Fist First Read online

  Fist First

  A Frank Stoker Novel

  Nigel Mustard

  An author

  Cover Images:

  Altered version of The Way of the Exploding Fist by Feans - https://flic.kr/p/7ctwyj

  Altered version of San Diego Night Skyline by Brandon Leon - https://flic.kr/p/7hKXbb

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Connect with Nigel Mustard

  To Joan, who said I never could*.

  Well… I have** now haven’t I?

  * Write a book

  ** Written a book.

  Chapter 1

  There are men, and there are large men.

  A large man leant coolly against the inside wall of the train. His face aged, almost imperceptibly, every second.

  Frank Stoker looked intimidating, hunched in the corner of the train carriage, his long black leather jacket matched only by his long black hair and black leather boots.

  His gloves were also black leather. His black shirt was open to the third button, provocatively revealing a wiry bush of very, very dark grey hair.

  At the end of his musclebound arms lived his huge fists, the size of adolescent watermelons.

  With one of these fists, he coolly thumbed a copy of ‘The Art of War’, by Oriental novelist Sun Tzu. The pages were well worn. Clearly this man had read this book a number of times.

  Clearly this was an educated man.

  But his eyes were not on the page(s). Something had caught Stoker’s eye(s).

  Some punk had been troubling a lady on the other side of the carriage for a while. Sometimes men don’t take no for an answer.

  They soon learn.

  The kid smoked a cigarette disaffectedly as he shoved the girl. Stoker strode over and grabbed him by the left shoulder with his right hand. (Your left hand, as if you were looking at him). The punk wheeled round and showed Frank ten inches of steel.

  Frank Stoker smiled to himself. He had seen bigger two bit punks than this and seen bigger blades.

  He laughed at the kid:

  ‘That all you got? Try it.’

  The kid sneered – and lunged. Stoker grabbed the onrushing blade with a deft flick of his right hand. The punk screeched as Stoker twisted the wrist upwards, backwards and in on itself. Stoker made mincemeat of the bones as if they were cooked macaroni.

  Stoker decided to be nice. He flashed his well-polished police badge which sat snugly in a real-leather wallet.

  ‘You got one chance kid, and I’m telling you to desist. Do not resist.’

  The kid was young and brash, and black, which was irrelevant to Frank Stoker. Punks were punks. And punks got levelled.

  The kid snarled:

  ‘Fuck you, you white idiot – I’ll fucking ki..’

  The reason that sentence finished in the middle of a word is that Stoker had stopped the punk talking through sheer physical violence. He smashed his right elbow into the punk’s throat, sending him flying into the window of the cabin. This kid was strong and didn’t fall immediately. Sometimes Stoker wished punks would make it easy on themselves.

  Within a second, Stoker was on him again, dealing out more punishment – a headbutt to the forehead of the kid.

  BANG.

  The fight was over as quickly as, or even more quickly than, it had started. The kid crashed into a heap. His breathing was shallow, but Frank was relieved to see breathing was ongoing.

  Up, down, up, down.

  In, out, in, out.

  Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

  You probably get the gist.

  Relief washed over him. He didn’t need another damn death on his damn conscience.

  Not tonight.

  Stoker reached over touched the lady on the left shoulder, firmly but without overt sexual intent.

  ‘You OK lady?’ he growled.

  As she turned he noticed she had one blue eye, except for the other, which was a shade of jade which struck Frank as unusual. Frank was a standard heterosexual man and couldn’t help but notice she was a beautiful female girl, aged about nineteen years of age. She had an hourglass figure, big breasts coupled with a small waist. Statistically, in a few years things would start to go south. But men like Frank Stoker didn’t wait around for that to happen.

  Frank’s touch was soft - she was amazed someone so violent could be so tender.

  ‘I’m amazed someone so violent could be so tender’ she pouted.

  ‘Violent? Hmph.’ Stoker shrugged. ‘I just hate to see a damsel in distress’, he continued.

  ‘Well, looks like this little rodeo is over’ she replied, almost instantly.

  Their snappy dialogue had sexual undertones.

  ‘And does this damsel have a name?’ Stoker replied, maintaining the back and forth.

  ‘Why yes, name’s Chloe.’ she said. (The conversation was still going on).

  ‘Frank Stoker’ said Stoker, again replying.

  ‘Well, Mr Stoker, looks like I owe you my…’

  The sentence was never finished. She glanced over Stoker’s left shoulder and her face turned the normal colour of standard paper. White. She released herself of the grip of Frank’s right hand and turned 180 degrees before retreating to the very back of the carriage. Stoker sensed danger. He spun on his heels like some kid’s whirling top.

  The punk obviously had two friends on board the train, and they wanted their pound of flesh. They both strutted over to Stoker with the confidence of prom queens on prom night (N.B. They were both male).

  One was big, a white kid, and the other was a small but dangerous looking Filipino. Both were probably still teenagers. They grasped lit cigarettes aggressively between their top and bottom lips – clear smokers both.

  He warned them.

  ‘You’ve seen what I’ve done to your friend. If either of you takes one step further – you join him in the hospital.’

  Sometimes, warnings are heeded. But sometimes, kids are dumb.

  They charged him, and nearly had him off balance. But Stoker was stronger and quicker, and drove his knee into the groin of the smaller Filipino, upending him instantly. He followed with an arcing kick from his right boot into the face of the bigger white kid – suddenly what had previously been facial features dissolved into pulp. Stoker smiled inside his head at the simple equation. Strong legs plus a hard boot plus a soft face (stay with this please) equals skin milkshake.

  The Filipino was writhing on the floor like a de-legged caterpillar. Snarling, he reached into his pants band for his concealed gun, (which Stoker had already clocked instantly upon first seeing him but the author chose not to mention it at the time), but Stoker was on him and tore the weapon from his hand, before smashing the butt into the sternum of the attacker.

  ‘Give up kid. Give up.’ Said Frank.

  ‘You… don’t… understand…’ spluttered the kid through blood red lips, ‘Magnelli will…. you’re fucking… dead.’

  Frank drove his left fist into the jaw of the still writhing Filipino and sent him to sleep. One hell of a damn lullaby.

  The white kid was out for the count. The black kid lay slumped against the door of the train.

  The carriage was empty and the train had stopped. Time to assess the scene – three targets down. No injuries beyond a throbbing left fist. No witnesses. Except for Chloe of course – but when Stoker turned round, she was gone. She must have ducked out before he could notice.

  Stoker coolly left the carriage after an impressive opening chapter.

  Looks like this was his damn stop.

  Chapter 2.

  Stoker walked through the New York City streets like a ghost. H
e cut a path of black menace through the clouds of neon. He handed a bum a dollar in Time Square before walking through the Bronx and then back through Time Square. Walking was his peace… his solace in a world gone to hell.

  Stoker had been a beat cop for twenty two of his twenty five years on the force, and held city records for arrests and several bravery badges. He was a ruthless man. A violent man. But to the criminals of New York… he was an urban myth. A legend.

  ‘Twenty five years a cop, and what have I changed?’ Stoker, thought, in his head.

  ‘God damned nothing’ he continued aloud, with humility and modesty.

  He walked… past bookies, bums and blondes… through alleyways and across streets… walked… walked…

  New York seemed to breathe on nights like this. It seemed to sing, songs of great joy and songs of great sadness. What a big city.

  Eventually, near midnight, he stopped at the diner below his flat, ‘The Stop-In’, and spoke to a man who was wiping the tables. Incidentally, the man was African American.

  ‘We’re closed!’ Cried the man.

  ‘Jesus Moe, is that how you treat all your regulars?’ Shot back Stoker, rapier quick.

  ‘Oh, sorry Frank, I didn’t know it was you.’

  Moe walked over to Stoker and they embraced, ending with an effortless and natural inverted handshake.

  ‘Now tell me Moe, you got any respectable damn Blues music in this old juke of yours yet?’

  Moe laughed heartily at the joke, which he found very funny.

  ‘Oh Stoker, you been makin’ that joke fo’ ten years now! It’s the same ol’ Juke… same ol’ songs’.

  Frank laughed as well. It was a natural conversation… two old friends shooting the breeze. Skin colour really didn’t enter into it. They were just friends.

  ‘If you didn’t make the best damn soul food in New York City, I wouldn’t still trek my worthless ass down here twice a night. Louisiana ribs, Moe, with collard greens.’

  ‘Trek? You live upstairs you dummy!’ Moe crowed, as he hobbled back to the kitchen.

  Stoker cracked his knuckles and sipped on his ice water (that he had previously ordered from Moe and Moe had provided quietly.) He rubbed his left hand with, obviously, his right hand. It had dealt the final blow and it throbbed like Harry Potter’s wand.

  His huge frame sat awkwardly in the small wooden chair, but he still looked sexually attractive to the opposite gender (and up to 10% of his own gender; the endowed male gender).

  ‘Too damn old for this nonsense now, Stoker’, he mumbled to himself after a while, still tellingly rubbing his hand.

  ‘If any of them youngun’s was worth a dime, you wouldn’t need to still be on the street, whoopin’ hoodlum’s asses’ said Moe, who had brought Stoker’s food. ‘Oh don’t be embarrassed now Frank, I spend most of my day talkin’ to myself too.’

  ‘Jesus Moe, you’re right. You always know how to put things. In some ways you’re smarter than some of the Harvard educated lawyers I deal with.’

  To take that sentence literally would of course be absurd – Moe was an unskilled, uneducated café owner – but you could tell that Stoker meant it kindly.

  After finishing up his meal, he went upstairs his apartment, finally ready to sleep.

  His shelves were lined with hundreds of books, ranging from complicated criminology textbooks to fine literature. Stoker wasn’t one to brag, but if he was, he would simply tell the truth about his voracious appetite for reading words in books.

  He pumped out two hundred press ups, which came easy to his massive muscles. Stoker was forty four years old, but had the hard, muscular body of a matador in his mid to late twenties. He drank few glasses of gin whilst reading a few pages of Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’ – a classic novel from hundreds of years ago - and lay down to sleep.

  Sleep never came easy to a man like Stoker, but eventually he drifted away. He went to sleep.

  He never dreamed.

  Never dreamed.

  Dreamed.

  Chapter 3.

  Across the sleeping city, on a pier by a warehouse by the docks, a grey haired Caucasian man, who was awake, dressed in a red fine wool turtle neck, grey slacks, and shiny black shoes, speaks softly with moist mouth lips into his cellular phone.

  ‘What do you mean, you couldn’t kill her and she escaped from the train carriage?’ He said, breathing foul cigarette smoke into the cool night air. ‘Some guy? One guy stopped all three of you?’ He continued, gently running his fingers down the railing at the side of the pier.

  ‘Look, I’m Thomas Magnelli,’ he said, pointing out the name of his character, ‘and when I say some broad dies… she dies. You’d better fix this or I’ll fix you – permanently’. The way he said ‘permanently’ clearly implied that he would kill whoever he was speaking to.

  Magnelli threw his cell into the Hudson River and turned to speak to a man by his side.

  The man was a mountain – the best part of seven feet tall and a rippling ball of muscle. Surprisingly, the man was neither white nor black, but was an Asian man. Built like a taller, slimmer sumo wrestler, and weighing over three hundred pounds. He wore silk trousers, and carried a scabbard which concealed a katana: a deadly samurai sword. He smoked a potent brew of Oriental spices and tobacco from a pipe made from Bonsai wood.

  ‘Hitoshi. We may have a problem. This bitch Chloe Crawford must know we are on to her – looks like she’s bought protection. If these shitheads can’t finish the job, I’ll need a professional. I’ll need you.’ Magnelli pointed his pointy finger at Hitoshi when he said the word ‘you’. It was neither relevant nor threatening and unworthy of comment.

  Hitoshi bowed elegantly and deferentially (in the Japanese fashion) and grunted in reply.

  Magnelli sighed and stretched, striding softly to the lapping waters of the Hudson. Somebody would need to pay for this. Image was everything to a man with an empire like Magnelli’s. He had run the lower East side for close to fifteen years now, in part due to the regular and generous bribes he paid to New York’s Finest, but mainly due to his fearsome reputation.

  Six months ago he had taken control of the entire city’s crime network. He was the head honcho. Numero Uno. Alpha Dog. The Big Swinging Dick. Cock Of The Walk. You Get The Idea. It would be bad for business if he allowed even a shred of doubt to enter the minds of his clients or his competitors.

  He spotted a cockroach strutting arrogantly towards him.

  ‘You know, I have respect for creatures like you. You never give in. You never give up. You take what you want. I respect that’.

  He crushed the cockroach with the heel of his snakeskin boot.

  ‘But you disgust me. I detest you.’ He added ruthlessly as he walked into the warehouse through a side door. Hitoshi followed, floorboards creaking under his massive weight.

  Magnelli’s footsteps echoed in the cavernous space inside – save for a few decaying canning machines there wasn’t much going on.

  He bisected the floor by walking across it and conceitedly typed in a thirty two digit code into a small panel by a door. The keypad beeped submissively with each key stroke. Mechanisms whirred and bolts unbolted. Magnelli entered the smaller room, still callously smoking his cigarette. Slowly, the lights flickered, casting light onto a diabolical scene.

  Over thirty black bags lined up against the wall. The bags were about six feet long and about two feet wide. They had zips down their fronts. The bags were tagged with names. Names of the deceased. These were body bags. Quite literally bags filled with bodies. Bodies of people killed, presumably, by Magnelli’s criminal organisation.

  ‘Holy fuck, how the hell have we got such a backlog here?’ Magnelli stepped over the first bag and kicked the second. A dull thud responded.

  ‘Get these processed and get them out of here. We can’t hold this many at one time.’

  Magnelli reached for another cigarette and an extravagant, carved ivory lighter. He raised them to his lips, sparked the
cigarette and began to suck. He sucked and sucked until the draw was complete. Then he pulled the cigarette from his lips. He exhaled smoke menacingly, before sitting back down on his expensive chair.

  Hitoshi grunted again.

  Chapter 4.

  Stoker woke at 7am. He had never set an alarm in his life – had never needed to. He rose and walked naked to the shower. His manhood swung eagerly in the cool calm air of his flat.

  Sexy saxophone music played from an unseen source.

  As he stood underneath the shower in the normal way, it took him a couple of minutes to remember the train journey home. Stoker was so steeped in violence, it took more than a train brawl to leave a mark.

  One thing he couldn’t forget, as he scrubbed his athletic body, muscles bulging like rocks, were the eyes of the lady on the train… Callie? Charlie? Chloe. She seemed to look into his very soul with her gaze.

  He scrubbed and scrubbed, beyond the point of being hygienically clean – as if to wash away invisible stains of guilt and regret relating to events of his past.

  Fifteen minutes after waking up, Stoker left his flat, feeling unusually relaxed. Stoker hated that feeling – it normally meant a seriously shitty day lay ahead.

  His suspicions were confirmed when he walked past his local newsstand and picked up a copy of the New York Times. After establishing a natural rapport with the Irish-origin newsboy, he stared at the front page:

  HERO ‘MAN IN BLACK’ PUMMELS THUGS, SAVES MAYOR’S DAUGHTER, LEAVES WITHOUT TRACE, THIS HAPPENED ON A TRAIN, OCCURRED LAST NIGHT, MAYOR THANKFUL

  Concerns attack may have been mob connected – 3 page story inside

  What most concerned Stoker was the freeze-frame from the CCTV on board the train. Half of his face had been captured as he left the train, and though he was not immediately identifiable, Stoker knew there was a chance he could be recognised by one of his colleagues, or worse – someone from the evil criminal underworld.

  He couldn’t decide which would be worse – if someone at New York Police station noticed, he could be suspended for excessive violence and not booking the thugs. But if a baddie noticed it and worked out if was him, that would mean he would be hunted by criminals as a revenge attack.