Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (58 page)

“Jamie, I can’t.”

Jamie sighed, wanting only his bed and oblivion. Thrawny had left him little choice but to make this last desperate move in the game. “The mortgage on the house is paid. Joan will never know the difference, she can go on believing her drunken brother is still capable of taking care of her.”

He watched as Thrawny’s shoulders slumped in relief and knew he’d broken a man as surely as if he’d sliced him in half.

“Are ye blackmailin’ me, Jamie?” Thrawny asked, though there was little question in the words.

“Yes,” Jamie replied coolly, “I suppose I am. Eight o’clock, be here and be sober—understand?”

“Aye, I understand,” Thrawny said, glaring out of bloodshot eyes, “yer not the devil, yer his master.”

In the street Jamie took a deep breath of the smoky air and shut his eyes for a second, banishing the memory of Thrawny with tears in his eyes.

Right now, he could not afford anyone’s tears.

CHRIST ON A PIECE OF TOAST, I don’t know how ye expect me to get through this sober.” Thrawny eyed the oddity before him with a great deal of worried skepticism.

“I’ll keep quiet and follow your lead,” said the vision in front of him, nimbly adjusting its greasy leather cap and bouncing down off the wall like an acrobatic Pan spotting a nymph.

“What in the name of all that’s holy is that?” Thrawny asked a moment later when confronted with their transportation.

“A chip van as you no doubt can see,” Jamie replied, blithely swinging up onto the driver’s seat and waving impatiently at the passenger’s seat.

Thrawny reluctantly took it, knowing he’d no choice in the matter. The lack of options, however, didn’t make this scenario more appetizing. He’d been in on escapades with Jamie before, had even been known to orchestrate a few, but the prey they were hunting tonight played for keeps and had the meanest set of teeth he’d ever seen.

The Club was a nameless establishment that was known only to those who drank and played billiards there. Like a secret society, you had to earn your way in through a process of initiation. Wedged at the end of a brick laneway that was accessed through a narrow crack between two buildings, it was a low-ceilinged, nondescript building with no sign above its door. The barred windows and metal door made certain that no hapless tourist ever made the mistake of wandering in to slake his thirst.

Standing in a hard rectangle of barred light, Thrawny thought there were likely very few doors in the world he’d less like to step through at the moment.

“How will we know the man?” Jamie asked, smoothing down the corners of a dense, oily mustache.

“There’ll be a space about him of two seats to a side, an’ he’s a face on him like a Netterjack toad. In fact he’s called the Toad, though no one’s fool enough to say it to his face.”

The place was harshly lit and about as inviting as a medieval dungeon. Cinderblock walls had been painted an institutional shade of green and were a perfect match for the dour expressions that were to be seen on each and every face as they entered the building.

“Friendly crew,” the Greek—aka His Lordship James Kirkpatrick—muttered out of the side of his mouth.

Thrawny hitched up his pants with a deep breath, “Don’t say I didn’t warn ye.”

The Greek threw him a sideways smile, causing his moustache—large, black and oily—to twitch alarmingly. Thrawny felt a jolt of worry; in the aftermath of previous excursions with Jamie his primary emotion was a fervent gratitude to still be in possession of his life.

The man called The Toad was obvious at once. There were the two empty spaces to either side of him that Thrawny had said there would be. And he did, most assuredly, bear a strong and unfortunate resemblance to a small brown amphibian.

The Greek, ignoring the societal rules of the club, went and hopped onto a stool adjacent to the Toad.

The Toad turned slowly, menace apparent in his every move. Several sets of eyes were trained on them now, unblinking and tense with the expectation of violence. The Greek seemed unaware of the heavy currents running toward him and smiled cheerfully at the stubby man, a gold tooth winking insolently under the heavy moustache.

Thrawny, a shade of pale that looked distinctly greenish, gave a nod to the Toad.

“E’s with me.”

“Is he?” The Toad’s eyes narrowed. “An’ who the feck is he when he’s not at home, eh?”

“Coo-zan,” the Greek said with the wide-eyed innocence of one who found the complexities of English entirely beyond him.

“Yer cousin?” The Toad lifted his tufted shelf of a brow. “Doesn’t look like no relation of yers.”

“Aye, well,” Thrawny shot a heavy look in the Greek’s direction, “he’s distant—second cousin, three times removed.”

“An’ does yer cousin have a name?” The Toad asked, eyes flat as stagnant water.

“Uh, his name,” Thrawny swallowed, corner of his mouth twitching in nervous hilarity, “is um, Zorba.”

“Zorba the Greek,” the Toad snickered, “is this some kind of feckin’ joke?”

“You think is funny?” said the Greek, thick brows lowering ominously, “I think not is funny.”

“Yeh, I think is funny,” the Toad replied with a sneer.

“
Koutoc
,” the Greek said and spat distastefully to one side.

“What the hell did he say?” the Toad asked, rising on springy legs off his stool, blunt pocked hands fisted up and ready to knock the insult—for the tone was clear—back down the foreigner’s throat.

“Ees Greek for stupid,” the dark man replied heatedly, oily mustache bristling in indignation.

The Toad eyed him for a long moment. “Well ye get points for stupidity anyhow. But maybe ye don’t understand how things work about here. That’s what’s wrong with this country, lettin’ greasy foreigners come an’ go as they like. Get him out of here, Alex, before yer short one coo-zan.” The Toad laughed at his own hilarity and sat back on his stool, dismissing the Greek’s presence in a most insulting manner, or at least that was how the Greek seemed to see it.

“
Seenoeteekos proveeos
,” the Greek said haughtily, arms crossed high on his chest, a dark look aimed down his nose.

The Toad cocked his head and blinked. “What’s he said now?”

“My Greek is no’ so good,” Thrawny cleared his throat delicately, “but chancin’ a translation, I think he’s called ye—roughly speakin’ ye understand—a sodomizer of sheep.”

The signal was subtle, fore and middle fingers lightly tapping the seam of his pants as he hopped off the stool. It would have, and had, passed without notice under many a set of ordinary eyes. The Greek, however, not possessing such mundane orbs, swung quickly into action.

“Yia va zoee!”
the Greek bellowed and with a tornado-like swipe, dismembered the table of its contents. Glass and bottle alike, flew, spirit-winged, flinging liquid jewels in their wake. They arced, they tumbled, they head-over-heeled, landing with a glorious smash, one upon the next, in the glowing bed of peat.

For a shocked heartbeat, there was silence.

Then chaos, with a chuckling hiss, loosed itself upon the room in the form of thick clouds of creamy blue smoke. It spread quickly, like a fungus, invading throats, eyes and noses with impunity. Like moles under the summer sun, all were blind and stumbling. Profanity, of a wide and astounding range, vented the air as men fell one over the other, upended tables and chairs, upset bottles and barrels, knocked heads and knees.

Thrawny, as sightless and choking as any man present, felt himself to be in the midst of a hurricane. Furniture whirled past his head, the pungent smoke filled his senses with an oily reek, and over it all he heard a voice, distinctly lacking in Mediterranean nuance, declaim,

‘...as a bear, encompassed round with dogs,
Who having pinch’d a few and made them cry,
The rest stand all aloof and bark at him.’

The bastard
, Thrawny thought to himself,
the sodding sadistic bastard
was enjoying himself! He tried to make his way towards the voice, but found that it seemed to move about in the smoke, as if it were the disembodied organ of a phantom. His ears, he knew, must be playing tricks on him, for the last line seemed to issue straight down from the rafters. Then suddenly he felt a charge and whirl of scented air at his shoulder.

“The devil,” said a honeyed tongue, sweet in the midst of chaos, “is betaking himself back to hell.”

And then the charge, the whirl, the devil were all gone and the smoke began to dissipate, rolling in no great hurry out the door that someone had left open in their departure. Thrawny looked about wildly. The Toad’s stool was empty, the Toad himself conspicuously absent in the milling, coughing crowd.

“—the hell’s that?” said a man who was emerging rodent like from behind an overturned table. Thrawny followed the man’s puzzled gaze onto the top of the only upright piece of furniture in the place.

Left behind, side by side, were two water-stained shoes, with a heavy, oily mustache arranged, very neatly, amidst the laces.

TRUSSED TIGHT AS A CHRISTMAS GOOSE, but without the benefit of trimmings, the Toad chewed furiously on the gag in his mouth. In his nose hung the heavy smell of deep fried potatoes. On his back was an ungiving weight that seemed to have a finger on each of his nerve endings.

Suddenly the gag was unceremoniously ripped from his mouth.

“Who the hell are ye?” the Toad managed to gasp out with a great deal of blood-specked spittle.

“Your worst nightmare,” said the devil on his back, whose grip was still ungiving as iron. “One you won’t wake up from if you don’t give me the information I want.”

“I can’t tell ye—owww—a thing,” these last two words started low and ended in a sort of piercing yowl. “Stop! Stop will ye! I heard a bone snap!”

“It hasn’t broken just yet,” said the demon, who gave the arm another sharp prod, eliciting a high-pitched swarm of profanity from his captive, “but it will soon if you don’t give me what I’m asking for.” The Toad heard an alarming creak issue from the twisted arm. He was gasping in agony, sweat running freely down his brow.

Thrawny, watching from the front of the van, noted that in contrast to his captive Jamie was entirely cool, only the white set of his face any indication that he found the situation stressful. Thrawny loved the man as dearly as a brother, but he knew well enough how ruthless he could be when threatened.

“I can’t—Christ that hurts—tell you—AAHHH!” the bone snapped clean through, the sound causing the bile to rise in Thrawny’s throat.

Jamie got up off the man’s back, crouching to the side, green eyes sharp as a scalpel blade on the Toad’s face.

“Why the hell d’ye have to break my arm?” the Toad whined, tears running down his face along with the sweat now.

“I figured you’d understand me better if I spoke in your language.”

“Yer sure as hell no Greek.”

“Brilliant deduction,” Jamie replied dryly. “Now if you don’t want me to break the other one, you’d best tell me what you know.”

“Boy’s good as dead,” the Toad wiped his blood-speckled mouth against a dirty sack that lay under it, “if Kenny’s got ‘im.”

The momentary relief the Toad had felt when the devil climbed off his back, was shattered by the feel of a pistol being slid neatly into his ear, the hammer click like a reverberation of thunder against the drum.

“And where would Kenny take him to kill him?”

The Toad tried to breathe, but panic was tying his lungs in knots. “There’s any number of places, I don’t know, I—” he gasped as the man dug a knee into his spine again.

“I don’t know is not on my list of acceptable answers, you had best try again.”

“There’s an old burial mound, looks like a hump under a green carpet, down Ardglass way, on the Lough. Near that old wreck of a fort.”

“Dun Siog?”

“Aye.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.” The one word was a faint hiss. Sweat was streaming into the Toad’s eyes now and he wished he could just pass out and awaken in a different country under an assumed name. Anything less and Kenny was going to find him and make sure he had a long drawn out death. If this bastard didn’t kill him first. Which might, he thought, be a mercy, all things considered.

He got the first part of his wish a second later, as the butt of the pistol clipped him neatly behind the ear, rendering the world a deep and welcome black.