Bad II the Bone (25 page)

Y marked the air with her samurai sword and held her stance.

“Never leave home without it, Ms Wong?” Y said.

Their banter falling
on deaf ears.

“What’s the deal, motherfuckers? Y’all never hear of us b
efore?” Patra bellowed. “Well you sure as hell gonna find out now.” She paused seemingly considering her response. “Tell that asshole, Darkman from me, he can kiss my ass. You know what scratch that; I’ll tell him myself, up front and personal.”

The zombies
eyes showed a deep emptiness as if their souls had been sucked from the bodies and what remained could only take care of locomotion and nothing more. But Patra’s provocation seemed to spark something in them that suddenly spread like wild fire. It was almost as if an invisible puppeteer was pulling on their strings and stoking them to a white hot frenzy. Only when they reached boiling point the tether of spell or suggestion was snipped and the men with new found energy, ran at the girls screaming like banshees from hell.

“Fast zombies,” Y muttered. “I hate fast zombies.”

Red Ground Estates

Surrey

Several hours later Patra stood naked, her skin being bombarded with what felt like a Shangri-La of lilac scented steaming water. The shower was mirrored on every side and combined with the shower head’s LED mood lights she felt as if she was in a surreal disco for swingers. Naked wet swingers. She admired herself in the mirror through curtains of steam with the tired expression of someone who had had just experienced a jump in initiation for some South Central gang bangers and she had come out the worst for it. She looked exactly how she felt – exhausted and beaten and covered in cuts and bruises. Her fingers came up to gently touch her shoulder that was nicely scrapped, a lucky deflection from a blade. Even hovering over the area with her fingers transmitted a warning of pain to come.

She was lucky
– that was her gift after all. No broken bones or gashes especially to her face. Patra protected her looks fiercely. The bruises on her body would smooth out and the battered blood under her skin would dissipate. And in time her body would repair well but she wasn’t so sure about her mind.

Her gift had turned up to maximum against tonight’s threats and she was glad. Her Luck Factor was like an old dog she had back in Atlanta when she was growing up. Old Grover did things in his own time, whether it suited you or not. He had to go do his business according to his needs and if you wanted to come along for the ride – be his pooper-scooper - then that could be arranged too. But Grover could surprise you and would bite your ass if you jangled a mean streak in him and usually that was a reflection of
the meanness in you. So tonight the quantity of meanness was of such a degree her gift came out to compensate.

She winced.

The most significant throbbing came from both her thighs and she could see the discoloration from the bruising showing through her caramel skin. She had to beat off some sly attempts from that disgusting desiccated, nasty smelling, and ravenous cock sucker with no legs that had crawled up in the frenzy to take a chunk out of her thigh. Maybe opening up its head like a dry coconut on an anvil wasn’t a good idea after all because she was paying for it now.

Thai boxing used the thighs a lot in attack and those things they had been up against earlier
tonight may have seemed insubstantial, rotting, facsimiles of humans but they were tough like old leather, meat fossilized to rock, bone ossified, unyielding and hard.

But she had given as well as she took from those motherfuc
kers and they had led her down a road she never knew she would ever take. Patra shivered. A quake starting from the pit of her stomach, radiating outwards and feeling like it resonated bluntly with the gold piercing in her clitoris. Shivering even amidst the steam, Patra let the water wash through her cornrows and sluice down her body carrying with it blood, dust and chewed up gore.

No woman and especially a black woman after having her hair ‘Did’ the way she liked it would allow the elements to taint it. Rain, showers even vigorous lovemaking can flip the switch from good girl to crazy bitch because it was important to keep the myth of female perfection alive. Patra propagated that belief but t
onight was different.

Tonight she was washing away blood from her skin some hers, most others’, watching it flow from her and swirl away down into the sewers, not caring about her coiffure.

She braced herself on the mirror, looking at her hands and her cracked and shattered nail extensions and swore. She needed as complete overhaul, hair and nails. And then she wondered about her state of mind. Patra’s eyes caught a wash puff made from some kind of mildly abrasive synthetic material folded into itself to form a cute ball and thought this wasn’t the kind of thing Spokes would use on himself. Then she saw the store label and smiled weakly. He had tried his best to make them welcome, his angels, Spokes Angels. Maybe taking the job in the first place was a mistake? Things weren’t going so well and yet Patra had felt truly alive through it all. If her risk free attitude could possibly be ramped up then knowing Spokes had done just that. It was just the consequences of that rush she had conveniently decided to not think of. No biggy, life had chosen to show it to her anyway. She plucked it from the sucker attached to the wall, soaked it in liquid soap and began to scrub herself.

Patra started from her face, then her chest, arms and breasts down to her stomach and her legs. What started casually became more frantic as the horrors of tonight stood before her accusingly and she continued scrubbing as if she wanted to buff through skin, muscle, cartilage to clean white bone.

Working her way back up to her shoulders, Patra started to massage her biceps in turn, trying to ease the soreness from them, hoping the force of the water would help too but they remained stiff. That hefty tree branch she had been swinging offensively at first and then when shit got real, as a tool of extinguishing life had taken its toll. Not that these walking dead cocksuckers didn’t deserve it but they weren’t all that way. Darkman had thrown in some wildcards in the mix to mess with their heads, play on the weaknesses they possessed.

Taking life did not come naturally to them even under the ci
rcumstances and he knew that. What he had done was to be his little ‘go suck my dick’ message and they received it loud and clear.

The Darkman had snatched a piece of them tonight, leaving the wound purulent and infected but his septic mind games would not take hold in them, she just knew it. In her case it was a small piece but significant enough to have her question what she did tonight. Making her believe that a dark cancerous corner of her psyche enjoyed thrusting the jagged points of the broken tree limb into the zombies throat, watching him flap like a fish out of
water. Remembering how surprised she was at the feeling of its warm arterial blood arcing onto her arms and face and the guttural gasping for air from a shattered larynx of a man not a reanimated corpse. Then watching in horror that malevolent spark depart him – that thing Darkman had used to hold him enthralled - and then his humanity returning to his eyes, sparking them alive again just before he died.

The few seconds looking down at his pale face and those pier
cing blue eyes felt like an eternity. Patra shivered although the stinging droplets of hot water bounced off her skin, gooseflesh marched up and down her back.

Yep, Darkman had taken a bite and it would leave a perm
anent mark. And she knew there would be more to come but a sparkling sense of certainty punched through the dark clouds. It was the words from her father of all people, Pastor Ignatius Jones, that God fearing, pulpit preaching and family loving hypocritical mo’fucker who couldn’t look her in the eyes ever since he knew she was bi-curious, heteroflexible, AC-DC. The worst kind of heathen there was in his books. It’s going to be all right, he said in her head with biblical conviction. It’s going to be aaaalright!

This time she believed him.

Brixton Police Station

Sunday July 21st

10.45am

Shaft looked at the circular coffee stains on his wooden desk and blocked out the drone of activity in the operations room at Brixton nick. He leaned back on his favorite chair - the one with the busted back rest he had bound together with packaging tape - and massaged his lumbar region into it until it creaked lovingly.

He had mentally pulled himself out of the frenetic activity taking place around him. The other team was in the last stages of a sting operation that was hopefully going to apprehend a gang of armed robbers targeting Farringdon and its jewellery district.

His small unit was sharing space with the Flying
Squad but nothing more. The gung-ho optimism the Sweeney exhibited as standard did not rub off on Shaft. They needed to take a walk in his world and see how the lines of reality and fantasy blurred.

Twenty minutes away
from everything, just to refocus.

Contrary to what his superiors thought about his legendary laid back attitude, these moments he took to think of other things, other interests, hadn’t affected his crime busting record at all.

In fact, when the rank and file were doped up and tanked up from job related stress, his mental health would be intact.

He checked today’s menu in his head.

Shaft had two mouth-watering choices to occupy his short time.

Y had left a voice message on his mobile and it sounded like she wanted to talk. And damn, he was not too proud to say even her voice was a turn on for him. So in effect he’d be enjoying twenty minutes of extremely sensual verbal foreplay.

No contest, really.

Except for mouth-watering choice number two.

The neatly compiled manila folder sat tantalizingly in the middle of his desk, its recycled paper showing through its grooves like a busty woman would her assets.

Okay it did not have an ass that brought tears to your eyes, or long dark sculpted legs that he would willingly volunteer over his shoulders in a steamy evening romp. But it was work and the weak man that he was, Shaft succumbed to the pile of folders’ immediate charms and the possible secrets it held over Y for the minute.

Men, weaklings.

He pulled the files along the table towards him and opened the top one reluctantly. Shaft took more time than usual to o
bserve the blue Manila folder with the colorful elastic binder. He wanted to handle the coroner’s report with forceps and a Hazmat suit. Just the thought of the contents made his hands go clammy and an immediate animated knot of pain twisting into his gut accompanied with that sense of cold sweat and creeping flesh. Justine Dorset - murdered. No suspects and about a thousand witnesses. Modus operandi was similar to Enoch Lacombe’s sadistic viciousness - the poor girl was evaginated - on live fucking radio. The Scotland Yard forensic teams were having a field day with this. Impossible, unprecedented, inexplicable, bizarre were all words being thrown around to describe something no one could explain. Shaft hadn’t been able to attend the post mortem but the photograph’s said it all. Her body was turned inside out, all her internal organs, hanging outside of her skin suit like gross body ornaments. Now, how the rass do you affect the human body in that way? What in God’s name, can harness the kind of forces required to turn bone and muscle into itself like you unfurled a sock from your foot. If it was machine generated, the Metropolitan Polices’ brightest and best knew of no such technology that could affect the body in that way. While the other option was equally ridiculous and the conclusion unavoidable, he couldn’t deny the facts. It was caused by an antagonist who had the ability to bend and brake every physical law at will, leaving no signs of entry or exit, just a degree of bloodthirsty sadism seldom seen in London crime scenes. Shaft closed it and tucked it in at the bottom of the pile, his hand shaking.

Calming himself, he picked up a covering letter that had been written by DI John Dawson and set out to make the contents even more appealing to him. He closed with an ominous message.

Having read these documents under no circumstances keep them on your person. Destroy them immediately.

The man was on a Mission Impossible tip but could you blame him.

DI Dawson for all his eccentricity had made it possible for him to follow this case more closely than he would if he was researching it solo. If truth be known this could present itself as a sweet opportunity to earn the move from DS to DI. Career advancement aside, and ignoring Dawson’s hard-on for its historical value, it meant something to him personally. This case was his first ever as a DS in Black Book and, although long and bizarre the main suspect was eventually caught but the treasures were never recovered. Officialdom had the case retired while he had developed his seventh man theory. When the snickering of his superiors had died down, his line of enquiry was blatantly ignored. But Cold Case file FS13877 was never forgotten.

It came to his attention again when one member of Darkman’s crew had testified against him and Deacon’s thugs who had joined the witness protection scheme began to be murdered in inexpl
icable ways and it was then Dawson contacted him.

Only one man out of this situation of robbery and murder came away unscathed and that was the gangster Deacon himself. Shaft knew he had orchestrated Enoch Lacombe’s life sentence and made three soldiers in his firm go down for him. Two of his men never had the opportunity to plea bargain and were given full sentences for armed robbery and murder. The other, a self assured psycho whose claim to fame was his looks and his legen
dary thirteen inch dick, was locked away in Belmarsh Prison, serving a reduced sentence of five years because he had helped in the investigation. Shaft had the benefit of all the current facts at hand but it still read like a tale of the fantastic. He wondered how the three erstwhile crew members who were banged away for their crimes had reacted to the news. Four of your mates had been murdered in the space of a month by an unknown assailant, who is able to kill by unknown means and leave without a trace. The prison grapevine was a very effective link with the outside world but even if you did know what had happened, three killers like that wouldn’t be worried. Why should they? Deacon’s men were untouchable on or off the streets and in the nick they were respected.