Private London (Private 4)

‘That’s not me.’ Brendan gestured at the damning evidence.

‘You know anyone else who’s enough of a dipshit to get a tattoo of a snake doodled on his wing-wang?’ I asked.

Brendan Ferres looked at me. The colour had come back into his face now. He was flushed with it. A dark angry red.

‘Fuck this!’ he said and charged at me.

Like I said, he was quick.

I swung the baseball bat, but he got to me before I could finish the swing. Grabbing me in a bear hug and pushing me backwards to smash against the wall.

He locked his arms around me and I held back just as tightly. He was grunting with fury and I couldn’t shake him loose.

‘You sure you want to do this?’ Del Rio asked me, gesturing with his gun to let me know he could put an end to things.

I couldn’t speak. Damn it, I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. I shook my head and rammed my knee upwards into Ferres’s crotch. He moved sideways as I did, grunted but didn’t loosen his grip. I dipped my head and then butted upwards, catching him under the chin. His grip loosened. I stepped back and drove the end of the baseball bat hard into his solar plexus.

He doubled over, making a painful gurgling sound. I stepped back to take a breath or two into my own pained chest, then swung the baseball bat as hard as I could into his left knee.

Ferres crashed to the floor. His face purple now as he sucked in air, trying to hold his hands to his shattered knee as if he could piece the fractured pieces back together. He looked up at me, a squealing sound issuing from between his clenched teeth.

‘Why don’t you finish him?’

I turned round. Rebecca Allen was standing behind me, watching her fiancé writhe on the floor in agony.

‘I’m done here,’ I said.

‘You don’t finish him, he’s going to come find you and kill you,’ said Del Rio.

He was right. I had killed before, God knew. I had killed that very night. Put a round of high-velocity ammunition into the forehead of a beautiful woman. There was nothing beautiful about Brendan Ferres. Nothing redeemable about him as a human being. The world would be a far better place without his breath in it. I pictured him swinging the same bat that I was now holding into Chloe’s head. And I pictured myself doing the same to his. Cracking it open like a coconut.

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Instead I let my arm go limp, resting the head of the baseball bat on the floor.

I turned to Del Rio. ‘I’m done here,’ I said.

‘I’m not,’ said Rebecca Allen, and took the baseball bat from me.

I looked over at her father. ‘We good?’ I asked.

‘We’re good,’ he said.

I nodded to Del Rio who touched his fingers to his forehead, tipped them as a kind of salute to Rebecca, and then followed me out of the door.

The door closed mercifully before the screaming started up in earnest again.

I didn’t think we would be seeing Brendan Ferres any more. I didn’t think I’d lose much sleep over it, either.

An hour and half later I was having three broken ribs checked over in the hospital.

As the doctor stepped away Chloe came into the treatment room and into my arms.

If there were tears in my eyes it was probably because she hugged me a little too hard.

Chapter 112

Morning. One week later.