Staying Out

CHAPTER 1-2

Jimmy’s heart pounded uncomfortably against his shirt. “I’m sorry Mr Dewar. It’s just that it ain’t quite so easy as I thought to raise the cash right now…” He was aware of Dewar’s heavy face, devoid of expression. “Sharon’s expecting another kid. We have to pay a hundred quid a week on that pokey flat. You know how it is,” his voice trailed helplessly beneath the other man’s stony stare.

“‘Course I do, Jimmy Boy,” but Dewar’s tone carried very little sympathy. “Got kids of me own. ‘Course they’re all grown up now. Davy’s my youngest, coming up fourteen, but I’ve been there. Only some of us got ambitions and others ain’t.” Jimmy was well aware of the meaning behind his words, the ill concealed mockery behind them.

“So you don’t have anything for your Uncle Ed then?”

Jimmy hedged. “Look, I… I’m sorry. I know I already owe mon…”

“Four hundred and fifty quid at the last count,” Dewar interrupted him harshly. “So what have you come here for if it ain’t to pay me?”

“I was hoping you’d see your way clear to upping the loan for me, that’s all,” Jimmy dared, clearing his throat uneasily. “S… say another hundred? I’ll pay it back, I promise.”

Dewar’s eyes blazed so ferociously, Jimmy observed the whites almost disappearing into the lids, his heart thundering accordingly. Sweat draining from every pore at the audacity of what he had asked, Jimmy wiped the palms of his hands down the hip of his jeans.

“You’ve gotta nerve, boy, asking me for more fuckin’ readies when you still owe me four hundred and fifty. You ain’t even paid me back a penny of that dough yet. What do you think I am kiddo, a fuckin’ bleedin’ charity?”

To avoid the fat man’s penetrating blue eyes, Jimmy stared morosely at his broken blackened finger nails, telling their own story of too many lengthy hours working on the bike. “Look, I just thought, that was all. I know I can’t pay you back right now.”

“So why don’t you sell that heap of metal you call a motorbike?” Dewar leered at him. Throwing his head back and laughing savagely, mockingly. “It might fetch you fifty for scrap.”

Sell the Kawasaki? His last vestige of transport? His beloved bike? So, it well past its best, unable as he was to get spares, it was all he had now. He dealt Dewar a particularly poignant look. It failed to wash with the merciless gangster, of course.

“But that’s impossible! I can’t sell the bike.” Jimmy winced at the humbled tone present in his voice.

“Then, Jimmy Boy,” Dewar sprang his heavy bulk from the chair with amazing agility for a man of his stature, “you pay me five hundred and fifty by the end of the month!” Reaching into a side drawer of his desk, Dewar extracted 20 five-pound notes and tossed the money across the polished desk in Jimmy’s direction. He slyly watched the young man determinedly stuff the money into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“Thanks, Mr Dewar. I will pay it back soon, honest.” he murmured gratefully.

Jimmy moved to the paint flaked door quickly before Dewar changed his mind. But Dewar barred his way, his massive frame providing little means of escape for Jimmy’s contrastingly slim build. Dewar savoured his words with a particular relish.

“Oh you’ll do that, Jimmy Boy. Like I said, by the end of the month, which goes to show how pretty lenient your Uncle Ed can be, ’cos if you don’t” he paused, his voice hardening ominously, “Mr Chadwell ain’t gonna like it one little bit. And if Mr C gets upset you’re liable to find yourself in hospital with that pretty boy face of yours cut to ribbons. Even your old man, if you had one that is, won’t be able to recognise you beneath all the bandages you’ll be needing.”

Louise O’Donnell entertained the initial swing of colour to her powdered cheeks the moment ex-detective superintendent Tom Reynolds draped the skein of genuine pearls around her neck. At 52 she had, to all intents and purposes, settled down to life as a widow. To see Patrick O’Donnell dead these four years from drink induced liver disease had come as no surprise to Louise. If Tom had entered her life whilst her Irish husband had still been living, there would have been little chance of getting married. A Catholic divorce was positively out of the question for Louise.

“They’re lovely,” Louise enthused “but they must have cost you a packet!”

Grey eyes twinkled in the spade bearded face. Tom Reynolds, looking older than his 61 years, wore his hair closely cropped to his bullet shaped head as almost to be shaven. In spite of his rather overweight frame he was a man who liked to dress well. Saville Row suits, expensive Gucci shoes, Harris tweeds being the order of the day. His first encounter with Louise O’Donnell had, surprisingly at least for a homely Cockney woman like Louise, been at a public art gallery. Louise, having forgotten her umbrella, had been inside sheltering from the rain. Tom Reynolds, an art connoisseur, had been there to view. Louise had literally bumped into him. They got chatting. Both were from entirely different backgrounds. Tom’s family heralded from a long line of both police officers and soldiers. Despite this, on the spur of the moment Tom asked Louise to lunch.

How much longer could she continue calling herself ‘Donnelly’? Or how soon would it be before Tom put two and two together and clocked the woman he was dating as the mother of two blag merchants involved in the murder of a security guard four and a half years ago?

“The pearls look lovely with the white silk,” he complimented. The white silk dress accentuated the slender curves of her newly slimmed down figure.

That afternoon it had hurt badly to turn Christina away. To disown her because of her own need to cultivate her relationship with Tom. Not only that, Christy was bad news. It was unforgivable, what had happened to that poor security guard.

Lou reflected on the day Vic Simmons, then Detective Sergeant Simmons, accompanied by two other plain clothes officers had burst into her living room. Steve was there, so was Christy. They were all sitting down to a quiet evening meal. Only the merest flash of an ID card from one of the officers indicated any respect for their impromptu entrance. Two of the officers, one of them Simmons, thrust drawn pistols in her son and daughter’s direction. Louise gasped, observing both of them freeze momentarily before Christy leaped up from her chair, green eyes darting about frantically for a possible exit. Steve pulled a flick knife from his jeans, springing the blade in the face of one of the officers in the hopeless endeavour to resist arrest. Hopeless because the officer grappled for the knife after throwing Steve to the floor. The other policeman blocked Christy’s chosen escape attempt through an open window. She spat like a wild cat at the police, demanding her rights, protesting her innocence.

Simmons read them their rights after accusing Christy and Steve of taking part in an armed raid on the security truck in which a guard was blasted to death by a pump action shotgun. At the time it was not properly known who had fired the shot. Neither gang member it seemed wanted to incriminate Christy or Morelli in the guard’s murder. Since Steve was wheelsman he was immediately exonerated from blame. He’d also insisted that he had not been armed during the raid. The other two gang members, Martin Lucas and Billy Sherrin, although unwilling to take the rap for murder, were not prepared to own up that Morelli had carried it out so cold bloodedly either. Lucas testified to being unarmed during the raid, Sherrin to carrying a .38 pistol. Only Christy and Morelli had carried shotguns. Tyler’s companion, the other security guard, testified in court that the slimly built person he had at first mistakenly believed to have been a youth, but was in reality a girl, had issued several warnings throughout the raid whilst she held the guards at gunpoint, something about getting their f*****g heads blown off if they attempted any heroics.

That same evening Rick Morelli was cornered in the rundown caravan located near the docks and belonging to an old man named Arnie Rosenbaum. A shoot-out ensued with Morelli discharging a Magnum revolver at the police, injuring two officers. Apparently Morelli had overturned an oil lamp, or a police bullet shattered it. No-one really seemed to know.

“I’ve already booked our table for tonight, we mustn’t be late Lou,” Tom interrupted her uneasy thoughts and Lou shivered suddenly. Immediate concern crossed his bearded features. “You all right Lou?” In answer she dealt him a tentative smile. “Now that I’m done up like a dog’s dinner I can’t afford to be anything else but all right, can I!” she said with an enforced attempt at cheerfulness.

Rick Morelli was alive, his handsome bronzed Italian features suffusing a lascivious smile at sight of her naked form lying on the bed. He had never appeared so apparently virile or attentive, his hard hot body coved hers, the ejaculation flowed inside her.

“The Filth thinks you’re dead.” She heard her own voice, an echo of wild laughter underlining her words. He laughed too. Throwing back his thick dark mane of shoulder length hair he moved in to kiss her lips.

“I told you no prison can hold Rick Morelli. That goes for death too, babes. The Filth? What do the motherfuckers know? They think I was killed in the fire. They oughta know they can’t kill me that easy.”

His lips burned beneath hers, Christy drowning in his kisses, curling her arms around his neck passionately, threading her long red fingernails in his profusion of thick black hair.

Suddenly, inexplicably, he was no longer there. The room unexpectedly strangely empty left her disappointed. Alternatively Christy imagined she could still hear the sounding echo of his laughter, disembodied and mocking. Rick wasn’t dead. He had spent half his life outwitting the law, so why shouldn’t he cheat the Ultimate Destructor as well?

Sweat beaded her face behind the close fitting balaclava hood rolled down over it. The sawn off shotgun gripped rigidly between black gloved fingers tracking each and every movement of the two white faced security guards in the van, both guards shaking badly, hands escalating in sheet terror, Christy openly aware of Rick Morelli’s tall frame beside her, his handsome face concealed behind the balaclava mask, spitting orders and threats from the narrowed mouth slit. Seconds later the pump action shotgun exploded despite the fact that neither of the guards had made a move. A ripple of crimson fire accompanied by a rapid volley of bullets, and the guard’s dark blue uniform swiftly flowered red, a gaping hole erupting crater-like in the centre of his chest, dead level with the heart region, blood spurting reminiscent of some terrible scarlet fountain. She had not seen so much blood, ever. Another bullet jerked the guard deliberately off his feet, slamming him back like a lifeless doll against the metal interior of the van. Another shot followed another, deafening echoes disrupting that terrible awesome stillness, Rick pumping the shotgun harder and harder until blood streaked the guard’s smooth skinned features unrecognisable. A gooey mess that she imagined to be bone and tissue admixed with his brains spilling out of another gaping crater at the side of his head.

A woman was screaming hysterically. Christy yelled for her to stop, realising she had been the one who had been screaming all along, jerking awake abruptly to discover the fine lawn nightdress she had borrowed from Linda to be saturated raggedly in her own perspiration despite her hands shaking clammily.

The door opened quietly. His dark hair unkempt and awry about his head from sleep, Barry moved into the room, securing the belt of his brown bathrobe about his waist.