Free Black Treacle Magazine (Issue 3) by Black Treacle Publications Page A

and the kid howls.
    “Marc,” Dom
says. Again, he's ignored. Another swing, and the other knee
goes.
    Marc pushes
his hair back, leaving a trail of red through the blond, then
brings the club down again, straight into the kid's gut. A spurt of
blood comes out of his mouth, but no more sounds.
    “Marc,” Dom
says. Louder, this time. “For fuck's sake.”
    Marc spins
round, the club still in his hand. “What? Have we got a problem
here, Dominic? You got something you want to say to me? Some
objection you want to make?”
    He lets the
club fly once more. Jimmy flips up and over, comes to rest on his
back. His head cracks down on the concrete and one arm falls,
loosely, over what's left of his face.
    Dom exhales
slowly, looks down at the floor. The time for objections is past,
now. “No, Boss,” he says.
    “Good.” Marc's
breathing hard and his knuckles are white. “I came here to give
this boy a chance to explain himself, but he decided he'd rather
tell me a fairy story. It was a good one, though. You'd have liked
it. Better than the three bears and the three pigs and the three
fucking billy goats gruff. Magical powers, Dom. That's how he got
robbed. Not because he's a fucking useless bastard, but because
this woman's got magical powers.” He spits into the puddle
spreading under Jimmy's head.
    “Her name's
Elena,” Dom says.
    Marc looks up
at him. “What?”
    “The woman he
was talking about. Elena. I've been asking around, what with all
the shit that's been going on lately, and this is what I'm hearing.
It wasn't just Jimmy, that's the thing. She turned Kelton over last
night, as well. Took the lot. Everything he had. The money, the
gear, everything.”
    Marc leans the
club against the wall, then goes to the sink and washes his hands.
“You speak to Kel yet?”
    Dom glances at
the mess on the floor. 'Yeah, but you're not going to like it.'
    Kelton Adams
is a smackhead, but one of the functional ones. He runs his patch
well, pays up on time, keeps his shit together. Went to university,
still reads books. He talks a lot of bollocks, especially when he's
high, but there's a decent brain under all the shit. Or so Dom
would have said, anyway.
    He rubs the
back of his neck. “He said she was a goddess. Immortal Death, the
goddess of time. I think that was the exact quote.”
    Marc looks at
his watch and lets out a hiss of annoyance. The glass is cracked.
“Are you serious?”
    “I'm just
telling you what he said. He wasn't making much sense.”
    “No shit. How
bad was he hurt?”
    “He wasn't.
Not that I could see, anyway.”
    “So he just
let her clean him out and walk away? Didn't put up a fight?”
    Dom shrugs.
“He said he did. He said he killed her, but it didn't make any
difference. Don't ask me, Marc, I don't know what happened. There
was blood all over the flat, but it wasn't his--there wasn't a mark
on him. Kel can be handy with a knife when he needs to be, but if
she'd lost that much blood she'd be dead. So, I don't know. Maybe
she sacrificed a goat or something.”
    Marc snorts.
“Right, yeah. A black mass. Voodoo. Maybe that's how she does it.”
He steps over the body on the floor. “All right, let's get this
sorted out. Find out where our little voodoo princess is hiding. I
think it's time we started telling some of our own stories. Like
the one about what happens when you pick the wrong people to fuck
with.”
    Dom makes some
calls. Nine times out of ten, that's good enough in itself. If
Marc's looking for you, you don't want to be found. Most people
decide they've had a good enough run and quietly slip out of the
game.
    But this one?
No. She doesn't disappear. She doesn't even keep out of the way.
She turns over their bookie, another couple of dealers and one of
the legit-front shops--a florist, and who the fuck robs a florist,
for fuck's sake--then walks right into the warehouse while they're
unpacking a shipment.
    “Hi,” she
says, like it's some kind of make-up party. “I'm