Tom Graham - A Fistful of Knuckles

‘Of course I want to bang you up for Denzil. You killed him.’

‘Right.’

Patsy was flicking the lighter, trying to get a flame, and Sam realized then that reasoning with him was hopeless. He didn’t give a damn if it was one murder he went down for or two, or a hundred, or more — it was all the same to him. For ten years he had nursed his hatred of Denzil and Spider; for ten years he had looked forward to his revenge; and not once in all that time had he given so much as a thought to the consequences of killing two men. No threat of prison would deter him, or even give him cause for second thoughts. Such thoughts failed to register on Patsy’s inner radar. All he knew was that he wanted payback, and that he would get it.

‘It’s what the underworld’s like,’ Stella had said, back in the Lost amp; Found Room. ‘Fights that get fixed, fellas making off with winnings what aren’t theirs, blokes paid to bust other bloke’s hands. It’s the way it is. Betrayal and revenge. ’

Betrayal and revenge. That was it. Nothing else. In Patsy’s simplistic world of men and violence, that’s all there was: betrayal and revenge, turning forever on a wheel, over and over to the end of time.

As the flame sprang from the lighter and danced there, cupped by Patsy’s small, narrow, iron-hard, murderous hand, Sam all at once found his thoughts flowing very clearly through his mind:

Nothing I can say will stop Patsy burning Spider in front of me. But my duty is to stop him. If words and reason mean nothing to him, then I will have to use force. Regardless of the odds ranged against me, I have no choice. I simply have no choice.

Sam aimed a swift kick. It struck Patsy’s hand and sent the lighter flying. But at once Patsy lunged at him. Sam flung himself away, landing in the mud and scrambling frantically to his feet — or tried to. He felt his boots skidding and sliding on the boggy ground. The wet ground swallowed his hands and held them like glue.

With incredible calm, Sam found himself thinking: will he kick me to death or punch me to death?

Glancing round, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Ray and Chris, peering in at him between two caravans. Chris’s one good eye was wide and fearful. Ray spat out a mouthful of blood and bared his teeth, cursing his impotence to break free from the hands that held him and help his fellow officer.

Helpless, thought Sam. We’re all helpless.

He felt Patsy’s hands clamp like vices on his shoulders and haul him with terrible, inhuman strength up out of the mud.

Ah — he’s going to punch me — over and over, like he did to Denzil.

Sam was turned roughly around, and he found himself nose to nose with Patsy. He could smell the man’s breath, hot and cloying as it gushed over him. It reeked of excrement.

This close, he doesn’t look like a human being at all. Every bit of him is disfigured — his nose is flat and broken — his mouth is misshapen and ragged — his ear’s just a scrap of flesh hanging from the side of his head — and his skin … it’s green … green and blue from all that ink … Is this the last face I’ll ever see? Will I manage to think, for one last time, clearly and precisely, of Annie, before this monster finishes me off entirely? And after that, what then? Will he go after Annie? Whatever that Devil is that has come out of the darkness for her, it has found its expression in the body of Patsy O’Riordan — and I cannot stop it. I cannot defeat it. It will kill me … and then it will go after Annie … and I cannot bring myself to imagine the hell it intends to drag her to …

‘I’m sorry, Annie,’ he said, just as Patsy clamped his hands around Sam’s throat. And as his windpipe was squeezed shut, and he felt the blood bulging in his tongue and bursting in his temples, he thought: Maybe the guv can do what I can’t … maybe the guv can do what I can’t …

There was a blur of movement, and the sense of heavy impact, and all at once Sam found himself sprawled on the mud, gasping air greedily into his lungs. Beside him, reeking of paraffin, lay Spider, leaking blood into the damp soil.

In the next moment, he was surrounded by shouting and rushing and violent action. Sam scrubbed at his eyes, tried to clear them of the swirling patterns that filled his vision, and blinked stupidly this way and that. He saw Patsy staggering strangely across the arena, lashing at something on his back. It took a moment for Sam to realise that the something was a man — very short, very stocky, with cropped grey hair and a fierce, lined face.

I’ve seen that face before …

‘Dermot,’ he croaked out loud. ‘Dermot … from the gym!’

The short but hard-as-nails trainer from Stella’s Gym battered Patsy’s head with astonishing force, rattling his skull, sending him lurching and staggering until he crashed against one of the caravans and toppled over. Patsy smashed into the mud like a chunk of falling masonry — but Dermot clung on, firing his fists with precision into the bullet-like head as if he meant to crack it open like a monstrous, ink-stained egg.

And now Sam was aware of the arena shaking all about him. The caravans lurched and shuddered as men fought and struggled on every side. He saw Ray break free from the man who held him, turn sharply, and throw a punch. He saw Chris ducking behind Ray and defending himself from the flying elbows of fighting men. And then he saw the guv.

Sam’s heart leapt. Gene strode magnificently into the arena, planting his patent leather loafers into the mud heedless of how it soiled them. He still looked like a circus clown, with half his face black from bruising — and yet to Sam he appeared as an avenging angel arrived in a cloud of wrath.

Moustache-man loomed up behind him, balled his fist — and then went down as Gene’s elbow rammed into his solar plexus.

‘No time for playing mud pies, Tyler. We got a shout. Ain’t you noticed?’

The caravans rocked on their suspensions as all around him big men clashed with other big men. Sam saw faces that he seemed to recognise.

‘The lads from the gym!’ Gene declared, reaching down and hauling Sam to his feet. ‘Better than the Special Patrol Group.’

‘The gym?’

‘Stella’s Gym, you dope. You didn’t expect me to turn up here empty handed, did you?’

‘I didn’t expect you to turn up here at all, Guv. How the hell did you know?’

If Gene had felt inclined to respond to Sam’s question, he got no chance as two huge fairground roustabouts burst out of the melee and hurled themselves at him. Gene caught one with a bone-crunching haymaker, delivered square-on and pulping the brute’s nose like a squashed tomato. It was enough to send him slithering into the mud, senseless — but his companion, a huge brawny bastard in jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, dropped his head and charged like a bull, ramming into Gene at full speed and lifting him clear off his feet. Cowboy locked his arms around Gene’s body as the guv’nor, carried along, rained hopeless blows on his back. Together, the two men slammed into the side of one of the painted caravans. Gene’s bruised face grimaced. Cowboy released him, but only long enough to jab two rapid blows into the guv’s guts, knocking the breath clear out of his lungs. In the next moment, Cowboy clamped his hands around Gene’s throat — but instead of throttling him, he began twisting and straining, trying to snap Gene’s neck.

Seeing his guv in trouble all at once cleared Sam’s head and renewed his energies. Up he jumped, springing forward and looping his arm around Cowboy’s neck. He wrenched hard — and again — and then yet again, harder still, hard enough to force Cowboy to release Gene and deal with Sam instead. Sam found himself staring up into the broad, sweating face of this bear-like man, his bushy brows knotted, his uneven teeth bared, his small, narrowly spaced eyes glittering with a brutish, dangerous light.