had big guns in their hands and even bigger muscles. Then they looked at Shoop, tall scrawny and apparently unarmed.

  The air in the small side street thickened as the tension mounted. The prospect of death solidified around the men but they were too dumb to notice. In their opinions, big beats scrawny every time, especially when the big are packing semi-automatic weapons and the scrawny only appeared to be packing an unfounded amount of confidence.

  They glanced at each other one more time. The decision was made.

  They raised their arms slowly against the hellish air and tried to take aim.

  Everything happened in slow motion against the denseness of the atmosphere. Shoop saw their decision to fire before they’d even moved their limbs, two guns flew out of his jacket with blinding speed as his hands worked them free faster than the eye could see. They were pointed at the men before their guns had managed to reach waist height. With two deafening cracks two of the men were struck dead before they could take aim. The two remaining men dived for the floor as the bullets flew, they fired randomly, hoping to catch Shoop as he dived for safety, but Shoop didn’t dive. He’d learned long ago that standing rooted to the spot and keeping his cool tended to have things end more favourably for him.

  The two diving men received small hunks of metal between the eyes before they hit the floor.

  And just like that, it was over. Four shots…..done!

  Shoop’s slight frame was bounding over the bodies and was in the door in a flash, he had to catch the man on the moped. With any luck he’d be cowering inside behind yet more henchmen. If he was out of luck, then the man would’ve taken the time that it’d taken Shoop to deal with the men outside to take off across the roof-tops and get clean away.

  Shoop entered the building tentatively but speedily and was faced with a dark stairway that reached up into an even darker room. He paused for a moment, took a deep breath with his cigarette still hanging out of his mouth and re-holstered his guns inside his jacket.

  Whatever was waiting for him at the top of the stairs was drenched in darkness; he had the perfect weapon for ill lit places.

  He slowed his heart-beat, which wasn’t really very quick, but you can never be too relaxed when going into a potential battle, unless your so relaxed that you’re asleep, then things tend to get a bit messy. Shoop started climbing the stairs.

  He heard some rustling and shifting from the room at the top of the staircase as he climbed. There was more than one person up there which could only mean one thing. They were better trained than the men at the door.

  Badly trained men would’ve rushed down to help the men outside, filing down the thin stairway and allowing themselves to be picked off one by one. This probably meant that as soon as Shoop got to the top of the stairs a cloud of bullets would turn him to vapour.

  Shoop stopped, sat down and finished his cigarette. This did two things. It made whoever was waiting at the top a lot more nervous than they already were, and it meant that he could finish his smoke in relative peace. He was pretty sure that they wouldn’t come down the stairs, not now, not after they’d waited as long as they had.

  He smoked his fill and then set about his business.

  “I’ve killed the men outside.” Yelled Shoop into the darkness, “I don’t know how many of you there are up there, but know this; if you don’t hand over the man I’ve been following immediately, then you will be either blind or dead within the next five minutes!”

  The inhabitants thought that Shoop’s threat was completely empty, which was why they all started laughing, which was a very stupid thing to do as it gave away their numbers, and by the sounds of things, there was at least thirty of them.

  “Just thought I’d give you fair warning!”

  Shoop dug into his pocket and retrieved a small pen-like cylinder of shiny metal. He pressed a button on the side and the top of it clicked open revealing something that looked a little like a tiny flash bulb. He counted to three, lobbed it into the room at the top of the stairs, pulled his hat down over his head and held his eyes tight shut. All the men in the room watched as the little shiny thing came sailing in a long arch in toward them, all of them curious as to why Shoop would throw a pen at them.

  The flash that came would’ve put the sun to shame.

  Shoop waited for the screams of agony to start before he sprinted up the few remaining stairs between him and the room. He was greeted with a truly horrific sight. There were twenty-three men all cradling their faces in their hands as blood leaked from their eyes, their corneas literally cooked.

  Three men had had the presence of mind to dive for cover, but Shoop had no problem incapacitating them amongst the screams and pandemonium by winging them with his gun.

  Scanning the chaos it fast became apparent that the man he was after wasn’t in the room. At the far end of the room was a ladder leading to a skylight that hung open. Shoop crossed the room, knocking the poor anguished men off their feet as he sped. He was on the roof in seconds, his fear of loosing the man spurring him on.

  He was in luck; his quarry had waited for Shoop’s threat to the dark room before making a run for it. He was close enough for Shoop to give chase. He sprang over the ramshackle rooftops, swiftly
gaining ground. As he gained on him, the man became more panicked, he stumbled a couple of times as he saw the seemingly unstoppable man pelt towards him. Terror gripped him.

  Shoop got close enough to use his gun. He dropped him with one clean shot that entered the back of his knee and burst out of his knee-cap in a cloud of blood and bone. He hit the floor like a damp rag and Shoop was on him, stifling his screams before they could even get passed his tonsils.

  “Hello!” said Shoop after the man stopped trying to scream. The man was quivering with the pain and beads of cold sweat flooded his forehead and stung his eyes.

  “You didn’t think that you actually stood a chance did you? I mean, your surveillance was diabolical, you’d have been as well wearing a big neon arrow on your head.” Shoop hissed menacingly in his ear.

  The man made pained, grunting noises underneath Shoop’s hand while he held his shattered knee.

  Shoop shifted his pose slightly, letting the moonlight glance off his face, allowing the man to see the side of Shoop’s scrunched up fearful face. The man quivered at the sight.

  The quiver gave Shoop a mild feeling of relief. His last few attempts at scaring and threatening people hadn’t gone according to plan. Bunty, Jeeves and the men at Jeeves’ house had found Shoop about as scary as a telly-tubby. He was beginning to believe that he’d lost his touch; it was good to know that he could still be supremely terrifying.

  The moon was high in a cloudless Singaporean sky and the night was hot and muggy. The man was clammy with sweat, but cold with fear and shock, and the buzz that Shoop got out of feeling the chill in the man made him decide to enjoy what he was about to do as much as time would allow. He didn’t know if an alarm had been tripped in the building, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. He needed to get as much information out of the man as possible, which would take thirty seconds, and then he’d spend the other four and a half minutes making him hurt.

  “Now, let’s get down to business shall we, you’re not going to scream if I take my hand away are you?” The man shook his head furiously; Shoop took his hand away and knelt down next to him. He looked at the man quizzically, “Don’t I know you?”

  “I don’t know,” said the man, his voice laced with terror, “maybe I’ve just got one of those faces.”

  “No, I’ve definitely seen you before!”

  “No you haven’t!” the man was feverish now.

  “Don’t fuck with me!” Hissed Shoop, the man squealed and flinched as if he’d been struck.

  Then it dawned on him, “You were part of that clean up crew in Montreal five years ago weren’t you!”

  The man’s bowels gave way.

  Shoop recalled a case where some French Canadians had dabbled in a bit of devil worship. They’d managed to get their hands on an ancient text that was said to release a demon that would do their bidding. Somehow they had managed to work the incantations and a nine foot tall, blue quadruped with teeth the size of a human leg had popped through from another dimension. Shoop had been tracing the text that the unwitting coven had been using. He found them in a warehouse in an old industrial section in the south of the city.

  Suffice to say that the big blue thing didn’t do their bidding.

  When Shoop found them two weeks after the summoning, they were liberally scattered around the warehouse in lots of little pieces. The big blue thing had proved to be territorial and, luckily, hadn’t ventured out of its confines. Well, that and the fact that it was too damn big to fit through the door. It hadn’t had to go and look for food either as the rancid remains of the fourteen coven members had been sufficient feeding for two weeks.

  Shoop walked in on the beast as it was gnawing at its last human leg.

  He’d managed to trap it with a makeshift net made from barbed wire that was attached to a generator.

  He called in a crew to clean up the mess and to take the blue beast back to the Sphere Of Influence headquarters in Edinburgh.

  The man he was about to torture had lead the crew. He had patronised Shoop so Shoop had beaten him around a bit to teach him a lesson. The man had been new to the Sphere at the time, and was very ambitious. He’d wanted to rise through the ranks and take over Shoop’s position. Shoop made him realise that it wouldn’t be as easy as he’d previously thought.

  “Justin!” said Shoop in triumph, “Justin Stain! That’s your name isn’t it? Now I know why you’re so shit scared of me. I used to call you Justin Pain!”

  A damp patch appeared on Justin’s crotch.

  “Oh I’m going to enjoy this!” sneered Shoop raking out a small surgery kit from his jacket pocket.

  Half way through his fun, Shoop thought he saw a small metal object floating in the air overhead and in front of him. It vanished, however, before Shoop could fix his eyes on it.

  He thought he’d imagined it and went back to work.

  Chapter 14

  Carl gives the game away

  The independents were spread out through the city, which suited them as they all preferred to operate on their own. Being cooped up in the bunker in Scotland had done none of them any good. They had been caged animals there and the new freedom they had was most welcome. Still the news that they were all unwittingly part of something that they couldn’t get out of without dying was not good news. The mental cage they found themselves in may have given them more room to move physically, but it was a cage none-the-less.

  Yan, Dr Komodo and Jim had less of a problem with their new cage than Carl.

  Carl was a creature of the now. He lived moment-to-moment, smoking weed and doing violence at the bidding of the great god cash. To be stuck in a situation, not doing enough violence and not seeing the immediate returns for his services didn’t sit well with him. He was getting frustrated and angry. Even the sweet smoke he craved was having problems keeping his sporadically violent ways under control. It didn’t help that finding marijuana in Singapore was harder than climbing a greased pole and a lot more dangerous.

  Singapore is called “A Fine City” by some. This is because you can be fined for doing almost everything. It is quite possibly one of the cleanest, safest, non-violent cities on the planet, which all looks very nice but can be a little unnerving. This is primarily because of the stupendously harsh punishments that are dished out for breaking Singapore’s stringent laws. Very few people dare to breach the confines of the justice system and drug crimes receive some of the more severe punishments. To paint a clearer picture of the laws, there was a time, very recently in fact, when you could be fined for carrying chewing gum as it was seen as potential litter. Not actual litter… potential litter.

  All in all, Carl wasn’t really enjoying himself very much. He was far more used to anarchically dangerous countries where they’d exchange a pretty girl for a kilo of heroin and a heard of cattle.

  The rest of the independents, however, were blessed with the wisdom of thought that reached beyond the present. If Shoop said that they would end up more comfortable and rich beyond imagining at the end of it all, then that was good enough for them. They all secretly prayed for early retirement among scores of half naked beauties on some paradise island. If this new course of events was going to get them what they wanted, great!

  Carl, however, yearned for nothing other than dirty scrapping action. Later, Shoop would curse himself for getting Carl involved.

  As the rest of the independents researched their given areas and Shoop did his best to stay out of sight, Carl half heartedly wandered around all the nineteenth century buildings that he could find in his area, taking snapshots like some bedazzled tourist.

  After a day he got bored and decided that he would get drunk on Jack Daniels.

  He found the least savoury bar that he could, plonked himself in a dark corner and started knocking back drink after drink. He used the booze to subsidise his depleting supply of weed.

  It proved to be an unwise decision.

  As any committed drinker knows, Jack Daniels is the alcoholic equiv
alent of the devil sitting on the shoulder of an old cartoon character. Jack sits there whispering evil, yet fun, things into your ear and makes you do bad things. Jack is hardy, Jack is strong, but Jack isn’t very clever, or more accurately, listening to Jack too much makes the listener less clever.

  The waitress brought yet another straight Jack on the rocks over to Carl in his dark little corner.

  “There you go.” She said.

  She was pretty, so Carl gave her a huge tip.

  “Oh, thanks, thanks very much.” She said, “A bit of advice though!”

  “What’s that then?”

  “I wouldn’t let Jack sit on your shoulder for too long, he’ll sell your soul!”

  “My soul was bought for peanuts years ago,” replied Carl, scowling as his eyes drifted into the past where all his pain lived. He ventured off for a moment and the girl got the very real impression that he was not a man to be trifled with. She saw violence, pain and loss in that momentary flash. It scared her. It only lasted the briefest of moments however, and Carl tuned himself back in before he started wallowing in self pity.

  He saw the girls anguish at his remark and expression; he managed to grumble “but thanks for the advice,” in a photocopy of sincerity.

  She half smiled politely and walked away, tray in hand and very little desire to serve the man again, despite the tip.

  Carl was in disguise, just as Shoop had instructed. Even with his unwillingness to participate in his current mission, he’d done very well with his costume. He had considered dressing as a tourist. It was the easy option and would’ve kept him insignificant, if it wasn’t for his harsh demeanour. Carl dressing like a tourist would be like a clown in a business suit. The face and the outfit just wouldn’t match. He’d needed something that worked with his dejected, miserable and possibly violent aura, but didn’t scream criminal, so, he ended up in the garb of a ship worker.