Dirty Work: Volume 2

Story Two - The New Groove - 5

After an excruciating twenty-four hours where I was pumped full of drugs and medicines and whatever other god-awful crap they could find, I was, apparently, slowly on the mend. My wrists still killed from where I'd bucked and thrashed against the restraints, my eyes were red and raw, and my throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper, but the doctors told me I was on my way to making a swift recovery. Whatever swift recovery that might be, it was one that I expected to be lined with rainbows and naked girls, or I don't know if I could justify the pain.

It crossed my mind once that Markro had defected to the opposition, and they were just having a laugh torturing me as much as they could. The idea got a cheap, quick laugh, which didn't help my throat and started a coughing fit, which made my eyes water, and eventually through the whole thing I started straining against the cuffs. Irony is beautiful sometimes, but only when it's not you that's being made the laughing stock.

Markro and Ashrore dropped by from time to time and told me that they were in a small set of rooms not far from the practice, so as to be as near to an incident as possible. Reyna I never saw, but I never expected a visit from her when there were far more pressing matters for her. We're so used to coming through things intact, that we begin to believe the age-old lie that nothing could ever happen to us. In our dreams we're invincible, and it takes a hit to shatter the illusions that have crossed over to the waking world.

Thirty hours or so after I woke up, when it was night and the hospital was wound down with only the night shift going on, the door to the ward opened. I tried to sit up, straining to see who was entering the room, but all I saw was a great silhouette against the hallway light.

'It's alright, Xayne,' said the bulky figure, 'don't hurt yourself. I'll come to you.'

And so he did, and it took me a while to recognise who it was that was coming to my little hospital bed. He put the bedside lamp on and the glow caught his haggard face. Shadows were blacker than night, wrinkles like mountain ranges on his forehead. He smiled, but it was the weakest, most wretched smile I had ever seen.

'Boss,' I said to him at last, rubbing the last grains of sleep from my eyes.

Grasslea looked over his shoulder at the man sleeping next to me. Villa slumbered on, shallow breaths and peaceful dreams. Somehow he had taken the least punishment of us all, despite being flipped nine times and in a raging inferno for a considerable time afterwards. In the boss's eyes I saw a flash of uncontrolled resentment, eyes that were struggling to contain his resentment.

He returned to me and smiled again. 'How are you feeling?'

'Like I've been put through a session of training for the military, with me as the target and punch bag.'

The boss nodded. 'I hope you know that if you're going to keep getting yourself almost killed, I'm going to have to keep you on bar duty when the club's back up and running to spare my wallet the pain.'

I spat out a laugh. 'You know I can't pour a drink to save my life. You wouldn't even accept me as volunteer.'

The boss smiled once more, and I saw something of the old twinkle in his eye. Memories of the club, the way it would kick into life every night and the way the stage would rumble as the entertainment slowly ratcheted up a notch as the hours wore their way on. The smiles on the faces of the girls as he added a little extra into their wages to help that session of extra classes on finance and economics they were trying to get through. I heard in those glassy orbs the sigh as he had to let go of a priceless piece of jewellery to make a small fortune, ploughing most of it back into the club. Most of that would be gone now, that money, spent on rebuilding the club, and...

'Thank you,' I said, looking him dead in the eye. 'I'd be on the slab right now if it weren't for you, wouldn't I?'

'You would have been on the slab a week after Markro bumped into you if you hadn't proven yourself. I like people who have a tendency to give the middle finger to death; especially if they work for me.'

'To the end, boss,' I said. 'To the damn, bitter end.'

The two of us sat in silence for a moment, not doing anything in particular except feeling the air shift around us, the tingle as a bead of perspiration rose on my brow, the quiet of the ward, far away from the chaos and the racket of downtown Celestria, and a different world compared to Dirty Work. It was a strangely peaceful moment, one that perhaps has its moment of epiphany somewhere buried deep within its shifting walls. If it does, I've been unable to find it.

'I was hoping to find him awake,' Grasslea said eventually, pointing to Villa. 'I'd like to get some answers, if he has any, about why my former employee wants him dead. It's no concern of mine if he dies, it's nothing to do with me, but we're too deep in this shit to get ourselves out of it without going a little further in first.'

'You don't think it's got anything to do with us, do you?' I asked cautiously. 'Some kind of revenge mission against the club?'

'That should have been gotten out of her system when Vayn decided to turn my palace into a slaughterhouse. It should have been enough for her. And yet... I don't think she's ever forgotten us.'

'We did get her arrested...'

'And then she slipped out again, wandering with nothing, just like you were. No, I think she'll have needed a lot of infrastructure already in place to be able to hire the amount of firepower she had. I think she's definitely got her eye on us, and after this the bitch will be practically begging to drink our blood, but I can't see her having set all this up on her own.'

'So you're saying she's worked her way into someone else's business, and if she has the ability to use her influence to get at us, she will?'

'That's the best I can come up with. I've put a couple of the old guys onto working with Salis to try and find out where her other friends are, and their families being held hostage. A failure as massive as this would warrant an execution, and I'm definitely not comfortable with that being on my hands.'

The boss checked his Halo-Core and rose from his seat at the end of my bed. His suit had a few flecks of dust around the shoulder pads, the first dirt I'd ever seen anywhere near him.

'Have you...' I began, stopping his exit momentarily. 'Have you seen Siala?'

The boss stood there quietly, waiting for the right time to find the right words. I saw his jaw move in the light from the lamp, struggling with language in a way reserved only for the truly heartbroken. 'I went to the door to go in,' he said at last. 'I heard Reyna begging, practically screaming for her to wake up. That was enough of a visit for me.'

Grasslea switched off the light. 'Recover quickly, Xayne. Things are getting personal now.'

With that he left the room without a glance behind him.