Drake (6 page)

N
oble thoughts don't pay
the bills. I'd done Wormwood's job for him, that was something. Whatever happened now, at least that was sorted, but I had no idea what I was going to do for money from now on. Hieromancy wasn't likely to keep me alive on its own, that was for sure.

Trixie had left me with a lecture I didn't really understand, a flat that stank of Russian cigarettes, and a vague sense of uneasy arousal that I didn't know what to do with. Now I'm not too proud to have a wank, I'll admit that, but it wasn't really that sort of feeling. It reminded me a bit of being in primary school, and the first girl I ever fancied. Her name was Melanie and I had been absolutely obsessed with her, in a prepubescent sort of way. She made me feel funny but without a clue what to do about it, so I had spent a lot of time in my bedroom just sort of thinking about her, and feeling funny. Trixie had left me feeling a bit like that, if I'm honest about it. I sprawled on the sofa in my office with a fresh cup of coffee, and thought about Trixie, and felt ten years old all over again. At least my back had stopped hurting, that was something.

I spent several days doing that, just sort of thinking about Trixie and not doing much of anything else. When I got hungry I'd wander down to Big Dave's and eat something bacon-based, when I ran out of coffee I'd nip over the road to the shop and restock. Other than, I didn't really do a whole hell of a lot. I tell you, I really wasn't myself. I was
so
not myself, in fact, that I didn't even seem to be able to muster the enthusiasm to wonder why not.

Needless to say, I ran out of money very quickly. I was sitting on the sofa in my office, looking at my last tenner and trying to decide if it would be better spent on food or coffee, and whether it was too soon to have another crack at the fruit machine in the Rose and Crown, when the doorbell buzzed.

The noise stirred me out of a vaguely confused miasma of thoughts about blonde braids and white auras, money and fruit machines, tight jeans and bright sapphire eyes. I got up and wandered across the room to lift the handset of the intercom from its cradle.

“Don Drake,” I said.

“Don baby,” said a nauseatingly familiar voice, “let me in. It's Steevie.”

That snapped me out of it quick enough. I winced and pushed the button. The door buzzed, and I heard the tread of footsteps on the stairs. I had just settled behind my desk when he came in. Gold Steevie sauntered into my office like he owned the place and took the chair opposite me without waiting to be asked. His minder stayed by the door, looming in a bulky leather jacket. Compared to Connie he looked like nothing special really, but I knew damn well he'd have a shooter tucked away in that coat somewhere.

Steevie crossed his legs and straightened the crease in the trousers of his thousand pound suit, the cuff of his shirt sliding back over the chunkiest gold bracelet I'd ever seen. There was a huge Rolex on his other wrist, solid eighteen carat and studded with real diamonds or I'm a monkey's uncle. No fakes for Gold Steevie, not if you knew what was good for you.

“Don baby, it's good to see you,” he said.

Steevie was in his early forties, and wore his receding hair slicked straight back with enough gel to flatten a forest. His suit was dark grey silk, his shirt a pale shade of pink and open at the throat to flash a heavy gold crucifix on a chain almost as thick as his bracelet. When he smiled at me his teeth were the artificial white of television celebrities, and his every finger glittered with sovereigns and diamond signets.

“How's it going, Steevie?” I asked him.

He grinned again, shrugged expansively, and straightened his crease again. “Business, you know how it is,” he said. “Ups and downs.”

I nodded. I knew exactly how Steevie's business was. In the shit with the Albanian mob was how it was, since he'd lost control of the docks in a brief but bloody turf war a couple of months ago. Not that he'd ever admit that to the likes of me, of course. I was just the hired help to Steevie, not someone you had to tell the truth to. That was why I had always made it
my
business to keep up with how my regular clients were getting on. I'm a great believer in not backing the losing side, by and large, and I don't like to let these pricks pull the wool over my eyes. I wouldn't have survived long in my line of work otherwise.

“Sure,” I said. “I know how it is, Steevie.”

He uncrossed his legs and leaned forwards, resting his forearms on the edge of my desk.

“So, listen baby, I've got a little piece of work for you,” he said. He was close enough that I could smell his expensive aftershave. “A little job, you know, what you do best.”

I nodded. This wasn't going to happen, but I could hardly come straight out and tell him so. That, I knew, wouldn't be good for my health. Now luckily I've always been a bit of a showman. The punters expect it, after all. It makes them feel like they're getting a real magician for their money and not just some hired thug. Whenever Steevie or someone like him came to me with a job I always made a big show of consulting the omens, making plenty of mumbo-jumbo about whether it was auspicious to do what they wanted or not. Funnily enough, the more they were paying the more auspicious it got, by and large. Not today though.

I opened a drawer in my desk and took my cards out. They looked very old, those cards, ragged and creased and stained and a bit greasy round the edges. None of your new age shop nonsense for Don Drake, oh no. In truth those cards were all of a year old, bought after I lost my last deck somewhere one drunken night, but I'd gone to a lot of trouble to make them
look
like they'd been handed down from my wise and powerful old great granny. It's all part of the show, you understand.

“Let's see what I can do for you then,” I said.

I shuffled and cut the deck, my eyes never leaving Steevie's. He'd seen me do this enough times before to know to be patient. I cut again, palmed a card, shuffled, palmed, cut. I'm good with cards, if I do say so myself. If only Wormwood had let his customers deal the cards once in a while I'd never have got myself in this bloody situation in the first place.

“Show us the way, oh spirits of the magnificent ether,” I muttered, and began to lay out the spread.

The first card was the Wheel of Fortune, reversed. Then came the Devil, then the Ten of Swords. I winced, feigning surprise. That was just about the worst spread I had managed to think up in the short amount of time I'd had to tickle the deck. I flipped the last card off the top of the deck, trusting to luck that it wasn't going to spoil things. It didn't – the cards obliged nicely and gave me my old nemesis, the Tower.

“Oh dear,” I said softly.

Steevie stared down at the cards, then at the carefully arranged expression on my face.

“What?” he said.

“Steevie, this isn't good,” I said. “This really isn't good.”

“Bollocks,” he said. “It's bullshit. I want this doing, Drake.”

“I can't,” I said. “Look at the cards, Steevie.”

“No, you fucking look at me,” he countered. “Paul's downstairs in the motor with a bag with ten grand in it. You want it or not?”

I wanted it. Of course I wanted ten grand for a few hundred quid's worth of ingredients and a day's work, who wouldn't?

I could see the boy's face, the bloody pits of his eyes staring up at me.

Steevie's driver Paul would be sitting outside the Bangladeshi grocers in Steevie's big, overly conspicuous Bentley, drawing stares the way a turd draws flies. Sitting there with ten grand in a bag. Ten grand for me, if I just said yes.

He was five years old.

“I can't,” I said again. “For you Steevie, for you I can't. The cards say you'll go to Hell this time.”

Steevie stared at me. Strange as it might seem, I knew the crucifix wasn't just for show. Steevie was a devout Catholic.

“You what?” he said.

“The Devil, Steevie, look for yourself,” I said. “The Wheel of Fortune reversed is bad luck enough, and then the Ten of Swords and the Tower. It'll all come crashing down around you if you do this one, whoever he is. The Ten of Swords means cruelty from above, and the Devil… well, you know…”

I was bullshitting like all buggery now, obviously, but Steevie didn't know that. He tugged nervously at the cuff of his shirt and cleared his throat. I've always thought a religious gangster was a bit of a weird combination, but he was far from the only one I'd met. It made things a lot easier for me in the long run. Hell, I'd been raised Catholic myself for that matter. Look where that had got me.

“Fuck,” he said. He slammed the flat of his hand down on my desk with a bang and leaned forward until his nose was almost touching mine, and bellowed in my face. “Fuck! Are you taking me for a cunt?”

“I'm sorry Steevie,” I said, looking as mournful and as scared as I could. I didn't really have to fake the scared part, to be perfectly honest with you. “It's in the cards, you can see it as well as I can.”

He lurched to his feet and glared at me for a moment, then his shoulders seemed to sag. “No,” he said. “No, you're right. You're just looking out for me, Don, I know that.”

I nodded, not quite daring to speak. Steevie might look slightly ridiculous, but I knew what he was capable of. If he'd thought for a moment that I wasn't being straight with him he'd have had no qualms at all about taking my fingers off with a pair of bolt cutters.

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

Steevie shrugged, and shot a glance at his minder. “Right, well I suppose we'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way then,” he said. “Cheers anyway, Don.”

He reached into his jacket and for a heartstopping moment I honestly thought he was going for a gun. I felt my heart turn over in my chest as his hand came back out with his wallet in it. He peeled two fifties off his roll and tossed them on the desk in front of me.

“For your bother,” he said.

It was all I could do to nod my thanks as he turned away. I didn't trust myself to speak in anything other than a whimper of fear. I hated Gold Steevie, and everyone else I knew like him. I absolutely hated them, but they were my customers. This was the other world I moved in, the world away from magic and places like Wormwood's club, and these were the sort of people I worked for. This was my life.
Was
my life, I reminded myself.

I sighed as the door closed behind Steevie and his minder, but I didn't dare move until I heard the Bentley pull away from the curb outside with a completely unnecessary squeal of tyres.

“Fucking hell,” I said.

This was going to present no end of problems. Steevie had given me a few quid, out of some odd mixture of superstitious gratitude and pity I suspected, but that wouldn't happen next time. I had bluffed him once, that was something, but he wouldn't fall for it a second time unless I could rustle up an actual priest from somewhere to back me up. Funnily enough I didn't know any priests any more. There was no saying that whichever of my other customers came to me next would fall for it at all. Right then I was actually
glad
that jobs didn't come around all that often. All the same, what the bloody hell was I supposed to do? I pushed myself to my feet and went through to the workroom.

“Where the fuck have you been?” the Burned Man demanded. “I haven't seen you for days.”

“Sorry,” I muttered. “I've been…”

“I don't give a fuck what you've been doing,” the Burned Man snarled, “I'm
hungry
. Come here you git.”

I opened my shirt and knelt down in front of it, wincing as it started to feed with more than its usual ferocity. Just how many days had it been, anyway?

“I'm sorry,” I said to it at last. “I've not been myself, I don't think.”

It slobbered something unintelligible against my chest, a thin trickle of my blood running down the scorched ruin of its face. At last it pulled away, sated and smiling.

“Who was that cracking bint?” it asked me.

“Er,” I said, feeling ridiculously embarrassed. “Which one?”

It snorted laughter hard enough to make a bubble of blood and snot pop out of its left nostril. Oh my days, but the Burned Man was revolting.

“Blondie, you pillock, the one with the weird white aura,” it said. “If you're cheating on
that
you're even stupider than I thought you were.”

It reached down and rubbed its tiny, burned little cock in a disgustingly suggestive way.

“Her name's Trixie,” I said. “She's… Wait a minute. How the hell do you know about her?”

“Oh, she popped her head round the door one morning,” it said. “About the same time you started trying to starve me to death.”

I went cold all over. “She did?”

It nodded. “Yup,” it said. “I offered her a bunkup but she wasn't having any of it. She just gave me this funny sort of look and shut the door again. You're a lucky little bastard, you do know that don't you?”

“No,” I said slowly. “No, I don't think I am. And I don't think I want to see her again.”

“Can I have her then?” the Burned Man said, but I wasn't really listening anymore.

If Trixie had been in here and seen the Burned Man, then whatever she was I could well be in a truly immense amount of shit. I turned my back on the altar and went to rummage through the old wooden chest of drawers that stood against the wall of the room, next to the door. There was an untidy pile of books and other junk on the top that I kept meaning to put away, and kept not getting around to. I rooted around in a drawer until I found the stone I was looking for, and a small artist's paintbrush as well.

Years ago people used to think a pebble with a hole in it was magic. They aren't especially, but they're nice and easy to thread on a cord or a necklace or whatever, so they make great amulets if you know what to do with them. I laid the pebble on the edge of the altar and dabbed the tip of the paintbrush in the fresh blood that was still trickling from my chest.