Catalyst

by Michael Knaggs

  “You guys okay?” said Ned, gaining in confidence and relaxing a little. He was a smallish man, pale and balding with a hunted look which made him seem totally unsuited for this sort of charged environment.

  “Apart from being pissing wet through and dying of thirst. Just get the fucking drinks, for Christ’s sake!” said the first man.

  The landlord, who had just finished serving another customer, walked up.

  “Okay, Ned, I’ll take over,” he said. He finished pulling the last pint and handed it to the eldest man.

  “Ten pound fifty,” he said.

  “Can’t believe you can charge that much with a straight face for this fucking whippet piss,” said the man. “Start a tab.”

  “You can start another tab when you’ve paid off the last one,” said the landlord. “In the meantime, ten pound fifty. And if the lager’s that crap, Jimmy, I’d be delighted if you’d go and drink somewhere else.”

  Max Jordan was a very large man. Most of his weight was now in front of him and his shirt gaped open between every button. But he was a formidable presence all the same, with a bull neck, shaved head and thick, muscular forearms covered in tattoos. Even so, more than anyone he had encountered in thirty years behind a bar, these three pushed his courage to the limit. He knew this could turn bad at any time. But not tonight; not yet.

  “Give him the money, Kev,” said Jimmy to the small one.

  “Fuck off. I didn’t even want to come in here tonight,” replied Kevin. Even so, he took out a twenty pound note and handed it over.

  “Shall I knock the change off your tab?” said the landlord.

  “Don’t fucking push it!”

  “Fine.” He handed over the change.

  During this exchange, a stranger had entered the pub and taken up a position on a stool next to them. The man was in his early forties, with a dark beard which was not much more than a few days’ stubble. His eyes were intense and alert, but not unfriendly. He was tall and slim, and wore a black baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead, a long black leather jacket and a pair of faded jeans.

  “Yes?” said the landlord.

  “Very large Jameson’s, please.” The man spoke with a thick Northern Irish accent, returning the landlord’s tentative smile.

  “Triple?”

  “Aye, at least.”

  The man paid for the drink then drank half of it in a single swallow, exhaling a satisfied ‘aaah’ as he placed the glass back on the bar. Then he reached along the bar, behind Kevin, the nearest of the three men, towards a bowl of peanuts. In doing so, he caught Kevin’s arm, causing him to spill some of his pint down the front of his shirt. Kevin whirled round, dropping from his stool and slamming his glass onto the bar. He grabbed the stranger by the lapels of his coat, leaning backwards slightly as if he was about to head butt him. The man raised his hands instinctively in front of his face to prevent the attack, at the same time crying out, “Sorry, sorry! It was an accident. I’m really sorry!”

  The three men had surrounded the stranger who was still on the stool, his back arched over the bar with Kevin’s clenched hands holding his collar and his knuckles pressing against his throat. The landlord reached across, pushing Kevin gently but firmly in the chest to ease him back.

  “Come on, Kev,” he said. “It was just an accident, like the man said. No need for this. He’ll get you another drink, won’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” said the stranger, choking out the words. “Get them all one, please. I’m really sorry.”

  “You will be fucking sorry!” Kevin snarled, almost spitting out the words, his eyes still blazing. “And what about my fucking shirt?”

  “Well, I… ”

  “It’s fucking ruined!”

  “Okay, look, I’ll give you some money to replace it. But it was an accident. Really.”

  Kevin let him go and the stranger slowly and very deliberately took out his wallet. Jimmy grabbed it off him.

  “Good shirt, that, Kev,” he said, sniggering. “How much did you say it was?”

  “Eighty-five quid,” said Kevin. All three laughed.

  “Well, there’s plenty in here,” said the man looking in the wallet. “Let’s say a hundred shall we, to cover bus fare there and back to Saville Row. What do you reckon, Karl?” He turned to the third man.

  “Uh-uh-uh,” his brother made a grunting sound which just about passed for a laugh. Karl was the same height as Jimmy, but much bigger all round. His bulk was mainly excess weight and he had none of the other’s muscle definition. In every other way, he was exactly like him. He had the same shaved head and tattoos, and had copied his elder sibling’s outfit right down to the colour of his boots. His face was round and full, with none of the hardness of the other two.

  “You okay with that, mate?” said Jimmy. “Reckon you’ve got off lightly so far.”

  “Now come on,” the landlord stepped in again. “Give the man back his wallet and let him buy you all a drink. Those few drops aren’t going to spoil a shirt – certainly not such an expensive one,” he added.

  “Who are you, Max, his fucking nanny?” said Jimmy. “Let him speak for himself. Well, fuck-wit, what do you think? A hundred quid’s fair?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “if the shirt was really that much.”

  “You calling me a liar?” shouted Kevin, renewing his grip on the man. “First you throw a fucking drink over me and then call me a liar. You got a fucking death wish?”

  “No, no. A hundred’s fine. Then I’ll buy you that drink.”

  This time the stranger pushed Kevin away firmly himself, and then reached over and took back his wallet from Jimmy. He took out five twenties and handed them to him.

  “Now three pints, wasn’t it?”

  “Tell you what,” said Jimmy, “Just to make it right – I mean, we were all having such a good time until you came in throwing your weight about – I think you ought to get drinks all round. Then you might even get out of here alive.”

  “Right, that’s enough, Jimmy,” said Max. “It was just a little accident and this has gone too far… ”

  “Let’s ask the lads, then,” said Jimmy. He turned to the room in general. “Who wants to have a drink with me and my brothers, on our Irish friend here?”

  No-one spoke.

  Jimmy’s eyes swept the room, finally fixing on a table covered in empty bottles close to where he was standing. The three men at the table were all in their mid-thirties, with bulky frames and hard-looking faces. Collectively, they looked as though they would be more than a match for the three brothers, but they became agitated and nervous as Jimmy picked them out.

  “You three – would you like a drink with me and my brothers?” he shouted.

  “Yeah, that would be great,” said one of the men, quietly and without enthusiasm, and the other two nodded.

  “Good!”

  Jimmy looked up and round the room again; everyone either muttered a ‘yes’ or nodded or raised a reluctant hand.

  “Look,” said Max to the stranger, “you don’t have to do this, friend. And if you want your hundred quid back… ”

  “No, that’s okay, thanks anyway,” he said. “But I’ve got to be getting along. So, if I just give another hundred to Jimmy, here, then that should easily cover a round for everybody, I guess.”

  He took five more twenties from his wallet and handed them over. Jimmy took the cash as the three brothers sat down again. He held each of the notes up to the light in mock inspection of the money, while the other two laughed. The stranger, looking relaxed and composed, drained his glass and put it down on the bar. He nodded to the landlord but before he could move, Kevin turned round on his stool to face him.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going? You haven’t asked if you can leave yet.”

  “Let him go,” said Jimmy. “At least let’s give the poor bastard a start.”

  They all laughed again.

  The stranger stood up very calmly, smoothed the c
reases from his jacket and pulled down the cap a little further.

  “Five seconds,” said Jimmy. “You’ve got five seconds to get to that door and away. Then we’re after you. You’d better run like fuck!”

  The man smiled, thinly.

  “Oh, I will,” he said.

  Without warning, he lunged forward and shoved Kevin in the chest. The force of the attack knocked Kevin into Jimmy and the three bar stools and their occupants crashed to the floor like falling dominoes.

  He moved quickly across the room and through the door into the street. Outside he was confronted by a group of around thirty youngsters, mostly in their early teens, who had been hanging around the pub in the pouring rain. As if by a collective reflex, they all started shouting abuse and insults at him, but did nothing to impede his flight. He set off down the road out of the estate.

  In the bar, the brothers scrambled to their feet, taking a few moments to fully realise what had happened to them.

  “Stop the bastard!” yelled Kevin, pointlessly.

  They raced out into the street. The crowd of youngsters picked up the story as they saw the brothers emerge.

  “That way!” they shouted.

  “Right!” yelled Jimmy, seeing the running figure already two streets away. “Get him!”

  The stranger set a challenging pace. The three brothers, at the vanguard of the pursuing pack, initially made no impression on him and Karl soon fell behind. But after several minutes their quarry began to slow down. The road had left the estate behind, passing through an open area before entering an old business park of factories, yards and warehouses, currently deserted.

  “This is fucking perfect,” panted Kevin. “No witnesses.”

  The man, who had been running purposefully in one direction, suddenly turned right into a side street.

  “Shit, we’re going to lose him.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Jimmy. “More like he’s just committed suicide.”

  Jimmy slowed down as they approached the corner of the street, and the pack reduced their pace to keep behind him. Most of the gang from outside the pub had stayed the course and fanned out across the entrance of the street as the brothers turned the corner. Karl arrived, gasping for breath, and pushed his way through them to join his brothers.

  The street was an old cobbled cul-de-sac, with red brick walls of ancient warehouses rising high on both sides and huge cast-iron factory gates across the end. The stranger was about a hundred yards away, with his back to the crowd, and holding on to the vertical bars of the gates as if supporting himself. He looked totally spent from his exertions.

  The three men started towards him; the others followed, still spread across the full width of the cul-de-sac. Jimmy stopped suddenly and turned on the crowd.

  “Right, fuck off, you lot!” he shouted.

  “Oh, come on, Jimmy,” someone called back, and there were mutterings from many of the others.

  “Did you hear me? Get the fuck out of here!” Jimmy yelled at them again.

  “We won’t say anything, Jimmy. Just let us watch,” shouted someone else.

  This time Jimmy strode across to the Asian boy who had spoken. He grabbed him by his hair, pulled back his head and yelled into his face, “Are you fucking deaf or just stupid?”

  Then he slapped him twice very hard across the face – forehand and backhand. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes and blood ran freely from his nose. Jimmy pushed him to the ground and kicked him three times as he lay there. He squealed with pain, dragging himself to his feet, half running, half limping away.

  “Anyone else want to stay?”

  The rest of the crowd quickly started to leave the street and head back the way they had come, following the injured boy.

  Kevin and Karl had not taken their eyes off the motionless figure at the factory gates. When the last of the crowd had left the end of the street, Jimmy joined them again and, with him leading, as he always did, they set off walking towards him.

  The torrential rain bounced off the cobbles. They were about forty yards away when the man turned to face them. The brothers slowed down, cautiously anticipating the pending action.

  The man noted that they looked like three gunslingers on a western street, line abreast, arms hanging loosely but in readiness by their sides, waiting for the first move. He smiled at the image.

  “Why, look’ya here,” he said, in an authentic cowboy drawl, “It’s the good ol’ Brady bunch. The Hole-in-the-Head gang. Howdy, boys. Welcome to Dead Man’s Canyon.”

  The brothers stopped.

  Jimmy screwed his face into a snarl.

  “Who the fuck are you? You’re a fucking weirdo, I know that!”

  “Why, what a hurtful thing to say, Jim-boy. That sure ain’t friendly-like,” said the man, still in character. He looked around him at the sombre walls of the buildings.

  “Just look at this shit-hole,” he said, dropping the fake voice. “What a hell of a place for you to die.” He looked up into the sky and felt the rain beating down into his face. “At least the blood will get washed away,” he added. His voice was soft and refined and there was now no trace of the Ulster accent.

  The brothers had not moved. The initiative had been taken away from them completely by the unnerving composure of the stranger.

  “So here we are,” the man went on. “The brothers Brady. Jimmy, nearly twenty-one, and Karl and Kevin, eighteen. Twins – nowhere near identical; in fact, amazingly different. One a big, fat slob; the other a pathetic little runt. Only one thing in common – neither possesses a single brain cell.”

  “You’re a fucking wanker!” shouted Jimmy. “And if you think you can talk your way out of anything, you’re fucking stupid as well. And how come you know us? Are we supposed to recognise you or something?”

  “No,” answered the man, “you don’t know me. But we do have a mutual acquaintance. An elderly lady on the estate. Acquaintance might be the wrong word, because I don’t know if you ever actually met her, but some very bad things happened to her front door. Someone painted some really bad words on it, then smashed it in a few times with a sledge hammer or something and put dog-shit through the letter box. I guess that was all your doing. She tried to kill herself three times because of you guys.”

  As he was talking, the man had moved slowly away from the gates towards the brothers until he had halved the distance between them.

  “You look a bit worried, Jimmy,” the man continued. “I’m surprised really, considering you’re just about the hardest guys on the planet, aren’t you? Terrorising all those defenceless people; getting children to do the dirty work while you hide in the shadows. And I mean, just look how you dealt with that kid just now. How old was he – twelve, thirteen? You showed him, didn’t you? Don’t mess with me! Fucking big hard-man me!”

  He paused, giving them a chance to respond. No-one spoke.

  “Hey, but that’s not fair, is it?” he went on. “I could see how it was with those guys in the pub. Nobody wanted to look you in the eye. They were even too scared to turn down a drink with you, even though they would’ve probably choked on it. How does it feel knowing that every one of the guys in that place wishes you were dead? Come to think of it, I guess that’s going to make me a hero after tonight.”

  The twins kept glancing nervously at Jimmy for some sort of signal. Jimmy stared straight ahead at the stranger.

  “Are you carrying any tools, by the way? Knives? Guns? Guns, I reckon. Knives are for small time cowards, aren’t they? If you want to be a really big coward you have to carry a gun these days. Tell you what, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

  No-one spoke for half a minute. The stranger broke the silence.

  “Look, are you guys going to do anything? I mean you put in a lot of effort to get here. Or are you just scared shitless by one old man?”

  The twins reacted instinctively to the challenge. Suddenly they both had knives in their hands, and the sneer had returned to their faces.<
br />
  “Right, you fucking twat,” Kevin snarled. “Piss-taking over! This is it! Get him, Karl!”

  Together they rushed forward. In what seemed like a single, blurred movement, the man pulled aside his jacket with his left hand to reveal an automatic pistol in the belt of his jeans; then the gun was in his right hand, arm extended, aimed, fired. The shot signalled the end of Kevin Brady who, with his twin brother, had covered no more than half the short distance between them. He crashed to the ground and lay twisted in death on the street, the rain washing around him, a hole in his forehead.

  Karl stopped, frozen in his charge. The man dropped his arm to his side and spoke.

  “Well, Karl. You haven’t said a single word all evening. Wouldn’t you like to say something now? What about, ‘Please don’t kill me’?”

  Karl dropped to his knees on the cobbles. He stared across at Kevin and started shaking with fear. He seemed incapable of speech. The man shouted impatiently, “Well, come on! Are you going to fucking say something or not? I’ll count to three – one, two… ”

  “P-P-Please,” stammered Karl, in a barely audible whisper, “don’t k-k-kill me. I d-didn’t… ”

  The man furrowed his brow and pursed his lips in an exaggerated expression of concentration. Then his face relaxed.

  “No, sorry,” he said. His arm came up to the firing position again. His second bullet dispatched Karl with the same precise head shot. Jimmy had not moved since the first shot. His eyes were open wider than seemed possible as he looked from his two dead siblings to the stranger.

  “Well, what do you think of that, Jimmy?” said the man, nodding towards the two bodies on the cobbles. “That’ll be you in a couple of minutes. Tell you what, though,” he went on, replacing the gun in his belt. “I know you’re packing a shooter, so we’ll do this cowboy style. And as you’re the baddie, it’s a sort of tradition that you get to draw first. I guess you must know, though, that you don’t have a fucking snowball in hell’s chance. Right?”

  They looked at each other in silence for a full minute, Jimmy’s lower lip trembling like a child’s. Then, suddenly, his expression changed; his eyes flashed and he reached quickly inside his jacket. His gun had hardly cleared the pocket when the stranger fired. The shot shattered Jimmy’s right knee-cap, tearing ligaments and sending splinters of bone up into his thigh. The impact of the bullet lifted his leg up behind him and sent him crashing onto his face on the cobbles, his body sending up a spray of water. The gun flew out of his hand and bounced across the street coming to rest against the kerb. He rolled onto his back into the gutter, jerking his head from side to side and screaming in his agony. The blood pouring from the wound was carried away with the rainwater.