Chapter 80
The ringleader sneered.
“How about you give us the keys first, huh? C’mon, mate, think straight. Give us the keys, nobody has to get hurt.”
“She’s pregnant, you stupid fucks.”
One of them shrugged. “One born every minute, ain’t there?”
Eli heard the catch of the car door give, then the heavy thud of Jenny shutting herself in.
“Lock the doors, Jen!” he yelled at her, but she’d—stupidly—gotten back into her own car, and if not even the electrics would start…shit, did she have manual locking?
“God, you’re a dense fuck, aren’t you?” the boy said. His voice was thin and reedy, barely having broken.
Eli backed right up against the frame of the car, the edge of the roof digging into his spine. His heart was beating a mile a minute, his eyes fixed on the glint of the crowbar and theirs on him, and—
Jenny screamed, and Eli was blinded. Something roared, someone swore, and then the headlights that had hit him full in the face swung around. Eli, who hadn’t realised until he lowered them that he’d thrown up his arms to defend his face, blinked owlishly in the sudden gloom again. A familiar, battered car was rocking to a halt on the tarmac, windows down, music blaring, a passenger leaning out with familiar dreadlocks and a shit-eating grin.
And Eli relearned how to breathe, and inched further away from the lads as a huge frame unfolded itself from the driver’s seat almost lazily.
“I think,” rasped a familiar deep voice, “that you might wanna fuckin’ rethink that, lads.”
Eli’s heart staggered in his chest. Thank fuck. Thank fuck.
The boys were less impressed. “Fuck off, mate, this don’t involve you,” their ringleader snapped, almost casually jabbing the crowbar in Rob’s direction.
“Yeah? Kinda fucking does,” Rob snarled. His approach was slow and idle, but relentless; he came to a halt almost casually between Eli and the boys, lounging against the roof of Jenny’s car like a man turning up for a photoshoot, not a man disturbing a mugging.
“Fucking hurry up an’ can ‘em, Rob, let’s go! I’m fucking hungry!” Danny bellowed. The door of the Suzuki slammed, and then a dark shadow hopped up onto the bonnet, toothy grin visible even in the shadows from the headlights. The music kept pounding, just as irrepressible as the Hawkes brothers.
“Good idea, mate! Yeah, why don’t you and your boyfriend piss off,” one of the lads said.
Rob’s snort was nothing short of derisive.
“You sick wanker,” he sneered. “That’s my fucking brother, you perv. That’s my boyfriend,” he added, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Eli. “So…no. I ain’t pissin’ off. Best thing for you to do is go home and give your mother another good fuckin’, how about that?”
“Fucking faggots, man,” one of the hangers-on sneered.
Eli slipped around the car. He wasn’t fucking stupid. Rob was there to defend him, and if he was out of the way…
“Can ‘em, Rob,” Danny drawled.
Eli whipped back around, just in time to see the crowbar flash in the glare of the Suzuki’s headlights. He cried out—but Rob was faster, almost casually batting it aside with a blow to the kid’s wrist. He caught the hood in a fist and slammed the kid, head-first, into the roof of the car. The Audi rocked violently; Jenny screamed inside, and Eli saw the flash of her phone screen.
“Call the fucking police!” he yelled at her.
Rob let go, and the kid slumped boneless and keening to the tarmac.
“Either o’ you two cunts wanna give it a shot?” he sneered.
“Fucking shit, Jamie, move your arse!” one of them yelled at the downed idiot, who was sitting up and swaying. Rob snorted and delivered a hefty kick to his ribs that sent him sprawling before idly loping back to the Suzuki and tossing Danny his phone.
“Thing is, lads,” he said loudly, emptying his pockets of keys and wallet, too. Danny accepted them with a wide, gleeful grin that was downright disturbing. “You oughta pick your targets proper, like. Pretty blokes and preggers birds, that’s bad karma, that. That’s the kind of shit you get punished for before y’even fucking started. Now you pick on another little shit jus’ like you, nobody’d come for ‘im. That’s how you play it. Not pretty blokes and preggers birds. They got people, they do.”
“People like you, you fucking queer?” one of the lackeys sneered, but his voice was wobbling. “Fuck off, alright? We weren’t gonna fucking ‘urt ‘em.”
“Maybe not,” Rob drawled. His accent was thickening into the heavy slur it had been in Scotland, only more steely. This wasn’t Rob’s fucked-out voice. It was his gonna-fuck-you-up voice. “I’m gonna hurt you, mind.”
The ringleader staggered to his feet, wobbling drunkenly, and spat a gobbet of blood onto the floor. “You…fucking…pouf,” he snarled.