Rock Solid

  ROCK SOLID

  A Novel By

  Paul Slatter

  This book is entirely a work of fiction. References to real people alive or dead, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are for the intended purpose only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  TNCS - Publishing Edition

  Copyright – 2017 by Paul Slatter – 1103027 B.C. Ltd.

  Kindle Edition

  ISBN: 978-1973866299

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The publisher is not responsible for any websites, or contents of any websites, that are not owned by the publisher.

  First Trade Edition:

  1103027 B.C. Ltd.

  Also by Paul Slatter

  Burn

  Trust Me

  For

  SunSun

  Amicus meus

  The Vancouver Series

  Book Two:

  Rock Solid

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter One

  Paawan Gill woke to the early morning sun on his face, looked up through the camouflaged netting, and saw its first rays high in the morning sky lining the clouds with gold. He breathed in the fresh morning air blowing in untouched from the vast sea that lay before him as he floated. And as the unmistakeable smell of rubber hit his face from the small holes in the inner tube wrapped firmly around his chest, he stretched his lips, pulling at the tape that silenced his screams as the dark waters of the riptide swept him towards the beautiful inlets at the southern end of the Strait of Georgia.

  Paawan held out his hands, fighting the current, and desperately trying to steer his body towards the security of land as a torrent of water pulled him further away from the sanctuary of the tree-lined shore and out towards the open ocean.

  How he had ended up here, fighting for his life inside a rubber tire hidden away from any thin chance at salvation by cheap netting better used for hunting ducks, he didn’t know. But here he was, frantically clinging to life, his turban gone, his black hair out in the open, the water splashing his face, its salt stinging his eyes, his feet wrapped in chains.

  Only hours before, he’d been kissing her, her soft lips against his as she writhed beneath him, their tongues entwined—their silence beautiful after as they'd rested. He'd stroked her. Marvelled at the softness of her skin. As he’d laid in the dark, he’d wondered how many years he’d been away, as though feeling all at once the time that had gone before’—time he’d wasted and lost without her touch, time he could have spent loving her instead of living life on a razor’s edge. Instead, he’d flown, he’d lived for the rushing air beneath his arms, swooping like a bird, fuelled only by courage as he tempted fate with the strange madness only a few men have it in them to do. But as he’d laid there with her in the darkness, listening to her breath, feeling her clasped hands wrapping his body, he’d known that those wasted years would soon be forgotten. She’d missed him as he’d missed her. She was his again, and this time, without a word, they both knew it was to be forever.

  ******

  Charles Chuck Chendrill sat on the train and thought back to the Russian he'd found earlier in the day and wondered if he could find a new matching plate set for the aging Englishman who liked to employ his services and paid well.

  The Russian was gone, but he could still feel the burn on his stomach and the jarring of the train in his broken ribs as it pulled and pushed its way along the tracks, driven by binary code. What a week it had been. Now he just needed the plate set and he could go relax until someone else called worrying about something that would probably mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.

  He leaned back and watched a group of Asian girls, who, from what Chendrill could tell by their shape, could only be dancers. The girls standing there giggling at the sight of a guy on a poster posing in his silver underpants. He smiled. He was getting to know that kid in the poster well now—and his mother even better. As crazy as he was, the kid was alright, a real character at least. He was the kind of guy who could steal your car and make you feel guilty for not asking him if he wanted to borrow it.

  But that shit wouldn’t last long with Chendrill. Once yeah, it had happened, but the second time the kid wouldn't just be back on the bus, which Chendrill had been making him take to preserve his normality, despite his unexpected fame. After all, he had been employed on full rate plus a Ferrari to keep an eye on the wonder kid, this up-and-coming international sensation who lived in the basement room at his mother’s house. And so far, it had been well worth it.

  Chendrill was a private investigator who once had been a cop and worked in the city he grew up in and loved. A guy with his own style who could make it happen, solve your problem, or simply tell you to go fuck yourself in his own Machiavellian way, should you be so deserving.

  Pulling out his phone, he called Williams, the kid who showed promise as a police detective, but needed the years to fall behind him before anyone would take him seriously. Ditcon was there, Williams said, and so was the Russian, laying on the floor, and so were the press—outside on the sidewalk with Ditcon as he gave interviews and took the credit for having solved a case he never would have gotten close to had Chendrill not stepped away from his paid job babysitting the kid—who, once again, stood before him in a poster wearing silver undies that were certain to get these Asian dancing girls’ minds whirling come bedtime—and put the puzzle together.

  He got off the train at Granville Street and took a cab back to his apartment that overlooked the park and the people who frequented it. Jesus my ribs hurt, he thought. . . the guy with the baseball bat sneaking up on him like that just because Chendrill had been fucking his girl—even if she wasn’t his girl any longer.

  How long was this pain going to rip through him? From experience, it was at least five to six weeks of no sleep and staying away from people who made him laugh, but how was that possible when he worked for the most eccentric gay guys in town and was paid to look after a guy who had stolen their underpants?

  It was going to be tough.

  Tough, but not as tough as the
last week had been when he'd nearly been burned alive for trying to fix something he knew the people in charge would let slip through the cracks. But as he lay down on his soft comfy bed and closed his eyes for a moment, knowing he still had to go find a matching plate set, little did he know that what had just occurred was nothing compared to what was coming.

  ******

  About an hour later, he was woken up by the guy who kept food on the table and, at least for the moment, a Ferrari in the garage, and Chendrill told him straight, “If it’s about the plate, then you need to give me time.”

  And as he lay there in pain, he heard Sebastian's worry nearly break the phone in his hand, "It's an emergency, Chuck. If it’s not here at seven, I'll look like a fool."

  And he would, there was no doubt about it, Chendrill thought, as he began to try and ease himself off the bed, having people over for dinner and someone having to sit there with an odd plate in front of them—my God!

  Chendrill sat back up and walked to the bathroom—his abdomen still sore. Was it worth it, he thought, sticking his nose in like he had, chasing the Russian down and nearly being burned to death in the process? He had done it for the sake of his old friend Daltrey, so it had been—this was certain.

  Chapter Two

  Rann Singh stood in the bright and clean washrooms at the Surrey Center Mall, staring at himself while he fixed his purple turban in the long mirror above the sinks.

  A purple turban, pink top, and brown shoes with no socks were the way to go. He'd got the call from the girl who worked as a cleaner and told her he'd pay her the $500 she wanted for the photos, as long as they were the only ones.

  "They are—I promise," she'd said. They'd agreed to meet and Rann had wondered who this girl with his phone number was.

  He walked out into the mall and waited next to the coffee stall and looked around. She could be anywhere, he thought. Then he saw her through the crowd, looking at him, her body long and skinny, her hair bleached white showing her brown roots that, undoubtedly, some of the $500 would go into repairing.

  They sat down and sipped the coffees Rann had bought as she took the brown envelope from her bag and slipped it across the table to him. Opening it up, he sneaked a look inside, stared a moment, then said, "I know this guy."

  "Yeah—he's rich, he sells condos downtown."

  "Who's the girl?" Rann asked.

  The girl with the bleached hair and white skin like an albino bunny shrugged and said, "She lived in this place I used to clean, I used to see her there sometimes. We all thought she was his mistress or something, but she's gone now."

  Rann opened the package for a second look, then closed it again. The girl was beautiful, really hot, like some kind of supermodel. Then he said in his London accent, "What a fucking darling!"

  "So, you going to pay me?"

  Rann looked at the girl in the picture and then at what she was doing, and felt himself rising below. Looking up, he stared at the girl sitting before him. She wasn't too bad really—she had the pure white skin he liked, and she'd been looking at his turban quite a bit. Giving it a shot, he said, "Only if you let me see you again."

  The girl with the skinny frame and the bleached hair shot him a look and smiled. She got asked out a lot, but this was the first time she had been asked out by an East Indian with a turban who spoke with a funny English accent.

  "What makes you think you're my type?"

  "Because you keep looking at my turban.”

  “I was wondering if my hair’s longer than yours, that’s all."

  And cocking his head to the side, Rann Singh, from London, on the run from the Metropolitan Police, opened his wallet, peeled off the $500 in cash, and handing it over with a cheeky smile said, "Well if you sleep with me, maybe you’ll find out."

  ******

  He took the envelope and let the contents fall out onto the kitchen table of his rented apartment on the outskirts of Whalley and took a better look at them. They were a little perverse, but he'd seen and dealt with worse—in the world of a blackmailer, one saw many things. He remembered the guy for sure now, the realtor who plasters his face on the back of almost every bus ploughing its way through town.

  This could be a good one, he thought, real good. Anyone spending that much on self-promotion would do whatever it took not to have his reputation damaged in any way. Maybe he’d even thank him in the process—after all, almost everyone had a secret, especially this guy.

  Rann Singh was a blackmailer through and through. It was almost all he'd ever done for the last ten of the twenty-eight years this world had been blessed with his presence. Born on the outskirts of London near Heathrow, the only son of Sikh parents, who as children in the seventies had been asked to leave Uganda by Idi Amin after the dictator woke one morning from a dream sent to him by God, or so he claimed, and had given all the Indians, who kept the country’s economy stable, ninety days to leave.

  With the money they’d smuggled out in magazines and books and inside their turbans, Rann’s grandparents and his father—then twelve years old—resettled in Hounslow in the suburbs west of London, buying a small three bedroom home close to Heathrow Airport and sending Rann’s father off with his hair wrapped up in a hanky on the top of his head to the local primary school to be teased and mocked and called a Paki cunt and wog along with all the other Indians from Uganda who’d arrived and were not Pakistani and had never been to India.

  The days turned into weeks, then months, and the kids threw stones at his grandmother dressed in her sari as she waited patiently by the school’s gate. Rann’s grandfather took a job as a diesel mechanic at a Ford dealership as big as the one he’d owned in Entebbe less than a year before when Amin had stolen it from him along with his home.

  By the time Rann was born, his grandfather, sick of suffering chronic racism for the second time in his life, said goodbye to his son and grandchild along with the rain and the grey skies of London, packed his bags for Uganda’s more stable neighbor Kenya, and returned to the Africa he loved.

  Settling into an unoccupied homestead ranch he’d found nestled securely at the foot of the Aberdare Mountains two hours north of Nairobi, he took to living alongside the arrogant and condescending white colonials residing in a country they claimed was their own, but who called him choot for wanting to do exactly the same.

  And as the busy years passed in Hounslow on the outskirts of London with the same frequency as the lodgers who came and went from the small upstairs room Rann’s father let out in the home under the flight path that Rann’s grandfather had paid for with money he’d smuggled out from under a dictator’s nose, Rann’s father met his mother and, each with a doctorate in medicine, set up practice nearby.

  Five years after Rann was born, he too headed off to school, as his father had, in his spotless blue crested blazer and shiny shoes to be called a Paki cunt for the first time in his life while his hanky covered hair, all neatly wrapped up in a bun, was pulled from the top of his head by the children of the men who had done the same to his parents—men who now lived on welfare with their ugly wives on the council housing estate nearby, who worked low-income jobs, and who would sometimes sit before Rann’s parents in their new surgery, in their dirty shoes, on National Health Service coin, telling Rann’s father their woes—usually depression, fuelled by self-inflicted obesity or alcoholism. These were men living in denial that they’d gone nowhere with their lives, struggling to face these dim facts as Rann’s parents listened patiently, while their own kids, destined for the same, bullied their doctor's son at school. Spitting on him in the playground, bashing his bun, just as they had done themselves to the decent man they now came to seeking solace—though they didn’t know it. “Go black home,” their children had shouted to Rann, adding the ‘L’ to ‘back’ in an ignorant attempt to validate their argument—even though he had been born in the same hospital as them, and was at home. These vile, dirty, feral children without guidance, with open sores and football boots for shoes, who wou
ld still smile and say hello when Rann would see them at his father’s surgery when they were sick—when they were away from the gangs that were gradually becoming smaller as the neighborhood’s ratios changed.

  And then one day at the tender age of twelve, as Rann sat at the front of the class listening to every word, his mother and father headed to a hospital along the Great West Road and never came home. Rann waiting at the school gate at the end of the day and later in a neighbor’s home as he watched them cry, wondering why he was being kept away from school until his grandfather and grandmother arrived from Africa to tell him the bad news of how they and his Sikh god Guru Nanak would be looking after him from now on, as his parents, sadly, were never coming back.

  Within a year of his mother and father’s death, Rann knew every inch of the ranch his grandfather had left to come and raise his grandson. “My ranch,” he’d say, unconsciously stroking his long grey beard as his turban wobbled, sitting there with his feet in sparkling, curly toed slippers up on a stool next to the blocked off fireplace.

  “My ranch, I gave it up for you, Rann. Its roof was made of straw, and had a village for the help around the side. To the front was a view of the Aberdare Mountains, which rose up from the earth and pierced the blue of the heavens as the forest tried to climb its slopes, a forest deep and dense, full of wild animals. Its enormous trees started at the fields we owned, endless fields reaching all the way from the mountains to our ranch and the gardens where the women from the village bend over sweeping the grass clean with brooms made from fallen branches and strong twigs held together by twine.” Rann listened daily, wondering if the smell of his grandmother’s spices would ever leave his clothes and skin, and how he could get out of helping his grandfather paint the house a different shade of purple, feeling guilty, as if it was his own fault his parents were gone and his grandfather had sold his ranch and left Kenya, letting the home he loved with its view of the mountains and its women who swept the lawn go, under value, to a South African whose name, Malcolm Blou, was now a curse word in the small three bedroomed, strangely painted house under the flight path to Heathrow.