Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (20 page)

Marcus Boswell had grown up in the last two years. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been a skinny and confused kid looking for a gang to belong to. I’d met him through his brother, Eric, who had died after crossing the Mann brothers. Eric had gone by the name Bauser, but Marcus had liked things simpler and had been known as Boz. But that was then. Things had changed.

He led Gaines and me to the back of the hall, where a door led to what would once have been a private room for parties and league games. The old snooker table was pushed against the wall now, though, and piled high with cans and bottles of beer and liquor. A television and games console rested on top of some old milk crates. The walls were covered with sound-muffling curtains behind faded leather sofas, and the coffee table between them held ashtrays, rolling papers, and a bag of pot. Dodge waved us to the nearest sofa before stepping round the table and dropping down onto the one opposite. He waved at the Asian, who he had called Sukh, and the three of us were left alone.

“Dodge, huh? That’s new.”

He spread his arms out either side of him on the back of the sofa. “How long you known it was me?”

“I’ve always known.” I liked getting the chance to seem in control. “It’s my job. I’ve been trying to protect you, keep you out of things and keep us from coming over here looking for you.”

This was all news to Gaines, who’d had no idea who Dodge was or why I always talked her out of looking for him. She didn’t say anything, but for a moment I felt the same cold stare hit me as when she’d learned about the death threat. Another mark to add to the tally of ways I’d crossed her. I didn’t know if we could go back from today, but if I could keep her alive I didn’t care.

She turned to Dodge. “Where does the name come from?”

Dodge scratched his left elbow with his right hand. There was a tight collection of scars there where his skin looked paler, almost pink. “Some cops tried arresting me, back when they were giving a shit about us. I jumped off the bridge and slid down the bank to the motorway, scratched all my side, but got up and ran between the cars to the other side. Next day people were saying I was a human dodgem, so I ran with it. Better than Boz.”

Gaines nodded, showing him she was impressed. He smiled. Somewhere in there was still the boy I’d known, looking for approval.

“I hear you’re a high-up now, Gyp. Running the show. But you know I’ve put a price on her head, right?”

Gaines leaned forward now, her voice cold. “I’m sat right here, and I have a name.”

Dodge stared at her for a cold minute before nodding and putting his hand out.

“I been rude, I’m sorry.” They shook hands and then he leaned back. “But you been rude too. Coming in here, going eye-to with my boys? This ay your patch, Gaines, and you need to show some respect.”

Gaines smiled. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Gotta respect you coming here, though. You know how this is likely to go?”

Gaines leaned back in her seat. “Same way it went for Letisha, right? It’s not going to go that way.”

Dodge sat upright. The confusion on his face was for real. “Letisha? You think that was me?” He looked from Gaines to me, then back again. “I liked her. I had her back. Whole fucking reason I put a price on you was I thought it was you done her.”

Gaines looked at me. I had nothing.

I’d thought Dodge had been behind the killing too. As much as I’d told myself I was protecting him by stalling a war between us, I’d been protecting myself, too; if he’d killed Letisha then he wasn’t the kid I’d once known, and that was something else I’d not wanted to deal with.

“Then who?” Gaines asked.

Dodge shook his head. “Not one of mine. I was willing to talk. That’s why I agreed to meeting with her. Last thing I needed was a fight with you. I wasn’t ready for that.” He let that hang in the air for a second before he felt the need to cover it with bravado. “Not then, anyway. Now? We’re ready.”

My turn. “We’re not here for trouble. We need your help. There are people coming in from abroad, taking out the family. They want our patch, and right now they want us.”

“Do my job for me?”

Gaines put a hand up to stop me and took over. “No. You know how it works. If someone else takes me out, you don’t get to make your name, and you lose all of this to the next kid who comes along with a reputation. Look, your lot and my lot? We’ve had an understanding. We stay the other side of the M5, and you don’t start pushing into West Brom or Smethwick. You’ve got guns and muscle, sure, but my lot are the ones with connections. We get the best product, we make the most money.”

She waited for Dodge to say something, but all he did was pull a nonplussed expression and wave for her to carry on.

“These people coming in? They’re bigger than both of us. If they take us out, they won’t stop at that. They’re already buying land out at the airport. They’ll want to connect the dots, fill in the land between.”

“Anyone comes in here looking for trouble will find more than enough of it to go round.”

Gaines shook her head. Dodge wasn’t getting it. “You know how much pull I have? You do. You’ve seen me take out both Mann brothers. You know we don’t get messed with. But here we are, and right now I can’t stop it happening. What chance do you think you have?”

“Skip to your point.”

I had no idea where Gaines was going with this, but it was the opposite of what I’d had planned. I was going to appeal to our old friendship, ask Dodge to give us protection as we drove to wherever Gaines wanted to go. She seemed to have other plans.

“I want to wipe them off our map. I want to show them what happens when they pick a fight with the Gaines family. I’m talking the biggest fight this whole region has ever seen, and I think you’d not only want to get in on that, but you’d want to be on the winning side.”

Dodge stood up and walked in a lazy circle in front of us before lifting three cans of lager off the table and throwing two of them to us.

We each pulled the top and took a sip.

It was cheap and nasty, but now didn’t seem like the time to play the snob, so I took another sip and looked like I was enjoying it. I knew Gaines was used to much finer things, but she didn’t show any disgust. A seasoned pro.

“Let me get this.” Dodge stood in front of us, his beer hanging down from his hand, drawing a loop in the air as he talked. “You come here and think to play me by offering a fight? You think that’s going to be enough of a draw for us to work with you, after all that’s gone before?”

Gaines swigged from the beer and leaned back, putting her free arm across the back of the sofa and looking at ease. She flicked her eyebrow, a move she’d used on me many times. “Isn’t it?”

Dodge shook his head. He drank again and watched us. I started thinking of things to say. If Gaines’s big play had failed I would need to go back to plan A, appeal to old times, maybe offer a trade. What did I have?

Then Dodge held up his beer in a toast that Gaines matched. He drew long on the can before licking his lips and settling back down into the sofa opposite. “Here’s how this will work. We’ll help you, and you’ll help us.”

Gaines nodded. “Go on.”

“It’s crowded round here. Too many idiots, too many gangs. I want what you got. We’ll help you run these guys out, and then you and me? Partners.”

Gaines put her hand out to shake on the deal. Dodge put his out but hesitated. He pulled back a little. “I mean for real. I’m not your boy, and I’m not an idiot. We run everything together, equal. You may have cut Gyp here in on the board of your companies or whatever, but that’s not what I’m after. I’m going to be sat at the top with you.”

I held my breath. I knew both of these people and yet I couldn’t tell if they were being honest with each other. A teenage boy bargaining with Veronica Gaines over a seat at the top table? I looked from one to the other. Then Gaines raised her hand a little higher, reminding Dodge that it was there to shake.

“You going to keep talking or start shaking?”

The door opened and Sukh stepped in. He nodded at me, then back over his shoulder. “There’s an old dude here. Guy in a suit. Says he’s with you?”

All three of us stood up, but I put my hand out toward Gaines, telling her to hang back. She told me to go to hell, and we both followed Sukh and Dodge out into the hall. The old man in the deerstalker had left, and Branko was standing in his place at the bar, sipping a glass of milk while talking into a mobile phone. He smiled and raised his glass at me. I listened to him talking into the phone, and picked up on local road names.

Directions.

He was telling someone where we were.

“Mr. Miller, it is good to see you again. Perhaps we could have our little talk now?” said Branko. Someone had killed the music and his manicured voice echoed around the large hall. He spun the phone around in his hand like a cowboy playing with a gun, then slipped it into his inside pocket. “And Miss Gaines if you could come along, that would be of great help.”

Dodge turned to us with a question in his eyes, and I shook my head. He turned back and nodded to his guys. Sukh pulled a gun out from the small of his back, and one of the black kids raised the gun Dodge had held earlier.

Branko drained the glass and rested it on the bar, wiping his lips lightly before turning his attention to the gunmen. “I see everyone in this country welcomes a guest with the same manners as Mr. Miller. Really, all I want is to speak with him. Perhaps I should tell you about the first time—”

“We don’t need any more of your stories,” I said.

He shrugged, taking it much as I imagined he would if I’d said I didn’t like the color of his socks. “Shame. Maybe we should talk about youth.” He looked across at the teenagers and then at Gaines and me. “You’re all young to me. Confused, I should think. I envy you that, I suppose. I never had the time to be confused. You know, my hometown, it’s famous in the country, because people say nobody should live there. They say it’s only good for the fucking of the wolves.”

He talked as if he didn’t see the guns trained on him. And, unlike when he faced me down, these kids were not afraid to use them. Just when I’d thought I had the measure of him, he found new ways to scare me.

“You can hear them at night,” he continued. “The howling, the fucking. You know a wolf howl when you hear it, even before you know what a wolf is. You can lie in bed and hear these animals going about their lives in a part of the world that really belongs to them. It is not a place for a young boy, certainly not a family. My sister, she went out after dark once, never came back.”

Dodge turned to me. “You want this freak dead?”

“I do.”

I turned back toward Gaines to escort her back into the back room, which had more to do with my own wish to avoid the bloodshed than hers. I heard the guns being raised again.

Then Branko spoke, his voice still calm and reasoned. Almost pleasant.

“Mullo.”

I turned back to him, my mouth opening and closing before my throat caught up with the idea. “What?”

“That’s what your people believe, yes? Haunted by a Mullo, by a spirit come back to punish you for your actions?” He slipped his phone out of his inside pocket. “Quite a poetic way of explaining how the world works, don’t you think? My father used to say it was who you left behind, rather than who you helped, that you would be judged by.”

He pressed a button on the phone, and after a second of electronic clicking I heard a whimpering that rose above the shuffling of the gang members as they shifted positions. It was a familiar sound. I’d heard it many times, in those early nights of Matt’s recovery when he slept on my sofa.

“He is still useful to me,” Branko said. “You are his use. Will you walk away now, make him, like the kitten on my farm, one more thing to put down?”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. I thought of all the excuses I had to turn and run. I thought of Tony’s wallet, and all the ghosts around my bed. I pulled Dodge toward me and whispered an address.

“Get Gaines there. Say I sent you. Regroup.”

“You doing?”

“Being an idiot. Go.”

Dodge told his crew to keep their guns on Branko long enough for him to get clear and nodded for Gaines to follow him but she stood her ground. She stared me out, and a moment threatened to pass between us, rolling in like storm clouds to hang in the air. Then Branko stepped forward, and Gaines followed Dodge through the curtain. We stood in silence for a few moments. I counted out what I hoped would be enough time for Dodge to get to a car and pull out of the street. Then I waved for the kids to lower their weapons.

I walked toward my smiling Mullo.