Hit Me (The Bailey Boys #2)

HIT ME

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In my line of business eye contact is everything.

You have to be able to read people. Know what they’re thinking – sometimes before even
they
know what they’re thinking.

It’s all in the eyes.

You’re in a club, leaning casually on the bar.

There’s the watchful one standing not too close. Fleeting eye contact and then looking away. Assessing you but not wanting you to know that’s what he’s doing.

There’s the one who
does
stand too close, who makes too much eye contact. The one who sees your shaven head, your tatts, your muscles acquired from a life in the gym and maybe a few too many steroids, and sees you as a challenge, an affront to his manhood.

There’s the one who tries to slip into the club unobserved, wearing a jacket when this Spanish sun on the Costa del Crime is way too hot for that much leather... It’s in the eyes again: eyelids peeled back from dilated pupils, the blinking, the twitch – the staring coke-eyes of someone out of his depth but who’s in here now and has to do something with that piece of kit tucked inside his jacket.

Those speed- and coke-eyes – whether it’s a hitman or a twitchy punk off the street, they’re always trouble, always likely to over-react, to snap.

You have to be able to read them all. Spot the signs. React first.

§

But then there’s the other kind of look. The look that can be the most dangerous of all.

Like the one
she
gave me.

Imelda – although I didn’t know that was her name when I first set eyes on her, and I’m still not convinced it’s her real name.

That look she gave me when I walked into Fearless Lloyd’s harborside bar in Puerto Libre.

I clocked her as soon as she twisted on her barstool to look at me.

Who wouldn’t?

She wore killer heels and a vivid red skirt that started below the knees and slit most of the way up to her ribcage, or so it seemed; she was class through and through.

With those dark, sultry looks she could have been Spanish or Italian, or just as easily South American – the Costa was one of the most cosmopolitan places I’d seen: full of ‘foreigners’, as too many British expats had already told me.

Her nails were glossed the same shade of red as the skirt. Her full lips, too.

I was staring, and so was she.

As I say, in my line of work you have to be able to read people, but anyone would have understood her look just then.

There are looks that say
Don’t mess with me
.

Looks that say
I’m going to kill you
.

And then there are looks like Imelda’s, ones that say
I want you. I want you and I’m going to
have
you
.

Now... I’ve never been one to run away, but when she gave me that look, if I’d truly understood the implications I should have run a million miles.

Puerto Libre is what it’s all about.

The luxury apartments overlooking the harbor. The millions of pounds’ worth of yachts lined up in the marina. The parking lots full of Porsches and Ferraris.

This was the lifestyle all of us aspired to out here, whether we’d come to the Costa by choice or because we were on the run. Or, in my case, a mix of the two.

As I walked along the seafront that morning, heading for Fearless’s bar, it was obvious I wasn’t alone in this. Older guys weighed down by the gold on their knuckles and round their necks. Younger, fitter dudes in designer clothes and shades. The tatts and scars. The minders. To the casual tourist these were just ordinary guys with money, but I could spot the look a mile off. Again: it’s something in the eyes.

I’d never seen so many gangsters in one place before.

And the women. Oh my sweet Lord, the women!

That Imelda stood out when I saw her a short time later said something pretty damned special about her, because the women in Puerto Libre were something else, a different species to the one I was used to. Long-legged blondes, sultry black sirens, beautiful Latin curves. This was the place where they cloned all the world’s supermodels, I was sure.

I’d set out early, walking along the seafront from my place on the outskirts of town – I hadn’t quite hit the heights of harborside Puerto yet... Soaking it all up: the apartment developments, the yachts, the sports cars.

It was hard to understand why I hadn’t come down here sooner. The rough streets of London seemed a long, long way away.

This was the life.

This was what I’d earned.

Not to put too fine a point on it, to a thug like me Puerto Libre was the dog’s bollocks.

§

Fearless’s bar was right in the heart of things, in a prime location overlooking the harbor. It was a classy place, not the kind with drug dealers in the shady corners and rooms ‘rented’ out by girls, although he owned a few of those, too. It was the kind of place that had security on the door at eleven in the morning, just to be sure it was a secure environment for Fearless and his buddies.

It was the kind of place where you might just see some of the Costa’s other ‘faces’ staking out a table, drinking in peace and the knowledge that this was a safe place, neutral territory on a coast where open gang warfare was an everyday fact and a ‘visit to the mountains’ was always a one-way trip.

You could usually find Fearless here, at his favorite table at the far end, by a window with a view out over the water.

Fearless was old school. He’d been in Puerto Libre since circumstances had dictated that a move away from London might be a very good thing back in the late ’90s. He’d been here long enough to build up a lot of respect in the right quarters and that was a currency worth far more than euros, dollars or bullion.

The bar had once been a replica traditional English pub, a popular thing here on the southern Spanish coast, but in Fearless’s time it had gradually moved up-market, until all that remained of its origins was the English-style bar and the name, the Cock and Bull. And then he’d renamed it, so now the place was called, simply, Los Cojones.

I paused at the door, raised my hands briefly to indicate I wasn’t carrying, and said to the muscle on the door, “Hey, Pablo. Fearless at home?”

I don’t know if his name was Pablo or not, but when it came to a scrap the guy was a true Picasso and that’s all I really needed to know. The doorman grinned and nodded. “Sure thing, Señor Bailey. The guvnor, he is here.”

It was funny hearing words like
guvnor
in a strong Spanish accent, but again, it was a respect thing. Everyone here knew Fearless was the guvnor.

§

Sure enough, he was there. A big black man, hair silvering and thinning on top; one heavy gold ring in his left ear and several more on the fingers of his big, meaty fists. In every way Fearless was larger than life, a character you could never make up.

He was standing at the bar rather than at his regular table, a glass of beer in front of him, and a tall, curvy woman on a stool at his side, her back to me.

When he saw me he stepped away from the bar and spread his arms.

“Hey, Lee, my boy! Long time no see.” His voice was a rich baritone, his accent pure East End Cockney.

I’m not exactly a hundred pound weakling, but in Fearless’s big embrace I was a delicate eggshell, just waiting to be crushed. He smelled of sweat and a fruity aftershave, and morning beer.

“Hey, Fearless,” I said. “Good to see you.”

“Any word from Eddie?”

That was always the first thing, even though Fearless probably spoke on the phone to my father in his prison cell more often than I did. The two of them went back years. Fearless had been Dad’s righthand man when the two of them had run half of East London.

“Same old, same old,” I said.

Fearless sat and that’s when I glanced across at his drinking companion and really took her in: Imelda.

My eyes roamed down from the perfectly stacked, glossy black hair to the flash of exposed back, the skin flawless, to the line of a bare arm, that slit in her skirt that led down long legs to needle-heeled fuck-me shoes and then all the way back up again.

When I finally met her eye she was staring at me. Giving me the look.

If the shoes said
Fuck me
that look said
Now
.

I’m not being arrogant when I say guys like me get that look a lot. When you’re running security in a club, or minding someone big, you get it all the time. You’re a target. There’s a whole breed of women who want a piece of you, from middle-class housewives to prison-bait teens. They’re drawn to the glamour and money, but they’re drawn to the rough, too, the muscle, the danger – and that’s exactly what I am.

But Imelda’s take on that look... well, it reached right inside me and twisted something.

I’d never known anything like it before.

I rolled my shoulders, my head tucked back into the muscled cradle of my neck. I needed to focus.

As if sensing some of this, Fearless raised an eyebrow at Imelda and said, “Sweetheart?”

She knew that was her cue, and she stepped away from her bar stool and smoothed her skirt down.

She said something in Spanish, too fast for me to follow, and then started to walk away.

Immediately, I stepped back to let her pass. She paused, met my look, smiled briefly and then moved on.

I tore my eyes away, and Fearless was grinning.

“What was
that?
” I said.

He shook his head. “That was Imelda,” he said, before adding, “otherwise known as Trouble,” but I’d worked out that last bit already.

We went across to Fearless’s table, after I’d convinced him I didn’t need a drink.

“Trying to get myself clean,” I told him. He knew I’d been putting in long hours at his gym, hard work replacing what the steroids and speed had once given me. At risk of turning into some kind of bore about it all, I felt so much better doing it this way. I was loving being fit again.

“Not a bad thing to be clean out here, son,” said Fearless. “Down here it’s so easy to slip up.”

When we sat, he leaned heavy elbows on the table, hands steepled before him, and he fixed me with a look that had turned many a man’s blood to ice – but to me he was just Fearless, or Uncle Fearless when me and my brothers were younger. Nobody seemed to know if ‘Fearless’ was a nickname or if he’d actually been given that name at birth.

“So, Lee,” he said. “What’s the matter? What did you want to see me for, eh?”

I looked at him, trying to find the words.

I’d been down here all summer, since I’d left London with my brother Dean, his girlfriend Jess, and a trunk full of Russian mobsters’ cash. While Dean and Jess had invested their cut wisely, I’d burned my way through mine until now it was mostly gone. ‘Spunked it away’ as Fearless would have put it.

“I want it back,” I said. “I want my life back.”

§

If anyone would understand it was Fearless.

I’d come down here, blown a fortune and made a lot of temporary friends while I did so. I’d enjoyed the life. I’d drifted.

But there’s only so long someone like me can keep that up.

Fearless had done similar back in the late ’90s. I knew the stories. The hookers and coke, the drink. The run-ins with local gangsters and police until he’d learned how things worked. But my dad’s old mate had turned it around. He must have come to the same point as I had, realizing he wanted something more in his life again.

And look at him now, one of the longest established and most respected faces on the Costa del Crime.

“You want your life back, son?” Fearless was shaking his head. “Don’t you think you should’ve thought about that before you left London?”

But he got it, I could tell. It wasn’t about the money, although that figured. It wasn’t about London. It was about the life. The buzz.

It was about the look in people’s eyes when you walked into a bar. The recognition that you were a player, that you meant something.

It was about respect.

I’d had enough of being a holidaymaker. I wanted more now.

It was time to get back into the game.

“You sure about this?” said Fearless.

I nodded. “I need something back in my life,” I said.

“But
this?
” With a wave of one hand Fearless indicated the bar, the harbor, but I knew he meant something else entirely: the place, the life, and all that went with it. “You don’t have to go back to all that, son. It’ll suck you in. You don’t have to go back to doing what you did, boy.”

I shrugged.

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” I told him. “And if there’s one thing I’ve realized it’s that I don’t know how to do anything else. Know what I mean?”

“Things are very different here, son. Everything here is... well, it’s
more
. More extreme. More dangerous. More complicated. Back in London you knew the people, knew the rules. You had a reputation. Out here you don’t have any of that.”