Nobody’s Hero (Ben Koenig #2)

Chapter 29

Koenig and Danielle stood outside Big City Nights. The door was metal-framed. It was battleship grey. The paint was peeling like bark from a birch tree. It was tagged with graffiti and gang signs.

Danielle looked nervous. Koenig knew she was having second thoughts. He also knew she’d walk into Big City Nights with him and, if it came down to it, she’d have his back. He knew the type. The SOG had been full of them.

‘Will she be OK?’ Danielle said, pointing at Draper. She was lounging against the cooling hood of the Jag. Looked like she didn’t have a care in the world. ‘That’s an expensive car. Someone might want it for their chop shop.’

Koenig considered how that might go down. ‘I think she’d enjoy that,’ he said.

‘Did she really torture people for the CIA?’

‘Of course not,’ Koenig said. ‘That would be illegal.’

Now they’d stopped moving, they could hear noise. Muted talking, the occasional snort of laughter, commentary from a soccer game. Nothing that couldn’t be heard outside any bar in any country. Koenig tried the door. It was locked. Yet the guy who’d come outside to puke hadn’t kept his foot in the doorway. He’d let it shut on him. He hadn’t needed a key to get back in and he hadn’t knocked. Koenig studied the door frame. It was wood. Wood had natural fibres. It swelled when it got damp. Basic hygroscopic expansion. Metal didn’t have the same properties. Metal expanded with heat, not moisture. When hot weather made the metal expand, the wood would shrink. When cold weather made the metal shrink, the damp climate of a British winter would make the wood swell. Koenig didn’t know the scientific term for a simple machine made inefficient by its material’s contradictory expansion properties, but he knew the non-scientific term: The door was stuck. He put his shoulder to it and pushed. Not wham, bam, like he was breaching a room and the whole point was to make noise and cause confusion. This was a gradual increase in pressure, like he was pushing a piano up a hill.

The door creaked, then swung open.

Big City Nights went silent. The soccer commentator shouted, ‘Goal!’

Someone muttered, ‘Bollocks.’