Chapter Six
Mitch
The Watermill was a run-down pub that backed onto the canal’s long, lean towpath.
The sad old hanging baskets were dead, and a board outside advertised a quiz night from four months previously.
Behind it stood an old barn, the door askew and a large hole in the ceiling.
Weeds and shrubs were head height, and a scramble of thorny bushes led the way to a side door swinging on its hinges.
“Want me to check that out?” I asked Andrew as we took position behind the pub’s graffiti-strewn fence.
“Good call. Maybe we can drag him in there, out of sight.” Andrew lifted up his bandana. “Get some privacy, you know.”
I stepped off the towpath and pushed several long thorny branches out of my way; the first berries were ripening on the ends. Underfoot it was uneven, rocks and a few broken bricks, a patch of tall stinging nettles.
“Fuck,” I muttered when I felt a sudden sharp scratch to the left of my eye. I didn’t pause but touched it and was greeted with the sticky warmth of blood. “Damn bushes.”
When I reached the door, I stood for a moment, letting my focus adjust to the dim lighting.
It smelled of the earth and straw, perhaps faintly of fertilizer, too.
I stepped in. The rafters were high, and a pigeon took umbrage to my presence and flapped out of the hole in the roof to the white morning light.
Placing my hands on my hips, I glanced around.
An old tractor, minus its wheels, had found its rusty graveyard in the corner.
A pile of metal junk stacked up beside it—microwaves, bikes, cracked satellite dishes, a stained chest freezer, and several garden parasols, likely from the pub’s overgrown garden—and then a row of beer barrels that didn’t appear like they’d be good for anything.
I spotted a hard metal chair on the pile and picked it up. It was sturdy enough, so I set it in a clear spot, the metal feet poking into the dirt. After another quick search I found a length of cable, an old extension lead, so I set that beside the chair.
Better than rope.
I had one more scout around then slipped back outside. A plane traveled east to west high overhead, leaving a white trail. Within seconds I was with my crew, bandana up, Cillian at the ready with the hood.
“You reckon he’ll come by?” Finn asked.
Andrew checked his watch. “If he’s going to it will be soon. If not, we’ll be on to plan B, pay him a visit at home.”
“Just get the right guy, huh,” Phil said. “Don’t need complications.”
“Apparently he’s an ugly fucker,” I said. “Skinny as fuck. No teeth. Wart on his nose.”
“Nice.” Cillian huffed.
We were all quiet.
“Someone’s coming,” I said.
We tensed. I held my breath.
A woman, mauve shorts and top, headphones on. She didn’t even glance our way as she ran past on the narrow weedy path, proving we’d found ourselves decent cover.
“Patience,” Andrew muttered.
A songbird broke our silence, and then a long red boat—Molly Sue—chugged past. We slunk back to avoid a dog walker who ambled by, her small terrier stared our way but was thankfully silent.
Five minutes passed. Nothing, no one.
Phil stuck his head above the bramble bush. “A jogger is coming.”
“Him?” I asked.
“Could be.”
“I’ll get into position, give me the thumbs-up if so.” Cillian rounded the shrub so that he’d be behind the jogger when he passed us.
Andrew rolled his shoulders, clicked his neck, then peered forward. “I’ve seen his images on his social, I’ll know pretty quickly.” He paused. Peered out for a second, then: “It’s him! Ninety percent sure.”
“That’ll do,” I snapped and nodded at Cillian. “Get him.”
Finn flanked his brother. Coiled like lethal cobras about to strike.
“Ready?” Andrew said to me.
“Too damn right I am.”
“Phil, you’re the muscle once we’ve got him, okay.”
“Sure thing.”
Leo Green’s footfalls tapped on the hard ground, getting louder by the second. When he was almost level with us, Andrew and I stepped in front of him, a wall of muscle and determination.
“What the fuck?” He came to an abrupt halt, his eyes widening as he took in our black outfits, bandanas, and sharp steely eyes. “Get out of my way.”
“Leo Green?” I asked.
“What’s it to you, fuck face?”
“Everything,” Andrew said. “Fucking everything.”
And then for Leo everything went black. Cillian had slammed the hood over his head and captured him in an arm lock.
“Get the hell off me. You don’t know who you are—”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said.
Finn delivered a kidney blow.
Leo doubled with a groan, right into Phil’s brawn. He scooped him close then quickly dragged him toward the barn.
Andrew and I checked about to make sure we hadn’t been seen abducting an asshole on his morning jog. We hadn’t.
That made life easier.
“Jesus Christ, I’ve got mates in high places who will…”
This time it was Cillian’s turn to deliver a brutal and accurate kidney blow.
He cried out, and that earned him a whack around the head from Phil as he heaved him over the uneven ground.
“Hurry up.” Andrew rushed to get to the barn, moving a few branches out of the way.
“It’s all good,” I said. “There’s no one here. We can spend all day with this cunt if we want to.”
“What? You bastards. Why? Get the hell off me.” Leo tried to spin around but found himself unceremoniously forced into the barn and plonked onto the chair.
Cillian and Finn set to winding him in place with the length of cable. Securing his legs, his torso, and his arms.
“What the fuck have I ever done to you assholes?” Leo shouted furiously.
“You haven’t done anything to us,” I said beside his ear. “But it doesn’t work like that, does it? You’ve done things to other people, awful things, evil things, to women who have never done anything against you. See now…get it? It’s your turn to be on the other side of the fucking hurt river.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Your worst fucking nightmare.” I grabbed the top of the hood and wipped it off. “Say hi.”
He shook his head then stared around at us all. He’d never ID us, not with our black neutral clothing and bandanas. All but Phil had a cap on, and his brown hair was short and totally unremarkable.
“What is this? Some kind of sick joke?”
“No joke.” Andrew folded his arms. “Though we might be laughing, you certainly won’t be.”
“Let me go.”
“Perhaps, if you’re a good boy,” I said.
Cillian chuckled, so did Finn. They wouldn’t talk during this interrogation, their accents were too strong, too identifiable.
“Want me to take his feet off?” Phil swiped an axe through the air so that it made menacing swishing sounds.
It was a good bit of improvisation; he must have found it in the barn.
“Not yet,” Andrew said, “maybe later. It’s a rusty axe, right? Will take a few strikes to take a foot off.”
“Yeah, not that sharp.” Phil tossed it into the air, watched it spin once, then caught it by the handle.
Leo shook, a full-body tremble, then the familiar scent of piss wafted up toward me.
“Filthy fucking animal,” I said, slapping him hard around the head. “What you do that for? We all got to be in your stink now.” A puddle formed on the floor around him.
“I…I let me go. I ain’t done nothing to you.” His mouth was slack and his weak chin wobbling. “And I ain’t done nothing to no women.”
“Somehow we don’t believe you,” Phil said.
“So what…” Leo’s voice trembled. “Do you want?”
“We need some information,” Andrew said and paced in front of Leo winding his hands together as though preparing to strangle him. “Perhaps if you give it, you’ll get to keep one foot.”
“I don’t know nothing about nothing. Honest.” He looked at his feet as though deciding which one he wanted to keep.
“Honest isn’t in your vocabulary,” I said. “We already know that.”
“Let me go, please.” He sniffed.
These fucking assholes, who were all bravado bastards around their mates and vulnerable women, always folded the quickest. Pathetic creeps.
“You’ve just done time, right?” I asked.
“Yes.” He nodded. “Yes, I have. Want to know about my asshole cellmates? I had a few. I’ll tell all. They’re nothing to me. What do you want to know?”
I kept my mouth closed. It was too soon to tell him he’d already been grassed up by a cellmate and they were of no interest to us.
Andrew nodded at me.
I drew the pliers from my pocket and held them in my fist. “You like Eastern European women?”
“Doesn’t everyone. They fuck like Easter bloody bunnies.”
The disgust I already had for him tightened into a painful coil in my belly. “Kosovo women are your flavor, so we hear.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I gestured to Cillian.
He smacked a fist onto Leo’s shoulder, a dead-arm strike. Fucking painful, and I knew ’cause he’d done it to me once when we’d been jerking around.
“Ah!” Leo bucked off the chair as his brachial nerve screamed and scorched his right arm.
“Got a girlfriend?” Andrew asked.
“Did have, two, left me when I went inside, didn’t they. Bitches.” He was breathless.
“Left you or…” Andrew stooped and spoke into his face, his bandana shifting with each word. “Escaped?”
“What? They were whores, both of them.”
“Indeed.” Andrew pointed his finger at Leo’s face, clearly in the mood to rip his head off. “Whores because you’d paid for them, but they hadn’t received any money, had they, no making a living for them? Some fucking criminal human trafficker got the cash. You. Bought. Them.”
“Yes, they were mine, I bought them. I’ll admit that.” His legs were shaking, his heels tapping up and down on the dirt.
“Women.” I lay his hand flat on his thigh, fingers spread. “Are not possessions to be bought. They are to be cherished, protected, and adored.”
“You see how we think differently now,” Andrew said. “Different neuron connections. We respect and value women, you don’t.”