Jack: The Rann Brothers Trilogy Book One: Social Rejects Syndicate

by AM Cosgrove

  John still said nothing, staring at the movements of the amber liquid as he sloshed it around in the bottle. “John?” Jack said after a moment of watching his brother.

  “Hmm?” John said, snapping out of his momentary reverie.

  “Take a drink or say something, but sitting here watching you slosh that shit around in silence is driving me mental. Not to mention, I would like another if you aren’t going to have any.”

  “I’m just thinking,” John said, taking a quick sip before handing the bottle over to Will, who drank more before he walked it back to Jack.

  “We can see that, John. Do you want to enlighten us on what is going on in your mind?” Jack asked, taking the bottle from Will.

  “I am just thinking about what you said before we got in here.”

  “Which part? The part where I said I was disappointed in your lack of protection for your family?”

  “The part where you said someone is trying to drive this family apart.”

  “Well, it seems like that is something that is well within the realm of possibility. I mean, after all, what have we been doing these last five years, you and I? Even in the best of times we have been at odds with each other.”

  “Have we really drifted that far apart, you and I?” John looked up and locked eyes with Jack.

  John nodded. “Well, you and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms for the first few years after the trial.”

  “So, you can see why I am starting to wonder if someone is playing the long game with us. Someone is doing whatever they can to fracture us for some reason.”

  “I can see what you are saying, Brother. I’m surprised I didn’t see it before,” John sighed.

  “Someone easily could have been setting this all up from the start or they simply could have taken advantage of the fact that he was locked up for the last five years and decided that it was a good time to continue to drive the wedges in further.” Will shrugged. “It does make sense, John.”

  “But then, that leads to the question of who? Who would not only stand to gain but have the guts to take us on?” John asked no one in particular.

  “See, that’s what I have been trying to think of myself. It could be almost anyone. It very well might have nothing to do with me or anyone I know at all, but rather a business associate of yours that noticed the weak link between you and me and decided to exploit it.”

  John stood up and stormed across the room.

  “I can’t fucking believe I didn’t see this shit,” he roared.

  “John—”

  “No! I fucking put business before family, and I almost lost everything.”

  “It’s in the past now, we can’t change it, so let’s move on and figure out who the fuck is behind it and remind them of who they are dealing with.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jack

  He got back into his car a few hours later. The list of people who stood to gain from the destruction of the Rann family was long. There were fewer that didn’t stand to gain.

  In the end, they had decided to spend the next few hours reaching out to their contacts and seeing what they would be able to dig up.

  Not that anyone would be willing to openly admit to taking a stand against them, but at the very least, they would be able to squeeze just enough information out of people so they would know who wasn’t involved.

  Jack’s phone rang. “Hello?” he said, hitting the Bluetooth as he pulled out onto the main road.

  “It’s me,” John’s voice came through the speakers of the car.

  “I figured.”

  “Will is worried about his businesses.”

  “I am well aware of that, John, I am worried about the entire family here. Nothing seems to be safe or sacred at the moment.”

  “I get it now. I’m just sorry I didn’t see this shit before it came to this point.” Jack could hear the guilt weighing heavily on his brother through his voice. It wasn’t something that he was used to from his older brother.

  “Listen, John, we’re good and we’re going to figure this shit out. And we will do everything we can to make sure Will and his businesses are safe and sound at the end of the day.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “I have a few people I want to talk to on the west end of the city. From there, I don’t know. I will figure it out as I go. It’s going to be a matter of figuring out who it isn’t before we shrink the list of who it might be.”

  “Call me when you figure out anything.”

  “Of course,” Jack said a second before John hung up.

  His brother was acting almost completely out of character. This whole situation seems to have rattled him far worse than it was rattling Jack himself, and he was the one who had the shit kicked out of him the day before.

  He drove through the streets of London as the lights started coming on one at a time. Normally, the drive would have been enjoyable, but tonight, it was all business.

  The seedy bar he pulled up in front of, after almost an hour of driving, looked like it had seen better days. Jack took a deep breath as he walked in the front door. He hated it every time that he had to come here to pick up something or find someone. It wasn’t the sort of place that people like him frequented.

  The bells on the door jangled as he walked in, causing the bartender to look up from filing her nails. The bar was almost empty, save for one older man, Jack didn’t recognize, that had a big beard and was sitting in the corner nursing a bottle of Guinness.

  “Good evening, Gloria. How are you tonight?” Jack said sweetly, smiling at her.

  “I’m doing well, Mr. Rann. How is your fine self doing tonight? Still, as handsome as ever, I see.” She smiled back, batting her heavily made-up eyelashes at him.

  “I am doing well. Is Larry around by any chance?” He sat down on a barstool and paused, inspecting the bar top before placing his arms on it.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time that he had put his arms down and landed in a puddle of booze that had been spilled.

  “The old man is not in this evening. He has a bridge game with his wife. Mary has had it up to here with him being here every night of the week at his age,” Gloria said, gesturing above her head with her hand.

  “Well, you know he should be slowing down, he’s almost… what? Seventy?”

  “Nah, he’s only sixty-five, but this place has put a lot of years on him.”

  “Well, that’s to be expected with the people that come in here. I’m surprised that you guys aren’t busier than this.” Jack waved a hand around the empty room.

  “We would have been, but the plant down the road closed down about a month ago and all the workers that used to come in here after work, stopped coming. It is what it is. I can’t see it lasting much longer.”

  “That’s sad, really. I kind of like this joint,” He lied.

  “Yeah, don’t even start with that bullshit, Mr. Rann. Ain’t no one here that actually likes this place. You and I both know that.”

  “Ah-ha! You caught me, but at the same time, you have to admit, it does have a certain appeal to it after a while. It kind of grows on you.”

  “Yeah, it grows on you all right. Like mold on a month-old strawberry.”

  Jack laughed. That was one thing that never changed here, Gloria’s knack for hitting the nail on the head and making him laugh, aside from the outdated décor, of course.

  “Well, I know you came here to see Larry, but is there anything I can do for you that would help? Maybe get you a gin and tonic or something?”

  “Nah, Gloria, I’m looking for someone, and I was hoping Larry would be able to help me find them, but since he is busy playing bridge, I will just leave it be for the time being and come back another time.”

  “Suit yourself. But if I can be of any service to you….” Her voice trailed o
ff as she once again batted her eyelashes at him, placing a hand on his arm.

  “Were good, love. I will catch up with you later on. Be a good girl and take care of the old man,” Jack said, patting her hand before removing it and standing up from the stool.

  Gloria shrugged and walked away, saying nothing else, picking up her nail file as she went. She had been trying that trick with Jack for as long as he had known her. He was pretty sure she was old enough to be his mother, but that didn’t seem to stop her from trying.

  Jack stepped out into the dark street. The cool night air made him wish he had brought a heavier jacket with him. His flat was on the other end of town and he had far too many more stops to make tonight to be bothered going back to grab something warmer.

  He spent the next two hours rolling around the west end of the city trying to find answers, but nothing and no one was talking, and if they were, there wasn’t much being said. He was no further ahead than he had been when he had left his brothers hours ago.

  It wasn’t so much that he believed that someone was going to come running up and saying, “I know the answer you seek,” but at least he hoped that he would have some sort of direction to keep heading down—somewhere to dig in deeper. Instead, he had nothing.

  He dialed Will’s number as he headed back to his flat across town. Will picked up almost instantly, even though he sounded like he had been asleep moments before.

  “Sleeping on the job, eh?” Jack laughed at his brother’s groggy voice.

  “Listen, I am not much use to any of you people right now, so at least one of us should get some rest while the others are tramping about town stirring up hornet’s nests.” Will’s voice became clearer the more that he talked, but he definitely sounded irritated at being woken up in the wee hours of the morning.

  “Well, then I guess I will let you get back to whatever dreams you were having, and move on to calling John.”

  “Did you find anything that would be of any value to any of us?” Will said before Jack had the chance to hang up the phone.

  “Oh, so now you are interested in finding out what is going on.”

  “You damned well woke me up, so what else am I going to do?”

  “Go back to sleep?” Jack laughed.

  “Piss off, you wanker.”

  “Grumpy puss. Nothing. I found exactly nothing. I was hoping that one of the two of you had had better luck than I did.”

  “Well, I talked to a few of my shadier friends, and they had heard nothing. I am starting to wonder if this might be all in your head to be quite frank.” The irritation was back in his voice.

  “No, Will, this is not all in my head. It actually fucking makes a load of sense when you sit down and think about it.”

  “I think you are just trying to cover your own ass here and make us think that there’s something more afoot than there is so that we won’t keep focusing on your bullshit.”

  “What the fuck, Will? I thought you were on my side here?”

  “No, Jack, I am on MY side. There is no you or John’s side.”

  “Wonderful, as if our family wasn’t already starting to get bad enough as it is.” Jack’s anger flared.

  “I don’t quite think you understand, Jack. I am trying to have a legitimate life here. Trying to run actual businesses that have nothing to do with whatever you and John are up to. I don’t want any part of it.”

  “But you are a Rann.”

  “I understand that, but that doesn’t mean I have to be involved.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you do or you don’t, Will. It is what is.”

  “And that’s the problem I’m having, Jack. Whatever you and John do, directly affects me, and what I am doing. It is now at a point where it could seriously damage everything, I have been trying to build over the years, and that isn’t fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair, Little Brother.”

  “Well, being related to the two of you makes it even less so.”

  “William—”

  “No, I’m done. I don’t want anything to do with this mess. Just keep it on your end of the fucking city and leave me out of it.”

  The phone went silent as Will disconnected.

  Jack immediately dialed John.

  “Ok, so what’s chapping Will’s ass at the moment?” Jack asked the second John answered.

  “Oh, you talked to him, did you? I am surprised you can still hear anything. After the ass-chewing he gave me a while ago,” John sighed.

  “He’s obviously pissed off at the two of us about something that he wasn’t earlier.”

  “I suppose it could be the fact that the cops were at the damned door to his store just a few hours ago.”

  “What? Why didn’t anyone call me?”

  “There wasn’t anything you could have done about it.”

  “But it would have been nice if my older brother had called me and told me that my brother was on fire and likely to explode if I called him.”

  “I guess, but it was going to happen no matter what.”

  “You still could have spared me that.”

  “I’m still not convinced completely convinced that this is a direct attack on the family.”

  “So now you’re doing a one-eighty on the entire thing? Great. Just fucking great.”

  “I never said I was doing anything of the sort. Merely pointing out that there is still a chance that this is nothing more than some sort of shitstorm that you stirred up somehow, and the backlash from which is getting spread across the entire family.”

  “Right.”

  “I have spent the better part of the evening and well into the night trying to find any shred of anything that leads me to agree with your assessment of the situation. I have found absolutely nothing.”

  Jack said nothing but looked around as he waited for a stoplight to turn green. “Unless, of course, you have found something that would be of use.”

  “No,” Jack said after a long pause and the light turned green.

  “Well, I don’t know what else I can say to you, Jack. I can see where you are coming from with how you feel things are going, but at the end of the day, we are not finding out anything that pushes it in that direction. Anything and everything, seems to be pointing back to you and something you have done.”

  “Look, we will talk tomorrow. I am going home to get some rest.” Jack hung up the phone without waiting for his brother to reply.

  Jack gritted his teeth. He knew without a doubt in his mind that he was on the right track with everything. There was no other option. He had to be right. Right?

  The longer he drove, the more his mind started playing tricks on him, making him wonder if he really was making things fit into another scenario and missing out on the actual picture.

  Could his brother be right? Could this simply be someone he had pissed off bad enough to want to completely fuck with his life? He was no angel by any far stretch of the word, but at the same time, he also made sure that he kept himself relatively low key. Nothing that he would have done would have garnered any unwanted attention. Except for the fight over the girl in the bar, the night he was arrested and subsequently sent to prison over.

  He had beaten the man pretty badly. Could it be that incident that led to all of this?

  Could there be someone out for vengeance for what had been done? He had no clue who the man was. They had said his name at the trial, but he hadn’t been paying any real attention as he thought his case would have been thrown out as nothing more than your average bar fight.

  The judge, of course, had known who he and his brothers were, and threw the book at him, sentencing him to the maximum allowed. His lawyer had managed to get him out early for good behavior. Nothing had been said or done to him while he was locked up, which was why he was having a hard time believing that this was anything related to that f
ight. If it had been someone’s family, surely some kind of retaliation would have happened over the last five years? If they wanted to target him, what better place to do it then when he was locked up with no place to go—nowhere to hide or escape.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jack

  A banging on his door startled Jack out of his sleep. The first thing he did was reach for the gun on the side table and carefully made his way to the door. He cautiously looked through the peephole and saw what appeared to be two coppers standing on his front doorstep.

  “Can I help you, officers?” He said through the door, tucking the gun behind his back for a moment, not entirely believing that things were as they appeared.

  “Mr. Rann?”

  “Yes. Who else would it be? You’ve come to my flat at an unholy hour, so it’s rather unlikely to be anyone else.”

  “Right, of course. We have a few questions for you about something that happened yesterday.”

  “Something?” Jack shook his head, they weren’t instilling any confidence in his belief that they were, in fact, legitimate officers.

  “There was a robbery at a pub that you and your brothers like to frequent, and we would like to ask you a few questions about that.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.” He still wouldn’t open the door—not entirely convinced.

  “Mr. Rann, we really do need to come in and have a talk with you for our investigation. Can you please open the door?”

  Jack stuffed the gun in a side table close to the door and then opened it.

  “Make it quick because I don’t have time for this nonsense.”

  “So, sorry to bother you. I know you have so many other things to be dealing with,” the shorter of the cops said, not even bothering to hide the fact that he rolled his eyes as he spoke.

  Jack huffed. This was going to be fun.

  “Mr. Rann, what my partner is trying to say is that we appreciate your time and cooperation with our investigation,” the taller one whose name badge read Jameson.

  “It sure as shit, didn’t sound like he was appreciative of anything.”