Jessie Keane - Ruthless

‘ Shit ,’ he shouted. ‘Don, come on. You can’t …’

‘I can.’ Don was taking a box of matches from his pocket. His eyes were hard, implacable. He was really going to do this. He took out a match, paused, and grinned at Rufus before moving to strike it.

That pause, that almost imperceptible second’s worth of gloating time, was a mistake.

Rufus lashed out hard with his foot, catching Don in the groin. Don let out a wheezing groan, dropped the unlit match and doubled over, his face screwed up, falling to his knees in a moment of almost exquisite agony.

The heavy on the left moved in and Rufus kicked out again, aiming for the man’s knee. He heard the thing pop out of its socket with a satisfactory snap, and the man fell to the floor, stumbling over his boss’s huddled form.

Now the one on the right.

But this one was more cautious. This was the one who’d coshed him, Rufus reckoned. This one had the eyes of a thinker, he was not just a mound of dumb muscle. Rufus was on his feet now, crouching, still pinioned by the chair, tied to it, unable to straighten up. He turned sharply, hoping to hit the man with the chair, but it was only a glancing blow. The man reacted too quickly, bouncing back on his toes, just out of reach.

When Rufus looked over his shoulder a cosh had appeared in the man’s right hand and he was swinging it viciously. The other two men were still writhing helplessly on the floor in a sea of stinking fuel. Rufus edged away from the cosh until the chair hit the sink and he couldn’t go any further. If his arms hadn’t been tied, he could have sorted this fucker with his fists. Improvising fast, he jammed the chair legs over the rim of the sink and used the leverage to lift both legs, pistoning them out with all the strength he could muster.

He caught the man in the stomach.

The man doubled over, dropping the cosh, retching and trying to draw breath as he clutched at his belly.

Rufus unjammed the chair from the sink rim and kicked the man in the head, hard, while he was down. Then he propelled himself towards the window, launching himself at it head-first, chair and all.

He shot through the tattered drapes. Felt the impact as his head went through the glass, the rotten frame disintegrating under his weight. He hit the ground hard, with bits of broken window raining down all around him in the dry dirt. And still the fecking chair had him in its grip, though a couple of the legs had broken off in the fall. He looked wildly around him, blood dripping in his eyes so that he could barely see, knowing that he had to get clear before Big Don and his men recovered their wits.

Scrambling to his feet, bent double with his arms still strapped to the chair, he ran as best he could.

He could see the hotel through the trees, about five hundred yards away. They hadn’t even bothered to take him far, confident that they had him, that they would incinerate him in the old building in the woods and make their escape before anyone realized what had happened.

Expecting them to overtake him any minute, Rufus hobbled towards the driveway, hunched double under the chair’s weight, bleeding, sweating, and reeking of petrol. When he made it to the entrance he toppled through the door with a crash, causing the thin receptionist to leap to his feet, hands raised in alarm, face contorted in disgust at this bloody apparition messing up his nice clean hotel. He shot out from behind his desk to stop Rufus coming any further.

‘Merde! ’ cried the man, gawping at the blood dripping from Rufus on to the marble floor.

‘Yeah, you got that right,’ said Rufus. ‘Now will you for feck’s sake get these ropes cut before the people who tied me to this damned chair catch up with me?’

Something in Rufus’s expression convinced the receptionist that he’d best do as he was told. He found a pair of scissors and with trembling hands cut the ropes. To his obvious relief, Rufus was not inclined to stick around. The moment he was free, he ran out of the hotel and leapt into the Rolls-Royce. Picturing the diplomat’s outrage at this disruption to his schedule, Rufus sped off down the drive. He didn’t stop until he reached the border, where he abandoned the car and crossed on foot into Spain.

Don was still on his tail through Spain. Rufus was pursued into Italy, then Switzerland. He started to know how a fox must feel, with the hounds baying at its heels. He was being chased by an implacable enemy, and despair began to eat into him.

Rufus became paranoid, jumping at shadows, seeing danger everywhere. He took a plane to Tenerife and worked the clubs along the Playa de las Americas for a while. He chilled – or tried to – in Bobby’s Bar, drinking pina coladas, touring, lying in the sun on black volcanic ash, sometimes almost choking on the red dust that blew over from the Sahara. Maybe that was the place he should head for next – Africa. Get some mercenary work; there was always trouble there.

Then one of his bouncer mates pulled him to one side. ‘Rufus, I’ve heard something…’

And there went Tenerife. The man told him that Don and a contingent of hard boys were sitting in Dublin airport ready to come and get him.

Don was never going to give up on this. Three, four, five near misses, and now Rufus was feeling truly desperate. And Christ, how he missed Ireland, his own true home. What the hell. Feck it. Don could find him anywhere, that much was obvious. So let him find him there, if he could.

Not wanting to go within a mile of his mother, the whining old cow, he went to the farm, the place by the Shannon where he’d played as a teenager with his cousins. Fatalism gripped him now. He’d given up caring whether he got caught; he couldn’t run forever. He was tired, exhausted from it all. Rory’d been right: Don was never going to let this go. So to hell with it. Let him do his worst.

As a boy, he’d visited the farm as a poor relation. Now, as a man, he supposed he still was. He stood on the drive and looked at the big imposing stone building, the same way he had all those years ago.

‘It’s the proceeds of crime,’ his mother had sneered whenever she and her husband and son were invited there. His mother claimed that her high-and-mighty brother Davey’s branch of the family thought their poorer relatives beneath them. But Rufus suspected that she, with her make-do-and-mend life, was merely jealous of the material wealth they so obviously enjoyed, and it stuck in her craw to see it.

Once, Rufus’s father had been given a chance to join the family firm, but Mother had shouted the old man down, the way she always did. As a result, they remained poor, and she remained stubbornly and stupidly resentful of anyone who wasn’t in the same boat. ‘Talk about ill-gotten gains,’ she’d say. ‘It’s all robbed from London fellas, that place of theirs.’

But Rufus’s memories of his visits to the farm were sweet. Mostly, they centred on his cousin Orla. He had never got on with Tory or Pat; they were ham-fisted thugs without finesse. Brutality came naturally to them, and they’d pushed and shoved and bullied the younger members of their family – Orla, her twin Redmond and the baby of the clan, Kieron – mercilessly.

Rufus might look like a wild man, but at least he had some sensibilities. The Jesuit fathers had raised him, instilled a little common decency – something that was completely lacking in Tory and Pat.

He carried on walking up the great sweeping drive towards the house, the vision of Orla as she had been that long-ago summer’s day when he’d kissed her in the garden filling his mind. Sadness gripped him. She was lost to him, lost forever. Dead and gone.