Free The Concrete Grove by Gary McMahon Page A

a kiss on his way out the door. “Next time we’ll have some proper fun,” he said, before thrusting his hips like a piston. “Some proper fucking fun...”
    Lana remained where she was on the floor, squatting like some primitive warrior woman delivering a baby in the dirt. She was no longer shaking. It was comfortable down there, near the dusty skirting board. She stayed there for a long time even after they left, thinking about her options, trying to work out what to do about the situation. Once again, she had failed her daughter. The choices she had made led only to despair.
    Soon all she could think of was Hailey’s face when she walked through the door after school to find the flat emptied of their belongings.
    Hailey’s poor, sad face and a single word, one she’d always been afraid of, even when it had entered her life two years ago. A word that stayed there, lodged inside her head, even when she stood up, crossed the room and closed the door. Her hands, when she looked at them, were as steady as those of a stone sculpture.
    The word in her mind brought horror, it promised terror and a release from financial bondage: the word was revenge . But it was something she shied away from, terrified. Violence was an option she could only ever consider once everything else had failed. She’d learned that, at least, from her desperate murderer of a husband.
     
     
    T HE THREE MEN walked outside and headed towards their car, the largest of the group hanging back from his colleagues. He stopped, looked up, and then looked back at the Grove Court flats, feeling a strange tingling sensation at the back of his neck, as if he were being watched.
    “Boater! You coming?”
    He kept staring at the grey-walled building, his eyes scanning the façade. Finally they came to rest upon the window of the flat they’d just left – Lana Fraser’s place. What was drawing his gaze? Why was he staring so hard, so intently, at that window? Was it that he was desperate to get another glimpse of the woman inside? Yes, she was beautiful, but he’d seen better. In truth, he’d had better. Despite his size, and the fact that he was not a handsome man, the power associated with his position as one of Monty Bright’s pack-dogs ensured that he never went hungry for physical pleasure.
    No, it wasn’t just her beauty. There was something more – an inexplicable desire, a craving. It exhausted him to think about her, and the obscene act he’d put on inside the flat had caused him to lose his grip on the day. All he wanted now was to go home and rest.
    “Come on, man! For fuck’s sake, we have work to do. That junkie needs sorting out, for one thing. Monty doesn’t want him coming down from his high before he can go to work on the skinny bastard’s arse.”
    Francis Boater fought hard to drag his eyes from the window. He strained, forcing the muscles in his neck to turn his head. Then, when he was once again facing in the direction he was meant to be heading, he pushed his reluctant feet across the pavement.
    “I’m coming,” he said, but what he really wanted was to get away, to go back to the flat and tell that woman that everything would be fine. These thoughts were new to him; never before had he felt even a glimmer of tenderness. Not way back when his mother used to treat him like a house pet, or during any of the subsequent desperate relationships he’d fallen into. This feeling – it was so large, so much bigger than him, that he felt like falling to his knees and crying, or pummelling the nearest face into mush.
    Yes, that was it – that felt so much better. A normal reaction: the lust for violence. Francis Boater would be nothing, just an empty shell, if it were not for the violence at his core. It was what drove him, what made him real.
    He joined the others at the car, those alien thoughts banished for now. Banished but not forgotten.

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    H AILEY KNEW SOMETHING was wrong before she even entered the main