Dispossession by Chaz Brenchley

features, the smell of cigars on his clothes and the smell of
power all about him. Not much of his weight was fat, I thought. In a rumble, no
way would this man stand back and let his minders sort it out.
    I just shrugged, in answer to his question. Insofar as I had
a strategy for this, I meant to say as little as possible. The less I told them,
I thought, the more I’d learn.
    Maybe.
    “Totalled that nice motor I bought you, yes?”
    Score one to me. I’d guessed this already, that he’d paid
for that impossible, that ridiculous car; but now I knew.
    “Seems so,” I said. “Sorry.”
    He grunted and moved over to the table by the window, where
all the bouquets stood in their ranks of vases. “One of these from me, is it?”
    “The big one,” I said, winning another grunt from him, this
one approving. He fingered the flowers proprietorially, and I thought yes, that
was absolutely right behaviour for this man, in this situation. He’d paid for
the car, he’d paid for the flowers, they were his.
    He was paying for me, I remembered bleakly; and why the hell
had I ever let that happen? I didn’t want to be in thrall to this man...
    The lackey had come to the far side of my bed, where he
could stand in the corner, out of everyone’s way; the minder had taken a
position classically by the door, wearing his suit about as easily as
professional footballers wear theirs, I thought, looking totally misdressed.
Briefly, I wondered if he had a gun concealed under the jacket. Then my eyes
met his and I saw him grin, I saw him wink at me.
    Christ. Neither did I want to be on winking terms with one
of Deverill’s bully-boys. A client of mine, a hard and dangerous man in his own
right, had once crossed Deverill on a deal; smuggling drugs, I’d heard, when he
wasn’t supposed to. The following night a tip-off had brought the police to a
bonded warehouse, where they found the alarm disabled, a sealed door jemmied
open and my client unconscious, trapped beneath the tines of a fork-lift truck
with cases of brandy tumbled all about him. No fingerprints anywhere other than
his own, though the set-up was deliberately ridiculous, not intended to be taken
seriously. He had multiple internal injuries, besides what harm the fork-lift
had done to his ribs; and he wouldn’t say a word, to the police or to me. No
one doubted Deverill’s involvement. Chances were he’d been there himself, his
own boot doing a share of the damage, he was known not to delegate what seemed
to him important; but he wouldn’t have been alone, and he didn’t keep a private
army, only a small team of loyal hard men. Not unlikely then that this cheerful
winker, this seeming buddy of mine had been there also.
    “Vern.” That was him now, showing me another aspect of his
work: glancing quickly away from me and interrupting his boss’s private train
of thought, unfolding his arms to make a little sideways gesture with his hand.
    Deverill had a wide vocabulary of grunts. This one
presumably was an acknowledgement, good, you’re
doing your job, lad, because he stepped immediately away from the
window, coming all the way around to the near side of my bed. Paranoia or just
common sense, not to make a target of himself? I couldn’t say, I didn’t know
how much actual danger he lived in. There were many people, surely, who’d be
glad to see him dead; but most of them wouldn’t be out there tracking him with
a twelve-bore, nor hiring professional assassins. I assumed. On the other hand,
it would only take one...
    Yes. Knowing what I knew of Vernon Deverill—and that was
only the common knowledge, little enough compared to what there must be to
know, a thin stream flowing from a lake—I thought perhaps that if I were he, I
wouldn’t stand framed in too many lighted windows either.
    “Well now,” he said, turning suddenly to me and striking his
hands together, “I don’t suppose you’ll have anything new to tell me, will you,
Jonty?”
    And though he tried