Crime Always Pays

by Declan Burke

  But he was still only halfway there when his sucking gut told him, shit, he'd guessed wrong. Ray the ex-Ranger quicker than Rossi would've believed, the Uzi's barrel swinging up to meet his lunge, Rossi so close the muzzle-flash blinded him even as his head exploded.

  SATURDAY

  Ray

  'There's fink,' Ray said. 'Fink, rat, squeal, snitch, nonce.' He thought about it. 'Finger, peach and stool. How many do you need?'

  Ray with a nice buzz on, five or six highballs down the hatch, heart still pumping from dragging Rossi's dead weight one-armed. The rush easing off now, chilling into what he could only describe as mellow exhilaration. Ray, for all his time in the Rangers, he'd never shot down cold on anyone before.

  'One'll do it.' Melody sniffed. 'The one that sums up how you feel about Karen.'

  'Then definitely fink. F for Friday, I for ink.'

  'I know how to spell fink, Ray.'

  The bar quiet, only a few hardy souls still drinking this late. Or, Ray trying to focus on the mirror-clock behind the bar, this early. Most of the plush velvet seats, the semi-circular booths, taken up with prone backpackers, rucksacks piled every which way.

  'What you might find interesting,' Ray said as Mel bent to her notebook again. 'They're all verbs used to be nouns.'

  She checked her notes. 'It's possible to peach?'

  Mel with the idea Ray was some kind of gangster, hard-boiled. Ray hated to disappoint the ladies. 'Nothing sweeter than a juicy peach,' he said. He sipped on his highball and leaned in along the polished counter of the bar. 'Hey, can you keep a secret?'

  'That all depends,' Mel said, edging closer.

  'It only has to be a secret from Sleeps. Otherwise you can tell whoever you want.'

  'Even Rossi?'

  'Why would you want to tell Rossi?'

  'No reason. I'm just checking.'

  'Between you and me, Mel, everything's a secret from Rossi. That,' he warned, 'being the biggest secret of all.'

  'I won't tell anyone,' Mel said.

  'Tell 'em what?'

  'This secret I can't tell Sleeps.'

  'Oh yeah.' Ray tapped a finger against his nose, mainly to buy time, then remembered. 'Karen isn't gone to Crete,' he said.

  'No?'

  'Nope.'

  Melody flipped back a page or two, scratched out a line. 'So where has she gone?'

  'Ah.' Ray waggled a forefinger. 'That's a different secret.'

  'It's all part of the same secret, Ray.'

  'Actually,' Ray said, considering, 'I haven't the faintest idea where she's gone. For all I know she's headed for Crete.'

  'But you just said --'

  'I just picked an island,' Ray said. 'First one popped into my head.'

  'So why Crete?'

  'It's a big place. Wild in spots. You want to hide away, you and your wolf, there's plenty of room.'

  'So you'd have gone to Crete,' Mel said.

  'I had a wolf, yeah.'

  'Did you tell Karen that?'

  'About Crete?' Mel nodded. 'I don't know if I mentioned Crete specifically,' he said. 'Why?'

  'Because if you did, it's the last place she'd go.'

  'She knows I won't be chasing her.'

  'You just broke up with her, Ray. Think she's taking your advice on anything now?'

  'I'm not entirely sure,' Ray said, 'it was me broke up with her.'

  'So she dumped you. Same difference.'

  'Being honest, and technically speaking, I don't know if we were together long enough to break up. It was barely a week.'

  Mel, the tip of her tongue poking from the corner of mouth, scribbled another note, underlined it twice. 'So what'll we do about the ten grand?' she said.

  'What ten grand?'

  'The ten we're owed by Rossi and Sleeps. For their passports.'

  'We?'

  'I'll cut you in for two. Get it back and there's two in it for you.'

  'Sorry, Mel. I'm retired.'

  'Three. Three's my final offer.'

  Ray heard himself tell Mel how much he had stashed in a safety deposit box. How little he needed three grand, no offence, thanks all the same.

  Mel, eyes huge, licked her lips. 'You're kidding.'

  'Don't believe the hype, Mel. Crime pays. Ask Marx.' He drained his highball. 'Anyway, I've a notion Rossi won't be following through on that deal he'd planned. I'd say your ten gees are gone.'

  Mel put her pen down and stared gloomily into her Shirley Temple, stirring it with the big pink swizzle stick. 'Not really up to speed on the whole knight in shiny armour bit, are you?' she said.

  'You're white,' Ray said, 'you speak English, you have a credit card. There's about three billion people'd think they'd died and gone to heaven they had half your chances.'

  'So much,' Mel said, 'for chivalry.'

  Ray signaled the barman. 'Chivalry,' he said, 'is strictly from hunger.'

  Sleeps

  Sleeps woke to gnawing panic, already reaching for the steering wheel, shit, his worst nightmare, falling asleep at the --

  Then realised, relief flooding through, the car was parked, still deep in the guts of a ferry. He knuckled his eyes hauling himself upright, saying, 'Sorry, I must've dozed off. What were you saying?'

  Except she was gone. Leaving a note on the dashboard, 'Gone to freshen up, back soon. x Mel.'

  Not saying, no surprise there, what time she left.

  Sleeps, fiddling with the stereo, getting only static, snatches of Greek gabble, wasn't sure if he should be worried. On one hand, Rossi'd been gone for hours. On the other, Rossi'd been gone for hours.

  Sleeps, feeling a little guilty about it, was more worried about Mel. Rossi could handle himself, mostly, but Mel was a bit more delicate. Not to look at, okay, the girl was built like a gingerbread cottage. But there was something Sleeps liked about the fragile way she thought. Ideas that went off at tangents, looped around, tied her up in knots. Sleeps, dozing off one time, tried to imagine what one of Mel's thoughts might look like as an arc and was so impressed he woke up dizzy. Or maybe he was so dizzy he woke up impressed.

  The girl asking him, not long after Rossi took off after Ray, 'How come you let Rossi call the shots?'

  'The guy's happier,' Sleeps'd said, 'he thinks he's the one running the show.'

  'Okay, but what about you? When do you get happy?'

  Sleeps had to think about that one. 'I always thought,' he said, 'I was a coward for not wanting to go to war. I mean in theory, no one's letting me in any man's army, right? But, you think about it, going off to war and shit, you're thinking, no fucking way. I used to say I was a pacifist, like it was a philosophy, not wanting someone to blow your head off. Especially as it's always some other fucker's war, some bastard sitting in an office ringing up some bastard on the other side, saying, "Hey, I got a surplus on rockets over here, want a war?"' Sleeps glanced in the rearview. 'How come you're not taking notes?'

  'It's, um, all up here,' Mel said, tapping her temple.

  'Anyway,' Sleeps said, 'I didn't realise, you go off to war despite the fact you're crapping it, not because you're some kind of hero. Most guys, you'll find, they're not heroes. And then, most soldiers make it back. They didn't, you'd run out of soldiers fast, one way or another.'

  'Okay. But what's that have to do with Rossi ordering you around?'

  'I seen a movie once,' Sleeps said, 'you had this ordinary guy, a private, and his sergeant or corporal, can't remember which but the dude gets shot, a sniper. So the ordinary guy, he radios back to base, he's told, "You're promoted, congratulations." So the guy, it's bad enough he's in the middle of a fucking war, in the jungle, he has to take charge. Making sure everyone else makes it too. I mean, most soldiers make it back, like I said. But lots don't.'

  'So you're saying,' Mel said, 'it's a lack of ambition.'

  'That's one way of looking at it, I guess. Plus, I go on the nod. You go back through history, look at the achievers, Alexander, Khan, Ali, Rossi – there's not many narcoleptics i
n there, y'know? Or, say they were even prone to the anytime siesta, no one's hailing it as any kind of unfair advantage they had over everyone else.'

  'I wouldn't,' Mel murmured, 'have necessarily put Rossi and Alexander the Great in the same bracket.'

  'Valentino Rossi. You never heard of him?'

  'Can't say as I have.'

  'The Doc, yeah, greatest motorcycle rider in history. So good he was planning to race cars, he was bored winning on bikes. The guy's Rossi's hero, the reason he picked the name Rossi.'

  'Rossi isn't his real name?'

  'So he says.'

  'So what is it?'

  'Dunno, he never said. Anyway, the Doc, he wasn't given to forty winks whizzing through any chicanes, y'know?'

  'Isn't there any kind of treatment you can take?' Mel said. 'For the narcolepsy, I mean.'

  Which must have been the point where Sleeps dozed off. Now he wondered if he shouldn't go take a look-see upstairs. Rossi, taking off after Ray, had said to stick with the car, but Sleeps couldn't see what he was achieving by staying put. Plus his sugar levels were dropping, he hadn't eaten in five, six hours, this on top of the big black hole opening up where the lake of crizz used to be. A crash in the post, Sleeps'd been there before, a plummet like a suicidal lemming.

  Not pretty.

  He locked the car, leaving the key behind the driver's wheel in case Mel came back down, and got up on deck just as the ferry docked at some port, reversing in. Sleeps hung on the rail watching the folks beetle up onto the orange-lit dock, shivering now in his shorts and pink daisy shirt. It was only then it occurred to him that Rossi and Mel, either or both, might have already jumped ship.

  He went back down to the car, opened the trunk. No fake Louis Vuitton. He pulled up the trunk's floor and hauled out the spare tire, expecting Johnny Priest's parcel to be gone too. Except that was there. He wondered if she'd forgotten about it, or couldn't find it, or if it was just, the girl checking out, having it on her toes, she hadn't wanted to give them any reason to chase her.

  That one gave Sleeps a pang, an empty feeling it took a chocolate malt and three cheeseburgers to fill again. So you're saying, it's a lack of ambition. Munching steadily, dribbling hot sauce onto the pink daisy, Sleeps realised he was going to have to meet Mel halfway.

  So he filched a big guy's rucksack, the guy snoring on a bench behind the self-service restaurant, found a quiet restroom and dug in. Came out wearing baggy denims, a white tee under a v-necked short-sleeved blue shirt, navy Caterpillar trainers that pinched a little at the toes so Sleeps had to dump his socks. He bought a shaving kit at a restroom vending machine and scrubbed up, even laced some gel through his hair. Then sallied forth, heading first for the ferry's bar, and saw, soon as he stepped through the doors, Mel at the bar with Ray's arm around her shoulders, close enough to suck out Ray's fillings and not need a straw.

  Sleeps let the door swing to, went back up on deck and made his way to the stern. Spent a while looking down into the ferry's wake, the black sea churning up greeny-white, the phosphorescence hypnotic. Sleeps tempted to dig into Johnny's parcel, do all the coke in one go. Fritz up his works with one lightning-bolt to the brain.

  Sleeps squidging his bare toes in the new trainers with an empty ache inside a ton of cheeseburgers wouldn't fill.

  Karen

  Pyle put the carton of orange juice down on the bedside locker, the half-pint of vodka, two ham-and-cheese paninis, a jumbo bag of chips. Went in the bathroom and came out with the toothbrush glass. 'This guy Ray,' he said. 'You were saying he has an Elvis quiff, right? Only blonde.'

  'Elvis '56,' Karen said through a mouthful of chips. 'Why?'

  'He's upstairs in the bar.'

  'Shit.'

  'Draped around some girl,' Pyle said, pouring the vodka, 'looks a lot like Elvis '77.'

  'There's a girl?'

  'Woman enough for two,' Pyle said approvingly. He tossed off the vodka-orange, poured one for Karen. 'So what's this mean?' he said. 'We doping him too?'

  Karen waved away the vodka-orange. 'He isn't chasing me,' she said. 'He's got no reason.'

  'Hell of a coincidence, him just turning up like that. I mean, there's a lot of ferries leave the Piraeus every day. And he just happens to be on the one you're on.'

  'There was a girl with Rossi,' Karen said, 'coming off the ferry into Amsterdam, she looked built to model mosquito nets for four-poster beds.'

  'Then that could be her, sure.'

  'So what the fuck's Ray playing at?'

  'Pat-a-cakes, it looked to me.' Pyle chugged another vodka-orange. He said, 'The guy left you most of the money, the .38 so you'd be safe. Why should he turn on you now?'

  Karen went into her spiel, her experience with men. Starting with her father, who she'd forked in the chest and got put away. 'I had to bust my own jaw to convince them,' she said, thumbing just above her chin, the twist where the bone hadn't fused properly. 'Then I went to visit him and started screaming about how he'd been fucking me up the ass since I was a kid.'

  Pyle winced.

  Then, Karen went on, Rossi, the guy in more than he was out in the ten years she'd known him, a rogue loser gene in his DNA. And now Ray, who, there was a good chance, he'd been scheming with this cop Doyle behind Karen's back. Except, when the heat came on? Ray'd bolted. And was now, by the sounds of things, hanging out with Rossi's crew.

  'What I'm saying,' she said, 'is if you stick with a guy long enough, he'll turn on you. Ray, it took him a whole week.'

  Pyle sipped his vodka-orange. 'I've known you what, ten hours? Twelve?' Karen shrugged. 'In that time,' he said, 'you've done a bunk from this guy Rossi, then disarmed a cop, doped him to the eyeballs. All the while running around with a bag of cash you're saying you scammed from some insurance company, a .38 tucked in there too. A bona fide wolf in tow, with this cop, Doyle, possibly on your tail.'

  'What's your point?' Karen said.

  'You're not at any point wondering,' Pyle said, 'and I'm just asking here, just throwing it out, if maybe you're not a little high maintenance?'

  Doyle

  Doyle and Sparks wound up on a beach to watch the sun come up, a bonfire down to embers, crates of Amstel in the tide keeping cool. Some Aussie guy strumming a guitar, Crowded House songs, Doyle never could stand Crowded fucking House.

  Sparks copped off around dawn, one of two Aussie guys, strapping, they played footy for the same team back home. On a gap year, working their way around Europe. Except Doyle'd lost interest when she learned her guy, Jamie, was just three months older than exactly half her age. The guys horsing around, asking Sparks if she'd thrown her knickers at John or Paul when the Beatles were still touring.

  'They're just kids,' Doyle warned.

  'Like, duh.' Sparks touching up her mascara in the compact mirror, putting Doyle in mind of a guy shovelling sand onto lava flow.

  'I mean we're just their older woman story for when they get back home.'

  Sparks packed away her stuff, put out her hand and shook Doyle's. 'Hi,' she said, 'I'm Miss Happy Ever-After.'

  So Sparks'd headed off with Ron, linking his arm going up the beach, telling him how her favourite tae kwan do move was the old bassai dai with a yama tsuki combo, asking Ron if he'd ever saw a guy'd had his nose cartilage jammed up into his brain. Leaving Doyle behind, tired and cold. Sand in her skimpies. Doyle wondering if island life was all it was cracked up to be.

  When Jamie, blonde dreads and an ironic tie-dyed Deadhead tee, ambled across and sat down, offering Doyle a joint, Doyle had a toke and then told him she was a cop working undercover. The guy thinking this was hilarious until Doyle dug in her bag and showed him the badge she shouldn't have been carrying, being suspended.

  Three minutes later Doyle was alone with the joint, the bonfire and two crates of Amstel, no idea of where she was or how to make it back to the Katina.

  So she smoked the joint slow, the first in a long time, and watched the sun slide up around the headland, the greens and violets
burning off, the sea hardening to petrol-blue and then softening to azure. The headlands either side bright orange like new brick and dotted with dusty scrub. A fishing smack bumbling along way out to sea, its foamy wake a brilliant white. Doyle felt a long, long way from home.

  The buzzing of her phone woke her up.

  'Hey,' she said, untangling her tongue from the web some spider had built in her throat, the lesser-spotted musty sock spider. 'What's up?'

  'You alright?'

  'Fine, yeah. You still hanging out at Jamie's cradle?'

  'It's crib, Doyle. Get with the programme.'

  'I said cradle, I meant cradle.'

  'Listen, where are you?'

  'Still on the beach, I fell asleep.' Doyle dry-washed her face with her free hand, wondering if she should try to open her eyes sometime soon. 'What time is it?'

  'Nearly nine. The reason I'm ringing, a ferry's just pulled in and a wolf got off.'

  Doyle came awake fast. 'It's Karen?'

  'Karen I've never seen. But there's a girl, yeah, she has this wolf on a chain leash. A guy with her looks like Johnny Depp's dad.'

  'Ray,' Doyle said, 'looks nothing like Johnny Depp. More skinny Elvis, a quiff going on.'

  'Okay, I see him now. Yep, he's the one the wolf's attacking.'

  'Sparks? What's happening?'

  'Ray's down. The big girl, she looks worried.'

  The big girl? 'Where are you, Sparks?'

  'The port. Place called Ios Burger, they do a nice Irish fry, three sausages, beans on top. Good coffee, too. So who'd you want me to follow, Karen or Ray?'

  Melody

  Ray said, 'Karen, meet Melody. Mel, Karen.'

  'Charmed I'm sure,' Mel said.

  Karen ignored the outstretched hand. 'Ray, Pyle. Pyle, Ray. Anna you probably remember.'

  ''Course. Hey, Anna.' Which was when Mel realised Ray was drunker than she'd believed, Ray hunkering down to pat Anna and getting a head-butt for his troubles that knocked him clean out of his unlaced trainers. Pyle helped him up. 'So this is Ios,' Ray said. 'I was expecting, I don't know, less wolves.'