Free Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time by M.P. Wright Page B

room. I had my head in my hands and was lost in my thoughts.
    “Hey man, you OK? Look, I’m gonna split, git myself a shave and a few hours’ sleep. I overheard from Pearl you had a dinner date with ’em tonight. I’ll let her and Gabe know you been on the hooch and you ain’t well enough to head over fo’ supper later. You don’t want either of ’em seeing you all busted up like that.”
    “Thanks, man, you—”
    Vic butted in, not giving me chance to thank him for all that he had done for me these past twenty-four hours.
    “Now Loretta says to tell you that if you’re going looking fo’ that cock-rat Jocelyn Charles, that you’ll recognise her by the mangy old fox-fur stole she wears round her neck. So we gonna pay us a visit to the Speed Bird later tonight then?” he asked enthusiastically.
    The playful look on his face gave me little chance to reject his enthusiastic proposition.

10
    Otis Grey was the stuff of nightmares. He was the kind of man we know exists but we’d rather not think about. At over six feet tall, the powerfully built Jamaican possessed a pockmarked and scarred face that resembled the kind of gothic creatures you would normally find hanging off the inside pillars of a church. Otis inhabited a world of prostitution, drugs and violence, the last brutally meted out to those stupid enough to cross him. The street girls he controlled lived in fear of his cruel wrath and his tendency to inflict physical pain with a large butcher’s knife that he kept hidden in a sheath sewn into the long black leather greatcoat he always wore. Only his mother had ever called him Otis; to everyone else he was simply known as Papa Anansi.
    I had grown up around men like Papa Anansi all my life. As a child I had witnessed the violence and the fear these men elicited when they applied unwanted protection to local store-owners and publicans, and in later life as a police officer I’d see at first hand their rancorous acts of savagery as they waged gang war against each other. They built wealthy empires on misery and then one day would lose all they had to other monsters with equally, if not more, inhuman criminal behaviour than their predecessors had.
    I needed to talk to Jocelyn Charles without Papa knowing. But that was easier said than done. Papa had a never-ending string of lackeys who were prepared to offer up the most meagre information for the price of a ropey joint. On top of that, if Jocelyn was found to be talking to me about his business affairs or the other girls in his pox-ridden harem, she would most probably say goodbye to a couple of fingers, or worse.
    The Speed Bird club was on Grosvenor Road and only a short walk from Cut Man’s gym. I’d arranged to meet Vic in the Prince of Wales pub at ten that evening, hang around till last orders, then move on to the Speed Bird. I took the only suit I owned from my wardrobe. The navy-blue worsted fabric was wearing thin, but I still looked pretty sharp in it. I picked out a light-blue shirt and a dark knitted tie. I smarted from pain every now and then as I dressed. Loretta had made a fine job of cleaning down my overcoat and hat. I put ’em on, took a couple of aspirin to hold the stinging in my shoulder at bay, then headed out.
    I opened my front door and the cold air hit my face, taking my breath away. Coal-fire smoke ran up the chimneys and billowed out into the night, mixing with the freezing fog that was dropping down in the streets as I walked carefully over the frozen, compacted snow and ice on the pavement.
    It was just before ten by the time I pulled open the door to the Prince of Wales pub to meet Vic. A heavy mist of cigarette smoke floated across the lounge, where my cousin stood at the polished oak bar talking to the barmaid, his eyes staring downwards towards the low-cut top she was wearing and the ample cleavage on display. The juke box was playing the Rolling Stones’ “Little Red Rooster” to a small, unappreciative audience of