The Desert Run

by Gregg Dunnett

  “I’m going to need your phones too,” Paul said when he was done. He pulled out a padded envelope from inside his jacket. It looked like it was lined with tinfoil. “Come on boys. Turn ’em off. Take out your SIMs and stick it all in here. You’ll get them back when we’re done.”

  I looked at Ben, hoping he’d protest, but he just shrugged and took out his phone and held the button down till it shut down. Paul turned to me and smiled sarcastically. “Now you, pal.” He smiled at me.

  I’d come to know that smile very well, but that first time I saw it I just got a very bad feeling. It was the way he looked like he loved himself way too much. Gelled hair, leather jacket, stubble on his face. Teeth artificially whitened. I didn’t smile back, but I did what he asked and handed it over. Then we all got in the car, me in the back and Ben in the passenger seat. The first thing Paul did was fiddle with all the buttons, the heated seats and the stereo and the traction control or something, I don’t know what. Then, when we finally set off, he was driving too fast.

  “Can you slow down, please,” I said from the back. “We shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.” I was being an arse I know, but I was in my post-Julia angry phase by then.

  “Can you shut the fuck up, please?” Paul answered at once. “Do you know how far it is to Scotland from here?”

  “Well, however far it is, it’s going be considerably further if we get stopped for speeding and the police notice the car’s full of hashish.” We glared at each other via the rear view mirror. I knew I was being an idiot but I couldn’t help it.

  “Where the fuck did you find him?” Paul asked Ben, ignoring me and turning up the music so I couldn’t hear Ben’s reply. But he did slow down a little, and I sat back, trying to force myself to relax into the leather upholstery. I had to admit one thing: it was a nice change to get out of Ben’s stinking van.

  For the first few hours of the journey, we travelled in silence—well, we didn’t talk much. We were listening to some R&B crap. Paul’s arrogance extended to his driving, he stayed in the fast lane, burning up behind people, then sitting too close and flashing his headlights if they didn’t move over. When the traffic thinned out though he suddenly switched the music off and began to talk.

  “So, this is your first time doing this?”

  Because I was in the back seat, it could only have been Ben he was talking to.

  “Yeah, sort of. We’ve done some before. Just a slightly bigger scale this time,” Ben replied. We’d agreed to be as vague as possible. It seemed safer that way.

  “Uh-huh,” Paul said, not sounding particularly interested, then he went on.

  “So… Danny didn’t tell me how you got it in. Through customs?” He glanced across again.

  “Danny doesn’t know,” Ben said. “I’m sure you’ll understand, we think it’s best if we keep that information to ourselves.” Ben looked across at Paul and smiled, but Paul just kept his eyes on the road and said nothing. I thought he’d dropped it but then he spoke again.

  “Not sure that’s gonna work,” he said. “Jimmy’s going to want to know, you see. And you don’t want to be ‘keeping it’ from Jimmy. Do you know what I mean?”

  He glanced again at Ben, and then I saw his eyes check me out in the rear view mirror, interested to see how we both took that.

  It sounds crazy, thinking back about it. I’d given hardly any thought to who this Jimmy guy was or what he might be like. I’d just taken Ben’s word for it that it was all sorted. That this was just a delivery drive, even if I didn’t really understand why we had to make it.

  But when Paul started talking like that, I really began to see that this still wasn’t over. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into here. And no defence if something went wrong.

  “OK,” Ben said suddenly, making a decision. “There’s nothing too much to know. We hid it in surfboards and drove it back.”

  I watched Paul’s reaction to this. His pretence of being uninterested had slipped. He turned to Ben.

  “Surfboards?”

  “Well, paddleboards, to be exact. You know, like all the celebrities are into.”

  Paul said nothing, and Ben went on explaining.

  “They’re bigger, you see. You get more space and…”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  Ben shut up.

  “So you hid it in paddleboards? Then what? You just drove it home? In that shitty van?”

  “Yeah.”

  Paul put his head on one side, like he was working his way through the practicalities.

  “How’d you get it in there? Inside the boards?”

  Ben jerked a thumb toward me in the back. “Jake. He’s a genius at fixing stuff up. He opened them up, packed it all in, and put them back together so no one could tell the difference.”

  “The guy in the back’s a genius?” Paul said, sounding doubtful, but this time, it was Ben who smiled.

  “Yeah. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “They stopped us. At the customs. We just got unlucky, and they were stopping everyone, and we thought we were fucked—they even had a dog sniffing over the boards. And they didn’t suspect a thing!”

  I saw Paul’s eyes appraising me again in the rear-view mirror.

  “Yeah, Jake’s a genius.” Ben warmed to the theme. “You should have seen the boards, they looked like new.”

  “No shit.” Paul said.

  I couldn’t decide how to take this. On the one hand, I felt a small surge of pride at Ben talking about me like this. On the other hand, if I allowed myself to think about him sleeping with Julia it still left me hollow and out of breath. And then, it was his plan that meant we were sitting in a car, driving to Scotland with someone who was probably going to rip us off and steal all our money. It was a complicated feeling.

  For a moment, no one spoke, and the only sound was the low growl of the car’s big engine, and the hum of air and flying bugs smashing against the windscreen.

  “And where did you say you bought all this from?”

  “He didn’t,” I interrupted. “And I don’t think this Jimmy needs to know everything, does he? Maybe the less we all know about each other’s business, the better?” Ben might have decided to tell all, I still wanted to stick to the plan.

  Again Paul went silent for a little while, just gunning the big car forwards. Then he turned around to speak to me, totally taking his eyes from the road.

  “How much do you know about this Jimmy?” Paul asked, and watched me while hundreds of metres of unseen road flew towards us.

  31

  “I just know he’s got the money, and he wants to buy the dope,” I said in the end. “Can you please look where you’re going?”

  To my relief Paul turned around, but he still watched me in the rear view mirror.

  “Then you don’t know shit. He’s got plenty of money. That’s for sure, and he’s interested in buying your little stockpile, but he’s going to want some questions answered, questions that I’m here to ask. And if I don’t get those answers, then he doesn’t get those answers. And he’s not going to like that.”

  Paul paused.

  “You do know his nickname is Crazy Jimmy, don’t you?”

  Obviously, I didn’t, and from the way Ben wouldn’t meet my alarmed look, he didn’t either. The fucking idiot.

  “Do you want to know why his nickname is Crazy Jimmy?”

  I didn’t really, but I had a feeling he was going to tell us.

  “When you meet Jimmy you’ll see he’s kind of a scary guy anyway, but if he gets angry he’s liable to get real angry. I mean the sort of angry with serious consequences. I mean people get hurt. Or worse.” Paul shook his head as if he’d seen it happen too many times.

  “I guess these days you’d say he’s got anger management issues. I’m sure he could get help if he wanted to, you know, counselling or something. Hypnotherapy. They make them stroke rabbits don’t they? The fur calms them down. But he doesn’t do any of that.
I think he likes it to tell the truth. He likes how his reputation precedes him. You know what I mean?”

  Neither Ben nor I replied.

  “Well the point is it’s not a good idea to do things that Crazy Jimmy doesn’t like. That’s what tends to make him go a little crazy. Do you understand?

  “Do you understand?” Paul asked again, when neither of us responded.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Good. And since we’re on the subject, I should tell you that if Jimmy doesn’t like those answers...” Paul winced. “Then this isn’t going to end well for you. Do you understand that?”

  I was cursing Ben for setting this up at that point, and especially for abandoning our van. I hated the fact we were trapped.

  “I understand,” I heard Ben say from the front. “It’s alright. I get that he’ll want to know the provenance. That the dope is legit—isn’t stolen—whatever. That it’s not going to cause him any trouble. We can do that.” Ben turned around to me in the back.

  “Can’t we, Jake?”

  I was scared, but somehow, I was more angry than scared.

  “Yeah. We can do that.”

  “Good,” Paul said. His tone had lost its menacing edge and was back to all business. “So, where does it come from?”

  I listened as Ben told him our story. At first, he tried to keep some details out of it, obscure the facts a little, but Paul was good at probing and good at insisting everything was explained properly. And if there was any comfort to be taken, it was in the fact that Paul didn’t seem to mind that we were total amateurs. In fact, he seemed to like it. My problem was, I was increasingly thinking how this made us a whole lot easier to rip off. Or, if Jimmy really was as crazy as Paul made out, to murder.

  We drove straight through the night. Paul didn’t seem to need to take rests, but we had to stop for fuel around three in the morning, somewhere near the border. I said I had to go for a piss, and Paul told me to go in a bush where he could see me. I guess he thought I might try and make a run for it. I might have too, even with all our dope in the boot. Then we got back in the car, and the constant drone of it and the warm comfortable seats meant I must have slept for a bit, because the next thing I knew, Paul had opened all the windows and was shouting at us.

  “Yo, compadres. Wake up.”

  Cold air was rushing into the car. I sat up in a hurry, blinking. It was still dark, six in the morning now. When Paul saw that we’d both woken up, he shut the windows. They hummed up, and then the road noise was cut out again.

  “We’re nearly there. I need you to put these on.” Paul reached across in front of Ben and opened up the glove box, where he pulled out a couple of black material bags, with little drawstrings on the bottom.

  “Put these on your heads. Pull the cords tight, go back to sleep. I’ll wake you when we get there.”

  Paul tossed one of the hoods into the back, and I picked it up.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “So you can’t see where the fuck we’re going. It’s a good thing. It means I don’t have to kill you if this all gets fucked up. Put it on.”

  I watched as Ben put his on, and wishing I could think of an alternative, I did the same. As the fabric hid the sight of the car and the back of Paul’s head I wondered if that would be the last thing I ever saw. A part of me marvelled at how willingly I was giving myself up. I almost welcomed the hood and the chance of oblivion it promised. But then the cheap nylon smell of the fabric and the touch of it against my face and the way it covered my mouth and trapped my breath all made me realise just how fucking scared I was. I had to fight to keep my breathing shallow so that I didn’t suck the material into my mouth. Some time later I realised I should have been trying to work out where we were. The last sign I’d seen was for Glasgow, but it was impossible. I’d missed miles fighting against my panic and now I had no idea where we were, what sort of road, or how fast we were going. Paul had put his music back on too, so I gave up. I let myself fall into a kind of limbo where I waited for whatever was going to happen next.

  32

  “Wake up. We’re here.”

  I felt the car had stopped moving.

  “Take your hoods off.”

  I did so, and the brightness of daylight hurt my eyes. I’d already sensed it was daytime, but the hood had still cut out most of the light. Squinting, I saw Paul getting out of the driver’s seat. He stretched outside the car and then unbuttoned his fly and took a piss against the wall which stretched out in front of us. Right in front a tall iron gate blocked our path. On either side was a high stone wall, and two CCTV cameras were mounted on the posts holding up the gates, like a pair of birds of prey. All around us, as far as I could see, were mountains, rising up steeply, their tops lost in the mist.

  “Ah, that’s better,” Paul said, shaking himself dry.

  “Where are we?” I heard Ben say.

  Paul went up to a metal grille and pressed the button for the intercom. He leaned in and spoke for a minute, then straightened up. He stretched again. Then he walked back to the car and got in.

  “Good sleep ladies?” he said, as the gate slowly swung open.

  The drive curled around the side of a lake—a loch, I guess, since we were in Scotland—and led up to a house, a modern building like a white square box. There was more CCTV here.

  “Welcome to Jimmy’s,” Paul said.

  I didn’t look across at Ben, but I could sense he was nervous. Me? I was fully shitting myself. As I got out of the car, I looked around, hoping I’d see something to reassure me. To our left was a stand of trees that extended behind the house, cutting off the chance that anyone could see us from there. In front of the house was the loch; I could see the far bank, and even a couple of buildings, but it was a long way away, much too far for anyone to see what might happen here. To our right was the long drive we’d just come down, and the end of that was the sort of place you could take a piss without worrying about being seen. It all meant one thing: No one knew where we were. If anything went wrong, we were in big trouble.

  Paul led us to the back door and rapped on it hard with his knuckles, and we all waited.

  The door cracked open, and I heard a man’s voice; I could hear at once he was on the phone. He opened the door enough to see who we were and glanced around outside as well, like he wanted to check there was no one else around. Then he swung the door fully open and just stared at us, continuing his phone call into a little earpiece.

  That’s when I got my first sight of Crazy Jimmy. He was middle-aged, dressed in jeans and a black shirt, with short hair and a neat beard. His whole look was groomed, like he’d worked on it, but like he had a way of looking cool naturally as well. He had the mobile phone in one hand but no wires to the earpiece. It must have been Bluetoothed.

  “Hold on,” he said, presumably to whoever he was speaking to on the phone. Then he stared at us, his face empty of expression.

  “Paul,” he said eventually by way of a greeting, but he gave nothing away as to whether our arrival was welcome or even expected. Jimmy ran his eyes over Ben and me.

  “Just do it like I told you to and get on with it,” he said suddenly into his phone, and then he cut the call and pulled the earpiece from his head.

  “Which one of you is Ben?” Jimmy asked, and Ben raised his hand like a kid in a classroom when the headmaster unexpectedly comes in.

  “You’re younger than I thought.”

  Jimmy continued to stare at us.

  “Fucking hell. Like policemen. You know you’re getting old when they look like they’re not even shaving yet.”

  Jimmy exchanged a look with Paul. A look that said something, but it was too cryptic, too fast for me to read anything from it.

  “So, you want to come in? You’ve come a long way to see me.”

  Paul moved forward, but Jimmy held up his hand to stop him.

  “You checked them over, right? Phones?”

  “Yeah. It’s all good.”

&n
bsp; “The product?”

  “I told you. It’s good.”

  “No issues on the way up?”

  “Jimmy, I did it just like you told me.”

  Jimmy sniffed and pushed the phone and his earpiece into his jeans pocket.

  “You better come in, then.”

  We followed Jimmy in, Ben going after Paul and me last. We walked through a narrow corridor over worn flagstones; the house seemed to be a modern shell built over something older. We went up a glass and steel staircase, and the space opened up, and I drew my breath in. We emerged into a big modern room. One end was a kitchen, and the other had low-lying sofas arranged around a giant TV. But the most striking thing was the front wall: it was just glass, outside a big balcony that stretched the full length of the room, and beyond that the loch, where wisps of mist hung over the still water.

  “Have a seat,” Jimmy said, pointing to the kitchen table. It was empty apart from a laptop resting on it, and he pressed the lid shut as Ben and I sat down. Paul didn’t sit; he walked to the window and stood against the glass, looking out at the loch.

  Jimmy hadn’t sat down either. He stood in the middle of the room, still staring at us, his head cocked to one side as if he wasn’t sure whether he should just kill us now. Then he spoke to Ben.

  “So, you’re the one who set this all up? This is your thing, right?”

  I think Ben wished he hadn’t been so quick to sit down. Now, Jimmy and Paul had the height advantage, along with every other advantage going.

  “Yeah.”

  “And how you feeling about it now? You feeling good?”

  “I’m feeling OK.”

  “You’re OK. You’re feeling OK. That’s nice.” Jimmy repeated back to him. “You know, I was very surprised when I got the message through Paulie here, that a couple of guys wanted to see me with a shipment of product. Very surprised.” Jimmy stroked his beard.