The Power(64)

So now they’re four against one. Closing in. Danni sifts her little mesh net in her left hand.

Sam says, ‘He was asking for it. He begged us for it. Fucking begged us, followed us, told us what he wanted done to him. Filthy little scrote, knew just what he was looking for, couldn’t get enough of it, wanted us to hurt him, would have licked up my piss if I’d asked him, that’s your fucking brother. Looks like butter wouldn’t melt, but he’s a dirty little boy.’

Yeah, well. Might be true, might not. Roxy’s seen some things. She still shouldn’t have touched a Monke, should she? She’ll ask Ricky’s mates about it quietly when all this is over and maybe she’ll have to tell him not to be a stupid boy; if he wants that kind of thing she can find someone safe to oblige.

‘Don’t you talk about my fucking brother like that!’ Darrell yells suddenly, and he’s aiming the shotgun butt for her face, but she’s too quick for him, and it’s metal that shotgun, so when she grabs it he gasps and his knees buckle.

Sam gets one arm around Darrell. His whole body’s shuddering – it was a big jolt she gave him. His eyes are rolling back in his head. Fuck. If they hit her, they hit him.

Fuck.

Sam starts to back away. ‘Don’t you bloody follow me,’ she says. ‘Don’t you bloody come near me, or I’ll finish him, like I did your Ricky. I can do worse than that.’

Darrell’s close to tears now. Roxy can tell what she’s doing to him: a constant pulse of shocks into the neck, the throat, the temples. It’s most painful at the temples.

‘This isn’t over,’ Roxy says quietly. ‘You can get away now, but we’ll come back for you until it’s done.’

Sam smiles, all white teeth and blood. ‘Maybe I’ll do him now then, for fun.’

‘That’s not clever,’ says Roxy, ‘cos then we really would have to kill you.’

She gives the nod to Viv, who’s circled back round during the commotion. Viv swings her baton. She gives a whack to the back of Sam’s head like a sledgehammer taking out drywall.

Sam turns slightly, sees it coming, but she can’t put Darrell down in time to duck. The baton catches the side of her eye and there’s a burst of blood. She screams out once and falls to the floor.

‘Fuck,’ says Darrell. He’s crying and shaking; there’s not much they can do about that. ‘If she’d seen what you were doing, she’d’ve killed me.’

‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’ says Roxy. She doesn’t say anything about how he shouldn’t have gone for Sam with the shotgun, and she thinks that’s fair enough.

Roxy takes her time in marking them. Don’t want them to forget it, not ever. Ricky won’t be able to forget it. She leaves them with a spider-web of red, unfolding scars over their cheeks and mouth and nose. She takes a photo with her phone, so Ricky can see what she’s done. The scars, and the blind eye.

Only Barbara’s awake when they get in. Darrell goes to bed, but Roxy sits at the little table in the back kitchen and Barbara flicks through the photos on the phone, nodding with a mouth like a stone.

‘All still alive?’ she says.

‘Even called 999 for them.’

Barbara says, ‘Thank you, Roxanne. I’m grateful. You’ve done a good thing here.’

Roxy says, ‘Yup.’

The clock ticks.

Barbara says, ‘I’m sorry we were unkind to you.’

Roxy raises an eyebrow. ‘I wouldn’t say the word for it was “unkind”, Barbara.’

Which is harsher than she meant, but there’s a lot happened when she was a kid. Those parties she couldn’t come to, and the presents she never got, and the family dinners she was never invited to, and that time that Barbara came round to the house and threw paint at the windows.

‘You didn’t need to do this tonight, for Ricky. I didn’t think you would.’

‘Some of us don’t hold grudges, all right?’

Barbara looks like she’d slapped her in the face.

‘It’s all right,’ says Roxy, cos it is now, it’s been all right maybe since Terry died. She chews her lip a bit. ‘You never liked me cos of whose daughter I was. I never expected you would like me. S’all right. We stay out of each other’s way, don’t we? It’s just business.’ She stretches, her skein tautening across her chest, her muscles suddenly heavy and tired.

Barbara looks at her, eyes slightly narrowed. ‘There’s stuff my Bern still hasn’t told you, you know. About how the business runs. Dunno why.’

‘He was saving it for Ricky,’ says Roxy.

‘Yeah,’ says Barbara, ‘I think he was. But Ricky’s not going to take it now.’

She stands up, goes over to the kitchen cupboard. From the third shelf, she takes out the bags of flour and the boxes of biscuits and there, right at the back, she sticks her nail into an almost invisible crack and opens up a hidden cubby-hole, not wider than your hand. She pulls out three small black notebooks held together by an elastic band.

‘Contacts,’ she says. ‘Narcs. Bent coppers. Rotten doctors. I’ve been saying for months Bern should just give this all to you. So you could work out how to sell the Glitter yourself.’

Roxy holds out her hand, takes the books. Feels the weight and solidity of them in her palm. All the knowledge of how the business is run in a compact block, a brick of information.