Page 13 of Jazz
“Nah,” I interrupted, all faces turning towards me and Dougal raising an eyebrow quizzically. “I like the crazy. And when the Kings see her fighting for her life, it’ll hit home harder than seeing her passed out on brown.”
“So you’d rather see her fighting as we all fuck that fight out of her?”
I shrugged, not answering, just staring at where the woman hung on the winch, quieter now, focussed only on the pain in her arms.
“Aye, that’s what I would do.”
“This your enforcer?” Grim asked Dougal, who nodded in answer. “I like. He’d do good here for us when we take over.”
I didn’t falter, glancing sideways for a fraction of a second before staring ahead again. Between my brothers in the Rats and the Bloody Hand, this woman was going to have a really hard time. I chewed on the inside of my cheek, my eyes still on her, a deep gnawing feeling starting in my stomach. I could do this. I could be a part of this. It was what they’d brought me up to do. To maim and torture and kill without remorse. Without conscience. All that anger. Every little bit tried to consume me. I could push it all into my job. But this. Her. The thought of harming a woman. Now I wasn’t so sure. I had a sister, for fuck’s sake. This was someone’s sister. Would mine end up collateral like the King’s woman was? I chewed harder.
“What’s the status of the product?” Grim’s raspy American accent broke through my thoughts.
“Delayed. The Kings burnt our supplier down.” Dougal answered.
“The vet?”
I nodded. “The local boys went in a bit hard on him. Turns out a colleague of his was running with one of the Twins.” Dougal scoffed beside me. “Or both of them. Who the fuck knows.”
“Then that gives us a problem, doesn’t it, boys?”
Behind me, there were shuffles of feet. Brothers feeling uncomfortable.
“Chase’ll sort it out. He always does,” Dougal continued, eyeing me across the exchange.
“Better sort it quickly, Dougal. You want to be a part of us, better get us some product.”
“About that,” Dougal began tentatively. “We thought we’d stay as the Road Rats. You know, become a sister club to yours?”
“This,” Grim wagged his finger back and forth. “This isn’t how this works. You become the Bloody Hand. Nothing else.” Grim patted Dougal hard on the back, his hand lingering over the red-eyed rat back patch. “Fail us, join us. Doesn’t matter. The Rats will be no more. You’ll either be The Bloody Hand or dead.”
Mutters broke out behind me. I glanced at my President, and he caught my look. I didn’t need to ask what the fuck he’d got us into. It was clear it was a huge pile of shit, and we either survived and joined the Bloody Hand, or died. And I knew which one I preferred, Teesside Road Rat or not.
Grim stepped forward, crossing the space from the spectators in leather and the woman suspended from the ceiling. He stood in front of her. Her face twitched as if she could sense him there. I held my breath waiting for her to kick off, yet she stayed still, as if she could sense the immediate danger she was in. Clever girl. He reached a hand up towards her, gently stroking a strand of hair from her face. Her lips pursed, but she did nothing. No kicking. No wriggling. She was just still.
“I want her first, Dougal. You’ve got three days to mess with the Kings. Then you tell them. Because after that I’ll be the first to fuck her.”
He turned back towards her then, running his hand down her cheek and then the side of her neck.
“You’ll be a good girl for Daddy, won’t you, babe?”
I saw the movement of her eyebrows. The curl at the side of her lips and then suddenly she spat at him, the big gob of spit splattering him in the middle of his face and running down into his beard.
“Fuck off, cunt!” Her voice dripped with poison.
Fuck. I grimaced.
He turned away from her, wiping the palm of his hand through his beard. And then, without so much as a flinch, he whipped back round, the back of his hand slamming across her face. Her head snapped backwards as if it had been taken clean off her shoulders, the whimper of pain escaping her mouth unchecked.
Around me no one uttered a word, everyone’s eyes now fixed on the woman who slumped against the bounds that tiedher wrists together and suspended her from the hook hanging from my warehouse ceiling.
“Can’t fucking wait for that one,” Grim laughed as he turned back to face us. “Fuck me, she’s going to be good.”
The crowd of Rats standing nervously in the silence breathed out a collective breath before breaking into chuckles with the President of the Hand. All but me.
Chapter Nine
I could smell the man in front of me. Stale alcohol on his breath, the undertones of aftershave but not enough to mask the faint smell of sweat, cigarette ash and evaporating petrol. He’d just filled up a bike, the smell slowly vaporising. A hand, that was what I could smell, just before rough fingertips stroked my face, almost caringly. But the conversation that had just finished in front of me was far from that. My future looking bleaker by the second. An American sex-slave or a tortured and dead British one.