Page 83 of Jazz

Chapter Forty One

An alarm blared, screeching loudly. Heads turned towards Indie, eyes alert.

I cast a glance around the room, at the men sitting around the table deliberating over how long to torture the man hanging below us before slitting his throat and dropping his body off in Teesside.

And now there was a scream. A howl. The war cry of a Valkyrie.

“Rats?” Chaos asked.

Fury shook his head. “Worse. That’s a Busa.”

Indie squeezed the bridge of his nose. “She’s coming for him.”

“Maybe we should’ve strung her back up again until this was over,” our President grumbled into his hand.

Chairs scraped on the floor, everyone standing.

“We going to stop her?” one of the twins asked, but I’d lost track of which was which as we rushed for the door.

“Course we fucking are,” Fury snarled, and we rushed out behind him.

Feet thundered down the stairs. A dog barked in the background from Indie’s rooms above the pub. A draught of cold air rushed in, billowing up the stairwell and hitting us in the face as if we’d stepped into another climate.

“Kitchen,” Indie instructed, feet hammering over groaning floorboards like a wild herd of horses.

The door was wide open, night flooding in. But out in the car park there was nothing, just the smell of petrol and scorched rubber, sharp and sweet where the tyres had bitten into the ground.

“Fuck!” Fury bellowed. “Mam’s gonna go mad.”

*****

The phone buzzed against my chest, deep inside the leather. I ignored it. Fury had peeled off back at the A167, back to Heidi and their warm bed. I rode on alone through the wet glow of the Gateshead streets, tyres humming over slick tarmac. The river smell followed me. Diesel, rain and old ghosts.Down throughTeamswhere the streetlights flickered, and the pavements remembered every fight. My block waited at the end of the row, a sagging red-brick flat with more history than hope. I killed the engine, the night folding in around me. The phone was still vibrating when I swung off the bike.

I stood there for a second, helmet in hand, watching my breath ghost in the cold. The street was quiet except for the hum of a telly bleeding through someone’s curtains and the distant bark of a dog that never shut up. Same as always.

The phone started up again. Persistent. I fished it out, screen lighting my gloves in a sick blue.Mamma Dot.

“Hey,” I answered, my voice lowered to a hush in the sleepy street.

“Did she do it?”

I could hear the pain in her voice.

“Yeah. She got him.”

“And they didn’t catch her?”

“No.”

“Thank you, Reap,” she said sincerely.

“Why did you come to me?” I asked the matriarch of the Kings.

“Because I knew you would understand. More than anyone else.”

I sighed, my mind heavy and my chest heavier.

“Night, Mamma Dot. I’m sorry I couldn’t persuade her otherwise.”

“I never thought you could, son.”

“She loves him, y’know?” I didn’t know why I said that. “I could see it in her eyes.”

“I knew you would understand,” she spoke softly. “I knew you’d know how it felt to let someone go, and I knew you would know why she couldn’t.”

The line clicked off, the only noise the static buzz of drizzle on overhead power cables. I’d known love like that once. A long time ago. But Mamma Dot was wrong; I’d never been able to let go.

I looked up at the flat. At the old brick walls. At graffitied tags covering the little brick wall at the front. My name had been painted on these walls once. Long gone now, but the mark stuck. Gateshead remembered its own, even the broken ones. The house was dark. Grandad’s place. Or it had been. I ran my hand over the scar on my jaw, the old ache in my knuckles flaring, scar tissue pulling tight with the cold. Then I pocketed the phone, turned the key, and stepped inside.