Gun (4 page)

The lad pulled a sour face,
then
started emptying his pockets.
A nice wad of cash that wasn’t anything to do with Richie, but which might've had something to do with the gun.
Then more cash on top of that.

"This
your
fuckin
' job, is it?" said Richie.
"The pay's mint."

The lad didn't say anything, kept turning out his pockets.
Two lighters, one of them Richie's.
His tabs.
A mobile.
Richie took the lot, then jerked his chin at the lad, said, "Now the shoe."

"Fuck you talking about?"

"Take your
fuckin
' shoe off. The foot you were kicking us with."

"I'm not taking off
nowt
."

Richie moved quick, pinned the lad to the wall. He drew back his fist, brought it hard and short into the lad's gut, then stepped back to watch him fold in half, the wind ripped out of him and the Gregg's steak bake he had for breakfast about to follow. Just as the lad went from the wet to dry heaves, Richie planted his foot in the lad's ribcage, feeling something
crack
against his instep. The lad let out a restrained howl, rolled over onto his side. Richie bent over, grabbed one of the lad's shoes and wrenched it off.

"When I tell you to take your
fuckin
' shoe off, you take it off," said Richie, hefting the new shoe in his hand.

The lad burbled something on the ground. Richie waited until he was finished and looking his way, then he hurled the shoe as far as he could. It bounced off into a skip. Richie dusted his hands down, pulled out the lad's mobile and dropped it on the ground. Another shrill, fractured noise came out of the lad, getting higher as Richie brought his foot down on the mobile.

"Just in case you decide to call your mates round, eh?" said Richie.

He ground the pieces into the concrete, then turned out of the alley and headed for The Admiral. As he walked, he checked his watch. It was getting on for noon, which meant the place would be open at least.

Good, he thought. He could get a pint down his neck, and his hands were shaking enough to need one.

5

Early doors at The Admiral, and this Brandon
gadgie
still hadn’t bothered his arse to turn up.
Didn't matter.
Richie could wait for him inside. He'd just have to hope that the
charva
lad didn’t find some way to warn the bouncer that Richie was coming. Course, Richie wasn't daft – he wasn't about to pick a fight with a bloke who fought on a nightly basis. Not in his condition. Nah, he thought he'd see how well a little gentle persuasion went first.

Richie pushed through stiff and thin double doors into The Admiral, which didn't look so much like a pub as someone's front room with pretensions. It was already heavily populated, clusters of smoking men ignoring the ban, huddled over thick pints of bitter and flat lager. The entire place stank of dog. Richie went straight for the bar. A stringy pale man with a shaved head stared at him.

"Pint of Carling," said Richie.

The skinny man didn't move. "How old are you?"

"You what?"

"You heard."

"I'm eighteen, mate."

"Just turned, is it?"

"Nah."
Richie looked at the bloke with dead eyes as he bluffed it. "Closer to nineteen, you want to know, like."

"That right?" said the landlord. He breathed in and smiled it out. "This is a member's club, son."

"It's a pub. Now give us a pint of Carling before I put your
fuckin
' teeth out."

The landlord bared those teeth as if he'd tasted something rotten. It looked like an invitation to Richie. Then he looked behind Richie and blinked.

"Your man's not in yet." Richie smiled.

The landlord brought his focus to the lad at his bar. "The fuck happened to your face?"

"The fuck happened to yours?"

The landlord's eyes narrowed to a double squint. Richie raised one hand and grinned as wide as he could with the swelling.

"I'm just having you on, mate," he said. "I'm here to talk to Brandon."

"Brandon."

"Aye.
Me and him, we got a little business."

"Kind of business?"

"
Nowt
bad.
Nowt
illegal.
And we'll take it outside."

"Good," said the landlord. "I don't want your blood on me nice new carpet."

Richie glanced down. The carpet wasn't nice or new. In fact, he was positive that was where the dog smell was coming from.

"He's not here," said the landlord.

"I know he's not here. I said that. I want a pint while I'm waiting, mind.
If it's not too much trouble."

The landlord thought about saying something – Richie could see it flicker in his face – but then shook it out of his head. He went to the pumps, set a Carling to pour. Richie dug in his pocket, brought out a twenty and slapped it on the bar. "What whisky you got? I can't see from here."

"Bell's or Grouse."

"Any brandy?"

"Nah."

"Then give us a Grouse, double, no ice." He nodded at the note. "You keep the change an' all."

When the landlord slid the Grouse and pint in front of Richie, he looked around the place for somewhere to sit. Took him a while to find somewhere with a decent view of the entrance and the car park, and he knew it could change in a minute flat. People were as territorial as wolves in this place and might've marked that territory in the same way judging from the smell of the nook Richie found. He just hoped that some old bugger wouldn't get mouthy if he saw Richie in his seat.

Halfway down the pint, Richie noticed that his hands had finally stopped trembling. He set them both flat on the table in front of him, looked like he was about to conduct a one-man séance,
then
balled them up into fists.
Looked again – still no shakes.
He looked out of the window. That was lucky. He'd kept his hands hidden most of the time he'd talked to the landlord, but he wouldn't be able to hide the shakes from Brandon.

That was if the bugger ever turned up. Richie started to gnaw on the inside of his mouth, glancing across at the landlord. Because if that bloke over there was clock-watching, then it meant that Brandon wasn't the type of bloke to stumble in late.
Which meant there could be something wrong already.

He knew he shouldn't be thinking like this already, but it was habit. The old saying – pessimists are rarely disappointed. In Richie's case, he reckoned if he saw the worst in the situation, it minimised the surprise when life chucked shit at him. He looked into his pint, reckoned that he'd give Brandon until the end of the beer to turn up,
then
he'd try to get the bloke's address off the landlord. In the meantime, he had to sit tight, play it calm and collected.

It was difficult. If he sat alone in silence, he had a tendency to think. And when he thought, he reckoned he should be at the dole office right now, keeping that promise to
Becka
. She wasn't even the type to guilt him into going, but she'd gotten fucking responsible while he was inside, hinting at the kind of life she wanted to have. At first, Richie reckoned she'd seen one too many Jeremy
Kyles
and had the straight scared into her, but
Becka
kept on. She didn't nag.
Didn't need to.
She told him what she wanted like it was an achievable dream.
Respectability, not in the house-in-the-suburbs kind of way, not really.
More in the boyfriend's-not-in-the-nick vein.

"I want you around," she said.

"I am around," he told her.

"Aye, until you do something daft and get yourself caught."

He tried it on with the charm, said, "Wey, I'll just not get caught next time."

"Nah," she said. "I don't want that."

"
Becka
–"

"I can't take that, Richie. I need promises, and I need '
em
kept, alright?"

"I can promise."

"
And
kept, I said." She did one of her big sighs at that, like that tart in the big frilly dress from that pure long film they watched the Sunday before he went in. Everything was so fucking
tiring
. "I need someone who's going to be around, someone who's not going to jail, like, at a second's notice."

And Richie said, "Alright."

"You promise?" she said.

"Yeah, aye."

"'Cause I'll hold you to it."

He noticed the tears about to come, so he said, "Aye, I promise."

They went into a hug. Richie felt her shaking against his chest. For a second, he wondered if she was laughing, and then wondered what the fuck he'd just agreed to. He moved away and saw the tears running down her face. He frowned, asked her what the matter was. She shook her head, smiling,
then
went back to his chest.

His chest ached now, the memory turned her hug into a
headbutt
. Richie rubbed his cheek and stared out of the window, seeing nothing. The way she looked at him after he promised, the way she started talking about moving somewhere else, somewhere Richie could get
himself
a proper job, all this talk of settling down. It made his gut twitch.

And Richie said, "How, hang on a
sec,
we can't move anywhere, can we? I'm still on licence."

"We can work round that," she said. "Reckon the
probation'll
be happy you're moving away from the reason you got put inside. Besides, we'll need to be in a decent area, lots of parks an' that.
Like,
a family area."

It was all falling into place now. And he wondered how the fuck he'd managed to miss it. Too caught up in trying to find paying work, most likely, but when he thought about it now, she wasn't being too fucking coy about it, was she? The
lass was
either pregnant or wanting to get there. And
Richie'd
promised no more dodgy jobs, as good as he promised to fucking
marry
her.

"Fuck," he said now. An old guy at the next table turned his paper bag face Richie's way, his mouth working.
"Nah, man.
Not you."

Richie leaned forward on the table, put his head in his hands and stared straight down into his barely fizzing pint. If he'd known sooner, he wouldn't have gone to Goose. He would've got himself down the dole and signed on. Would've
took
the first job they gave him and worked it till he broke.

And now where was he? Some shitty pub miles away from home, waiting on a bloke who had a gun he needed.
A fucking gun.
Richie never saw a real live gun before in his life until today. Knew some of the lads further up the food chain wore the vests and carried something in their cars, but
Richie'd
never come into full contact with them. Now in the course of a single morning, he'd bought and lost one.

This was the way he kept promises, was it?

He caught movement, looked up and saw a brown Cavalier rolling into the car park. A big bloke behind the
wheel,
almost took up the front two seats by himself. He killed the engine,
then
struggled to get out of the car. Then Richie noticed that he wasn't just a big bloke, but a big fat bloke.
Muscle underneath all that, mind.
Not like Florida Al. If anyone looked like a bouncer, it was this bloke.

Richie watched Brandon stride towards the front of the pub, then downed his Grouse. It burned going down and Richie wanted to cough it out, but he held firm. Brandon pushed into the pub, and the landlord called him over. Richie heard the landlord say something about "the lad in the corner", and Brandon say, "Oh aye?"

Richie hunkered up around his pint, breathing slow, pushing thoughts of
Becka
and the possible
bairn
out of his head.

"You wanted to talk to us, son?" said Brandon.

Richie turned in his seat, looked up at the bouncer. From this angle, the
gadgie
was a fucking mountain.

"Aye," he said. "Probably best we do it outside, like."

And he finished his pint, got out of his seat, and tried not to limp as he led the way.

6

Brandon thought about it for a long time, looking up at the grey sky, his lips bunched. Then he looked down at Richie.

"Nah," he said.

Richie opened his arms, tried to smile. "
Howeh
, I'm just trying to offer you a
fuckin
' deal here, mate."

"How's it I'm your
fuckin
' mate?" Brandon's mouth hung open. "I don't know you, but you're all acting
pally
like you
fuckin
' know us, like. I
never seen
you before in my life. And now you're talking about a dangerous
fuckin
' weapon. A gun, was it?"