A Fistful of Knuckles

CHAPTER NINETEEN: AN EVEN HOTTER SHOWER

Patsy was sagging, slumped up against the side of one of the caravans, his head lolling as he absorbed a ferocious pounding from Spider — and then, without warning, he was battering Spider with his small, hard fists, lunging powerfully forward, driving Spider backward with bone-breaking strength.

He was playing possum! Sam thought, aghast, keeping his distance. Patsy was swallowing all those punches whole — he was just toying with Spider, lulling him into a false sense of superiority … just like he lulled me.

Spider was thrown hopelessly off-guard by Patsy’s sudden revival. He took a terrifying cannonade of fast, shuddering punches to the side of his head, his chest, his stomach, his rib cage, which sent him staggering and veering wildly until he slammed against one of the caravans and slithered down it, half senseless. He left behind him a huge smear of blood shaped uncannily like Australia.

Patsy loomed over Spider and smothered him with his whole body, like he meant to absorb him; he clamped his arms around Spider’s body and squeezed, throwing his head back and roaring as he did so. Spider made no sound; his mouth opened wide, the blood vessels in his face and neck swelled and stood out. Sam saw the spider tattoo along his neck rippling and bulging, saw the veins thrusting out from beneath it, but the only sound that came from Spider was a muffled, sickening crunch.

With a cry, Patsy hurled Spider to the ground, and at once he planted one of his heavy, steel-capped boots onto the back of Spider’s neck and drove his face down into the mud.

Sam found he was frozen. An inner voice was screaming at him — get in there, you’re a copper, break that fight up, nick Patsy before he kills Spider, do something! — but his body refused to react. The horror of what he had seen had locked his joints, stiffened his muscles, unmanned him.

All around, he could hear the bellowing of excited men as they jostled and clambered to get a better view of the action in the arena. They drummed their fists against the sides of the caravans, creating a deafening timpani in every direction.

His foot still planted on Spider’s neck, Patsy flung his arms into the air and roared. The crowd of men roared back. The lights of the fairground flashed in the sky beyond the confines of the arena, but to Sam they seemed to be flames lashing and whipping against the night; the low clouds reflected the smouldering glow of great lava flows that spread sluggishly across the face of the planet; the city itself was on fire, the buildings falling, the pavements melting, the very ground itself erupting in shattering bursts of hot lava and fragmented clinker. A million black balloons bobbed against the sulphurous sky.

Sam covered his eyes with his hands, forced himself back from this hellish vision, forced himself to be sane. Furiously, he opened his eyes again and glared about. The lights of the fairground were just that — coloured lights — and the city was no longer burning and dying. It had been nothing; another of the Test Card Girl’s phantom visions — indeed, would he now glimpse the brat’s face staring sadly at him from the men in the crowd?

I don’t give a damn if she’s there or not. Spider’s under my protection, and Patsy O’Riordan will not kill him. I will not permit it. I will stop it — NOW.

Before he had a chance to lose his nerve, Sam strode forward with the intention of — somehow — arresting Patsy and calling for police back-up.

But now Patsy was glaring right at him, his massive torso rising and falling with every breath, his tattoos glistening beneath a sheen of sweat and blood. His eyes blazed. If he was still just Patsy O’Riordan, or if he had become some other creature, the Devil in the Dark itself, Sam could no longer tell. The two monsters had, in Sam’s eyes at least, become one. His heart quailed. He thought of Annie, told himself that it was he and he alone who stood between her and the evil intentions of this ogre. He was the thin blue line that defied the advance of chaos.

‘Patsy O’Riordan, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Denzil Obi. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence against you.’

The men whooped, jeered, brayed, hooted. Something was thrown into the arena, landing heavily next to Patsy, but Sam’s attention remained on that inked and inhuman face.

‘You’re coming with me, O’Riordan. You’re nicked.’

Patsy leant over and picked up the object that had been thrown at his feet. It was a white plastic carton containing a transparent liquid.

‘Get your foot off Spider’s head, O’Riordan. That man needs an ambulance.’

Patsy unscrewed the cap of the carton and started sloshing the liquid onto Spider’s back and legs, dousing him.

‘Don’t make me use force with you, O’Riordan,’ Sam heard himself say. ‘Come quietly. I’m warning you.’

Emptying the carton, Patsy cast it carelessly aside. It was then that Sam was struck by the chemical stink of liquid paraffin. Pasty began groping in his trouser pocket for something. The men gawping into the arena from all sides had fallen silent. Nobody moved. Nobody blinked. Distant screams and laughs and music reached them from the fairground as Patsy produced a cigarette lighter.

‘O’Riordan,’ said Sam, his voice low and even, completely devoid of emotion. ‘Patsy. Stop.’

‘Ten years he ‘ad this coming,’ said Patsy, his voice husky. Still panting, he fixed Sam with his pale eyes. ‘You know what ‘im and Denzil did to me.’

‘I know. But we don’t discuss it here, like this. We discuss it back at the station, like men.’

Patsy shook his head slowly: ‘I knew what you wanted, right from the start. I knew you wanted to bang me up for Denzil.’

‘Of course I want to bang you up for Denzil. You killed him.’

‘Right.’

Patsy was flicking the lighter, trying to get a flame, and Sam realized then that reasoning with him was hopeless. He didn’t give a damn if it was one murder he went down for or two, or a hundred, or more — it was all the same to him. For ten years he had nursed his hatred of Denzil and Spider; for ten years he had looked forward to his revenge; and not once in all that time had he given so much as a thought to the consequences of killing two men. No threat of prison would deter him, or even give him cause for second thoughts. Such thoughts failed to register on Patsy’s inner radar. All he knew was that he wanted payback, and that he would get it.

‘It’s what the underworld’s like,’ Stella had said, back in the Lost amp; Found Room. ‘Fights that get fixed, fellas making off with winnings what aren’t theirs, blokes paid to bust other bloke’s hands. It’s the way it is. Betrayal and revenge.’

Betrayal and revenge. That was it. Nothing else. In Patsy’s simplistic world of men and violence, that’s all there was: betrayal and revenge, turning forever on a wheel, over and over to the end of time.

As the flame sprang from the lighter and danced there, cupped by Patsy’s small, narrow, iron-hard, murderous hand, Sam all at once found his thoughts flowing very clearly through his mind:

Nothing I can say will stop Patsy burning Spider in front of me. But my duty is to stop him. If words and reason mean nothing to him, then I will have to use force. Regardless of the odds ranged against me, I have no choice. I simply have no choice.

Sam aimed a swift kick. It struck Patsy’s hand and sent the lighter flying. But at once Patsy lunged at him. Sam flung himself away, landing in the mud and scrambling frantically to his feet — or tried to. He felt his boots skidding and sliding on the boggy ground. The wet ground swallowed his hands and held them like glue.

With incredible calm, Sam found himself thinking: will he kick me to death or punch me to death?

Glancing round, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Ray and Chris, peering in at him between two caravans. Chris’s one good eye was wide and fearful. Ray spat out a mouthful of blood and bared his teeth, cursing his impotence to break free from the hands that held him and help his fellow officer.

Helpless, thought Sam. We’re all helpless.

He felt Patsy’s hands clamp like vices on his shoulders and haul him with terrible, inhuman strength up out of the mud.

Ah — he’s going to punch me — over and over, like he did to Denzil.

Sam was turned roughly around, and he found himself nose to nose with Patsy. He could smell the man’s breath, hot and cloying as it gushed over him. It reeked of excrement.

This close, he doesn’t look like a human being at all. Every bit of him is disfigured — his nose is flat and broken — his mouth is misshapen and ragged — his ear’s just a scrap of flesh hanging from the side of his head — and his skin … it’s green … green and blue from all that ink … Is this the last face I’ll ever see? Will I manage to think, for one last time, clearly and precisely, of Annie, before this monster finishes me off entirely? And after that, what then? Will he go after Annie? Whatever that Devil is that has come out of the darkness for her, it has found its expression in the body of Patsy O’Riordan — and I cannot stop it. I cannot defeat it. It will kill me … and then it will go after Annie … and I cannot bring myself to imagine the hell it intends to drag her to …

‘I’m sorry, Annie,’ he said, just as Patsy clamped his hands around Sam’s throat. And as his windpipe was squeezed shut, and he felt the blood bulging in his tongue and bursting in his temples, he thought: Maybe the guv can do what I can’t … maybe the guv can do what I can’t …

There was a blur of movement, and the sense of heavy impact, and all at once Sam found himself sprawled on the mud, gasping air greedily into his lungs. Beside him, reeking of paraffin, lay Spider, leaking blood into the damp soil.

In the next moment, he was surrounded by shouting and rushing and violent action. Sam scrubbed at his eyes, tried to clear them of the swirling patterns that filled his vision, and blinked stupidly this way and that. He saw Patsy staggering strangely across the arena, lashing at something on his back. It took a moment for Sam to realise that the something was a man — very short, very stocky, with cropped grey hair and a fierce, lined face.

I’ve seen that face before …

‘Dermot,’ he croaked out loud. ‘Dermot … from the gym!’

The short but hard-as-nails trainer from Stella’s Gym battered Patsy’s head with astonishing force, rattling his skull, sending him lurching and staggering until he crashed against one of the caravans and toppled over. Patsy smashed into the mud like a chunk of falling masonry — but Dermot clung on, firing his fists with precision into the bullet-like head as if he meant to crack it open like a monstrous, ink-stained egg.

And now Sam was aware of the arena shaking all about him. The caravans lurched and shuddered as men fought and struggled on every side. He saw Ray break free from the man who held him, turn sharply, and throw a punch. He saw Chris ducking behind Ray and defending himself from the flying elbows of fighting men. And then he saw the guv.

Sam’s heart leapt. Gene strode magnificently into the arena, planting his patent leather loafers into the mud heedless of how it soiled them. He still looked like a circus clown, with half his face black from bruising — and yet to Sam he appeared as an avenging angel arrived in a cloud of wrath.

Moustache-man loomed up behind him, balled his fist — and then went down as Gene’s elbow rammed into his solar plexus.

‘No time for playing mud pies, Tyler. We got a shout. Ain’t you noticed?’