Location: Liverpool - England#1.04
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Chas was currently taking his third phone call of the last ninety minutes, chatting away with the air of politeness held by someone who was only talking to the other because they wanted something, and to get it they had to grin and bear the pleasantries. He'd dropped some texts to old contacts, dealers he used to bargain with - hoping that someone had had recent tradings with Gary, or at least knew someone else who had. The first two hadn't known anything and had at least half-suspected Chas to be part of some narc sting, especially as they'd not heard from him in the last two years - those calls had been swift and un-enlightening, quickly shut down. The third though - more forthcoming. Gave Chas the benefit of the doubt; he was either cocky or thick, but it didn't really matter which, as long as he had the information they wanted. In the Before Times, the guy had been an infrequent backup when other dealers fell through, or the group was in a pinch. He had been reliable, and near-always available - Chas just didn't like him, because he had a habit of trying to push harder stuff than just the weed they wanted, and when they turned him down, he had a petty tendency to mark up what they'd actually came for. He was an opportunist with little scruples, and Chas expected that not to have changed.
Chas finally got off the phone and turned to John, who looked sullen, but was actually just bored.
"You alright?"
"I can hear Cheryl." John answered, gravitas filling his voice. Chas looked panicked for a moment, quickly sitting beside John and putting a hand to his shoulder.
"You can?" He asked, urgency in his tone.
"Yeah. She's saying I should have brought a book."
John smirked as Chas pushed off him, his face swapping from concern to aggravation.
"Bastard." Chas said, then looked at his phone as it pinged. "Alright, I have good news and bad news."
"Good news, please. Need some of that."
"Fella dealt to Gary pretty recently. Knows where he was staying. Gaz might still be there."
John's face perked up, excited at this positive development. Cautiously, he asked:
"And bad news?"
"He sold Gary a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Like, what did you do to get this cash and why are you making a swan-song purchase, a lot."
"Ah."
"Yeah. And he's not heard from him since, either. Maybe Gary was just buying in bulk like a sensible consumer...or maybe..."
"Or maybe he shot up everything he had and we're gonna find him on his back with a faceful of his own vomit." John finished the thought. "If the coppers haven't already bagged him."
He sat back and sighed. Every step forward seemed matched by another one back.
"But the guy has the address, and he just sent me the meet spot. We just have to bring cash."
"Bastard."
"Yup. Regular entrepeneur." Chas agreed, bouncing his leg and staring off into the setting sun. "What do you want to do?"
John dragged his hands down his face. Despite the cool temperatures of the encroaching evening he felt sweaty and unsettled.
"Fuck it, let's go. It's the best lead we have. If this falls through we'll just have to call it. Maybe one day he'll find us instead."
"The only thing Gary's finding is a vein he hasn't blown through." Chas remarked in a low, cynical voice. All the same, he slapped his knees and stood up. "Alright. It's not too far. You got cash on you?"
John put a hand into his pocket and pulled out the notes inside, counting them up in his head. He felt a knot in his stomach as he thought about what was left of this month's Universal Credit. It'd have to do. They couldn't turn away now.
"Yeah, but not enough if I remember this guy's prices right. I'll have to get more."
"Bank machine on the way." Chas said, already walking off. "Let's get moving."
It all felt a bit cliche to John. They'd crossed to the city outskirts and snuck through a roundabout to underneath the motorway bypass, great concrete pillars holding aloft the hundreds of cars that roared past overhead. The rough ground around them was littered with rubbish discarded by drivers above, and roadkill that had been flung over the roadside barriers; birds, mostly, popped into split-open carcasses and clouds of feathers, but also the odd squirrel or rat that had made the poorly-fated climb. John could see all had been gnawed at indiscriminately, and some of the bursted corpses made his stomach turn. Ahead of them where the bypass rose was a flat cement wall that marked the end of the initial ramp; it was against this surface that he and Chas could make out the dim figure of their rendevous partner, illuminated only by the faint orange glow of his cigarette. John itched to look at it, and almost instinctively reached for his own pack, sparking up and puffing away as they approached.
Beverly Hughes was an unfortunate man. His name had caused him no end of grief most of his life, but at this point he had become inured to it, and even much preferred it to the other moniker that had been attached to him. You see, Beverly was a misshapen fellow, rotund and bottom-heavy with an awkward, rolling gait. He was also quite short, and pronouncedly hairy, and his face, while large and round, had all its main features converging to a point on his wide nose, with a small mouth hanging beneath and a pair of prominent front teeth completing the picture. The resemblance was as uncanny as it was undeniable. That the maligned sobriquet fit quite neatly against Beverly's actual name was just a petty joke played by God.
"Alright, Beaver?" Chas called out as they neared, attempting a friendly, jovial air - but Christ, even at a distance and in this fading light, John could tell he didn't half put his foot in it.
"Very bad start..." John murmured low so only his friend could hear. Chas just waved dismissively.
"Fuck off, Chandler." Was Beverly's only reply, his rodential face immediately darkening. Chas opened his mouth to speak once more, but John pulled the cig from between his lips with one hand while fishing the cash from his pocket with the other, stepping in front and across Chas to interrupt him before he blundered again.
"I've got the money." John announced, taking the attention of Beverly's squirrelly little eyes away from the gesticulating Chas. Beverly lashed a hand out to seize the wad from John's grip, and then passed back a small scrap of folded paper. John opened it carefully. Scrawled in biro was an address - an address John had heard before. It was one many 'roommates' from his hostel wound up in. He could've slapped himself.
"When did you last see him?" He asked, tucking the paper away. Beverly didn't look up as he thumbed through the notes, counting it was all there.
"Mmmm...three weeks, maybe?" He answered, non-committal. "More than a fortnight, less than a month."
"Anything unusual?"
"Nah. More paranoid than usual but who isn't these days. He's been a pretty regular customer past two years. Would have expected to hear from him again by now."
"And you haven't?"
"I told Chas over the phone. Gaz bought big last time. You're probably looking for a corpse."
"We're staying optimistic." John growled, Beaver's flippant nature and ugly face beginning to grate on him.
"Well good luck, but I'd say you're wasting your time. Guy's been looking for the will to kill himself for two years, and you ask me, he just found it. He's been fucked up ever since that girl he was sweet on disappeared."
John screwed his eyes shut, but not before he saw Chas tense up as well. Beverly didn't notice either of them shift in demeanour, and carried on shoving his foot in his mouth.
"Never did figure out what happened, not for lack of trying bless him. Well, as much as shooting smack up to your eyeballs can be called 'trying', anyway. I did tell him to forget it. She probably just ran away. Shit town, shit fam, shit mates, who wouldn't! Either that or the silly bint got herself snatched, or killed, or both. Any day now, they'll dredge her skeleton out of the Ter-"
Beaver did not manage to finish his sentence. There was a dull smack, the sound of flesh hitting flesh, then a couple more, and then the addition of leather into cloth as boots wailed against the fallen figure.
John opened his eyes. To his own surprise, it had not been him to lay into Beverly. Chas was standing over the groaning huddle of Beaver, his shoulders heaving. Chas bent down and ripped the cash from Beverly's fist.
"Chas..." John said, almost a whisper. Chas turned to look at him, a frightening expression of tranquil and deliberate rage painted across his face. John pointed at a bush off to their right. "...do you see Cheryl over there?"
Chas followed John's arm, took a long look at the indicated shrubbery, and then returned his eyes to John's as his face softened.
"No, John, I don't." He answered. "How's our old girl looking?"
John took another look. Cheryl stood with her arms twisted and stretched out toward them. Her hair was matted with dirt and grease and some viscous ooze; it fell across her face and obscured her expression, except for her mouth, warped into a screaming maw roaring in some unheard black tongue. He tried not to look at her belly, torn and ragged and hanging off in loose strips of flesh beneath a shredded, blood-stained blouse.
"Fine." John lied. "We need to get out of here."
Chas nodded, giving Beverly's writhing form a final kick for good measure.
"Yes lad, I would say we do."
John and Gary sat in John's kitchen, the steady rain pattering at the window as the hallway clock's ticking melded with the raindrops into an off-kilter rhythm that set John's teeth on edge. The pair were quiet aside from the slight clinking of glass bottles being lifted from the table to their lips and back down again. John had opened his dad's case of Becks and deemed it free for pilfering; he'd pay Hell for it later, when Thomas returned from work late that evening, but right now he didn't care. The belt was normal by now; there wasn't any point to fearing something that had become so routine. With any luck, between the Becks and the plastic bottle of voddy he'd stolen, he'd be drunk enough by then to barely feel it anyway.
It had been a fortnight since any of them had heard from Cheryl, and a week since John had reported her missing to the police. Six days since he'd sat at this very table under very different circumstances, pinned between a stern police officer and a reticent Thomas, pertinent questions asked and guarded answers given. All he'd wanted to do then was seize the baton from the back of the officer's belt and pulp his father's head with it until he gave up what he'd done to his sister; now, that suspicion had crept away. Thomas just didn't seem to care all that much. There had been a time, distant and fading from memory, that Thomas Constantine had loved his daughter - but since the day John killed his brother and mother, Thomas' hatred of his surviving son had stained everything else. Cheryl defended John, protected him, looked after him, cared for him unconditionally; so by her actions she was deemed tainted by their father, an extension of John's rot. Another thing he'd taken from Thomas. Another threshold carved on the boundary between Before and After John. John felt the encroaching spectre of his own defining delineation; he looked back on With Cheryl with deep fondness, despite its own hardships. He could not fathom a life Without.
John cleared his throat, breaking the silence. Gary didn't react, just swayed slightly in his seat as he carried on drinking. When John spoke, his voice was scratchy and hoarse from under-use.
"Coppers said they'd be able to crack her phone in a day or two."
This was the latest development in the case. Truthfully, it was the first proper forward direction since the missing persons report had been filed. The police had rifled through Cheryl's room for any indicators of where or when or why; they'd discovered more an absence of items than a presence of anything meaningful or incriminating, but the phone was at least significant, an opportunity to review recent activity and potentially monitor anything new.
"Then we can see if she's been threatened, or pissed off some creep. Find a suspect, maybe."
Gary grunted, a dry noise of acknowledgement but little else.
"When I get my hands on whoever took her..." John mused, mostly to himself but still loud enough for Gary to hear. An empty promise, made by the desperate - unable to mount a rescue, so reduced to vowing retribution instead. For a micro-instant, Gary frowned, a dark anger passing across his face; John almost missed it, the expression so brief and Gary's face falling back into drunken fugue so quickly that he wasn't sure it had ever occurred to begin with.
"I think I see her sometimes." John continued, picking at the label on his half-empty bottle. He drained it and opened another. "Catch her face in a crowd, or a whiff of her perfume, or hear her chuckle. But when I turn to look, or run after it, it's not her. It's never her..." he trailed off, taking another long sip of lager. It wasn't working half as fast as he needed it to.
This time, Gary's dark expression lasted longer, and he leant forwards in his chair. The plastic creaked beneath him.
"Wishful thinking," he replied, pointing at John with the neck of his bottle, "or a guilty conscience."
"What?"
"Which is it, Johnny-boy?"
Gary didn't budge; John was stunned, but he felt outrage bubble within him. He set his own bottle aside.
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Gary?"
John was raising his voice. Gary retracted his bottle and finished the beer, standing up and looming over John from across the table.
"You've been consorting with devils, John Constantine."
John slammed the table; bottles jumped and toppled, his own drink splashing to the floor as the fallen beer rolled to the edge of the table and tumbled off. He stood, pointing his own aggressive, accusatory finger in Gary's face, trembling slightly.
"Have you gone fucking mental, Lester? Like, have you actually lost your marbles? Say what you fucking mean to say."
There was a long moment of quiet, a stand-off between the two boys. The hallway clock had stopped ticking.
Eventually, Gary blinked, and he stepped out from the table, unhooking his jacket off the back of the chair as he went.
"I'm leaving. Thomas is going to beat you raw when he gets home."
John sat down, shaking, retrieving his spilt beer. "Get the fuck out of my house, cunt."
"Raw, Johnny. But not half as much as you deserve."
Suddenly the bottle in John's hand sailed through the air at a vicious speed; it passed within a hair's breadth of Gary's temple, and obliterated itself against the kitchen wall. Glass shards and lager oozed down the plaster.
"I said get the fuck OUT!"
Gary left. John stared at the wall for a while, and then he wept and wept.
John's last words to Gary lingered in his mind as he and Chas arrived at the address on the scrap of paper Beaver had given them. They were both anxious and fidgety; the remnants of adrenaline still coursed through their systems from their altercation with Beverly, and they were also aware that Bev knew exactly where they were going and who they were looking for - now, they were against the clock, racing to find Gary before Beaver did, or before he caught up with them, or both. The place looked promising, at least. John knew of it off-hand from some ex-residents of his own hovel, and as they approached, a vagrant-looking young man watched them suspiciously from the first-floor window. John looked up, trying to discern if their observer was also their quarry; whoever it was, they darted away from the glass before he could make them out. He briefly thought he saw the outline of Cheryl's rough-cut bob past the fluttering net curtains, but brushed the notion away quickly. Since he'd opened up to Chas, he felt elucidated; the visions were not so all-consuming, easier to dismiss. Reality felt more within his gift. It was a feeling he had forgotten, and not one he wanted to give up or take for granted again.
"Your turn I think." John said, his voice low while the pair surveyed the despondent building before them. Chas looked back at him and raised an eyebrow; John could only shrug, looking kite-like with his hands in his jacket pockets. "Last time Gary and I spoke...last time we ever spoke - we didn't exactly leave it on good terms."
"And what if it's not Gary that answers? Got bad blood with all of Liverpool?"
John wouldn't be surprised if he had. "My track record with strangers not so great either."
Chas couldn't argue with that, so he huffed and stomped up the front path, delivering several heavy blows to the flimsy plywood door. His knocks peeled out like thunder, and John couldn't help but feel overcome with a deep sense of ill omen. They waited. There was murmured commotion within the house. John hoped this would be the last strange home they would need to cold-call; and then, finally, the door opened.
Chas backed away immediately, suddenly throwing his hands up and open, palms flat and facing out, making calm and steady movements. John couldn't see anything at first, but as the door swung open completely, the flickering streetlight illuminated the doorway and caught the glinting metal of a blade, brandished waist-height toward Chas. He felt a surge of panic, but daren't move; sudden action would be a very poor decision at this juncture.
The wielder of the kitchen knife - a rather large kitchen knife, John noted with another pang of fear - stepped fully into the light; he was scratty, agitated, greasy and dirty and littered with trackmarks up his arms. Chas kept his distance, and spoke with a gentle tone, slouching his posture and bending his knees slightly to reduce his height as much as he could and appear as non-threatening as possible. The doorman looked jumpy, and no one needed hospitals or police involved.
"Easy, fella. Not here on any bad business. My friend and I are just looking for someone."
Chas pointed back at John, who pulled his own hands out of his pockets to hold them up and show empty palms as well, throwing in a slight wave at the same time.
"That's my friend," Chas continued, "his name is John. I'm Chas. We're looking for Gary."
The doorman's face dropped, his eyes going wide and skin pale. The hand holding the knife dropped, arm slack at his side, to which both Chas and John breathed a slight sigh of relief.
"W-what d'ya want w-with him?" He asked, fear and urgency filling his voice.
There was something electric in the air. The question felt leading, like the answer was already known and expected, he just needed Chas to say it. All of a sudden, John wanted deeply and darkly to abandon his mission, give up on his search; he and Chas needed to leave, to go home, to watch some shit telly and depart for London in the morning. No good would come of pushing even one more step down this path.
It was too late. Chas was already answering.
"We, uh - we want to put things right."
The knife clattered to the floor, released from its grip in shock.
"That's what he said you'd say." The man hissed, and Chas shot John a worried look. John could only return it in kind.
"Yeah, he's been here. Out of his mind, man. Talking about devil worship and black magic for weeks. Thought it was just the drugs, but he wouldn't stop, man, just kept talking and shooting up more than I've ever seen anyone shoot. Yeah, he mentioned you two as well. Said you were looking for him. Hunting him down. Called your 'friend' all sorts, a warlock, a sorceror, a demon in disguise - and you, man, you, he called you a pet, a husk, a meat bag puppeted around-"
"I mean I've put on a few pounds sure but-" Chas tried to lighten the mood, calm the frightened man down, but he was cut off with a look of deep terror and dread that belied the gravity of Gary's lunatic ravings.
"He said you'd arrive. Tonight. And he said you'd say exactly what you did say."
"Look mate, why don't we step in, get this all sorted-"
"NO!" The man shouted, and suddenly the knife was back in hand and raised once more. John's heartrate spiked and Chas put a few more steps between him and the blade. "You're not coming in here. Gary ain't here. He left this morning and he left you a message: if you're looking for him, if you really wanna 'make it right', then you go to the bridge so you can try again."
Powerful horror gripped John, and Chas went rigid.
"Now fuck off. Gary might be mad, but I'm not taking any chances anymore. You take whatever bad voodoo you're carrying away from here."
The door slammed shut; neither Chas nor John had any desire to try it again. They stared at each other for stretched-out seconds, letting something dark and unnerving take root in their bones; and then, all at once and without a word, turned toward the River Mersey and the fateful bridge that spanned it.
4x Thank
