KEEPING WILL Dent in view from the small bar was a challenge, but no more difficult than making sure the girl with the red hair didn’t have him thrown out.
For the third time she came across to him and said, “Can I get you anything else?”
“Another orange juice, thanks.”
She frowned and said, “You’ve had three orange juices and you haven’t gotten off that stool. You know you’re in a nightclub, right?”
“I’ll dance, maybe…I’m building up to it.”
“God, after this kind of buildup if you don’t dance like Disco Stu it’s going to be a terrible disappointment for both of us.”
Despite her very reasonable concern that Darian was some sort of creepy oddball, she got him another orange juice and left him alone. The music was getting faster and louder and further out of step with Darian’s more acoustic tastes, but he blocked it out and focused on the reason he was there.
Will Dent was all over Transistor, at the large bar and then on the dance floor, back to the bar and off to the bathroom and back on the floor. He seemed to be making a point to be as annoying as possible to as many people as he could encounter in the crowd, bumping into some at the bar and stepping on people who were trying to dance. It was all so deliberate that even in a place so full of movement and noise it became noticeable to more than just the spy ensconced at the small bar. The barman who had been serving Dent was alert to it and Darian saw him make a call on the phone behind the bar. A minute and a half later two very large men wearing T-shirts with the Transistor logo made their way inside and took Dent by each arm, guiding him to the exit.
That was Darian’s cue to leave but he had to play the role carefully. If Dent was on the hunt for a battle then spotting Darian would give him a target. He walked slowly round the edge of the room and out to the main exit, thirty seconds behind Dent and his burly escorts. Out through the double doors and into the street, colder now than when he had come in but louder, life tumbling out of the bars on surrounding streets and trying to fall into the club to round off a night of inebriated entertainment. Dent was over by the curb where a near-constant stream of taxis was picking up and dropping off, drivers beeping horns and shouting abuse at each other, their industry increasingly heated. It was easy for Darian to skip out unnoticed and move along Martin Road until he found a nook to hide in. He took up position and watched Dent make another attempt at picking a fight.
His drunken indignation was turned toward the two bouncers who had chucked him out, one a completely bald man built like the sort of rugby player who would be banned for excessive violence while the other was tall and thinner, dark and with the sort of matinee idol looks that wouldn’t have lasted long on a doorman in Challaid had he ended up sticking around.
It was at that one Dent shouted, “It’s people like you that they shouldn’t let…people like you into this country.”
If he’d known what the person he was shouting at would go on to become the abuse would only have been more unpleasant. If there’s one thing drunken racists hate more than foreigners it’s foreigners that become successful in their new country, and Baran Vega would go on to great success. At that point he was a twelve-monther, earning his dual passport with a year of employment in the city.
The bald man said in a thick Challaid accent, “It’s arseholes like you that shouldn’t be allowed in this country, but maybe we can get rid of you one building at a time because you’re barred from this one.”
“You can’t bar me because I quit. I wouldn’t come back here if you paid me.”
The two bouncers glanced at each other, laughed at the stupidity of it all and went back inside. The look they gave their female colleague on the door was sympathetic.
Being thrown out and barred was a poor return for his night’s aggravating work so Dent was never going to leave it at that. Darian watched from the doorway of Sharik’s Pet Store two doors down while Dent looked left and right for the easiest target he could find, which happened to be a young and drunk couple who seemed to be suffering from an excess of gravity as they fought to avoid being pushed to the ground under the weight of it. They found the struggle hilarious as they swayed about, and neither of them was paying any attention to Dent when he walked up to them and punched the young man in the guts.
The girl screamed, “Hey, that’s my Duncan, that’s Duncan.”
Dent didn’t care that he was punching Duncan. It could have been Prime Minister MacDonald and he would have kept swinging those fists. He got three or four punches in before a couple of other revelers jumped in and pulled him away and the woman on the door ran across. Darian noticed her putting something back into her pocket and guessed correctly it was an alarm to inform her colleagues inside she could use backup. They would be out in a second and Dent would be monstrously outnumbered and outgunned. He was about to become the target in a game of whack the bastard, and he was smart enough to realize it, which was why he started to run.
If he had gone the other way things could have turned out very differently, but he didn’t, he ran down toward the pet shop. He didn’t spot the young man lurking there, so he didn’t see the foot that Darian stuck out and tripped him with, standing back in Sharik’s doorway and watching a ruck of people pile on top of the sprawling Dent. It didn’t take a beautiful mind to deduce what was going to happen next so Darian slipped away from the rumble on the pavement and made his way back to the car.
The first person he called was Sholto.
“Darian? Tell me you’re not still working. Tell me you don’t expect to be paid for all these hours.”
“Dent didn’t go to work tonight, he went partying, which in his world means getting hammered by both alcohol and doormen. He’s about to get arrested outside Transistor on Martin Road. Do you have a number for DS MacNeith? She can use this as an opportunity to question him.”
Sholto sighed down the phone and said, “I’ll call her, persuade her this is worth her time, I’m more charming than you. You didn’t get him beaten up, did you? Because you know we’re not allowed to make these things happen.”
“He didn’t need any help from me or anyone else.”
Darian hung up and tried to start the car, getting a cough of life from the engine on the second try and enough power to trundle back to his flat. He went straight to bed, knowing he would be up early, desperate to find out if the formidable DS MacNeith had cracked open Will Dent and ripped the truth out of him.