Past Echoes Read online

‘Good evening, sir.’ The bartender motions at the seat opposite mine. ‘Do you mind if I join you for a brief chat?’

  ‘Be my guest.’ I slump back in my seat to show how unconcerned I am. ‘What would you like to chat about?’

  ‘Your presence here. You’ve told my colleague that you’re waiting for someone. May I enquire as to whom it is you’re waiting for?’

  Like his polite words, the tone used by the bartender is neutral and respectful. This informs me that I’m not yet deemed a threat. The gorilla is there to make sure I don’t become one. Or at least, that’s what he expects to happen.

  ‘Actually, he’s just arrived.’

  The bartender looks over his shoulder, then back at me with a puzzled expression.

  I clear up the confusion by pointing at him. I’m still mostly prone on the fake leather couch so he gives a thin smile.

  ‘If you were looking for me, then you coulda just asked someone. The guys here know who I am.’

  I nod. ‘True. Problem is, I didn’t know your name. Still don’t. Didn’t even know it would be you that I wanted to speak to.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me. Is it me you’re looking for or not?’

  ‘I’m looking for the person in charge of this place. If it’s you, then I’ve found who I’m looking for. If not, I’ll have to ask you to lead me to them.’

  His expression darkens, and he straightens up. ‘I’m in charge. What do you want me for?’

  ‘To see how much this place is selling for.’

  He throws back his head and guffaws. The gorilla laughs too, although I doubt he’s bright enough to have understood the conversation.

  ‘You’ve had a wasted trip, buddy. The Elite Club. Is not. For sale.’

  I figure he’s emphasised those last four words for the gorilla’s benefit rather than mine.

  My eyes never leave his as I give a series of slow nods. ‘I think you’ll find that it is for sale. The people I represent have decided that they would like to buy The Elite Club. Therefore, it is for sale.’

  ‘And exactly who do you represent?’

  I toss him a name. It’s amazing what you can find on the internet when you have a friend who’s as good at running searches as Alfonse is.

  The bartender blanches and I don’t blame him. He works for a guy who runs a sizeable portion of Queens. The name I’ve just given him controls all the Bronx.

  There’s a change in the bartender’s expression. All pretence of politeness is gone as he looks at me with a shrewder focus.

  ‘You’re not one of their men. There’s no way they would employ an Englishman.’

  I raise a hand in a halting gesture. ‘I’m Scottish. And if you ever call me English again, I’ll pour a pint of gasoline down your throat and throw lit matches at you.’

  The gorilla takes a step forward, but the bartender waves him back. ‘I apologise. I took a guess. No offence was intended.’

  His words would be mollifying were it not for the look in his eyes. He doesn’t trust me.

  ‘I am who I say I am, and if you want to sit there insulting me, then I won’t bother suggesting that we buy this place.’ For the first time in the conversation, I add a snarl to my voice. ‘Instead, I’ll prepare a hostile takeover.’

  The bartender doesn’t flinch.

  ‘Nice try, buddy, but I’m not buying what you’re shovelling. There isn’t going to be a sale, or a hostile takeover. This place isn’t on the market. If it were, I’d know.’

  I hand him my cell. ‘Call The King and tell him what I’ve just told you. Then we’ll find out if this place is for sale.’

  ‘I’ll call him, but not here.’ He stands. ‘I’ll call him from the office; you’re welcome to listen.’

  His words are a direct challenge. If I were who I’m implying, I wouldn’t fear going somewhere private with him and his pet gorilla. On the other hand, if I’m some random chancer, there’s no way I’d be stupid enough to take that level of risk.

  It’s a lot of years since I backed down from a challenge.

  I stand and put a happy expression on my face. ‘Finally, we’re getting somewhere.’ I gesture towards the two key-padded doors. ‘After you.’

  He leads, I follow. The gorilla follows me.

  By the time we get to the office, one of the roving doormen has fallen in behind the gorilla.

  Three against one isn’t the worst odds I’ve faced but, in a cramped office, there isn’t a lot of room for manoeuvre when one of the room’s occupants fills almost half the space.

  I lean nonchalantly against a wall as the bartender goes towards the cluttered desk. The office is a functional one. It has painted block walls and a number of filing cabinets. Cameron told me about a second office, which has a boardroom table, where he would meet Kingston and his lackeys whenever a face-to-face was required.

  As soon as the barman hears the click of the door closing behind the roving doorman, he whirls and throws a shot at me.

  He connects.

  But not with me.

  I’m wise enough to anticipate a sudden attack, so I push myself backwards in time for him to miss me, and thump his fist into the block wall.

  The crack of his knuckles breaking is followed by a yelp of pain.

  As the bartender is cursing I throw a kick at his knee and an elbow towards the gorilla.

  The kick connects but the elbow doesn’t.

  Something akin to a freight train collides with my ribs, and I see a cheerful smile on the gorilla’s ugly face. This is what he likes: attacking smaller men and inflicting pain on them. He’s even got a buddy as backup should he need any help. Perhaps the buddy is just here to observe the beating so the gorilla has someone who can support his retelling of the event.

  I bounce off the wall and back towards the gorilla. Using my forward momentum, I arch my back and plant my forehead on his chin. Head-butts are best aimed at the nose but, short of jumping, there’s no way I’m tall enough to connect.

  He roars and comes at me with his arms held wide.

  I don’t have time to do much but drop to my knees. As the gorilla’s arms swoop over my head, I throw an uppercut at his balls.

  He grunts and doubles over. I repeat the blow and force my way up between him and the wall.

  I push the gorilla and he falls over the prone bartender.

  With them both vulnerable, I whip the sharpening steel from my sleeve. I’m just about to crash it down on their limbs when the roving doorman speaks.

  ‘That’s enough!’ His voice isn’t quite a yell, but it’s not far off. ‘Drop the weapon.’

  I glance at him and decide to do what he says. After all, he’s the one with the gun.

  There are soft moans coming from the gorilla, and curses from the bartender, but it’s the roving doorman I’m listening to.

  I think about the gun nestling in the small of my back. It’s accessible, but I don’t for one minute think I can whip it out, take aim, and shoot the doorman before he pulls his trigger.

  He motions for me to sit in the office’s chair.

  I sit.

  He throws a left cross at me that reopens the split on my lip and loosens a tooth. Considering it’s his weak hand, it’s a good solid punch.

  I straighten my head and look at him. ‘Is there any need? Your buddies jumped me. I defended myself. Now you’re waving a gun around like you’re John Wayne.’ I shake my head and make sure I have eye contact with him. ‘The people I represent will not be happy about this. You can make it easy on yourself by putting that gun down right now.’

  ‘No way.’

  There’s uncertainty in his tone, so I try again. ‘I’m telling you. Keeping that gun on me is a very bad idea. Either you’ll shoot me, which will start a turf war, or you’ll miss me, and I’ll kill you before I leave this room. The longer you have that gun aimed at me, the shorter your life expectancy gets.’

  His eyes flick to the floor, and the gun droops an inch, before his attention is snapped
back to me and the gun’s aim returns to my face. I guess he got a signal from his buddies.

  It’s the second time tonight that a fool has pointed a gun at me. I’d rather there wasn’t a third.

  If the guys on the floor are sending the doorman signals, it means they are recovering from the damage I inflicted upon them. With a gun on me, and two pissed-off guys seeking retribution, I don’t much fancy my chances of leaving this office without a serious injury.

  As I look at the gun, it’s being traversed up and down my body. One minute it’s pointing at the top of my head, the next my balls. I should be scared that the doorman is picking his spot.

  Instead I’m glad he’s so cocky.

  As he gets to the top of his range I make a mental note of the position of his arm, and wait while he goes down and up again.

  I throw myself under his arm as the gun’s aim passes my nose and is still moving upwards.

  By the time his brain has told his finger to squeeze, I’m below the bullet’s path and am driving him against the wall with my shoulder. The gunshot exploding so close to my head is deafening, but now isn’t the time to wiggle a finger in each ear.

  I wrap two hands around his gun wrist and twist his arm to the point of dislocation. And beyond.

  He screams as he drops the gun.

  I keep hold of his wrist and swing him round until his head collides with a wall. He drops in an untidy heap so I turn my attention to the gorilla and the bartender. The gorilla is holding both hands against his gut and there is blood seeping between his fingers, while the bartender is trying to pull his leg free from underneath the gorilla.

  I guess the shot fired by the doorman has hit the gorilla.

  I retrieve the gun and aim it in the general direction of the bartender as I pick up my sharpening steel. My next move is to slam the steel against the knees of the doorman, before I use it to knock the gorilla out cold.

  The bartender eyes me with fear as I approach him. He’s still trapped by the gorilla’s bulk as I use the sharpening steel to smash his right elbow.

  I sit myself back in the office chair and wait for his groaning to subside. When it turns into pleas for mercy, I hold a finger to my lips.

  He shushes.

  ‘Where can I find The King?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I can’t tell you that. It’s more than my life is worth.’

  I could point out that his life isn’t worth anything to me, but I don’t think he’d appreciate my honesty.

  ‘I’ll only ask you nicely once more. Where can I find The King?’

  He doesn’t answer. There’s defiance in his eyes.

  I walk the two steps towards him, place a boot on his left wrist and open my backpack. The chef’s blowtorch fits nicely in my hand.

  I press the button and a blue flame springs from its nozzle. I show it to the bartender, see the terror in his eyes, and take a sweeping pass of his fingertips.

  He yelps, but otherwise remains silent.

  I bend to take another sweep and his hand curls into a fist. Improvising has never been an issue for me, so I hold the flame against his knuckles for the count of three. I can see his skin blistering as the air fills with the smell of burnt pork.

  He howls and tries to wriggle free, but my boot holds him in place.

  I hold the unlit blowtorch in front of one of his eyes. ‘Where can I find The King?’

  ‘I … I … I don’t know. If I need him I have a number to call.’

  He gives me the number.

  I write it down on a piece of paper that gets stuffed in my pocket, and take a roll of duct tape from my backpack. Tying people up with duct tape might be an overused cliché, but hey, it works.

  Five minutes later I have the three of them tied up and I’m leaving the office. Had they not started throwing punches around, and refused to answer my questions, they would be in a lot less pain. They struck first so I feel no guilt about their various agonies.

  I now have two guns stuffed into the small of my back. I’ve checked the new one and it has eight bullets in its cartridge. Fifteen bullets, when you’re as inexperienced with guns as I am, isn’t a lot, but it’s eight more than I had. If things go the way I’ve planned, I won’t be getting myself into any gunfights.

  Rather than let any of the staff release the bound men and alert The King, I find one of the roving doormen and tell him that The King is coming for an urgent meeting, and that he's to close the place for the night and send all the staff home. He tries to resist me giving him orders, but I drop the wrong kind of name and he does as I bid.

  It takes him twenty minutes to get the doors locked, but finally the last member of staff leaves.

  I make sure the club is secure and let myself out of a side door.

  61

  I take a zig-zag route away from The Elite Club until I find myself on a busy street. There’s a club across the road where throngs of people are hanging outside, chatting and smoking.

  The scene is one I see three nights a week while tending door at The Joshua Tree: Casperton’s rock bar, where even the music has to be twenty-one or older.

  The club will be noisy and filled with laughter, arguments and people shouting into their friends’ ears to be heard over the music.

  I need somewhere quieter, but not so quiet that my conversation is overheard.

  I look along the street and see a collection of bars. I head towards them in the hope of finding one with a working payphone.

  Two girls are walking towards me; one is carrying her shoes, while the other totters on impossibly high heels. They see me walking their way and cut their giggling.

  While it’s not my intention to frighten innocents, I guess my scars are doing their job. I also figure that my recent fight, on top of all the other events, has left me looking a lot grimmer than usual.

  I reach the row of bars and look for the least classy. It’ll be the quietest one, devoid of shrieking laughter and booming music.

  When I enter, I see the kind of place that’s been around for decades – one that uses its original features to give it character. The problem is, this bar has all the character of a speakeasy that’s fallen silent.

  The fittings may tell of a bygone age, but they also tell of a bygone cleaner. Every piece of chrome or brass is pitted with rust spots and discolouration. The furniture is the uniform brown of dirt accumulated by a century of use, and there’s no way I would drink from any of the glasses behind the bar.

  I order a bottle of soda from a bartender, who appears old enough to have been Methuselah’s headmaster, and ask if they have a payphone.

  He puts my drink on the counter without a napkin, and points to a cubbyhole. ‘Phone’s in there. Don’t know if it still works. It’s been a while since it was last used.’

  I wipe the rim of my soda bottle as I walk to the cubbyhole.

  The phone has a dial-tone when I lift the handset, so I feed a handful of coins into it and punch Alfonse’s number into the keypad.

  Sure, I could have used my new cell to call him, but this phone is anonymous, and therefore won’t leave a trail pointing to him should the worst happen to me.

  Alfonse picks up on the second ring.

  I spend two minutes talking to him and hang up.

  To avoid suspicion from the biblical headmaster, or the bar’s four patrons, I finish my soda and head out to the street.

  There’s a bar across the street that looks like the one I’ve just left, so I head over there to kill the ten minutes Alfonse has told me to wait before calling him back.

  This bar is only half as old as the other one and, when I check, on a fake trip to the bathroom, the payphone has a dial tone.

  62

  ‘You’re nothing but a waste of space. I can’t believe I once loved you. Do you hear me, Cameron? You’re a waste of space. A complete and utter bawbag, whose only achievement in life is the infliction of misery upon those foolish enough to love him.’

  Cameron gets a pang of nostalgia
at Ivy’s use of the Glaswegian insult, bawbag. Her abusive rants have lasted so long he’s now immune to them.

  If he cared about her opinion of him, he’d have been wounded by her words, but he’d lost the few feelings he’d had for her a long time ago. Now she’s nothing more than a distant echo, shouting back at him from the cavern of history.

  He’d thought about telling her that he wasn’t listening, but decided against it. Knowing her, she’d just raise her voice.

  A part of him feels sorry for her. Not for the damage his actions have wrought; more for the years she’s spent accumulating bitterness. Emotions like that eat into happiness the way a starving lion gorges on a fresh kill.

  Just two days after losing the fortune that would have funded his retirement, he’s cast aside any thoughts of allocating blame for his misfortune, and is looking forward rather than back.

  ‘You remember when your mother contacted me saying you wanted a divorce? That was the day I found out what you really were. She cried on the phone to me that day. Have you any idea how often we pictured your body being found somewhere? How many times we speculated that you’d been killed, or committed suicide? Were you even aware that your mother aged twenty years in the two years it took for you to get in touch?’

  Before he can stop himself, Cameron rises from the bed and bangs on the door. ‘That’s enough, Ivy.’

  Cameron hears a throaty chuckle. ‘So that’s your weak spot is it? Your mother? Not your kids. Not your wives. Your mother. You’re a pathetic excuse for a human being. The thought that I ever let you touch me makes my skin crawl. You broke my heart and those of my kids. Not content with breaking three hearts, you did the same with your other wife and kids, and yet, big tough guy that you are, you’re only bothered about your mammy.’

  ‘You’ve said enough, Ivy. Leave my mother out of this.’

  ‘Why, what you going to do? I saw the pain of worry age her. I remember the haunted expression she took on after you’d scarpered. She’s a good woman who loved the bawbag that was her son. You’ve never cared about your children, but you listen to me: just like your mother, I love my children. I’m proud of them and their moral fibre. They are fine, upstanding citizens who’ve thrown off the grief of being abandoned by a worthless bag of skin that’s not fit to say the word father, let alone behave like one.’