James Patterson - Private London

Del Rio was leaning against the wall, working his jaw muscles and pointing his weapon at Laura Skelton who was cowering against the corner of the sofa, her eyes wide with terror.

If any of the neighbours had heard her scream there was no sign of it. Unless someone was calling the police, of course. But if they were it didn’t matter.

I’d already done the same.

I slipped the rucksack off my shoulder and threw it at her.

‘What’s this?’ Her eyes darted back and forth between me and Del Rio.

‘Brendan’s supplier at Chancellors has gone out of business. We thought your boyfriend might like his gear back.’

Laura looked in the bag. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t have to understand, darling,’ said Del Rio. ‘You’re not in the game any more.’

‘Give me your mobile phone,’ I said.

‘I don’t have a mobile.’

‘You want to give him the phone?’ Del Rio raised his pistol slightly. ‘Or you want to be a hero like your fat fuck of a boyfriend?’

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and threw it over to me. I slipped it in my jacket pocket, then bent down and ripped the house phone out of its socket, kicked the junction box off and smashed the connections with my heel.

‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with.’ Laura crossed her arms and a petulant look appeared on her face.

She was an attractive young woman, no denying that. But there was a hardness in her eyes every bit as ugly as the slap mark bruising her cheek. Brendan Ferres was a hero, all right.

‘Where is he, Laura?’ I asked.

‘You want to shoot me, shoot me. But I’m not putting myself between you and Brendan.’

I didn’t blame her. And I didn’t much care. I knew exactly where he was.

‘We’re going to the pub now, Laura. You tip him off that we’re coming and we’ll come back for you and do more than smash your phone in.’

If she was cowed by that remark you couldn’t have told by the smirk on her face.

‘You go up against Brendan Ferres in Ronnie Allen’s pub and you won’t be going anywhere, tough guy! Except in a hearse.’

‘You’ll be glad to know that Chloe Smith is out of intensive care – they reckon she’ll make a full recovery.’

A look flicked through Laura’s eyes then. Sure enough, a flicker of fear.

‘That wasn’t my fault. That wasn’t supposed to happen. How were we supposed to know she was going to turn into some kung-fu bloody madwoman?’

‘You saying she deserved it?’

The look flashed through her eyes again. ‘I’m just saying it wasn’t my fault. Brendan wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone.’

I looked at her coldly. ‘Well, he did. And now he’s going to pay for it.’

‘You got any sense, mister, you’ll walk away from him now and keep on walking.’

I looked over at Del Rio. ‘What do you reckon, Del? We should walk away?’

He worked his jaw muscles a little. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I don’t do walking away.’

I looked at my watch. Just over forty-eight hours since it had begun and it was way past time to finish it.

I pulled up the zipper on my jacket.

‘Why’d you do it, Laura? You’re a bright kid. You’re at a top university.’

‘You got any idea what it costs to go to university nowadays? The sort of debt you leave with?’

‘A lot of people deal with it.’

Anger danced in her eyes. She had the kind of beauty that made it easy for her to get what she wanted in life. Easy for her to justify her actions to herself. She wore her sense of self-entitlement as easily as she wore her designer jeans.

‘Yeah, well, I was dealing with it too,’ she said. ‘A little dealing. A little video work. Then Hannah offered me the big score. Even if her father didn’t ante up – and she didn’t expect him to – then she was going to pay me big time anyway.’

‘Never mind who got hurt along the way.’

‘No one was supposed to get hurt!’ Laura shouted at me. ‘My dad’s a plumber, for chrissake! I didn’t have money like Hannah and Chloe or most of them at college. I didn’t have privilege. All I had was debt. And she had the power to take that away.’

She shrugged. ‘It wasn’t a hard call to make. Besides, you know…’ She shrugged again, collecting herself, a cruel smile curving her lips. ‘It was supposed to be fun.’

I nodded to Del Rio and we walked out the front door. She’d learn soon enough what fun was.

Five minutes later and we watched from the front seats of my car, parked back a bit and across the road from her house.

Laura came out wearing a black parka, with the rucksack slung over her shoulder. She walked away from us without even looking around. Already high on whatever she had sampled from the media student’s stash, no doubt.

She got about twenty yards before DI Kirsty Webb stepped out of an unmarked police car, followed by a uniformed officer, and put her under arrest.

As busts went, it wasn’t the high-profile case that Kirsty had been looking to solve this weekend. But it probably gave her a degree of personal satisfaction as she cuffed Laura none too kindly and shoved her head down as she manoeuvred her into the back of the car. Like I said, Kirsty was fond of Chloe too.

And also like I said, I had made a call earlier. Laura Skelton might not have made it to a phone box but I had given my ex the heads-up. I had made one other phone call, too.

Del Rio looked at me from the passenger seat. ‘Ready?’ he asked.

I nodded, resisting the impulse to say I was born ready.

‘Let’s finish it,’ I said instead.

The Enforcer could open triple-locked and bolted doors. The trunk of a BMW was no match. The lid flew open and an alarm started shrieking.

We were in the car park at the back of the Turk’s Head, up the road a half-mile or so from where we had watched Laura Skelton being driven away into a whole new world of misery.

Del Rio was leaning, in his normal casual style, against the brick wall of the pub, his gun held alongside his leg, watching the back exit.

A short while later a stocky man came through the door, some five foot nine inches tall, barrel-chested and with a neck about twice the size of mine. He was carrying a set of car keys in his hand.

‘The fuck you think you’re doing?’ he said to me, not quite believing what he was seeing. His eyes bulging like a pug’s on steroids. He pushed the key fob to turn the alarm off.

‘He said it was okay,’ I said and pointed to Del Rio who was now pointing his gun at the bull-necked man.

‘You know whose car that is?’

I nodded. ‘We were invited.’

The man looked at Del Rio, his hand twitching. The bulge under his jacket showed he was carrying. I guess he was weighing up the odds.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Del Rio.

The man held his hands up and let Del Rio take his gun off him.

‘No one’s going to spank you for this,’ I said to the heavy. ‘We take full responsibility.’

He glared back at me and then smiled. It was not a pretty sight. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘It’s your fucking funeral.’

I reached into the boot of Brendan Ferres’s BMW and pulled out the baseball bat that I was pretty sure I would find there.

Showtime.

The Heavy walked into the pub, hands held high.

There were no customers as such. Ronnie Allen sat at his usual table with Brendan Ferres, the East Coast Mafiosi Sally Manzino and his glamorous companion.

Sitting next to Brendan Ferres was Rebecca Allen, Ronnie Allen’s daughter who was engaged to be married to the man whose baseball bat I was holding. She was every bit as large as life as I remembered her. She was dressed to kill in tight jeans, a low-cut peasant blouse, her full lips were painted blood-red and her big blue eyes sparkled beneath the mass of blonde hair that tumbled around her heart-shaped face. I think she rather liked the look of Del Rio. I was probably too much the urban sophisticate for her. She smiled and sat back to watch.