Not Dead Yet

30

His moist lips closed greedily around the fat soft tobacco leaf of the Cohiba Siglo. He sucked the dense smoke into his mouth, blew it out towards the ceiling, then picked up the crystal tumbler and drained the last of the thirty-year-old Glenlivet.

This was the life. A great deal better than prison, oh yes. You could get most stuff that you wanted inside, if you knew your way around the system and had influence, the way Amis Smallbone did. But nothing compared to being free. One of the girls – a redhead, naked except for her ankle bracelet – stood up from the sofa to get him a refill. The other stayed closely at his side, massaging his crotch through his trousers, slowly bringing a part of him back to life again.

He tried to keep his focus on his pleasures tonight. Saturday night. His first taste of freedom in a decade and a quarter. A porn movie was playing on the home cinema screen in front of him. Two blonde lezzies. Yeah. He liked a bit of girl-on-girl action. He liked this big room in this fuck-off mansion set back behind electric gates in Brighton’s swanky Dyke Road Avenue.

He’d lived in a place even bigger than this once upon a time, just a few streets away. Before a certain Brighton copper took it all away from him.

The pad’s owner, his old mate Benny Julius, with his pot belly and dodgy toupee, was down in the basement Jacuzzi with the other three girls. This was a welcome home party. Benny always did things in style, always liked living it large.

He winced as the girl slipped her hand inside his zip. Then she whispered into his ear, ‘Oooh, it’s quite small – but it’s ferocious, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, ferocious,’ he whispered back, before his mouth was smothered by hers.

That was how he was feeling. Ferocious. His focus was slipping from his pleasures. Ferocious. He barely felt the girl’s hand on his shaft any more. Ferocious. Twelve years and three months. Thanks to one man.

Detective Sergeant Roy Grace.

Been promoted a few times now, he’d read.

He was stiff as a rock.

‘Like a pencil,’ she breathed, huskily, into his ear. ‘Like a tiny little pencil stub!’

He smashed her across the face with the flat of his hand so hard she fell to the floor. ‘Fuck you, bitch,’ he said.

‘You couldn’t if you tried,’ she retorted, rubbing her cheek, looking dazed. ‘It’s not big enough to get it in.’

He staggered to his feet, but the drink had got there first. His natty grey suede loafers embedded themselves in the deep pile of the carpet and he fell flat on his face, snapping the cigar in half, showering dark grey ash across the white tufts. As he lay there he stabbed a finger at her. ‘Remember who you fucking work for, bitch.’

‘Yeah, I do. I remember what he told me and all. About why you’re called Smallbone.’ She held up her forefinger and thumb and curled them, with a sneer.

‘You fucking-’ he climbed to his knees and lunged at her. But all Amis Smallbone saw, for a fleeting instant, was her left foot coming out of nowhere towards his face. An elementary kickboxing manoeuvre. Striking him beneath his chin, jerking his head upwards and back. It felt, as his consciousness dissolved into sparking white light, as if her foot had gone clean through his head and out the back of his skull.