James Craig - Shoot to Kill

After days and nights of aimlessly trudging the streets, Gasparino felt weary to his very marrow. All he wanted was to be left alone and get something approximating a good night’s sleep. In the morning, he would head down to the toilets at Charing Cross railway station and have a wash and a shave. Maybe then he could come up with some kind of idea about what he should be doing.

Gasparino looked vacantly at the bottle. It was four-fifths empty and his head was already swimming. ‘No point in leaving the rest,’ he mumbled to himself, tipping his head back and pouring the last of the gin down his neck.

Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, he screwed the cap back onto the empty bottle, placing it in the side pocket of his rucksack, which was stuck behind his head as a pillow. Breathing through his mouth, Gasparino stared vacantly down the street. Despite the late hour, there were still plenty of people around, drunks and other revellers in no hurry to leave Central London and head back home to the suburbs. On the far side of the street, he watched a young woman, blind drunk, support herself against the back of a parked car. With her free hand, she hitched up her red skirt and pulled down her knickers, before squatting and aiming a stream of piss towards the tarmac. The pool of steaming urine made it a couple of inches away from the girl before the camber of the road sent it back towards her outsized platform shoes.

Behind her, a girlfriend leaned against another parked car, laughing drunkenly. ‘You’re getting it on yourself!’

‘Piss off!’ the squatting woman grunted as she did a little jig, trying to avoid stepping in her own wee.

Shifting in his sleeping bag, Gasparino caught the eye of the standing woman. She was wearing a thin, sleeveless dress that ended about half-an-inch below her crotch. A small bag hung from her left shoulder. She had no jacket and her legs were bare. The regulation over-sized shoes were strapped to her feet. Intoxicated as he was, Gasparino imagined he could see the goose bumps on her arms, even from fifteen feet away.

Glassy-eyed, the shivering girl stared right through him, as if he was invisible. ‘C’mon, Jen,’ she shouted, ‘let’s get going.’

‘Hold on!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’m almost done.’ Finally, she levered herself back into something approximating a standing position, pulling up her pants as she did so. Stepping over the lake she had just created, she wobbled towards her friend, who reached out with a supporting arm. ‘Will we make the train?’

‘Dunno.’

Gasparino watched the two of them stagger off down the road. You don’t know how lucky you are , he thought groggily, having somewhere to go, a bed to sleep in . As they disappeared round a corner, he closed his eyes, knowing that, for him, sleep was unlikely to come.

After more than twenty years in the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, serving in Saudi Arabia, Northern Ireland, Germany, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, it had taken barely a couple of weeks for his marriage to collapse and his life to unravel. Trying to ignore the pain in his leg, Adrian Gasparino picked up a grubby copy of a freesheet that had been discarded in the doorway. He checked the date on the front page. Maybe it was today; maybe it was yesterday. Thinking about it for a moment, he realized that, either way, his baby’s due date was only a couple of days away.

If it actually was his baby.

‘Hey! Mister!’

Gasparino looked up but said nothing.

‘Got any money?’ A tall skinny boy, wearing jeans and a red hoodie with the legend ANIMAL on the front, stepped towards him. He had a blank, acne-scarred face, with no obvious signs of intelligence behind his dead, dark eyes; the type of kid he’d last seen cowering in a compound in Helmand. Hovering behind him, Gasparino counted four others, all dressed in similar fashion, a posse of evil urchins.

‘Gimme your cash,’ the boy repeated, his scrunched-up mockney accent harsh and unforgiving.

Gasparino’s hand reflexively slipped inside his sleeping bag. In his trouser pocket he had twenty-three pounds and seventy-six pence. Twice, earlier in the day, he had counted it, each time coming up with the same number. He had no idea how long he would have to make it last.

The boy took a swing at the end of Gasparino’s sleeping bag with the toe of his Nike trainers. ‘Are you stupid?’

The sound of bovine laughter came from the boy’s mates.

‘I don’t have anything,’ Gasparino protested. He tried to struggle out of his sleeping bag but a kick in the stomach sent him back down.

‘Don’t take the fucking piss,’ the youth shouted. ‘Give us your fucking booze money.’

Gasparino felt a spasm of anger in his chest. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone? ‘Fuck off, you little bastard!’ he hissed. Pulling his arms out of the bag, he grabbed the kid’s ankle and pulled his attacker towards him.

Unable to keep his balance, the boy fell on top of the ex-soldier, arms flailing. Blood pumping, Gasparino tried to get his hands round the kid’s neck before he could escape. The urge to do some serious damage to the little bastard was overwhelming. He got one hand over his Adam’s apple and squeezed. The kid let out a satisfying gurgling noise as his eyes rolled back in his head.

‘You little shits!’ Gasparino shouted, squeezing harder.

‘You cheeky cunt!’ someone shouted. Then they were all upon him, kicking, screaming and biting. He grabbed hold of an ear but couldn’t get a grip. Then a face appeared in front of him and for a moment he thought it was Justine. Confusion spread through his brain as someone ripped his hand from the kid’s throat, snapping a finger in two in the process.

‘Bastard!’ Again, he tried to struggle to his feet but two of them had him pinned down against his rucksack.

‘Fucker!’

The last thing Adrian Gasparino remembered seeing before the lights went out was the dirty sole of a boot heading for his face.

‘What the hell are you doing, representing Clive Martin?’

A dark look passed across Abigail Slater’s face. ‘Surely,’ she glowered at her lover sitting opposite, ‘ I have discretion – total discretion – when it comes to deciding on the clients that I choose to take on.’

‘Well, yes,’ Christian Holyrod stammered, ‘but come on. On the one hand I’m trying to clean things up, and here you are, getting in the way.’

Slater placed her knife and fork carefully on her plate and looked slowly round the restaurant. For an evening early in the week, The Triangle was doing more than brisk business. There was not an empty table in sight and a growing crowd at the bar, waiting to be seated. You would hardly think they were in the middle of the worst recession since the Second World War. Then again, economic austerity was for the little people. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of Christian’s more lame-brained colleagues, famously said, ‘We’re all in it together’; what he meant was, ‘You’re on your own, losers’. The little berk had last been seen on the slopes of some swish Swiss resort, enjoying a ten-grand skiing break, while his minions were busy trying to cut all the social services they could. Politicians, Slater thought contemptuously, they were such useless cretins. For a moment, she tried to remember why she was having a relationship with one. Nothing came to mind.

‘What’s so funny?’ Christian asked, a sour look upon his face as he played with his glass of Vega Sicilia Unico 1996.

‘Nothing.’ Slater cut a large slice off her mound of beef tartare. Popping it into her mouth, she chewed lasciviously, licking her lips as she swallowed. The look on Christian’s face signalled the rush of blood to his crotch, amusing her even more.