Tweedledum gurgles like a blocked drain and collapses. His face mimics a traffic light, turning red, amber and green. He’s out of the game.
Tweedledee looks at his prone partner. Confusion is writ large across his Boat Race as if he’s attempting a junior crossword. He raises an eyebrow, grunts, and telegraphs a haymaker. I step inside the swinging fist and lift my knee into his groin. The grunt turns into a groan as the wind leaves his sails and he doubles over, comically cross-eyed. Then I kick his kneecap, hearing it pop. I wear Doc Martin steel toecap boots so it must’ve hurt. Tweedledee yelps like a schoolgirl as I grab his wrist, twist his arm sharply and spin him around. His pug ugly mug French kisses the entrance door, smudging badly spelt graffiti with claret.
Tweedledee is gonna be even uglier when he wakes up.
“C’mon,” I say.
Lucy holds my hand as we run to my Ford. The two hoods are out of action but I need to put distance between them and us before I start to ask questions.
So I gun the Ford’s engine, burning serious rubber and do just that.
By the time I get Lucy to my tiny bachelor flat her eyes are red from weeping. She sits on my sofa. Her face is pale. She’s petrified and as fragile as delicate porcelain. A fury towards the people who’ve done this twists my guts.
I get a bottle and two glass tumblers from a cabinet in the kitchen. Take them through to the living room and pour generous measures of malt.
“Here, sip this slowly,” I say.
I sit next to her on the sofa, drink some whisky and listen to her tale.
Her father’s death is a raw wound. She has no idea who killed him or why. She tells me after his demise she’d found a note from Archie saying that I could be trusted in the event of anything untoward happening.
Lucy gives me a smile for the first time. “Dad used to say Jonny Hustler, he likes to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares.”
It’s my turn to smile. That sounded like the old bugger.
“How long have those goons been harassing you?” I ask.
“They’ve been calling for the last few days.” Lucy blows her nose on a small, monogramed handkerchief. “I was at my wits end with worry. Then this afternoon they forced their way in.”
Lucy reminds me of my own estranged daughter. The Met always came first and my family paid a high price. I know I have to help Lucy; if only to exorcise a few personal demons.
“Did they say what they wanted?”
She shakes her head.
“Did they say where they were taking you?”
“No,” Lucy dabs her nose with the handkerchief again, thinking… ”But I did overhear one of them mention something when he was talking on his mobile.”
“Go on,” I say.
“The Black Mamba Club.”
I pour myself two fingers of whisky. Sit back and light a B &H, thinking things through. I was going to need another motor, clean hardware and a pair of balls the size of grapefruits.
I’d arrested Sylvester Pope on numerous occasions. He’s a career criminal with a vicious reputation. Sylvester is notorious, ruthless and as slippery as an eel. Each time I’d felt his expensive tailored collar a fast-talking lawyer found a legal loophole for him to slip through. The prerequisite of a successful gangster is highly paid legal expertise that’s as bent as a nine-bob note.
But this time it was just me and him and I was operating outside the law and its asshole regulations.
The Black Mamba Club is a glitzy West End casino and Sylvester’s centre of operations. Luckily for me viciousness and ruthlessness has led to over confidence and carelessness.
Security at The Black Mamba Club is sloppy. The alarm system is outdated and piss-poor. Before dawn breaks over the capital I break into the basement through the delivery entrance and quietly make my way up to the living quarters. Exhilaration and adrenalin flushes through my veins. I feel alive, taking the bad guys down while the due’s still on; just like the good old days.
In a dimly lit hallway I wait, as patient as a saint, as still as a statue, while Joe Vincent, Pope’s master of arms and enforcer takes a four thirty a.m. pee.
Through the half open bathroom door and jamb I watch Vincent, a steroid popping bodybuilder with a tattooed body shaped like a sparkplug. He yawns, squeezes out a fart and stoops to pull up his big white baggy Y-Fronts. I ease the door open with my Doc Martin boot. The door hinges creak and as Vincent turns towards the sound I club him across his close-cropped head. Two quick blows with the truncheon in my gloved right hand: Thwack! Thwack!
The fat lady sings her song for Joe. He slumps and falls off his throne. I lower him onto the tiled bathroom floor and pull a length of nylon rope from my backpack. Within a few minutes I have him trussed up like a turkey ready for Christmas. As I shut the karzie door and continue along the hallway the irony is not lost on me. The feared, big Joe Vincent caught with his pants down.
I switch on a bedside lamp. Sylvester Pope rouses from his slumber with a start. Not surprising really. I’m a big angry bastard and pointing a Smith & Wesson.38 revolver.
“Jesus Christ,” Pope hisses.
Lizard eyes blaze. Pope raises himself on one elbow and the king size duvet falls away revealing a mass of grey chest hair. Stomach muscle turning to flab sags above the waistband of his boxers. His washboard stomach is washed up. Sylvester has been enjoying a touch too much of the good life.
“Sylvester.” I stick the.38 into his mush. “Tell me everything you know, and I mean everything, about Archie Knox.”
Lizard eyes give me the stone-eye.
I crack him across the mouth with the barrel of the.38. I’m not taking prisoners and need to loosen his tongue sharpish.
He curses and drips blood onto the expensive Egyptian cotton sheets.
“You’re not the law anymore, Hustler.” Pope spits broken teeth and, “Your Sweeney Todd days are long gone.”
I place the muzzle of the.38 on his forehead. His eyes grow big. “Not the law, Pope but judge and jury all rolled into one.” My finger caresses the trigger.
He cracks, starts to blub and spills the beans. They always do.
Pope denies anything to do with Archie’s gruesome demise. He throws me a curve ball saying Archie had recently pulled off an audacious robbery, way out of his league.
He’s got my attention. “Tell me more.”
“I’m talking about a half a million pounds worth of jewels,” Pope says through puffy lips. “Knox plundered the treasure from an East European geezer called Kozlov. A real heavy bastard.”
I can’t believe it. Had Archie really hit the big time?
“Then why sic your two dogs on his daughter?” Touching the shooter against his busted lips I add, “I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“I was after the bloody Tom Foolery, Hustler!” Pope pleads. “I wanted the friggin’ gems.”
That figures. This bastard would steal the gold from his late grandmother’s teeth before she’d gone cold in her coffin.
“Tell me more about this Kozlov character?”
I listen as Pope blubs and spills more beans.
The mysterious Kozlov likes to play the casino tables. Albeit badly; owing Pope a small mountain of rubles.
“I can show you.” Pope points a shaky finger. “His I-O-U is in the safe.” He spits blood and, “I only wanted what was rightfully mine.”
“Where’s the safe?” I ask.
“In the study.”
I drag Sylvester through to the study. He lifts a mirror down from the wall and I cover him with the.38 as he spins the dial of the safe backwards and forwards.
“Here it is,” he says excitedly, reaching into the safe.
Pope turns with a Browning 9mm semi-automatic silenced pistol in his right hand. Instinctively I grab his wrist and the.38 falls to the floor. We sashay together like a couple of poncy ballroom dancers, doing the hokey-cokey back and forth until I put my right foot in and stamp a Doc Martin down hard on his bare foot. The Browning coughs once. Something wet and warm splatters my cheek. Pope falls to the floor, minus half his kisser. I can tell it’s gonna take a lot of scrubbing to get the goo out of the shag-pile.