He sneered. Hyena that he was.
‘But word on the street says the Jacob boys are looking for you.’
‘That right?’
He slapped the waitress’s arse as she walked past us, holding her uniform in her hand.
‘They want to take you out.’
‘Do they?’
‘They mean business.’
‘You know what to do.’
‘I do.’
I always did.
It was two weeks since he’d killed Annie. I was acting, biding my time, waiting for the moment, so I could get him alone. I nursed him like a delinquent child when he needed someone to listen to his deluded self-indulgent rants. You see with men like Marty you don’t just go in. Although I would when the time was right. And the Jacob boys were just the ticket. Marty had outstayed his welcome with certain people. And I wanted him to believe for a while I wasn’t one of them.
Sunrise. I watch Sally’s face look down at me. She is holding a cup of coffee. Another one of Marty’s presents, this sick lachrymose piece of soiled flesh I find in my bruised bedroom every tired morning. He is adept at turning everything into porn. Used, forlorn, forgotten, afraid, exploited, troubled, derivative, lacking all credibility in a world without redemption from sin. Marty ignores sin in his own little empire. I see a bulldozer on the horizon and his house crumbling in the rising sun. He has performers, no more than that, and I am performing for him straight out of Walt Disney. I climb out of bed, watching Sally apply makeup in furry slippers. Hot Chocolate’s I believe in Miracles is playing on the radio that hisses and fizzes like a schizoid DJ in a plastic box. The music seems to be coming from another room, unreal as the woman who lies beside me each fractured night. I close my eyes. I finger the handle of my gun, I taste the gun oil as I watch his head spatter against the tiles of his newly appointed mansion in the countryside. I look at Sally and think back to Marty and what he did.
I greet her, distantly, with no trace of emotion. Because she is there. And because she is not my wife. She is the dancing clone Marty has placed in my living room like a sick doll spying on my nightmares. I trace the razor across his sleeping face and wait. I wait for Marty and feel my hand on my gun, I am firing the bullets one by one into his body, as I tell him why he is going down and I am standing over him staring at his shocked inarticulate face, the black sky above my head. One day soon I will kill him. That day Goofy will bring the house down. I want to taste his despair like a cup of blood that day. But today I humour Sally as she sobs at the sad music on the cheap broken radio.
They don’t make paisley scarves the way they used to anymore. Nothing stays the same. My wife’s favourites are now soiled with another man’s semen. Her paisley scarves hang upstairs. Sometimes she wore one when we made love. Her skin was softer than their silk. Her pupils would dilate when I touched her. She would wrap her thighs around me and I would remove that final piece of clothing from her neck as she arched her back. She made them erotic. They will rot in the moth-ridden wardrobe, a piece of my pierced sanity locked away with a broken key. Nothing stays the same, from the shops on the fading corner, which used to be peopled with clients on a Saturday morning, to the newspaper boy who is now a man. Only Marty stays the same. Marty with his smart look, his cheap words. Marty the liar, Marty the fraud. He gave me a lifestyle. When you think what that means it equals enslavement to an empire and another man’s ideas. And I had ideas of my own.
The Jacob boys stood in faded denim outside their club, guns in their trousers, waiting for us. Marty wanted to watch. It was a form of peep show for him to see his enemies pumped full of bullets. Later he would watch the women dance for him, with slow, methodical rhythm lacking all passion. He failed to discern its absence in their used bodies and disinterested faces.
I arrived early and my driver shot past them in the Merc as I leant out of the window and I let rip an Uzi into their bodies, watching them dance. Marty was sitting in a white van, staring out as they lay pooling blood. One of their ears landed on the van’s side, and left a long smear of blood he looked at with deep satisfaction. I saw a smirk stretch its way across his face. Then I went into the club. I shot the bouncers full of lead and dragged one out by his hair. He was six four, dumb as shit, full of muscle. I stared into Marty’s small dead eyes and blew the bouncer’s brains all over Marty’s patent leather shoes. He was wiping them off with a napkin as I walked away. I wasn’t finished yet. I hadn’t even started.
Marty liked envelopes, he collected them, especially unusual ones. He had boxes of them. He liked to feel he had positioned you, enclosed you in his world. That was the way I saw his obsession with used containers that held missives. It was similar to the way he liked his whores kept in cages.
I visited him the next day at his sprawling mansion on the edge of Surrey, where fields of crops bled into gardens secured by gardeners with guns tucked into frayed jackets, too little soil on their shoes, and muscles just too large to belong to their assumed positions.
His wife Glenda greeted me at the door, with a glass of Gin and Tonic in her hand swaying, eyes glazed, a small bruise fading beneath her left eye, her negligee hanging open, just a glimpse of pale pink nipple there and a flicker of interest as I walked in. I ignored the offer. Marty was always watching his empire, cameras surveilled his possessions, among them his punch bag wife and the air of suicide she carried about with her.
He was sitting in his oak-lined office, handmade shoes on an ottoman, smoking a Cuban.
‘So did you do them?’ he said, waving its burning tip at me.
‘I did.’
‘I saw you shoot them,’ he said, standing up and adjusting his trouser belt. ‘But did you do the rest?’
‘I carved them up.’
‘Did you chop them up so small no one would know?’
‘I did.’
‘Good man.’
He slapped me on the back and I felt like taking my jacket to the dry cleaners. I looked at him as he stubbed out his cigar and I thought of all the ways I wanted to hurt him.
‘You know what’s next.’
I didn’t need to nod.
I just walked away past Glenda, drunk in the hallway, her eyes wandering, hopeless, lost.
More acquisitions. Marty wanted to take over and he thought I was helping him, and although that is what I seemed to be doing I was isolating him. The more Marty got the lazier he became.
The other rivals were a group called the Franklin boys. Vicious but ill organised they would be easy. I headed there with a couple of Marty’s gardeners and some explosives.
Hank, the older brother, saw us coming and began shooting. As he fired at the gardeners I crept up behind him. I took his head off with my Glock. Then we went in. Keith, the younger brother, was counting money at his desk when I lifted him up from the carpet by his lapels and began to cut his throat while his bodyguard watched.
‘Where’s the money?’ I said.
He gurgled the answer.
I had what Marty wanted.
We set fire to the building and took the cash.
I handed it to him back at his club.
And I knew what I was going to do to him.
The first time he punched Annie she coughed blood. He was wearing his large gold ring, the one he sported on his middle finger and would glance at as he chatted up one of the women who were in his pay. He used his ring on them as he did on my wife the day he raped her. Alone at the house we shared with our memories while I ran his errands for him.