Justice for the Damned (3 page)

‘I hope it does. I hope it makes the prick do something – something that’ll give me a reason to tear his ugly head off.’

Staci dug her long fingernails into the hard-packed muscle beneath Reece’s grey suit. ‘For starters, Wayne wouldn’t do anything to you. He’s not that stupid. He’d do it to me. And you know how good he is at hurting girls who piss him off.’

Reece knew alright. Always quick to brag about the control he had over his girls, Wayne had once told him how he kept an old-style police truncheon wrapped in foam to punish any of them who stepped out of line. He’d boasted that he knew how to hit them in ways that were excruciatingly painful, yet barely left a mark. He’d even offered to show Reece how to do it.
Once I’ve given the bitches a couple of love taps with my truncheon, they never fuck with me again.
Those had been Wayne’s exact words. A tremor passed through Reece’s arms as he recalled them. Ridges of muscle tautened against Staci’s fingers.

‘And for seconds,’ continued Staci, her grip and voice softening, ‘when I said you’d have done the same to Wayne if you weren’t who you are, I wasn’t only talking about what you do for a living, I was talking about what’s inside there.’ She pressed her palm against Reece’s chest, looking up into his dark brown eyes. ‘You couldn’t kill anyone. I know that.’

‘How?’

‘Because you’ve got gentle eyes.’ Staci brought her hand up to stroke the skin around Reece’s eyes. Even in her seven-inch heels, she had to draw him down towards her to kiss his lips. He responded hesitantly, his gaze flicking towards Wayne. She trailed her hands down his square-cut cheeks, angling his gaze away from the pimp. Her tongue teased his lips apart. Reece’s hesitation dissolved like mist in the sun. The lines of anger fading from his face, he circled his arms around her back, crushing her thin but full-breasted figure against the slab of his torso. She smelled of strong, sharp perfume, cigarettes and something else, something faint yet muskily sweet that set his heart pounding.

Staci pulled away with a ripple of laughter. ‘That’s what I like about you, Reece. You kiss like a hungry man at an all-you-can-eat buffet.’

His voice came in a husky murmur. ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can be alone.’

‘I’ve got to get back to work.’

‘No, you don’t.’ Reece pulled a handful of banknotes out of his pocket. ‘There’s five hundred quid there.’ He jerked his chin at Wayne. ‘Give it to that prick. Tell him I’m buying you for the rest of the night.’

Staci looked at Reece as if she wasn’t sure she liked what he was saying, but she accepted the cash and tottered across to Wayne. The pimp’s eyes alternated between it and Reece, narrowed with a mixture of suspicion and barely concealed hostility. Staci thrust the banknotes into his hand. As she turned away, he quickly stashed them somewhere on himself. Eyes fixed on Reece, he jetted saliva through his brown-stained teeth.

Reece’s long powerful fingers slowly curled and uncurled at his sides.

Staci took Reece’s hand and drew him towards his car. ‘We can go to the house,’ she said. ‘The other girls will all be out working.’

Stan tugged Bryan’s balaclava up over his mouth and gagged him with duct tape, whilst Liam jerked plastic handcuffs tight around his wrists and ankles. When they were done with Bryan, they turned their attention to Les.

‘Is he alive?’ asked the man with the bandaged eye.

Stan felt for a pulse in Les’s wrist. ‘Just about. I don’t reckon he will be for much longer, though. Big boy here’s done a proper job on him.’

‘What else was I supposed to do?’ protested Liam, his voice surprisingly thin and squeaky for such a hulk of a man. ‘He had a gun.’

‘We needed him alive.’

‘He is alive.’

‘Yeah, but he’s unconscious. He can’t talk if he’s unconscious, can he now, big boy? It kind of restricts the whole talking thing.’

An angry flush rose up Liam’s cheeks. He opened his mouth to make a retort but before he could the one-eyed man intervened. ‘Enough bickering.’

‘Sorry, Tyler,’ said Liam.

Sorry, Tyler
, Stan mouthed mockingly at Liam as Tyler rifled through their captives’ pockets until he found Bryan’s car keys. Looking at Liam, Tyler motioned at Les. ‘Carry him to the car. We’ll take the other one.’

‘Aren’t we going to have a look and see who they are?’

‘Later. For now we just need to get them out of here.’

With a grunt, Liam heaved Les’s limp body over his shoulder.

‘And try not to get any more blood on the carpets,’ added Tyler as Liam started downstairs. Motioning for Stan to get hold of Bryan’s feet, he reached for the gangster’s hands. They carried Bryan to the Range Rover and dumped him in the boot alongside Les.

‘Wait here,’ Tyler told his companions. He hurried back upstairs, tripping to his knees halfway up. A spasm of irritation twisted his face. He quickly smoothed it away. The loss of his eye had fucked up his depth perception, especially when it came to determining distances closer than a metre or so. But there was no point getting pissed off about it. As his training had taught him, he was simply going to have to adapt, and fast.

He flipped open a knife and cut away the bloodstained carpet. Tucking it under his arm, he returned more slowly to the Range Rover. He tossed the carpet into the boot, before climbing into the driver’s seat. The air inside the vehicle was suffused with the warm, heavy smell of faeces.

‘I think one of the dirty buggers has shit himself,’ Liam said from the back seat, his words muffled by the hand covering his nose and mouth.

‘Either that or your nappy needs changing,’ said Stan.

‘Fuck you, Stan.’

Tyler sharply shushed his companions, cocking an ear towards a portable police scanner on the dashboard as a constable called for assistance with a suspected burglary in Attercliffe. Without turning the headlights on, Tyler reversed out of the drive. He proffered Bryan’s car keys to Stan. ‘You follow us.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Liam, eagerly reaching for the keys.

Stan snatched them up. ‘The fuck you will.’

‘Don’t be a prick, Stan. You know I’ve got a weak stomach. The stink in here’s making me want to puke.’ Liam turned to Tyler. ‘Come on, Tyler, let me drive—’ He broke off at the stony, silencing look Tyler gave him.

‘Stay close, but not too close,’ Tyler said to Stan. ‘If anything goes wrong, we’ll split up and meet back at the farm.’

A smirk curling the corners of his mouth, Stan flicked Liam a wave and got out of the Range Rover. In reply, the big man gave him the finger.

‘Keep your eyes on our friends back there,’ said Tyler. ‘And you’d better not puke or I might be tempted to feed you to Kong along with them.’

A slight shudder running through his muscular frame, Liam twisted around to watch the captives. Bryan was straining against his bonds and struggling to speak through his gag. Liam jabbed him with the baseball bat. ‘Lie still, unless you want a real taste of this.’

Tyler waited for Stan to start the engine of their captives’ red Subaru before turning on the Range Rover’s headlights and accelerating away. He constantly moved his head from side to side to compensate for the reduction of his peripheral field of vision as they headed south through a sprawling suburb of Victorian terraces, inter-war semi-detached houses and boxy, homogenous new estates. When they hit open countryside, they turned west, skirting along the edge of the city, climbing steadily across a hump of moorland. To the road’s left a dark expanse of valley dotted with pockets of lights opened up. The road began to drop down, winding around a rocky escarpment. At the bottom of the valley, it passed through a picture-postcard village of stone cottages. A few miles further on, they came to another village, beyond which a bridge crossed a reservoir glimmering beneath the moon. The road began to climb again, snaking its way through a thickly wooded river valley. The landscape took on a more isolated, inhospitable look. Hills loomed up on either side, crowned by bleak, barren moors. Except for an occasional farm, there were no more houses.

Tyler turned onto a dirt track, its edges overgrown with brambles and bracken. Trees leaned towards each other across it, interlocking boughs like embracing lovers. He pulled up at a farm gate, to either side of which a wire fence extended into the trees. ‘PRIVATE STAY OUT’ was written in white paint on a piece of wood nailed to the gate. Next to it was another sign that read ‘BEWARE! GUARD DOGS RUNNING FREE’. Tyler allowed himself the faintest of smiles at the warning. There were no dogs on the farm. But there was something else. Something much more effective.

Liam unlocked a padlock, uncoiled a chain from the gatepost, and opened the gate. As he waited for Tyler and Stan to drive through it, he eyed his surroundings with quick glances. In many places, there were holes in the earth beneath the dark canopy of trees as if someone was searching for buried treasure, but there was no sign of whatever had dug them. He clicked the padlock back into place and climbed somewhat hurriedly into the Range Rover.

After half a mile or so, they emerged into a grassy field. A drystone wall caked with moss ran alongside the track. At the far side of the field, a ramshackle collection of barns surrounding a two-storey stone farmhouse was pressed against a steep hill. They drove under the cover of a barn roofed with corrugated iron sheets that rattled and squeaked in the wind gusting down from the hilltop.

Liam stepped warily out of the Range Rover, directing a torch beam into the barn’s cobwebby corners.

‘They won’t be hanging around here at this time of night,’ Tyler reassured him. ‘They’ll be in the woods.’

‘Just making sure.’

‘Don’t worry, Liam, even if they were here they wouldn’t take a bite out of you,’ said Stan. ‘They’re not cannibals.’ His pot belly quivered as he laughed at his own joke.

‘You wouldn’t laugh if you’d seen what they can do.’

‘Shut up and help me carry our guests into the house,’ said Tyler.

Once again, Liam hoisted Les over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Les let out a gurgling groan. Liam slapped him on the backside. ‘That’s it, pal, come on wake up. There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.’

‘This is the dirty sod who’s shit himself,’ said Stan, hauling Bryan out of the boot. A dark stain stretched from Bryan’s groin down to his ankles. Stan jerked his hands away. ‘Oh Christ, it’s coming out of the bottoms of his trousers.’

‘Stop fucking around and get hold of him,’ ordered Tyler.

Liam chuckled. ‘Go on, Stan. Do as the man says.’

They carried their captives to the farmhouse. To a casual observer the house would have looked almost derelict – its walls were studded with mould and moss; several windows were boarded up; rainwater dripped from guttering sagging over the porch. But a closer inspection would have revealed that its front door was newish, some of the slate roof tiles had recently been replaced, and all the unbroken windows were fitted with iron bars. Tyler lowered his end of Bryan to the ground, unlocked the door and switched on a light, illuminating a filthy, threadbare hall carpet and peeling wallpaper. A mildewy scent wafted out the door.

Stan dragged Bryan inside. A muffled groan came from the gangster as his head bumped up several steps. Tyler locked the door and they made their way to a room that was empty except for an old chest of drawers against one of the walls and a chair in the centre of the floor. The chair was metal and bolted to floorboards mottled with dark stains.

‘Put that one in the chair first,’ said Tyler, indicating Les. ‘We might as well see if we can get anything out of him before he gives up the ghost.’

Liam dumped Les on to the chair. He secured Les’s wrists to the armrests with steel handcuffs, and lashed his upper body to the back of the chair with a leather strap, cranking it so taut that he couldn’t slump to one side no matter how hard he was hit. Stan propped Bryan up against a wall in front of the chair. ‘There you go, matey, we don’t want you to miss the show, do we now?’

‘Right, let’s have a look-see who we’ve snagged,’ said Tyler.

Liam and Stan peeled away their captives’ balaclavas. For a long moment, they stared at the unveiled faces. Then they exchanged troubled glances, before giving Tyler a
What the hell do we do now
look.

In response, Tyler slowly shook his head and murmured through his teeth, ‘Oh fuck.’

Reece parked outside a two-up two-down terraced house perched at the top of a steep cobbled street overlooking the bright lights of the city centre. Staci led him along a hallway, its woodchip-papered walls yellowed with damp, up some narrow stairs to a room just big enough for a single bed and a wardrobe. An assortment of perfumes, lipsticks, eyeliners and other cosmetics cluttered the carpet in front of a rectangle of mirrored glass propped against the wall. On the window ledge there was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts – since going cold turkey Staci had taken to smoking two or three times her usual daily number of cigarettes. She drew some thin curtains that barely kept out the draught from the rotten, rattling window frame, and flopped on to the bed. She patted the duvet, indicating for Reece to lie down next to her.

With a slight hesitancy, he did so. He didn’t reach to touch Staci. It wasn’t only the meanness of the room that dampened his desire, it was the photos pinned to the corkboard on the wall above the head of the bed. They were all of the same young girl. In some of them she was only two or three years old, in others she was maybe six or seven. She had strawberry-blond hair with a slight curl, sparkling blue eyes, chubby cheeks and an ever-present mischievous gap-toothed grin. In most of the photos she was alone, but in several a woman was squatted next to her, arms wrapped around her shoulders. The woman was unmistakably Staci, but her face was fuller, her eyes brighter, her figure more curvaceous. And she was smiling, a wide smile that showed her gums. Reece had seen her smile, but never like that.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Staci, following Reece’s line of sight.

‘Yes. Like her mother. How long has it been since you saw her?’