Read Online Light Errant by Chaz Brenchley - Free Book Online Page A

good protection if Jon or Janice ever needed it, might accord them a little influence if they ever chose to use it, but it wouldn’t be conducive to making friends.
    o0o
    It was a hot day, they said, though it felt fresh to me after the heavy humidity of the Spanish coast. Not a day for leathers, though. It was a change, a pleasure to feel too cool in loose shirt and shorts, so that was what I did.
    How many times had I walked this way, this exact route down the hill into town? I couldn’t say; but I’d lived the best part of a year in that flat, while my studies and my social life were both focused around the town centre. Hundreds of times, then, for sure. Given the way I used to dash around, hectically determined to be so much a student, so involved—and given that I never caught buses, every penny saved had been crucial and I could save pounds in a week by walking everywhere—it might be pushing a thousand.
    The same streets a thousand times, and not so long ago: too recent for my feet to forget, at any rate. Sore muscle-memory took over again, following tracks I’d laid in my head more than on the pavement. I let it get on with things, never gave a thought to turning left or right at corners; my eyes and mind were busy searching, scanning, trying to spot what was different.
    Not much seemed to be the early answer. A few shopfronts on the long hill were boarded up, or dark behind their locked security grilles; but this had always been the shady side of town, businesses came and went overnight almost, empty properties simply emphasised the status quo. Or seemed to. People used to open unannounced and not bother with fixtures and fittings, or signage outside; they’d fill the window with gear that was dodgy or hot or usually both, sell cheap and buy cheaper and hope to get in two or three weeks’ trading before the police or the Macallans came to call. Either one would put them out of business. No slack in the turnover, nothing spare to pay bribes or fines or protection money.
    It didn’t matter, seemingly to anyone. Even the traders themselves didn’t noticeably worry. A mayfly trade it was: live for a day here, a day there. Follow a shop with a market stall, a stall with a van, each progressively more mobile, better able to keep ahead of the chase; when the van dies, run an insurance scam on the carcase and rent a shop again with the proceeds. They made a living, and never seriously troubled anybody.
    So I’d have expected changes, departures and new arrivals on that stretch. Even right in the heart of the city, where we came ten minutes later, it was no great surprise to find a couple of what had been major retail sites shuttered and for rent. It was ever thus. Long-time businessmen would tire eventually of the peculiar economy here, the extra overheads imposed by my family’s demands and the failures of the police; they’d find some gullible entrepreneur—usually from outside, often from a long way outside—to sell up to, and make tracks rapidly for a less interesting environment. The new boy would often last no more than a year or two, before selling on usually at a loss; and so it would go, fly-by-nights and failures following each other in ever-decreasing circles until at last some cousin of mine (or Uncle James, often Uncle James but never, ever my father, he had no eye for this) would pick the place up for a song or else—more likely—seize it in lieu of unpaid debts that might or might not be genuine or legitimate. They’d install their own man, there were always plenty of collaborators in the queue for Macallan backing; and that was the status quo ante comfortably restored, for the next decade or the next generation or however long it took before constant friction broke it down again.
    So a couple of dead sites, yes, but only a couple that I passed, that I saw. That was pretty much average, for any time these twenty years. No mass exodus, then,