The Magpye: Circus (2 page)

"I helped you, didn't I?" he
asked weakly.

"Yes, Marv, you did," replied
Magpye. "And you're still helping me now. Let's face it, if I stop,
what else are we going to do?"

"Live?" suggested Marv, his
tone glib.

"As ghosts, maybe. Hiding down
here in a tomb? We may as well be dead."

"But we're not. We've got a
chance. I've got friends in LA, a few friends in Vegas... we could
start over." Marv gripped Magpye by the shoulders, tightening his
grip, "Everyone who goes up against the Kings ends up dead, kid.
Everyone knows that. What happened here, what happened to us?
They've done things a hundred times worse. They own this city, and
nobody is taking it from them."

"I am."

"Bah!" scoffed Marv. "Well, at
least use that secret passage of yours," he said, heading out of
the room. "I don't want Marissa any more upset than she is already.
And don't think you can come back and haunt me if you get yourself
killed out there."

But Magpye didn't answer. As he
closed the door, Marv heard the unmistakeable sound of Able Quirk
zipping up his mask, and he knew that any vestige of the boy was
gone in an instant. Inside the mask, there was only Magpye, and
Magpye only wanted one thing.

Magpye was going to kill the
King.

Vic was the last to arrive.
He'd planned it that way. Outside of a movie, he'd never known the
bosses of a city to ever sit down together. It didn't happen. You
didn't put four sharks into a tank full of blood and expect them to
just get along, and you didn't sit down four of the most powerful
and dangerous men in the city and expect them to get along either.
There was a reason that they had territories, that they stayed out
of each other's way.

War was bad for business.

The slaughterhouse had been
chosen by Blake, the oldest of them by far. Some people thought
that he might be in his 90s, a relic from the last generation of
criminals to run this city. His power was undeniable though.
Despite his age, the others all feared or respected him enough to
come here in the dead of night to talk about what he called "mutual
problems".

Of course, when the mutual
problem was a group of cops and their tame psychopath who had been
systematically pulling your business apart for six months? Well,
maybe sharks could swim alongside each other for a little while
after all.

Still, the whole place smelt of
raw meat and blood and fear and death and Vic knew that he could
walk around the corner into the barrel of a gun at any moment. He
was still here though, because a gun in the face was what passed
for a retirement plan in Vic's line of work. A lunatic in a mask?
That was a whole different ball game.

"You're late!" barked
Blake.

Sitting hunched at a large
metal table in the middle of the slaughterhouse kill floor, Blake
looked like 90 would be an underestimate. Wheelchair bound, he had
two large oxygen cylinders next to him, and he sucked greedily at
the air in between sentences. His body was so emaciated, his head
seemed to balance on top like a great dome-headed vulture on a bare
tree. His clothes were loose, draped over his frame like clothes on
a line.

"You think it's safe... all of
us here... together?" he rasped.

"No, I don't," replied Vic,
pulling out a metal chair from the table. The feet screeched across
the tiled floor and he noticed the criss-cross of scratches and
gouges in the metal table top. Great, he thought, we're all going
to sit around a butcher's block. "But I needed to be sure that you
hadn't put a few of your boys around the place, maybe thinking
you'd take advantage of our mutual problem for your own
benefit."

Blake raised his hands. They
were covered in liver-spots, his yellow skin stretched over the
bones and as thin as parchment. "On my honour, this place is empty
Vic. It's just you, me, Crow, and Keane."

Silent until now, the other two
bosses shuffled in their seats. Vic smiled inwardly. If Crow and
Keane where sharks, then Vic and Blake were a pair of killer
whales. Their territories, the east and west of the city
respectively, were only divided up by the territory held by the
other two, which was split roughly north and south. If either Vic
or Blake decided to take on the other, it was Crow and Keane who
got caught in the crossfire.

It was Crow who spoke first. "Good evening, Victor." A mix
of Asian and Native American descent, Crow's territory was the
north central part of the city. Well
-
heeled and
well
-
monied, he focussed on the things that wealthy people
always wanted: drugs, gambling, untraceable loans, girls, and the
occasional hit. There was more paid for murder amongst the upper
classes than anyone cared to admit. Crow fancied himself a
businessman and gentleman criminal. He was immaculately turned out,
from his designer suit and shirt to his hand made shoes. It paid
well to run the girls in North Central, Vic guessed.

Keane merely grunted. An Irish
American thug who had fought and killed his way up from the
streets, his main racket was protection. For a sizeable fee you
could buy protection from Keane and, so Vic had heard, his record
was impeccable. Nothing went down on his turf that he didn't know
about and sign off on. The polar opposite to Crow, Keane looked
like he was still on the streets. Wearing dirty jeans, an old
t-shirt and leather jacket, he still looked like the thug he had
been ten years ago. You didn't need expensive clothes when you had
a body count like Keane's though.

"So, we're all here," said Vic.
"Now what do we do? Is this the bit where I stand up and admit I'm
an alcoholic?"

Nobody laughed. Keane tapped his stubby fingers on the
table, rocking
back and
forth
in his chair. Crow idly
brushed dust from his shoulder.

It was Blake who broke the
silence. "I haven't seen a meet like this in forty years," he
croaked, the full weight of those forty years audible in every
syllable. "And you idiots aren't a patch on the guys who sat around
the table that day. You want to know what to do? Put your cards on
the table and share what you got, 'cause together is the only way I
see us getting out of this alive. You don't want to play? Fine. Go
home, drop your pants, and get ready to get fucked. Just don't fuck
the rest of us at the same time."

Blake's oxygen tanks shuddered
as he took deep lungful after deep lungful of air. The speech had
taken it out of him and Vic wondered how Blake had held onto his
territory for so long in this state. Maybe that was the answer, he
mused, just take Blake's territory and then squeeze the other two
out of the middle...

"Cards on the table..." said Crow. "Fine. I'll tell you
what I know. There's a new police task force, all out-of-towners,
brought in to clean up the city. They were sniffing around my
operations for at least six months before the rest of you even knew
they were here. They pulled off a few small busts, made some big
press for themselves, then hit a brick wall of red tape and limited
manpower when they wanted to go for anything bigger. King still
owns the real cops, and the real cops
don't kick down door one
without his say so."

"So want went wrong,
Chinatown?" grunted Keane.

"You know what went wrong,"
replied Crow, ignoring the insult temporarily. "They got help.
Special help."

"The guy in the mask," rasped
Blake. "The one who's been hitting us... ever since."

Silence fell around the table
again. Cards on the table was one thing, but nobody was going to be
first to admit how badly they had been hit. They were still sharks,
after all.

"My boys say it ain't one guy,"
said Keane, breaking the silence. "They reckon it's the cops. One
of them put on a mask one night, did what they thought needed to be
done, and now they're all in on it. Vigilante cops, no more angels
than we are. This is just a turf war, boys, the badges don't make
it special."

"So how come these guys are
still breathing?" asked Vic.

"Like I said," replied Crow.
"They've made some good press. The whole thing, this "strike
squad", it's happening all over. New York, Washington, Chicago,
here. New president got in on a law and order platform, said he was
cleaning up one state at a time, so every TV channel and newspaper
in the state are crawling all over these guys like they're rock
stars. We go after them direct? That's more heat than I want, and
definitely more heat than my customers want."

"Federal heat?" said Vic
derisively. "Been there."

"Presidential... heat..."
wheezed Blake. "You heard Crow, this comes from the top. The real
top. We ain't never had heat like it."

Vic steepled his fingers and
sat back, rocking his chair onto its hind legs. There was something
that none of them were saying, that maybe none of them dared say.
The shark among sharks watched the others with his cold eyes and
waited for the next droplet of blood to hit the water.

"Why ain't one of you guys turned 'em?" asked Keane. "We
all got guys in the police, even me
,
and I ain't
normally one for putting pigs on the payroll. Find what they want,
what they need, and just give it to them."

"Leverage," rasped the old man.
"It's been tried. But these guys, they're something else. My guys
have dug, and dug deep, and there's nothing. And I mean nothing.
They got no families, no girlfriends, no fucking boyfriends either.
No kids."

"Nobody's that clean," said
Crow. "You should let me try, I've got girls who can..."

"Forget it," interrupted Vic.
Crow's eyes flashed indignantly, but the inherent pecking order of
the table held sway. "Blake was bribing cops when movies were still
in black and white. If he says they're clean, they're clean."

"A crack squad of completely
clean cops..." mused Crow. "Except for when they put on masks and
burn our businesses to the ground?"

Vic shrugged. "Maybe. Or maybe
it is just one guy. Maybe the president sent him too, huh?"

Blake's oxygen tanks rattled as
he took another deep breath. "One of my guys got up close to him,"
he said. "Said he was fast, like scary fast. Used a knife, cut my
guy's fingers clean off and tossed him through a plate glass
window. Said he stood over him afterwards, watched him. Talked to
himself the whole time."

"So the guy's a nutjob, so
what?" muttered Keane.

"You don't get it," hissed
Blake. "My guy? He's been with me twenty years. I've known him
since I was a kid. He ain't never been scared of nothing, but he
was scared of this guy. And I mean real scared. Last I heard, he
was still pissing the bed and sleeping with the light on."

"Maybe you need better guys,
old man."

Blake lurched forward in his
seat. "You little Irish shit! I ought to rain down... rain down...
enough pain on you to..."

"Leave him, Blake," interrupted
Vic, standing up to talk over the old man's coughs and splutters.
"And you, Keane, you shut up now! You run protection in Southside?
I can put the word out with one phone call that your protection
ain't worth shit, that you ain't worth shit, and you'll be back
mugging hookers for beer money by Friday."

Keane opened his mouth, then
closed it. Crow let out a small snigger. The shark among sharks had
spoken. Vic had never uttered a threat that he could not carry out
ten-fold, and they all knew it.

"That's what this is all about
anyway, right, protection?" Vic continued. "Well fuck, guys, if
you're all too scared to say it then I will... what the hell is
King going to do about this?"

And there is was. The thing
that none of them spoke about. Shark or not, killer whale or not,
that was the one thing that you didn't talk about. Shark or whale,
you didn't call out King. Compared to you, King was the god-damned
ocean that you swam in. The boss of bosses, a criminal elite so
elevated that he owned the cops, he owned the media, he owned
senators and governors, and he did it all in plain sight. Cane King
had been a household name his whole life, the heir apparent to the
King fortune. Charismatic, powerful, and deadly. A celebrity
criminal, the kind they didn't make any more. He was the guy the
sharks paid for protection, for license to operate in what he
called "his" city. They all had "King's Men" on their crew and they
all paid up to the King.

For a moment, there was no
sound in the slaughterhouse except for the shallow hiss of Blake's
oxygen bottles. Vic realised he was standing over the others, but
held his ground. An old man, a pimp, and a thug... how the hell had
it come to pass that these were all Vic had for contemporaries?

And that was when it happened.
A slow hand clap that echoed around the kill floor, bouncing off
the cold metal walls, and seemed to fill the place like thunder.
Vic, Blake, Keane, and Crow all looked up.

There, on the gantry above
them, looking down on the kill floor, was Cane King.

The warehouse looked just like
all the others. It was supposed to, because the warehouse was
hiding in plain sight. A lot of meat came in and out of the docks
and a lot of it moved at night, so nobody paid much attention to a
warehouse that kept the lights on and had vans and trucks coming
and going in the small hours. No paid much attention to the rank
odour that oozed from the place, the paper and board covered
windows, or the odd noises that you could hear in those rare times
when the docks were truly silent.

Each to their own, right? That
was the code of the docks. Nobody ask, nobody tell, and everyone go
along. Unless you were Owen White and Rosa Blind. If you were Owen
White and Rosa Blind then you were cops, and it was your job to
notice warehouses like that warehouse, and have the uncontrollable
urge to kick the door in.