Jessie Keane - Lawless

But she wasn’t there.

She was gone.

Wendy Metcalfe and her boyfriend Sammy Spears came out of the pub. They were off home, get a Chinese on the way, and now this was all a bit inconvenient because there was this drunk lying there waiting to trip someone up. A person could break their fucking neck over the inebriated bastard.

‘Hey!’ said Sammy, poking Kit with his shoe.

‘Is he pissed?’ asked Wendy, peering impatiently at the man on the pavement.

It was raining out here and rain flattened her hair, she hated getting her hair wet, it was nightmare hair, thin and fine, her dad’s hair not her mum’s, sod her luck, and she didn’t have an umbrella because they’d said blue skies on the forecast and of course that was bollocks, as per usual. It was also pretty dark, only the light from the street lamps and the pub windows to illuminate anything, that and the swishing intermittent lighthouse sweep of passing car headlights.

‘Of course he’s pissed,’ said Sammy in disgust.

Wendy peered closer. ‘There’s blood on his shirt. Isn’t that blood?’

Sammy had a look just to humour her. ‘Shit! Looks like it. D’you reckon he’s been in a fight, someone’s knifed him?’

‘Dunno.’ There was a lot of blood. Wendy looked at the man’s face; his eyes were closed. Maybe he was not drunk but dead, who knew? She withdrew quickly with a shudder. ‘I’m going back in, phone 999,’ she decided. At least then she wouldn’t be standing here in the rain, getting her fucking hair ruined.

When Bianca got home in a state of hysteria, babbling that she’d done it, she’d killed him, Bella phoned her favourite, her Vittore, who showed up an hour later with Fabio in tow.

‘She says she shot Kit Miller,’ said Bella, as Bianca sat hunched over a glass of brandy at the kitchen table.

‘Where’s the gun?’ asked Vittore.

Bella motioned to Bianca’s bag, there on the table.

Fabio took up the bag, opened it. There was the gun, a.22, a dainty little thing but deadly at close range.

‘I’ll get rid of it,’ said Fabio. ‘And the bag’s got to go too. Residue.’

Fabio left the room. Vittore and Bella sat down at the table and looked at Bianca.

‘Was he dead?’ asked Vittore.

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Bianca, and started to cry again. She’d hated him but she’d loved him too, and now he was gone. He’d deceived her, lied to her, probably snatched Tito away from her, but she loved him.

‘How did any of this happen?’ asked Vittore.

Bianca told him in halting sentences punctuated by crying fits, about Kit coming into Dante’s, calling himself Tony Mobley. She couldn’t tell Vittore all of it, of their affair, of how passionate and deep and fiery it had been, that it had been love, or at least she had thought so.

‘Who saw you together tonight?’ he asked, scratching at his bandaged hand. It was healing, and it itched like crazy.

‘She’s tired, let her-’ started Bella.

‘ Who? ’ shouted Vittore.

Bianca flinched. ‘People in the restaurant. Gino’s. The waiter. I don’t think anyone actually noticed us.’

Vittore looked at his adopted sister. Bianca never passed unnoticed anywhere; she was far too striking for that. But maybe they could scrape their way out of this.

‘We were near a pub, there was a jukebox playing very loud. No one would have heard the… the shot. And there was no one about, it was raining.’

‘That was lucky,’ said Vittore. He was thinking fast. It would be even luckier if Miller was pronounced dead at the scene. If not, things could get a little untidy. The bastard might recover, might name Bianca as the shooter. That outcome had to be prevented at all costs. He’d get some of the boys out, check the hospitals.

‘She’s very upset,’ said Bella, patting Bianca’s hand.

‘I should have cleared this up sooner myself,’ said Vittore. ‘Then Bianca would never have got involved with any of this. You see, Mama? Sometimes action is necessary.’

Bella nodded grimly. This was what she had been trying to avoid. A child of hers or of Ruby Darke’s ending up on a slab. But despite all her best efforts, she’d been unable to prevent it.

‘Have a bath, Bianca. Scrub your fingernails in case there’s cordite on your hands. But first bag up all the clothes you were wearing tonight and give them to me – I’ll burn them.’ Vittore eyed his sister dispassionately. ‘You did good. Tomorrow, you go back down to Southampton and you stay there. Don’t worry about it. That bastard deserves to fry in hell.’

The ambulance came, blue lights flashing, siren wailing, the medics piling out into the rainy night: a crowd gathered, interested, as people always are, in death and disaster. They watched the medics check to see if Kit still had a pulse – which amazingly he did – then they checked his blood pressure.

The onlookers watched them give him oxygen as the police arrived, and Wendy stepped forward and told them she and Sammy had found him out here on the pavement. As the medics attached an IV line and fastened an oxygen mask over Kit’s face, Wendy said that no, she didn’t know the man, Sammy didn’t either, they’d just come out of the pub and nearly fallen over him lying there on the pavement, that was all.

‘Someone stab the poor bastard?’ asked Sammy.

‘It looks like a bullet wound so far as we can ascertain, sir,’ said the policeman. Another one came up, had a look at Kit.

‘Jesus!’ he said.

‘You know him?’ asked his partner.

‘Looks like Kit Miller – local businessman.’ The officer knew Kit. He knew Kit’s boys. He fucking well ought to, he was on their payroll.

The medics were wrapping the victim in blankets, lifting him carefully onto a gurney, strapping him in, loading him into the back of the ambulance. There was blood on the spot where he’d lain, but now the rain started to wash the pavement clean. Soon, it would be as if he’d never been there at all.

‘We’ll need a statement,’ said the first policeman to Wendy as the medics slammed the ambulance doors and the siren started up.

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Wendy, thinking that this was what it was like, scum on the streets these days. People getting themselves shot, for Christ’s sake.

It was indeed Kit Miller who nearly got himself wasted that night. There was a driver’s licence in his coat pocket and a handful of belongings – a wallet stuffed with more money than most of A&E had seen in a year, comb, a red card with Dante’s emblazoned across it in gold, a handkerchief, not much else.

‘An inch to the right and he’d be in G4,’ said the surgeon as he fished around for the bullet that had smashed through Kit’s chest wall before being deflected by one of his ribs, just missing his heart. It had embedded itself in his upper left arm, tearing an artery in the process. G4 was the morgue, down in the bowels of the building.

‘Clamp,’ he barked, and the nurse hurried forward, stemmed the bleeding. ‘Ah, look. Here it is.’ The surgeon held a tiny pellet of silver in his bloody gloved hand. ‘Small calibre, you see? Any bigger and it would have killed him right then and there.’

‘Blood pressure’s falling,’ said a nurse, and alarms sounded as Kit went into cardiac arrest.

PC Halligan, the second policeman to show up at the scene of the incident, put through a call to a number he knew very well; Rob answered. Within fifteen minutes, Rob had phoned Ruby, dressed, and was on his way to the hospital.

‘Can you tell me how Kit Miller’s doing?’ asked Rob when he got to the hospital and stood at the receptionist’s desk.