by Simon Logan
He wipes the booze from his moustache then walks back towards his car, muttering further threats and obscenities, swigging what remains of the liquor as he goes.
“What the hell . . . ?”
He slows to a halt, looks at his car parked up on the opposite side of the road and sees a group of teenagers huddled around it.
“Hey!” he shouts, starting towards them. “Hey!”
They scatter as soon as they hear him, revealing the four slashed tires. He gives chase but they’re too fast. Within moments they’re gone, only the echoes of their laughter remaining, and he is doubled-up, desperately trying to recover his breath.
“Little . . . bastards. . . .” he gasps, then throws the bottle. The glass shatters somewhere in the darkness.
He staggers to his car, kicks at a deflated tire and notices the scratches in the paintwork too. He leans on the roof of the vehicle, wondering if the night can get any worse.
Then he spots the poster—and suddenly things start to look up.
4.
DeBoer scratches his ass crack as he approaches the poster.
It’s pasted to the wall, competing for space with a dozen or so others. Mostly monotone with flashes of red and the words The Broken in large, jagged writing across the top, it is the rough image of the woman at the centre which catches his attention. In mid-swing of the guitar she wears, her teeth bared in a grimace or anger, a microphone to one side. Her hair emerges in random spikes from her head and there’s a strange tube emerging from her throat.
As he gets closer, DeBoer realizes that those last two details have been added to the poster in marker pen.
He squints, attempting to figure out why she is so familiar—and then the realisation hits him.
The girl from the island.
The girl who was responsible for the deaths of, among others, Wvladyslaw Szerynski, with whom DeBoer previously had a sweet smuggling deal on the go. Right up until she murdered the man in his own arcade, of course.
“Well, well, well, looks like every coat has a silver lining after all. You’re the reason I had to turn to gambling in the first place, you little bitch,” he says to the poster, his lip curling. He searches his memory for her name but it eludes him.
He slicks his hair back from his brow, reading the date and time of the advertised gig as well as the location, the Wheatsheaf. Hadn’t that place burned to the ground a few months back? He then notices an additional banner across the lower-left hand corner, the time of an open soundcheck. He checks his watch—it’s due to start in less than twenty minutes.
“Plenty who would be willing to pay up to have you in their hands from what I hear,” he says to the poster, running a hand across the woman’s face.
He turns and looks once more at his car tires. They are utterly deflated.
A set of headlights appear and he steps into the road, waving his arms to slow the vehicle down. It looks as if it is about to swerve to avoid him then the brakes suddenly squeal and it comes to a halt, a boxy old station wagon torn straight out of the 1980s Soviet Union. He circles around to the driver’s side and knocks on the window. It cranks down and an old man peers out from within, his nose is scrunched up in an effort to keep a pair of thick-lensed glasses from falling off.
“Get out of the car,” DeBoer says.
“Excuse me? You’ll have to speak up, I’ve . . .”
One liver-spotted hand goes to the hearing aid plugged into his ear.
DeBoer reaches into his pocket, pulls out his badge and holds it up. “Get out of the car, you old twat. Police emergency.”
“Officer, what seems to be the—?”
“Detective,” DeBoer says, finally losing his patience, snapping the badge wallet shut, shoving it back into his pocket and pulling open the car door. He grabs the old man by one shoulder and tries to drag him out but the man’s seat belt is still buckled and holds him fast. DeBoer reaches in and punches the release switch then tries again. The old man tumbles free of the vehicle and falls to the wet road beneath.
“Officer, please,” he protests, scrabbling for his glasses.
“Detective!” DeBoer shouts in his ear. “Fucking detective, you old coot!”
He steps over the man, straightens his raincoat, and gets into the car.
“Jesus Christ,” DeBoer splutters, the steering wheel embedded in his gut and his knees jammed against the console. He fumbles for the seat’s adjustment lever and attempts to slide the seat back to give himself more room but it’s jammed tight, probably rusted in place after too many years in the same position.
The old man gets to his knees, sliding his glasses back onto his nose. One lens is badly cracked and an arm sticks out at an angle. “Officer—”
DeBoer slams the door shut. It’s a struggle to manoeuvre his legs but at least it’s an automatic so he only has to fight with the accelerator and not worry about a clutch as well. He sticks the car into gear, then leans out of the still-open window.
“It’s detective!” DeBoer shouts one last time.
He hits the accelerator, leaving the old man stranded in the middle of the road and heading straight for the Wheatsheaf—and his way out of the hole he is currently occupying.
5.
Katja.
Not long after he arrives at the bar the name comes to him as he stands in a corner next to a concrete column, as far from the main crowd as possible, but still with a good view of the stage.
She no longer sports the large spikes of hair she had in the photo he had originally seen in the Policie report which had come from the island and in the vandalised poster for the gig, but despite that, and the large tattoo that covers her neck and some of her chest, he has no doubt it’s her.
He watches her shriek and thrash about on stage, barking into the microphone as if she were an attack dog ravaging a coke dealer’s arm, the neck of her guitar gripped in one hand, and can’t help but feel contempt for everything and everyone around him. Sweaty, drunken, criminal fuckwits who think that making as much noise as possible is a valid substitute for melody. Those who are interested bounce around him like lunatics, almost colliding with him multiple times, but he resists the instinctive urge to grab them and punch the living shit out of them.
He refuses to let anything interfere with his reason for being there.
He bides his time, despite the agony of listening to the so-called music, beginning to wish he had taken the old man’s hearing aid as well as his car. Maybe there would have been some sort of white noise setting to block the cacophony out.
Fortunately the soundcheck is as quick as sex with the prostitutes he frequented and so soon enough Katja pulls the guitar from her shoulder, revealing a skull spray-painted onto the T-shirt she wears.
“Yeah, fuck you, too,” she says into the mic before she disappears.
DeBoer pushes through the crowd to keep her in sight, watches her vanish into the darkness of a corridor at the back of the stage. Thanks to a couple of busts he’d made on the place a year or so back, he knows where it leads and so hurriedly leaves. Scaffolding encrusts most of the front of the building and the scorch marks from the fire which had recently engulfed it remain like old scars, but everything is fine around the back.
He takes a dirty handkerchief from one pocket and then a small brown bottle from another. He removes a dropper from the bottle and places a few drops of liquid into the handkerchief then is about to head for the rear door to wait for her coming out when he hears footsteps.
He ducks into a doorway as four women walk past.
No. Wait.
He squints, his eyesight not what it used to be and his ears still ringing from the gig.
They aren’t women at all.
Lady Delicious and her mob, he realizes.
He thinks of Frank’s threat—his promise—to set the transvestite debt collector on him and decides to remain where he is. Ignoring his itching
asshole, he watches the four confront Katja when she emerges from the Wheatsheaf and momentarily worries that he might miss his opportunity to cash in on her but in the end all they take from her is her guitar and perhaps a little self-respect. He leans farther back into the shadow of the doorway as they walk past him and a minute or so later Katja follows.
He lets her pass and turn onto the main thoroughfare then hurries to the car, parked up on the opposite side of the road to the Wheatsheaf and still with all its wheels intact. He squeezes himself back in, fumbling for the seat adjustment lever but finds it rusted into place, and so resigns himself to his discomfort. He watches Katja until she is a block or so away then starts the engine and pulls the vehicle onto the quiet streets. He drifts along as slowly as he dares, figuring that anyone seeing him will just assume him to be an old near-sighted coot, while always keeping Katja just in view and no more.
He almost loses her a couple of times as she makes her way through the streets via an unnecessarily complicated route, and wonders if perhaps she has spotted him after all. She slows as she approaches a row of buildings, once impressive three-storey homes now nothing more than brick and concrete bug shelters.
Without missing a beat, DeBoer stamps on the accelerator, having to wait several moments for the power to come through, then screeches to a halt metres away from her. He pulls himself from the car and she’s running now, across a weed-choked lawn. He jumps at her, almost missing but coming down on her hard enough to crash her to the ground beneath him. He pulls her hood away, revealing her closely shaven scalp. She manages to slam an elbow into his face before he snatches the handkerchief, freshly soaked in chloroform, and shoves it into her face. She throws her head from side to side but already the chemical is taking effect and her movements become sluggish. He loosens his grip on her and lets her turn herself onto her back. He fingers his cheekbone where she had struck him but the damage is minimal.
Katja looks up at him, her lids heavy, squinting against the light of a street lamp behind him. She says something but her words are slurred.
He leans into her, pressing the handkerchief to her face once more. “Stop fucking fighting, you little tramp.”
She claws at his hands but her fingers are limp and ineffective. Within moments her limbs slump to the ground beside her.
“I know who you are, Katja,” he says, unable to control his joy at having caught her. “And I think we both know that there are certain people who would just love to get their hands on you.”
He wants her to see him. He wants her to know what lies in store for her, to suffer that knowledge.
She murmurs slurred words and he turns his head to one side to hear her better. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up. I’m deaf as a tent-pole from that fucking racket you were playing.”
“Useless. Fucking. Junkie,” she says and then her eyes roll back in her head and she is gone.
6.
Seven of them in total, in the middle of the vacant parking lot of a burger joint which is no longer there, all lined up like school kids after a fire alarm.
A woman with bright pink, dyed hair clipped in place with a dozen little clasps stands before them. She holds a clipboard in purple-gloved hands and one by one takes down the details of those gathered.
Nikolai recognises most of them as scene regulars—a collection of chemical misfits and wasters who are probably as close as he will come to a social circle. As he waits for his turn, he studies the crumpled leaflet he holds in one hand, the same leaflet some of the others have brought with them, torn from the walls of research labs and universities and subtly noting the details for the gathering. In his other hand, something that none of the others have—a poster for a punk gig.
The Broken, a dense, jagged scrawl announces, along with the dates and times of the show.
And a picture of a girl, one hand clutching a microphone so tightly the bones of her hand show through the graininess of the printing.
Despite the shaven head and new tattoos he has no doubt that it is Katja. He recognised her the moment he came across the poster earlier that day, the first time he had seen her face since being kicked out of the Stumps a couple of months earlier. After he had fucked up yet again.
“Not seen you around for a while,” one of the others says to him as they wait. “I heard you got into a lock-away?”
The man who stands beside Nikolai is short and weedy looking with lank hair tied back in a ponytail. He’s wearing a death metal band T-shirt and his smile is punctuated by only three or four crooked, stained teeth. He wears a small chain with his name spelled out in little silver letters: DAMIEN.
Nikolai shrugs. “It was a . . . a laxative.”
“And did it work?”
“You said yourself you’ve not seen me around for a couple of weeks—what do you think?”
“Eeep,” Damien says.
The woman with the pink hair and clipboard moves onto the next volunteer.
Damien nudges Nikolai. “Thought I’d landed myself a dream one a week or so back.”
Nikolai ignores him but the man continues. “Some sort of sex pill. They had this other pill that was like an off-switch for it but they’d been having problems getting it to function in their previous test subjects so I basically spent a solid week fucking day and night whilst they figured out what was causing it to not function. One hundred bucks and a bunch of weeping sores, that’s all I got out of it. Wouldn’t have been so bad if the women they’d brought in had been something to look at, I’m telling you.”
Nikolai continues ignoring him.
“One hundred fucking bucks, how can they expect us to live on that? I spent the lot on creams for the sores which they didn’t even provide as part of the trial, by the way, those cheap bastards. This one, on the other hand—it’s that old inverse proportion rule, right?”
“The what?”
“You know. The shittier the location we have to go to for assessment, the more underground it all is, the better the pay. And vice versa.”
He stops talking when the woman with the clipboard reaches him.
She shines a small torch into his eyes, examining his pupil response, then asks him to open his mouth and shines it in there too. Her lip curls involuntarily at the sight of his crooked teeth. She asks him several questions, then scribbles down his responses on her notepad.
“Are you currently on any medication?”
“Nope,” Damien says, winks at Nikolai.
“Any illegal substances?” she asks, as aware as those gathered that it’s like asking a prisoner if they are innocent.
“No ma’am,” he says and winks again.
The woman makes more notes then takes a step back and looks him up and down. She says, “Thank you.”
She repeats the procedure with Nikolai, checking his eyes and mouth, then his fingernails.
“Are you currently on any medication?”
“No.”
He’s aware of Damien grinning madly beside him but takes no notice.
“Any illegal substances?”
“I’m clean,” Nikolai answers.
“Thank you,” she says, then turns and flicks through her sheets of notes. She walks up the line and back again and it shifts with her presence as if she exerts some sort of gravitational pull on each person there.
“You,” she says finally, pointing her pen at Nikolai.
He hesitates then steps forward when she motions for him to come towards her. He stands beside her, looking back at the crowd from which he has been plucked.
“Thank you all for coming,” she says and then guides Nikolai towards the cherry red Honda she had arrived in.
“You’re fucking kidding me. That’s it?!” one of the others complains, loudly enough for the woman to hear. “You’re only taking one?”
“One is all we’re looking for, guys,” she says, opening the door for Nikolai. He climbs insid
e.
“And you choose him?” Damien shouts. “He’s the biggest fucking junkie out of all of us!”
She closes Nikolai’s door and climbs into the driver’s seat. “Maybe next time fellas,” she says.
The group has now gathered in front of the car, blocking its exit. The woman starts the engine, revs it a couple of times. She hits the headlights, flooding the group in light and for a few moments there is a stand-off, nobody prepared to make the first move. Finally the crowd splits, though only just enough for her to squeeze the car through them, and, as she passes, fists and palms slap against the roof and window.
She pulls the car onto the main road and joins the light traffic, glances in her rearview mirror at Nikolai.
“It’s not true,” he tells her, nervously rubbing his hands across his thighs. “I’m not . . . taking anything. Not anymore.”
The woman says nothing, her indifference as tangible as it had been when assessing them. She swings the car into a u-turn to head back the way she came.
Nikolai looks out the window as they pass the parking lot.
Damien stands at the front of the crowd and gives him the finger.
“I hope they fuck you up, Nikolai!” he shouts, then disappears from sight.
But before that, there was this. . . .
• • •
Bridget watches the couple from a booth at the back of the club, away from the main throng and bathed in the glow from a couple of slot machines lined up against one wall.
The woman is of medium height with rich black hair, multiple tattoos adorning her arms. The man is taller, bright blue eyes and short blonde hair. He says something and the woman laughs, placing a hand on his chest, fingers spread.
Bridget sips at a glass of water, leaning to one side when someone entering blocks her view momentarily.
“Loving your look,” another man says to her. He wears a suit with his tie and top shirt buttons loosened, the gel in his hair losing a battle to keep it slicked back from his forehead.
