Bully

Chapter 36

   “Don’t you want to consult The Boss first?” Brawn asked with a frown, as he took a seat on the faded brown table. “This is a bit...”

  “Cruel,” his companion finished with a cold grin. Gabrielle had called in Brawn, as I requested, and another thug who was apparently quite well respected. I didn’t like him though – he had an air about him that just put you on edge. The fact that his nickname was ‘Vulture’ didn’t help his case.

  Vulture was a tall, thin man with a sunken looking face and long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail. He had pale skin, like the sun had never touched it, but deep grey eyes that stood out like a stain in the snow. In all, he was the type of man you’d give a wide birth when you walk past him on the street. But who was I to judge? My own character was potentially just as bad as his.

  “Look we need to act before he does,” I said, inspected the stubs on my right hand where my fingers were. Brawn raised his eyebrows at the sight of my new handicap but didn’t comment on it. I bet he’d seen much worse things than a few missing fingers. I placed my hand down on the table before looking up at him. “If we sit around and plan this he’ll beat us to it. This is a chance to get one up on him. To show him he’s not the one in control,”

  Brawn shook his heavy head. “We haven’t planned this – too many things can go wrong,”

  “Since when have any of our plans went right?” Gabrielle snorted, shocking everyone. She was taking my side... someone alert the Guinness world records – this was a first (and probably a last too)! “We plan, we do, and then all Hell breaks loose,” she shot me a look that quite evidently showed she hated the fact she was agreeing with me. “Byker’s right –we don’t have time to sit around and iron out all the creases,”

  Brawn still looked reluctant. “But we’ll be putting her at risk. She’s an old woman. She’s innocent-”

  “She’s not innocent,” I interrupted, my temper flaring.

  However my angry interrupting obviously agitated Brawn. I don’t think we’d ever had a disagreement before. It was like the world was thrown on its head today. First Chief turned out to have a secret personality as rotten as a corpse, then Gabrielle had sided with me in an argument, and now Brawn was disagreeing with me.

  “Look I don’t care about whatever happened between your and her,” Brawn snapped. “The bottom line is, I am not using an elderly woman as bait,”

   “Be careful, Brawn,” Vulture said slyly, his dark grey eyes alight with amusement at the argument. “I’m starting to think you’ve got morals,”

  Fortunately he didn’t react. The last thing we needed right now was for Vulture to provoke further argument. I hadn’t known him all that long but it was clear he was a human catalyst for argument. There was a sick pleasure in his eyes at the discord.

   “I need to talk to her,” I said lowly, trying to suppress the argument. The longer we spent here, the higher the chance of Moseby reaching her first. “We don’t have to use her as bait. Just let me talk to her,” It was a compromise I was unwilling to make, but it was necessary. A large part of me wanted to leave Brawn behind and use the woman as bait like I originally intentioned, but I couldn’t lose Brawn’s trust in me. Now that Chief had showed his true colours, Brawn was the closest thing to a friend I had in this place. I couldn’t lose his respect or his confidence in me.