Bad Blood

by David Bussell

  I smiled at the girl, who, despite the gun, looked more scared of me than I did of her. Her noodle-thin arms trembled under the heft of the pistol, as though its weight might dislocate her shoulder at any moment. Sweat beaded her skin as she struggled to keep the weapon balanced.

  ‘Careful that thing doesn’t go off,’ I said, smiling. ‘Call me a narcissist, but I sort of like my face without a bullet hole in the middle.’

  As I talked and grinned and tried to give off as relaxed a demeanour as possible, I wracked my brain, trying to work out what I’d done that had put me on the Galoffis’ shit list. What I’d done to warrant being dragged here and tied to a chair in front of a girl with zero trigger discipline.

  Shit.

  Three years back—so long ago that I’d practically forgotten—I was paid to kill a cousin of theirs, Albert Galoffi: a bald, squat little guy with baby teeth and damp hands. Somehow he’d charmed the wife of someone very, very bad. Someone who couldn’t be seen to make a move himself for business reasons. So he’d had word sent to me. I ended up having to strangle the guy to death with his own belt. He pissed himself as he kicked and slapped at me, his face beetroot red as I choked the life out of him.

  Yeah, I know, you think a thing like that would stick in a person’s memory, but this is my job, okay? I mean, do you remember the filename you gave that Excel spreadsheet three years ago? The customer you sold that insurance loan to? The… um… okay, I’ve run out of mundane analogies. What do I know about your world? About as much as you do of mine, that’s what.

  Right. So the Galoffis were going to torture me to death because I’d offed their horny, wet-handed cousin. At least I knew where I stood now, that’s something, right?

  Man, I had to get out of that chair.

  I looked Sophia square in the eye. A rivulet of sweat ran down her cheek and clung to the bottom of her chin. She tilted her head and mopped it off with the shoulder of her nightgown, and as she did, I snatched a quick glance at the table with the evil-looking surgical implements. At the bone saw. If I could lay a hand on that thing I could cut through my bonds in no time. How though? It was three feet away at least, and my wrists were bound firmly to the back of the chair; so firmly that my hands felt like they’d been plunged into a bucket of ice water.

  ‘Please don’t make me,’ the girl whimpered, smelling my cogs whirring.

  ‘Relax,’ I told her, calm as I could muster, ‘no one’s making you do anything.’

  Except they were. Mum and dad were, sticking a gun in her hand and leaving her in a room with a known assassin. Not exactly responsible parenting, that. So why do it? Why not have the heavy with the busted nose look after the guest? I’m sure he’d have loved some alone time with me and a ten-inch bone saw.

  I looked at the revolver in Sophia’s hand, twitching dangerously. Did the Galoffis want the gun to go off, was that it? Some twisted rite of passage for their daughter? Her first kill, whether she wanted it or not?

  Jesus, I really had to get out of that chair.

  I groped around behind my back, looking for something I could untie with my fingers. Instead, I found a snag, not in the binding, but in the wood of the chair. A splinter. Only slight, but just enough to create friction. Just enough to saw with.

  Doing my best to keep my front half static, I began working my wrists up and down against the snag, biting into the binding with short, sharp strokes. As I did, I felt a warm flush through my body as though someone had stirred sugar into my blood, my tattoos lending a helping hand.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked the girl, locking her elbows, gun stiff in her grip. ‘Why are you glowing?’

  The tattoos were giving off a warm red bloom, the way they do when they’re juicing me up. They were also giving the girl a very obvious sign that I was up to something.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied innocently. ‘Probably a trick of the light or something.’

  I resumed sawing, up and down, up and down, hoping the girl with the gun wouldn’t see the muscles tensing in my jaw. Hoping she wouldn’t catch the whiff of burnt rope as the snag chafed through to the other side of my binding.

  ‘Mum!’ she cried. ‘Dad! I think she’s trying to get out!’

  Rumbled. I gave up all pretense of disguising what I was doing and went at the rope hammer and tongs.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ said the girl. ‘Don’t make me use this.’

  Her finger tensed. The trigger was half-pulled.

  I didn’t give her the chance to pull it any further. Instead, as my bonds fell away at last, I launched myself in her direction, slapped the gun from her hand, and cracked her one in the jaw. Sophia went down hard; hard enough to rattle some teeth, but not enough to leave her with any permanent damage.

  I rubbed my knuckles. ‘Sorry about that, little girl. Nothing personal. Well, a bit personal. Actually, mostly personal.’

  I scooped up the gun and checked the cylinder. Fully loaded. I took aim at the door in case the girl had succeeded in raising the alarm and the Galoffi goon squad was inbound. Nothing.

  I went to the door, cracked it open to check the hallway beyond, found it clear. I could hear voices from the room next door. Lots of them, harrumphing, arguing, fighting to be heard over one another. I had no idea what was going on in there but it sounded serious. Something to do with me? Or was I just the side dish? Was I earwigging on a sit-down between the Galoffis and the rest of the Brighton crime families, and if so, what had brought such an occasion about?

  Whatever it was, I wasn’t sticking around to find out the answer. I padded down the hallway, footfalls softened by the Turkish rug beneath my feet, and snuck by the half-closed entrance to the adjoining room. Just a few more feet and I’d be at the front door, then off I’d go, away on my toes, vanishing like a fart in a jacuzzi.

  I almost made it too.

  I had my open palm aimed at the doorknob, ready to give it the old twist and push, when Busey’s Stuntman emerged from a room on the other side of the hallway and stepped out in front of me.

  He offered a crooked grin. ‘Going somewhere?’

  I pointed the revolver at him, aiming from the hip, nice and casual. ‘Actually, I was thinking I might take a stroll to the Royal Pavilion, I hear the gardens are lovely this time of year. Now, do you want to get out of my way, you bucket of fuck?’

  He peered at me over his big clown nose. ‘Make me.’

  Fair enough then. I took aim at one of his kneecaps and pulled the trigger. The gun went off, loud and violent. The goon remained decidedly unmoved by the spectacle though. Instead of clutching his knee and collapsing against the front door like a good boy, he just stood there smirking.

  Blanks.

  The pistol was loaded with bloody blanks.

  The goon laughed, his shoulders racking with mirth. I was about to show him that I could still make use of the gun by shoving the thing up his arse, when I heard movement from behind. I spun about to find the Galoffis stood there, arm-in-arm and wearing a shared look of confusion.

  ‘Now what are you doing, my dear?’ asked Layton.

  ‘What does it look like?’ I shot back. ‘Getting out of here before you nutters kill me.’

  ‘Kill you?’ said Millie, placing a hand on her wounded heart. ‘We didn’t bring you here to kill you, Ms Banks. We brought you here to hire you.’

  3

  Ordinarily, when someone wants to secure my services, they don’t have their goons beat the crap out of me, bundle me into a car with blacked-out windows, and hold me at gunpoint. But then the Galoffis were a long way from ordinary. I mean, I assume the whole incest/ancient monsters thing had already clued you into that, but I just thought I’d make it crystal clear.

  A team of henchmen returned me to the back room, the one with the chair and the torture tools. The Galoffis came too. Given that I was surrounded and outnumbered, I decided to hear out their proposition. I know, very gracious of me.

  ‘What’s this job you want doing then?’ I asked, but the Ga
loffis were already busy peeling their daughter’s face off the floor.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Millie, checking the bruise on Sophia’s jaw and wincing.

  The girl stabbed a finger in my direction and hissed from the side of her swollen mouth. ‘She did! She was trying to kill me!’

  ‘Hey, I only kill for money. Well, not only, but mostly. At least half of the time it’s for money, and that’s my final word on the matter.’

  Busey’s Stuntman decided he wanted in on the conversation. ‘Don’t make me laugh, you skinny bitch. Acting all tough. You’re nothing but mouth.’

  ‘Says the bloke who looks like he’s dressed for Red Nose Day,’ I replied, my eyes landing on his mashed snout.

  ‘You sucker-punched me,’ he growled. ‘I would have taken you even if the gun you snatched was loaded.’

  ‘Have a swing, fuck-nuts, let’s see how it shakes out.’

  Busey growled and took a step towards me.

  ‘That’s enough!’ ordered Millie. ‘How dare you speak to our guest that way?’

  ‘Yeah, you prick,’ I added, wearing my best shit-eater of a grin.

  ‘Leave us,’ ordered Layton. ‘You are dismissed.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘I said you are dismissed.’

  The goon opened his mouth to form a reply then thought better of it as Layton’s unblinking eyes fixed on him. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and sloped away, closing the door behind him.

  Sophia was sat up straight now. ‘Daddy, what did he mean when he said the gun wasn’t loaded?’

  ‘Exactly what it sounded like,’ he replied. ‘Did you really think your mother and I would leave you alone with a loaded pistol?’

  ‘What if it went off and you hurt yourself?’ said Millie. ‘What then?’

  The girl looked crestfallen. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose right,’ said Layton. ‘You couldn’t even manage to keep our guest here comfortable like we asked. How could you possibly be trusted with a loaded gun?’

  ‘Honestly, you are forever finding new ways to disappoint us,’ said Millie. ‘We asked one simple thing of you and you let us down.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sophia sobbed. ‘I did my best.’

  ‘Well, your best isn’t going to cut it,’ said Layton, venom cutting through his honeyed tones now. ‘Look how you tremble in front of your own parents. You are a Galoffi. It is well beyond time you started acting like one.’

  ‘Listen, if it’s okay with you guys, I think I might take off. Things are getting a bit domestic around here, and I don’t want to intrude…’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Millie. ‘We haven’t even explained why we invited you here yet.’

  “Invited”. Hell of a way of putting it.

  ‘Yeah, about that,’ I replied, ‘you say you want to hire me, but what’s with that thing then?’ I gestured to the table with the bone saw. ‘You planning on showing me your carpentry skills?’

  Her eyes went to the table too. ‘What? Oh! You thought we were going to torture you. Layton, she thought we were going to torture her!’

  Her husband’s eyes widened. ‘She didn’t?’ He turned to me and saw that I very much did. ‘That is hilarious.’

  I folded my arms. ‘Yeah, I’m creasing up here.’

  A muffled scream slid into the room from elsewhere. From beneath the floorboards if I wasn’t mistaken.

  ‘Uh, what’s that?’

  ‘What’s what?’ asked Layton.

  A second scream.

  ‘The really obvious screaming.’

  ‘Oh that,’ replied Millie. ‘That’s someone we are having tortured, due to an entirely unrelated matter. Is the noise disturbing you?’

  ‘Well, it is a bit shrill,’ I said over a third scream.

  ‘Yes,’ said Layton, ‘they always get shrill once the attention is turned to the testes.’

  So the main headline was that the Galoffis definitely didn't want to kill me, which meant they clearly had no idea I’d killed that cousin of theirs, the one I strangled to death with a belt. Old Clammy Hands Galoffi. Best not mention that then, I figured. I’m smart like that.

  ‘The job we require you for is… delicate,’ explained Layton.

  ‘I am pretty renowned for my subtlety,’ I said, lying like a bastard.

  ‘Our son, Leo…’ his voice trailed away and his jaw clenched as he struggled to keep his emotions under wraps. ‘Our son, my boy, the heir to the Galoffi family business… he has been taken from us.’

  ‘Taken how?’

  ‘Kidnapped,’ said Millie, grabbing a photo from a mantelpiece and thrusting it in my direction, ‘our baby boy, not even a year old, snatched away in the dead of the night.’

  Gooseflesh crept across my skin. A little boy, abducted from his family under the cloak of darkness. It’s fair to say that story struck a little close to home.

  ‘And just what do we have here, wandering these hidden streets?’

  My brother James, floating away in a ball of magic.

  The Red-Eyed Man.

  I shook my head, dismissing the memories.

  Millie Galoffi proffered the photo and I examined the little boy inside the frame. He was chubby, pink-skinned, and wore a crop of thick, brown hair. He even looked like James.

  ‘When?’ I asked through clenched teeth.

  ‘A week ago,’ Layton replied.

  ‘A week? Why wait so long to start looking for him?’

  ‘You think we’ve been sat here doing nothing?’ asked Millie.

  ‘Easy, my love,’ said Layton, hugging her and drying her tears with a handkerchief from his top pocket. ‘It’s going to be all right, I promise.’ He spoke to me over his sobbing wife’s shoulder. ‘We put our own people on it already, but so far they have turned up nothing, and we can hardly go through official channels. That is why we are coming to you.’

  I chewed it over. The Galoffis had access to a lot of money, so the most obvious motive for the kidnap would be to try and milk them for as much of it as possible. ‘Did the kidnapper leave a ransom note?’ I asked.

  ‘No note,’ said Layton. ‘All we know is what Sophia saw.’

  I turned to the girl. ‘You witnessed the kidnapping?’

  She nodded, eyes pointed at her slippers.

  ‘What did you see?’

  Her voice was shaky. Her body trembled. ‘Something… something came through my bedroom window.’

  ‘Something? What do you mean, something? What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know… I just saw a shape. He was like a shadow. It was so dark.’

  James! Where are you taking my brother?

  Red eyes.

  Red eyes.

  Red eyes.

  I gripped her shoulders, my eardrums pounding with dread.

  ‘Describe it to me. This thing... what were its eyes like?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Think, it’s important. Maybe they glowed?’

  Where are you taking my brother?

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophia, her voice quavering, ‘I think they did glow.’

  ‘Red? Did they glow red? Were the eyes red?’

  ‘It was all so fast and I was scared. But yes. Red eyes.’

  I could feel my pulse ticking in my throat. My heart was a bomb, ready to explode. Could it really be the same creature, doing the same thing after all this time?

  ‘Listen to me very carefully, Sophia. I need you to tell me everything you can remember about the Red-Eyed Man. Any detail, doesn’t matter how small. Can you do that for me?’

  Her body shivered under my touch. ‘I don’t know. I just remember a dark shape, and then… and then it’s all kind of fuzzy.’

  ‘What do you mean, “fuzzy”?’ I shook her, not meaning to.

  ‘Like the memory went away. Like it melted. Like a snowflake on the tip of my tongue.’

  Went away. More like taken away. Taken like my memory of James’ abduction. The room seemed to swarm with an ambient hum of menace. I
was in my own world. I could hear words being spoken but couldn’t decipher their meaning.

  ‘...You have to get him back,’ said the mother. ‘You have to bring back our little Leo. We can’t lose another child.’

  That last part woke me up. ‘What was that? Did you say another?’

  Layton answered on his wife’s behalf, his mouth a hard line. ‘Our eldest child, Joshua. He passed away two years ago.’

  ‘Passed away how?’ I was well beyond tact. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Joshua drowned, out there in our swimming pool.’ Layton pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘An accident. It had nothing to do with this incident. Here…’ He held out a folded piece of paper.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A list of people we want you to look into.’

  ‘We haven’t even discussed my fee yet.’ A bit of bullshit on my part, I was seeing this one through, no matter what.

  Layton’s lips thinned. ‘Return our boy to us and you will be handsomely rewarded. That’s a promise.’

  I had no reason not to believe him. The Galoffis were a sinister clan of weirdos and deviants, but they never welched on a debt. Still, I liked to hand out some promises of my own.

  ‘If I get him back and you try and fuck me over, the boy you scooped out of that pool won’t be the only dead person in this family.’

  Layton Galoffi eyed me cooly then nodded. I snatched the piece of paper off him. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Names,’ said Millie. ‘Any one of them could be responsible for this.’

  ‘Do any of them have red eyes?’

  ‘None of them would have taken Leo themselves,’ replied Layton.

  ‘We don’t care about the monkey, just the organ grinder,’ added Millie.

  ‘But we expect you to kill the monkey, too,’ Layton clarified, ‘when the moment comes.’

  Could it be that the Galoffis and I were victims of the same abductor? Maybe that’s what the Red-Eyed man I remembered taking James was: just a monkey paid to do a job. Paid to grab my brother. Had our paths crossed again at last? There was only one way to find out...