by Declan Burke
'So where to now?' he said.
'The airport. Where else?'
'What I thought,' Sleeps said. 'Only thing is, I don't fly.'
Frank
The pain, Jesus, Frank'd never had anything like it. Even reaching for the push-button doohicky hanging from the headboard sent agonising bolts shooting up through his thigh, into his spine, the electrical impulses frying his brain. Frank thumbing the doohicky like he was sending out Morse code, S-S-S-S-S-S …
Like, where the fuck were the nurses? You pay through the nose for Blue Riband, the least you expect is a little service and at least one nurse who didn't have a face like a pot of boiled frogs.
Jeeeezzzzzusssssss …
Frank's thumb a blur clickety-clicking the doohicky, except even twitching his thumb was setting off depth charges in his shin that pulsed through every nerve and --
The door opened, light pouring through. The glare half-blinding him as a nurse stepped into the room.
'Jesus bungee-jumping Christ,' Frank said through gritted teeth. 'The fuck took you? I could be dying over here.'
'Sorry about that, Frankie,' said a deep voice.
Frank cranked one eyelid half-open. A male nurse? 'Who the fuck're you?'
The guy, in white trousers, some kind of pansy smock, advanced to the bed. 'How're you doin' there, Frankie?' he said. 'You making out?'
Despite the pain, Frank's instincts were still solid. He knew this because his scrotum crawled, balls retracting. He peered at the smock for a name-tag but there was none. 'They sent a janitor?' he said, hoping – praying – to be extra outraged any second now.
'That's right, Frankie.' The nurse had a squarish head, a twice-broken nose. 'A janitor, to take out the trash.'
Frank opened his mouth to scream, not really planning any words as such, just something shrill and loud, except a fleshy hand clamped down across his nose and chin with enough force to punch his breath back down his throat and jam a blockage somewhere at the top of his lungs. He choked, eyes bugging. The guy raised a warning forefinger, placed it against his lips. 'Ssssh, Frankie. No sense both of us ending up shit creek, eh?'
A warm wetness spurted between Frank's thighs. Then, immobilised by the pressure of the hand forcing his chin down onto his chest, Frank felt the guy reach behind and slip a pillow out from under his head. As the suffocating cloud came down on his face, its softness the heaviest weight Frank had ever known, he made claws of his hands and started swiping.
No joy.
The last thing Frank ever heard was the guy whispering, 'Frankie? Terry Swipes says bonny voyage …'
THURSDAY
Karen
'You're paying ten grand for a passport,' Karen said, 'you expect, I dunno, something a bit more flattering than Bridget Fonda in a wind tunnel.'
'The guy turned it around in three hours.' Ray, still buzzed on the pills, had volunteered to drive while he still could. The fluorescent orange lights gleaming weirdly on his newly blond hair. DIY kits, Ray a little bit James Dean with the blond quaff. Karen'd gone for an electric-blue rinse. 'Besides,' he said, 'who looks good in their passport?'
'You do.' Karen comparing passports. 'What'd you do, get it took professional?'
'The guy got paid, yeah, he's a pro. Anything we're forgetting?'
'Passports,' Karen said, checking off on her fingers. 'Tan oil. Bug spray. Gun. What else?'
'Money,' Ray said, nodding at the khaki duffel at Karen's feet, the ransom that had fallen from half a mill to two hundred grand to one-six-five in a little under fourteen hours. This before Madge got her cut, eighty-two and change. Karen having her very own Black Friday.
'Money,' she said. 'Check.'
'So that's everything.'
'Well,' Karen said, 'I'm down the cell phone Rossi swiped up at the lake. And then there's the whole wardrobe I'm leaving behind, all my personal shit, y'know, photos of my dead mother. But other than that, yeah, we're cool.'
'Doyle knows where you live, Kar.'
'I know. I'm just saying.'
'You want to risk it?'
'Nope.'
'You're sure?'
'Don't tempt me, Ray.' Karen wondering, Christ, when does it end? Like, first her father beats her mother to death, taking a slow fourteen years to do it. Then she gets tangled up with Rossi, who was in more than he was out in the ten years Karen knew him. She'd done it, though. Survived her father, got the bastard put away, then got past Rossi, put an actual life together. A life that included, okay, once in a while sticking up gas stations and post offices for chump change, using Rossi's Ducati, his .44. All this to keep Anna in kennels, the wolf-husky combo tagged a dangerous breed. A life, sure, that couldn't last.
But Karen would've come up with something else when the time came. Karen, she'd learned to duck when she had to, dive when she could. Except she'd have done it her own way. This? Hightailing it out of town, one step ahead of the posse …
'I can understand,' Ray said, 'you're concerned, starting again somewhere strange. But take Anna. I mean, she came all the way from Siberia. Talk about not being able to speak the language …' When Karen didn't smile he said, 'Anna's doing okay, isn't she? Found someone to look after her, she wasn't even looking. Didn't even know how to look.'
'She lost an eye,' Karen said. 'Got a bullet in the head that could've killed her.'
'Except it didn't. She's alive and kicking. Or rather,' Ray said, 'alive and doped to the eyeballs in the back of a van. But she's making out.'
'Just about.'
They drove in silence until he turned off the M50, heading south for the ferry port. 'Hey,' Ray said, 'how about Terry and Madge? Who'd a thunk it, huh?'
'The girl's a free agent, she's still kicking it. Why not?'
'I hear you. You and her weren't friends, y'know, I'd be … Hey, I'm kidding.' When she still didn't smile he said, 'So how do you think the twins'll take to Terry Swipes?'
'The twins, they make it through the next time they see Madge, they'll like whoever she tells them to like. She's gone up through the gears since they seen her last.'
'How d'you mean?'
'Frank was supposed to pay for the twins' trip to Aspen, their flights, the works. Except Frank being Frank, he left them in the lurch, five grand's worth. So the twins maxed out Madge's credit card.'
'Ouch.'
'She only found out trying to book the flights to Athens. I don't think I've ever seen her so crazy. Well,' a watery half-grin, 'apart from when she shot Frank.'
'She didn't get to book the flights, huh?'
'Nope. And then had a screaming match down the phone with this bitch telling her --'
'How about the cruise? She get to book that?'
'Sure. She booked that first, then went looking for flights. Why, what's wrong?'
'You think the cops, with Madge missing, won't check her credit card to see if they can't track her that way?'
'Maybe they'll think,' Karen said slowly, 'she's gone to Aspen.'
'They won't think it for long.'
Karen slumped back, drained. Jesus, every time she turned around it was something else. Karen wondering if maybe she shouldn't stop turning around, just for once go in a straight line. 'You think the Greek cops'll give a crap about Frank?' she said. 'I mean, there's all that jurisdiction stuff, right?'
'It's still European Union, Kar. There's protocols, agreements.'
'So she'd be screwed.'
'Madge?' Ray nodded. 'Except we're the ones brought her to Terry and never mentioned the whole credit card deal. And if he gets hauled in, aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice? Anna won't be the only one missing an eye.'
Doyle
Doyle'd never liked flying, especially when they served dinner. Trying to pretend cruising at thirty thousand feet was so normal there was no reason you shouldn't be eating plastic chicken too.
Then the washrooms, designed to fit anorexic dwarves. Doyle freshening her lippy while the plane jitterbugged around the sky, electric storms ov
er the Balkans. Doyle wondering if she wasn't overdoing the gloss. Trying to achieve a delicate balance, needing to look hot enough Niko would help her out but not so smoking the guy'd take it as a come-on. She'd decided to skip the eye-liner, it was just asking for trouble, a poke in the eye, when there came a tapping on the door. The stew, telling Doyle to return to her seat, they were starting the descent.
Doyle wobbled back up the aisle, edged into the window seat and looked down on Athens, wondering how Niko'd look, two or three years now since she'd seen him last. He'd been thin then, sallow and tall. Doyle liked them tall but not as thin as Niko, the guy a greyhound, all cock and ribs. Cock, mainly. Had this habit, too, of looking at a girl from under half-closed lids over the beaky nose that he thought was sexy but made him look like a lizard with cataracts.
He'd kiss both cheeks, Doyle knew that. Long, lingering smooches. All Doyle was hoping, as she switched the big fake emerald from the baby finger of her right hand to the ring-finger on her left, was Niko'd remembered to brush.
Niko, he liked his tzatziki heavy on the garlic.
Rossi
Rossi had always imagined that if he ever made it onto the set of a blue movie he'd be a little more jazzed. It didn’t help that the set doubled as the props room. 'So you're a getaway driver,' he said, 'except you're narcoleptic, nod off when the mood takes.'
Sleeps checking out his reflection in the full-length mirror, the chauffeur's cap perched at a rakish angle over one eye. 'I was narcoleptic all along,' he said. 'You're the one picked me for wheelman.'
Rossi deep-sixed the jay, held it down for a count of ten, a tip he'd picked up at anger management class inside. 'Okay,' he said. 'But let's call this a fresh start. Clean slate. Is there anything else I should know?'
'Well, I'm allergic to penicillin,' Sleeps said. 'Plus I'm borderline diabetic, on account of I'm a little big-boned. Except I can't remember, do I eat sugar to keep my levels up? Or do I avoid it in case it blows my head off?'
'I'll blow your head off,' Rossi growled. 'Worry about me.'
Sleeps nodded. 'Lee Marvin, right? Point Blank.' Then told Melody, 'The doc reckons it was a lack of nutrition when I was a kid, screwed my system.'
'A lack of nutrition?' Rossi said. 'Sleeps, no disrespect man, but you look like you ate the Michelin Man.'
'I was deprived in the womb. My mother, God rest her, was a juicer, drinking meths, the works.'
'Okay.' Rossi mulled it over while he had another toke. 'But what's any of that have to do with not flying?'
'Nothing. That's from when I went to the funfair, going up on the Whirly Chairs.'
'And?'
'They were whirly chairs, Rossi. Thirty feet up. Forty miles an hour.'
'Yeah, but … They crashed? What?'
'I just figured, in a plane? You're five miles up doing a million miles an hour. I mean, do the math.'
'The statistical chance of being killed in a plane-crash?' Mel said, fluffing out her veil. 'It's the same as being kicked to death by a herd of wild donkeys. That's a whole herd, by the way, not just one donkey.'
'Twenty-nine people died last week,' Sleeps said, 'in Uzbekistan, a 767 that didn't exactly clear the airport fence, came down tits up in a swamp. So that's twenty-nine herds of wild donkeys, at least twenty-nine, out there roaming the steppes.'
'You were a kid,' Rossi said, 'up on the whirly chairs. So it makes sense you got a fright.'
'At the funfair?' Sleeps shook his head. 'That was last month. I made a pact with God.'
Rossi squeezed his eyes closed, massaged his temples. 'With God?'
'There and then, in mid-air. The deal being, if I don't fly, God won't kill me in a plane-crash.'
'You'd be surprised how many people won't fly since the terrorists started acting out,' Mel said.
Rossi with a pain in his ear like he'd shipped a stray bayonet. No, the hole where his ear used to be. 'Listen, Dollface, if you don't have nothing to say might help, I'd appreciate you keeping your cakehole --'
'What I'm saying,' she said, 'is lots of people won't fly these days. But they still go on holiday.'
Sleeps grinned. 'The ferry,' he said. 'Of course.'
'The best part?' Melody said. 'At the port they don't really pay too much attention to passports and suchlike when you're heading out.' She squeezed past the leather couch, used her hip to bump Sleeps away from the mirror. Sleeps bumping her back, getting a grind going on. 'I mean,' she said, 'you were saying you need to get passports, right?'
'That was a private fuckin conversation,' Rossi said.
'You losing an ear and all,' Sleeps pointed out, 'you've been a doing a lot of shouting ever since.'
Mel turned all the way around, frowning at herself in the mirror. 'Does my ass look big in this?'
'Not if you're planning to screen a movie,' Rossi said.
'Hey,' Sleeps said. 'No personals, okay?'
Mel shrugged it off, went through to a side room. Came back holding a fat envelope, from which she drew a bundle of passports.
'Holy shit,' Sleeps said. 'Are they real?'
'Most of them, yeah.'
'You get much call for passports in blue movies?' Rossi said.
'These German guys we have in the movies? They're mostly not German. They want to come here, y'know, get into the EU through the back door, our guys'll bring 'em in, no problem. Except then they need to work it off before they get their passports back.'
'By screwing in blue movies,' Rossi said, awed. 'Christ, it's a dirty job …'
'When our guys say they'll get in through the back door,' Mel said, 'they're actually saying, y'know, the back door.'
'What about the girls?' Sleeps said. 'They trafficked too?'
'The girls are mostly Irish. Models, like. Only in Ireland there's enough work for about two and a half models. So they're going the other way, getting out.' Mel put the bundle of passports on the coffee table. 'Just make sure the one you pick is still in date. Don't get us screwed on some schoolboy error.'
'Us?' Rossi said.
'A three-way split,' Mel said. 'It's that,' she added, 'or I tell you she's gone to Timbukthree.'
Rossi, helpless, looked over at Sleeps. Sleeps just shrugged. 'A three-way split of something is at least something,' he said. 'Without Mel we got fuck-all.'
Rossi suppressed the urge to punch himself in the head. 'I got an idea,' he said. 'How about we just pin you to the fuckin wall and --'
'Not on my watch,' Sleep said.
'I'm guessing,' Mel said, 'and I might be wrong here, but I'm guessing you're broke. I mean, driving into Europe, you'll need to gas up the car once in a while, maybe eat.'
'You're going to fund us?' Sleeps said.
'Call it an investment. A straight ten per cent on my outlay. Except that's ten per cent,' she warned, 'on top of the credit card interest. All of which comes off the gross before we split the take.'
'Christ,' Rossi said. 'Why don't you just put on a balaclava?'
'You're kidding,' Melody said, giving herself one last twirl in the mirror, flattening down her bodice, the pleated ivory-tinged skirt billowing out in her wake. 'And hide a perfectly good tiara?'
Ray
Ray hung up and threaded back through the tables to where Karen was sitting in the bay window overlooking the port, the place bustling now under a sodium glare, the ferry like a tipped-over Christmas tree out along the pier. Karen scoping for guys lounging on corners, reading newspapers in the pre-dawn chill, maybe talking into their collars once in a while.
'No joy?' she said, reading his expression.
'It wouldn't be like Terry not to carry a phone,' he said. 'But I'm wondering, the guy's taking a cruise, maybe he figures he won't need one this once.'
'Unlikely, though.'
'Yeah. He's probably knocked it off for take-off, forgot to turn it back on.' He sipped some vodka-lime. 'So, Rossi – what d'you think?'
'I think you're being paranoid.' Then she grinned.
'What's funny?'
'Nothing. Just something Rossi used to say.'
'What?'
'Whenever he got seriously pissed off? He'd say he was paranoid. As in, par-annoyed.'
'Hilarious, yeah.' Ray held up his slinged arm. 'A foot to the left and he'd be a comic genius.'
'I'm just saying --'
'Forget it. What about the cruise?'
Karen had a crooked twist to her jaw from when she bust it on a porcelain sink to get her father put away. Now she did the thing where her lower jaw twitched, letting Ray know, even if she didn't know she was doing it, how he'd snuck up close to some line she'd drawn in her head.
'Why would Madge tell Rossi she was taking a cruise?' she said.
'I'm not saying she told him anything.' Ray believed this wasn't the best time to point out that Madge had confessed to Rossi she was his mother. 'But if there's even a possibility she mentioned it, then taking chances is a good way to get Terry nabbed.'
'And Madge.'
'Madge, you know her better than me, maybe she can arrange for a hit from behind bars. Terry I know for fact.'
'Okay,' Karen said. 'But even presuming she told him, so what? The guy's probably in ICU right now. Anna damn near chewed his head off.'
Ray considered that. 'Any chance he'd tip off the cops?'
'Rossi? Tip 'em over a cliff, maybe.'
'Okay, except the cops aren't even the half of it. He could sell us on.'
'Sell us …?'
'Say Rossi puts the word out. Who we are, where we're going. How much we're carrying. Then, someone hits us, Rossi gets points on the bag. A finder's fee.'
'Jesus. Whatever happened to honour among thieves?'
'It probably got thieved. Also, we don't know for fact Rossi's in ICU. And what we don't know for fact we don't presume.'
'Because,' Karen said, sounding to Ray more irritated than his caution deserved, 'that's a good way of going about getting ourselves nabbed.'
'Correct.'