Page 62 of Fury
I jolted, knocking the trays, the first one tipping over onto the floor, the heavy boot of the angry man crushing the sandwich into the carpet beneath his feet.
“Fuck’s sake, Demon. That’s a new fucking carpet.” Indie grumbled.
“You should have told me, Indie. I would have pulled her out of Trouble.”
“You think Ciara’s gonna let you do that?”
“She has no fucking choice. I can’t protect her there. Fuck’s sake. She’s there right now. Fuck!” he shouted angrily, pacing back and forth, pulling his hands over his head with laced fingers, a look of torment on his face.
“Calm down, Demon. We’ll ring Tez. We’ll get him to bring her over.”
Demon still didn’t settle, the pacing getting worse, like a raging caged bull on drugs. The older woman pulled me to the side.
“Better come out of the way, pet. Things look a bit heated.”
Fury followed out now, striding towards the irate man, putting his hands on either side of his head and forcing his face toward him. They were almost the same height, but Fury dwarfed him in build.
“We’ll take them all out, bud.” I heard Fury speak, or maybe I’d read his lips, and got it all wrong, because it sounded like a threat to whoever they were. And I didn’t like the sound of that. “But right now, I need you to calm down. Tez is bringing your ol’lady here, and then I want you to go home and fuck, until the pair of you can’t remember who the fuck you are. VP’s orders, got it?”
Demon nodded; his face still full of anger.
“Get Demon a drink,” Fury called to no one in particular and then he moved to me, to where I stood with the woman with the grey hair.
“Hi mam,” he said to the woman that looked just like him. The same deep, dark eyes and the towering height, even though she was smaller than he was. “I see you’ve met Heidi.”
The woman said nothing, but stepped round in front of me and gently grabbed my shoulders. She stared for a long while, her eyes scanning my face, dropping to my chest and then down my legs. And then back to my face again. Then she smiled a big wide grin, patted me on the shoulder and walked away.
“What was that all about?” I asked Fury who had been watching, his arms folded across his chest.
“That, doll, was my mam’s seal of approval.”
“I didn’t realise I needed it.” But the moment those words had left my mouth, I could see the effect on him, the look in his eyes, the tension around his mouth.
“Your step-brother problem,” Fury said suddenly. “We go back in and get the evidence. Then you can hand it over to the police. Sure, they’ll sort the rest out.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“Good. Come on.”
“Now?”
“Unless you want to stay for a biker party?”
I looked around at the leather that now filled the pub, swarming the sandwiches and the pots of curry and chilli set onto the bar top. The room was growing louder, voices, grunts and the deep chuckles of men. Big wide smiles as everyone tucked into the food and helped themselves to drinks from behind the bar. It was almost like watching a family gathering, something I’d only see on TV or in a movie. They were relaxed again, the raucous of earlier had died down, everyone back to being friends and even the angry Demon seemed to have stopped wanting to kill someone now that he knew his girl was on her way here, like she was the key to keeping the blackness inside him actually on the inside.
“Heidi?” Fury prompted.
“Yeah. Let’s go now.”
Chapter Twenty Nine
We drove in silence through the night, the only noise the rumble of the truck’s engine and whatever was playing on the radio, words I wasn’t listening to, a tune I couldn’t focus on. What I could focus on was the coldness of her words when she met my mam, and it settled deep in my stomach. I wanted to be angry, wanted to start a fight, but we weren’t a thing. Not really. We’d had sex. I’d chased her for days. I didn’t want to let her go. The first time since my early twenties I’d ever felt that way about a woman, and back then I’d put those feelings down to young man hormones and too much alcohol.
But tonight, I was sober and worse off for it. Tonight, that rebuttal from her hurt. We were different. Very, very different. She came from money. I came from nothing, just hard-working folk trying to exist. I sighed, wishing the tension would fuck off, but nothing was shifting it and it whirled around in my stomach, battering my insides and building in pressure.
The other funeral home was in one of the better parts of Newcastle, expertly placed on the doorstep of dying rich people. No wonder the brother thought it was an opportunity to take every bit of money from them as he could. Houses overlooked the place, but even early in the night, or early for biker terms, the inhabitants would mostly be in bed. We pulled up at the side of the road. There was no carpark at this office, not where land was such a high premium. If it there had been one once, it had been sold off for housing years before.
“Keys?” I asked, holding out my hand.