Molls Like It Hot

by Darren Dash

  “My guys would have shot the shit out of Jeb and Smurf at that meeting. Made it look like they’d got into an argument and drawn on one another. They’d have killed Toni too, and anyone else with them. People would have thought Smurf was upset by his sister’s death, out of his head on drugs and grief, not thinking clearly. Things got out of hand, probably over something trivial. Bang bang, boom boom, night night. Simple.”

  I thought it over. It certainly seemed much neater than his original plan, and I guess it would have gone down with Jeb’s people as explained. There was only one problem with it…

  “I turned up before your guys could make their play,” I murmured.

  “Yeah.” Brue’s features darkened. “Where the hell did you get hold of those explosives?”

  “I know a man who knows a man,” I said lightly.

  “Going in there alone… taking them on single-handed…”

  I could see he was impressed, and I have to admit I felt fairly good right then, proud of my night’s work, even if it had led me to such a sticky end.

  “You’ve watched too many movies,” Brue laughed. “Who do you think you are? John Wayne? Bruce Willis? Jackie Chan?”

  “Just Eyrie Brown,” I replied. “A guy doing his job and earning his pay.”

  “You fucked my plan up royally,” Brue said. “My guys were outside the casino, monitoring the situation, when you hit the scene. When we caught wind of the plan to gang rape Toni, we decided to time it so that they’d contact Howard and bring him in shortly before the action was due to start, which would play even more into our favour — if people thought Smurf was upset that Howard was trying to deny him his sexual payback, it would further justify his apparent wild reaction. They saw you striding out like Clint Eastwood in his heyday, Toni in tow. They didn’t know what the fuck was going on, whether to shoot you, help you, follow you or what. They rang me in a panic. I told them to hang back and give me time to think things through again. You’d thrown everything up in the air.

  “I could have told my guys to trail you and grab her back, but there was no way they could explain their being at the casino — it wasn’t the sort of place they would have hung out, so nobody would have believed that they’d just happened to be there. I could have contacted you, told you to wait somewhere for me, thrown a fake tip-off into the mix, have them pick her up, but I didn’t think Jeb’s people would buy that after everything else that had gone down. The way I finally saw it, there was only one solution, and it ended up being the best way of them all.

  “Betrayal.”

  “You know all about that,” Toni jeered, but Brue ignored her.

  “This is where Rabbit proved his true value,” Brue said. He looked across at his second in command, who smiled shyly. “Rabbit rang Jeb Howard this afternoon and told him Toni had been in touch, looking for me. Rabbit told Jeb that he’d said I was out of town and it would be a while before I could be contacted, so she’d dealt with him instead. He said she’d told him on the phone that she’d come to kill Golding Mironova, that the hit had gone as planned, but she’d been kidnapped and wounded afterwards. He told Jeb she’d escaped and was in pain and difficulty, that she needed my help and was reaching out.

  “Rabbit told Jeb that he’d meant to leave a message for me as soon as he got off the phone to Toni, but then he’d had a thought and paused. And he’d thought some more. And he’d decided to say nothing to me and sell Toni to Jeb instead.”

  “Was that feasible?” I grunted. “If Rabbit’s one of your most trusted men, did you really expect Jeb Howard to believe he’d sell you out?”

  “No,” Brue smiled, “but the beauty of it was, he was betraying Toni, not me. Massive difference. He made a big show of getting Howard to promise that her execution would remain their secret. I’d hear about her when I got back, try to track her down, but she’d be gone, vanished into thin air, and I’d think she was in hiding or had died in some dark, deserted alley, as long as both men kept quiet.”

  “They’d be in it together,” I nodded. “Rabbit gets rich while appearing to stay loyal to his boss, while Howard gets his woman and nobody ever knows, so there’s no fallout to deal with. Both come out of it winners.”

  “A believable betrayal,” Brue chuckled. “Who doesn’t try to make a few extra quid on the side when the boss isn’t looking, if they think they can do it without bringing the house of cards crashing down?

  “We let Jeb choose the location, so he wouldn’t think it was a trap. They agreed a price – a sum large enough to make your payoff look like chicken feed – and set a time. The plan, as far as Jeb was aware, was that Rabbit would pick up Toni, tell her he’d arranged for her to see a doctor, but it had to be in the middle of nowhere so that no one would ever find out, then he’d bring her here and hand her over. It was a sweet deal. No reason for Jeb to suspect anything. Hell, if it had been the other way round, I would have fallen for it.”

  I nodded slowly, figuring it would have fooled me too.

  “Of course,” Brue went on, “in reality Rabbit told Toni that they were going to kill Jeb Howard. As soon as he led her away from us at the bookies, he said that was the reason I’d summoned her, that we’d always planned to play it this way, only without her being kidnapped and tortured.”

  “I thought nothing of it,” Toni said, furious at having been duped. “I couldn’t wait to kill that sack of shit. Lewis had used me for similar jobs in the past.” She glared at Brue. “Why didn’t you just hire me the normal way, let me gun him down and leave it at that? Why screw me like this?”

  “Closure,” Brue sighed. “I was confident that you and Rabbit would get the drop on Jeb and his boys, but what then? His people would have looked to pin the blame on someone, and I fit the bill too nicely. We had to draw a line beneath this to make it work.”

  “The plan was for Rabbit to kill you after you’d killed Howard and his men,” I told Toni, finding it easy to connect the dots now. “He’d have used Jeb Howard’s gun, made it look like you’d shot each other. Then he’d have left his gun in your other hand, so people would have thought you’d gone in solo. It would seem as if everyone present had been killed in the crossfire. Nothing to tie any of it back to Rabbit or Lewis Brue. Right?”

  Brue nodded. “And the car they came in was one Rabbit had stolen a few days ago. He’d have simply left it here and walked away.”

  “All I’d have had to worry about was making it through the East End without having my wallet nicked,” Rabbit joked.

  “It could have worked,” I said, as if I was an expert in such matters.

  “It has worked,” Brue corrected me. “There are the corpses.”

  “But Toni’s still alive,” I noted. “And there’s me to account for.”

  Lewis Brue’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll admit, I didn’t bargain on this. I should have kept my mouth shut in the bookies and sent you packing. But I’ve liked you since you pulled me off the street that blood-spattered night. I didn’t want you to feel too bad when you walked away.” He grimaced. “Truth be told, I didn’t think I’d be dumb enough to let anything slip. You did well to pick up on it, but there should have been nothing to pick up on. My tongue must be loosening in my old age.”

  I took all that with a large pinch of salt. I think the plan had been for Rabbit to kill me later. That’s why Brue had been loose-lipped with me. He saw me as a dead man walking and didn’t think he had anything to fear from shooting the breeze with a corpse-in-waiting.

  “So where do we go from here?” I asked.

  Brue looked surprised. “What do you mean? Nothing has changed. Rabbit will kill Toni – or I might do the honours myself, now that I’m here – and we’ll go our merry way.”

  “You think I’ll let that happen?” I was even more surprised than Brue.

  “You can’t stop it,” Brue said. “If you make yourself busy, you’ll force us to kill you too, and that’s a complication we can do without.”

  “You’re going to kill me an
yway,” I said, deciding the time had come to stop acting as if I believed his lies about sparing me.

  “No,” Brue protested firmly.

  “Without my corpse, you can’t have that closure you so cherish,” I said. “Jeb Howard’s people will know about me, my connection to Toni, the part I played in rescuing her from Smurf Mironova. They’ll come looking for me to find out if I know anything. You can’t let me walk away from this.”

  “Of course I can,” Brue disagreed. “Jeb’s people won’t give a fuck about you. If you stay, sure, they’ll be curious to hear your side of the story, and that would be bad for both of us, but they’re not going to hunt you if you leave London and never come back. We’ll help you slip out of town, set you up with a new identity, point you in the right direction.”

  I felt a bitter smile dance across my lips. “Back at the bookies, you told me I didn’t have to leave London. I guess you wanted to keep me here so that Rabbit could drop by and pay me a visit after he’d finished with Toni, huh?”

  “No,” he said, but the protest was weaker this time. He knew he’d overplayed his hand, and he knew that I knew it too. “This has all been crazy. So much has happened, and so swiftly. I’ve had to change course over and over, and I haven’t slept all weekend. I’m starting to lose track of what I’ve said and haven’t said, and why I have or haven’t said it. If I said in the bookies that you could stay, of course I was wrong, but I have no recollection of that. I must have been rambling.”

  My scepticism must have shone through because he rolled his eyes dramatically. “OK, I’ll admit, it would be easier if we added you to the bodies, but I genuinely don’t want to do that. I view you as a friend, Eyrie, and I don’t discard my friends lightly.”

  “Toni’s your friend and you’re discarding her,” I noted.

  He winced but nodded gravely. “Toni’s a regrettable sacrifice, one that I’m compelled to make. This just doesn’t work without her bullet-riddled corpse.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to find a way to make it work,” I insisted, not lowering my gun, even though my arm was aching from having held it aimed for so long.

  Brue’s eyes narrowed. “I thought nothing happened between you.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “You sure about that, Eyrie?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “It could have, but we didn’t let it, because we trusted you and didn’t want to betray what we thought was your trust in us.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry I let you down,” he said, and he sounded on the level.

  “I don’t want your regrets,” I snapped. “I want you to find a way out of this that doesn’t involve killing Toni.”

  He shook his head. “Her death was the one constant in all my plans.”

  “I don’t care,” I growled. “It isn’t going to happen. I won’t let it.”

  “Of course you will,” Brue said with a smile that was several shades colder than any he’d displayed so far. “You’ve a track record of letting shit like this happen and doing nothing about it.”

  I stared at him silently, knowing instantly what he was referencing, but amazed that he’d uncovered the secret.

  “Did he tell you about the great love of his life?” Brue asked Toni. “The woman he fell in love with when he was in the Army? The terrorist?”

  “She wasn’t a terrorist,” I said automatically.

  Brue shrugged. “Whatever. I did my research on you, Eyrie. I couldn’t bring you in on something like this without knowing the calibre of man I was involving. It was difficult to get to the core of who you really were and what had happened to make you the man you are, but no lock’s impossible to pick if you throw enough money at it.”

  “He told me about Zahra,” Toni said.

  “And Jim James?” Brue pressed. “The guy who killed her? Did he tell you about him too?”

  “Yes,” Toni said.

  “Really?” Brue smirked. “He told you what he did to James when he was done crying about his dead girlfriend?”

  Uncertainty flickered across Toni’s features. “No. I assumed –”

  “– that big, brave Eyrie Brown wreaked an unholy revenge,” Brue boomed. “It’s what you or I would have done. What anyone in our circle would have done.” His smile faded and he shot me a look that was half pity, half respect. “But Eyrie’s not part of our sick world. He’s one of those normal people we hear a lot about but never have much to do with.

  “He did nothing,” Brue said curtly. “He didn’t press charges. He didn’t try to kill Jim James. He just walked away, tried to forget about it, returned to civilian life, got drunk every once in a while and howled with madness and grief.”

  Toni stared at me and I’m not sure if she was sympathetic or scornful.

  “That’s why you chose me,” I croaked. “I didn’t stand up to Zahra’s killer, so you figured if I somehow pulled through this alive, I wouldn’t stand up to Toni’s killer either, even if I found out about the betrayal.”

  “It wasn’t the main reason,” Brue said, “but it was certainly a factor. Toni’s a damn fine looking woman, and no one would describe her as sexually conservative. You stick any straight guy with her for a few days, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll fall for her. As well as using someone who was an invisible man – as you so aptly put it a while back – I needed someone who wouldn’t lose his head and come gunning for revenge if he thought there’d been foul play. No reason you should have ever thought that if you’d survived – and as I see you’ve correctly surmised, that was only an outside chance in my original plan – but I like to cover as many of the angles as I can.”

  Lewis Brue had been holding the gun he’d retrieved from the slain Jeb Howard by his side. Now he raised it and took aim — not at me but at Toni.

  “Rabbit’s going to release Toni when I give the word,” Brue said, “and I’m going to finish this. Then Rabbit, you, and I are going to leave this place together, as friends.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me.

  I said nothing.

  “You OK with that?” Brue asked.

  Again I said nothing, and this time he smiled, self-satisfied.

  “Take a step back, Rabbit,” Brue said.

  Rabbit didn’t move. He was eyeing me dubiously.

  “He still has me in his sights,” Rabbit grunted.

  “But his right hand is fucked and he’s holding the gun in his left,” Brue said. “He wouldn’t be able to hit you even if we gave him a dozen tries.”

  “What if he’s left-handed?” Rabbit asked.

  “He’s not,” Brue said. “I saw him using his right hand back at the start of our adventure, when he was personalising the bank account that I set him up with.”

  “I dunno…” Rabbit wasn’t cool with this.

  “Are you ambidextrous, Eyrie?” Brue jokingly asked.

  “No,” I replied honestly.

  “There you go,” he said to Rabbit, but Rabbit was still reluctant to chance it. Brue muttered something to himself, then snapped at me, “Lower your gun.”

  I glanced at him as if I wasn’t sure what he’d said.

  “Come on,” Brue said encouragingly. “We can’t proceed until you prove you’re on the same page as us. We need a show of good faith.”

  I kept my Hi-Power trained on Rabbit, but I started blinking nervously.

  “The sooner you put your gun down, the sooner we can wrap this up and be out of here,” Brue said softly, kindly, like he was trying to do me a favour. “Let’s finish this, put our weapons away, and go get drunk.”

  My hand trembled and I began to lower the gun. Caught Toni’s eye. She looked resigned. No hatred in her expression. This was just the way things played out in her world. She didn’t blame me for going along with Lewis Brue and saving my own neck. It’s what she would have done in my position.

  I let the gun dip further and looked aside with a heavy, defeated sigh.

  “Now,” Brue said, and Rabbit released Toni and took a step
back. He took a second step. A third.

  That’s when my trembling hand steadied and flashed up, and I fired.

  The slug smashed through Rabbit’s teeth and tore out the back of his skull. He flopped to the ground, his face a bloody facsimile of what it had been a mere second before.

  I spun towards a shocked Lewis Brue and fired again. The bullet struck him in his right shoulder and his gun went flying as he was knocked backwards. Brue roared with pain and shock as he clutched the wound with his left hand and gawped at me, too stunned to try racing for cover.

  “Are you crazy?” he shouted as a dazed Toni blinked at Rabbit, then at me, then at Rabbit again, not quite sure what had just gone down. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “No,” I said, advancing slowly.

  “It makes no sense,” he croaked, staring at Rabbit’s corpse, then at his bleeding hand. “Leopards don’t change their spots. You did nothing before. You should have done nothing again.”

  I shook my head. “I’m surprised you found out as much as you did about me, but you should have dug deeper. You’ve been operating under a misperception.”

  “What are you talking about?” he cried.

  “I did try to kill Dancing James in the desert,” I said. “But he expected that and was ready for me. I was easily subdued and the chance for immediate retribution passed before I could claim it.”

  “But you’ve had years since then,” Brue bellowed. “You could have gone after him but didn’t. You let him get away with it. He’s still alive — I checked. You…”

  He stopped, his expression changing as an awful understanding set in. A glance in Toni’s direction told me that she understood too. She was no longer blinking dumbly. Instead a small, admiring smile had lifted the corners of her mouth.