The Big O (A Screwball Noir)

by Declan Burke

  Except it was Karen who brought it up, how she’d been to see an estate agent, a guy called Terry. How he’d quoted her three-fifty for the cottage and three acres, finance to go with it….

  Ray shivering, a chilly breeze chopping up the lake. He flipped away his cigarette and walked in off the jetty up the incline towards Karen.

  ‘Talk me through it,’ she said.

  ‘What’s to say?’

  ‘The snatch. How does it work?’

  Ray gave it to her in broad strokes. Karen said: ‘And what happens if the ransom isn’t paid, it goes missing?’

  ‘It’s never happened. Most people, the kind we snatch, they’re at the high end of the scale. Insured against everything, icebergs falling on the yachts, the full nine yards. Why wouldn’t they pay? It’s not even their money.’

  ‘But just say it happens. What then?’

  ‘You’re worried, I can appreciate, because it’s Madge. But the thing is, Frank wants Madge snatched. So it’s going to happen. The guy’s made up his mind. But if you know it’s me that’s holding Madge, then you know nothing’s going to happen her.’

  ‘All due respect, Ray, but what the fuck do I know about you? I mean, we only met three days ago.’

  ‘Five if you want to be technical about it.’

  ‘Technical? Ray, three fucking times I asked what you were doing outside my place last night. Yeah? And you fed me this horseshit about how you were just passing. Now it’s because you were stalking Madge, and you want to get technical?’

  ‘Karen ––’

  ‘You lied to me, Ray. Straight to my face you lied, three fucking times. Although, I can understand why. I mean, what’s a good way to tell someone you’re kidnapping their best friend?’

  ‘You knew what I did, Karen. I told you straight off, first night we met. Now because it’s Madge you’re getting moral?’

  ‘Fuck moral! This is Madge we’re talking about.’

  ‘I hear you. But you’re presuming something’ll go wrong, that Madge’ll be exposed to some kind of threat.’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘We’ve pulled a lot of these jobs, Karen. Never once has there been a problem.’

  ‘Except this time there’s already a problem.’

  ‘You can’t stop it, Karen. And even if you could, if you tell Madge, what does that achieve? Frank arranges to have the twins snatched instead, by someone you don’t know. How would that be any better?’

  ‘Even Frank wouldn’t sink that low.’

  ‘With half a million on the line?’

  Karen considered. ‘Actually,’ she said dolefully, ‘Frank’d sell tickets to an abortion if he thought he’d get away with it.’

  Ray nodding along. ‘So you see where that leaves us. Look, Karen, you’re telling me you want this place for Anna, right?’

  ‘Mostly, yeah.’

  ‘And you’ll be a long time knocking over bookies before you put together three-fifty.’

  ‘So?’

  Ray took a deep breath, plunged on. ‘So I say we do it, snatch Madge, then take our cut and ––’

  ‘Our cut?’

  ‘You’re in it, Karen. Whether you like it or not, you’re in it now and it’s bigger than you or me. Or Madge.’

  Karen closed her eyes and swore softly. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I know this guy, he runs finance. You put up the basics, he’ll punt you the difference. He won’t screw you on points either.’

  ‘You know him that well.’

  ‘He’s a businessman, he won’t do me any favours. But yeah, he’ll be okay.’

  ‘And you’re arranging all this out of the goodness of your heart.’

  ‘Hey,’ Ray said, stung by the acid tone. ‘You want this place or not?’

  ‘Not,’ Karen said quietly.

  ‘Because,’ Ray said, nodding again, ‘it’s blood money, earned from snatching Madge. But what you have to realise is ––’

  ‘Because,’ Karen said, ‘Rossi’ll find it, track me down, and then it starts all over again.’

  ‘Fuck Rossi.’

  ‘I got a better plan.’

  ‘There is no other plan, Karen. It happens this way or ––’

  ‘First tell me,’ she said, ‘when it’s happening.’

  ‘If Frank stumps up the good faith and doesn’t change his mind, then it happens Tuesday.’

  ‘Good faith?’

  ‘Twenty grand. So we know he’s not a messer.’

  ‘He’s a messer. How long will it take once you have her?’

  ‘That all depends on Frank. If he has everything sorted and the insurance claim goes through fast, then a couple of days.’

  ‘And once Frank pays up, Madge goes home safe.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘So who gets the money?’

  ‘Frank, mostly.’

  ‘Mostly?’

  ‘We take our cut. Maybe, depending on circumstance, a little extra. What’s he going to do, ring the cops?’

  ‘What’s to stop you taking it all?’

  ‘Frank’s big mouth and five-to-ten inside. Maybe a shiv in the ribs because my guy had to take some heat from the cops.’

  ‘Okay. But what if Frank manages to lose the cash, I mean before he pays you off – your guy can’t blame you for that, can he?’

  ‘Karen ––’

  ‘And like you say, Frank can hardly go crying to the cops.’

  ‘No,’ Ray said slowly, ‘I don’t suppose he can.’

  ‘How d’you think your guy would react to that?’

  ‘How do think Madge would?’

  ‘Pretty fucking badly at first,’ Karen conceded. ‘But stinging Frank for half a million? I think she’d see the lighter side of it in the end.’

  ‘Long as he gets his points,’ Ray said, ‘my guy’s rinky-dink.’

  ‘Which leaves us,’ Karen said, ‘splitting about four hundred grand. I mean, me, you and Madge.’

  ‘If, for example, Frank fucks up and loses the ransom.’

  ‘Our problem,’ Karen said grimly, ‘will be getting to Frank before he fucks up and loses the ransom.’

  Sunday

  Doyle

  ‘So you just let him go,’ Doyle said.

  ‘The other guy,’ Moran insisted, ‘kept falling asleep.’

  Doyle consulted the arrest record. ‘Says here they were booked at two-thirty in the morning. Why wouldn’t he fall asleep?’

  ‘Let’s just say it wasn’t your normal kind of sleep.’ Moran round-shouldered, forty-plus with a salt-and-pepper crew-cut going thin at the sides. Dull-eyed now, on his way home after the graveyard shift. ‘He’d wake up, fall asleep. Then wake up again.’

  ‘And then – let me guess – he’d fall asleep again.’

  ‘Right. Bobo in the clown suit said the guy was narcoleptic and diabetic, could start having fits. Said claustrophobia, being in a cell, brings it on. Says he goes, and I quote, spastic he doesn’t get his fuckin’ zeds.’ Moran shrugged. ‘No way’s any fucker clocking off on my watch.’

  Doyle’s buzz long since punctured. She’d been up early, feeling bright and zesty, the intern’s come-on – clumsy though it was – giving her the impression something new was on the horizon.

  Then, on her way through to her office, checking the night’s arrests at the front desk, she’d spotted the name of one Rossi Callaghan. Doyle getting excited, it wasn’t often a collar just dropped into her lap like that. Except Moran had signed Callaghan out, along with his narcoleptic buddy, forty-five minutes before Doyle got in.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’re letting the spastic go. That much I understand, he’s more trouble than he’s worth. But what about Callaghan?’

  ‘It was the spastic stole the car,’ Moran said patiently. ‘Callaghan was just an accessory after the fact.’

  ‘Says here,’ Doyle going back to the arrest record, ‘there was enough grass in the trunk to stun a hippo.’

  ‘He says it must have already been there when the car was stolen. Or
it was planted.’

  Doyle raised one eyebrow. Moran shrugged.

  ‘You didn’t think to check him out?’ Doyle said. ‘I mean, the guy’s only wanted for attempted rape.’ Although, Doyle had her doubts about that, a gut feeling telling her Marsha was working for sympathy by creating a diversion after getting caught screwing her sister’s fiancé. ‘Not only that,’ she went on, ‘he gets himself nabbed prowling the domicile of an ex he’s been stalking since he got out.’

  ‘How the fuck would we know that?’

  ‘Like I say, you could’ve had him checked out.’

  ‘In the middle of a stampede. How long’s it been,’ Moran wanted to know, ‘since you worked the Saturday night desk?’

  ‘Couple of years,’ Doyle admitted. ‘But even then, way back in the Dark Ages, we had computers where you could type in a name, see if anything snagged.’

  ‘What I do is book ’em in. That’s what they pay me for. What they don’t pay me for is standing around all morning taking grief from detectives who need other people to do their jobs for them.’ He looked pointedly at his watch. ‘Now, if it’s okay by you, I have a wife and three kids back home. Who’re entitled to give me grief.’

  Doyle watched Moran’s back as he walked away. The weekend day-shift desk jockey, a red-cheeked rookie busy typing, looked up and said: ‘That spastic? Says here he has six outstanding parking tickets.’

  ‘Whoop-de-fucking-doo,’ Doyle said.

  Karen

  Karen rolled over, nudged Ray. ‘You awake yet?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Pity. Can you eat breakfast while you’re asleep?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Scrambled eggs okay? Some toast?’

  ‘Sounds good.’ Ray opened one eye, felt for Karen’s thigh under the covers and squeezed it. ‘Want me to make the coffee?’

  ‘What’d I tell you, Ray? Stop trying so hard.’

  ‘Okay by me,’ he said, snuggling down under the duvet again.

  Making a guy breakfast in bed wasn’t really Karen’s thing but she’d woken up feeling, what … oppressed, that was it. Sensing him, his warmth and bulk even though he was curled up way over on the other side of the bed, Karen telling him going to bed how she felt hot and prickly in her moods. Ray filling a space that, okay, Karen didn’t actually need right there and then but might, hey, it was a girl’s prerogative to roll around in her bed on a Sunday morning….

  But even as the resentment grew Karen had to acknowledge she was being self-destructive, freaking about Ray screwing with her space, going out of her way to make things difficult, digging up potential problems so she’d have a little something to trip over if things got complicated. She cracked some eggs into a bowl, flicked the kettle on to boil, laughing at herself – Christ, she was into a kidnap caper, snatching her best friend, and was worried things might get complicated?

  It wasn’t Ray’s physical presence, she knew: it was more what his being there meant, how Karen was into something she couldn’t control, map out all the way. Ray she couldn’t trust, not now. Whisking the eggs, Karen knew she had to accept that fact, make it her bottom line: for all Ray had to worry about doing time if the snatch went wrong, maybe taking a shiv in the ribs like he said, Karen had other concerns.

  She felt guilty about Madge, for sure – although the deal depended, Karen had insisted, on Madge saying yes; otherwise no dice – but Karen knew Madge, or Ray for that matter, didn’t have someone depending on them the way Karen did. No one else would get turfed out on the street and starve, or get a bullet in the back of the head, if Karen let them down. Anna, though – she needed Karen, needed Karen at the top of her game, and Karen at the top of her game meant not trusting Ray another inch. Hey, she said as the guilties came eating at her again, he’d had his chance. Three fucking chances….

  Karen had taken him out to the lake with a little speech in mind, to show him why she’d go through with the snatch; not because she wanted the cottage, not anymore, not with Rossi on the prowl, but because she wanted something like the cottage – a place for her and Anna, somewhere safe where they wouldn’t be hassled and poked up the ass by world that couldn’t get enough of that poking.

  Ray, if he’d baulked, Karen’d been ready to tell him she’d blow the whistle, turn him in. Not because she wanted to do it – not because she’d do it, end of story – but because she wanted him to know how big it was for her, how much it mattered. That she was prepared to stitch him up to make it happen.

  Karen shivering now, even in the warm kitchen, trying to imagine half a million in cash … And then caught herself, still mulling it over, halfway to the kitchen door on her way back to the bedroom to ask Ray if he liked Tabasco in his eggs. She decided there and then that Ray liked Tabasco in his eggs or he got used to the taste; Karen was too old to go changing her eggs now. You start by leaving out the hot sauce and next thing you know you’ve become your mother, or Madge, fifty-one years old and trying to remember, shit, didn’t I used to put something tasty in my eggs once, just to give them a kick…?

  She popped some bread in the toaster, nibbling on a sneaky Belgian truffle; thinking, okay, it had to happen sooner or later, if not with Ray then with someone else – the tipping point, the breaker. It was inevitable, with the stick-ups, that the law of averages had to kick in: some day, somewhere, someone’d call her bluff, even after she’d waved the .44 around, racked the slide. She drew the line when it came to pulling any triggers; had tried to picture it, standing there braced with both hands on the butt, squeezing one off into someone’s face….

  No. Not that there’d be much point squeezing any triggers: Karen’d never even loaded the .44. The first thing she’d done after lifting it from Rossi’s lock-up was dump the ammo in the canal. Armed robbery was one thing; anything more was a world of pain. Karen’s plan, if some guy thought he was a hero, made a grab for the gun, was to break the bastard’s nose, lash him in the face with the barrel, then call it a day. Get gone. Put the guy down, drop the .44, walk away. Karen wasn’t too clued up on forensics but she was pretty sure fingerprints didn’t have a best-before date, and Karen hadn’t touched the gun without wearing surgical gloves since she’d pinched it from the lock-up. The one good thing about Rossi being back on the streets was, if Karen did have to drop the gun, Rossi’s prints were all over it. Christ, there was a time when the prick couldn’t stop playing with it, Roy fucking Rogers, twirling it and dry-firing it, all this shit….

  Except, she knew, it wouldn’t happen as easily as that. It hadn’t happened like that. When Ray came up out of the freezer into her peripheral vision, Karen had turned and dry-fired without thinking, right in his face….

  Maybe, she pondered, just maybe, the fact that it had been Ray was an omen of sorts.

  She put three scoops of coffee into the pot, a little perk-me-up, Karen still a little groggy from the pills and the wine. Arranged the tray, trying to picture Ray twirling a gun; hearing him again, his voice low and growly, looking her straight in the eye: ‘I don’t have to understand anything….’

  Karen smiled, thinking, yeah, maybe you could do things with a guy who thought that way. Especially if you were coming from a place where you didn’t have to trust him.

  But when she pushed through into the bedroom, nudging the door open with the tray, Ray was gone. Leaving a note: ‘Things to do. Catch you later. x Ray.

  An x? After all they’d been through last night, all she got was a fucking x?

  Frank

  ‘You’re a persistent little bugger,’ Terry said grudgingly. ‘I’ll give you that.’

  ‘He still hasn’t called?’

  ‘It’s Sunday morning, Frank. Even Koreans don’t do business on Sunday fucking morning.’

  ‘But you’re saying, he’ll definitely call.’

  ‘Definitely, yeah. But not until Tuesday. On Tuesday he’ll be up with the fucking larks, ringing me. Why would I lie to you on this?’

  A construction site went off in Frank’s
head, the stress causing the hangover to finally kick in. He plucked the deck of smokes from his desk, lit a fresh one from the old despite the shake in his hands, resumed pacing.

  ‘I just want you to know, Terry, that I’ve said it. In case anything goes wrong. There’s no point in ––’

  ‘Why would anything go wrong?’

  ‘Just let me say it. So there’s no confusion after.’

  ‘It’s clear as a bell to me right now, Frank. So anything you might say would only start messing things around. And I hate it when things get messy.’

  Frank sucked on his front teeth, then quit when he felt something wobble, the loose crown. ‘Can I at least ask a question?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘On what the question is.’

  ‘But how will you know what the question is,’ Frank said carefully, the construction site dancing a rumba in his head, ‘until I ask it?’

  ‘Sorry, Frank. I don’t do philosophy Sunday mornings.’

  ‘But say something does go wrong,’ Frank said hurriedly. ‘No, wait – say he goes ahead with the snatch and for some reason the ransom isn’t immediately available.’

  ‘He waits, Frank.’ An edge to Terry’s voice like a saw before it begins to buzz. ‘He’s good at waiting.’

  ‘Okay.’ Frank downed his bourbon. ‘Now say the ransom is likely to never become immediately available.’

  ‘He goes on waiting.’

  ‘That’s it? He keeps on waiting?’

  ‘What he does isn’t your problem, Frank. It’s what you’ll be doing should worry you. Anyway, what’d I tell you already?’

  ‘That we’d only cross that bridge,’ Frank mumbled, ‘if we burned it down.’

  ‘So, there it is. Frank – when he rings Tuesday morning, I’ll get him to double-check with you everything’s kosher. What’re you worried about?’

  Terry hung up. Frank dumped another bourbon in his glass and began pacing again. What was he worried about? Christ, down twenty grand already, and looking at two grand a month interest for the foreseeable future or knee-caps like, Terry’d said, punctured fucking gerbils. Then, with Doug sticking his fat face in the way of Frank’s Slazenger, Frank had no one on the inside at Trust Direct to sign off on the insurance forms. This on top of Bryan getting ready to sue.