"I'll phone Barry when I know for certain the Welshman's there. Maybe after mid-day? Give him a chance to sleep it off?"

"Better leave it until well after mid-day. We'll be busy."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, we're getting married in the morning. Just like the song," she said, grinning like a game show host.

Raymond Chandler once said that a piece of writing should always lead the writer and not be led by the writer. I don't know much about that but it certainly works that way when it comes to boozing. When you let the alcohol lead you, when it takes the reins and drags you with it toward oblivion, those are the best drinking sessions. After Lightning's bombsh.e.l.l about the wedding, I let the gargle lead me all the way to a stinking hangover.

I was as rough as toast and I was probably still over the limit when I drove Trigger, my lime green Vespa, up the hill toward the Happy Valley caravan site.

I hadn't been there for a while but I used to be a regular at the Happy Valley Social Club back in the eighties. Those were the days before karaoke, of course.

Back then it was called Bandbox, which consisted of a singer and an organist. Maybe a drum machine, if they were hi-tech. The performer I remember most clearly was Legs, an old bloke in a World War I Kaiser Bill helmet who did "comic" versions of popular songs. The way he transformed "The Lady in Red" into "The Lady in Bed" was a stroke of genius, if you ask me.

I pulled up beside Booze 'N' News and saw Mrs. Blue sat on the step of a caravan smoking and reading a copy of h.e.l.lo magazine.

"Mrs. Blue, it's Peter. Peter Ord. Barry's mate from school."

"I remember you," she said, squinting. "You used collect them American comics with drawings of muscle men in them. We had you down as a shirt-lifter."

I grimaced.

"Nice to see you again, too," I said. Though it had rarely been nice to see Mrs. Blue.

It was usually about the time when he saw Mrs. Blue with her ear pressed to a gla.s.s that she'd put against the wall that Barry knew he'd be moving home again, soon.

It was the regular pattern throughout his childhood. He and his parents would move into a flat above a shop or a terraced house or some other type of private rented accommodation. And things would be fine and Jim Dandy for a while. But somewhere along the way, Mrs. Blue would start to get jealous. She'd be suspicious of her husband's comings and goings. Well, mostly his comings. She'd usually suspect one of the neighbors or a woman from the corner shop. She'd ask Mr. Blue where he'd been when he'd come in from work, even though he was covered in c.r.a.p from working shifts in the foundry. This would escalate into a screaming match, with plates and cups smashed against the wall.

Then Mrs. Blue would start spying. She'd keep Barry off school so he could walk the streets with her looking for Mr. Blue and "fallen women." When it got really bad she'd call the police and say that her husband's fancy women were trying to burn the house down. Or there'd be a fight with someone she'd accused of making the two backed beast with her husband. And so she'd be sectioned again and given the old EST. Then she'd come out of hospital and they'd move home and everything would be okay until it started again.

When Mr. Blue died of asbestosis, Barry and his mother were left with a ma.s.sive wad of insurance and compensation money. So, Barry gave up his job at the Thermos flask factory to take care of his sick Ma.

She didn't look that sick now though. She was dolled up to the nines, wearing a red PVC dress and a leopard skin coat. It seemed as if it had done her and Barry a world of good when she'd moved out.

"Did our Barry send you to look for me?" she said.

"Aye."

"Does he know where I am?"

"Not yet."

"Are you going to tell him, then?"

"That's my job, Mrs. Blue. I'm a private eye now," I said.

She finished her cigarette, put it out, and lit up another one in a flash.

"How's he doing?"

I took out a bottle of water and glugged it down in one.

"Not too bad," I said. "In fact, he's getting married later today."

She started to laugh.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, really," I said.

"He told you to tell me that didn't he? To get me to come back."

"Naw, it's true!"

Mrs. Blue made a tutting sound, stood up and walked back into the caravan.

"p.i.s.s off back to your comics, son," she said as she slammed the door.

The turnout at Barry and Lightning's wedding wasn't exactly Charles and Diana standard, apparently. It wasn't even Charles and Camilla standard. Just Harry Shand and a couple of booze hounds. But the low attendance was more than compensated for by the appearance of Mrs. Blue bursting into the registry office brandishing a golf club and screaming at Lightning, calling her a number of variations of the word s.l.u.t.

This resulted in Lightning giving Mrs. Blue a gut punch which had her doubled over and puking. Barry then grabbed Lightning by the throat and continued Mrs. Blue's dialogue theme as he tried to throttle her. And then Lightning turned to Barry and punched him in the jaw, knocking him clean out. Which was what I meant by Lightning striking twice.

Not that I saw any of this, of course. I was feeling a tad delicate after my meeting with Mrs. Blue so I decided to go back home and have a kip before phoning Barry and telling him of his mother's whereabouts.

Not the best idea, in retrospect.

The evening was melting into night and dark, malignant clouds were spreading themselves across the sky. I pulled down the metal shutters and locked up Las Vegas Amus.e.m.e.nts as a battered yellow taxi cab spluttered to a halt in front of the arcade. Living above an amus.e.m.e.nt arcade was hardly ideal but my landlord, Mr. Raymond, give me a cheap deal as long as I locked up the place and did the bingo when one of the callers rang in sick.

I shuffled into the back seat and was attacked by the overpowering aroma of air freshener and blow.

"Where to?" said the taxi driver, a constipated-looking rat boy with a checked Burberry baseball cap and a crackly sh.e.l.l suit.

"Belle Vue Cemetery," I said.

"Dead center of town, eh?" said the driver as the taxi coughed itself to life.

In less than ten minutes, we were outside the Belle Vue Cemetery's wrought iron gates. I paid the driver and popped into Costcutter for a can of wife beater to get me through the morning and a bunch of flowers. I downed half of it as I stood at the counter. The tall Sikh that served me paid me no heed as I pushed the can into my jacket pocket.

As I rushed into the graveyard I b.u.mped into the gangling form of Reverend Abbott, pulling up his fly as he stepped out of a Portaloo. He nodded and we walked toward the grave together.

Mrs. Blue was inconsolable although the big ginger Welshmen next to her was doing his best. Harry Shand, complete with a black eye and an arm in a sling stood scowling. Then, Reverend Abbott, his long hair flowing in the cold north wind began his eulogy.

"There comes a time in every young man's life," he said, his long arms stretched wide, "when he knows that he will never be The Fonz. Shortly after that realization it becomes clear that he won't even be Richie Cunningham. And, so, then, he has to make a choice. Will he be Ralph Malph or Potsie Weber?"

I tuned out after that. Abbott's frankly barmy sermons were as famous as his acid flashbacks. It was clear where he was going, though. Poor Barry wasn't one of life's lucky ones.

A couple of days after he split up from Lightning and his mother moved back in with him, there was knock at the door. Spammy Spampinato's brother, Little Joey, stood there with a baseball bat which he proceeded to use to redecorate the Blue household. Harry Shand, who was visiting, tried to intervene but it was no use. Little Joey Spampinato was only known as "Little" due to his age rather than his size. And once again Barry got in the way. He was dead before he got to the hospital.

Abbott finished his rambling eulogy and we all threw dirt and flowers on the coffin.

"Do you want to say something Peter?" said Shand, as rain began to pour down in sheets.

I shuffled around and then took the half empty can of Stella from my jacket pocket.

"Here's to Barry Blue," I said. "Unlucky in love and not much cop at cards, either."

I finished off the can and headed off. It was almost opening time.

Spinetingler Award nominee Paul D. Brazill was born in England and is on the lam in Poland.His stuff has appeared in loads of cla.s.sy magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 8. He writes an irregular column for Pulp Metal Magazine and his short story collection, 13 Shots Of Noir, will be published in 2011.His blog, You Would Say That, Wouldn't You?, is here: http://pdbrazill.blogspot.com/.

A Night at the Royale.

By Chris F. Holm.

The man in the black gabardine suit gritted his teeth and tried in vain to ignore the idiot Americans who sat behind him in the otherwise empty theater. They'd stumbled in five minutes prior a good twenty minutes after the feature had begun giggling like schoolgirls and reeking of patchouli and marijuana. In the man's youth, such tardiness was not permitted; when he was a boy, if you wanted to catch a film in Amsterdam, you were to be seated before the lights dimmed or you were not to be seated at all. But then, these were different times, as the dull glow of the No Smoking signs peppered throughout the theater reminded him and these imbeciles were as unfamiliar with Dutch culture as with the inside of a shower.

All they knew of Amsterdam they'd doubtless learned from movies. Movies they'd evidently talked through.

Of course, he really should have known better. The Royale was one of the oldest cinemas in all of Amsterdam, but it sat just across the ca.n.a.l from De Wallen, the city's red light district. De Wallen is the nexus of the city's drug and s.e.x trade both, and no doubt the point of origin of these two cackling, dreadlocked simpletons. But the Royale's theme nights were often too good to pa.s.s up, and tonight's was no exception a triple-bill of the finest exploitation the Seventies had to offer: Foxy Brown, Death Race 2000, and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. The handbills dubbed the evening "Royale with Cheese." Perhaps these two came expecting burgers.

By and large, the h.e.l.lbent-on-revenge Pam Grier and punchy Motown soundtrack should have been enough to drown out all but their most clamorous of comments, but the pudgy one he of the ratty Phish T-shirt and cargo shorts kept ramming his Birkenstocks into the man in black's seat back, jerking his attention away from the screen. His friend a beanpole of a young man in a coa.r.s.e hooded Mexican pullover and a spa.r.s.e dusting of reddish-blond beard did not seem similarly jimmy-leg afflicted. His bare feet dangled unmoving just centimeters from the man's face, the boy's ankles resting crossed atop the seat back beside him. His feet smelled of sweat and bore thick calluses, darkened by years of ground-in dirt. A faded tattoo the size of a two-Euro coin graced the outside of one leg an Aztec sun inside which danced a cartoon bear.

The man in black told himself they were harmless buffoons, uncultured and unwise. That their offenses were not intended to be personal. That he should exercise restraint, and should not respond as if their transgressions were intentional. For a time, at least, he was proud of his success in doing so apart from a few withering glares cast over his shoulder whenever their inanity reached a fever pitch, he'd not engaged the two at all. And one could hardly begrudge him such glaring. Glaring, he told himself, was expected. It was what ordinary, civilized people did in situations such as these. The notion pleased him, for although the man in black thought himself an intelligent and cultured man, he knew he was not ordinary nor was he civilized.

Reflecting on that evening and its unfortunate conclusion from some distance, the man in black felt he had done nothing wrong. He'd given them every opportunity to avoid their fate; it was not his fault if they ignored his generosity at every turn.

"Yo, Harvey," said the fat one, kicking the man in black's chair. "What's your name?"

The man in black ignored him, instead focusing on Pam Grier strutting across the screen in her lime-green halter.

"Dude, why you asking his name if you already know it?" asked the beanpole.

"I'm not saying that's his name. I called him Harvey 'cause that's the dude who played Mr. Black in Reservoir Dogs. You know, Harvey Weinstein."

"Keitel," said the beanpole.

"Huh?" said the fat one.

"Not Weinstein, Keitel. Except not him neither, 'cause he was Mr. Blonde."

"So who was Mr. Black?"

"Steve Buscemi."

"Nah, Buscemi was Mr. Pink. 'Member, he thought it made him sound like some kinda Commie fairy."

"Then who was Mr. Black?"

"I dunno... Sam Jackson?"

At that, the man in black could take no more. He turned around slowly, but with purpose. Placid-faced until the moment he made his move, he slapped the beanpole's ankles off the chair back, causing him to pitch forward in his seat. As the boy's head swung toward the man in black, the man grabbed a handful of dreadlocks and yanked. The beanpole shrieked and fell to his knees, his gaze forced skyward as the man applied a little downward pressure. A wince of sudden pain showed beneath the boy's pathetic beard.

The man in black leaned in close so close he could smell the reek of beanpole's breath. "There wasn't one," he said, in lightly accented English.

"What?!" the beanpole squealed.

"I said, there was no Mr. Black. Keitel was White. Buscemi was Pink. Madsen was Blonde. Roth, Bunker, and Tarantino were Orange, Blue, and Brown, and Samuel Jackson wasn't even in the f.u.c.king movie. And if you paid even the tiniest shred of attention to what Cabot told them at the outset, you'd know he was sick to death of all the hard-a.s.ses in his employ fighting over the Mr. Black moniker, so he took the option off the G.o.dd.a.m.n table. Now, are the two of you going to shut your f.u.c.king mouths and watch the movie, or are there any other notions you'd like me to disabuse you of?"

"We're cool," said the beanpole, his face twisted into a rictus of pain. The pudgy one just nodded.

"Excellent," said the man in black. He released his grip on the beanpole's hair and smoothed his suit-coat out with both hands. Then he straightened his tie and returned his attention to the movie, hopeful that this interruption would be their last.

It wasn't.

It took a whole fifteen minutes for them to bother him again. This time, he'd heard it coming the two of them whispered amongst themselves like schoolgirls, first about what a G.o.dd.a.m.n psycho that dude in front of them was, and then eventually, as their meager wits returned, about how bada.s.s the whole affair had been like something out of a movie, they agreed. Once they fit the experience into its proper box named it something they could understand it was only a matter of time until they were emboldened to try again.

This time, it was the beanpole who spoke first.

"So, you're like some kinda serious Tarantino fan, huh?" he asked, leaning over the same seat back where his ankles had rested until the man in black removed them. They hadn't returned since.

"I am a fan of the cinema in general," the man replied with a resigned sigh. Clearly, enjoying a film tonight was not in the cards. "In my line of work, one finds one has a great deal of free time."

"And what line of work is that?" asked the pudgy one.

"I'm a consultant," said the man, the non-answer/lie rolling off his tongue with ease, "a fixer, you might say. People hire me when they have problems to take care of. I make those problems go away."

"You got lots of free time doing that?" The beanpole, incredulous. "Seems to me, everybody's got problems enough to keep a guy who fixes problems pretty f.u.c.king busy."

"Ah, but most people cannot afford my services. And I'm paid handsomely enough for them I've the luxury of only working when I see fit."

"Oh."