Hit Me (The Bailey Boys #2) (6 page)

“Who? What’re they doing? What’s happened, Deano?”

“Russians. Latvians. Ukrainians. Whatever. We’ve never had any trouble here. No more than you’d expect, at any rate – there’s always a few drunken holidaymakers and the like.”

He waved a hand. “You’ve seen this town, Lee. It’s not exactly Fuengirola or Puerto Libre, is it?” The two places he mentioned were opposite ends of the same broken scale: one the heart of the seedy 24-hour street drug scene, the other swanky Gangster Central. This sleepy little seaside town where Dean and Jess had put down roots was a million miles from both of those places.

“We just want to run a nice place, you know what I mean?”

“So what changed?”

“About a week ago we picked up a new regular. Eastern European guy, close-cropped hair, scar on one side of his skull. Had that look in his eye: daring me to challenge him. I had him sussed the minute he walked through the door.”

I knew immediately where this was going. “Dealer?”

Dean nodded. “We had words,” he said. “I encouraged him to move along.”

“Old-style?”

Another nod.

While I was the one who’d been the semi-pro cage-fighter, all three Bailey Boys knew how to handle themselves, and had never shied away from getting involved.

“You know those 4000-volt stun guns?” Dean asked me. “You ever used one? It overrides every muscle in your body. You freeze, you go rigid, your bladder and your guts let go. Your fucking hair stands on end, bro’.”

“Sounds like you’ve got things under control, Deano.”

“Next night we got a visit from his friends. All very amicable, very business-like. They made me an offer. Partnership. Not in the drug-pushing, although that would go with the territory. The bastards ‘offered’ me partnership in my own fucking bar, Lee.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me.” But it didn’t surprise me. As Fearless had told me more than once, most of the successful businesses on the Costa were founded on crooked money, and any that weren’t soon got dragged into the mire.

Hell, I wasn’t any stranger to the occasional protection racket, which was pretty much what this was: let the Russians become your partners and do what the fuck they liked on your premises or pretty soon you’d be begging for their protection.

It’d start with a few broken windows. There would be drunken gangs settling in for the night, driving out your clientele and trashing the place. Visits from the building inspectors about some obscure regulation that hadn’t been followed when the place was built thirty years before. A fire, maybe.

And then there would be the actual violence, of course: the broken fingers and cigarette burns, the kneecappings and beatings. The threats to your loved ones.

It was almost my old job description.

Except now it was a bunch of Russian gangsters trying it out on my brother.

“So what did you say? You’re not considering it, are you?” Was this the advice he was after? Not so much advice, as wanting me to approve whatever he’d already decided to do...

Dean was shaking his head. “I don’t know, bro’,” he said. “This isn’t London, you know.”

I peered around at the buildings, the blue sea, the sun. Raised an eyebrow and we both laughed.

“You know what I mean. Back in the Smoke we were
it
, weren’t we? The Bailey Boys. We fucking owned it. But here... It’s all faster. Zero to sixty in no time. The rules are different. The price is always higher.”

“You sound like Fearless.”

“He knows what he’s talking about. He understands this place.”

“I’m learning.” I couldn’t help it. I could feel my whole face breaking out into that stupid grin I sometimes wore. “I’m going to get to grips with this place, Deano. I’m back in the game.”

“Seriously?”

I don’t know what I’d expected, but the surprise on Dean’s face wasn’t it. I’d just taken for granted that we’d get back into business at some point. Even Dean: sure, he’d set up at the New Duchess, he was enjoying a bit of the old domestic bliss with Jess, but he’d get the itch. It was in our blood.

I shrugged. “I’ve put a toe in the water,” I told him. “Put in a couple of nights in club security. Getting my name out there. Building up my rep. I can’t just sit on the beach all day, Deano. Drives me fucking nuts.”

Dean shook his head again. “I remember watching you grow up. Little scrap of a thing. You took a fair few knocks when you were a kid. You were never the natural hard guy. You had to learn, be taught by me and Owen and some of the other guys, particularly once the old man was locked up and Fearless and the others had ducked out. You had to work hard to get all that muscle, too.”

Work hard, yes. And then turn to the steroids to push things further, the speed and coke to help me work harder and longer in the gym and in the ring. I didn’t need Dean to tell me how hard it had been, or what kind of a price I’d paid.

“That doesn’t have to be how it is now, though, bro’,” Dean went on. “Now’s the perfect time to walk away. Find out what kind of a bloke you might have been if you hadn’t grown up in one of the hardest families the East End’s ever seen.”

“Like you’ve been able to walk away?” He didn’t miss the irony: Dean had tried to do exactly what he was telling me, but people like us can never escape the past, or the kinds of people we are.

“I know what you’re saying, Dean,” I said. “And yes, I had to work hard at it. I had to learn the ropes. But I learned well. I’ve never known anything else. I can’t go back and find who I might have been. This is me. This is how I’ve turned out.”

I didn’t know how else to put it.

“I’ve tried the quiet life, Deano. All fucking summer. I’ve tried it and it didn’t work. I need to get the buzz back. What I need now is a bit of action.”

I should have known that was the kind of statement that comes back to haunt you.

I persuaded Dean to give it some time. Wait for the East Europeans to make their next move.

If they were smart they’d do some digging behind the scenes before trying to muscle in. Maybe the reputation of the Bailey Boys would be enough to turn them away to softer targets.

Lots of maybes.

Dean didn’t have security at the New Duchess, as such. Óscar behind the bar looked pretty handy, and Reuben, whose main role was standing out on the seafront promenade trying to smooth-talk potential customers in for a drink and maybe a bite to eat, was no hundred pound weakling, but there was no-one on the door. It wasn’t that kind of place.

I spent the first evening out on the street by the Duchess with Reuben, working my Cockney charm with the punters, getting a feel for the place.

It was a different pace of life here in San Pedro, just a few miles along the coast from Puerto Libre. It was hard to match up Dean’s story of dealers and mobsters with what I could see over the next two days and nights.

But I trusted my brother, and you don’t exactly misinterpret a discussion like the one he’d had with the Russians. They never like to leave much room for interpretation, in my experience.

I wondered how many of the local businesses they’d already acquired an interest in? The tapas restaurant next door? The bar next to that? The row of tourist shops after that? The hotel on the other side? The sea food place?

On my second day hanging out at the New Duchess I explored the neighborhood, asked a few questions. Drew up a blank. That wasn’t unusual, of course. Nobody liked to talk about that kind of thing. But there’s not talking because you’re scared, and not talking because you haven’t got a clue, and I started to get the distinct impression this was an example of the latter variety.

So if that was the case, why was the New Duchess being targeted? Was it because of who owned it, or was it simply because it was a newly thriving business in what had been a sleepy pocket of this coast and so the obvious first move for someone who wanted to claim the territory?

It was impossible to say, on the information I had, but I was getting a feeling. The kind of feeling a cop describes as a hunch and someone like me recognizes as survival instinct kicking in.

Again, I was reminded of the way Fearless talked about the Costa. Layer upon layer of complexity, currents of power and corruption seething below the surface but which you can never quite grasp.

I’d promised Dean I’d keep an eye on things, and the more I did so, the more convinced I became that we had very good reason to be wary.

§

On the second night I sat at the bar with an Estrella and a bowl of peanuts, just another customer.

I liked what Jess and my brother had done here. The whole English bar thing was huge on the Costa, but the New Duchess was pitched at the upper end of that market, classy.

When Dean and Jess had taken the place over I’d been surprised, and I’d put it down to a kind of homesickness: bringing a bit of London to the Costa. Even the name had been a play on our old family pub in Poplar, The Old Duchess.

I’d been mistaken. What I’d identified as misplaced nostalgia had been a sharp business sense at work: between them, Dean and Jess had taken a look at the market and worked out where to pitch in. Dean really had stepped away from the old life.

Maybe my cynicism was misplaced. Maybe he really could make a clean break. If only we could sort out the current situation.

I’d been trying to explain some of this to Jess, who was working the bar tonight. Trying to get across how impressed I was, and how I’d realized maybe Dean was talking more sense than I’d credited him with a few days earlier.

Maybe it was me who was foolish, trying to get back into the business when it was, as everyone kept telling me, a very different game out here.

“So what’s happened, Lee?”

I’d been surveying the room, but now I swung my gaze back to Jess. She sometimes came across as a bit flippant, but she could be more perceptive than just about anyone I’d encountered. And she had a look that could cut right through you.

“Huh?”

“You,” she said. “There’s something different about you, and I don’t think you’ve hit the speed again.” She was joking, but I knew she wasn’t comfortable around users – she’d had a rough time of her own before she’d hooked up with Dean, a year or two when she’d gone off the rails.

I shrugged, as if that would deflect her.

“Have you met someone? Are you in lurve?”

I couldn’t think of an answer that wouldn’t fuel it now, denial or otherwise. Finally, I settled for, “It’s complicated.”

“Really? I was only teasing. I didn’t think...”

“I don’t know what it is, okay?” I said. “I barely know her. Only that people seem to think she’s trouble, but–”

“You can’t stop thinking about her?”

I rocked my head side to side. As I say, Jess could be very perceptive sometimes.

“It’s just... Her life isn’t exactly simple right now. And I haven’t heard anything from her for a few days. I can’t call her because I don’t have her number. She can’t call me... Not that I’d really expect her to... Hell, Jess, I don’t know
what
I should expect...”

“She seeing someone else?”

I shook my head. “Dodgy ex. It’s messy.”

Jess nodded. “It’s never simple, though, is it, Lee?”

She was right, of course. I was used to her cutting through things like that. But that didn’t mean I had to admit when she was right.

“I don’t do relationships,” I said. “And especially not complicated ones.” There was good reason I always tried to steer well clear.

“But you can’t stop thinking about her?”

She was smiling, enjoying this.

“I’m not cut out for this kind of thing.”

“But you can’t stop thinking about her.”

§

She was right. Somehow Imelda had taken root in my head. I’d dream of her. I’d wake with fragments of those dreams in my consciousness. I’d think of her at random moments through the day and evening.

And – much to my surprise, I’ll admit – it wasn’t just a sex thing. It was that late night when she’d waited for me at Los Momentos, the way we’d sat and talked so freely... I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t remember the last time I’d let so many barriers drop, so quickly, if ever.

All I wanted now was to know she was okay.

The last thing I expected, a short time later, was to sense someone in the doorway, coming in off the street – to twist and look, and to see it was her.

Imelda.

Here in my brother’s bar.

I’ve been with some beautiful women in my time. Faces – and bodies – you’d recognize from TV and magazines. Real lookers. Superficial, me? Well maybe, but at least I’m up front about it: I’ll be the first to admit that I love the way women look, and the way that makes me feel. And because I’ve never been a relationships kind of guy, it often hasn’t gone far beyond that: the first impression, the physical, the beauty. That’s my experience of women: rarely much beyond that first night or two.

But there’s beautiful and then there’s Imelda.

She paused in the doorway, her gaze slowly working the room.

Her shoes were black patent leather with needle heels, her skirt black and slit high in that manner she clearly liked – a style that emphasized the long sweep of her legs, and drew the eye up. The perfect curves of hip, waist, bust. A real woman’s shape. If a body could be a work of art, well, Imelda would have secured a place in the Louvre. If she wasn’t already in some creep’s private collection...

Her top was white, something silky, enough buttons undone that you’d just have to keep undoing them, if you didn’t simple rip it open.

All in just a glimpse, a snapshot of beauty and desire.

Imelda.

Her eyes found me, and I remembered the first time I’d seen her, that first look. The look that had said
I want you. I want you and I’m going to
have
you
.

This look was part two, and all it said was
Tonight
.

If there was one thing Imelda understood, it was the power she had over men.

She’d learned that early on, back when she was really too young to be learning such things. Back on the streets of Playa de las Américas, when she’d realized that her burgeoning womanhood was another tool she could use, and was soon the most powerful tool she could use – to get attention, to work a man’s interest, to draw him in and spit him out again when she was done.