Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

by Giles O'Bryen

  ‘And seeing as yer up to yer neck in it anyway,’ said Big Phil.

  I looked round at the girls, feeling as much astonishment as pride. My eyes came to rest on Peanut; he stared right back at me without saying a word, but without obvious hostility, either – the Peanut equivalent of a warm hug.

  ‘Feel free to get lost again, if you don’t fancy it,’ said TJ.

  ‘I’m in,’ I said.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Ollie.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said TJ. ‘The gang from the farmhouse, they did for our boy Azza, insulted the Regiment and showed a general disregard for human decency. We don’t like them.’

  ‘One of them’s already dead,’ I said. ‘And the others ran off. How’re we going to find them?’

  ‘The one that croaked on the end of your fist was but a kid,’ said Peanut. ‘No disrespect.’

  ‘We reckon they sent him up to the loft to look for stuff to nick,’ said Big Phil. ‘We turned up, they left him there and legged it. Cunts.’

  ‘Remember what was on the wall?’ said Zeb. ‘Anti-KLA stuff. Means they’re Serb militia, right?’

  ‘According to the brief,’ said TJ, ‘the big dogs round here are a gang called Bura. Means tempest. They operate out of the police station in a town called Kric.’

  ‘About seven k that way,’ said Zeb, pointing north.

  TJ snapped his fingers. ‘See what I mean, Jimmy? It’s pure chance. We didn’t move that AA unit, we didn’t ask it to move, but we came after it and here we are, seven kilometres away from some fuckers we don’t like. To turn round and walk away would be just plain wrong.’

  As a piece of ethical logic, this was as about as lame as it gets, but they didn’t care and neither did I. The muscles in my shoulders twitched and my mouth filled with saliva that tasted of salt and iron. Anyway, the bare facts were true. The Serbian militia who’d been plundering Kosovo with increasing brutality for the previous twelve months were often based at local police stations – hardly surprising, since most of them were commanded by local police chiefs. These pillars of the community swelled their ranks with itinerant ex-cons released from jails further north – many of them veterans of a life of thievery and violence in Bosnia. They dressed up in military gear, armed themselves to a level of extravagance that would have made an SAS armourer blanch and, under the guise of preserving law and order amongst the Kosovar militants, terrorised the countryside.

  It was a fair bet that the three men responsible for the slaughter at the farmhouse had at least some connection with the nearest police station – or so TJ and his men had convinced themselves. And I was more than ready to join them.

  7

  We cleaned our weapons, ate and rested, then set off north at midnight. A three-quarter moon dangled above the trees like a huge, misshapen pearl, its smooth light making the faces of my fellow soldiers look pensive and gaunt. We moved silently so that our breaths were the loudest noise to be heard. A bird lost its nerve as we passed, flopping from its roost on heavy wings. I felt exhilarated, full of courage and purpose. Flitting through the black trees under the polished grey dome of the sky, I believed that I had at last discovered who I was and what I was for.

  We came in close to Kric and the track dropped steeply down into a series of meadows, crossed by a river that wound its way towards the fringes of town. A low mist drifted over the grass, thick as fleece in the grey moonlight. The valley was studded with farmsteads and there were pens and livestock sheds, and dogs to guard them, no doubt. At the sight of these habitations, it entered my mind for a brief, unpleasant moment that the people we did not like might be asleep with their families in this house or that, and it was at least conceivable that Kric Police Station was a model of probity and restraint.

  This is not how soldiers think, I told myself, as we left the track and crept through the mist towards the river. It was only ten or twelve yards across, but running high and fast, its black surface milling with glassy swirls. There was a bridge a little way up, and the land on the far side did not seem to be farmed or inhabited. We squelched along the bank, clambering over tatty fences and tumbledown walls, listening to the water sluicing through the reeds.

  As we approached the bridge, TJ stopped frequently to check the way ahead. We were very exposed here, with the river to our right and the open plain behind, and my eagerness for the night’s work revived. It was thrilling to be out on this illicit and dangerous mission under the leadership of the notorious TJ Farah, stalking towards an unknown place where the honour of the Regiment would be satisfied.

  The bridge was an old stone hump-backed affair with a rowboat moored in the lee of its pillars. We crossed one by one, then continued along the far bank, under cover of a sparse fringe of undergrowth. The reason no one farmed here was obvious now: the ground was swampy and we were soon slopping around up to our shins. The ooze stank of decay and the twigs and branches we pushed aside were slimy to the touch. We laboured on until we reached the lower slopes on the far side of the valley. The going became easier and in ten minutes we had circled round to a vantage point just to the west of town, which is where TJ’s map suggested the police station was located.

  We were in a playground – a square of rough tarmac with a lopsided swing and an obstacle course made of rotting tyres. The town below us had a main street with low iron lamps and a square with a large church flanked by a pair of sycamore trees. Two or three ranks of houses were arrayed parallel with the main street, their rooftops receding into the dark hillside behind. The police station was not going to advertise its presence, since such places were obvious targets for KLA raids. TJ decided to send someone down to recce.

  ‘You lot are good at sloping around on the sly,’ he told me. ‘Go and find out where it is.’

  When it came to sloping around on the sly, TJ was a hundred times slopier and slyer than I could ever be, and as I crept off towards the town square it occurred to me that I might have been set up. I’d find the police station and, assuming I evaded detection, return to an empty playground. My comrades would already be half way to Macedonia, their progress hindered only by the hilarity they were enjoying at my expense. The Regiment was known for its thunderous sense of humour and hearty appetite for the practical joke. This one would run and run.

  I put these mutinous thoughts aside and moved on towards the centre of Kric, keeping to the shadows and checking behind me at every turn. The wind that had rasped steadily over the higher ground was gusty and capricious down here in the valley. An empty plastic bottle skittered and popped along the gutter ahead of me, and somewhere on the other side of town I heard the clang of a dustbin overturning. Out of the silence that followed there came voices, singing, shouting. I crouched behind a shed and watched three teenage boys roll along the main street, brazen and fisty with drink. They’d set off a couple of dogs with their racket, but the barks were merely dutiful and soon subsided. Once they had passed, I stepped to the corner and watched. They swayed on for a hundred yards or so until they were about to enter the darkness beyond the last of Kric’s iron streetlamps.

  A door to their right banged open and a man swaggered out. He was wearing a cowboy hat and, judging by the way its huge shadow was lurching across the wall behind him, he too was drunk. The boys fell silent and he summoned them over. They assembled themselves before him. He said something and made a peremptory gesture. They each went through their pockets and one of them came up with a flask-shaped bottle. He handed it over to the man in the cowboy hat, who spun off the lid and took a swig, then waved the teenagers away. Two of them moved off, but the other held out his hand for the bottle. The cowboy tipped back the brim of his hat, leaned over and spat in the boy’s outstretched palm. The boy backed away, rubbing his hand on his trousers. Cowboy hat watched him go, then went back into the house, slamming the door behind him.

  What kind of man confronts three drunken teenage boys at dead of night, steals their drink and spits at them? A man with authority. A man who comma
nds fear. These boys had pointed out the police station as surely as an illuminated sign above the door. Even the cowboy hat fitted in: they were popular among Serb militia, the gun-slinging, every-man-for-himself-on-the-wild-frontier motif bolstering the pretence that there was more to their activities than various categories of crime. Still, I decided I’d better go and make sure: if I led TJ and co to the wrong house, I’d never hear the end of it.

  I took an alley that ran parallel with the main street and soon reached the house where I had seen the cowboy-hatted man. It was a utilitarian building in whitewashed render, much like any large family house except that it lacked the usual signs of domestic cheer: no curtains, just Venetian blinds over the ground-floor windows, no pot plants or ornaments on the window sills, no bikes or toys. . . It reminded me of the single men’s barracks in some desolate army town – the sort of place I had slept far too many nights over the last few years. At the back was a large yard with a high wall and double gates topped with barbed wire. I pulled myself up and looked over. Parked up against the house was a gleaming black double-cabbed Toyota pickup, its jacked-up haunches bulging over fat, white-lettered tyres, its snout dipped crossly like a mastiff at its meat. The perfect wheels for a man who wears cowboy hats, I thought, though he’d have to be doing well for himself to pay for it. Next to it was a dark red Skoda estate.

  I carried on round the house until I came to a window at the front where one corner of the blind had got jammed up, releasing a wedge of yellowish light into the street. I crouched down and looked through. He was stretched out on one of a pair of battered black leather sofas set either side of an electric fire, cowboy hat on the floor beside him. The room was littered with crushed beer cans, their tops smeared with cigarette ash, empty half-bottles of vodka, old newspapers and discarded clothes – jeans, T-shirts, socks, boots. There were half a dozen wooden chairs, a grey steel cupboard and a large wooden table bearing two crash helmets and a stack of dirty plates.

  As I watched, the man put the bottle to his mouth and drank, then studied the contents against the light. A few more dregs. He finished them, swung his arm down and let the bottle drop to the floor. He sank back again, and I could tell from the way he twisted his big girth and rearranged his arms that he was about to fall asleep.

  I completed my circuit of the house, but most of the other rooms were dark, with just a little light filtering through from the hallways. There was no sign that anyone else was in, and when I got back to the room where the man lay, he had his eyes shut and his mouth open.

  I went round to the yard, climbed the wall and took a set of steel steps to the back door. It was locked, but someone had propped open a small, square window and I squirmed through into a foul-smelling toilet cubicle. I went to the back door and pulled back the bolts, found and pocketed the key, then drew the Browning Hi-Power handgun I carried and padded upstairs. Six rooms, strewn with mattresses and sleeping bags and more evidence that the regulars here were fond of a drink and a smoke. I went back down and, obedient to procedure, checked each room in turn, though it was already obvious that the men who based themselves here were out for the night and had left the drunken cowboy to hold fort.

  At the back of the house was a room which looked like the boss’s lair: a high-backed chrome and leather chair behind a desk with a half-empty bottle of tequila and a collection of shot glasses, a deck of playing cards and a crucifix mounted on a plinth. The waxy-hued body of Christ faced out into the room, reproachful splotches of red adorning its hands, feet and ribcage. A blue military cap hung on the corner of the chair: uniform of the Special Police Force of the Serbian Interior Ministry – special because, unlike the regular police who occasionally dealt with regular crimes, they devoted themselves full time to the persecution of Kosovars.

  In front of the desk was a wicker chair with the seat cut out. There was a cupboard against the far wall. I opened it and found girly pics glued to the inside of the doors. Why the inside? This wasn’t a school locker room. Who wasn’t supposed to see the pink curves and dark cracks – Jesus on his cross? The girls looked back over their smooth shoulders at stacked cartons of ammunition in half a dozen different calibres and, on the lower shelves, a galvanised steel bear trap and a petrol-engined chainsaw. In a cardboard box on the floor beside the cupboard there were two baseball bats and a collection of knuckledusters with stained grips. I picked a set from the box, worked my fingers into the holes and closed my fist over the grip. Tools of the trade for the men who worked here, at once utilitarian and savage. I pressed the business end against my cheek, feeling how easily the ridge of brass could pulp skin and shatter bone.

  I put the thing in my pocket and went to the room where the man slept. I leaned against the table and watched him snuffling on his couch. I no longer cared whether he heard me or not. If he started to make an arse of himself, I would kill him, because I was one of us and we didn’t like him. He didn’t stir.

  There was a notice board above the table, displaying schedules or rotas of some sort, names and days of the week and places, though I couldn’t make them out. In the centre of the board was a photo of a dozen men posing against a felled tree. They had cigarettes slanting from their mouths and shotguns or automatic rifles dangling from their fists, and wore combat gear, military boots and black bandannas or cowboy hats. A spent fire smouldered in the foreground. Some were big, cheerful-looking types who could have been local farmers out on a Sunday shoot, jolly uncles with guns and a sack full of dead rabbits; but there were also several dark-eyed, scrawny characters with shaven heads and the sour, chippy expressions of people who think they’ve been hard done by. One of these was stripped to the waist, revealing a triangle of hairless torso above high-waisted black trousers. A gold cross on a thick chain swung from his neck and his chest was tattooed with an image of what looked like a corpse with a knife protruding from its ribs.

  I unpinned the photo and folded it into my breast pocket, then went back to the passage that led to the rear of the house. It was lined with tall filing cabinets and I pulled open a drawer at random. It was so jam-packed with paperwork that the top edges of the folders made a tut-tutting noise as they flipped against the frame. I opened a few more drawers and found a carved wooden crest of a two-headed eagle, a plastic wallet full of official certificates and accreditations, and two pink teddy bears in cellophane wrappers.

  I left the house and jogged back up to the playground. My comrades hadn’t deserted me but were sheltering behind a stack of tyres. As I approached, Zeb crept up behind me, poked me in the ribs and whispered ‘Gotcha!’ in my ear. Just to remind me how much I still had to learn.

  ‘Key to the back door,’ I said, handing it to TJ. ‘And a picture of our Bura friends.’

  TJ studied the photo. ‘What category of cunt gets a tattoo of his dead self all over his own fucking ribs?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s supposed to be him,’ I said.

  ‘It’s him all right,’ said TJ. ‘I can prove it.’

  He handed the photo back and pulled out his map. ‘How soon can they ride to the rescue, I ask myself. They haven’t gone out for a frolic in the woods, so – the nearest Kosovar village is here, maybe ten or eleven k. . .’ He mused for a while, and his men watched in a kind of awe, because when TJ frowned over his map and muttered, it was a ritual that seemed as mysterious and infallible as the summoning of some supernatural force. He was arranging a future in which the men of his unit took on the Serbian militia known as Bura and destroyed them, and it didn’t pay to interrupt.

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and felt the knuckleduster. Why had I taken it? It seemed a dirty thing, out of kilter with the honourable nature of our mission. When no one was looking, I dropped it into the trough of a tractor tyre.

  8

  We went down to the police station and in through the back door. TJ ran to the front room, slapped the sleeping man hard in the face, then seized him by the throat and levered him upright.

  ‘Fallen asleep on the
job, cowboy? What a fuck-up.’

  He slapped him again. The man saw that he’d been attacked by someone just about half his size – TJ is small, five-eight and probably seventy-five kilos, and big men always find it humiliating that he can dominate them physically by dint of speed, balance and ferocity alone. This one decided to fight back. He swung a fist up towards the little pest’s jaw – must have thought it was the perfect shot until the fist was half an inch from his assailant’s chin. TJ brought one hand up beneath the cowboy’s upswinging elbow while simultaneously pressing the other against the outside of his wrist. The cowboy’s knotted fist shot past TJ’s nose and smashed into his own. The weight of the punch sent him sprawling across the sofa and he lay there, stunned.

  ‘Smartass,’ said Peanut, searching the prone man and pulling a fat Makarov pistol from a holster under his arm. ‘I’m dreaming of the day when your block is late.’

  ‘Not a block, a guide,’ said TJ. ‘Zeb, get the toy truck up and running. Jimmy, have the Lone Ranger here call his friends for help.’

  I pulled the cowboy back to his feet and found his cellphone in the breast pocket of his shirt. I pointed at the man in the photo who’d decorated himself with a tattoo of a corpse and held out the phone. The cowboy looked flabbergasted that I should want to bring this particular character down on our heads. I jabbed him in the gut by way of encouragement and he took the phone.

  ‘He’s going to tell them we’re here,’ I said, watching the cowboy call up the number with fingers made clumsy by fear and drink. As the trained spook amongst us, I felt obliged to make this obvious point.

  ‘No shit,’ said TJ. ‘Let him talk for five seconds max, then bring him out back.’

  The cowboy started to yammer into the cellphone. His eyes wandered over mine. How long before I realised how foolish we had been? I counted to five, then pulled the phone away from his ear and cut the call.