by Stephen Ross
::
Hedgepig believed in himself; belief without question, utter faith. He strolled along K Road on that autumn afternoon as though everyone else on the footpath, everyone driving by in their cars—hell, everyone in central Auckland City—could hear the music thundering inside his head. He was the star of his own private music video. He was the smooth dude, a walking orgasm. He was the King of Concupiscence.
Hedgepig (that’s what they called him) was going to meet the man, and he was going to put a knife into him. He’d set up a meet for four in the afternoon in the Karangahape Road Arcade—a forgotten arcade of shuttered stores that had had its heyday back in the 1970s. Only two stores were still in business; both at the front near the street: an incense shop and a secondhand bookstore. They were side-by-side next to an abandoned video outlet with a sign in its window: Fifty cents for twelve movies all week.
Hedgepig had chosen the location, presumably, for two reasons: (1) it was a lonely, out-of-the-way public place that didn’t require a complicated journey to get to (he bused in from Mt Roskill, $1.80 fare), and (2) there were no security cameras. He could walk in the arcade’s front entrance, do his deed, slip out the back and vanish into the city’s anonymity, another loose clump of hairy human debris in a sea of same such.
Hedgepig (honestly, that’s what they called him) had a perma-smell of tobacco about him and a set of orange, cheese snack-stained fingers. He had spent all morning sharpening the hunting knife he’d stolen from his brother after his brother had gone inside for stealing a trolley load of food from a supermarket and driving over a skateboard kid in the supermarket car park on his way out.
Hedgepig had requested a meet with Mister Hobbs. A face-to-face. Hedgepig had this notion that Mister Hobbs had been ripping him off. He hadn’t. It was the meth. First rule of the delivery business: Don’t do your stuff.
Hedgepig had never met Mister Hobbs. Mister Hobbs was at the top of the supply chain, and Hedgepig was at the bottom—a delivery dude of weed, pills, meth and miscellany. He boasted he could get his mitts on Russian krocodil and Mexican snuff movies. He couldn’t. He’d sit in public bars and bore drinkers to states of concrete with tales of his underworld adventures, as though he’d been out on some kinds of great Arthurian drug quests. People mostly wanted to score. If the delivery dude was talking, they didn’t have to. They’d listen, pay their money, get what they needed, and then quietly retreat to their darkened rooms and the sweet oblivion. Hedgepig was just the bore-fart manning the cash register. Second rule of the delivery business: Don’t talk about the business.
Hedgepig came in through the front entrance of the K Road Arcade and walked his walk of the champion down to the end… to where I was standing. I’d followed him from his home, sat four rows behind him on the bus, and had shadowed him along the footpath to the arcade building. I’d then slipped around the back and had come in through the rear and waited. I’d even had time to light a cigarette and half smoke it.
The HP walked up to me.
There was no one else around. It was a cold, lonely, deserted concrete space, with no security cameras.
Hedgepig’s eyes were wide, sparkling. He was like some kind of dirty, high, hairy anime character.
“Why do you call yourself the King of Concupiscence?”
He smiled at the recognition.
“Ain’t it a cool word?” he said.
“Do you know what it means?”
He didn’t. “Don’t it roll off the tongue so beautifully?” he glowed.
“I guess.”
“The first time I heard it, I thought, that’s the word for me. I’m gunna be the king of that word.” He salivated on its syllables, “Con-coo-pis-ence.”
I was in the presence of an intellectual giant. I dropped my cigarette to the ground and slapped it out with my heel.
He studied me with a sniff of suspicion. “Are you Hobbs?”
“Nope. I work for him. He sends you his best wishes.”
The last thing the king of cups’ brain registered was the snubbed nose of the gun coming out of my coat pocket.
“Is that a silencer?”
“Yeah, mate.”
::
First published: Mondays are Murder / Akashic Books / October 2017
Copyright © 2017 Stephen Ross
