Nick Oldham - Nightmare City

‘ Fine, fine,’ acceded Henry.

‘ Give me a leg up,’ said Rider, seeing Henry did not seem able. ‘I’ll open the gate from the other side.’

Henry nodded. He intertwined his fingers, crouched low with his back to the wall, braced himself and hoped Rider hadn’t stepped into any dog muck.

Rider put his right foot into Henry’s hands, counted softly and on ‘Three!’ Henry heaved up, propelling Rider who got his left foot onto Henry’s shoulder and a moment later was lying astride the top of the wall. He shuffled his legs over and dropped into the yard.

Uncaringly, Henry wiped his hands down the sides of his trousers, dog shit or not.

The gate opened. Rider beckoned him through into the yard, which was not particularly big and was full of empty beer barrels and all the paraphernalia associated with the waste from licensed premises.

The back door to the club was a huge steel panel, riveted to the brickwork.

Henry studied it despairingly. ‘How the hell do we get in here? We’ll need bloody cutting gear.’

‘ We don’t — we get in up there.’ Rider pointed up to a window at first floor level. ‘We’ll stack up some barrels and climb up. It should open OK. This place is about as secure as Buckingham Palace.’

‘ I’m surprised you haven’t had it screwed.’

‘ We have. Security’s crap on the outside, but the bar area’s pretty tight.’ Together they manoeuvred two barrels on top of three others and Rider climbed cautiously onto the top one to find his head and shoulders more or less on a level with the window. He heaved at the window. Nothing gave. He tried to lap his fingers underneath the frame, which was rotten, and he started to ease it away. With great effort and persistence there was some movement. But the window remained firmly shut.

Using the initiative which seemed to have deserted his recent actions, Henry scoured the yard to find some kind of implement to assist.

More by luck than judgement he kicked against a rusty hand-trowel of the type used by builders. He handed it up to Rider who jammed it between window and frame and applied leverage.

With painful slowness the window moved. Eventually it was wide enough for him to get his fingertips in properly, and he completed the task with a loud, splintering crack, nearly overbalancing off the barrels at the same time.

Seconds later he was inside the club.

Henry followed, dropping down behind Rider into what was a long disused lavatory.

‘ Thank God for-’

‘ Shh!’ Rider warned him hoarsely. ‘You never know — cops could be at the bar, waiting for us to show. Let’s take it one step at a time.’

Chastened, Henry nodded silently. He followed Rider out of the toilet and into a dark corridor. With soft footfalls, they made their way along.

‘ What we can do,’ Rider whispered over his shoulder, ‘is get some sleep up here. We won’t be disturbed. Then tomorrow…’ His words drifted.

‘ Yeah, tomorrow,’ said Henry sourly.

They stopped at the first door they came to. There was a bolt on the outside which Rider slid back. He placed his hand on the doorknob and suddenly the door seemed to have a life of its own and exploded open.

A huge form careered out of the blackness, brandishing a chunk of wood which was about the size, weight and length of a pick-axe handle.

The wood swished down into thin air, slicing through the point where a split-second before Rider’s head had been.

Rider crimped himself out of the way and the blow was completely ineffective. In a continuation of the same movement, Rider swung back, and landed an iron-hard punch into the guts of the attacker. The wooden weapon dropped out of his hands and bounced on the floor as the impact of the fist whooshed the wind out of the man, who sank down to his knees, clutching his stomach.

Rider stepped behind the figure, clamped his right hand across the man’s mouth, yanked him upright and growled, ‘Jacko, you dumb stupid bastard, it’s me!’

From what they could see of him in the darkness, Jacko looked a mess. Conroy’s men had not been nice to him. His nose was knocked out of shape, and one eye was cut, swelling and oozing some sort of unpleasant looking greasy substance. A tooth was loose and his ribs and stomach were a welter of bruises and grazes.

The three of them were in the room in which Jacko had been imprisoned. Henry stood on guard at the door, cocking his head down the corridor and half-listening to Jacko who was giving Rider the lowdown. Rider listened without interruption.

‘ Six of them, you say?’ he asked finally.

‘ That’s all I saw. Could be more.’

‘ They came in, took the place and they’re still here. I wondered why we didn’t see our door staff leaving. What d’you make of it, Henry?’

‘ Conroy… the guns?’

‘ Yeah, makes sense, taking the place over. But why, tonight, unless he needs the place now, or later today for something. Jacko, did they mention anything that could give us a clue?’

He wracked his brains. Couldn’t think of anything.

‘ What’re they doing now?’ Rider asked.

‘ Just hanging about, I think. I got dumped here and haven’t seen any of ‘em since. I couldn’t hear anything because we’re so far away nom the front of the club here.’

Rider looked up at Henry again. ‘They’re here for a reason and it’s nothing to do with selling drugs, because there ain’t no one here to sell ‘em to. I think you’re right, it’s connected with the guns. Let’s go and have a look what they’re up to.’

Exhausted, Henry’s heart dropped.

‘ Jacko — you leg it out of the window and stay low. We’ll lock this door and if they check up on you it’ll look like you’re still in here.’

‘ Anything you want me to do?’ Jacko asked.

‘ Yeah — gimme your fags and matches and don’t get involved. Henry

… let’s go looksee.’

‘ This place used to be a casino, closed early sixties. When I bought it, though it was being run as a club, it was in a pretty dangerous condition once you got beyond the public areas. So were some of the public areas, come to that. The ceiling over the dance floor is not the most secure in the world. I keep expecting the rotating silver ball to crash to the floor and kill some poor bastard underneath.’

‘ Any electric up here?’

‘ No, only on ground level.’

Rider was leading Henry along an endless maze of dark, dusty corridors populated by spiders’ webs, dust, planks and other miscellaneous pieces of rubbish which made quiet progress difficult and walking hazardous. The lack of lighting made it all much worse.

‘ What you see downstairs is only a fraction of what there is,’ Rider continued. ‘There’s two floors over that. Lots of rooms have been bricked off for whatever reason. It’s just incredible, really. You don’t appreciate what there is until you start looking.’

Rider struck a match which flared briefly, lighting up his face and also what he wanted to see — a door.

‘ I think we’re here.’ He extinguished the match, but before he threw it down ensured its tip was cold. ‘It’s so dry in some places, wet in others, don’t want to chance a match anywhere. The place could go sky high. Fire hazard, really.’

‘ Sounds a peach of a building.’

‘ It will be, it will be,’ Rider said, seeing his dreams for a moment. ‘We need to be real quiet now. If I’m right we should be over the main part of the club once we go through the door. I think the floor’s… not good, shall we say?’

‘ So I could drop through.’

‘ Distinct possibility.’

Henry thought about two broken legs. It would round things off nicely.

‘ Why are we going in here?’