Action: Pulse Pounding Tales Volume 2

GOOFY BRINGS THE HOUSE DOWN By Richard Godwin

He sat at the bar, back to the stage, the soft light mellowing his face.

‘The thing about Goofy is he ain’t,’ I said, waiting for his wise crack. Marty always had a way of putting you down.

I looked at the women getting ready to dance, squeezed into outfits so tight I thought I could hear sequins scattering across the stage. They reminded me of broken teeth and back alleys a long time ago. Marty’s bloated face drifted towards me through the cloud of smoke. A blonde looked over at us, her gaze hovered at my face, then skipped onto him, stared at the back of his head, looked away, as she whispered something to her fellow dancer, a buxom brunette who shook her head and checked her stiletto. I wondered what he’d done to them.

Marty cracked some nuts, licked the salt from his fingers and said, ‘Ain’t what? Johnny you always saying ain’t this and ain’t that. What are you fucking talking about?’

I leaned towards him, my fist white beneath the table.

‘Ain’t goofy, he ain’t dumb at all.’

Marty smirked.

‘That right?’ He nodded and threw his shoulders back. ‘You and fucking Disney. And how about you, are you?’

‘You know I ain’t.’

‘So, job tonight, think you can handle it?’

‘Where are you going to be?

He winked towards the stage where they were dancing, some doped, most bored.

‘Looking after my women.’

I could see which one he had his eye on. He had that look on his face. It led to drinks in his office alone and a locked door. The coercion he used was simply the option of cash instead of rape. And all the women who worked for him knew which one to pick when invited to his office. He handed me a piece of paper.

Outside I spat into the dirt. I got into the Jeep and drove there as a warm wind lifted debris from the cracked pavements and hurled them pointlessly at doorways in which I saw the lolling forms of drunks. The wind rippled the London plane trees, their leaves like the riffled cards in a deck. I drove there, rage inside me, all the way to the bloodbath.

It was a bar on his territory or a bar that was a front. The barman was named Don, and Marty had scrawled his name in eyeliner on a napkin from his club. I stared at it, wondering which waitress the eyeliner belonged to, and thought about all the times he ripped me off. Marty ducking my brother’s head under the water. Marty kicking a punk in the face, aged 14, Marty age 16 scalding his bitch with an iron. Marty who I wanted dead with every twisted sinew in my body. I wanted to hear him scream. And I was going to. Goofy had begun to collect machetes; he liked to watch the moonlight drift across their surfaces. Goofy became a hustler the day Marty killed my wife.

I knew all his jokes, the ones he cracked about me when I was still in earshot. He called me Disney; he used to take the piss of how much I liked cartoons as a kid.

I saw Don wince and walk away when I entered his bar, just another smurf wearing a badge that said I was Marty’s boy. But that was all about to change.

At the back, beyond the boxes of crisps and barrels of beer, down the dark staircase, through the piss-stained basement, the women were all in cages. And those that weren’t could hardly stand. I could smell the fear. Faces loomed at me out of the semi-darkness. Marty kept them like that. Commodities he could sell to the highest bidder. Mostly young women caught in the drug trap, on a ride to a dream that didn’t exist. They’d meet Marty, spend a night with him, lose some years in his basement. And when time caught up with them he cast them adrift, useless, wasted flesh. I’d seen girls end up on skips, nothing to say for their lives except the scars that climbed the side of their thin arms.

Marty had got word that Don was short changing him and using the women for his own ends. I checked out the state of affairs in the office at the back, went through the takings in the safe. Short.

So I called Don in, sat him down and said, ‘Have you been keeping all the money?’

‘Sure.’

There was alarm in his voice and his body was tense.

I walked behind him and shot him in the back of the head.

I thought of Goofy as I pulled my Glock and blew his brains away. And I thought of Marty, as I squeezed the trigger, his head wasted, just a mass of blood. I had plans to show Marty who I really was.

I carted the body out of there with one of the bouncers and buried it under a streak of moonlight that failed to illuminate much more than our shadows at the back of the building. And I thought of Annie, her pale face on the pillow as I pierced the dry cold ground with the edge of my spade. The night I smelt him on her and the night I made the decision.

War was about to break out. And I was going to stand at Marty’s right hand and shoot the living crap out of whoever came at him, because I wanted him all to myself. A fight for gangland territory erupted all over London that week.

Back at the bar Marty was climbing into a silk gown. I watched him stand there, an erection protruding from beneath it as I told him what went down. A waitress pulled a G-string onto her arse at the back of the office and I smelt semen, stale and cold in the air conditioned vault.

‘So we need a new barman?’ he said.

‘We do.’

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.

I knew he liked her. I didn’t know he would go to those extremes to further his empire. Annie was in the garden when he marched up to her and began unzipping his flies. My cameras caught it all. You wouldn’t know they were there, I’d had them positioned to monitor my property covertly.

She ran for the house and he grabbed her. He punched her until she wasn’t moving. Then he did what he came there to do and wiped himself on her scarf. He blamed it on a break in. He even broke a window, locked the back door and kicked it in. His sneering snarling face is still etched into my mind every night as I lie down to sleep two weeks later.

‘Dear oh dear, Johnny, the hooligans, you oughtta get them killed,’ he said.

I decided then what I would do. But I had to ease him into position first.

The day I took out the Franklin boys I watched him drive away, smoking a Cuban, a disease on the edge of crime.

You see the only way I could secure his death was to make sure he didn’t think I suspected him. I turned up for work, silent, grieving, and I picked off his enemies. And he trusted me even more, as you do someone you think is too dumb to know what is going on. I knew he would agree to the offer I was about to make. I was dumb enough to be trusted.

There were a few more gangs Marty wanted to get rid of, minor hustlers with no future except what awaited them in prison. But I needed his complete confidence, and I needed him on his own, away from his empire. It was training for what I intended to do to him. And I wanted to see how much control he would give me of his clubs.

The Jones boys were easy. I blew them away one night in a back alley, left them in their blood. Then there were the Murphys. They’d been making noises about going for some of Marty’s clubs. I took them for a ride with one of Marty’s bodyguards, shot them in the back of their heads out on some industrial wasteland.

Marty was happy, he gave me a lot of cash and I stayed late with him one night. He was a little drunk and I watched him unlock his safe.

The thing about Marty is he liked the racetrack, gambling was in his blood, you could say.

The following week we went to the races. I watched him blow hundreds and get that one win that made him high.

‘Feels great,’ he said, waving the money at me, blowing great smoke clouds into the air and eyeing a woman’s arse as she passed by.

I watched him in his car all the way back to his club thinking about it and when I would do it.

‘Fancy one of my waitresses Johnny?’ he said.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Still cut up about Annie?’

‘You could say that.’

‘I’ll get the hooligans who did it.’

‘No Marty I’m going to get them.’

I left him at the club.

I went home and thought about when and where.

He’d think it was a joke until it got nasty.

There was another race the following week. There was a horse trainer I knew. He owed me favours.

‘He has a scam going and you could make a fortune,’ I said to Marty.

He looked at me and said, ‘Johnny, you’re fucking great, I’m going to make you my manager.’

But I already was.

He slapped me on the back and walked away.

When we got there I told Marty the trainer wanted to meet him in some stables. I had the keys to them.

‘He should be here any minute,’ I said.

I watched him walk right in there, and got ready.

In the gents I put on my turtleneck and waistcoat, pants shoes, with gloves and rumpled fedora and I went in.

Marty was stroking the stud’s head when he turned, Cuban smoking, clenched his yellow teeth on the butt and said, ‘What the fuck?’

‘What the fuck indeed,’ I said and swiped his neck open with a machete I’d tucked inside my waistcoat.

Marty sprayed the horse with blood, it was dripping by the time I finished with him.

I leaned into him as he stared up at me with dumb eyes.

‘Marty you dumb fuck I have the keys to your kingdom. You think you can rape my wife and get away with it?’

I kicked him in the face until he wasn’t moving, and I headed out of there all the way to the club and away with the money he kept in his safe.

Marty needed to believe the people around him were dumb, which is the dumbest thing of all.

BIO:

Richard Godwin is the author of critically acclaimed novels Apostle Rising and Mr. Glamour. One Lost Summer is his third novel. It is a Noir story of fractured identity and ruined nostalgia and available at all good retailers and online here http://www.amazon.com/One-Lost-Summer-Richard-Godwin/dp/0956711340/ref=sr_1_1?s=books &ie=UTF8 &qid=1369681195 &sr=1-1 &keywords=one+lost+summer+by+richard+godwin

He is also a published poet and a produced playwright. His stories have been published in over 29 anthologies, among them his anthology of stories, Piquant: Tales Of The Mustard Man. Apostle Rising is a dark work of fiction exploring the blurred line between law and lawlessness and the motivations that lead men to kill.

Mr. Glamour is about a world of wealthy, beautiful people who can buy anything, except safety from the killer in their midst.

Richard Godwin was born in London and obtained a BA and MA in English and American Literature from King's College London, where he also lectured.

You can find out more about him at his website www.richardgodwin.net, where you can also read his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, his highly popular and unusual interviews with other authors.