The Crooked Bullet E-Book

Rotimi Ogunjobi

• Herausgeber: xceedia publishing
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 212

Beschreibung

Someone has stolen The Crooked Bullet; Raj Desai's treasured family heirloom and lucky charm. His daughter has also been kidnapped. To the rescue comes Frank Wire private detective and disc jockey by night, fresh from trailing the runaway wife of a dipsomaniac landscaper. But for Frank Wire, his dream appearance in the premiere concert of new pop music sensation Ex-Man , is soon jeopardized by the need to also find and rescue his kidnapped girlfriend, from the faceless, ruthless and ubiquitous organization known as The Barefoot Revolution. The search takes Frank through East London, where he is hunted by assassins, assaulted by hooligans and robbed of prized possessions. As the reluctant mule delivering the kidnap ransom for Raj Desai's daughter, Frank is eventually confronted by an old enemy - the reclusive Rabbi Zulu , a rebel with a diabolic mission; as well as the sordid secret behind The Crooked Bullet.

Leseprobe

THE CROOKED BULLET

A Frank Wire Mystery

By

PROLOGUE

Upton Park, London.

Raj Desai sat alone in the back office of his jewelry shop. It was Saturday night, and the staff and security had left; but like every other night, Raj locked up by himself – he was a very careful man. On a wall of the cramped office were three portraits. One was of his deceased wife Sangita , an owl-faced woman whose persistent stare seemed always to accuse. The second was of their daughter and only child Rupinder now twenty five , now a doctor , and soon be married to a young accountant by the name of Kalyan Gupta. The third portrait had been taken about twenty two years earlier. It was of the entire family together: him, Sangita and Rupinder. In this one, Rupinder was no more than a baby – the picture had been taken two years after they came to England and about eleven years before Sangita passed on.

Why had he not married again, even though it had been more than ten years since? Quite often Raj would ask himself this question, even though he already knew the answer. Fifteen years of that had done him in; killed all the passion he had in him. He had decided to raise a teenage daughter all by himself; and so closely bonded had they become that Raj considered the option of giving his daughter a new mother, would have been like a betrayal. When he finally married Rupinder away to Kalyan, his conscience would be pacified. Not that he liked Kalyan a lot. The young man had once been described to him by a certain obnoxiously drunk fellow at The Bitter End (whoever it was that gave names to these pubs? Some drunk definitely) up in Romford as a ‘geek’ , which Raj imagined to mean a weak-willed person in the strange and constantly metamorphosing language of this country. Not that that bothered Raj at all. Indeed he imagined that every father would secretly wish to marry their daughter off to a kind-natured man; rather than to a self-conceited macho ape.

Geek. Hadn't he been such when he himself had married Sangita ? And it certainly had helped very much when they came to England and when they had bought the jewelry shop. Sangita was a hard woman to live with, but that had soon been forgotten because in this their new business, Sangita's true talent had bloomed to overshadow her faults. She did have an amazing eye for fineries and a very sharp shrewdness. And thus, Raj who had become no more than an assistant in the business had by patience allowed these attributes rub off him and to a beneficial result. Sadly Sangita died, but Raj had learned enough from her to make a continuing success of their shop, Bhatti's Jewelry.

In a couple of months more, Rupinder would be married to Kalyan , whom he will persuade to take over the running of the shop , while he took that world trip he had always dreamed of , and perhaps go off to spend a year or two back home in Mumbai. The thought thoroughly warmed his heart.

Raj opened the top drawer of a deck built into the steel desk and brought out a black box - about the size of a medium-size pizza delivery box. The box was expensively decorated with black velvet and gold trimmings. Inside, it was lined with purple satin on top of which was a gold pendant attached to a gold chain. The pendant had the shape of a bullet, though not quite. It was shaped like a bent bullet but if the tip had not been so blunt, it could have equally passed for a golden banana. Not that a bent golden bullet made any more sense than a golden banana of course , but that wasn't the point . The pendant was supposed to signify peace: because it is nigh impossible to be killed by a bent bullet.

By itself this piece of jewelry wasn't worth much; he'd be lucky to get twenty quid for it. The Crooked Bullet, as it was called, had been in any case faithfully passed down for five generations as a lucky charm. The pendant had to be handed over to the first son to get married in the family as it had been for more than a hundred years. Raj detested this pendant. He actually remained sure that it was an evil charm that had brought him nothing more than ill-luck. But not to worry he thought; in a short while it would be gone. The problem that threatened was that Raj had no son to pass the family heirloom down to. But he would therefore give it to the husband of his only daughter - and he, Raj, will be free; free as a bird. He closed the box, quite lovingly tucked it away again in the drawer and locked it with a key. The pendant must not be lost, a legend had warned, else the result will be a life plagued with untold hardship for many generations following. And Raj didn't want any more hardship in his life.

For the last time this night, he looked at Sangita's portrait and grimaced back. Raj couldn't bear to remove this portrait from the wall either; because Rupinder would disapprove; so would Sangita, wherever she was. But soon he would be free of the shop, free from those watching eyes.

‘Very soon my dear, you will go to someone who will love you as his own mother ‘, he said to the portrait.

Raj tested the safe to ensure that it was locked. Must be nearly a hundred thousand in cash inside there; which was the average daily cash takings. Most jewelry buyers preferred to buy in cash – possibly to prevent the expenditure from being traced. If Sangita was alive, she would have insisted that he counted the cash that very night and put it in the night deposit at the Barclays Bank down the road on Plashet Grove. But nobody was coming to steal a safe, as he had always tried to make Sangita understand without any luck. Such things didn't happen anymore, and least of all not in twenty first century England. Raj armed the shop security system, locked his office and exited the large shop through the side door, which he also locked and tested as he did every night.

Bhatti's Jewelries was on Green Street and about a hundred yards away from the tube station. All around, the street this night, teemed with African and Asian immigrants, many of whom perpetually looked defeated and diseased. Not a lot different from what he and his wife must have looked like when they had come to live here more than two decades ago, he knew. The only appreciable commercial traffic at this time was from the Tesco supermarket which would in a few minutes more be also closed. It wasn't football day, else the pubs around would have been rowdy with drunken revelers from the stadium down the road where Westham FC played their home matches. Here on these streets , spotted with phlegm and perpetually smelling of disinfectant, he and Sangita had nevertheless found good fortune when they had bought the shop from old man Shami ‘Bhatti’ Bhatnagar; widowed , quite fed up with his bad arthritis and going back home to New Delhi . Fortune had certainly smiled on him since then and after Sangita passed on, Raj had been able to move away to live in the more up-market Romford, away from the gloomy houses all around.

There was still a bit of a chill outside; summer was still several weeks away. Raj pushed his wool cap tighter on his head, and wrapped his coat tighter around him. He thought of what to do next. When you are nearly sixty, life seems to become so much humdrum, and the choices available for nearly everything become so few. Should he have Dum Biriyani at the Hyderabad Darbar Restaurant down the road, or should he go nearer home at Romford to have Gosht at Aroma on High Street? And thereafter should he go to have a pint at The Bitter End or just go straight home to watch an Indian movie at home on Sky? Dum Biriyani at Hyderabad Darbar won this night for the dinner nevertheless.

Chigwell, Essex.

One night later, a grim conference took place at a health spa known as Woodstock. The place, located near Chigwell had previously been a farm. Now it was a celebrity hideout – where the annual membership was rumored to cost nearly as much as a brand new Rolls Royce. The rules inside Woodstock were for those to whom money meant very little – primary of those rules being that shoes were not permitted to be worn within the grounds of the estate.

The office in which the night conference took place looked quite like it had been time-warped from the sixties. Moses Samuel, or Rabbi Zulu as the proprietor of Woodstock was more fondly called, was having a discussion with four men of Eastern Europe stock. Also in his office were three other people, one of them his closest aide Sasha Cohen, a slightly plump lady who habitually wore dark John Lennon glasses.

The huge room was completely decorated with vintage furniture and fittings; including a large Beatles grandfather clock and an RCA radiogram. On one of the walls were two huge posters each of them about eight feet tall. One was of the singer Isaac Hayes playing at the Sahara Tahoe in the '70s – with dark aviator sunglasses, a heavy chain around his neck , naked to the waist and looking so sweaty sexy. It was an image Moses Samuel always faithfully tried to imitate to the limit that his own white skin would permit. The other poster was of a barefooted Masai warrior in full battle leap. This was the one around which he had built the new philosophies behind his life and business.

Only one of the four men in attendance spoke English; but they all nevertheless understood the instructions that were being passed to them.

‘The bank is in Hackney .It was in there that a person I knew, hard working man, lost his home to them way back and killed himself as a consequence, do you understand?’

The men nodded.

‘Yah, yah'; they understood. They also still understood the intolerable iniquities of uncontrolled capitalist economics.

Moses Samuel pointed to a television camera on the table before them.

‘See this thing? Real techie stuff. I had it specially made for me in China. It is not only a camera; it will also scramble all CCTV signals and disable all other security equipment; and so nobody will be able to understand what happened. After the job, you will drive away to Dover from where you will across the channel and then get a plane to Brazil. By the time you return home in a couple of months you will have no worries. Plus you will be rich’

Sasha gave the leader of the men a large envelope which contained plane tickets, some fake travel documents. They nodded quietly, and left with the television camera.

Moses Samuel switched on the huge gleaming imitation vintage RCA radiogram standing in a corner of the room, and eagerly twiddled the tuning dial till he found the channel he was looking for. It was a rogue radio channel. A hip-hop remix of an Earth Wind and Fire ballad seeped out of the large speakers of the retro-modern music center.

You will find peace of mind

If you look way down in your heart and soul

Don’t hesitate ‘cause the world seems cold

Stay young at heart ‘cause you’re never (never, never, ..) old at heart

‘He's good, isn’t he?’ Moses Samuel nodded his head, and at the same time seeking the ladies’ approval.

‘Yes, he’s cool’, Sasha said. The other girl in the room was not so committal; neither was the small bespectacled young man who looked like a newspaper guy. They didn’t understand this type of music.

‘I'd surely enjoy working with this guy. We do have a lot in common’, Moses Samuel said.

‘Half of London is dying to know who he is. Keeps extremely modest for a musician, I think. I admire that’, said Sasha.

‘Ex-Man’, Moses Samuel gushed. ‘Ex-Man; the most mysterious and perhaps the most talented musician in England .I love the name - Super hero; superstar’

‘I’ve got to go to bed now Rabbi’, Sasha said with a reverent bow. Moses Samuel pleasantly waved both ladies goodbye.

‘This job you asked those men to do at the bank, do you think it has a hope of success?’ the young man asked.

‘Why not?’ Moses Samuel seemed surprised that anyone could think this way.

‘Oh well; robbing a bank with a camera. It seems such a ridiculous notion as I see it ‘, the man truthfully opined.

‘Exactly’, Moses Samuel agreed with him. ‘And it is because it looks so ridiculous that is why it will succeed. Difficult to rob a bank with a machine gun; a hundred times easier to rob a bank with a camera’.

Together they had a good laugh over their ridiculous plan. The young man shut his laptop computer and lugged it out of the room, with a reverent bow at the door.

Alone in the office at last, Moses Samuel sat behind his huge ornate oak desk nodding and humming to the music. Ex-Man's weekly hour-long broadcast had become a phenomenon - regularly bringing the boredom index in London crashing down every Sunday night. The pirate radio came on around eleven till midnight and then completely disappeared from the air till the next week. Within a short time it had become one hour that discerning Londoner came to look forward to.

Much of Ex-Man's music was not new. Much of it was really a remix of old tunes, but done in ways that nobody had ever thought possible. Now, Moses Samuel thought, here was one musician worth putting money on to go places. Ex-man's first single - ‘Dynomite’, had just about a month ago, hit the chart and quickly climbed up as fast as a monkey with its tail on fire. But still nobody knew whom Ex-Man was and so deliciously, neither was he going about advertising his identity.

Dynomite had been quietly released by Def Adam - a new and unknown private label - no parties, no press. Def Adam as he found out was owned by an Isle of Man company of the same name but with nominee directors, and the distribution of the four record of the label so far was being done by Michael Jah, a Jamaican agent from a shop hemmed in between two vegetable shops right inside Brixton Market. There the trail had gone dead.

‘I just sell records man, I don't sell comics. Yeah man’, the seemingly perplexed records broker had reasoned with him.

Moses Samuel had subsequently been even more intrigued by and full of respect for this unknown artist. Certainly not like any of the no-talent wannabes parading selves as musicians on the strength of being able to ingest a lot of mind-bending chemicals and scream at the top of their voices as a consequence; the papers were always plastered with their stupid faces.

Who was Ex-man? Ironically, that mystery really had contributed in a major way to the success of the new record. Moses Samuel loved that bit of irony. As a matter of fact it was the same sort of device which had moved his life and business forward.

He walked over to another table on which sat the one foot high scale model of what was a shopping mall, though any one else could have called it an art gallery .It was two story high , looked about a hundred yards wide and was painted up like Andy Warhol had been at work on it. Who is Moses Samuel? Yes they did have a lot in common, him and Ex-Man; they were both definitely destined to go places. Probably together.

.

CHAPTER 1

Dynoooomite!!

The wide-mouthed black youth, looked like J.J. Walker from the old time TV series Good Times. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and doing a mime to Ex-Man’s remix of Tony Camillo’s Dynomite on MTV when Frank O’Dwyer woke up in the morning. Frank's clock showed that the time was ten o’clock, and if you had a boss who didn't like you very much and you woke up at ten o’ clock on Monday morning you knew dead cert that your ass was already grass.

Frank had fallen asleep on the couch, as he realized. An open can of Guinness was spilled on the carpet. He had no recollection of when he had popped the can or switched on the TV; he also couldn’t tell for certain how he had got home last night. It had been really a hell of a gig and a demon or two were still trapped in his head, hacking away with sharp axes and picks. Frank picked up his mobile phone and called his office at East End Mirror.

‘Ellen, I am going to be a bit late this morning, I am not feeling so well’, he told Ellen Wescott, the secretary.

‘Frank, you had a meeting scheduled for nine thirty with Spencer and he’s hopping mad. Better come in as soon as you can, but I think you’re dead meat already’, Ellen told him.

Frank’s heart sank. It was the day of the monthly departmental meeting with his boss Spencer Cowley akaThe Beast; who also owned the East End Mirror newspaper. As the journalist who handled the crime beat Frank’s absence wouldn’t go unnoticed, at least not by Spencer who seemed quite lately to have a special place in his heart for him - a place where poisons were kept.

David Fernandez would be there of course. David was the bespectacled young Indian rookie journalist who presently covered the trivia departments and the cocktail circuit. David was okay really - quite friendly and efficient. He was also very unnaturally gifted with computers, and so prodigiously prolific that Frank suspected the little guy had programmed his computer to crank out fake stories.

David did remind him of a long time foe Phil Jenner , who used to work with The Independent but had somehow just disappeared ; like fallen off the face of the earth. Phil Jenner had been quite a terror to Frank's life because Spencer Cowley always compared Frank's puny effort to the prodigious Phil Jenner .And so prolific had Phil Jenner been that it appeared he manufactured his own stories – like when he wanted to report a murder, he just went off and killed somebody. But somehow he disappeared and life had since then become more bearable for Frank – until David Fernandez showed up. Later though, Frank had learned to his shame that David Fernandez just made more creative use of Google and Yahoo! Frank had afterwards learned to live amicably with David since their tasks rarely encroached.

Somewhere along the line though, Spencer had determined that newspapers thrived more on gossip and trivia than on real news and thus had David become to be much more seriously reckoned with at the East End Mirror. And as David grew in importance so had Frank begun to feel his own relevance diminished. In his nightmares the little Indian guy now played a significantly menacing role and as a matter of fact, Frank suspected that David was being prepared to take over from him in the event of his demise, which now seemed quite near.

Never one to distress nevertheless, Frank took off his seven-inch wide bling which said MC Wire, had a quick shower, coffee, a burnt buttered toast, and eventually set out for work. Trevor ‘The Mad Scientist’ Cook, his tandem deejay act, did bring him home last night, he knew. Trevor had just bought a new BMW, and they’d together taken it for a spin to Brighton for a gig along with two mad West Indian chicks and two cases of wine. Pity he couldn’t now remember the girls’ names.

The sun seemed unusually bright and hot this morning; shining with such intense malice. The entire world seemed to jog along sluggishly around him like gargantuan mobile Dali sculptures. Frank’s flat was mere minutes from Hackney Central, which was not too crowded at this time. From there he caught a bus to the office of the East End Mirror, located in Shoreditch, ten minutes away. Frank had barely sat down at his desk when Spencer Cowley breezed by.

‘You know, this paper is going to go under the way you lot carry on and then you’re going to starve and you’re all going to die’, he loudly soliloquized. Spencer Cowley was in a really foul mood.

‘Could you come with me for a little chat Frank’, he said, without a pause in his steps and without looking in his direction. Frank noted that nobody was looking in his direction either. The greetings this morning had been quite lukewarm all around - something heavy definitely seemed expected.

Frank found Spencer in the small conference room at the end of the corridor which ran the entire length of the office. Everyone remembered the room as the place where major negotiations were made: such as hiring, promotion, ass-kicking and firing. Spencer was smoking a cigar when Frank came in, and Frank felt an irresponsible urge to tell him that it was against the law to smoke in the office. An irresponsible urge because here at the East End Mirror, Spencer Cowley, owner, Chief Executive and Chief Editor was the law.

‘Frank, do you honestly think this newspaper is a joke?’ Spencer asked, puffing violently on his cigar like a mad marijuana fiend. Frank thought this a trick question and safely kept quiet. Besides, his head hurt like hell.

‘Let me put it another way, Frank, do you honestly enjoy working here?’

Against common sense, Frank this time around had an irresponsible impression that Spencer genuinely had his best interest at heart; like your anxious mother hassling you for spending the whole night out at a party. Frank looked away into the clear glass table and doodled nervously on the top with a finger.

‘No I don’t enjoy working here, Spencer’, he truthfully replied; and this did somehow make him feel good.

‘So why don’t you be man enough about it then and quit?’ Spencer said to him; and this made Frank feel bad.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t mean to say that’ Frank apologized. Too late though; he found Spencer looking into his eyes with contrived pity, slowly and very sadly shaking his head.

‘I’m sorry I’ve got to let you go Frank’, Spencer said to him; and this made Frank feel a lot worse. He tried to feel man enough about it nevertheless.

‘Don’t I get any kind of notice?’

‘Your contract entitles you to one month notice Frank, but never mind. I have signed you a check for the next month and you can leave today’, Spencer told him, offering a sweaty handshake. ‘If you need references I will be pleased to give you some .I’ve already given Ellen a check for you and you may collect it immediately. Good luck Frank’.

And so had ended the meeting. Frank returned to his desk and silently began to empty the drawers. The entire office seemed unusually quiet and busy around him . He felt angry with them all , with Spencer Cowley and most of all with himself for handing Spencer the perfect excuse to throw him out, right on a golden platter. It hadn’t been a great job, but it paid the bills. Ellen came around a few minutes later with his check.

‘He’s in a hellish mood today, innit?’ She commiserated.

‘Yeah, well it’s got to happen one day; and I guess the sooner the better’, Frank puts up his brave front.

‘I’m happy you can think like that. It’s all really no more than just a job, see? Just hang on to that truth and you won’t feel so bad anymore’ Ellen advised.

‘Thanks Ellen’, Frank said to her and signed the voucher for his check.

‘Good luck Frank, we’re going to miss you’ Ellen shook his hand. David Fernandez also came by a few minutes later, and so did all the others. Frank emptied much of the contents of his desk into the bin. They were mostly half-written stories which were long dead. This completed, he left the office of East End Mirror, giving one last tired salute at the door, his few prized possessions in a little box under his arm. Spencer Cowley standing menacingly in the middle of the news office returned the salute.