Deadly Obsession

by Michael Kerr

  Ken ran his fingers through his hair several times as he considered his options. There were only two. Do something, or do nothing. This had all the hallmarks of what could turn out to be a no win situation; a shit storm that he would no doubt take all the flak for. His knee flared. The cold weather and stress seemed to be fuel for his arthritis. He needed a heat pad on it. Or maybe a bottle of Scotch to internally warm his inflamed joints and numb his brain. It would be nice to not give a fuck for a few hours.

  “Okay,” Ken said after the best part of a minute had passed. “Lisa, I’d appreciate your helping me word a suitable press release. We need to rattle his cage, and hopefully get some woman who doesn’t want him as a pen pal to give us a bell and shout for help.”

  While Ken and Lisa got to work, Jack went down to the squad room, poured a cup of coffee and parked himself in a chair with his legs crossed and his booted feet up on the desktop in front of him.

  “No rest for the wicked, boss,” Eddie McBride said, cradling his phone. “We got a lead on the Joey Lewis case. The witness, Kelly Davis, spilled her guts to a friend of a snitch of mine. She said it was Randy Gant that had Joey topped. Came up with the name of one of the team who took him out; Tyrone Tyrell.”

  “Does your snitch think Kelly will talk to us?”

  “Yeah. She’s hurting and mad. Randy caught her holding out on him and carved her up. Played noughts and crosses on her face with a Stanley knife. She wants him to go down.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Still in hospital.”

  “Let’s go and talk to her. Offer her the world if we have to, then pick up Tyrell and sweat him.”

  Kelly was all cried out. Her face was chopped liver. She had believed she looked a lot like the late singer Whitney Houston, back when Whitney had made The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner, up until Randy had widened her mouth by two inches either side, slit her nose down the middle, and half scalped her. She had more stitches than a prison mailbag, and knew that even with plastic surgery she would be reduced to giving pissed punters blow jobs in dark alleys. Fuck Gant! She would finger him for having little Joey Lewis blown to kingdom come. Then she would go back up north, change her name and start over. Randy had beaten-up on her before. She’d once been off the street for a few days with cracked ribs. And on another occasion he had pounded her so hard that she couldn’t get out of bed for a week. But he didn’t usually mark faces. A girl who looked like the Phantom of the Opera wasn’t an asset. Carving her up like a Sunday roast was his way of cutting her loose, in every way. She wasn’t safe down the Smoke now, so might as well grass him up and do a runner.

  “Hi, Kelly. Mind if I pull up a chair?” Jack said, holding his ID out for her to see. “A little bird told me you wanted to do the right thing now and give Gant up.”

  She looked nervously up and down the ward. “I...I got nuthin’ to say to you,” she said. Her bottle had gone. Fear was flooding back in to drown the anger.

  Jack sat down on a chair next to the bed. Eddie remained standing.

  “He’s done with you, Kelly. And he knows you’ve got enough on him to put him away for life. Do you want to end up floating face down in the Thames, or stuffed in some skip at the back of a kebab house with your throat cut?”

  “You pigs can’t protect me from ’im,” Kelly said. “I’m on the first train out of ’ere in the mornin’.”

  Jack got the gist of what she was saying. It wasn’t easy. With her swollen and remodelled mouth, she sounded like a third-rate ventriloquist trying to throw her voice while drinking a glass of water. If it was possible, he wanted Gant even more now. In one way the Jamaican gangster was as bad as and maybe worse than the serial killer they were after. Christ knew how many deaths the bastard was responsible for. The drugs he imported were peddled indiscriminately, even finding their way to kids via the pushers he employed to work the schools and clubs to get them on the habit young. And anyone who crossed Gant disappeared or turned up dead.

  “You’d be followed and dealt with, and if you aren’t stupid you know that,” Jack said. “We’re your only way out of a hole, Kelly. We’ll move you to a private clinic and give you round-the-clock protection. Do the right thing and we’ll set you up with a new identity. You’ll have a second chance.”

  Kelly thought it through. She was terrified of Gant; too terrified to take her chances and run. He had contacts everywhere. Maybe she couldn’t win whichever way she jumped. She looked straight into the cop’s face. She could read men. It was all in their eyes. Six years on the streets had given her a certain dubious talent. Just one look at a punter and she had him pegged. Most of them were married, just playing away from home with a stranger who didn’t know them from Adam. A quick fuck or a blow job, and they rushed back to wifey feeling like naughty schoolboys. It was the single blokes she had to watch. Not the old guys, who had trouble getting it up, or the teenagers who didn’t suffer that problem and usually popped in three seconds flat. It was the ones between twenty-five and fifty with flash cars and money who could turn mean, too demanding, and be dangerously unpredictable.

  Kelly’s worst experience had been with a guy who worked in the city and drove an Aston Martin. He thought he was James fuckin’ Bond, and that he was doing her a favour. She’d been sixteen at the time, still operating freelance, and had gone back to his place in Kensington. Closing her eyes, Kelly experienced the fear again; was there with him, suffering. His apartment was almost completely white. White walls, white leather upholstered sofa and easy chairs, white scatter rugs over pale blond varnished floorboards. He put some spooky whale song music on, told her to get undressed and shower, and then took his own clothes off, but didn’t touch her for over two hours. He talked about himself; how he planned to retire a millionaire at forty and go and live in the Caymans. They drank white wine. And when he eventually led her into the bedroom, he manacled her wrists, securing them to straps fitted to the sides of the bed, and gagged and blindfolded her, and even pushed plugs into her ears. It had been a hellish form of sense depravation. All she could do was smell and feel.

  He had bitten her breasts and the inside of her thighs. Straddled her and got off with cleavage sex, before finally forcing a long, thick solid object up inside her, which caused a lot of pain, but thankfully no lasting internal damage. That she could not see, hear or cry out against the agony and humiliation, or know that he would stop short of killing her, was the worst part.

  Much later, he released her, offered her more wine, and acted as though what he had done was completely natural. He had let her shower again and attend to the bites, before giving her two hundred quid and driving her back to where he had picked her up. She hadn’t gone to the police. She was a teenager on the game and not in any position to run to them and complain that a well-to-do gent had gone too far. Soon after, she had joined Randy’s string of girls. He’d set her up in a flat and given her protection, at a high price.

  “Kelly. You still with us?” Jack said.

  “Uh, yeah. What’s your name again?”

  “Ryder. Jack Ryder.”

  “Well, Jack Ryder, why should I trust you?”

  “Because I’m one of the good guys, Kelly. I don’t talk bullshit, or promise anything I can’t deliver. And because you owe it to yourself, Joey Lewis and a lot of other people that Gant has hurt or had murdered. So help me to nail his arse.”

  She believed he cared. Her mother had once said that eyes were the windows to the soul. This man’s eyes radiated honesty.

  “How’d you lose your pinkie?” she said.

  Jack knew that for some obscure reason his reaction and answer were crucial to whether she would choose the right side to fall. He held his mutilated hand up, palm toward her. “I stuck it in the wrong guy’s mouth,” he said.

  “Lucky it was just your finger,” she came back, suppressing a smile that would have burst her stitches.

  Jack did smile. “So how do you want to play it, Kelly? This is the first day of the rest of your l
ife. You get to open a fresh deck and be the dealer, if you want to.”

  “I’m not into metaphors,” she said. “But don’t forget, the house doesn’t always win.”

  “There are no real guarantees, Kelly. Anyone who says there are is trying to sell you something, and lying through his teeth. I’m not a salesman, I’m a copper. At the end of the day it’s your call.”

  “Pass me some juice,” Kelly said, pointing to the plastic cup with a straw in the lid, which was on the locker top next to the bed.

  Jack handed it to her as he pulled his chair closer, into her personal space. The time was right.

  “Best get your notebook out, Jack Ryder. Or do you have one of those little cassette recorders they use on the TV shows?”

  Jack slid his notebook and pen out of his pocket.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know,” Kelly said. “But what I can tell you is gospel. I know that Gant told Tyrone Tyrell to: ‘Blow that little motherfuckah Lewis’s head off, Ty. While he’s breathin’, he’s thievin’, an’ makin’ me look bad’.”

  Much later, Jack and Eddie left the hospital, after first arranging for Kelly to be moved to a clinic north of the M25. She had named names, given dates, and knew enough to ensure that Gant and many others would in all probability do serious bird.

  “You going to give this up to Taylor, boss?” Eddie said.

  “Not in this life, Eddie. AMIP can clean up after we take Gant down. The less people know about Kelly, the more chance she has of surviving to tell her story in the witness box.”

  “Are we going to lift Tyrell now?”

  “We need to take him out of circulation without any fuss. I don’t want him or his goons taking pot shots at us. We need him alive. He’s our passport to Gant.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  IT was one a.m. when Ty gave his cousin Marvin a high five and left the Mint Julep Club to saunter down the alley to the car park at the rear. His imported powder-blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville stood waxed and shining under the perimeter lights. He stopped twenty feet away and appraised it as he answered his mobile phone.

  “Yo.”

  “Dat you, Tyrone?”

  “Yeah, Randy.”

  “Where you at, mon?”

  “Jus’ left de Julep. Sonny Charles is ’ere for de week. You should get to see ’im, Randy. De dude is eighty an’ still plays the ’orn like an angel.”

  “We got us a problem, mon. Kelly’s not at de ’ospital. She gotta visit from de filth, an’ now she gone. I tink dey’ve stashed ’er, which means de bitch plans on talkin’.”

  “No sweat, Randy. When I find ’er, you want ’er back?”

  “Fuck, no, mon. Jus’ whack ’er.”

  Ty pocketed the phone, went to his cherished Caddy and climbed in and drove home. On the way he called Sammy Foster, who had been with him when he’d topped Joey Lewis.

  “You know what the fuckin’ time is?” Sammy said.

  “Yeah, I gotta Rolex. Now lis’en up, Sammy. De bitch dat Randy put in ’ospital ’as been talkin’ to de filth. And now she’s dropped outta sight.”

  “S’just ’er word. What she tell em don’t count for shit.”

  “She knows too much. Randy wants ’er offed.”

  “So ’ow d’ya wanna play it?”

  “Pick me up at ’ome in tweny minutes. Somebody at de ’ospital will know where they took ’er.”

  Dr Alex Morrison was attending to a drunk who had been on the receiving end of a severe beating, when a nurse drew back the curtain and told him that the brother of one of his female patients was out in the waiting area, and wanted a word with him.

  “Tell him I’ll be ten minutes,” Alex said, and turned his attention back to the injured man. Jesus Christ! He was hardly able to function at a safe level. He was beginning to think that being a junior doctor in a large city hospital was probably a mark of insanity. He worked for days’ on end, grabbing a few hours’ sleep in a room the size of a cubby-hole on the tenth floor. And he was always on call. A day off hardly gave him time to recharge his batteries. He was at a point where it would be easy to just jack it all in and walk. This was not how he wanted to spend the next few years of his life. He was now convinced that the NHS was beyond saving and was on a slippery slope heading down into a quagmire of semi privatisation.

  Finishing up, Alex left the patient with a nurse, who would have the problem of admitting the guy and trying to do the impossible and find him a bed.

  “Over there,” nurse Joanne Evans said, pointing to two black men; one the size of a barn door.

  Alex walked across to them. He didn’t like talking to relatives. They asked inane questions, were usually wound up as tight as a spring with worry and concern, and seemed to always believe that not enough was being done for their loved ones, or that the treatment was wrong, or inadequate. PR was definitely not his forte.

  “I believe you wanted to talk to me about a patient,” Alex said to the tall, shaven-headed man who walked up to him.

  “Dat’s right, Doc. Kelly Davis. I’m ’er brother, James. I jus’ flew in from New York, an’ was told she was in ’ere.”

  “Er, no, I’m afraid she’s gone. She―”

  “Gone! You mean...you mean she’s dead?” Tyrone said, projecting a suitable air of panic and shock.

  “No, no,” Alex said, realising how what he had said must have sounded. “What I meant to say is that she isn’t a patient here anymore. Please, come with me and I’ll explain.”

  He led the two men down the corridor into a small consulting room, closed the door and asked them to take a seat. He intended to call up Kelly Davis’s details on the computer terminal, but didn’t get chance to.

  “Sit down an’ listen very carefully,” Tyrone said, pointing a pistol with a silencer screwed to the end of it at Alex’s face. “I need to know exactly where she is. Find out, an’ you get to carry on playin’ doctors and nurses. Try jerkin’ me around an’ my friend ’ere will start cuttin’ pieces off you.”

  On cue, Sammy produced an old ebony-handled flick-knife and pressed the button to release the razor-sharp blade and let the light play on it.

  Alex put his hands up defensively and swallowed hard. “Okay, okay. Let me look up the details,” he said, slowly turning and walking towards a monitor on a desktop.

  “It won’t be on a computer, dickhead,” Tyrone said. “De police ’ave moved ’er. You were ’er doctor, so you must know where they took ’er.”

  Alex had no idea. He had been informed that she’d been transferred out, and hadn’t even asked why. Didn’t care. It was one less patient to worry about.

  Tyrone saw the truth of it in the young doctor’s expression. Knew that he couldn’t help them. He took up the slack on the pistol’s trigger.

  The door flew open, and in the fraction of a second it took Tyrone to begin to react, the cold gun muzzle of a gun was jammed up behind his right ear.

  “If you even twitch, I’ll blow your thick skull apart, Tyrell,” Jack said in a controlled and matter-of-fact voice. “Your call. Drop the piece, or be stupid. I don’t care which way you want this to go.”

  Sammy had already let the knife clatter to the floor and raised his hands in the air. There were two other cops, both aiming guns at him. Worse than bad odds.

  Tyrone dropped the gun.

  “You’re not as dumb as you look,” Jack said. “Now, very slowly, put your hands behind your back. And don’t do anything that would make me nervous.”

  Eddie holstered his gun, moved forward and cuffed Tyrell. The ratchet handcuffs only just engaged round the thug’s thick wrists.

  Sammy assumed the position without being asked, and Phil Jennings quickly hooked him up.

  “So let’s move,” Jack said. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “We got nuthin’ to talk about, cop,” Tyrone said as he was hustled out of the room, ducking to avoid cracking the top of his head on the door frame.

  “Take these two losers to the c
ars,” Jack said to Phil and Eddie. “I want a quick word with the doctor.”

  Within seconds, Alex had faced the threat of personal injury or death, and was now safe again, looking up at who he presumed and hoped was a plainclothes cop, now slipping a handgun into a shoulder holster.

  “I’m Detective Inspector Jack Ryder,” Jack said, showing the young, pale faced doctor his warrant card to reassure him. “What did our friend want to know?”

  “Where a patient by the name of Kelly Davis was,” Alex said. “He said he was her brother. I couldn’t tell him anything. I don’t know where she was moved to.”

  “And you are Doctor...?”

  “Alex Morrison.”

  “Well, Alex, I’ll have an officer take a statement from you. And then I suggest you go home. You’ve had a nasty experience.”

  Jack left. They had been lucky. Tailed Tyrell home from a club in Hammersmith, then to the hospital, after he had been picked up by another lowlife, Sammy Foster, who had previous for GBH and aggravated assault. Jack, with Eddie and Phil, had followed the pair into the A & E department and spoken with the nurse that Tyrell and Foster had talked to. It was obvious to Jack that they were going to ask the doctor where Kelly had been moved to. There had been no time to call in an Armed Response Unit, so he’d played it by ear, with saving the doctor a lot of grief a priority. It had worked out.

  “You’re looking at life, Tyrell,” Jack said an hour later, seated across from the stony-faced prisoner in an interview room in the bowels of the Yard. Eddie was standing near the door, thumbing through a file.

  “Fuck you,” Tyrone said. “You got nuthin’ on me, apart from illegal possession of a firearm.”

  “We got trace evidence off Joey Lewis’s body, that I think will bury you,” Jack said. “And Kelly is giving us times, dates, names and places that will help us put Randy in the next cell to yours. You’ll be able to grow old together.”

  “No one is goin’ to believe a word that whore says.”

  “I believe her, Tyrell.”