Sudden Death. Phil Kurthausen
his mouth.
Suddenly, there was a burst of static in his ear mic.
‘I’ve lost him.’
Erasmus groaned but this time it was a groan of disappointment. He gently pushed her back.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Work.’
She cocked her head to one side.
‘What is it you do?’
He half smiled and shook his head.
‘You don’t want to know.’
He opened the door of the cubicle and gave her an apologetic salute.
Even against the banging bass of the club and the whoops and cheers of hundreds of drunken and drugged revellers, Erasmus heard the message loud and clear through his earpiece.
‘I can’t find him!’
He began moving quickly towards the exit, pushing people aside gently but firmly so he could carve a path through the heaving, sweating mass of bodies. It was like swimming through flesh.
A bearded man, dressed to Erasmus’s mind like a cross between a thirties miner and a day-tripper, tried to grab him. He slipped under the man’s arm and brought his mouth close to the man’s glistening face.
‘Get out of my way now.’
The man stared back at him with pupils like black plastic buttons. His dopamine grin changed to a cocaine snarl and he pushed Erasmus in the chest. Erasmus glanced up at the suspended gantry that ran around the circumference of the dance floor. He spotted two bouncers, one of whom was scanning the dance floor for incidents just like this.
His earpiece growled static and then another message.
‘He’s on the roof. Get up here now! I think he’s about to do something stupid!’
He had no time to debate the issue with Cocaineman, who had now raised his hands and wiggled his palms in the internationally accepted gesture of ‘come on then’. Erasmus sighed.
‘When will you kids learn to just say no?’
Erasmus pulled his right arm back and balled his fist but it was just a feint. It would make what he actually planned to do easier. Cocaineman obliged and, anticipating a punch to the face, started to sway back. Erasmus dropped to his haunches and swept his right foot around in an arc taking the man’s legs away from under him in one smooth movement. He dashed forward and caught the guy’s head before it hit the floor and lowered him the few inches to the dance floor.
Cocaineman looked stunned and his breathing was laboured.
‘Do us both a favour and stay down,’ said Erasmus.
Erasmus stood up and began to walk quickly towards the exit and the lift that would take him to the top of the building.
‘You need to get up here now. I can’t see him!’ The voice in his earpiece sounded desperate now.
From behind him he heard a scream. Erasmus turned round and saw that Cocaineman hadn’t taken his advice and was back on his feet. Worse, he had pulled out a knife. Erasmus sighed.
People had instinctively moved away from Cocaineman, but not so far that they wouldn’t see the action. The crowd surrounding him were filled with a nervous but visceral bloodthirsty excitement.
The blade was six inches long and, reflecting the light from the strobes, it looked like a whirring, diamond power tool. Cocaineman was grinning, no doubt enjoying the reversal of power that his hyper firing synapses were telling him had just occurred. He was wrong.
There was another scream. Erasmus noticed a tall, pretty, heavily made-up girl run long pearlescent white finger nails over the bare skin of her arm and her red lips part in expectation. Wherever there is a fight there’s always a crowd waiting to watch the blood, thought Erasmus. He looked up and saw the bouncers were on the move heading for the metal stairs down to the dance floor. In a way it was a relief, there was no need for subtlety any more.
Cocaineman swung the knife at him in a lazy arc. Erasmus moved back an inch on his heels and the knife’s path missed him.
‘What did I tell you?’
Cocaineman ignored him and pulled back his arm ready to strike again. He never got the chance.
Erasmus transferred his weight onto his toes and then in one fluid movement pushed forward over his right knee, his right palm slamming hard into Cocaineman’s nose. He held back slightly as he didn’t want the bone fragments and destroyed cartilage that he could feel crunching beneath his palm to travel upwards into the chemical mess of Cocaineman’s brain: Erasmus figured he had enough trouble in there to be going on with.
Cocaineman didn’t even have time to scream before his eyes rolled up into his sockets and he collapsed unconscious to his knees, and then slumped onto the floor.
The girl with the pearlescent nails let out a small satisfied sigh.
Erasmus winked at her and then jumped over the man’s prone body and headed for the emergency exit. He risked a look back. The two bouncers had reached Cocaineman and were slapping him around the face to revive him. Nice doorman medical technique, thought Erasmus.
He hit the metal bar and the exit door burst open leading to a service corridor. Erasmus walked briskly to the end of the corridor and opened the door at the end. It led into the lobby of the club. There were velvet drapes hanging from the double height ceiling and a statue of a large golden cow squatted in the middle of the lobby, totally dominating the space. This was the icon of the Blood House, a refurbished dance and drugs palace that operated in the building where once Liverpool’s oldest slaughterhouse had stood.
Erasmus ran across to one of the drapes and pulled it aside, revealing a lift. He hit the call button. Above him he heard the sound of pulleys and machinery begin to whirr.
‘Can you see him, Dave?’ said Erasmus into his microphone. There was no reply, only the low sizzle of static.
Behind him he could hear leather soles on tiles. The bouncers were right behind him, running down the corridor.
The sound of the lift grew closer.
The head doorman was Jeff Dooley. He was forty-five, a former bare-knuckle fighter and too canny to lead. He left that to Craig, his assistant, who at twenty years his junior should damn well have the breath to run ahead, even though his steroid fed body hadn’t actually been developed for speed during the thousands of hours of gym work that he subjected it to. But it wasn’t just that. Jeff had seen the man take down Barry Gilligan, Cocaineman as Erasmus thought of him. Barry wasn’t professional but he wasn’t a pushover and the stranger had blown through him like a tornado through Texas. Best to leave the point work to Craig, thought Jeff, fingering the plastic grip of the weapon on his belt and flicking open the clip on the leather holster.
Craig burst through the door and Jeff slowly followed.
In the lobby of the club the front door banged on its hinges as the hard, cold wind whipped in off the Mersey, got funnelled up through the concrete canyon of Water Street and slammed into the front door. The door crashed against the frame again, this time so loud that Jeff thought it would shatter.
Craig pulled the door shut.
‘He’s gone,’ he said.
There was a loud ding as the lift arrived on the ground floor and the doors opened. Jeff pulled back a velvet drape revealing an empty lift. He shook his head.
‘I don’t think so,’ Jeff said looking up. ‘He’s taken the stairs. He’s headed for the roof, come on.’
Jeff stepped into the lift and Craig followed.
Erasmus was more out of shape then he had realised. As he crashed through the fire door and out onto the roof of the Blood House, the icy air from the Mersey stole away what little remained