The gaffer tape stung as it was ripped from Elvis’ mouth, waking him. Opening his eyes, he realised he was in a warehouse of sorts. Dank and dark with boxes stacked to the double-height ceiling. A well-used fork-lift truck idling unmanned some ten feet away, but otherwise empty. The place smelled of mildew and diesel. Outside, the call of seagulls told him he was by the sea. But where was his abductor? And why did his throat throb so badly? He swallowed and winced. The pain lanced through him. The fear paralysed him.
It was all he could do to swivel his eyes to search for whoever had removed the gag.
To his left, plastic flaps served as a door into some adjacent area. To his right—
‘Jesus!’
The water bit into his skin like an ice pick. He could barely see. His breath came in miserly choking gasps. Shaking his head, he tried to shout out but his words emerged no louder than a whisper. ‘Who are you?’
A man loomed before him, clutching an empty bucket and wearing a sadistic grin. The giant whom he had last seen as a reflection in the mirrored lenses of his informant’s sunglasses. Dressed in all black with a leather jacket, like some B-movie gangster. He even had the buzz cut.
‘What are you doing?’ Elvis asked, his voice an agonising, hoarse rasp that grated his throat raw with every syllable he managed. ‘Let me go. I’ve got no problem with you. You’ve got no problem with me. Please. Take my wallet, if it’s money you want.’ Looking into the giant’s expressionless face, Elvis could see that his words were wasted. This was not a man to barter with.
‘Shut your mouth,’ the man said, planting a right hook on Elvis’ left cheekbone that almost knocked him from the chair he was tied to. ‘We want you to listen and learn, gay boy.’
Elvis spat blood onto the floor, remembering the alleyway. He had been bickering with his informant Sepp one minute and under attack from these brutes the next. Garrotted. ‘Where’s Sepp – the old guy with the long hair? What did you do with him?’
Grinning, the man whistled. The engine of the yellow fork-lift cranked up and the vehicle began to reverse towards him. Panting fast with adrenalin, Elvis noticed that it was being driven by one of the other men from the alley – one of the men who had sprinted after his informant. The fork-lift, which had had its sharp forks pointing in the opposite direction to Elvis, spun around. There, impaled on the end of the raised blades, hung the lifeless body of Sepp, transformed from a hoary old biker to a battered rag doll that dripped blood onto the warehouse floor in a trail. The vehicle moved closer and closer, coming to a stop only a couple of feet away. On closer inspection, Elvis could see that the old junkie was missing an eye. Blood dripped from the empty, ruined socket. A fresh kill.
‘Oh my God!’ Elvis cried. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘This prick was on our payroll,’ the giant said. He folded his arms, looking up at the body and nodding, as though he was admiring an art installation rather than a corpse. ‘One of us. His job was to watch you and your little friends – one little friend in particular, goes by the name of Georgina McKenzie.’
‘George?’ Elvis asked, staring at his abductor’s broken nose.
‘Yes. My boss has got a hard-on for McKenzie. She’s been a naughty girl and cost him a lot of money. So, my boss paid your man here to put the frighteners on McKenzie. Shadow her a bit. Let her know she was under scrutiny. But your little grass got greedy, didn’t he? You can’t take cash off the Rotterdam Silencer and then go running to some gay-boy pig for another handout in return for information on him. That, my friend, is called shitting where you eat.’
‘Why the hell did you cut the poor bastard’s eye out?’ Elvis whispered. Tears leaked onto his cheeks, betraying his show of bravado as nothing more than that. They’re going to kill me and cut out my eye too. Mum’s dying. And here I am, strapped to a fucking chair in some dockside warehouse. I’ll never see Arne again. My one shot at happiness and it’s over though it never really began. Then, it dawned on him. ‘You!’
‘Me what?’
‘The eye in the gift-wrapping in Vinkeles restaurant. You sent the eye to McKenzie and made her think it was her mother’s. But it really belonged to some two-bit dealer that had been killed and dumped on wasteland. Nasser Malik. The pathologist said it was an obvious gang-style execution. You did it!’
The man inside the fork-lift truck started to laugh. ‘He’s not stupid, is he?’ he shouted.
‘It might have been me,’ the giant said, winking.
‘Where’s McKenzie’s mother?’ The pain of his garrotted throat and the blood that seeped from his split cheekbone were the last things on his mind, now. Elvis was feverish with intrigue as he started to piece the puzzle together. Even his mother had receded to the back of the queue of conscious thoughts as his imagination raced away with elaborate theories. ‘McKenzie thought it was Gordon Bloom that sent the eye. The Duke. But it wasn’t, was it? It was Stijn Pietersen. And you work for him, don’t you?’
‘Clever boy. I already fucking said that.’ The sarcasm was audible in the man’s voice.
Elvis struggled in his chair, his nostrils flaring, working overtime to keep his cortisol-flooded body suffused with oxygen. This was it. The end of his life. ‘I’ve got no interest in the Rotterdam Silencer. Tell him that. You must tell him. I heard nothing. I’ve reported nothing.’ Deep inside him, his policeman’s honour and principles were intact. But they had been temporarily overridden by survival instincts. ‘Please. You’ve got to believe me.’
‘What do you want me to do with this arsehole?’ Elvis’ pleading was interrupted by the driver of the fork-lift, who manoeuvred the forks up and down for clarification. The sad body of Sepp, the duplicitous informant, flapped around like a listless puppet, showering Elvis with thick droplets of coagulating blood.
Elvis tried to scream but could only emit a half-hearted whimper, clenching his eyes shut. Opening them again, willing himself to face his murderers like a man.
His abductor shrugged. ‘Stick him in a body bag for now. I’ll take him to the incinerator when I get a minute.’ He turned to Elvis. ‘Now, there’s just the question of you, gay boy.’
He withdrew from his pocket something wrapped in a red-stained rag that had been placed inside a clear plastic lunch bag. Removing the object from the bag and peeling the edges of the rag back, the giant revealed a ratty, staring eyeball between his fingers and thumb.
‘Open wide,’ he said.
‘No! You’re fucking mad!’ Elvis said.
But the giant pinched Elvis’ nostrils together with his left hand, forcing him to gulp air through his mouth. Briefly, Elvis tried to shake his head around enough to evade the man’s cannibalistic intentions, but he had a strong grip on Elvis’ nose.
‘Pop it in your mouth. There you go, gay boy. A fudge-packer like you should have no trouble putting a ball in your gob, should you?’
He rammed the eyeball into Elvis’ mouth. Quickly produced a roll of gaffer tape from his jacket’s inside pocket and unfurled a strip with deft fingers. Placed it over Elvis’ full mouth in one fluid move.
Elvis started to gag immediately. He could feel the vomit rising in his gullet, realising there was no way out for it. This was worse than being garrotted. In five minutes’ time, he calculated he would have choked to death in any case. A bullet would have been kinder. Kill me, he thought. I can’t take this anymore. This is not what I signed up to. This is not bravery. It’s torture.
‘So, gay boy,’ the man said, leaning over so that his bowling ball of a head was level with Elvis’ face. Gripping his knees with hands like shovels. ‘This is the message the Rotterdam Silencer wants to send to Van den Bergen. And you’d better make sure you fucking give it to him, okay?’
Nodding, the tears streamed down Elvis’ cheeks. Vomit that had no other exit route sprayed through his nostrils, burning his throat on the way up and his sinuses on the way out.
‘Are you listening? I want you to give him and that bitch, McKenzie – especially McKenzie – the message that he’s watching them. The Silencer sees everything. But McKenzie in particular owes him big time for taking down The Duke.’
The man smiled and raised his eyebrows as Elvis fixed him with a quizzical look.
‘Yeah. That’s right,’ he said. ‘Gordon Bloom was the Rotterdam Silencer’s right-hand man. And when you dicks took him out of the picture, you forced the Silencer out of semi-retirement. So, now you’re going to pay. An eye for an eye, right? There’s a shit storm of biblical proportions brewing. It’s coming this way and it’s coming for Van den Bergen and McKenzie.’