Jessie Keane: Lawless

Both men started swearing and wincing. Shit, those things hurt.

It was the death of a thousand cuts. Flesh tearing, blood dripping off him like raindrops, Fabio hauled himself out of the damned brambles, seeing the copper still in there, trapped, struggling, trying to break free. Fabio sped off as fast as he could. He found himself in what appeared to be a deserted storage depot, surrounded by lorries in for repair.

Exhausted, he ran to the nearest shed door, slid it open. He slipped inside and slumped down on the floor, sweating, bleeding, shaking with the force of the adrenaline pumping madly through his veins. Minutes passed. He got his breath back, and… then he heard it.

A police radio, crackling, coming closer.

Shit.

He had to get out of here. He had the cash stuffed down his underpants. He inched open the door. No one in sight, but they were there , he could hear the bastards.

Fabio slipped outside, looking around for a way out. Quickly he pulled himself up onto the low roof of the building and nearly messed himself when a policeman went straight by the door, talking into his radio. A couple of seconds earlier, and he’d have seen Fabio coming out.

But Fabio had been lucky. And he meant to stay that way. When he was sure the copper was out of sight, he jumped from the roof onto a wall, and then almost fell down onto the other side, which turned out to be a main road. A road he knew.

Thank you, God.

He grinned triumphantly then broke into an easy loping run, heading homeward. He was fit as well as handsome, he took care of himself. He was just a jogger now – so long as nobody looked too closely at the scrapes and the bloodstains, and the black top hid a lot of it anyway. All around him, bedlam was breaking out. Cop cars sped past, blue lights flashing, sirens wailing.

Fabio trotted on, knowing precisely where he was going. In fact, he was getting tired of this, getting away with things by the skin of his teeth, these little bank jobs. But he’d accumulated a good bit of stake money in the process. Soon he would start getting into something far more lucrative and less risky.

Fabio had been working on a plan. The smash-and-grabs at the banks had brought in cash, but he was making a name for himself and that was dangerous: it was time to quit while he was ahead. The drugs game was a much better bet. Friends in the trade had told him the figures, and they were mind-blowing. He could buy a load of coke in Colombia for three or four grand, then sell it on for thirty grand in the UK. What was not to like?

Furthermore, he had a ready market in the clubs his family already owned. He could get people in his pay circulating among the socialites, the carefree daddy’s-little-rich-girls-out-on-the-town, and they could knock it out for a thousand pounds an ounce, netting him a clear thirty or forty grand profit on every deal.

Compared to that, bank jobs paid peanuts.

No need to enlighten Vittore as to this new status quo though. Big brother might think he owned the world now that Tito had gone off to run heaven, but Fabio liked having this secret, hugging it to himself. He would make a fucking fortune and it would all be his. No way was the family taking a share.

Kit was on his way out when he saw the woman. There must have been a smash on the road; the traffic was crawling in both directions. He sat at the wheel of his Bentley, gridlocked, and stared out at the God-awful weather. It had stopped raining for now, but it was still as cold as a witch’s tit out there. He wondered when this bastard headache was going to let go. Occasionally he sipped out of the open bottle of Scotch on the seat beside him.

He was too drunk to drive, he knew that.

He didn’t care .

Places to go, things to do kept turning over and over in his mind.

That was when he saw her. Traffic crawling along in the other direction, his own car going nowhere fast. And there was her face, in the back of a big black limousine – she was pale as ivory, with huge turquoise-blue eyes and… hadn’t Marilyn Monroe said she had a body for sin? Well this woman had a mouth like that. Sensual, full-lipped, you could imagine her doing all sorts of things to you with that mouth. Her hair was so white it was almost silver, falling straight to her shoulders, a black veil pushed back from it. He couldn’t see any lower, only that she was all in black and it drained the life out of her features. Drunk as he was, he still felt the swift urgent tug of sexual attraction.

Her head turned a little, and her eyes met his. She didn’t look away, just returned his stare. This was no shrinking violet: her gaze was direct, intelligent. Then the traffic in her lane moved on, and she was gone. He turned in his seat, wanting to maintain the eye-contact, but that was it, folks: end of show. She was gone, off across the city, one more person moving around the vast metropolis.

He picked up the bottle again and drank.

This is a nightmare , thought Bianca.

Vittore had hired a trio of limos from the funeral directors. One, of course, for Mama and himself (he was her favourite, they all knew that), while Fabio would have a limo to himself, leaving Bianca to share with Maria, Vittore’s poor doormat wife, who didn’t comment but must surely notice that she had been relegated, separated from her husband by his overbearing mother, yet again.

Now the limousine Bianca and Maria were travelling in was stuck in the traffic, crawling along, prolonging the agony of this day. The other two limos, travelling behind the hearse, were lost to view. The driver had said he knew a better route to the church, and had turned the car around. He was sweating, the idiot, he didn’t know the way at all. Now they were sitting, unmoving, in yet another line of cars.

Inch by inch, the car crept along. Bianca sat there like wood, gazing out at the matt dove-grey of the sky, thinking This cannot be happening.

But it was.

Today the family was saying its final farewell to Tito, who had been murdered in cold blood by some piece of scum – she spat on them, whoever they were.

Tito was dead.

She couldn’t believe it, but it was true.

Her eldest brother, the one she’d loved so much, idolized, was dead and gone. She knew that it was mostly Tito’s doing that she had been entrusted – at last – with Dante’s. Vittore would never have entrusted her with any responsibility. Vittore had always seemed indifferent to her; he was secure in his position as Mama’s firm favourite. As for Fabio, he had mocked the very idea.

‘Bianca? What, you joking, Tito?’ he’d laughed when the possibility of her running a club had first been broached.

All her life, Fabio had mocked her. Resented her. Cuffed her around the ear, punched her when Mama wasn’t looking, because she was the interloper, the new baby, and she’d taken his privileged place.

Only Tito had loved her as a brother truly should, indulging her, showing her the noble old Italian ways, accepting her unstintingly into the family. He’d taught her everything, even how to shoot. She remembered how he’d taken her hunting rabbits on farmers’ fields, and how she had treasured that time alone with him.

Now, her heart was broken. He was gone.

A sleek Bentley paused alongside the limo, heading in the other direction. Her eyes caught and held the stare of the man sitting behind the wheel. Even sunk deep in grief, she was arrested by how amazingly handsome he was: dark-skinned, black-haired. And his eyes were a startlingly clear bright blue – but they seemed full of some private pain.

Then the limo edged forward and the man slipped out of her line of sight. She turned to look back, but he was gone.