Career of Evil

“Is there a problem?” Strike asked the bouncer.

“Des’ll tell you, if there is,” was the faintly ominous answer.

So Strike crossed the room to speak to the DJ, and stood like a massive schoolboy summoned to the headmaster at his lectern. Fully alive to the absurdity of the situation, he had to wait while a third stripper deposited her glass of coins safely beside the turntable, wriggled out of her purple robe and ascended the stage in black lace and Perspex heels. She was heavily tattooed and, beneath thick makeup, spotty.

“Gentlemen, tits, ass and class from — Jackaline!”

“Africa” by Toto began. Jackaline began to spin around the pole, at which she was far more accomplished than either of her colleagues, and Des covered the microphone with his hand and leaned forwards.

“Right, pal.”

He appeared both older and harder than he had in the red light of the stage, his eyes shrewd, a scar as deep as Shanker’s running along his jaw.

“What are you asking about that bouncer for?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“He never had a contract.”

“I never said he had.”

“Unfair dismissal my fucking arse. He never told me he had fucking fits. Have you been sent here by that Alyssa bitch?”

“No,” said Strike. “I was told Noel worked here.”

“She’s a mad fucking cow.”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s him I’m looking for.”

Scratching an armpit, Des glowered at Strike while, four feet away, Jackaline slipped her bra straps from her shoulders and glared over her shoulder at the half-dozen punters watching.

“Bollocks was that bastard ever in the Special Forces,” said Des aggressively, as though Strike had insisted he had been.

“Is that what he told you?”

“It’s what she said. Alyssa. They wouldn’t take a fucking wreck like that. Anyway,” said Des, eyes narrowed, “there was other stuff I didn’t like.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“That’s my business. You tell her that from me. It wasn’t just his fucking fit. You tell her to ask Mia why I didn’t want him back, and you tell Alyssa if she does one more stupid fucking thing to my car, or sends one more of her friends round trying to get something on me, I’ll fucking have her in court. You tell her that!”

“Fair enough,” said Strike. “Got an address?”

“Fuck off, all right?” snarled Des. “Fuck off out of here.”

He leaned into the microphone.

“Nice,” he said, with a kind of professional leer, as Jackaline jiggled her breasts rhythmically in the scarlet light. Des made a “hop it” gesture to Strike and returned to his stack of old vinyl records.

Accepting the inevitable, Strike allowed himself to be escorted to the door. Nobody paid any attention; the audience’s attention remained divided between Jackaline and Lionel Messi on the widescreen TV. At the door, Strike stood aside for a group of young men in suits to enter, all of whom seemed already a little worse for drink.

“Tits!” yelled the first of them, pointing at the stripper. “Tits!”

The bouncer took exception to this mode of entry. A mild altercation ensued, with the shouter cowed by his friends and the bouncer’s strictures, which were delivered with several jabs of a forefinger to his chest.

Strike waited patiently for the matter to be adjusted. When the young men had finally been allowed to enter, he took his departure to the opening strains of “The Only Way Is Up” by Yazz.

46 Subhuman

Alone with his trophies, he felt himself entirely whole. They were proof of his superiority, his astonishing ability to glide through the ape-like police and the sheep-like masses, taking whatever he wanted, like a demigod.

Of course, they gave him something else too.

He never seemed to get hard when he was actually killing. Thinking about it beforehand, yes: sometimes he could drive himself into an onanistic frenzy with ideas of what he was going to do, refining and restaging the possibilities in his mind. Afterwards — now, for instance, holding in his hand the chilly, rubbery, shrunken breast he had hacked from Kelsey’s torso, already turning slightly leathery with its repeated exposure to the air outside the fridge — then he had no problem at all. He was like a flagpole now.

He had the new one’s fingers in the icebox. He took one out, pressed it against his lips then bit down on it, hard. He imagined her still connected to it, screaming in agony. He chewed deeper, relishing the feeling of the cold flesh splitting, his teeth pressing hard into the bone. One hand fumbled with the string of his tracksuit bottoms...

Afterwards he put it all back in the fridge, closed the door and gave it a little pat, grinning to himself. There’d be a lot more than that in there, soon. The Secretary wasn’t small: five foot seven or eight by his reckoning.