Fireproof (6 page)

"Not bad," Mike said. He was more impressed with his own reaction time and ability to take a punch than the boxer's fighting spirit. The new body would have kicked the shit out of his original one.

The boxer backed off a little and thumbed his nose like Bruce Lee. He was so focused on his target that he still hadn't registered the weapon in Mike's hand. With his fists raised he nodded to Mike. "Your move, junkie."

Mike waved the machete in front of the boxer's face. "Want to reconsider that, Rocky?"

But the adrenaline was too high and the boxer was a natural fighter. He'd obviously been threatened by worse than a six foot something drug addict and was not going to blanch at the sight of a blade. As the boxer shuffled forward, Mike sighed and dropped the machete. It hit the tiled floor with a clang. He raised his own fists.

"Fair's fair, I guess," Mike said. He didn't want to badly hurt the employee. A couple of black eyes would be nothing to a fighter like this, but cutting a chunk out of him with a machete... it wasn't on. At the prospect of a bare-knuckle scrap, the boxer beamed as if he'd just been offered the numbers for Saturday night's lottery draw. The fight was on. He rushed Mike with a flurry of punches.

Mike dodged the attack by stepping on the diagonal and exposed his opponent's left flank. Before the boxer could turn, Mike punched him in the floating ribs and again in the side of the head. The boxer recoiled a little and tried to recover. Mike didn't give him the chance. Three more straight punches to the boxer's cheekbone, jaw and temple laid him out cold. His face started to swell before he hit the ground.

Mike raised his arms and shuffled his feet like a flamenco dancer. He looked out the window and saw Tony and Jim. Their thoughts were easily read in their expressions.
Fuck!

Mike saluted his fallen opponent and strolled through the employee door to the till. He opened the till and pretended to take cash from it. Tony and Jim's views were obscured by the counter so he didn't need to put up too much of a show. He found the video player that was hooked up to the security cameras, ejected the tape, and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers. With no missing cash, no security tape and nobody badly hurt, the cops wouldn't look too hard for someone to prosecute.

He called an ambulance for the unconscious boxer and reported the crime to the cops.

"Did you just hit me?" The imp was back at Mike's ear.

"I don't know," Mike said, "Did I? It all happened so fast."

"Yeah, I'm sure." The imp tutted. "Have you robbed the place yet?"

"Aye, job done."

"Then might I suggest that we get out of here?"

"Sure."

The imp sighed; a rather pathetic sound. "And will you heed my suggestion?"

"Eventually, I will."

"Fuck you. I'm going back to hell."

Mike didn't care. He scanned the employee area, looking for something. "Okay, tell everyone I said hi." He would not be sure if the imp was truly gone until he had a look in a mirror, but for now, an end to his prattling was good enough.

"Ah, there they are," Mike said. He found a bunch of keys in a little box under the counter. It took him a second to free them from the half used pens and misshapen paperclips. "Spare keys, excellent."

Mike left by the front door of the shop and locked it behind him. He posted the spare keys through the letterbox. With the keys out of reach from criminal opportunists the boxer would be safe. The cops and an ambulance would arrive soon, and they'd be able to kick down the door to get at the boxer and secure the scene. Tony and Jim watched him without comment. Their faces still betrayed their awe, however. The trio crossed the Falls Road and went back to the park.

"Okay, I think we should do whatever this guy wants to pay us to do," Tony said to the ten teenagers who'd stayed behind.

"Fucking right." Jim seconded the motion with enthusiasm.

The others seemed to take Tony and Jim's recommendation as enough proof that Mike was on the level. Nobody argued in any case. The first police land rover arrived on the scene, the siren wailed and the blue lights flashed. Mike loved the effect it created. Seasoned petty criminals that they were, the Hoods didn't run. If they didn't run they wouldn't look guilty. The cops couldn't just scoop them up without being accused of harassment. Witnesses were, as always, hard to come by in West Belfast.

"Okay then," Mike said, "I'd like to welcome you to the True Church of Satanism. This is the start of something big, and you guys got in on the ground floor."

Mike faced his twelve disciples and raised his plastic bottle of cider.

"A toast," Mike said. "To religious anarchy, and all that it may bring."

"So, why do you want this job?"

Cathy resisted the urge to tell the panel that she liked to eat.

"Well," she said, "I think that you're doing some very important work in this area, and I'd like to be a part of it, even at such a low level. It's important to support this kind of initiative in your own community."

She directed her answer to the man sitting between two ladies. They sat across the table from her with their backs to a dirty window. The trio of well-dressed, straight-faced individuals made up her interview panel. Her recruitment agency had sent her in for this interview, stating that she was ideal for the job. When Cathy asked her recruitment officer about the qualities that made her stand out from the other agency clients, she was told that she lived just around the corner from their office on the Falls Road.

It was a secretarial post in the local Youth Outreach Centre. The pay was a little less than what she earned at Fisher and Fisher but on the plus side, she lived just around the corner.

It had been a month since she lost her job at Fisher and Fisher.

John was found at his house a week after Cathy's visit. In the end it was Cathy herself who phoned the police. She explained that her boss had not shown up at the office in five working days and that, although he sometimes enjoyed the occasional bender, he never missed more than two working days in a row. And he always phoned in to let her know when she could expect him back.

Since he had not been seen for more than the standard forty-eight hours, a police car called to his house a day later. They broke in to find an overweight man who'd died of a heart attack in his kitchen. There was no sign of foul play and the bloated, stinking corpse had been shipped off to the mortuary at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Of course, the police hadn't told Cathy that the corpse was bloated and stinking, but it had been a week and John had generally been bloated and stinky when alive. What hope had he in death? The fact that there was a closed casket service a few days after his body was found provided further evidence.

Cathy offered heartfelt sympathy to William Fisher after the service. The old bugger raised his arms for a hug, and then tried to grope her breasts as she stepped forward. She made her apologies and left early. It wasn't much longer before John's firm was officially closed. William was forced into retirement as junior partners fled the sinking ship in favour of more stable employment. Without John, there was no firm. With the firm gone, Cathy needed a new job. She hadn't thought of that when she conspired to kill the creep.

The Youth Outreach Centre had been dealing with troubled teens on the Falls Road for five years. Well, the Centre called them troubled teens. Everyone else called them hoods. Cathy didn't really believe they deserved the kind of understanding they received in places like this, but she was willing to put aside such views so she could pay the rent. She agreed that something needed to be done to combat the problem of West Belfast's wannabe gangster culture, but her preferred method relied more on baseball bats than on offices with leather couches in them.

But she needed the work.

"I think the problem with most of these young adults is that nobody has ever tried to understand them," Cathy continued. "The only way to help them reform is to show them, through positive programmes and one-on-one sessions, that there is so much more out there for them. They just need the encouragement to find it."

All three members of the panel nodded in agreement. Cathy felt like slapping each one in turn. They were typical bleeding-heart dreamers. They would let those little bastards come in here and draw pictures, talk about themselves and eat chocolate biscuits for a few hours a week, and expect them not to drive a stolen car to the nearest drug dealer and get wasted, before breaking into a pensioner's house as soon as they were done.

Cathy went on, "They're a product of their environment, but if they could spend some time away from that environment, in a safe place where they feel wanted, real progress could be made."

The round lady on the left smiled and announced that she would be asking the next question.

"Cathy, you seem to have a very good idea of the work that we do here. If we were to offer you this job, would you consider volunteering about five hours a week to help us with some of the young men and women we deal with? In recent days we've found it difficult to draw in volunteers and just five hours could potentially make a difference to what we could achieve here."

Saying yes to this would mean that she would actually have to talk to the little scumbags who called in. On the other hand, saying no could count against her. She decided to play it safe and then wriggle out of it after she started the job.

"I would be honoured to help our community in such a way." She laid it on thick. "It would be like a dream come true for me. I had rather hoped it would be a possibility."

In fact, she hadn't even thought of it, but she was quite good at improvising in interviews. As she prattled on about how she just wanted to hug the little darlings and all that guff, she became increasingly sure that the job was in the bag. The body language from the interview panel encouraged her. Lots of nodding and smiling was always a good sign.

The bespectacled, thin lady on the right announced that she would ask her the final question. Cathy smiled and nodded to signify that another question was more than welcome.

"When can you start?"

And that was it; she'd become a member of the proactive team.

***

It turned out that her ‘competition' for the interview hadn't exactly been stiff. Only one other person made it past the application stage and she was as thick as a ditch. When asked why she wanted the job, Cathy's competitor had answered that her jobseekers allowance would be cut if she didn't go for a few interviews. Cathy learnt all of this over coffee with the ladies from the interview panel. The two ladies, Margaret and Mary, made up the entire organisation.

Margaret and Mary were fifty-something ex-teachers who'd spent most of their prime teaching in secondary schools in working class areas. Margaret had the hardened look of a badass librarian; thin, bespectacled and possessing an intimidating habit of looking at you over the top of her glasses to emphasise the seriousness of life. Mary gave off the breezy air of a thespian actor who'd taken up teaching drama when she discovered the harshness of starving for the craft. Then she got fat. Physically, they were polar opposites. It was inevitable they would attract each other.

They met at the last school each of them taught in, Corpus Christi Boys Secondary School. In the staff room, they swapped stories about the teenage tearaways they'd taught over the years, and how much potential they'd witnessed waste away. Kindred spirits, they soon became inseparable. They received no further satisfaction in their posts at Corpus Christi, as they found the teenage boys who attended practically unreachable from the early age of twelve. Good behaviour and ambition were seen as weaknesses and as such, they became rare.

The aging teachers, jaded by the school system, took early retirement in order to set up the Outreach Centre with the aid of government and EU funding. They aimed to reach as many troubled youths that slipped through the cracks in the education system as they could. Cathy envied their optimism, but in her heart she knew that they were wasting their time. Still, a job was a job.

The man from the interview was their accountant, Roger. He didn't work on the organisation's premises. The ladies hired him from one of the big firms in the city when he was needed. This pleased Cathy. She'd had her fill of professionals in the work place and had never met an accountant she liked. Not dealing with Roger on a day-to-day basis could only be a good thing.

As far as the job went, what really floated her boat was the filing. Each visitor to the centre had a confidential file which recorded the little darling's progress. Cathy had to store each one alphabetically in the huge fireproof filing cabinet, when they landed on her desk, after a one-to-one session with Margaret or Mary. They made for great lunchtime reading. And an insight into the easily damaged human psyche could prove helpful if her dream career in contract killing ever became a reality.

The John Fisher incident had shaken her confidence, but after a little time to regroup she'd find a new practice run. Maybe one of the Outreach Centre files would mention a drug dealer or the like worthy of her attentions.

She spent a couple of days reading up on a young man named Jim McCracken. This young fellow yammered on about some friends who'd got mixed up with the devil. It took Cathy a couple of rereads to realise that he wasn't talking about a new drug. He was talking about some form of occultism.