Market Forces Page 18

  ‘Ah, that corner, I think,’ said Mike, nodding at Chris. ‘I’ll sit here and Griff, do you mind if I call you Griff, if you could sit here.’

  Dixon lowered himself onto the edge of the armchair. There was something painfully vulnerable in the expression on his face as he looked at Bryant.

  ‘You’ll need to get dressed,’ said Mike gently.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The T-shirt?’

  ‘Oh. Oh, no, it’s. Filthy.’ He compressed the already crumpled piece of clothing in his hands. ‘Been working on my bike. I’ll go up and get another one.’

  ‘Well.’ Bryant lifted a forestalling hand. ‘Perhaps in a moment. But we really need to get these questions sorted out. Uhm. You have a child, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dixon grinned happily. ‘Joe. He’s three.’

  ‘And he’s,’ Mike gestured at the ceiling. ‘Upstairs asleep, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘Good, good. Alright, now the official questions,’ Bryant reached into his jacket. ‘Where are we, ah. Yes.’

  The Nemex.

  Even for Chris, the transition was an almost electrical jolt. Mike transformed in a single motion from beaming, chocolate-voiced media host to a man with a levelled gun.

  For Dixon, it was clearly beyond the realms of comprehension.

  ‘What’s,’ he shook his head, grin still licking around his lips. ‘What’s, what’re you doing?’

  ‘Chris.’ Mike didn’t look round. ‘Close the door.’

  Dixon still hadn’t got it. ‘Is this part of—‘

  ‘Show us the T-shirt.’

  ‘Wha—‘

  ‘Show me the motherfucking T-shirt, you piece of shit!’

  ‘Mike?’

  ‘Just relax, Chris. Everything’s under control. When Jazz comes back, you just keep her out of the way. We’re not here for her.’

  Dixon stirred. ‘Listen—‘

  ‘No, you listen.’ Bryant took a step forward and drew a fresh downward bead on Dixon’s face. ‘Throw the T-shirt on the floor. Now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask you again. Show me the fucking T-shirt.’

  ‘No.’ It was like talking to a cornered child.

  Bryant moved faster than Chris had ever seen another human being move. From standing, he was suddenly at Dixon’s chair. The Nemex whipped out sideways and Dixon was reeling back, clutching at his head with both hands. The T-shirt fell to the threadbare carpet and Bryant scooped it up left-handed. Blood splintered bright through Dixon’s fingers.

  ‘You’re not on TV, Griff.’ Mike’s tone had gone back to conversational. He crouched to Dixon’s level. ‘There’s no need to be shy.’

  He shook the T-shirt out and laid it on the floor, face up. It was clean and freshly ironed, black lettering on soft white cotton.

  White Aryan Resistance.

  The words were printed horizontally, one under the other, the first letter of each limned in red in case someone didn’t get the message.

  The door swung open and Jazz backed into the room, still crouching from the contortion necessary to depress the handle without putting down the tray in her hands.

  ‘I brought some—‘

  Turning, she saw Griff cringing and bleeding in the chair, saw the gun in Mike Bryant’s hand. She dropped the tray and shrieked. The coffee leapt sideways, broad swipes of liquid on its way to the floor. Cheap crockery scattered and broke amidst something else. Biscuits, Chris saw. She’d brought biscuits.

  ‘Be quiet,’ snapped Bryant. ‘You’re going to wake Joe up.’

  Naming the child seemed to do something to Griff Dixon. He dropped his hands from his face. The gouge that the forward sight of the Nemex had opened in his scalp showed clearly through his razored hair, and blood was running down his face into one eye.

  ‘You fucking listen to me. Whoever you are, I know people. You touch any of us, I’ll—‘

  ‘You’ll do nothing, Griff. You’ll sit there and fucking bleed, and you’ll listen to me, and you’ll do nothing. Jazz, will you shut up. Chris, for Christ’s sake make her sit down or something.’

  Chris got hold of the woman and forced her onto the sofa. She was trembling and making a high keening sound that might have had the words my baby in it somewhere.

  ‘I know people who—‘

  ‘You know political people, Griff.’ The scary thing about Mike’s voice, Chris realised, was the energy of it. He sounded like an enthusiastic coach pushing a fighter who wasn’t punching his weight. ‘Political scum. Look at this gun, Griff. Recognise it?’

  It was only then that Chris saw the fear appear on Dixon’s face. For the first time since they’d entered the house, Griff Dixon was afraid.

  ‘That’s right.’ Bryant had seen it too. He grinned. ‘Nemesis Ten. Now you know the only people got access to these babies, don’t you Griff. You’re well enough connected for that. This is a corporate gun. And where it comes from, politicians mean less than a bucket of runny shit.’

  Jazz’s keening changed pitch.

  ‘First question for you, Griff.’ A tremor ran down Mike Bryant’s face. It was the single indication of the fury he was working through. ‘What possible reason does a member of the white master race have to stick his dick in a black woman?’

  Dixon flinched as if struck. His wife’s keening broke abruptly into something between a sob and a howl.

  ‘Didn’t you understand the question? Would you like to phone a friend? I asked you, what possible reason does a member of the white master race have to stick his dick in a black woman? Especially, Griff, if that black woman is screaming and fighting and begging you not to do it?’

  The room settled down to quiet and the sound of Dixon’s wife weeping. Bryant crouched again. He pressed his lips together hard. Pushed out a breath.

  ‘Alright, Griff. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m not going to hurt your wife or your son, because in the end it isn’t their fault you’re a piece of shit. But I’m going to shoot you in both kneecaps and the balls.’

  Jazz erupted in shrieks. She tried to get up from the sofa and reach her husband. Chris held her back. Bryant got up.

  ‘And then I’m going to blind you in one eye. There’s no way around any of this. I want you to understand that. You and your friends picked on the wrong black girl.’

  Dixon came out of the chair, screaming. For a brief second he reached Mike with his fists. Then the hollow boom of the Nemex shook the room and Dixon was convulsed on the floor, blood soaking the crotch of his jeans. The new sound that came out of him didn’t sound human.

  Mike Bryant got back to his feet, bleeding from the mouth. He got his breath back, then very carefully sighted on Dixon’s left knee and pulled the trigger. The white supremacist must have passed out because the noise stopped. Bryant wiped his mouth and lined up on the other leg. By now Jazz had given up fighting Chris and was holding onto him as if he could rescue her from drowning. Her tears burnt on his neck. He covered her ears with his hands as Mike pulled the trigger for the third time.

  In the cordite-reeking quiet, he watched as Bryant stowed the Nemex, took out a steel-cased pen, bent to Dixon’s head, peeled back the eyelid and jabbed hard into the eye beneath. It all seemed to happen very slowly and without sound and somehow he found that his gaze had slipped away by the end and focused on the sleek lines of the entertainment deck.

  ‘Chris.’ Bryant was leaning over him.

  ‘What? Yeah, yeah.’

  It took both of them to unfasten Jazz’s grip on Chris. When they had finally tugged her away, Bryant crouched in front of her and gripped her lower jaw in one hand. In the other, he held up a folded wad of notes.

  ‘Alright, now listen to me. This money is for you. Here. Here, take it. Take it, for Christ’s sake.’ Finally, he had to open her hand and fold her fingers around the notes himself. ‘If you want him to live, you’d better get help for him soon. I don’t much care if he lives or dies, but if h
e lives you tell him. He, or anyone else around here, touches another person with the surname Morris or Kidd, I’ll come back for the other eye, and I’ll kill your son.’

  Her whole body jerked. Bryant took her hand and squeezed the money into it again.

  ‘Now you tell him that, and you make sure he understands I mean it. I don’t want to come back here, Jazz. I don’t want to do it. But I will if your fuckwit racist husband and his friends make me.’

  In the car, Bryant put his hands on centre of the steering wheel in front of him and pressed his body back into the padded seat. He emptied his lungs in a long, hard single breath. Then, he just stared at the windscreen. He seemed to be waiting for something. There were lights on in some of the houses, but either no one had heard the gunshots or no one had any interest in finding out what they signified.

  ‘Did you mean it?’ Chris asked.

  ‘The eye?’ Bryant nodded to himself. His voice was barely above a murmur. ‘Oh, yes. People like that, they’ve got to have something to lose. Otherwise, you’ve got no leverage on them.’

  ‘No, his son. Did you mean it about his son?’

  Mike looked across at him, outraged. ‘Jesus Christ, of course not. Fuck, Chris, what kind of man do you think I am?’

  He was silent for a while. Very faintly, the sound of a siren came wailing to them out of the night. Bryant looked at his watch. He grunted.

  ‘Fast. She must have called a pricey one.’

  He started the engine. The BMW’s lights carved up the gloom in the poorly lit street.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, huh? We’ve got a lot to do.’

  It took them the rest of the night to find the other two men. Both were young, neither had a family and it was Friday night in the zones. Troy Morris’s information gave starting points, but from there on in, it was hard work. Mike drove, Chris checked streets, house numbers, the names on dismal little neon signs. They worked their way through mistaken addresses, dimly-lit pipe houses, underground clubs with promising names like Cross of Iron and Endangered Race, brothels, fast-food stands and even a local paycop garrison near the river. Everywhere they went, Mike Bryant brandished the Nemex or thick wads of cash to almost interchangeable effect. The money worked more often than the gun. It unzipped the right lips, opened the right doors.

  They found the first man at a hot-dog stand, drunk and swaying. He didn’t know they were looking for him. No one had bothered to warn him. The white supremacists weren’t big on solidarity, and besides, functioning phones weren’t all that common in the zones. The landlines got fucked up by technosmart vandal gangs and mobile cover was a bad joke, fatally compromised by rolling waves of government jamming aimed at satellite programming like Dex and Seth. Wheeled transport was all but non-existent. People didn’t get about much, messages even less.

  Bryant leaned on the stand, bought the man a burger and watched him eat it. Then he told him why he was there. The man took off, trying to sprint. They went after him. Halfway down a side alley they found him vomiting up Mike’s burger and the rest of the night’s intake. Mike shot him four times in the groin and stomach with the Nemex, then bent to peer at the damage in the dim light. When he was sure the man was bleeding to death, they left him alone.

  They had to drag the second supremacist out of a bed that wasn’t his own in a fifteenth-floor apartment that reeked of damp and rat poison. The woman next to him didn’t even wake up. When they got him into the living room he was mumbling, incoherent with ingested chemicals and sleep. They took an arm each and ran him head first against the balcony window until it smashed through. Outside, on the glass-strewn balcony, dawn was turning the night air slowly grey and there were birds singing in the trees below. Neither of them were sure if the man was dead or not. They stopped over the body, careful to avoid getting glass in their hands, picked him up and threw him over the rail. The birdsong stopped abruptly with the impact on the concrete below. In the kitchen, Mike left money for the broken window.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The sun caught them leaving the zones somewhere south of London Bridge. The streets were already full of pedestrians on their way to work and Alike had to hoot repeatedly to get them out of the road as they approached the checkpoint. Queues backed up hundreds long, snaking randomly away from the various turnstile entry points. There was even a queue at the road barrier, three rusting buses that looked almost pre-millennial, one of them belching oily fumes from its exhaust. Beyond the checkpoint, glimpsed through the low rise of preferential South Bank housing, gold light impacted and dripped on glass skyscraper panels across the river.

  ‘Jesus, look at this,’ said Bryant disgustedly. ‘Emissions monitoring, my fucking arse. Look at the shit coming out of that bus.’

  ‘Yeah, and it’s packed. We’re going to be here for a while.’

  It was true. Armed guards were ordering the passengers out of the first bus, lining them up. The first line had already assumed the position - right hand on the back of the head, passcard held up in the left. A single guard moved down the line, scrutinising the cards one at a time and swiping them through his hip unit. Every second card needed repeated swipes.

  ‘Don’t know why they bother,’ Chris yawned with a force that made his jaw creak. ‘It’s not like there’s been anything resembling terrorism in London for the last couple of years.’

  ‘Yeah, and you’re looking at the reason why. Don’t knock it, man.’ Bryant drummed his fingers on the wheel. ‘Still, this is going to take forever. You want to get breakfast?’

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Chris twisted about in his seat. A handful of frontages down the street they had just driven up, a grimed sign said Cafe. People flowed in and out with paper packets and garishly coloured cans.

  ‘In there?’

  ‘Sure. Cheap and nasty, plenty of grease. Just what you need.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’ Chris still felt slightly queasy when he thought about what Mike had done to Griff Dixon’s eye. ‘Think I’ll stick to coffee.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Bryant plugged the BMW into reverse and punted it back along the street. The engine whined high with unnecessary revs. Pedestrians scrambled to get out of the way. Level with the cafe, Bryant slewed into the curb and jolted to a halt at a rakish angle. He grinned.

  ‘Man, I love the parking in this part of town.’

  They climbed out to hostile stares. Bryant smiled bleakly and alarmed the car with the remote held high and visible. Someone behind Chris rasped something unintelligible and hawked up spit. Twitchy with the events of the night, Chris pivoted about. The phlegm glistened yellow and fresh near his feet. Not what he needed.

  He scanned the bystanders’ faces. Mostly they shuffled and looked away, but one young black man stood his ground and stared back.

  ‘You got something to say to me?’ Chris asked him.

  The man stayed silent but he didn’t look away. His white companion laid a hand on his arm. Bryant came round the car, yawning and stretching.

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘No problem,’ said the white one, pulling his friend away.

  ‘Good, you’d better get cracking then.’ Bryant jerked a thumb up the street. ‘That’s a hell of a queue up there. You coming, Chris?’

  He shoved back the door of the cafe and they worked their way past the line of people waiting at the take-out counter to the seating area at the back. There were no customers apart from a black-clad old man who sat alone, staring into a mug of tea.

  ‘This’ll do.’ Mike slid into a booth and beat a drum riff on the tabletop with the flat of both hands. ‘I’m starving.’

  There was a menu scrawled in luminous purple marker across the quickwipe surface of the table. Chris glanced across it and looked away again, nervous of the standing queue at his back. He knew the food. He’d eaten in places like this most of his teens, and occasionally, after a mechanic’s night out with Carla and the others from Mel’s Autofix, he still did. Like prime-time satellite programming,
it would be a loudly flavoured blend of low-grade bulking agents seasoned with garishly advertised vitamin and mineral additives. The sausages would average about thirty per cent meat, the bacon came swollen with injected water. He was glad he had no appetite.

  A waitress appeared at the booth.

  ‘Getya?’

  ‘Coffee,’ said Chris. ‘White. Glass of water.’

  ‘I’ll have the big breakfast,’ said Mike expansively. ‘You get eggs with that?’

  ‘They’re Qweggs,’ said the waitress sullenly.

  ‘Right. Better give me, uh, six of those then. And plenty of toast. Coffee for me too. Black.’

  The waitress turned her back and strode off. Mike watched her go.

  ‘Friendly here.’

  Chris shrugged. ‘They know who we are.’

  ‘Yeah, which means a massive tip if they can just secrete a little common courtesy. Pretty fucking short-sighted attitude, if you ask me.’

  ‘Mike.’ Chris leaned across the table. ‘What do you expect? The clothes you’re wearing cost more than that girl makes in a year. She probably lives in an apartment smaller than my office, damp walls, leaking drains, no security, and about two-thirds her weekly wage just to cover the rent.’

  ‘Oh, and that’s my fucking fault?’

  ‘It isn’t about—‘

  ‘Look, I’m not her fucking mother. I didn’t pop her out in the zones, just so I could claim breeding benefit. And if she doesn’t like it here, she can make her own sweet way out, just like anybody else.’

  Chris looked at his friend with sudden dislike. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘That’s right. Listen, Troy was born and bred in the zones, he made it out. James is off to the Scratcher in six weeks, he could end up making more money than both of us. So don’t tell me it can’t be done.’

  ‘And what about Troy’s cousin? The one got raped two nights ago by Dixon and his pals. How come she hasn’t made it out?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ Bryant’s anger collapsed as rapidly as it had sprouted. He slumped back in his seat. ‘Look, all I’m saying, Chris, is some of us have what it takes. Others don’t. I mean, this isn’t some cut-rate little African horrorshow of a nation. You don’t have to live in the zones because of your tribe or something. No one cares what colour you are here, what religion or race. All you’ve got to do is make the money.’