Hit Me (The Bailey Boys #2) (16 page)

I couldn’t see anyone else, which was good. And stupid on his part.

“Hey, Jack,” I said, feigning surprise, although I didn’t really have to bother. “You go this way, too?”

“Tonight, yeah.”

He’d been straight when I’d spoken to him earlier, but now he had that edge in his voice: it had taken a little more than Dutch courage before he’d come after me. Some things never change.

“So what’s it to be?” I said, bored with the pretence. “Have you come here to teach me a lesson? Fancy it when I’ve had a few and my arm’s all shot up? Is that it?”

“Maybe. Things are different here, Bailey. New world order and all that. Meat-heads like you don’t get to throw your weight around like you could back in London. Out here it takes a bit of brains to make it good, you know what I’m saying?”

He believed his own words, I’d give him that.

“Is that it, Jack? Or do you fancy your luck?”

We’d come to stand a few feet apart. I could see the whites of his eyes popping in the gloom of the alleyway.

I was on the balls of my feet, every muscle tensed, poised for action.

He really did think he could take me on, and where my estimation of this new Jack had been steadily creeping upwards, now it plummeted.

I glanced away, deliberately drawing him out, and when I looked back he had the knife in his hand.

He was fast – faster than I’d known him before.

I raised my good hand, beckoned him towards me. “Come on, then, if you really want it.”

He snaked the knife through the air theatrically.

“You know you’re not going to do it,” I went on. “You haven’t got the balls when it’s face to face. You’re not going to, are you?”

“Yeah? What’s to stop me?”

It was over in an instant.

I saw his body tense and the hand holding the knife draw back above his shoulder as if he was about to slash it down across my face, just as he said those words:
What’s to stop me?

“That,” I said softly, as a meaty fist closed around his wrist, and another hand came down on his shoulder, locking him in position, almost toppling back. Georgi had him in an iron grip.

Something else happened in the gloom – a twist of the arm, perhaps, or a foot in the back of the knee – and Jack the Knife crumpled to a kneeling position with a sharp gasp of pain, and the knife clattered away onto the paving.

Another dark shape emerged from the shadows to my left, and as I turned to make out Markov I heard a dull thud and another sharp gasp from Jack. When I looked back, he lay crumpled on the floor, clutching his ribs.

“Is good, yes?” said Markov. “Don’t worry, Lee: we will take it from here. You can leave us now.”

Now when I looked down at my fallen compatriot I saw the fear in his eyes. He must know Markov, and if he did then he also knew what the Bulgarian was capable of, and he must know that nobody would ever want to be the subject of the sentence,
We will take it from here
.

§

I could have just left it.

I had no compassion for Jack: he’d got himself in deep, and anybody in the game he was in must know the risks. Anyone operating on this stretch of the Costa must know there was a serious likelihood that one day they would end up under a pile of rocks in some remote ravine in the Serrania de Ronda.

I should just let Jack get what was coming to him and then see where things stood.

It was a pragmatic thing, though. Jack the Knife was more use to me damaged and angry than dead.

Markov had a place in the hills near Benahavís. An old smallholding, what the Spanish called a
finca
, set in a few acres of land. Lots of these places had been converted into holiday homes, but this one had remained neglected, a tumbledown place, not much more than a few stone walls topped with a wooden roof and a few wooden outhouses.

The track to get there from the nearest paved road was maybe half a mile long, rubble-strewn and crossing the snaking bed of a dried out river a couple of times. It was just as well Markov’s boys used an SUV to get to the
finca
, although that probably didn’t make much difference to Jack McGill as he was bounced about in the trunk.

I gave them until morning before following, and then just to be sure I called ahead from Benahavís.

“Mr Markov? It’s me, Lee Bailey. Okay if I come on up? I don’t like to leave things half-done, you know what I mean? Me and Jack, we go way back: maybe I can be of use?”

There was a danger he’d think I was somehow in with Jack and his gang – we were all Brits, after all. But it made sense: maybe I could get the kid to talk where other methods failed.

“Sure, sure,” said Markov, after a second or two. “How soon you get here? I don’t know he has much longer.” He laughed at that, and I wondered just what I was going to find.

§

As I approached the
finca
in my battered old Corolla, grounding occasionally on the rocky track, I spotted them gathered outside in the sun.

At first I thought they must be taking a break, but then I saw Jack. They had him tied to an old door, naked in the harsh sun. The foot end of the door was raised on bricks, and his head was covered with a thin towel, soaked wet so that it clung to the lines of his face.

His pale body was bloody and bruised, his breathing rapid, his skin red from the sun.

Markov hadn’t been wrong about him not having much time.

I stopped the car and climbed out.

What kind of person did it make me that I could see a sight like this and not react?

Had I become some kind of monster? Had I always been one?

Or had I become so deeply embedded in the logic that we all understood the risks that this actually
was
some kind of normal, just not as you might understand it?

Maybe I had been out of the game too long, and now was over-thinking things.

As I watched, one of the guys took a bucket and poured it over Jack’s face – not much, just a slow trickle, enough to saturate the towel again and set Jack retching and choking.

I might not feel anything for Jack, but Markov didn’t need to know that. As he came to greet me I let my jaw sag and I said, “Is that really necessary, boss? Waterboarding the poor fucker?”

Markov shrugged, hard to read with those big aviator shades pulled down. “It make him talk. I now know a lot more about him and his friends than I did before. I think that is good, yes?”

“So what next?”

“I think we’re done with him,” said Markov. “Time to tidy up, I think.”

Jack started struggling against his bonds, setting off another fit of choking coughs.

“Bastard took a knife to me,” I said. “And then he had me shot.”

“What you want? You want to do it? You want to finish him off?”

I shook my head. “I want to beat the shit out of him and let him go. Let him live with the knowledge that I’ve always beaten him and one day I’ll be there, waiting around a corner or coming up behind him, ready to finish the job.”

I remembered what Imelda had once said about Markov, the
reputatsiya
thing, and added, “I want him to go back to his mates utterly humiliated and broken. His reputation ruined.”

Markov was grinning, nodding. “Maybe I give you a present, yes? Maybe this piece of shit is more use to us alive than dead.”

With that, he leaned over and whipped the soaked towel off Jack’s face. “You hear that, Englishman?” he hissed. “Would you rather be dead, or hating being alive?”

And so I found myself a short time later, standing facing Jack.

The kid was naked, the fear and pain shriveling his genitals back into themselves until there was almost nothing there.

He could barely stand – no strength in his legs, his breathing ragged, his head rocking from side to side as if dizzy.

And he was shaking. His entire body visibly juddering.

I took a step towards him and he met my look, and I could tell he knew. He knew I’d saved his pathetic life.

Knew as I bunched a fist, took a short swing and then drove it forward into his skinny gut, that for him this was by far the best outcome.

He folded over in two, coughing and retching again, spitting clear liquid that must have come up from his lungs.

An uppercut crumpled his nose, straightened him for a sharp hook to the jaw that finally sent him sprawling in the dirt.

Just for good measure, I kicked him in the ribs, and felt something crunch under the impact.

I turned away.

The bastard knew I’d saved him, and he’d be sore and furious, and one thing I knew for certain: an erratic little dick like Jack McGill was never going to let that lie.

Which is exactly what I wanted.

Finally, Imelda Sanchez truly understood.

Reputatsiya
.

Reputation. Face. Honor. Status. A blend of all these things and more.

It was what mattered so much to Hristo, what drove him more than anything.

Maybe it was something to do with the path he’d taken from abandoned kid on the streets of Sofia, hauling himself up by any means that came to hand until he was here, a big man among other utterly terrifying big men.

She knew what it was like to grow up in those conditions, to drag yourself up and out.

She knew that even when you had no food in your belly, no water or shelter, sometimes it was what was in your heart that mattered the most.

And she had thought that was it until that evening at the Colombians’ place in Sotogrande.

The evening when she was forced, once again, to mold herself to that man’s will, to be his adornment, to be a part of the story he had built up around himself.

And to do so in the presence of the one man who had opened her eyes to the possibilities of what a man could really be.

The man she had fallen for.

Totally fallen for.

And she could not even meet Lee’s look. Could not talk with him, or smile or laugh. Could not ask how his wounded arm was.

Could do none of that because it was all about how others saw you, how others saw
him
, the Bulgarian, the man who owned her and controlled her.

And it made her feel sick to the pit of her belly.

She could not do this.

She would surely break. Or do something foolish. Reckless.

Like lead Lee Bailey out through the gardens to a privacy that must surely be illusory, a blink away from exposure, discovery, and all that might follow.

She had never known anything so intense. The silence as he stood behind her. His touch. His mouth on her and the physical reactions it prompted.

The way he held her afterwards and told her she must go, even though all she wanted was to drag him to the ground and do for him what he had done for her.

To take his hand and start to walk, to run. Down to the beach, the path that trailed back into the heart of the marina.

Keep going.

Forever, keep going.

And she could do none of that because she belonged to Hristo Markov, was part of who he was.

Part of his
reputatsiya
.

§

Lee called her.

Several days later.

The phone buzzed, making her jump. Because always that damned phone brought only bad news – a summons, her presence required.

But this time...

“Can we talk?”

“Not like this.” Paranoid, perhaps, but how could she not be? Hristo had given her the phone – if he wanted it tapped, such a thing was not beyond him. Even taking a call from Lee was risky, she knew.

“Where? How?”

§

She went to Lee’s apartment on the outskirts of Puerto Libre.

She didn’t know this part of town so well, a mix of residential and tourist hotels, a place for people to sleep and go to the beach. Until now there had been little reason for her to come here.

It was late, close to midnight, and she used all the tricks she knew to check if she was being followed, to throw off any tails, to take indirect routes that must lead anywhere but here.

He had a place on the top floor of an older building, a few blocks back from the seafront. A nondescript place, as if when he had chosen it one of his requirements had been that he should be able to blend into the background.

He came down to the communal entrance to let her in, turned almost immediately without words or any other form of greeting, and led the way up two flights of narrow steps.

On the inside, the place was far more modern than she’d expected. Tiled floors, clean lines, lots of glass and leather. An open plan living area and kitchen, with a doorway onto the bedroom, another to the bathroom.

When she’d finished surveying her surroundings, her eyes came back to Lee.

He was watching her.

She raised eyebrows, unable to read his expression.

“It’s arranged,” he said, finally.

Businesslike. That was his expression, the way he was trying to handle this.

Cool and remote, when everything about the way he held his taut body shouted sexual tension.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said, surprising herself.

Now it was Lee’s turn to raise eyebrows, wait for her to go on.

“The risk is too great. I don’t want you hurt.”

“I can look after myself.”

“He will go mad. He will do anything to uncover my killer and take his revenge.”

“That’s what I’m banking on. Right now there’s a rival gang – a rival gangster – who’s furious, and all out for revenge on Markov. We have to strike now, so Markov will blame that rival.”

“It will be open warfare.”

Lee nodded.

But she had to go on. “You don’t understand, my love. I... I’ve been using you. All along, I’ve been using you. I want things to explode. I want Hristo to suffer.”

He was still nodding, and Imelda paused.

“I’ve understood all along,” he said. “This is more than escape: it’s honor. Respect.”

“
Reputatsiya
. That’s what
he
calls it. It’s everything to him.”

“And you want to rub his nose in it. Have everything blow up in his face.”

“And so I found you. Used you.”

“And now you love me, and that changes everything.”

She swallowed. “And you love me.”