Raucous by Ben Paul Dunn Page A

tied to a chair.  A small room.  The twins had worked on him.  He was bleeding and in pain.
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about, old man,” Raucous said. 
    Jim spluttered, blood dribbled down his chin, a combination of red fluid from the gash on his forehead, cheek and the bubbles popping from his mouth.  He should already be dead.  Jim stared at Raucous, but Raucous wouldn’t look his way.  Jim shouted, and wrestled with the rope bonds that held him down.  His wrists and ankles bound to an Edwardian desk chair that would never appear on the antiques roadshow.
    “Yes, I do.  Look at me, you coward.”
    Raucous stared at Jim, “Just tell them what you know, Jim,” Raucous said, "and it all ends quickly."
    Simon, wiping his already clean blade in an attempt at being a James Bond villain said, “He’s already told us everything.  This is just the revenge bit.”
    “It should be you, Raucous,” Jim said.  “But you can’t do it, can you?  Walk away, hide, let others do what you should do.  An observer.  You heard what I told you.”
    Raucous looked away again.  Timothy and Simon laughed identical Mutley chuckles. 
    “Prison life not welcome you to the realities of violence?” Timothy asked.
    “You have no idea.”
    “Maybe the old man’s right," Timothy said.  "Maybe you have no balls for it.”
    Jim laughed, and rocked in his chair.  They hadn’t covered his mouth, they didn’t need to.  This was a private room for strippers, sound-proofed to avoid distraction to customers in the room next door and the door was closed.
    “You know, Raucous, they are right.  They with their knives and posh southern accents, all educated and pompous, yet they’re doing this and you aren’t.  Did you not hear me the first time?  You don’t have the balls for it.”
    Raucous pulled his snub-nosed .38 and extended his arm, the barrel shook, making small circles.  Jim was two meters and if Raucous shook more, there was the danger of hitting the twins.   Tears welled in his eyes, the barrel circled further from his shaking hand.  Timothy stepped forward, snatched the gun, and pointed it at Jim’s head.
    “I'm getting bored,” he said.
    He pulled the trigger, a large blast, Jim’s head shot back, and the chair toppled as a pool of blood spread across the floor under a white wall splattered with Jim’s brain.
    Timothy threw the gun gently back to Raucous.  Raucous fumbled briefly, taking three attempts to hold on tight.  His eyes never left Jim’s dead face.
    “That’s how you do it,” Timothy said.  “You don’t have to clean up, we’ll send down one of Turk’s Zombie women.  If you’re nice maybe you can get some action going on.”
    Raucous felt his eyes well-up as he crouched down next to Jim’s body.  He stared at the smile he had died with and looked up at the Twins.
    “That was for me to do.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
    Mitch had found a small hotel.  Zero stars and probably not officially in existence.  Ben awoke and knew the place, where it was and why Mitch chose it.  There were many, mostly filled with young foreign travelers or students.  This was A budget bargain room, one that the internet would refuse to publicize for fear of lowering the tone.  The building an obvious choice, the establishment a classic of the hideaway kind, a breakfast spent flicking suspicious eyes at others doing the same, but there were so many of these places in the city that the idea of searching everyone was an idea that only an idiot would enact.
    Mitch had found a hotel in an alley off an alley, where aged men with low pensions paid next to nothing to sleep on a dirty bed in a room just big enough to hold it.  There were many of these in the city and drifting under false names and false accents was easy to do even when being hunted.  Ben had no instruction, no idea.  Mitch had bought food.  Bread and water, biscuits and chocolate.  The plastic bag was on the floor.  Twenty Camel