The Reckoning (Carter Brothers), page 4
Amid the pandemonium that broke out, Danny tore up the steps, taking them two at a time. Moments later, he came to a shuddering halt. ‘No,’ he uttered, ‘no, no, no.’ His blood ran cold and as he brought his hands up to his head, the screams that came from his ex-wife were deafening to his ears.
Slumped on the floor was the lifeless form of a young woman. From Danny’s position, he was unable to see her face, but he didn’t need to, recognition tore through him and as he took a tentative step closer, his eyes were drawn to the blood that was splattered across the all-too-familiar pale blue party dress, complete with the bubble gum-pink satin birthday sash that his daughter had been wearing.
Danny felt his face drain of all colour. Sinking to his knees, he resisted the urge to pull his daughter’s lifeless body into his arms. Instead, he applied pressure to the gaping wound where the bullet had torn through the flesh just below her shoulder. His gut instinct told him that if Lexi had any chance of surviving then he had to stem the bleeding and fast. His hands were slick with blood, his little girl’s blood, and as panic surged through his veins, he fought the urge to not break down and cry.
‘Is she breathing?’ Maxine cried.
Hearing the terror in his ex-wife’s voice, Danny pushed down on the wound even further. There was so much blood, he couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. ‘Where’s the fucking ambulance?’ Danny screamed. He could barely breathe, so acute was his fear, and as he looked down at Lexi’s still form, his heart was in his mouth. ‘Come on, darling,’ he begged of his daughter, ‘wake up, sweetheart.’
Aaron physically shook and it took all of his effort not to vomit up the shots of tequila he’d downed. ‘Get out of here,’ he screamed at Skinny, shoving the gun into his friend’s hands, ‘go.’
Skinny didn’t need to be told twice. He rammed the semi-automatic pistol underneath his jacket, his eyes wild with panic as he ran towards the exit as if his life depended on it.
His mind reeling, Aaron craned his neck to look across the crowded club and as his father’s hard eyes turned on him, he swallowed down bile. He’d missed. His heart pounded even faster and fear shot down his spine. He’d actually missed.
‘Aaron.’
His brother’s voice shook him out of his reverie and as Colm reached his side, he could see the same shock and fear he felt reflected back in his brother’s eyes.
‘What the fuck happened?’ Colm asked as he looked around him at the chaos that had ensued after the shooting.
‘I dunno,’ Aaron lied. At his sides, he clenched his fists to hide the tremor that threatened to tear through him. The enormity of what he’d done was the equivalent of a sledgehammer hitting him face on and a ripple of disgust and self-loathing tore through him. He’d tried to kill his father; he’d almost succeeded, too, but if he had, Colm would never have forgiven him. And he would never have been able to forgive himself. In the distance, he could hear the wail of sirens as the emergency services sped to the scene and it took every ounce of Aaron’s willpower not to turn on his heels and follow Skinny out of his father’s club. He wanted to hide, to run away, to block out his wrong doings. He felt like a kid again, a frightened little boy.
‘Are you both okay?’ Moray approached his sons, his voice filled with anguish. ‘Did you see what happened, who the shooter was?’ he asked as he pulled both men towards him into a bear hug.
The unexpected show of concern from his father was Aaron’s undoing and as despair and guilt flooded through him, a shaky breath caught in his throat and his eyes glistened with the first sting of tears. He looked back to where the VIP section was housed; he’d hit someone, he must have done, and as police officers and paramedics rushed into the club, his worst fears were about to become all too real.
‘She’s just a kid,’ Moray stated with bated breath, ‘a fucking baby.’
There and then, Aaron’s heart sank even further.
As the paramedics worked on Lexi, Danny had to be forcibly held back, and as Logan tugged on his father’s arm, it took all of Danny’s strength not to shove his son roughly away from him.
On the floor, as she knelt beside her daughter, Maxine’s screams had quietened down to pitiful sobs and, as she glanced up, the look she gave her ex-husband was scathing. If Danny had been in any doubt before now that she despised him, he wasn’t any more. He could see the loathing, the contempt she felt for him in her eyes, her body language, her very being. In fact, it seemed to ooze out of her pores.
‘She’s going to be okay,’ Danny said out loud, more for his own reassurance than his son’s. He looked down at the blood staining his hands and he didn’t need a doctor to tell him it was bad. Lexi had lost too much blood for his liking.
Discarded packaging and soiled swabs littered the floor, an oxygen mask had been strapped to Lexi’s face, her eyes were closed, and her skin was so pale that for a few short moments, Logan actually believed that Lexi had already taken her last breaths. Tears stung his eyes. With just nineteen months between them, he and Lexi had always been close; they were one another’s greatest allies and were more like friends then siblings. Kneeling beside his mother, Logan pulled her into an embrace and as he stroked his mum’s hair, he whispered words of comfort, all the while hoping and praying that his little sister would pull through, that she would suddenly open her eyes and tell them it had all been an elaborate joke on her part. Deep down, in his heart, he knew that his little sister would do no such thing, she wasn’t able to. Instead, she was hovering between life and death, fighting the greatest fight of her life.
As he watched his son and ex-wife together, Danny swallowed down the hard lump in his throat. As much as he hated to admit it, there was no way that he could know for a certainty that Lexi would survive. At this moment in time, he didn’t know anything other than the fact that someone had smuggled a firearm into his club. He tore his gaze away from his daughter’s broken body to look in the direction of the entrance doors. The head doorman Callum Riley was no fool; he would never have allowed someone to gain access to the club if they were carrying, so how exactly had the firearm been smuggled inside?
Carlos Christos was seething, and after banging his fists on the restaurant door, it had taken just minutes for the lights to snap on and for Giorgio to pull across the heavy bolts.
‘What happened?’ Stepping aside to allow Carlos and Joey entry, Giorgio was concerned.
‘What’s happened?’ Joey roared back. Pushing past his friend’s cousin, his face was set like thunder. ‘He missed the target, that’s what fucking happened. Garner, the murdering cunt, is still alive.’
Giorgio’s face paled and as he placed his hand over his racing heart, he sank down on to a chair. ‘But how?’ he asked as he looked up at his cousin’s muscular frame. ‘You told me that the plan was fool proof.’
‘Because Aaron Garner is an incompetent little prick, that’s how,’ Joey bellowed. He began to pace the length of the restaurant, the muscles across his shoulder blades becoming more and more rigid with each and every step he took. ‘We should have taken Garner out ourselves.’ He stopped pacing and, coming to stand in front of his friend, he grasped the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles turned a deathly shade of white. ‘We should have planted a bullet between the bastard’s eyes instead of allowing that imbecile son of his to roam loose with a loaded gun.’
At first, Carlos didn’t answer, which wasn’t entirely unusual; he had always been the quieter of the two, the thinker, the one who reined Joey in when he went too far. Unlike Joey, whose strategy was to hit first and ask questions later, Carlos liked to have the facts laid out before him, he liked to weigh up his options before he took action.
Collecting three bottles of beer from behind the bar, Carlos placed the items on the table and set about prising open the metal caps. ‘We need to deal with this and fast.’ He lifted a bottle to his lips and took a sip, savouring the taste of the beer as it slipped down his throat. ‘Those two little pricks will need silencing before they end up pointing a finger in our direction, and the last thing any of us need is for Moray Garner to be given a heads up on the situation, to allow him the chance to retaliate.’
Gulping at his own drink, Joey nodded. Up until now, they had been so careful when it came to covering their tracks, even down to where they had sourced the weapon from, and Carlos was right. Aaron Garner and his pal Skinny would need to be disposed of before they had the chance to blow their murderous plans wide open. ‘Suppose I’d better inform my old man,’ he stated, pointing the bottle towards his friend, ‘but I can tell you now, he ain’t gonna be happy about this. In fact, heads are gonna fucking roll.’
‘As long as it isn’t our heads, then who gives a fuck?’ Carlos answered with a nonchalant shrug.
Fear gripped at Giorgio’s heart and his eyes flicked up to the ceiling beyond which his wife and two daughters were sound asleep, oblivious to the deadly world he had unwittingly become embroiled in. He closed his eyes in distress; his life was spiralling out of control, and no matter how much he tried to cling on, he had no means of stopping himself from tumbling over the edge. He could only hope and pray that when his wife and daughters found out what he had become involved in, they would one day find it in their hearts to forgive him.
The next morning, Danny, Moray, their head doorman Callum Riley, and Moray’s two sons gathered in the lounge of Danny’s four-bedroom detached house. Having spent the night at the hospital, Danny was running on adrenaline, and it wasn’t until his daughter had come out of surgery and had been settled in the intensive care unit that he’d decided to get off home and call a meeting. For the past hour, Danny had not only screamed, hollered, and threatened to destroy the culprit responsible for the shooting with his bare hands, but he’d also threatened to string him up by his nether regions in the most imaginative of ways.
‘I don’t understand this,’ Callum said, his Irish accent broad and even more pronounced than usual. ‘There’s no way someone would have made it past us if they were carrying.’ He tilted his head to the side and his expression became one of concentration as he tried to think back over the night’s events. Had he missed something? Had he allowed the men on the doors to become lax and maybe not search every punter who had entered the club? No was his answer, no fucking way. He’d worked the doors for years, had a lot of experience behind him and would never have taken his eyes off the ball, not even for five minutes. Clubs were notorious for trouble, and he knew from experience just how quickly situations could escalate. One minute, you could be laughing and joking with the customers, and the next a smashed bottle could be heading for your jugular vein. ‘I didn’t leave the foyer, not even to go for a piss, and I know for a fact everyone who came through was searched.’
‘Well, obviously not well enough,’ Danny roared back at him. ‘The gun didn’t manifest its way into the club all by itself, did it? Some bastard smuggled it in.’
‘I know how to do my job.’ Callum jumped up from the sofa, his voice loud and defensive. ‘And I’m telling you, everyone who walked through those doors was as clean as a fucking whistle.’
Slowly, Danny rose to his feet, the muscles across his chest and shoulders rigid and his fists clenched as he fought in vain to keep his formidable temper under control. ‘And I’m telling you,’ he growled, his face white with anger, ‘someone brought that gun in.’
‘Enough, sit down,’ Moray ordered both men, ‘this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it, and the last thing we need is to be at each other’s throats. Right now, we need to look at the facts. Whether we like it or not, someone brought the weapon into the club and, let’s face it, the whys and the hows are the least of our problems.’ He shot a warning glance in Danny’s direction. ‘The question I want answered is who that bullet was meant for, because I’m pretty sure we can all agree that Lexi wasn’t the intended target.’
Anger flashed across Danny’s face. Every time he visualised his daughter lying in a pool of her own blood, fury consumed him. It was only by some miracle that Lexi hadn’t lost her life, and if the bullet had hit just a few inches lower, she would have been killed instantly. Not that she was fully out of the woods just yet – touch and go, the surgeon had said – although her vital signs had remained stable through the night. Ever since the gunshot had rung out, Danny had asked himself the same question over and over again: who had the bullet been meant for?
‘It has to be something to do with you, Dad.’ Colm’s voice broke their thoughts.
‘What makes you say that?’ Danny demanded, snapping his head around so fast that he almost gave himself whiplash. ‘Where does your old man fit into any of this?’
Colm took a deep breath then sat forward on the plush velvet sofa and rested his forearms on his knees. ‘Well he was in the VIP section, wasn’t he,’ he answered with a glance in his father’s direction. ‘It stands to reason that he was the target; he had to have been.’
Sitting beside his brother, Aaron squirmed. He’d already bitten his thumbnail down to the quick and, as he felt Danny’s hard stare fall upon him, he instinctively brought his thumb back up to his mouth and resumed chewing, all the while wishing he was anywhere else other than inside the lion’s lair. Danny had a temper on him, they all knew it, and despite his earlier bravado in front of Skinny, he knew for a fact that he wouldn’t stand a chance should his father’s best friend decide to turn against him.
As he thought the situation through, Danny’s eyebrows knitted together. ‘He’s got a point,’ he said, addressing Moray, ‘you were up there; that bullet may well have had your name written all over it.’
Moray screwed up his face. Even if he had been the intended recipient, the situation still made no sense to him. Both he and Danny had been out of the life for years, eighteen years, to be precise. The life of crime they had once led was in their past, all but forgotten about. These days, they kept their noses clean and focused all their time and energy on running their club, which they did with military precision. They’d never even been so much as late paying the electricity bill, let alone gone out and actively brought trouble to their door. No, there was more to this than met the eye, there had to be. The fact he was in the near vicinity was just coincidence, wasn’t it? ‘Who else was in the club tonight?’ Moray asked as his fingers found their way to the thick, faded scar across his cheek.
Callum shrugged. ‘No one worth taking note of,’ he answered, ‘just the usual wide boys.’
‘No known faces?’ Moray probed.
Callum shrugged a second time. ‘None that I saw. The night was still early, way too early for a face to turn up. You know what they’re fucking like, they like to make a grand entrance, act the Billy big bollocks and make sure everyone in the know takes note of them arriving.’
Moray sighed and, as he and Danny shared a glance, in the pit of his stomach a niggling worry began to gnaw away at him. If Danny and Colm were correct in saying that the bullet had had his name plastered all over it, then by rights, he should have been dead by now. But the question was: why? What could he have possibly done to warrant a death sentence? ‘Well, you know what this means, then, don’t you?’ he said with a nod of his head towards Danny. ‘If that bullet was meant for me, then you can bet your fucking life on it that there’s a second one out there with your name written across it, too.’
As Danny processed Moray’s words, he blew out his cheeks. He and Moray had been mates ever since they were teenagers, a couple of years before they had begun working as paid heavies for one-time gangster Freddie Smith. They’d barely been out of school when Freddie had taught them everything there was to know about the life. As the years had passed, not only had they fought one another’s corners, but they’d also gone as far as to commit murders together, the first when they had been just seventeen years old. It was inevitable that if someone was after one of them, then they would more than likely have the other in their sights, too. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said.
‘No maybe about it,’ Moray answered, poking a finger forward, ‘it’s a fact and you know it.’
Chewing on his bottom lip, Danny looked Moray in the eyes. ‘I want the no-good cunt found,’ he said, his voice low and hoarse, ‘and when I get my hands on the bastard, I’m going to do more than just destroy the ponce, I’m going to decimate him for what he’s caused.’
‘You and me both,’ Moray answered, ‘and we will find him, you know what they’re like,’ he said, referring to the men they had once associated with, ‘they don’t know how to keep their mouths shut, and as Cal has so rightly pointed out, they like to act the Billy big bollocks. Someone will talk, someone in some shitty little boozer somewhere will be bragging about this.’
Nodding his head, Danny snaked his tongue across his teeth; there was more than a hint of truth to what Moray had said. So-called hard men liked to gossip even more than women did; it stood to reason that not only whispers but also a fair share of half-truths would be doing the rounds, and from experience Danny knew first-hand that secrets very rarely stayed hidden for long. ‘You’re right,’ Danny agreed, ‘someone will talk, and if they don’t,’ he said with a raise of his eyebrows, ‘we both know that there’s more than one way to make a man open his mouth.’
5
Hidden out of sight of the main road, gooseflesh covered Skinny’s skin. Leaning his back against the wooden gate that led to the side entrance to Aaron’s ground-floor flat, he pulled his knees up to his chest and breathed hot air onto his cupped hands in a bid to bring some warmth back into his frozen fingers. The hard concrete beneath him was both cold and uncomfortable, and to top it off, it had begun to rain; his jacket and shirt were fast on their way to becoming saturated and, as raindrops dripped onto the end of his nose, he swiped the droplets away, all the while silently cursing his mate.
