Savage Lies, page 1
part #1 of John Savage Action Thriller Series
Table Of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Other books by Peter Boland include:
Acknowledgements
Savage Lies
The truth is more brutal than you can imagine.
Peter Boland
Savage Lies.
Copyright © Peter Boland 2018.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or organisations is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the author.
Chapter 1
The bag of body parts slid across the back of the stolen van, making a wince-inducing scrape as it travelled from one side to the other. Minchie’s piggy little eyes darted anxiously towards the rear-view mirror, continually checking the status of his fragile and illegal cargo. Every time he swerved left, the bag skidded across to the right, colliding with the interior wall of the panel van, and when he turned right, it slid over to the opposite side. When he braked hard, it would catapult forward, concertinaing against the back of the van’s front seats. The bag must have wobbled across every inch of the dirty payload floor.
Minchie knew he should have secured the thing before setting off or at least wrapped it in blankets, as removal men do with furniture, but in his haste to get the job done quickly, he’d cut corners.
The van he’d stolen wasn’t ideal, either. He’d taken the first one he’d seen—a builder’s van or maybe a plasterer’s—a battered Ford Transit, its once-white bodywork suffocated with London grime turning it a mucky grey. Old yellowing copies of The Sun newspaper were stuffed between the windscreen and the dashboard. Empty coffee cups rolled around in the footwell. The back had been empty apart from a scattering of sand and grit and an old glove missing its other half. Minchie had tossed the medical-waste sack in, eager to get going, but he grimaced every time the plastic bag rode over the shallow sea of sharp, abrasive material. If one fragment managed to slice it open, blood would spill out, which would eventually leak out the back doors, which didn’t shut properly, one of the reasons it had been so easy to steal. Nothing drew attention to you in London traffic like a van dripping blood.
Minchie didn’t know the exact contents of the bag. The gang wouldn’t tell him, and he knew not to ask. All they had said was to get rid of it, not by throwing it in the river or by burying it. It had to be with fire. All he had to do was point the van in the direction of an abandoned building site he knew, set fire to it, and destroy the evidence. They’d told him some other important things too, but Minchie’s small brain and even smaller attention span had prevented the information from being stored in his short-term memory.
He wasn’t getting paid. It was a trial, an initiation to see if he could make it to the next level, he remembered them saying. If he did well, he would be in the gang. They were a serious outfit—secretive, tooled up, and big… very big. They had the means to get things done, to change things, that was for sure, and he wanted to be part of it. If he pulled off the little task they had set without any hitches, he could forget the seedy, backstreet debt-collecting job he had with Venables. It depressed and bored him, not like this. This was exciting. This was some serious James Bond shit. In fact, Minchie pictured himself in a movie, on a secret mission for a big organisation. It made him important, glamourous even. Maybe that was going a bit far. At six feet three inches and wide as a door, with a shaved head and a heavy forehead hanging over those shifty small eyes, like a steep cliff face, Minchie looked as if he’d narrowly escaped extinction at the last ice age.
He knew he could succeed as long as that damn bag didn’t split.
A tiny voice inside his head told him to pull over and at least try to stop the package from moving around, but he’d long since learned to ignore that voice. The voice also told him to call in on his old mum once in a while or check his bank statement so he didn’t go overdrawn. He hated that voice. It got in the way of him doing things, so he usually ignored it. Besides, if he stopped the van and opened the back doors, someone might see inside and start asking questions. Then he’d have to put them in the back of the van and make them disappear along with the bag. He simply didn’t have time to do both. No, he would keep going. Nothing would stop him.
Just then, something happened, something far worse than the bag splitting. A police car pulled out of a side road and slotted itself right behind Minchie’s van. The silver-and-Day-Glo-yellow Metropolitan Police Vauxhall cruised along behind him, two coppers in the front seats. Tensing up, Minchie gripped the steering wheel more tightly and began a mantra in his head: Just a random police car… Just a random police car… Over and over again, he said it in an attempt to calm his nerves. But police cars had a habit of pulling over white vans, especially ones with no markings on the outside. Paranoia gripped him like the coils of a snake. They’re going to pull me over. The owner of the van has obviously reported it stolen. Right now, the coppers are punching the number plate into their onboard computer, then it will flash up “stolen.” He could imagine what would happen next. It played in his mind like a scene in a TV cop show. Blue lights would flash, Minchie would pull over, they’d ask him what was in the back of the van, his mind would go blank, and he’d say something stupid like “organic wine.” They’d ask him to open the back doors. Then what? The scene in Minchie’s head hit pause. He couldn’t see beyond that part. What about doing a runner? Yes, he could make a run for it on foot. But where? Minchie took in his surroundings, a busy, slow-moving main road in South London. Tightly huddled terraced houses lined each side of the street, and no turnoffs or side streets were nearby. He wouldn’t get far. That was certain.
His rear-view mirror suddenly lit up with pulsating blue lights. The police were onto him. Minchie banged his hands on the steering wheel and cursed. Instinctively, he thought about hitting the accelerator, taking the police by surprise, and escaping through the traffic in a Hollywood-style getaway, but he had nowhere to go. Both lanes were an endless stream of slow-moving bumper-to-bumper traffic, so he simply didn’t have the space for a high-speed escape. Plus, the crappy diesel van he drove had been designed for shifting bags of cement, not car chases. That wouldn’t have happened if he had stolen a nice fuel-injected Volvo Estate. He would have had a chance of outrunning them, but then, the police wouldn’t have pulled him over in the first place if he’d been in a Volvo Estate. They would’ve assumed he was somebody respectable, like an accountant who shopped at Waitrose and had National Trust membership. Right then, Minchie wished more than anything that he could be an accountant who shopped at Waitrose and had National Trust membership.
For a guy as big as Minchie, his body felt weak and useless as he pulled the van up onto the pavement. His hands shook as he killed the engine, accepting his fate. He had no way of talking his way out. He wasn’t clever enough. Minchie let his head slump forward on the steering wheel as he waited for the inevitable tap on the window.
Any moment now.
Chapter 2
The tap on the window never came, though. Slowly, he raised his head like a scared child looking out from under a duvet. Through the windscreen, he could see the two lines of traffic had parted, as if powerful magnets lined the pavement and had dragged the cars over to the side. A blast of sirens made him jump. The police car that had been behind him rocketed past, hurtling down the middle of the street. Minchie watched open-mouthed as the pol
Adrenalin fizzed through his body, mixed with the elation of relief, making him slightly hysterical. He’d got away with it. One manic laugh escaped his mouth and then another. He ran his fingers over his scalp and swore rapidly, like a machine gun that fired swear words.
He couldn’t drive in that state, not when he was that wired. He had to calm down, or he’d end up having an accident. Part of him—actually, most of him—wanted to celebrate his miraculous escape from the cops. Something like that didn’t happen every day, not to him, at any rate. For that, he deserved to treat himself to a little sip of something to calm his nerves.
Farther down the street, boxes of produce were stacked up on the pavement with various exotic fruits and vegetables poking out of the top, protected by an overhanging canopy, the tell-tale signs of a typical London corner shop. Minchie left the van at the side of the road and headed towards it. He hated those places, normally. They were always open, for a start, even on Christmas Day, and that just wasn’t right. This is because they’re run by people who shouldn’t be in this country, the kind who have no respect for our traditions or way of life, like knowing when to stop working. They were always bloody working, seven days a week, nonstop. It made decent white folk look bad, as though they were lazy.
As Minchie got closer, he felt uncomfortable. Going into one of those places went against all his principles. They were usually run by Pakis, Ragheads, Wops, and more recently, Poles or Portuguese. No matter who they were, Minchie hated all of them. Actually, he didn’t mind Poles so much. They liked drinking, and some of the women were hot. With his current desire for whisky, though, he overlooked his other prejudices. Besides, the guys who’d set him on his little task would soon make places like that history. They’d send them all back to where they came from.
Minchie’s hulk-like frame barely made it through the narrow shop doorway. Inside, his nostrils were assaulted by a whiff of Far Eastern spices. Ugh, the worst kind of place—a stinking Paki store. Sure enough, there behind the counter sat a smiley Asian man chatting away with a tiny Asian woman clutching bags of groceries. They spoke to each other in a language that, to Minchie’s ears, sounded as if it had been sped up. Minchie grunted in disapproval and moved down an aisle packed floor to ceiling with all sorts of exotic foods, which Minchie would never dare touch—none of that foreign muck for him. He’d take a plate of egg and chips over all that spicy rubbish any day of the week.
Minchie passed packets bulging with dried delicacies with unpronounceable names, covered in strange writing and weird graphics that gave him the creeps. At last, he came to shelves full of beer and cider. The whisky wouldn’t be far away, but he could see no sign of it. Surely, they would keep all the booze in the same place. He did another circuit of the store and still saw no sign of it. But this place is owned by a Paki. Their brains aren’t right, so he’s probably put the whisky in some completely random place, like next to the beans or with the fish fingers.
After a while, when Minchie gave up looking and grumbled his way to the door, the owner politely asked, “May I help you with something, sir?” The guy’s politeness contrasted sharply to the animosity bubbling inside Minchie.
“Er, whisky,” Minchie muttered.
“Yes, it’s right here, sir,” replied the shopkeeper, pointing to a shelf behind the counter, stocked with various sizes and brands of whisky. Minchie’s eyes ran along the price tags until they landed on the cheapest one.
“I’ll have that small one for five quid.”
“Just one moment, sir. Let me finish with this customer, and I’ll be right with you.”
The shopkeeper continued his conversation with the small woman in front of the counter. They chatted and laughed and chatted some more. Minchie’s temper rose. Is this guy having a laugh? He wasn’t exactly serving the customer but probably just talking a load of boring shit about their families. That was what those people did. They had massive families, then all they did was talk about them all the time, like “My daughter’s going to be a lawyer” or “My son’s going to be a doctor.” Minchie couldn’t stand them. Who do they think they are?
Minchie swore under his breath. Then he spoke at full volume. “Mate, can I just get my whisky?”
“Yes, yes. Very sorry,” said the shopkeeper as he turned to get Minchie’s bottle. “I’m afraid this lady is an old friend, and we often get carried away. Terribly sorry.”
The woman turned and smiled at Minchie. Minchie stared back with an expression he used just before a fight. The woman quickly turned away. Minchie handed a fiver to the shopkeeper and left.
“Goodbye, sir,” he heard as he slammed the door behind him. Minchie wasted no time cracking open the metal seal on the bottle and taking a large slug of the strong liquor. As he lowered the bottle, the sight that greeted him made the burning whisky turn icy cold.
Hanging in the air, swaying gently from side to side, was the van he’d been driving not five minutes before. A powerful lifting arm attached to the back of a London Traffic Enforcement flatbed truck hoisted the helpless van higher and higher off the ground. They were impounding the vehicle, not because it was stolen but because Minchie had left it parked illegally in a bus lane. In London, blocking a bus lane was worse than punching the Queen.
Minchie spat out a stream of rapid-fire swear words again, in sheer disbelief at the scene unfolding in front of him, watching helplessly as the stolen van dangled above the back of the flatbed. The whine of the hydraulics sounded like tinnitus. He pictured the bag sliding everywhere, giving him a sick stab of pain in his gut, not helped by the whisky swilling around. Finally, the scruffy vehicle came to rest on the truck, its wheels swiftly secured by two men in hi-viz jackets. They took their time, checking and double-checking their cargo.
An idea popped into his head. Maybe he could reason with them and offer them a few quid to release the van, but Minchie had just spent the only money he’d had on a bottle of whisky. Perhaps he could do a trade: one slightly used bottle of whisky in exchange for the stolen van. Even to a dimwit like Minchie, it sounded like a crap deal. Besides, he knew what those people were like: they’d clamp a homeless person if they happened to be sitting on double yellow lines. They couldn’t be reasoned with. He could punch their lights out. That was Minchie’s solution to most problems he encountered. However, once he’d knocked them out, how would he get the van off the lorry? It looked too complicated to do by himself—lots of levers and buttons. With Minchie’s track record with anything technical, he’d probably end up lowering the van onto himself. Instead, he just stood there, slowly sipping his booze.
The diesel engine of the flatbed lorry rattled to life, and Minchie watched it disappear into the busy London traffic, the van wobbling on the back of it.
That’s that. It’s over. He’d had one job to do and had royally screwed it up, just for a quick drink. His plan to work with a big-time criminal outfit had fallen apart like the time he tried to build flat-pack furniture. He’d been lucky with the police car, but then he was slack and paid the price.
“Oh, Minchie,” he muttered under his breath. “You stupid prick.”
He didn’t know what he was going to say to the gang. He’d have to tell them the evidence they’d told him to destroy was now in the hands of London Traffic Enforcement and would very soon, no doubt, be in the hands of the police. They would kill him. No, he’d do what he’d always done—run away and hope for the best. Anyway, nothing was there to link him or the gang to the van and its contents. He took another slug of whisky, stuffed the bottle in his pocket, and shuffled away. He’d have to go back to Venables and his crappy debt-collecting job as long as the gang didn’t kill him first.
Chapter 3
John Savage knew exactly how he was going to kill himself.
In the middle of the lounge floor, he placed a table, the one he used to play poker on with friends, back when he had friends. It had once been a small dining table, but he’d covered it in green felt to make it look more professional. No cards were in sight that day, and his friends had all gone, disappeared off the radar or dead.
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