The Tick-Tock Trilogy Box Set

by David B Lyons

  12:00

  Darragh

  Prison isn’t bad. We’ve a games room here. There’s an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 in it. I’ve been masterin’ FIFA over the past few months. Nobody can beat me Man United team.

  Prison’s a bit like a boys’ club. It’s fine once your cell door is open, but when you’re locked up it can get a lil boring. All you have for company is your own mind and that often plays tricks on itself. I look at the clock on the wall of the meeting room. It’s just ticked by midday. Jennifer is always late. I bet she’s not here for at least another ten minutes. I’m not bothered. It’ll be more of the same. She’ll try to get me to plead guilty again. I left so much DNA at the fags’ apartment that she feels I’ve got no chance in me trial. They found me fuckin cum all over the television. Fuck it. I never thought of that. I don’t know what I was thinkin’. The cops are tryna get me to rat JR out but I ain’t givin’ in. I’m sticking to our plan.

  This prison doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen on the telly before. It’s actually a bit modern. It’s clean. It’s certainly cleaner than my bedsit. The bed’s a bit uncomfortable, but that’s me only real complaint. The mattress is so thin it’s like sleeping on an ironing board. But I’m slowly getting used to it. The screws are fine. Most of them are keen to get along with the prisoners. They just want to get through a work shift without any drama. There’s a couple of dicks, but most of them really couldn’t give a shit. I haven’t had a run in with any of them. In fact, I haven’t had a run in with anyone. The prisoners seem okay to me too. I just keep meself to meself. There are a few guys that I play computer games with but that’s about it. It’s winner stays on down in the games room so my company can change every ten minutes. I’d like to be known as The FIFA King but that nickname hasn’t really caught on. I guess you don’t get to come up with your own name in prison. I’m not bitter about gettin’ caught. I think we were just unlucky. Me lawyer says there were three phone calls made to the cops at around twelve o’clock on the day of the murder. They know who two of them are. Michelle and Noah from the banks. Vincent caved at the last minute, tryin’ to save Ryan’s life, and told them everything. But he fucked up. He got his pussy-ass boyfriend killed. I hope he’s carrying that guilt around with him. The cops seem to think it was my partner who made the third call. I don’t believe them. JR would never have ratted me out. We’re too close. They keep tellin’ me I can halve the amount of time I’ll have to spend in prison if I give him up, but that’s just not gonna happen. I’m going to get through this on me own. My trial’s supposed to be only two months away but me lawyer seems to think it will be delayed past that. She’s not happy with me. I can sense it. She really wants me to rat JR out. She doesn’t understand the rules of bein’ a gangster.

  When I’m alone in me cell I think through the morning of the murder again and again. Sometimes I get a little paranoid about JR’s involvement. It often flashes through me mind that he wanted to keep all that money to himself. But why did he give me fifty per cent of every other robbery we carried out? It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve added up in my head that he musta made me over eighty grand in the short few months that we worked together. And why did he set my computer up on the day to make it look like I was home all morning? He gave me an alibi. He gave me the disguise. Besides, JR rang me to warn that the cops were on the way. Why would he do that if he was trying to frame me? None of it adds up. He’s hardly an enemy. He’s a good friend. A great friend. Probably the best friend I’ve ever had. In fact, he’s definitely the best friend I’ve ever had. My lawyer and the cops have a different twist on it though. They haven’t a fuckin clue. They just want to put an end to this whole thing. One prisoner told me they have quotas to reach anyway. My lawyer would benefit from me taking a plea deal and reducing my sentence. She has a reputation for plea deals and that’s how she gets so much business. I like her though. Jennifer must be over fifty but she’s hot. Her face ain’t great. She’s got a few scars dotted around her cheeks. I’m not sure if it’s from acne or a knife. But she has that Latino body all men drool over. Big ass, big hips. I like spending time with her even if she does try to bully me a bit. She complains that I don’t say enough in our meetings, but that’s because all I’m ever thinkin’ is how much I’d love to bend her over and fuck her South American brains out. Besides, even if I did want to give JR up, I don’t really know that much about him. I know his name, that’s about it. In fact, I don’t really know his name. I know his initials. Billy, the barman who introduced me to JR, told me once that he thought his name was Jack somethin’-or-other. I think it began with a B or a D. He says JR looked like a guy a mate of his used to play golf with years back. He wasn’t a hundred per cent sure though. But even if I went down that road, I have no idea where Billy is now. The last I heard he was moving to Galway to become a barman at some jazz club. I don’t even know Billy’s surname. I could look into it, I suppose. Maybe I will in the future. But I’m certain JR will contact me at some point. We can hardly talk now. These cunts are trackin’ everything I do. JR will have to wait it out, probably for another couple of years. That’s a shame. I miss him. We spent so much time together. I certainly have the time on my hands to be patient. I have to shut out the bullying from Jennifer and the cops. I can’t let it play on repeat in me head while I’m in me cell alone. I’d probably ask for a less annoyin’ lawyer if Jennifer’s ass wasn’t making me dick hard.

  I guess the good thing about prison is me urges to kill seem to have gone away. I still think of the faces of the three men I’ve murdered. I can only remember the first two from the photographs that appeared in the newspapers over the days after their deaths. But Ryan’s face is very clear to me. I can even hear him talkin’ to me sometimes. I feel a sense of success over the cops that they think I’ve only murdered one man. I may have to spend the rest of me life in prison, but I still got away with murder – twice! I’m a proper fuckin gangster. I’m gutted I got caught but I’m fine with how my life’s gone. If I had the chance to go back in time to meet JR in the Deer’s Head, I’d do it all over again.

  12:00

  Vincent

  I never returned to the penthouse. I couldn’t.

  Chelle and her husband Jake organised the collection of my furniture and all my possessions. I’ve never set foot in any of the banks again either. My colleagues understood. I told them I was moving to Sydney to live out the rest of my life where Ryan always wanted to live; that I was dedicating the rest of my existence to his memory.

  The bank sorted me out with a very handsome redundancy package. They rushed it through as quickly as they could. Half a million euros. Thank you very much. That added to the €890,000 profit I ended up with for the sale of the penthouse. I couldn’t leave Dublin until the police finished their investigation, though. There was a period of two weeks where I was under serious consideration of being involved in the crime. Nobody at the bank thought I had any part in it but one of the detectives came down very hard on me. Even my tears of self-guilt didn’t give him reason to sympathise with the fact that my boyfriend had just been murdered. I suppose he was just doing his job. The other detective looking into the case was always on my side. Maybe they were just playing the good-cop, bad-cop card. It seemed that way to me. But after a couple weeks of intense scrutiny and uncertainty, they relieved me of any involvement.

  They’re still on the lookout for whoever escaped with the cash. Darragh Galligan isn’t giving up his partner in crime. That freak wasted no time putting a bullet through Ryan’s head. My ex-boyfriend died instantly. I imagined Ryan’s face every minute of every day for the next three months. I couldn’t get what he would have gone through that morning out of my mind. But I was keen to put that whole life behind me.

  The glare of the low sun makes me blink as I push through the glass door. It reminds me of the morning of the killing. A waiter greets me with a friendly smile but I don’t need his assistance. I know who I’m looking for. There’s no mistaking
the back of that head. It’s always had more hair on it than mine. He feels my presence and spins around just before I get to him; then grabs me in tight.

  ‘We did it,’ he whispers into my ear. I’ve missed his voice. I’ve missed his face. I’ve missed those lips. Jack is the best kisser I’ve ever kissed. I guess that’s down to the years he spent kissing girls before he realised he was gay. I don’t know why it took him so long. He’s so obviously camp. Much camper than me.

  ‘Yes we did!’ I reply before leaning off him so I can stare into his blue eyes. I love every inch of him.

  I never felt our plan would fail. Jack had new passports and identifications set up for us through his contacts with his old mates and I set out a plan to spread the money without any suspicion. We’re both Canadians now. Stanley Lam and Roy Gagnon.

  Fucking Stanley! I’ve actually become quite fond of it ever since Jack first told me what my new name would be. It’s grown on me over the past few months. The paperwork is official. The guys Jack knew from his gangland days know all the tricks with that sort of shit. The real Stanley Lam and Roy Gagnon are dead, but their deaths have never officially been recorded in Canada. We are them now.

  I taught Jack how to spread the money throughout Europe. The main bulk of the eight million is dotted around four different banks in Switzerland, but we’ve bank accounts in London, Brussels and here in Rome. Between us, we possessed the expertise to pull this off. We just needed to make sure the execution of the morning went without a hitch. I knew what the rough tiger kidnapping plan was, but Jack purposely didn’t tell me when or exactly how we were going to pull it off. We planned it that way so that my fear would be very much real on the day.

  We talked about living in Rome on the very first date we ever went on almost two years ago. Now here we are, multi-millionaires in our favourite place in the world, living out the rest of our days. Hopefully there’s a lot of days to come. We’re both classed as middle aged, but at almost 50, the chances are we’re both over the half-way line.

  It was Jack who raised the idea of me robbing my old bank pretty early on. But he was genuinely only joking. We laughed at the thought. We were two genuinely nice guys whose lives got turned upside down at the very same time we started to fall in love. Not long after I’d found out Ryan was fucking kids — and as a result was suicidal — Jack’s investigation into the killing of his son Frank was tying itself together. He discussed his search for Frank’s killer with me over pillow talk even in our early days of dating and we had long discussions on what he should do when he finally caught up with him. A light bulb went on in Jack’s head one day when he revealed the rough plan to me. I thought he was crazy. But the more we talked about it, the more it seemed to make perfect sense. It actually became a no-brainer. We were shocked we could both be so dark.

  We figured out a way to get rid of both Ryan and Darragh in one genius swoop while helping ourselves to our dream life. We both genuinely felt that we deserved our dream life. We’d both been served shitty hands up until that point. I try not to think about Ryan at all. I don’t feel a huge amount of guilt. He wanted to die. I’m not sure if Bob Nugent wanted to die, but he deserved to. The shit I saw that sick fuck doing to young kids in videos he posted to Ryan as TeenCum069 was vomit-inducing. He left a few hints in the forums about who he was and where he was based. It didn’t take long for Jack to track him down and use him as the ultimate test for Darragh. We had to know if he could kill. It all fell into place for us. The serendipity of it all would almost make you believe in fate. Jack and I had always arranged to meet up here on the rooftop of the Forum Hotel at midday exactly six months from the day of the robbery.

  Darragh’s upcoming trial gave me a big problem though. I was due to be a key witness for the prosecution. My lawyer fought hard to keep me away from the courts. The police weren’t happy but I was finally pardoned on the grounds of personal grief. The detective who had come down hard on me during the investigation turned out to be my hero. He told the courts they had more than enough evidence to put Darragh away for life without me needing to take the stand. The little fucker had actually wanked all over our apartment during that morning, spraying his juice all over our TV. You couldn’t make it up.

  Besides that, there’s a mountain of evidence stacked against him. He even had the gun he killed Ryan with in his pocket when he was arrested. He’s clearly not a bright little prick at all. Jack nailed it. He got everything spot on. So did I. I was brilliant. Not only during the morning of the robbery, but in the months that followed. I had to play the victim to perfection and I fucking nailed it. Everybody was smothering me with sympathy. Even the board members went out of their way to fawn over me after flying over from America. They have a plaque dedicated to Ryan in each of their Irish branches now. That makes me laugh. The only time I almost came out of character was when Clyde Sneyd snuffled under my arm at Ryan’s funeral to cry into me like a little baby. I should’ve been given an award for the straight face I kept as I patted the top of his head.

  And to think somebody once told me I couldn’t act!

  The end.

  Want to know…

  what Jack and Vincent got up to next?

  how Darragh is getting on in prison?

  how Jack and Vincent concocted their plan?

  how David B. Lyons came up with the idea for this novel?

  Well, you can watch this exclusive interview with the author right here where he will answer all of the above questions as well as many others.

  www.subscribepage.com/middayq&a

  Book II

  Whatever Happened to Betsy Blake?

  By David B. Lyons.

  For Lola

  10:00

  Gordon

  I don’t know why I’m smiling when I’ve just been told I have a fifty per cent chance of dying today. But I am smiling. I can feel it; my cheeks high and wide on my face. It must be the shock. Or perhaps the prospect of death is appealing to me; the thought of my mind finally shutting the fuck up.

  ‘Do you understand, Gordon?’ Mr Douglas asks.

  I feel my cheeks fall back down to their resting position, then let out a little sigh and nod my head.

  ‘I understand, Mr Douglas.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to prep the theatre as soon as it’s free. In the meantime, Elaine here,’ he says pointing to a young nurse dressed in purple scrubs, ‘will be available for you to talk to anytime you want. She’ll be positioned outside at the nurses’ station. Just press this button and she’ll be with you in no time.’

  He hands me what looks like a Nintendo games controller from the early nineties; one red button in the middle of it. Then he purses his lips at me before spinning on his heels. They all follow in unison, like a synchronised swimming team. I count them as they head towards the door. Seven. I’m waiting on them all to leave so I can sink the back of my head firmly into the pillow and yell obscenities. But Elaine turns back, walks towards me.

  ‘Mr Blake, are you sure there’s nobody I can call… nobody who can come up to see you?’

  ‘It’s Gordon, please,’ I tell her, my forearms propping me up on the bed. ‘And eh… no, there’s nobody. Not yet anyway. I may call my wife a little later.’

  ‘Your wife?’ she says, her eyebrows twitching.

  ‘Ex wife.’ Elaine makes an ‘O’ shape with her mouth. ‘There’s a few things I need to iron out in my head before I call her.’

  Elaine places the palm of her hand on top of mine and then purses her lips before turning around and walking out the door to catch up with the rest of her team. They must master that in medical college; how to purse your lips before spinning on your heels. As soon as she has closed the door I push my head firmly into the pillow.

  ‘Fuuuuuck!’ I screech, clenching my fists; my fingernails stabbing into the palms of my hands. I allow the reality of the situation to wash over me as much as it possibly can. A fifty-fifty chance of survival. That’s what Douglas said. Fuckin hell. I reach out t
o grab my phone and hold my finger against the screen so I can check the time. 10:03. Douglas told me the theatre would be ready at three p.m. I twitch the top of each finger on one hand to count upwards. Five hours. Jesus Christ. I might only have five hours left to live.