━━━━━━ ༻ 003 ༺ ━━━━━━
" Irish Trouble "

          THOUGH IT HAD BEEN HER CHOICE to walk a significant distance towards the Garrison alone that early afternoon, Jackie found herself falling victim to a case of acute melancholia while subjected to the humid air of Small Heath and the busy, but scarcely pleasant streets. It was in places like these that she missed the comfort of her home the most, such that even her easiest mask to wear — that of a compliant woman with not a care in the world — flickered out existence to reveal grimaces and threatening frowns.

Somewhere not so far behind, she knew Gene was following her, keeping a low profile and an unsuspecting distance, but even his presence's promise of safety did not cure her overarching uneasiness, not so much because of the attention she already expected to be receiving when she decided to wear one of her finer dresses for the meeting, but rather with the overall ambiance that this side of town presented itself to her.

The night before, she had memorized the way from the street where they've parked their automobile to the Garrison, but she will be first to admit she might have underestimated the distance she needed to walk. Right as she was contemplating turning back and leaving this ridiculous quest of asserting dominance for another day and another means too, a car pulled besides her. Being met with the end of a pistol's barrel standing out of the window, held by a driver whose trigger finger was twitching, Jackie was forced to fall to a stop.

"Get in the car," a tough, yet familiar accent greeted her.

"Do you not remember me, Freddie?" Jackie didn't make a single move to follow his order, holding her only clear motion to be her eyebrows rising.

"Nurse Alloways," he called her as he used to back in Frace, "do us both a favor and get in the car."

"Good," Jackie nodded. "You do remember me, hence this is exactly how you treat someone responsible for you still being alive. Wonderful to know." She stalled to look back the way she came, locking eyes with her brother, a little further down the street, grasping his own pistol from his coat. Though discreet, she shook her head.

"Get in the fucking—"

"No need to shout, Freddie boy," Jackie opened the backseat door and locked eyes with the second Irish man waiting for her there. She sighed, acting bemused with her careless smile even as she entered such an obviously dangerous position. She closed the door and got comfortable in her seat with her purse in her lap, between her hands and watched Freddie pass the gun onto his friend, a bald fellow whose gaze upon her was downright disgusting. "Where are we going?"

"For a ride," the bald fellow answered. "We got some concerns regarding the deal your brother's men—"

"I am not talking to you," Jackie interrupted him without a single glance to his pistol pointed at her. She looked ahead, into the rear mirror so she good catch Freddie's eyes every each second while he drove off. "I'll talk with who I know, and right now, I only know you, Freddie, so talk."

Enraged bewilderment radiated off of the man to her right, however, Freddie was bound to sigh. "Why did you get involved with this business, Jackie?"

"I was tired of seeing blood every day, so you best believe I quit being a nurse the second my brothers got rich enough for me not to need that job anymore," Jackie replied leaning back in her seat and rolling her shoudlers down. "Is this how you roll these days? Threaten women you haven't seen in a while with guns in order to check in on them?"

"We're the one asking the questions here..."

"I'm not talking to you," Jackie spoke her reminder louder to the man besides her.

"Your brother's men promised us guns," Freddie hurried to address the situation. He left room for retaliation, but since Jackie fell silent and her gaze was almost unblinking when he met it in the mirror, he continued, "Then they left, all of them, without delivering. We even gave a deposit—"

"My brother's business is his own," Jackie decides to interrupt there. "Which means that whatever your men's dealings are with him, it's none of my concern and you shouldn't think that I am capable of answering your inquiries. However, your implied questions are rather narrow minded, so even I, a complete outsider, a profiteering sister whose enjoying a holiday in a dredful humid country can answer them. That's how export-import business works, Freedie. You make a deposit, the shipment arrives, you pay the rest and take your merchandise. Your guarantee is the bill you received upon making the deposit and on it, you also have a date for when to expect the shipment."

"We need a better guarantee than that," Freddie shook his head. "It's a lot of money we paid for your guns."

"An investment I hear you were desperate to make," Jackie responded promptly. "Now that we settled this, be a darling and get me to Garrison Lane."

"You're closing dealings with the Peaky Blinders-?!" The outraged interruption of the man to her right choked in a damp noise that startled Freddie to turn around and look back. By the wideness of his eyes, he clearly did not expect to see his business partner holding with a shaking, unsteady grip the side of his neck, from where a needle was standing out.

Having taken the pistol from the man running out of air, Jackie pointed it at the back of Freddie's head, "Eyes on the road and listen closely, you fucking bastard." After a breath's moment of pause in which Freddie followed her order, Jackie continued, leaning forward, "My men are mine to do with them what the fuck I please. They go where I say they go and I haven't a single strand of care for what you think is a good guarantee or not, because you do not make the rules to my business. You think guns don't sell well? Think again. I have hundreds of clinets willing to pay me perhaps even more than you are for the shipment coming this month so tell your boys from Dublin to hold onto their bill and stop acting like children."

"We need those guns, Jackie."

"For your little revolution, right? Well, hate to break it to you, Freddie boy, but I don't give a fuck about your uprising," Jackie pushed the cold barrel into the back of his head. "Try something like this on me or my guys again and I'll make sure my sellers all know that the IRA is not worth the bother of selling a single thing to." Jackie glimpsed out the window to her left, "Stop the car."

She waited with the gun still pointed at the back of Freddie's head for him to pull over. In that moment of silence, the whistles of the man to her right got on her nerves, such that, when she spoke again, she had to address his state. "Drive your body to the hospital or at least a doctor. Tell them he tried to sew on his own and failed miserably. He'll live, which is a mercy, I hope you know."

"This land of work is not meant for a woman," Freddie sighed, shaking his head once he felt Jackie moving the pistol away.

"Let me know when you have a successful business of your own so I can start taking advice from you," Jackie shook the bullets from the pistol and let the four of them fall on the ground of the car. She dropped the emptied gun on the floor as well, and finally searched into her purse for a paper she leant forward and tappes on Freddie's chest. "For the ride."

It wasn't long after she exited the car — perhaps she made it, in her her slightly dazed fury lingering to redden her cheeks, as far as the corner where crossing the street would get her facing the clean façade of The Garrison Pub — that hands grabbed her shoulders. Had her brother voice not sounded to drop the blur from her eyes, Jackie's raised hand would have smacked him across the face right there, in the middle of the sidewalk.

"It's me, Jackie," Gene hurried to reassure her while his hands too sought his own reassurance by climbing to her face and studying her for any sign of bruises. "Who were those men? Did they hurt—?"

"I dealt with it," Jackie chilled herself with the sound of true bluntness being spoken off of her own lips, but she witnessed almost unphased how that numbness continued to take over her in such way that she pushed her brother off with a frozen demeanour. "We'll proceed as planned," she announced, leaving no room for further negotiation. Even if she would have been fine with discussing more there and then, the public setting of the conversation was undesirable enough that even Gene had to agree what had happened was a topic to be tackled only later. His disapproval of still going through with the Peaky Blinders gamble on their business after the incident on the street mattered very little when by the time Gene made sense of it all, Jackie was already disappearing into the pub.

Places like that saw little female clientèle, so Jackie was not too startled by the gulped silence she was greeted with at the first steps she took towards bar. What did however manage to shock her was recognizing the lady bartender as the dame in red who Mr. Shelby brought to the races.

"Can I get you anything?" The bartender inquired.

"I'm here for Mr. Shelby."

"One moment," Grace then nodded, freeing her hands, wiping them clean on a cloth and going around the bar to the back, in the small office of which she knew she'd fight Arthur Shelby. "The American woman your brother was expecting is here."

Jackie looked over her shoulder when the door opened again to watch Gene follow through with their plan and sit himself quietly at a small table close to the exit. Her attention was hooked away from him only by an approaching man's voice.

"Miss Alloways."

She turned around and observed a well dressed man, distinguished in his appearance even as it came with a messy shave on his moustache, approach her. The bartender, she noticed, was back behind the bar.

"Arthur Shelby," he extended his hand and though the lady shook it, he was not yet dulled enough by the drinks he's been having since the start of the day not to be able to tell she was tense for an entirely understandable reason. "I'm not the Shelby you're looking for. That would be my brother and he's on his way, rest assured. I've been told you are the prettiest out of our possible business partners and that observation wasn't exaggerated, I admit. We'll wait together, away from these loud bastards," he gestured widely towards the rest of the pub, while leading the both of them towards a door on the right side of the bar, leading to a more private compartment. "Grace," Arthur looked up to the bartender after opening the door for Jackie. "Get us...," he hesitated, looking down at Miss Alloways who, now that she was passing underneath his arm to get to the room, he had just noticed was much shorter of stature than she seemed when her intimidating eyes painted a status of strength around her.

"Whiskey," Jackie filled in the blanks left by his startled pause. "Preferably American."

"We have Irish," Grace noted, taking a look behind her at the bottles.

"My disappointment is immeasurable," Jackie shrugged, taking a seat down at the table in the small room. "But I suppose it will do while we wait."

Arthur gulped, nodded shortly towards Grace and then joined Jackie at the table after having closed the door. An uncomfortable silence followed, that she did not wish to cure and he had no clue how to dillute.

Waiting there was an equivalent to simmering in her own broth of anger. Arthur didn't seem half as bad as her pending headache was making him look, but with the help of the alcohol deepening the red of her cheeks, Jackie lost enough of her senses to completely deny reason. The ticking of the watch he wore started irritating her the longer they waited in that room.

Gene checked the watch on his own wrist ever five minutes, watching the door his sister entered over his raised newspaper running out of pages for him to read. He had a half finished pint on his small round table, but no desire to finish the bitter drink and thus stand out as odd waiting there in a pub growing busier by the minute. At the mark of half an hour having passed since he sat down, the door towards the street opened and his eyes locked with Thomas Shelby's cold gaze.

"Mr. Alloways," Tommy stopped and greeted. "I apologise for keeping you waiting. Please, join us..." His voice was bound to fade behind the sound of the door to his right opening.

Jackie stopped at the sight of Tommy. "Have you ever heard of the saying 'time is money'?" Once more, silence was drawn over the entirety of the pub. "I don't appreciate you wasting mine, Mr. Shelby," with disappointment heaving her tone, Jackie drew her attention away. In a hurried walk she stopped at the bar and left the money for her drink on the table. She heard her brother standing up and only because of that she could pay little to no mind to the bartender whose omnipresence in Thomas Shleby's life was starting to bother Jackie more than the alcohol burning in her veins on the fuel of the tensions of the day.

Thomas did not stand in her way, but after pausing to look at the pub's stilled clients with a wordless demand that they carry on their business, he followed the Alloways' siblings outside. "I would like a second chance to prove to you that I am a serious client."

"Let's not bother causing a scene here...," Gene managed to sneak in his concerned whisper down at his sister, but she was already fired up enough to stop in the middle of the street and turn around there and then.

"A second chance would mean that you have something I want and right now, that's not the case." Her raspy voice was a challenge to be matched with aggression, but with particular calm, Thomas approached slowly, far busier in retrieving a folded letter from the inner pocket of his heavy black coat with inner velvet lining. He unfolded the paper and held it up when he was a few steps away from Jackie.

"I do apologize for keeping you waiting, Miss Alloways," Tommy delivered his apology a second time, numb in such fashion that Gene would have been convinced he didn't mean it in the slightest. "But I am planning on making our time worth it in the end. If you allow me..." Given her prolonged stare at the piece of paper he held up for her, he already knew she'd send her brother off and agree to have this chat, finally happening at much different stages of acquaintance than at the races. He knew more than she would have liked him to.