Free C.T. Brown - Second Time Lucky? by C.T. Brown Page B

that
sort of reputation.'
    'I
ain’t going to call the pigs on you, I just wanted you to know I could . . .
and for you to know I picked up what you dropped on Frith Street. Stay out of
my way or it'll be anonymously handed in to the boys in blue.'
    I
grabbed for him but he jumped to his feet too quickly, by the time I'd come to
my feet he was letting the aluminium and glass door swing shut behind him. Great. A psychopath with a grudge has my knife. Running from
the cafe I spotted him disappearing round a corner and followed, another stellar idea as that's when I found out where the muscle was.
     
    A
few minutes later I was alone in the street and, with a little support from the
back wall of a theatre, was able to drag myself to a close approximation of a
vertical position. A quick check revealed that I still had all my fingers but
two on my left hand were intensely painful and bending too far in the wrong
direction to be anything but broken. Various scrapes, cuts and bruises vied for
my attention in between the throbs of pain from my left hand but were little
more than background noise in comparison. Fingers must have been put in a
really good mood by my misfortune, otherwise I'd be a digit or two down and
bleeding to death quietly. You know you're having a bad day when a good kicking
which results only in a couple of broken bones is a good thing.
    Reaching
around with my right hand I managed to pull my mobile from the left pocket of
my jeans, scrolling through my contacts I found the number for Adrian 'First
Ade' Doyle and called it. After a brief, bad tempered and unnecessarily complex
discussion of prices and the discount that favours owed should bring I hung up
and staggered along the litter strewn, neon lit streets to the corner of
Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, the kind of intersection you can
only get in London - a brightly lit tourist area where no-one will look twice
at you if you look like you've just had the crap kicked out of you, hell they
wouldn't even notice if you were on fire unless you got too close and then most
would only mutter about your lack of manners and try to walk around you.
    First
Ade's van stopped just long enough for the sliding door on the side to open and
one of his "nurses" to grab me and yank me inside, we were moving
again before the door closed. Inside the van is something like the lovechild of
an ambulance and a butcher's shop that had been dressed by Elton John in the
seventies. Recognisable medical equipment shared space with some pretty
gruesome looking tools that still give me nightmares, all in an interior
covered in dark red velvet that had been attacked my an insane seamstress with
a sequin obsession. Ade was the go to guy for medical help in the west end when
hospitals might ask too many questions and a legitimate underworld legend. No-one
knew how long he'd been at it, he appeared to be an eighty year old hippy but
by all accounts he had looked exactly the same in the sixties when he'd been
treating employees of the Kray twins, pop stars and other criminal types. How
did I know him and what he did? Same way I knew Fingers, spending three months
on remand and another six investigating the murder of a girlfriend whose father
turned out to be less the local grocer and more the local mob boss got you a
lot of contacts in London's thriving criminal classes, and believe me there
really were different classes. When you're investigating a crime as the prime
suspect, and even your family has disowned you because their suspicions closely
mimic the Police's, you soon learn the value of good contacts. You also soon
learn how to take care of yourself. The nurse, well over six foot and the most
muscular woman I'd ever seen, swung me up onto a camp bed that did for a
treatment table and Ade's long greasy hair and straggly beard swung into view. A
wash of weed scented breath passed over me as First Ade looked me up and down. "You
really pissed someone off this time didn't