Chapter Six #2
“I dunno about that, I can’t see your face. Maybe you’re all handsome dudes and don’t have to pay for sex. Fact is, I do.” Globs of spit had formed in the corners of his mouth. “I ain’t exactly James fucking Bond, am I? Don’t pay, don’t get. That’s my life, and who wants to be celibate?”
“We don’t have a problem with prostitution or the blokes who pay for sex and play nicely,” I said. “What we do have a fucking problem with are ass-fucking parties. Having your mates round to take a turn each. Non-fucking-consensual. That’s what we’ve got a serious problem with.”
“How the hell do you know about that?” He twisted and bucked, as though trying to escape. “Let me out of here.”
“No fucking way!” I gripped his wrist and held the pliers to his little finger.
“What? What are you?”
“Before my big mate here starts on your feet, we’ll warm you up with some fingernail removal. Pretty painful from what I hear. Popular in medieval times apparently.”
Andrew rested his hand on my shoulder to make me pause. “So say we wanted some girls for an ass-fucking party, how’d we get them?”
“But…but you don’t want them, not from what you just said.” He was staring at the pliers.
“Use your imagination, say we did,” Andrew went on. “How’d we go about it?”
“Well, you have to call the guy, don’t you. Order them. You can ask for skinny or fat, but he mainly has skinny.”
“Good to know,” Andrew said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “So say I have his number, ’cause I’m sure I’ll find it on your phone. What do I have to say?”
“I dunno what you mean?”
“Code word, asshole,” I said. “There must be one for this type of deal.” I’d seen it before, on the job. No high money exchange would happen without one, from order to delivery.
“There isn’t one.” The smug set of his jaw told me he was lying and trying to protect himself.
“Don’t worry about your contact coming after you for grassing,” I said, clamping the pliers onto the end of his dirty fingernail. “The trick to staying alive is to deal with the here and now, the present, and that, asshole, is us. We are your clear and present danger.”
“What? Just let me fucking go. I’ve got nothing to tell you.”
“Sure about that?” I asked.
“Yes, you cunt, I’m sure.”
I yanked out his fingernail. It was surprisingly easy, hardly any resistance, and with it came a trickle of scarlet blood and a large scream from Leo.
“Shut him up,” Andrew barked at Finn.
Finn thumped him in the sternum, taking the wind from Leo’s lungs. It shut him up.
I tossed the fingernail to the floor and blew the end of the pliers as if they were a smoking gun.
We all waited a full minute as Leo caught his breath, though it was still wheezing in and out of his scrawny chest after that time.
“Shall we try again?” Andrew said. “What’s the routine? What do we have to say to order women?”
“It’s fucking…shit, I don’t know.” He spat on the floor. “Fuck, man, this’ll get me killed.”
“No,” I said, “we will get you killed, and you’re lucky we haven’t done that already because you’re not being very cooperative, are you?”
He squeezed his eyes closed but opened them quickly when he realized I’d latched on to his ring fingernail with the pliers.
“What, no, fuck, okay, okay, I’ll tell you.”
“Start talking, quick.” I created tension on his nail then glanced at the door.
Cillian stood there, looking out. He gave me a thumbs-up. We were still alone. Good.
“He goes by the name Lucifer, or Devil, or Satan,” Leo said. “It’s changed over time but always devil something or other.”
“Fitting,” Andrew huffed.
“And when you call him you have to go by the name Mad Hatter.”
I frowned. Was he spinning us a tall tale?
“And then what?” Andrew asked.
“That’s all I know…honest.”
I applied pressure to the pliers, tugging the nail.
“Okay, okay. You say you’re having a tea party and you need an Alice, or three Alices, however many women you want.” He threw his head back and gritted his teeth. “This is fucking confidential information, you know.”
“It’s saving your life right now,” Andrew said. “Keep talking. How do you agree a price?”
“There’s no bartering. They are twenty grand each, cash, and he’ll tell you to go to the Queen of Hearts at a certain time on a certain date to get them.”
“And where is the Queen of Hearts?” I asked.
He stared me in the eyes. “I’m not fucking telling you. I’ve spilled enough info. Let me go. I’m a dead man walking for this.”
I pulled with more force on his fingernail. Like the first, it came out easily.
He yelped but quickly clamped his mouth shut to avoid another sternum blow. Instead, he stared at the growing bubble of blood at the end of his finger.
“Not sure how long these take to grow back,” I said and held the ugly bloody body part up in front of him.
He was shaking, his eyes watering.
“Tell us what we need to know, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll let you live to see the sunset,” Andrew said. “Where is the Queen of Hearts?”
“It’s top secret. I only know because I’ve bought off him in the past.”
“How many women have you bought?”
“From Kosovo, just the two, and that set me back, obviously, especially now they’ve fucked off into the sunset.”
“Good for them,” I said and smiled behind my bandana. “Now are we going to have to go through all your fingernails and toenails, or are you going to give us an address?”
“Ah shit, man.” He shook his head and gritted his teeth. “Okay, okay, it’s this place toward Aylesbury, way off the main road, think it’s near a chicken factory or was it a pig farm? Not sure.”
I nodded even though I had no idea where he was talking about.
“It’s a cottage, thatched, you know, but not pretty, could do with some money spending on it, and I don’t know why he doesn’t because he’s got enough. But it used to be dog kennels, so it’s got like all these cages in the back garden, handy, you know, to keep the new bitches in.”
“He keeps the women in kennels?” I couldn’t take the disbelief from my voice.
“They might as well get used to life as it’s going to be when they’re bought.” He shrugged and laughed.
Just for that I wrenched out his middle fingernail.
“Fuck, you asshole!” he shouted. “I’m fucking telling you, ain’t I?”
“I don’t like your attitude to women. It sucks.” I flicked the nail aside. “What’s the address of this place?”
“I dunno. I’ve only been once, and it was nighttime. My mate drove. I’d been on the booze, hadn’t I, got myself too excited about my purchase and didn’t want another drink-driving stint in jail.”
“Fuck.” Andrew shook his head. “This could be a needle in a haystack.” He rubbed his temple.
“But it’s a start,” I said.
“Honest, cross my heart. I don’t know no more.” Leo sniffed noisily.
“So what do you want me to do with him?” Phil stepped up to Leo. “Probably easiest to kill him, right?” He clicked his gun beside Leo’s ear and then shoved the business end to his temple.
Leo’s eyes widened, and he froze. “Jesus Christ!”
“He isn’t a killer, just a revolting shitbag,” Andrew said and dug into Leo’s pocket. He withdrew his phone, flashed it at his face, and opened it.
“Hey, that’ s mine!”
“Shut the fuck up.” Phil smacked him around the head with the gun.
“Yeah, let’s just leave him,” I said. “We got what we came for. Come on.”
We all walked to the door, our footsteps heavy.
“You can’t leave me like this. I’ll die. No fucker ever comes in here. The pub’s bloody closed, or can’t you see that? Come back. Untie me. You bastards, come back now. Give me my phone.”
We stepped out into the morning and slid down our bandanas. Phil put his gun away, and I did the same with the pliers.
“Shame he’s not a murderer,” Phil said. “I’d have enjoyed taking that son of a bitch out.”