The latter, however, had a tendency to land him in hot water.
His most recent exploits in the cardrooms had placed him in the path of one Santino Randazzo, himself an amateur poker-player - and, unluckily for Lewis, the younger brother of one of the more prominent mob-bosses in the Las Vegas area. Lewis hadn’t known who Randazzo was, or so Dolly assumed, when he tried to cheat him with a (by all accounts, poorly executed) card-up-the-sleeve trick; if he had known, and had gone ahead with the ruse anyway, then Dolly could only credit him with both more guts and fewer brain-cells than appearances suggested.
Randazzo had been alerted to the attempted con, of course. And, though he’d let Lewis leave the table after the game, he’d been far from happy.
“Kill him,” he’d ranted at Dolly, when he’d summoned her and Lucian to his penthouse suite at one of the bigger hotels on the Strip - holding court for half an hour in his silk pyjamas like the ghost of Howard Hughes. “Squash that little fucker like a bug. I want him ended, you understand me? Ended!”
They’d taken the job, because it didn’t do to say no to a Randazzo - even a second-tier one like Santino. But neither she nor Lucian were anticipating taking much satisfaction from the kill.
Sugar Love Mountain was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But Lewis, they knew, tended to work the night shift until 5am and retire thereafter to the cabin he kept on site, where he’d stay sleeping until at least two o’clock in the afternoon.
They’d decided on 9am, therefore, as the best time to make their approach - by which point, they’d reasoned, he would have passed into unconsciousness.
He kept the doors to his cabin unlocked: partly, Dolly suspected, because the Ranch was so far out in the middle of nowhere that even the most committed burglar would think twice before crossing the desert to get there, and partly because the madam who ran the place in Lewis’ absence - a Mae West type with a sharp eye, a lot of tight corsetry and an enviable collection of firearms - wouldn’t have thought twice before unloading every round in the chamber of her revolver into the vitals of any would-be interloper.
But they went in through the back window anyway: Lucian pulling up the wide glass pane in his giant’s hands without so much as a drop of sweat falling from him even in the heat of the morning sun, and the pair of them slipping through the gap he’d created, unfurling themselves softly on the ugly moss-green carpet of Lewis’ study.
And saw that there was someone there already.
Not Lewis, though: a girl, young and white and skinny as a garden rake, gloves like theirs on her hands and a grey-green wad of hundred-dollar bills in one fist so thick it would have been incriminating even if she hadn’t been standing by the open wall-safe she’d very clearly just raided.
A thief, Dolly thought. A thief, doing him over just as we’ve come by to do him in. What are the odds?
Lucian reached for his weapon to put the girl down, but she was - to Dolly’s astonishment - too quick for him: darting across the room and hurling herself through the gap in the window in an acrobatic roll, landing upright on the balls of her feet with the grace of a swan and sprinting away with cheetah speed across the sand outside.
He turned to follow her, gun out and ready, but Dolly stopped him.
Not now, she told him, very nearly silently. She’s got what she wanted - she won’t be back while we’re here. We can deal with her later.
He nodded, acquiescing - though she could tell he wasn’t best pleased - and they pressed on, further into the cabin.
It was a straightforward hit. Lewis was sleeping, curled up in a foetal position in his underwear, drool gluing his face to the sheets: three clean shots to the head through a pillow and it was done, Santino Randazzo’s little problem solved.
She bought Lucian breakfast, afterwards: drove them both to an all-day restaurant she knew and liked in Henderson and ordered him scrambled eggs and pancakes and three refills of the fruit smoothies he seemed to always be drinking.
“You’re annoyed we let her go,” she said, pouring herself a coffee. “The girl.”
“A little,” he said, through a mouthful of eggs. “Maybe.”
“You want to go after her? Girl like that shouldn’t be too hard to find, if we ask around.”
He chewed, swallowed the eggs and replaced them immediately with a square of buttered blueberry pancake.
“Maybe,” he said. Then: “She was good. Fast.”
Dolly nodded, wondering where he was going with the observation. He was a closed book sometimes, she found; inscrutable, even to her.
“That she was,” she added, wary. “Light on her feet, too.”
He finished the bite of pancake, Adam’s apple bobbing in his bull neck, and washed it down with yet more of the smoothie.
“Do you ever wonder,” he began, a contemplative look in his eyes, “whether it might be good for us, to bring someone like her in on things? Someone who could get us in and out of places fast, when we need to?”
Ah, Dolly thought - remembering how she’d felt herself before she’d found him. How she’d really begun to feel the lack of an extra pair of hands when she was on the job.
That’s it, then. He wants a helper.
“Might be,” she told him, blowing steam across the rim of her coffee mug. “Let’s have a think about it, shall we?”
Chapter 20
Golders Green, London, May 1998
It wasn’t the most elaborate of birthday dinners. But it was the best El had been able to do and, with the acquisition of Weeping Skeleton on hold - and with it, Colin and Lauren Robinsons’ dreams of securing for Horatio the most coveted rosette the Northamptonshire dog world had to offer - she was determined that Rose should enjoy it.
And as insalubrious and unromantic a venue as it was, Aphrodite’s was at least familiar. A run-down Greek taverna around the corner from the Golders Green Underground, it had served innumerable times over the years as a meeting-place for El and Ruby, and occasionally Sita, while in the throes of a job, and in the absence of any more convenient location. All three of them knew the owner, an Australian entrepreneur by the name of Lachlan Andreou, and were sufficiently well-acquainted with all five of his ubiquitously sullen waiters and bar staff that finding a table to eat at or an empty stool on which to down a complimentary ouzo was rarely a problem, even when the place was at its busiest.
Today, it was entirely empty, save for El and Rose and Andreou himself, who - in the spirit of longstanding almost-friendship and the promise of a favour repaid at an unspecified point in the future - had offered El the exclusive use of the restaurant between 2 and 5pm and a three-course meal on the house, with a bottle of his finest Moschofilero thrown in.
Both the front and back doors were locked and bolted, at her insistence; the Closed sign had been hung in the window to deter any would-be diners. El happened to know, moreover, that Andreou kept a very powerful, wholly unregistered twelve-gauge shotgun behind the bar; and, more comfortingly still, that he knew exactly how to handle it.
Eating there was a less secure move than doing as Ruby had recommended and staying put in the Holloway Road flat with the windows shut. And perhaps, El considered, it was a stupid one: accessing the restaurant from the outside would have been difficult, but not impossible, and however quickly Andreou might have been able to move to retrieve and aim his weapon, there was no doubt in her mind that Madera and Carruthers could be quicker.
But it was Rose’s birthday, and Sophie was safe under the watchful, protective and possibly - as El suspected but hadn’t been able to confirm - similarly well-armed wings of Harriet and RD Laing… and they’d had to do something, hadn’t they? Something even a little more pleasurable than spending another afternoon on that sofa, waiting, surrounded by toppling towers of hard rock detritus and the pungent scent of cat?
Although… perhaps the waiting, at least, would be over soon. If everything went to plan.
“Thank you,” Rose told her, reaching for a final piece of
baklava. “This was lovely.”
“I’m sorry it’s not, you know… more,” El replied, lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply, regretfully.
Rose picked up her knife; cut the baklava in two and put half on El’s dessert plate.
“It’s funny,” she said, watching El over the rim of her wine glass, “but the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether Ruby might have been onto something about you, after all. You really do worry too much.”
“Do I?”
“You do. I just told you, very clearly, how much I enjoyed this - you doing this for me, arranging it all. I actually used the word lovely. And yet your immediate reaction, on hearing this, is to apologise. To tell me how inadequate you find it.”
El froze, a jet of smoke escaping her mouth; felt suddenly, unexpectedly ambushed.
“I love you,” Rose continued, matter-of-factly, cleaving the remaining baklava into four still-smaller pieces. “It’s possible I don’t tell you enough, I realise. But I do. I really do. And if I’ve somehow done something to make you anxious that this isn’t the case or given you reason to believe you ought to be anything other than absolutely secure in my commitment to you or to our relationship… then I’m sorry.”
She took one of the slivers of baklava between her fingers and ate it, thoughtfully.
“I’m sorry,” El repeated, when she could speak again.
Rose frowned at her - not unkindly but quizzically, as if El had begun out of the blue to speak in Sumerian.
“Not sorry sorry,” El added. Rose’s frown deepened. “I mean… fuck. I’m not sure I even know what I mean. Sorry.”
At this, most feeble attempt at an explanation, Rose smiled.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” she said. “Not for this,” she gestured around at the restaurant, “which has been - as I may have mentioned - the loveliest birthday I could have hoped for. And certainly not for anything else. I know these are strange times - God knows, I know - but I couldn’t have wished for anyone better to have suffered through them with me. Okay?”
“Okay,” El mumbled, dropping her eyes and taking another, deeper drag on the cigarette.
Rose’s smile turned sardonic.
“You perhaps haven’t noticed, but I’ve been a little all over the place these last few months. These last couple of years, actually. Tense. Stressed. Absolutely terrified, actually - of something happening to Sophie, obviously. But then also, lately, you know… to you.”
“To me,” El said, monosyllabic in her awkwardness.
“To you, yes. And how’s this for irony? The more terrified I’ve become of it… the more I’ve needed you. And so now, as I’m sitting here literally frightened for your life and my life and my daughter’s life… I find I need you a great deal. So much so, in fact, that I’m not sure at this stage what I’d do without you. And I realise also, now I say it, what a lot of pressure that is to place on someone I’ve been with for barely six months, so perhaps we could skim over that part?” She paused, El thought to catch her breath as much as for emphasis. “The point I’m trying rather circuitously to make is: if the worries you have are founded even slightly on the belief that I’m likely to turn around one day soon and tell you that I’ve had enough or, I don’t know… somehow got you out of my system… then I can assure you, absolutely and wholeheartedly, that they’re baseless.”
El, struck entirely mute by Rose’s speech, could only nod, and extend a hand towards her across the table, stubbing out the ashy residue of her cigarette with the hand that remained.
“Good to know,” she said after a while, covering her nerves with a phantom cough. Then: “I love you too.”
Andreou drove them back to Holloway Road, as arranged; his armoured 4x4 - purchased in the heat of an internecine, multi-factional war between North West London restaurant owners now cooled to a detente - giving El at least a little reassurance as they sped through Highgate and on into Archway.
Harriet and Sophie, they found when they arrived at the flat, had decorated in anticipation of their - or rather, Rose’s - return: adding a floating, multi-coloured cluster of helium balloons to the already-full-to-bursting living room, and throwing paper streamers over some of the larger pieces of memorabilia. A home-made Victoria sponge was waiting for them on the coffee table, its forty-two candles already burning.
“This is wonderful,” Rose enthused, once the candles had been extinguished, all four of them had squeezed together on the sofa and Harriet had gone at the cake with a metal spatula. “Just wonderful. But when did you find the time to make it? And shouldn’t you be getting ready?”
The latter question she directed at Harriet, who looked - even by El’s sartorial yardstick - somewhat underdressed for the task she’d agreed to perform, in her faded jeans and ripped Soundgarden t-shirt.
“It doesn’t take long to whip up,” Harriet said, finishing up the thin sliver of sponge she’d served herself. “And I don’t know what you mean. I am ready.”
Was it possible, El wondered, that she wasn’t being disingenuous? That - even with a PhD in social psychology and a decade in applied research under her belt, in prisons and psychiatric institutions no less - she genuinely believed that her outfit fit the bill?
“I thought perhaps something slightly less… casual?” Rose offered, with such caution El could almost hear the eggshells cracking underfoot.
“This is fine, I promise you,” Harriet assured her. “Something like this… it will go far more smoothly, if I present as myself. I’m not like El here,” she dipped her head, disparagingly, El’s way. “I’m not a con artist. For me to play this at all convincingly, I’ll need to stay as close to myself as I possibly can. And if I were me, rather than the three-dimensional honey trap construct El would, I daresay, conjure up at a moment’s notice, then these are the clothes I would be wearing. QED."
Her irritation at the slight notwithstanding, El had to concede - grudgingly - that the argument had merit. Harriet wasn’t a professional; she didn’t routinely masquerade as someone she wasn’t, especially not when the stakes were as high for everyone involved as they were here.
Being herself, with just enough of a deviation from the standard template to make the task itself possible, was probably her best shot at pulling it off.
“Is there a dress code?” El asked.
The bar Harriet would be going to - the one they’d discovered, mostly through Karen’s skill in following the electronic breadcrumbs left by an American credit card used repeatedly on British soil, had been frequented by the mark almost every night she’d been in London - was small, discreet and prohibitively expensive: its clientele mostly wealthy, occasionally very wealthy, and exclusively female. El had been herself a handful of times, though always in the course of a job rather than as a way to meet women; Rose, despite fitting the club’s target profile to a tee, claimed never to have walked through its heavily guarded doors.
Harriet - who, as far as El knew, was straight, or at least so uniformly uninterested in everyone for the issue to be moot - hadn’t known the place existed at all.
“If there is one,” Harriet said, with a generous helping of the maybe-inadvertent condescension El was fast becoming inured to, “I shall find a way around it. I’ll pay them extra at the door, if I have to. That usually does the trick.”
It wasn’t a boast, this allusion to the enormity of her personal fortune. Harriet’s relationship to her own wealth - the wealth inherited from her father - was, at best, ambivalent; underpinned by an emotionally loaded combination of guilt, resentment and discomfort at being saddled with the Marchant name and legacy. According to Rose, she rarely touched the money she’d been left, and certainly wasn’t given to spending any of it on herself. The mountain of memorabilia she’d amassed - the ornaments, the signed posters, the guitars - had been paid for in their entirety out of her own pocket, drawing on nothing but the university salary she earned for herself.
But still, El - having lost everything she’d ev
er had - found it stuck in her throat anyway, just a little.
She’s just nervous, she told herself. She’s new to this, and anxious, and her anxiety is coming off as rudeness. That’s all it is.
They’d brought Harriet in on the job just once before: a year earlier, when Charlie Soames had put the thumbscrews on them and they’d had to look further afield for support. She’d been brilliant, then; hadn’t dropped the ball once, and had managed not only to aid them in bringing their own Soames problem to a resolution, but to convince Soames’ long-abused wife - and eventually his son, too - to free themselves from the grip of the man’s control.
She’d agreed to get involved for Rose and Sophie then, too, El remembered. To protect them; to stop harm coming to them.
This time, when Rose and El had sat her down and explained the specific nature of the threat to them all, when they’d outlined the plan Ruby had formulated and begged her to help them implement it, Harriet had said yes immediately. Hadn’t blinked; hadn’t hesitated, in spite of the danger it might bring to her door, too.
Though that, of course, had been before they’d told her exactly what helping would entail, in this particular set of circumstances…
“Thank you for doing this,” Rose said, smiling weakly at her sister.
“I’d say any time,” Harriet replied, smiling back - kinder and more sincere, now the words were directed at Rose, “but I suspect this may be a once and done for me. I really don’t know that I’ll make a very good honey trap.”
“You’ll be brilliant,” Sophie told her. “Just try to come off a bit mysterious and withholding. A little bit, you know… oh, but we mustn’t. Women like that.”
El wasn’t sure what disturbed her more: the kid’s enthusiasm for the con, since Rose had decided to stop keeping her in the dark and instead to tell her everything they knew about what was going on, or that the kid now - seemingly from nowhere - considered herself an authority on what women wanted.
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