“Please.” He said. “No.” He said. “Please.” He said. “Shit.” He gasped. “Fuck.” He screamed. And every muscle in his body tensed.
“My beautiful boy,” she sighed. “We only live this life once, and if we are honest, once is enough.”
He couldn’t argue with her. He couldn’t think beyond the need for this to be over.
Once, with her in his life, was more than enough for him even if it wasn’t for her.
His orgasm when it came was furious. There was blood in the seed as it seeped out of him.
Myrna Shepherd wiped her mouth and stood, sated.
For now.
She still wore the white dress she’d arrived at his door in. During all their time together, each time they’d fucked, he’d not once seen her naked. It was almost as though she and the white dress were one, the fabric fused inextricably onto her torso while its folds billowed around her legs. But she was happy enough to raise her skirts for him.
Shepherd swirled her skirts as she walked away, kicking up her heel; after what had just passed between them it was a curiously innocent gesture, playful, but then it was impossible to separate what was genuine and what was an act with the woman. Or maybe it was all theater? That didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate her playing the ingenue, it was just hard to reconcile the two images of her, Madonna and Whore. Gideon Lockwood and his new boy had sent her to him, a “gift” to buy his loyalty for a few more years to come. It had felt like a bargain at the time, but what had Lockwood said, “Remember, you asked for it.” Or something like that. Men like Taff Carter didn’t get to fuck women like her. That was one of the fundamental laws of nature. No matter how much he wanted to deny it, pretend he was doing something noble or that he had no choice in the matter, the truth was he was a bent bastard, just like Lockwood had mocked.
Taff didn’t care anymore. He was too exhausted to move. He just sat on the settee, dressing gown open beneath him, and stared down the bones of his rib cage to his cock where it stuck uselessly against his thigh. The blood scared him.
He didn’t even move to cover himself when the doorbell rang, or a few seconds later when the door opened. He just reached down to cup his balls and cover his modesty.
Seth Lockwood strolled into the room all unpleasant smiles.
“Well if it isn’t my little pet pig. Oink-oink. I would ask how you’re enjoying my little gift, but I can see the answer to that a little too clearly for my liking. Do you think you could stop playing with yourself for a minute?” Taff didn’t move. Seth waited. Taff looked up at him, eyes all but useless after the damage they’d taken from the succubus’s thumbs, his brain running slow. “That means take your fucking hand away from your miserable little cock while I’m talking to you, you perverted little bell sniff.”
Taff did as he was told.
“And cover yourself up. I really don’t want to see the shit stains on your dressing gown, thank you very much.”
He pulled the trailing edge of the terry cloth up over his groin, but didn’t belt it.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Huw,” the gangster said. “I thought we had a deal. Didn’t we have a deal? I give you your lovely fuck toy, and in return you give me what I want? Wasn’t that the deal?”
Taff nodded.
“So where’s my glass? I don’t see it. Unless you’ve got it shoved up your rectal passage? Have you got it shoved up there?”
Taff shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. So, like I said, I’m very disappointed in you. Do you know what I do to people who disappoint me?”
“Hurt them,” the Welshman said.
“Very good, Huw. I hurt them. So do you know what I’m going to do to you?”
“Hurt me.”
“You’re on fire. You’re on fucking fire. Or you will be, at any rate,” and so saying, Seth took a silver hip flask from his back pocket, unscrewed the cap, and splashed the contents all over the man and the couch in front of him as though he was dousing them in holy water. Only it wasn’t holy water and it wasn’t whiskey, either. The reek of petrol filled the cramped room.
Seth took a cigarette packet and lighter from his pocket.
“But you know what? There’s been enough dying today already. I’m feeling forgiving. I can understand why you’ve been distracted. She really is something, a gift from the gods, and a miserable shit like you doesn’t come into the orbit of such a heavenly creature often, I get it.” He put a cigarette between his lips, lit it and inhaled, drawing the smoke into his lungs. He exhaled, letting the curls of smoke raft up in front of his face. “I do. Honestly. But there’s a difference between my understanding it and my thinking it’s okay.” Seth tapped the ash off the cigarette tip. “From where I’m standing, you still owe me, Huw, and it’s spoiling my good mood.”
“What do you want?”
“Ah, good question. I’ve always liked a man who gets straight to the point rather than dicking about. Honestly, I want to watch you burn, but I can wait to have my fun. In the meantime I can use you. Your partner is getting in to be a real pain in the arse. You’d know what that’s like,” Seth said, lips curling into a sneer. “He cost me one of my people today. That’s bad enough, but he walked out of there with the Raines kid, which is the last thing I need. I need him taken care of. Call it preemptive problem solving.”
“Julie? You want me to kill him?”
“I said nothing of the sort. Jesus,” Seth shook his head. “I want to meet him face-to-face. I want to talk to him, see if he’s as flexible with his morals as you are. After all, once you go up in flames I’m going to need another pet pig to play with, and one thing I’ve learned is every piggy has his price. Bring him to me, Huw, let’s see if we can do some business. If I were you, I’d hope that he’s a chip off the little bent bastard block. Otherwise I will hurt you. Do we understand each other?”
Taff nodded. “Where should I bring him?”
“You know the old Latimer Road cinema in the Rothery? Bring him along in time for a midnight performance.”
“There hasn’t been a show there in years.”
“Let me worry about that. You just bring the audience along like a good little piggy. The curtain goes up at twelve sharp.”
31
DEAD ENDS
Julie was having none of it.
He drove with the window down and the stereo’s volume cranked up. It was summer music, vibrant and far too perky for the cool night, just the way he liked it. You could trust music in a way that you couldn’t trust people. Certain tunes made you feel good while others brought you down. They were attached to memories, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that you knew what you were getting with a song in a way that you didn’t with people. It was all about masks with people. They might appear perky and vibrant on the outside, but on the inside be tortured and twisted up.
He trusted Josh Raines about as far as he could throw him.
There was something off about the guy. It wasn’t just that his story didn’t add up. Julie considered himself a pretty decent judge of character; it went with the territory. But it was hard to get a read on Raines. He came across as a good guy and seemed genuinely distraught about the hell he’d put his mother through over the last week, but not enough to actually come clean about what had happened. Sure, there was enough weirdness in that flat of his to last a week if you decided to disappear down that particular rabbit hole, but a century-old crime? An obsession with some long-dead actress? Okay, he could accept it was a bit freaky that Lockwood and Raines looked like their counterparts in that long played-out story, but looking like someone wasn’t the same as … as what? Living a hundred years without aging?
Julie shook his head.
Yeah that was some weird shit.
But that was pretty much par for the course these days.
He was worried about his partner, and with good reason. Taff had been acting way out of character ever since he’d failed to clock off a week ago. Julie had been ar
ound to his place a couple of times to check in on him. Taff was never out of his damned dressing gown and insisted on wearing those stupid sunglasses inside like he was some kind of rock star on a weeklong coke binge. He looked bad, and smelled so much worse.
Julie decided to pay him another visit after he’d finished with this wild-goose chase.
Beside him, Josh had a badly drawn map open on his lap and was giving him directions a couple of turns at a time.
The only reason Julie was humoring him was because of the Comedians. What were the odds of two thieves matching the description of Clamp and Crake both robbing The Magic Circle and then being involved in a fatality that signaled the end of Josh’s disappearance? Sometimes when something stinks it really is shit and Josh was in it up to his neck.
He’d almost managed to forget about those teeth, but then he’d spent the last hour working pretty hard to convince himself that what he’d witnessed was actually the distortion of impact as his car had plowed into the screaming man, and everything else he’d thought he’d seen had been nothing more than a trick of that weird slow-motion momentum as adrenaline kicked in, everything moving so fast but seeming to go so slowly.
And he almost believed it.
“You’ll want the next left,” Josh said. “Followed by a sharp right about twenty feet after that, then we should start looking for somewhere to pull up. We’ll need to go the rest of the way on foot.”
Julie flicked the indicator on, signaling his intent, and edged the squad car over to ride along the white line for a hundred feet, waiting for a break in traffic before he swung across the other lane. Cars lined both sides of the road, constricting it so completely that Julie had to keep glancing toward the wing mirror to be sure it wasn’t grating its way down the street one unlucky parked car at a time.
There was no obvious break in the snake of vehicles parked along the curb.
Up ahead he saw a woman emerge from one of those overpriced boutiques balancing what looked like a big cake box on one hand while trying to fumble her keys out of her too-tight jeans pocket. Behind her a couple of guys from a building crew hung off the scaffolding, paying her backside far more attention than the job at hand right up until the moment where half of the roof came roaring down the plastic bins and emptied out into the skip in the street below. They gave each other a rueful smile as if to say the shock was worth it, and judging by the woman’s curves Julie was inclined to agree. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a woman naked without the filter of a computer screen between them. Weeks had slipped into months and into that weird territory beyond that where it was only natural to worry that sex wasn’t actually like riding a bike. “Be a gent,” Julie told his passenger. “Hop out and help the lady with her things.” He saw Josh’s confusion and smiled. “Don’t worry, she’ll think you’re one of the good guys. Goes with the wheels.”
Josh did as he was told.
A minute later the woman was pulling out into traffic in a car that must have cost eight times his annual salary and leaving a space for Julie to pull into. He locked the car and joined Josh on the pavement. “‘Onwards, Macduff.’”
Beside him Josh looked left and right, then back over his shoulder, on edge.
“No one’s following us,” Julie assured him.
“How can you know that?”
“Because this isn’t Gotham and the bad guys don’t have superpowers. Take me to this irrefutable proof. I want to believe you’re not a complete twat, Josh. I want to believe that you wouldn’t just fuck with your mum like that and disappear for a week, but I’ll be honest, right now I’m finding it hard.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“We’ll see.”
Julie followed him around another corner, stepping into what seemed at first glance to be a back alley behind the row of designer boutiques, but the street was cobbled. There weren’t many cobbled streets left in the city. He could think of a few around Neal’s Yard and Covent Garden, pandering to the tourists and that whole Ye Olde World thing they wanted to see, but not around here. That wasn’t the only thing that was noticeably different about the street. He looked up at the darkening sky. There was nothing remarkable up there, but the air tasted thick, like it was laced with smog or coal dust or Christ alone knew what other pollutant the factories farther along the river were pumping out. The difference in the quality of air between where they’d parked the car and where they stood now was so stark it felt like he’d suddenly developed asthma. “Okay, we’re here, what are we looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Josh Raines said, taking a small gold compact from his pocket.
“Trust me, you look beautiful,” Julie said.
Josh didn’t take the bait. He opened the compact, holding it slightly to one side of his face so that he could see over his own shoulder, then began to slowly turn in a full circle, obviously looking for something and equally obviously not seeing it. Julie watched him turn in five circles, each successive one a little more frantic than the last as he failed to see whatever it was he was looking for.
“Let me guess, it’s not there now?”
“I don’t understand,” Josh Raines said. He’d stopped spinning around, and was walking down the alleyway, using the mirror to guide him instead of just looking where he was going.
“I think I do,” Julie said.
“No. It should be here.”
“Of course it should.”
“Something’s wrong.” He opened and closed the compact, shaking his head. “It should be here.”
“What? What should be here? Where Lockwood held you hostage? Is that what we are talking about?”
“It should be here,” Josh said again.
“You’ve got to help me, Josh. I need to know what you’re looking for. Are we looking for a door? Is that it? Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it’s the wrong alleyway? These places all look the same. Let me have a look at the map.”
“It’s pointless,” Josh said, handing the paper over.
“Then what am I doing here?” Even so, he looked down at the map, seeing the street where they’d parked the car, and tracing the route they’d taken from there to the mark drawn on the map. They were standing right in the middle of it, whatever it was supposed to be. “What am I looking for?”
Josh held out the compact, offering it to him. “Look in the glass, can you see anything different? Anything wrong. Look at the street.”
And just for a moment Julie thought about humoring him.
He raised the compact up to his face, but instead of looking into the glass snapped the lid closed.
“This is ridiculous,” Julie said, handing the mirror back. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove here, Josh, but I’m done. If you get serious about wanting help against Lockwood, you know where to find me, but until then you’re on your own.”
He started to walk away.
“Wait!”
Julie looked back over his shoulder. The guy seemed to have shrunk by a foot in the few seconds since he’d turned his back on him. He looked broken. “What for? So you can come up with a better lie? Here’s the thing; I’m not interested. Whatever mess you got yourself into with Lockwood, you’re on your own. I don’t envy you. That family…” he shook his head. “They are nasty little fuckers.”
“You’ve got to help me,” Josh said.
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“He’ll kill me.”
“That may be the first true thing you’ve said to me all day,” Julie Gennaro said, and walked away.
32
HOT LEADS AND LOOK-ALIKES
A few hours later a scattering of pebbles against the glass brought Julie Gennaro to his window.
He hadn’t been able to sleep.
He hadn’t tried. He’d been thinking about Josh Raines. He’d got under his skin—or at least his predicament had.
He couldn’t understand why the guy had been so insistent on showing him stuff if he’d known ther
e was nothing to show. That didn’t make sense. He’d obviously expected to find something there, some conclusive proof that would sway Julie to his side, and because of that part of him was inclined to cut the guy some slack. It wasn’t hard to see he’d been dragged all the way to hell and back and was still deep in the stress of shock, but he wasn’t helping himself. That alleyway had been a dead end. The problem was crazy seldom made sense. And that flat over in Rotherhithe was a whole hoarder’s paradise full of crazy.
Even so, Julie couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d be reading about Josh propping up some motorway flyover if not tomorrow, then the next day, or the one after that. Like it or not, he felt responsible.
He’d walked away.
He was a cop.
He was supposed to put himself in the line of fire, not deliberately turn his back and walk away from it.
“Protect and Serve,” the Americans said. It was the same job over here, even if it didn’t have a fancy motto.
He should have forced Josh to tell him the truth. None of this follow-me-you-need-to-see-it-with-your-own-eyes bollocks he’d let the guy babble on about. He’d let himself get carried away in Josh’s story and forget the one simple truth: Joshua Raines was in trouble. He should have just sat the guy down somewhere safe and leaned on him until he broke. It wasn’t as if he would be a tough nut to crack. He was pretty much begging for help. He wasn’t the first person to get in trouble with a bunch of bastards like the Lockwoods and he wouldn’t be the last.
Julie couldn’t sleep because he knew he’d fucked up, plain and simple. He’d let himself get worked up because he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being screwed with, and everything Josh Raines said and did from that point on just made it worse. Looking at the street through a mirror? That was hardly normal behavior.
Instead of sleeping, he’d written everything he knew about the case on a piece of paper.
Assuming he could find the guy in the morning, Julie decided he’d take him somewhere safe, a non-hostile environment, somewhere out of Lockwood’s reach. Then it would be down to Josh to talk. He couldn’t force him to tell the truth. Unless, of course, Josh had had a change of heart and was out on the street right now, ready to bare his soul?
Glass Town Page 20
