The Sun God

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Jimmy’s fist connected with the jaw of a West End theatre actor named Rupert Rowe. A wet c***k of breaking bone was swallowed by the noise in the crowded Argyll Arms pub in Soho. The portly actor stumbled into a group of husky dock-workers who had been drinking heavily since they had clocked out several hours earlier. They responded immediately with an outcry of, “Oy!” and a sharp blow to the offending actor’s guts, propelling him back into the crowd. Jimmy sidestepped the groaning actor and let him fall to the dirty floor. He did not get up.

It was nearing midnight and the crowd in the Argyll Arms had been getting drunker and louder by the hour. Several beers had been spilt by the actor’s headlong plunge into the crowd, so within moments, a fight erupted and spread through the bar like wildfire. Jimmy avoided a fist coming from his right, deflected a thrown beer glass with his left shoulder, braced himself for an unavoidable blow to his side and then managed to duck under a table.

A slender young woman, a head shorter than everyone around her, forcefully pushed her way through the brawling crowd. She regularly had to avoid an oncoming blow, but she dealt out a few of her own and managed to get to the back of the room un-accosted. The noise of roaring and cursing men was deafening and disorienting. She finally spotted her chestnut-haired friend under a table gathering coins that had scattered on the filthy beer-soaked floor. She dropped to one knee right beside him.

“What are you doing Jimmy!” she shouted right into his ear.

He jumped, hit his head on the table, cursed, and looked into her questioning hazel eyes.

“Quinn! Great! Help me pick these up.”

“Leave them. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Jimmy looked at his friend with shock and worry. “Leave the money?!”

Quinn smiled. “You’re right I’m messing with you. I just wanted to see your face. We never leave money behind. Come on, let’s pick this up and get out of here. Why is this on the floor anyway?”

“These are my winnings”

“So I assume you’re the cause of all this?” she indicated the surrounding bar fight with a twirl of her index finger.

“No, absolutely not; it was this fat dishonourable bastard of an actor that started it all. He tried to cheat me at cards, Quinn.”

“Jimmy, you cheat at cards.”

“That’s no reason for him to do it,” Jimmy said indignantly.

“So does this place have a back door?”

“Certainly does. I checked when I came in. It leads to the alley out back.”

Quinn stuffed the last of the coins in her pockets, grabbed Jimmy by the arm and pulled him up into the fighting crowd. She punched a dockworker in the ribs, kicked out the knee of a man twice her size, and burst through the back door into the cold dark night. Thick London fog obscured the light from the gas-lit street lamps. They sped away from the pub, though no-one was following.

After running down a few streets, they dropped down to a slow walk. Jimmy clutched his side, where he had taken a hard blow, and groaned.

“I’m going to feel that for a while.”

“You can rest on the ship,” Quinn replied.

“What ship? I thought we weren’t leaving for the Middle-East for a few weeks.”

“Change of plans. We need to be in Liverpool in two days. We’re going to Guatemala.”

“We’re going to Guatemala in the rainy season?” Jimmy asked reluctantly.

“They paid us a two-hundred-pound advance and promised a thousand-pound fee,” Quinn countered.

“Let’s go to Guatemala in the rainy season,” Jimmy cheered.