Raucous (27 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTY

The three stooges, Mitch thought.

He had never seen the films or series, didn’t know the names, though maybe there was a Curly in there somewhere.  But that’s what he thought, and he would smile as broadly as he ever had, but the pain from his face stopped him.  His upper-lip was split, he could taste the blood.  Swelling too, he imagined.  The old man Rollin still clipped hard.  Short straight punches, turning over the wrist pushing the shoulder through as he twisted his hip.  He wasn’t fast, but the weight and timing, and the sharp knuckles left their mark.  Mitch was shook up, he wanted to giggle, his head spinning like the first inhale on a cigarette.  He didn’t know if the elation was fear or relief.  He thought he was dead in the bathroom.  He almost certainly would be soon.  They were not about to let him go.  But he had time.  He wanted to embrace it.

Mitch knew the dynamic had changed.  The chemistry was off.  Rollin had broken his principals, the internal code that specified the life he led, informed his every decision were no longer in effect.  Greed had got him, or rather he had been grabbed by the fear of poverty. 

Mitch knew they had no intention of keeping him alive.  They spoke openly of their plans, spoke clearly about information Mitch could use, could pass on to police.  They had no care.  They had decided, as a group, without communicating the fact, that Mitch was no obstacle to their flight because he would be dead. 

But they were each lying, holding back, playing along and hoping to be the winner from a game in which everyone was set up to fail.

They hadn’t gagged him but it didn’t matter, Mitch was unsure if he could speak.  Blood trickled down his throat, his nose was clotted shut.  He had no desire to shout.  He wanted to laugh.  Parker had taken the precaution of tying Mitch’s hands behind him with a plastic cord.  It was a cursory effort and Mitch was sure he could wriggle free.  He was sat on a basic, wooden dining chair in the centre of the apartment.  No one was quiet.  Chamberlain stacked blocks of cash into a large black canvas holdall.  He murmured numbers like a child memorizing a times table.   

Parker retrieved a large bag from behind a panel hidden in the back of an empty closet.  He set the bag down and unzipped.  He removed three guns and nine full clips of ammunition.  Mitch was no expert, but they were real versions of the replicas he had seen on countless American cop shows.  Parker slid a clip into the handle of the first gun; he pulled a lever, heard a click, looked the gun up and down, felt the balance, nodded and repeated the trick with the other two. 

The bag contained automatic rifles.  Mitch knew Kalashnikovs, but these were not them.  These were longer, more western in design. 

“The others?”  Rollin asked, as he watched the rifles.

“We won’t need them.  Too big, too obvious and too difficult to use,” Parker said.

Mitch looked at the bag, it was bulging.  Semi-automatics was his guess.

Parker passed the guns to Rollin and Chamberlain.

Chamberlain looked comfortable holding the pistol.  His small movements to get the feel of how it fitted in his hand showed him to be familiar with firearms.  Mitch wanted to smile again.  Chamberlain the weekend marksman, a hobby hunter in tweed and high green socks walking through a wood, taking down pheasants with a Glock.  The gun, unlike confrontation, did not faze Chamberlain.  He rolled it in his hand, pulled the same trick Parker had, a click to see if the chamber was full, and nodded his OK.

Mitch watched Parker and Rollin exchange a glance, nothing obvious and not a conscious effort to disrespect, but the glance was there.  They knew, like Mitch, and Chamberlain himself, that familiarity with the mechanism did not mean an ease with killing.

Rollin took the gun from Parker.  He did his check routine and placed the gun in the back of his trousers.  The ankle-hem rode up and briefly revealed a second, much smaller pistol attached to Rollin's ankle in a small plastic holster Velcroed tight to his business sock.  Rollin took off his jacket, put on a shoulder holster, placed his gun inside, clipped the protective flap in place and replaced his jacket.  The guns were not shop new, small but visible usage marks were clear on the handles and barrel.

Parker was already holding, but he slipped the third gun into his jacket pocket.  The bulge under his armpit showed he had a full shoulder holster, and the smaller bulge on his lower back meant his was carrying his blade. 

They all paused; they all looked briefly at the other two.  Were this an American team sport, now would be the moment to all slap hands in the middle or bend to a knee and pray and give thanks.  Parker grabbed Mitch by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet.  Mitch lolled his head.  A pain exploded in his brain.  He couldn’t laugh.

CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE

The drive started in silence.  There was no childhood excitement at a new destination, or nervous chatter from inexperienced adults on a training course.  Raucous drove, concentrating on the road, thinking about an end to a long thought process.  There was no way of knowing if he would come out feeling better or being dead, but the last years had been a slow walk to now.  He had thought many times, invented many ends, the depressed days wanting a smiling death, an end to a constant loop of regret and self-torture at being young and dumb and aggressive.  Others saw him kill, others again ended in arrest.

Raucous looked to the passenger seat, wanting to catch a glimpse of the woman he had known as a girl.  The girl he had loved in the childish perfect way that happens only once.  Charlotte was watching him.

“Are you planning on killing them?”  She asked.

Raucous smiled and looked back at the road.  He waited, thinking of how his mind was working now, what he wanted, if he could have a clear coherent thought.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “I’ve thought about it a lot over the years.  Had the time to, and the need.  It just depends on many things.”

Raucous glanced to his left.  Charlotte was still watching him.  He knew she would not let him rest till he explained again.

  “If I need to kill to save you or Christian or myself, then yeah, I’ll kill.  None of them would make me shed a tear.”

“So why not just kill them and have it done?”

Raucous slowed the car and pulled over.  He turned the engine off.  He held onto the wheel with both hands and clenched his fists tight.  He spoke but looked only at the symbol of a klaxon on the plastic cover.

The car in front, Roach's car, stopped but remained idling with Roach inside.

“I’m sorry about what I did to you and Christian.  I am.  I was young, very stupid and believed, bought into a way of thinking, a religion if you like of what it was to be a real man, a real person.  But like the religious doctrines preached by men with a core of vice, it was all bullshit.  No such men ever existed, nor ever will.  I certainly wasn’t one.  And I am not one now.  But I got caught.  I wasn’t killed like everyone else in that robbery.  I went away.   And I don’t care what people say about the easy life inside, the free food the free accommodation, where I went was hell.  Every minute of every day I had to fight.  Not physically, although there was plenty of that. 

“I went in young.  Easy prey they thought and I had to prove otherwise.  And I did.  But with that comes power and a need to hold on.  You can’t take a demotion, a backward step.  Every minute of every day I was a marked man.  Take me and your life will be easy.  Take down Raucous and you have an easy pass.  Because I was hated, for what I did, killing a woman, and hated for being stronger, meaner, more capable of extreme violence than them.  If I could go back, and meet me as the eighteen year old would-be hard man about to move up to a man’s prison, as starred-up as I was, I wouldn’t say anything.  I would pull a gun and kill me.  All that an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth business, sure, I’ll go with that.  You killed them so we kill you.  Yeah, I’ll take that. What I lived was worse.”

“You have your second chance now”

“There is no second chance, just the burden of what happened to carry with me forever.  My mistake and I paid.  Just as it should be.  But I was lucky, I’m big, I’m strong, I will kill if I must, but I had it hard.  Twenty-three hours in a cell.  A bucket and me.  Every second on the landing with others just like me, all wanting their shot.  It’s no way to live, and it is the biggest cruellest punishment of all.  No rehabilitation, just punishment.  Death for many is a dream.  And when you come out, after so long, none of what is happening in the real world makes sense, and you wish you’d died inside where the rules were there for a reason.”

“You won’t go back?”

“If I did I wouldn’t fight.  I’d be dead within a week, within a day if I go back to the same place.  And that’s fine.  But only if this turns out how I need it to turn out.”

“Why are you doing all this?”

Raucous turned to Charlotte, no tears; he had long ago learnt to cut tears at source.  He hoped she saw his pain, the self-torture he bore every second of every day as an adult from the moment he sobered up, the moment the drugs wore off and he knew what he had done.  The pain at Jim Sharples explaining the story, the pain at knowing he had been played.  The pain at being exactly the stupid Raucous they had all seen and all destroyed.  He tried to smile.

“So I know I am not the boy I used to be.”

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They drove on and passed Roach.  They indicated all was good.  Raucous drove slowly.  The city lights helped them at the start, but soon the houses gave way to countryside and the electric lighting gave way to darkness with sporadic outbursts of small villages and towns.  They followed the monotone voice of the GPS system on Charlotte’s phone.  It wasn’t Steven Hawkins but intonation was all wrong.  The voice sounded like it wanted to ask questions then lost confidence and merely stated fact.  Raucous watched the scenery until the light made his view hedgerows and trees.  He didn’t know if this was the route he and Christian had taken all those years ago.  Had no idea where he had been.  He wished he had known.  He knew he would have been the good boy inside, done his time quiet.  Defended himself but backed off being the man.  He would have come out and come here.  Taken what he could and disappeared.

But that was the reason Parker had followed him.  Jim had told him, warned that they believed he knew something.  They needed to see if Raucous, after all that time silent, was not planning revenge.  He thought about Jim, the first visit Jim had made.  The panic he felt.  He had killed Jim’s daughter.  Jim Sharples’ daughter.  Jim had explained, told him that Raucous was keeping silent for nothing.  Jim had explained.  And finally, after seven years of being uncontrollable, of being the man, he stopped and served his time.  He hurt no other man that didn’t ask to be hurt.  They still came at him, sporadically.  Raucous had lost his edge, Big Jim had scared Raucous, subdued him.  But they were wrong.  Jim had given him the truth.

Raucous didn’t believe him at first.  He had seen them die, saw them fly over the edge of that balcony.  It seemed high enough to him.  That height was almost certain death.  It wasn’t water below.  With water, 250 meters made it statistically untenable that you survive the fall.  Some had, but survive meant didn’t die.  Leg, spinal and head injuries, life altering injuries occurred to those that lived.  And they must all have thought God was punishing them.  An eternity with a disability, the rest of the life they wanted to end in a condition that made their unbearable lives worse.  Like prison, he thought.  If he had known, really known, what the existence inside would be, and if there was an option of quick painless death or seventeen years inside, he would have chosen death.

He smiled at those people who complained about prison life being soft.  And maybe there were soft prisons where they locked up the rich and influential.  Where tennis could be played, and cricket enjoyed on grounds of neatly kept lawn.  He had seen photos of an ex world champion boxer, inside for driving badly and hurting someone.  He was rich, influential too he guessed.  A photo of his prison, days out, freedom to walk the grounds.  They probably didn’t have a gate.  But that wasn’t where Raucous learned to survive.  Twenty-three hours of shut down in a cell with someone you invariably hated.  An hour to stretch legs and be on watch for anyone you may have offended or may want to take your place on the ladder of influence.  He had fought every day early on; he needed to make his mark.  There was going to be violence, he was going to be a target.  So he picked his own and went after them.  An existence in an altered reality where outside traits of calm studious courtesy marked you for prey.  But the traits that got you inside, violence, no empathy, disregard for the letter of law made you progress and be left alone.  It was a Darwinian training ground for violent psychopaths, and he had made it to the top.  Then Jim came and told him the truth.  Only Raucous wouldn’t believe.  And then Charlotte came.  But that was never her name.  She didn’t speak, she stared, anger in her eyes, her face scarred, her face changed.  But her eyes hadn’t.  The same eyes he had looked into and loved, if what he had felt were love.  And he knew then that Jim told the truth.  And now it was coming to an end.  An end he had hoped for, an end where they felt and experienced what he had, where their roles were reversed.

“You OK there, Raucous?”  Charlotte asked.

“You never used to call me that.”

“You always insisted.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve said that enough.”

“I still haven’t proven though.”

“You’ll get time.”

“Maybe.”

The GPS beeped its excitement.  They had found their destination.