Untethered: A dark hard-edged crime noir set in Bristol (John Black 1) by John Bowie

Author:John Bowie [Bowie, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bristol Noir
Published: 2023-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

18

I sit in the cold driver’s seat and miss the fire, and the comforts of deception in the Governor and his crew—they were growing me. Their cliché gangster four-by-four Range Rover is parked on the grass verge nearby.

I shake my head at the tragicomedy of the past few days, rev the engine and drive, clipping their wing mirror, whacking it back on itself.

I take the one road out and decide to hide the car in a campsite and wait for them to pass and try to tail them. If I can find out where they’re from, I’ll have it all. If not I’ll wait for opening time at the pub—after all, there are three days and I can beckon them any time I want with this brick of a phone.

I have to get out to open a gate and then drive through, hiding the tired Saab behind a thick hedgerow. I spy the road through the mass of entwined hedges. I lower the passenger window to listen to, in case they drive past and I miss it.

Nothing does pass, and I wait now with eyes shut, seat back, for a couple of hours as I mull it all over again. The stink of the case and whatever the mud field I was parked in was sprayed with last. It clams up my nostrils—pure shit.

The dashboard says 7:30 and I wonder what the others have been doing all this time on the beach; scheming, gloating—a bit of both.

I start the car, and it spins in the mud. My heart drops.

Of course the rain I’d swam through and the muddy field wasn’t as sympathetic to my blackmailed deadline, or to the ageing car—I was in thick.

I open the car door, my feet sinking in the mud just as an unmistakable shadow and roar of a four-by-four races past on the other side of the hedge as I stand there, ankle-deep in cold mud.

‘Fuck sake!’ I punch the window.

Walking back to the road I see the tail of them disappear up the road and around the corner, with a spray of mud and dirt flying behind.

‘What time do the pubs open around here?!’ I say to the sodden field.

A cow moos from a field across.

Then the entire herd joins, in a beef chorus.

‘What’ve we got here then—dogging were we?’ a farmer’s voice says from a tractor, head poking from his cab above the hedge line. It must be feeding time, exciting the cattle.

‘Stuck,’ I say, whilst I consider altering my accent to make it a bit Welsh, to match his. An attempt to get support.

‘Won’t be the first ones to get stuck in these fields. Dirty bastards. Up to their balls usually, as others stare in through steamed-up windows.’

‘Just me this time. I was having a break.’

‘Break from choking chickens more like. A one-man doggin’ crew is it—not much fun in that!’ I’ve given him his entertainment for the week. ‘You might wanna pick a different colour to wear though!’

‘What?’ I say, feeling I need to relent and join in one way or another.

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