Steve Garron looked through the steamed-up window of his family saloon out into the rain-soaked streets, blinking his eyes blearily. The car sat idling, the familiar chug-chug of the old engine working underneath the dented hood, still covered with a layer of faded blue metallic paint like the remnant of the 1980’s that it was. One headlight stretched some thirty feet in front of the car, the lashing rain drops falling through its beam to impact the puddles and tarmac of the old back-alley street. He disconnected his seat belt, easing himself back in the over-comfortable, incredibly well-worn driving seat and rested his eyes. Just for a moment, he told himself. Just one little moment, God please.
He thought back to his life before... before all this; before the sodden darkness, before the grey walls and the grimy floors... And before that fucking shop. Inhaling, he could almost smell the smoke of the cigarettes he used to smoke but instead, he found his senses assailed by the stench of cheap perfume, mould, old fast food and spilled, stale coffee. Exhaling, he fought the desire to scream in abject frustration, the feeling building within him but then suddenly dissipating with nothing more than a whimper that seemed to come from deep within his soul. Shame overwhelmed him.
“Shit, Stevey, this is really not going anywhere.”
The whore removed her head from Steve’s lap, wiping her mouth with the back of a dirty hand. Her ruby lipstick was smeared slightly onto her chin and cheek and her mascara had run from having to be stood out in the rain before she had got into Steve’s car. She clawed at her frizzy black hair with her false nails before adjusting her sagging breasts underneath her off-white crop top.
“Your little man just won’t sit up tonight, huh? That’s the third time this week, Stevey. I can’t give you no more freebies. Jason will beat me black and blue if I don’t get somethin’ from this. It’s been twenty minutes....”
Steve opened his eyes slowly, taking his time to focus on the haggard, drug-addled face of Mo Baggs, the busiest hooker this side of East Rhodes. He felt sad, ashamed and resentful, all at once.
“Get the fuck out of my car, Mo.”
Annoyance flickered across Mo’s eyes and her mouth turned up into a little sneer as she realised that Steve wasn’t about to pay her a damn thing for having her mouth around his flaccid member for twenty minutes. Twenty freakin’ minutes, what the hell is wrong with me?
“Oh I get you now, Stevey. You think I do this for fucking fun? You think I want your tiny prick in this beautiful mouth? Damn you to hell, you fucking freak! Don’t come calling round here no more! None of the bitches in this street would treat you half as good as I have!”
Steve sighed and rubbed a hand over his face, gripping it tightly until one of his knuckles cracked under the pressure. When he removed his hand, the white finger marks on his face turned back to a shade of pink slowly as circulation was restored. His green eyes bored into the prostitute and Mo visibly quailed under the glare.
“I said...
get...
the fuck...
OUT!”
Screaming the last word at her, Steve gripped the steering wheel, shaking involuntarily as his face contorted in rage. Mo had never got out of a car so damn fast in all her born days, leaving the door wide open as she fled shrieking down a side street. The rain began to lash into the car through the open door as Steve stared after the fleeing whore. Reaching over, he slammed the door shut before punching the steering wheel, hard. The horn sounded loudly in the back street, seemingly bouncing off the walls and adding to Steve’s dark mood. He gritted his teeth and looked over his shoulder, belting himself in before reversing out of the alley and heading for home.
Cruising slowly through the adverse weather conditions, it took Steve some twenty minutes to get home, parking his old car outside the front of the tenement block before stepping out into the rain and walking up the concrete steps to the front door. Some dumb fuck left it open again, Steve thought to himself. Is it any wonder the crime rate round here is through the friggin’ ceiling?
Steve would know. He used to be a Police officer himself, a detective no less. Fifteen years on the force, fifteen years where he gave his all, body and soul to the job that gave him next to diddly squat in return. Reams of paperwork, endless hours working in half light, fluorescent light or no fucking light at all, typing away, scribbling in a notebook or listening to the general public telling him how THEY were the victim and how THEY paid HIS wages.
Well not anymore. Steve jacked it in before the job jacked him in. Up on some trumped up disciplinary charges for allegedly helping himself to a few ounces of coke at a crime scene, he was looking at an end to his detective career and a return to uniform if not the loss of his job completely. Better to leave before all that, to keep his pension intact. Of course, his wife didn’t see it that way. She saw him as a deadbeat: Deadbeat husband, deadbeat dad. Shirley fled with the kids to her mothers, and then promptly took him to cleaners when she decided to divorce him on the grounds of facing “irreconcilable differences”. Yeah, Steve thought, irreconcilable if you mean fucking your gym instructor every day whilst your husband is at work, then complaining when he ain’t able to fund your gym membership when he loses his job.
Steve turned to drink after that. He made a new friend in Mister Jack and the two had been inseparable ever since. Losing his home, Steve had moved to East Rhodes and managed to land a flat in one of the 1960’s tenement blocks with all the other deadbeats. Steve, though, didn’t see it that way. After all, Steve had the shop. That fucking shop.
Jem Boon had been one of the massive varieties of old folk living in the same block as Steve. He ran a junk shop that he had named “Old Curiosity” and he’d been running that shop for forty years. He had never made a bean from it but Steve had found an odd comfort in helping the old timer run it. Jem had been ninety-five when Steve met him and a damned heavy smoker. He had a habit of coughing up black tar but swore blind that smoking was the reason he had lived so long. Of course, it was also the reason he spent his days in a wheelchair after he had both legs removed when suffering from DVT. That alone was enough to get Steve to give up smoking. Steve had known Jem for only three months when the old man popped his clogs and was found dead in his chair in the only working lift in the block. Some local kids found him like that but it was several hours before the police were made aware because the kids thought it would be great to wheel his body out to the skate park and use him to jump over on their bikes and skateboards. Fucking animals.
Jem left “Old Curiosity” to Steve in his will, a fact that shocked Steve and shocked him even more when he saw the state of the books. Jem evidently had never filed a tax return and had never declared an income, registering the premises as a hobby rather than a business. He was technically in breach of commercial regulations governing the usage of the property but if the council didn’t care, then neither did Jem. But the books weren’t Steve’s only problem with the place. He was confident he could scratch a living selling the odds and sods that were stored in the expansive warehouse out back to passing trade, but it was the protection racket in East Rhodes that would drive him out of business.
Griff Bolton took a mere three days after Steve re-opened the store following Jem’s death to come knocking, demanding payment and making his threats on behalf of some Under-baron or other. Steve had never taken much interest in the dealings of the Underworld, even during his time as a detective, working instead in vice and using it to meet his own ends, to his eternal shame. He’d never taken those drugs; he knew that much, but Jonny Del Soro, that sack of shit that was Steve’s sergeant on the vice squad had clearly set him up. He wouldn’t have put it past Jonny to stitch up any other detective on the team if it meant getting ahead himself. He was more cut-throat than half the scumbags they nicked week in and week out.
But Griff was something else. He was a huge, muscular man with a shaven head and a tendency to foam at the mouth when speaking, if you could call it that. Fists the size of hams, tattoo’s covering his brawny arms and a barrel chest that simply served to reaffirm his physical dominance, Griff was not a man for Steve to mess with. He saw that, but resented handing over any of his takings to this thug. If it meant his shop was safe from looters, burglars and shoplifters then so much the better, but that clearly wasn’t happening. His calls to the local Police fell on deaf ears. “Another shoplifting, Mister Garron? We’ll record it for you. Here’s your crime number.” Fat lot of fucking good that was when he had no insurance to claim off and no known value to anything that was stolen.
Steve climbed the stairs of the tenement block, refusing to use the lift ever since Jem had died in it. When he reached his flat door, he unlocked it and stepped inside into the gloom. Shutting the door behind him, he bolted it top and bottom before leaning a timber post against it and bracing it against a concrete pillar that rose unceremoniously out of the floor to disappear into the cracked ceiling above like a tower of depression all of its own. Dumping his car keys on the moth-eaten sofa he strode through to the kitchen, wearily, kicking off his shoes and shrugging out of his faded brown trench coat, a remnant from his policing past. It fell wetly to the floor. Reaching for a bottle of Jack on the kitchen side, Steve thought about getting a glass but then eyed the stack of dirty dishes, cups and glasses by the sink and decided against it, choosing instead to take a deep draught straight from the bottle. Walking into his bedroom, he lay on the bed and looked up at the ceiling, cris-crossed with stress fractures and old artex, he found the lines blurring the more he drank until finally he slipped into drunken oblivion.
Steve woke from his sleep, gasping for breath. The tiny, damp bedroom he slept in was cold and dark, illuminated only by the flickering streetlamp outside his window. Despite the cold he had been sweating in his sleep and he could feel it beading on his upper lip. He felt like he was having a heart attack and lurched to his feet unsteadily, fighting for breath and wrenching open the rotting wooden window in his room, looking out into the street below and sucking in a great lungful of cold, semi-fresh night air. His vision swam as he fought to slow his breathing before finally mastering his physical self once more. Looking back at the bed, he noticed a patch of blood where his head had been. Reaching a hand up to his face, he found more of it clinging dryly to the bristles on his chin. Frowning and suddenly worried, he turned to the small, dirty mirror on the wall beside his chest of drawers and as the streetlamp outside flickered on for a few brief seconds Steve saw that he had been bleeding from the eyes, the twin reddish-brown lines running from both corners of his eyes and down over the sides of his cheeks onto his chin.
In the street below Steve’s window, something awoke.
To be continued
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