16
W
here the fuck have you been?” Gunner swaggered to my table in the empty bar and pulled up a chair. It’s after 10 PM, Ronan was up in his office working his ass off, while this guy just walked in like he fucking owned the place.
“Didn’t realize I had to check in with you,” he snarled and I cooled my shit realizing I was taking my foul mood out on everyone around me.
I took a pull of my cigar and blew the smoke out, realizing that I was taking my foul mood out on him and Ronan, Betty, and Freddie. It’s no wonder that no one wanted to come near me tonight, and there was ample empty space circling me that no one dared enter.
Calming my shit, I replied evenly, “You’re on the payroll, Gunner. That means that you still answer to me.”
He took a deep breath, “I need a drink,” then got back up and strolled to the bar, messing his black hair up with his fingers as he did so. I wondered what was making him so uptight. I couldn’t be as bad as rats, and the toymaker tied the bed and left it for dead.
“Mikky?” Freddie carefully approached my table, leant down, and whispered, “The girl has been waiting in the hotel room for the last two hours.”
“Ah, I forgot about her,” I flicked my hand at him. I was in the mood when I asked him to organize it, but after seeing rats run across my red wool carpet, I lost my mojo. “Pay her and send her on her way.”
“Yes, Mikky,” Freddie replied as Gunner returned with a full glass of whiskey that he had helped himself to behind the bar since I had given the staff the night off.
“What’s going on around here?” he asked, frowning.
“Rats, but they’re gone now, and we had to delicately deal with a health inspector who mysteriously turned up,” I snarled, in between taking strong pulls of my cigar, then swallowing it down with whiskey. “It’s all sorted now, thank fuck.”
“Jeez, Ronan mentioned it, but I thought he was taking piss,” he grunted as his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Got to be an organized hit.”
“No doubt,” I replied as my mood lightened up a little, because despite Gunner’s sullenness, my nephew was good company.
“Anyway,” relaxing in his chair, “I visited Mom.”
I almost spat out my whiskey. “What? In Larsson? Fuck, please don’t tell me she’s here in Gothenburg.” I glanced behind me, almost feeling those suspicious eyes drilling into the back of my skull.
“Nah, in Larsson, but she’s planning a trip here soon,” he mumbled in his usual monosyllabic, depressing tone.
I shuddered and made a face behind my glass, “That’s the last thing I need.” I emptied my glass, stood at the empty bar, reached over the counter to grab the whiskey bottle, and returned it. Something white caught in my peripheral vision, and I thought it was another rat, but when I looked properly, I saw a white apron on the floor that had fallen from the hook above it.
When I returned to the table, I refilled my glass as the alcohol did its work of bringing life into perspective. “She’s been threatening to visit for a while to see her neglectful son and probably to snoop around.” I unbuttoned my cuffs, then took another pull of my cigar. Hopefully, your visit to her will delay her coming here.”
He groaned, “Yeah, maybe.”
“Why did you go there? Was it to get her off your back for a while, since she kept calling you because you weren’t calling her?” I mocked him.
“I didn’t know I was going there. Danny Lam set me up,” he explained dryly.
“Danny Lam? He took you to see your mom? I didn’t realize I was paying him top dollar to take you to see your mom,” I snarled. “Did you fly or drive. Oh wait. You must’ve flown and missed a day of school.”
He exhaled deeply and combed his fingers through his black hair, showing distress again. His mother had a habit of stressing out Kaiser men, including me. “Danny took me to the house, and we went over the scene to see if I remembered anything else that occurred that day. I thought he would take me back to the airport, but instead, he turned right.”
“Sorry, bro, it must’ve been devastating to see your mom after all this time,” I joked to get a rise out of him.
“The club looks good, though,” he told me.
“As good as Savile?” I asked curiously. Sylvie ran a tight ship, and we learnt a lot from her, but I was happier the further away she was from me and my club.
“No way,” he snorted.
“Did you discover anything different when you returned to the house?” I asked curiously.
“Nah,” he grunted. “The neighbor who witnessed the van is now dead. Her daughter still won’t speak to him even with a cash bribe.”
“Yeah, I know. Fuck it. It’s one dead end after another,” I took another sip of my whiskey as I could feel my body tensing up at the thought of how the police scrubbed clean everything that would lead back to the real killer.
“Pretty sure Annika couldn’t see the murder,” he said quietly.
“Pretty sure?”
“A hundred percent sure,” he corrected. “You know it was kinda like I was back then and heard the voices outside, followed by the gunshot. And I ran out of my room and met her in the hallway coming out of her room, so there was no way she could see the murder and pin you.”
“You’re not telling me anything new,” I leveled with him. “And don’t obsess over it, Gunner. More importantly, don’t obsess over her, the snitch.”
“I told them in court that she couldn’t have been a witness because she would’ve had to look out my window, but she wasn’t there. She was in her room when it happened.” His temperature was rising, and he was getting more agitated.
“Gunner-”
“They didn’t believe me and started asking questions that made me doubt myself, you know,” he started picking at the skin around his nails, chewing like a man who hadn’t eaten in a while.
“Bro, you were fucking sixteen years old. You were a kid. Stop doing this to yourself,” I hammered home because I was sick of him wearing the guilt of this.
“Yeah, but…”
“Just stop it, Gunner. It is not your fucking fault,” I slapped my hand down on the table. “Enough is enough. We’ll find out who did this, alright.”
He shook his head, still ripping at the skin around his nails.
“What? You think we won’t? Seriously?” I challenged his pessimism.
“They want you back in prison, Mikky. Don’t you see,” he argued, downing his whiskey and grabbing the neck of the bottle to pour another.
“You think I don’t know that?” I stated angrily. I wasn’t angry at him but furious at the sullen mess he’d become. “Look,” I pointed my finger at his face. “All you have to do is focus on schooling. That’s all. Get a nice girlfriend. Not the one who works here that you think is Annika. Not her because she’s staff and a suspect.”
“Riley,” he needed to remind me what her name was.
“Whatever. Call your mom sometimes. Everything else is my problem. Got it?” I assured him, but I knew it wouldn’t work because he was naturally compulsive and would keep digging until he found the truth.
Those black slug eyebrows dropped so low over his eyes, they almost attached to his eyeballs. “No.”
“What do you mean no? It wasn’t a fucking suggestion, Gunner. It was a demand. I’m the boss around here. You answer to me.” It was my turn to become unreasonable.
A strain appeared on his face, and it looked like he was in pain. “Don’t you see, Mikky? We’ve got nothing. They trashed every piece of evidence because they want you back in prison. I mean...the rats are part of your demise.”
“C’mon, Gunner,” I argued, knowing he was right. “I’m not giving up; they’ve got nothing on me.” I took a pull of my cigar. “See, this is what visiting your mother does to you. It makes you all morose and depressed. It’s like she sucks the happiness out of you.”
“Nah, it’s going back to the house in Larsson.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “It felt numb. Nothing changed, yet everything had changed.”
“Yeah, I don’t have the stomach to return there, and I don’t want to give the Larsson police a reason to arrest me. It’s safer here. They don’t have the jurisdiction, but they might pass my file on to the Gothenburg police.”
“Have you been harassed by Gothenburg police?” Gunner asked curiously, frowning.
I shook my head. “No. But that doesn’t mean they’re not watching us.”
He finished his glass and filled it up again. “Lam said that the blond cop was part of the investigation. The lady who now owns our house said she had questioned her about a few things. It’s weird that she also visited Riley, and it looked like she was threatening her somehow.”
A figure passed my vision range, and it was Ronan striding our way, staring at the phone screen in his hand. “We’ve got a problem,” he stated, standing over us.
I groaned. “What now?”
“Yarmouth,” he spat. “His lawyer had contacted me. He wants money.”
“Fuck,” I snapped, slapping my hand down on the table making Gunner jump.
“Yarmouth?” Gunner asked. “The toymaker?”
“Yep, the toymaker was found tied to a bed in the velvet rooms and defecated over the bed,” Ronan filled him in. Everyone knew who the toymaker was, even when we forgot his name. “He wants compensation for the stress it caused him.”
“Wait,” Gunner snapped. “Didn’t that happen just last night? And he’s already got his lawyer onto it.”
Ronan groaned in suspicion. “He wants compensation for the immense stress it caused him.”
“How much?” I asked as a heavy brick landed on my chest.
“Two million,” he replied.
I cracked up laughing. “He’s got to be fucking kidding.”
Ronan screwed his face. “He’s got a point, though. It occurred on our property under our business and by our staff. We failed to provide the service he asked for.”
I resigned to his rationale and flicked my hand at him. “I agree, but the coincidence is unsettling, and we still haven’t discovered who did that to him. Are you sure that girl had nothing to do with it? What’s her name?”
“Champagne,” Ronan informed me. “Yeah, she’s solid. She’s telling the truth, Mikky.”
I found a spot on the table to stare at while I thought it over. Like the rats, Mr. Yarmouth's being tied to a bed for several hours was a deliberate attack, but was it against him or us? Yet another mystery that needed to be solved.
“I’ve got an idea,” Ronan offered, slicing through my silence. “I think we need a mole because I think both the rats and the Yarmouth situation are inside jobs.”
“You reckon?” I questioned. It had crossed my mind, but I didn’t think any of our staff were dumb enough to cross us. Maybe I was wrong.
“Riley,” he suggested.
“What?” Gunner cracked up laughing. “Are you serious? I’m eighty percent sure she’s Annika. She’s not entirely on our side, so don’t forget the cop from Larsson who was on her back.”
“Yeah, that’s the point, though,” Ronan argued. “I spent time with her today, and she’s…nice and stressed about the cops.”
“You spoke to her about that?” Gunner asked in surprise.
“She volunteered the information because she suspects it was the police who planted the hidden camera in her room,” Ronan shot a sharp, dirty look down at Gunner.
“She knows that’s there?” Gunner’s mouth dropped open, astounded.
“Yeah, she recently discovered it,” Ronan told him, as Gunner was dumbfounded to discover that the girl was not as dumb as she looked.
Actually, she didn’t look dumb. She looked boring and nerdy, but for some strange reason these two young cums liked that. Maybe a different side of her was unleashed when they were intimate with her. She could be a kitten on the street and a tiger in the sheets.
“Did you touch her?” Gunner was angered, pointing his finger at his face. “Mikky said you can’t touch her.”
“No, I didn’t touch her,” Ronan stated, and I knew he was being honest because he was loyal to a fault. Gunner, on the other hand, was the one most likely to break my rules. “She contacted me because a couple of bros were harassing her.”
“Who?” Gunner barked, before Ronan could answer, my nephew added. “It better not be that fucking Shaun. I knocked out his tooth. I can knock out his fucking brain too.”
“She’s keeping it close to her chest because she worried about what you’d do,” Ronan told him. “But she said she went to the basement under the science library to look for you. Yet I thought you told her you would be away, so I don’t entirely believe her.”
“So, you want to get the girl who you think is a liar and colluding with the Larsson police and is possibly Annika the snitch to be our mole?” I questioned his sanity at this point.
“Yeah,” Ronan replied confidently. “Think about it. It’s the perfect plan. Ask her to snoop on the staff for us, then she’ll think we trust her. You know that saying, Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
I directed my stare to Gunner, who knew the girl better than anyone. “Would it work?”
Gunner cocked his eyebrows and nodded. “Yep.”
I took another pull of my cigar and blew the smoke out as I weighed up the information just given to me. Who was fooling whom here? “Alright,” I finally said to Ronan after several moments of deliberation. “Contact our lawyer and fill him in on what’s going on. We won’t agree to two million until we discover who was involved in his... little dilemma.” I rubbed the back of my neck with my hand.
Ronan nodded as he took notes on his phone. “Regardless, it occurred on our property, so we’re responsible.”
“I’m not disputing that,” I explained flatly. “And I’m not opposed to compensating him for his grievances, but I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t want his wife to know about his little fetishes with our girls, and considering that he makes toys for children for a living, I doubt that’s information he’d like released into the public.”
Ronan nodded in agreement. “We need time.”
“Exactly,” I sighed, as the alcohol and tobacco were finally starting to relax my body muscles, and I was beginning to see the situation from a different angle. “And ah…let’s put the girl to the test. Ask her to come into my office when she turns up for work tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Ronan agreed, yet Gunner wasn’t so sure, but he’d go along with it anyway. I suspected he was more interested in avenging Shaun for harassing the girl.
“Gunner,” I asserted in a firm tone. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Did he hurt her?” he asked Ronan.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ronan replied. “It’s all under control.”
“Gunner,” I stubbed out my cigar in the ashtray. “Don’t draw attention to yourself, now we know the Larsson police are lingering like a bad smell.”
“I won’t,” he grumbled in a bad mood, which was his default setting.
“Keep your nose clean, Gunner,” I pressed.
“I will,” he snarled as if I didn’t entirely trust that he could control his urges, which was true.
I glanced at Ronan before he turned and walked back up to his office. We knew what Gunner was like; he was his father’s son.