Southpaw Read online

  SOUTHPAW

  A ROBERT HOON THRILLER

  JD KIRK

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Also by JD Kirk

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  SOUTHPAW

  Published worldwide by Zertex Crime, an imprint of Zertex Media Ltd.

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  Copyright © 2021 by JD Kirk

  The right of JD Kirk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

  www.jdkirk.com

  www.zertexmedia.com

  Edited by Hanna Elizabeth.

  Cover Design by Andrew Dobell.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It had been a good night up until that point. Drinks had been consumed, laughs had been shared, and sexual advances had been laughed off, while at the same time tacitly encouraged.

  Not seriously, though. Not properly. It was flirting, that was all. Neither woman had any intention of so much as snogging either of these lads, much less anything else.

  They were fit, mind you. Dark hair, dark eyes, complexions so smooth that their skin might well have been burnished with ultra-fine-grit sandpaper. And well-built, too. Tall, long limbs, but not gangly. They were in good proportion.

  “In proportion in all the right places,” the men had said, which had earned more laughter and an excited whoop-whoop.

  And they’d been fun, the guys. They had the gift of the gab, the two of them. Always smiling, always cracking jokes, always saying the right thing while pressing another drink into a hand that had just moments ago been waving a ‘no thanks.’

  By the time last orders came, both women were struggling a bit to get to their feet, but strong arms had supported them, holding them up, guiding them to the door.

  They’d wanted to detour via the bathrooms—take a minute or two to get themselves together, to discuss their game plan on how they were going to ditch these two charmers and get a taxi home. They both had work in the morning. Two different classrooms at two different schools, each crammed to bursting with overly-excited five and six-year-olds.

  They had to get home, knock back a couple of preventative paracetamol, go to bed, and hope that the morning didn’t come too quickly. That was why the trip to the bathroom was necessary. From there, they could plot their escape. Call an Uber. Make a break for it.

  “It’s fine, our place is just around the corner,” a smooth voice had whispered.

  “Toilets are closed now, anyway. Just hold it for a minute,” another had soothed.

  The cold air had hit them like a one-two punch, sharpening their senses with one strike, while making their heads spin with the other.

  How much had they drunk? There had been wine to start with—there was always wine to start with—but they recalled pints, and shots, and big gulps of things that burned all the way down.

  Things that had seemed like a laugh at the time but that now, with firm hands on their arms and on their arses, tasted sickly and sour.

  “We should get a taxi,” one of the women said, her eyes darting to the blurred shape that was her friend. “We’d better get home.”

  The response had surprised her.

  “Yeah, course. No problem.”

  The man at her arm smiled. Even through her drunken haze, it really was a very nice smile.

  The hand on her back withdrew and became an offered arm for her to hang onto.

  “Let us walk you to the rank, though, yeah? Least we can do.”

  The women relaxed. Agreed. That was the least they could do, actually, after getting them this drunk.

  And besides, you never knew who was roaming around these back streets of London at this time of night. Having a couple of big lads on escort duty was safer than walking themselves.

  The streets around the pub seemed to have been set out with the express goal of causing confusion. Neither woman had been to that bar before, but the club had been too loud, and the dance floor too crowded, and the men had mentioned they knew a place nearby where they could talk. Have a laugh. Get to know each other better.

  The pub had been quieter. Much quieter. Dead, in fact. But they’d got a round in, fed the jukebox, and made the most of it. And it had been fun. For a while.

  But the fun was over now.

  There was a van. Old. Battered. The paintwork scarred by scratches and scrapes, the wheel arches pitted with dots of brown rust. It didn’t move, and yet it seemed to come at them out of nowhere, its back doors appearing in the mouth of an alleyway as they staggered past.

  No, not past, the women realised. Not exactly.

  Towards.

  “What are we doing?” one of them asked, as she was led closer to the vehicle. She turned to look in the direction they’d been headed—the direction where she assumed the taxi rank lay—then turned back and met the warm, soft lips of the man whose arm she was holding.

  He smelled nice. Better than the street around them, certainly. She sunk into the kiss for a moment, then a yelp and a metallic thud made her pull away.

  Her friend was pinned, her back jammed up against the van. She was trying to wedge her handbag between herself and the much larger man pressing himself against her, but it wasn’t proving much of a deterrent.

  “Get off,” she was saying, the words slurring as they tumbled from her mouth. “I want… I don’t… Just, get off.”

  “Hey! Leave her alone!” the woman protested, then she gasped as the hand on her arm tightened. Locked.

  The smiles on the men’s faces were still there, but they were different now. No longer cheerful or friendly, but something else. Something cruel. Something wrong.

  Keys were pulled from a pocket. The lock of the vehicle’s rear doors clunked at the press of a button.

  “Just get in,” one of the men instructed. “Come on, relax. We’re having fun, aren’t we? Then just come on and get in.”

  “No, don’t. Don’t. I don’t want to, I just want to—”

  The back of a hand cracked across her jaw. Fingers tangled in her hair, grabbing, pulling, sending shocks of pain through her scalp.

  They tried to scream then, the women. Tried to call out for help, but hands clamped over mouths and tightened around throats, and they were suddenly off-balance, feet tripping them, the whole world twirling in big birling loops as the van door was wrenched open and they were shoved towards the darkness that waited inside.

  And then…

&nbsp
; The light from the alley reflected off a pair of eyes set back deep in the shadows. There were gasps and grunts of surprise, not from the women, but from the men shoving them.

  “What the hell?” hissed one.

  “Who the fuck are you?” demanded the other.

  There was a creak as the man in the back of the van rose to his feet, rocking the vehicle on its rear axle.

  “Me? I’m nobody. Just consider me a concerned citizen. Don’t you fucking worry about me.” The accent was Scottish, the voice as rough as a badger’s arse. “It’s you two limp-dicked arse tumours you should be worrying about.”

  A foot swung suddenly from the shadows. The toe of a well-worn boot connected with the tip of a chin. A head snapped back. A gargled cry of pain was followed by the hollow thunk of a skull hitting pavement.

  “Taxi rank’s that way, ladies,” the guy in the back of the van helpfully informed them.

  Except, he was no longer in the back of the van. He was standing between them now. The other man was bent double, his eyes wide, his hands grabbing at his crotch as he sunk to the ground with a gargle and a whimper.

  “I suggest you go fuck off home now,” the Scotsman said.

  He was smiling, and his smile was somehow even more disturbing than those of their assailants had been.

  He cracked his knuckles, cricked his neck, then he bent and caught one of the fallen men by the foot, like he was going to drag him away and eat him for dinner.

  “Me and these two gropey wee cocksmears are going to have ourselves a cosy wee chat.”

  Bob Hoon enjoyed these little moments. It was the theatre of them that appealed to him. The building of tension in that calm before the storm.

  He appreciated the looks on their faces as they came around to find themselves gagged and bound. He enjoyed the muffled howls of panic before they realised that no amount of struggling was going to help them. The way their red-ringed eyes followed his hand as it reached into his tool bag and came out with something blunt and heavy, or pointy and sharp, depending on how the mood happened to take him at the time.

  Sometimes, he liked to come up with other ways to scare the shit out of them, as much for his own amusement as anything else. Spontaneous, out of character singing was a preferred choice of late. It really put them on the back foot.

  On one recent occasion, he’d sung the entirety of Hey Diddle Diddle into the face of a would-be rapist, then had left him hogtied in his own filth for a few hours trying to figure out what the fuck all that had been about.

  By the time Hoon came back, the bastard’s imagination had gone into overdrive, and he would’ve given up his own mother if Hoon had asked him to.

  It was a pity that he hadn’t known anything. Nothing Hoon needed, anyway. Nothing that could help him.

  He had high hopes for these two, though. They didn’t strike him as the usual seedy lads out for a good time types he’d been rounding up of late. These two seemed organised. They hadn’t just seen an opportunity and gone for it, they’d planned things in advance, right down to the positioning of the van.

  You could easily believe that they’d done this sort of thing before. Hell, you might even call them professionals.

  A professional was exactly what he had been hunting for these past few months, so to end up with two at the same time…?

  “Must be my lucky fucking night. Eh, lads?” Hoon announced.

  There was very little echo in the back of the van. The walls and rear doors had been lined with thick foam padding, most of it ridged like the inside of an egg box to help muffle the sounds within.

  Professionals. No doubt about it.

  “No’ so much yours, though, I should probably warn you both now that it isn’t your lucky night at all,” he continued.

  He hummed below his breath as he reached into his tool bag again, and this time he pulled out a pair of child’s safety scissors. Frowning, he gave them an experimental snip.

  “Fuck knows where these came from,” he said. He smiled at the men. “Funny the things you pick up, eh? They’re blunt as a dolphin’s bellend, so no idea what I’m going to use them for.” Hoon placed the scissors down on the thick, dirty rug that covered the van’s floor. “Still, I’m sure between us we’ll come up with something.”

  He was kneeling, and sat back so that his arse was resting on his heels. The two men lay on their sides, tied together, locked face to face in an embrace, their hands bound behind each other’s backs. Hoon had gone to the trouble of stripping them both naked. He found that this generally helped focus everyone’s attention.

  “You didn’t have ID on you, so we’re going to need to come up with names for you,” he said, considering them both. He ran his tongue across the front of his teeth, his eyes narrowing until, finally, he pointed at each man in turn. “Humpty Dumpty and Laser Tits. That’s who you’ll be.” Hoon sucked in his bottom lip, then gave a nod, satisfied. “Aye. Those suit you down to the fucking ground.”

  He returned his attention to the bag, took out a yellow snooker ball, and then produced a sock into which the ball was carefully inserted.

  “Actually, speaking of which, I mind a few years back, there was a bit of controversy over the whole Humpty Dumpty thing,” he said, giving the sock an experimental swish as he tested the weight. “Some BBC kids’ show changed it. Made it so that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men did actually manage to put him back together again. Gave it a nice happy ending for the weans watching at home.”

  He gave a shrug, indicating his indifference to the whole thing.

  “And you think, aye, fair enough. Go on yourself. There’s enough fucking doom and gloom doing the rounds, might as well mix it up a bit. Except, some arsehole of an MP—can’t mind who—he lost his shit. Said we were mollycoddling three-year-olds. That they needed to learn to live in the real world.” Hoon looked across to his hostages and raised both eyebrows. “The fucking real world! I mean, for one thing, it’s a story about a gang of horses trying to rebuild a sentient egg. I don’t think anyone’s mistaking it for a fucking documentary, I don’t care what age they are.”

  Hoon set down the sock, pulled out a small leather pouch, and unzipped it to reveal a selection of dentistry tools.

  “And secondly—and I remember thinking this at the time—how few fucking concerns must you have in your life that you’ve got time to worry about shite like that? What kind of Tweedledee fantasy dreamscape must you inhabit where you can waste even one fraction of a second fretting about the fate of Humpty fucking Dumpty? I don’t know about you two, but I want to think my MP has got better things to do with their time than shite the bed about nursery rhymes. Know what I mean? I want the bastards to have real problems to concern themselves with. Urgent problems. Pressing problems.”

  Hoon breathed on the dental mirror and wiped it on the front of his combat trousers. He nodded his approval, then glanced back at his captives.

  “You know, like you two have?”

  One of the men—Laser Tits—tried to eject some protest through his gag, but Hoon raised a finger and sharpened his features until silence returned.

  “Don’t you worry, lads, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to talk. I’ll make fucking sure of that. That’s the whole reason we’re here, after all. You’ll get your chance,” he promised. “Just not now. Not yet. It’s just more fun if we do it the hard way. More fun for me, anyway.”

  He fished in the bag again and this time took out a square of folded cardboard. Opening it, he slipped a photograph out and turned it to his captives without looking at it himself.

  “This is who you’re going to talk about,” he told them. “This young woman here. Take a look. Take your time. You’re going to tell me where she is. You’re going to tell me who took her, and where I can find them. And then, assuming there’s enough of you left by that point, I’m going to—”

  There was a knock on the back doors of the van. A side-of-the-fist thumping that could be felt as much as heard.

/>   Down on the floor, both captives raised their heads, eyes bulging, like they might be able to stare straight through the metal, or summon whoever was outside using willpower alone.

  Hoon placed a finger to his lips and slowly, quietly, reached for the sharpest implement he could find.

  There was a rattling of a handle being tried, then another round of knocking. The foam padding made it difficult to hear much of what was happening out there, but Hoon got the impression of murmured voices. Of footsteps scuffing up the side of the vehicle towards the front.

  Humpty Dumpty grunted. Squirmed. The business end of a scalpel was pressed against his throat, ending his attempts to draw the attention of the people outside.

  Hoon heard the rattle as someone tried the handle of the driver’s door but found it locked. He listened, breath held, as the voices outside muttered, then faded away into silence.

  He waited. He counted. Five seconds. Ten. No more movement. No more sound.

  “Alone again,” he whispered, giving Humpty Dumpty a friendly slap on the cheek. “Now, as I was saying…”

  The rest of the sentence was swallowed by the screeching of metal on metal. Hoon shuffled right up to the wall that divided the storage area from the cabin, shielding his face with a hand as sparks filled the back of the van like the trailing tail of a firework.