Page 16 of Fury
“So much for running her out of Newcastle,” Indie rolled his eyes as he passed me the wrench.
“I haven’t finished with her yet.” I twisted the metal in my hand hard, wincing audibly when the nut finally sprang free. “Fuck, that was a tight bitch.”
“Hmmm,” Indie grinned. The first grin I’d seen in a week.
“Aye, my thoughts too, mate.”
“She can’t be left to deal with the club account, Fury. It’ll raise too many suspicions, and we need a clear line into the crem when we need it, especially if I’m right about what is coming next.”
And Indie always was. He would have made a great officer for the British Army. He had a knack for intelligence, for understanding an enemy’s next move. The army had never seen that in him. Our northern accents too off putting for the rest of the officers with their silver spoons wedged up their arses.
“I’ve got this Indie. A few more visits and she’ll stay well away from us or be on our side.”
I had to have earned some Brownie points from saving her from whoever she had been running from last night. She’d been so frightened. It could have been the dark. Or an overactive imagination. I didn’t think I would have liked to have been locked in with a shitload of dead bodies in the pitch black of night. I would have imagined footsteps too.
“And what about Dave?” Indie mumbled into the bonnet of the Ford Ranger we’d been working on for the last hour.
“She seems to have sidelined him for now. He’s pretty hurt about it. That place is his life. She’ll fuck off back to London in a few weeks, though. We just need to wait it out.”
Indie stood up, staring at me.
“We’re gonna need to boost funds in the war chest, Fury. Just patching in the prospects ain’t gonna bring much more. And with a more expensive funeral to pay for, we’re really gonna be on the bones of our arses if we don’t come up with something.”
“What are you thinking?” Because if I knew Indie, I knew he’d have a plan.
“Magnet needs to step up production. Tez needs to hand us more of a cut. He’s not gonna say no now we know about his sidelines. Those people with secrets need to pay more for us to keep them quiet. And we need more members.”
Adding more people to the club was an enormous risk. And if Indie was even suggesting it, it meant the financial situation was pretty dire. But I did know a funeral home that could really use some CCTV. And that could serve two purposes.
Chapter Eight
I lay looking up at the ceiling of the sterile grey and white decorated hotel room. Sleep had been sporadic, plagued by nightmares of corpses chasing me like angry zombies, the only one who could stop them, a tall angry man dressed in leather. The sooner I got to the bottom of my father’s financial problems, the better. Then I could head home, to my city flat and pastel colours, away from the hotel suite of depressing grey and white.
‘They’re letting me out today,’ the letters of the email blurred, coming together in a mass of black and then moving away again in temporary focus. My glasses sat on the side table, a centimetre or two out of the reach of my fingertips. Closing one eye, the image on my phone sharpened. ‘Come by the house and let me know how you’re getting on?’
It was a summons from my father, not an invitation, and the thought of having to play niceties to the wife not that much older than me, would use up time in my life I wouldn’t get back.
‘I’ll pop in when I’m finished at the Walker Office later,’ I replied, my finger hovering over the ‘send’ button for just a moment before I dropped it onto the touch screen, the email disappearing into the ether.
Carefully I sat up, swinging my legs to the side of the bed and grabbing for my glasses, pushing them up my nose and focussing on something through the hotel suite’s panoramic windows as I waited for the dizziness to subside. I’d not drawn the curtains when I flopped into the big king-sized bed last night, my brain finally calm. Outside, the empty bottle of wine still sat on the table on the balcony, a glass half-finished, and a cigarette stub in the ashtray. I could use a cigarette now. To start the day. But that had been a habit I’d defeated years ago. A stab of regret struck me between the ribs, a knot forming in my throat. My first real test of stress and I’d relapsed, stopping the taxi at a garage on the way home last night to buy a box of cigarettes and some wine to take the taste away.
*****
My head felt like someone had stuffed it full of cotton wool, thick and fuzzy, and my limbs were heavy, like I’d spent the day before weightlifting. I needed to knock the wine on the head, do a detox, because with every glass I drank on a night, I was sure it was killing off more and more brain cells.
There was a buzz inside the Walker Office that morning, like the place and the people weren’t entirely dead. It was electrified excitement. And I didn’t know why. The girl on the reception desk glanced at me, diverting her eyes as quickly as ours caught, as if I might turn her to stone. I might if my mood was bad enough. But she said nothing, and I wandered past, the sound of false nails tapping a keyboard ricocheting round my skull.
It was as I pushed the key towards the office door I noticed it. The splintered wood. The damaged frame. Drawing the keys away, I nudged at the hollow wood with the heel of my hand; the door creeping open, slowly allowing me to see the carnage inside. Paper littered the floor. Two of the heavy filing cabinets pulled over.
“Shit,” I said to no one.
But someone did answer me.
“I know. We found it like that this morning. All bust up.”
“How?”
“Break-in.”