Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ready to read books .TXT) 📗

the movement. A giant indeed, gangland enforcer Nick Holloway was even bigger than the last time I’d seen him.

“Nicky,” I murmured. “What the hell are you doing here?”

CHAPTER FIVE

Making love? Had we ever done that? I wondered as I helped Nick Holloway to his feet. Honestly, I think we both would have laughed at such a sentimental description of what was really nothing more than good old-fashioned casual sex. And yet, I had comforted him when he’d told me about his father and the abuse he’d suffered in that cottage on the estuary. For my part, it had been a rare act of compassion in the dark days after I’d lost Haz.

“Nice way to greet an old mate,” Nick said, massaging the back of his thigh. “I thought you showpeople were supposed to be hospitable.”

I shook my head at him. “Not sure where you got that idea. Anyway, what do you expect when you creep up on someone in the dark?”

Though I could see he had lived some hard years since the last time we’d met, still the wrinkling of that snub nose made him look twenty again. His fingers curled gently around my shoulder. Just a twinge from where he’d hit me, though I expected a mighty bruise come the morning.

“Suppose I should’ve called out,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure it was you. And anyway, I didn’t expect you to come at me like that. I mean, you were always a bit on the mardy side, Scott, but Christ Almighty!” He puffed out lightly freckled cheeks. “I hope your shoulder’s OK.”

“And your thigh,” I said.

He grinned, circling his big hands around his upper leg. “Not bad, are they? Squats morning, noon, and night. It’s agony, but the boys love ’em.” He straightened up, his gaze taking me in. “Not looking too bad yourself. Do you ever age, Scott Jericho? I swear—”

“Enough with the charm,” I said. “What are you doing here, Nicky?”

“I got out,” he shrugged. “Just like you. Finally, anyway.”

I turned, and limping a little, Nick began to follow me out of the trees.

“You mean you left Noonan’s outfit?”

“I know,” he grunted. “Took me long enough, eh? Oh, I recognised the name, by the way. Jericho Fairs? Wondered if maybe you’d gone back to the travelling life, though last I heard you’d joined the filth. Noonan still wants your head for that little stunt, in case you’re wondering. You should hear the way he boasts about what he’ll do if he ever gets his hands on you.” I’d forgotten the strength of Nick’s Yorkshire accent, how it plumbed every vowel so that a word like “boast” emerged as “burst”. The London gangsters had always had trouble deciphering his dialect. “Said he’ll do for you in the end.”

I nodded. “Let him try.”

Mark Noonan. Not wanting to live much inside my own head after what had happened between me and Haz in Oxford, I’d fallen into a kind of work that didn’t require me to think. Work, in fact, in which thinking at all was aggressively discouraged. The only talents of mine that were required rested in my fists, and so I’d hired myself out to a few mobsters on a freelance basis. Noonan had been the least objectionable—not into prostitution and light on the drugs side—his operation had focused on counterfeit sports gear, smuggled cigarettes, and a bit of loansharking. From the beginning, I’d set out what I was prepared to do for him as an enforcer and what I wasn’t. It mainly involved putting the frighteners on his rivals and collecting debts owed by other gangsters. I couldn’t say I was proud of those years, but I was able to sleep at night. Just.

“So what happened?” I asked.

We had now reached the trailers and he’d shaken off the cramp in his leg. Doors were yawning wide and a bustle of Travellers was spilling into the night.

“Mark wanted to make me one of the husbands,” he said. “And you know how that always ends up.”

I grimaced. Noonan offered “husband” status to a couple of his favourites every year, usually on his birthday, making a kind of sick pageant out of the whole thing. It was a protected, cosseted position for the prettiest boys in his gang, but Noonan was famously jealous. There were stories of husbands who had lied and cheated on him and who afterwards found themselves one eye short of the standard pair. In a twisted way, mobster Mark Noonan was something like the housekeeper Miss Rowell—they both prized honesty.

“I only knew one man who could stand up to him,” Nick said, touching my collar. “Only one he was afraid of. I remember how you’d look out for me when he got into one of his rages. I was always grateful for that, Scott.”

I pulled his hand away. It had been more than five years since I’d last seen Nick Holloway and time hangs heavy on such men, but there was something else here. His pupils sat like pinpricks in their denim-blue irises and there were claw marks on his upper arms where he’d scratched his skin raw. Quite a feat for fingernails bitten almost to the quick. I searched his face.

“What’s going on with you?”

He tried to bluff it out until a wave of exhaustion seemed to overcome him. “Codeine.” He sighed. “Tramadol. All the usual prescription pain meds. It’s what Mark’s started dealing these past few years. Thought it was how he’d keep me, I reckon. Get me hooked on the stuff so that I’d never leave. He’s lost it, Scott. Made the amateur mistake of sampling his own product. Fentanyl patches, for Christ’s sake. The kind of stuff they give terminal cancer patients who can’t bear the pain anymore.”

“And you?” I asked.

“What can I say? It’s taken a while but I’m down to just a few pills a day.”

He rubbed the pad of his thumb across that faded burn mark as he spoke, and I wondered if what