Coffin Dodgers (3 page)

"More pelvic thrusts?" I ask.

"No, creepier than that. He was talking about how his ship was coming in again. He's got a date. It's going to happen this week."

"Ship?" Dave looks puzzled.

"The Yellow Man's been telling Amy that his ship is going to come in, and he's going to sweep her off her feet when it does," I explain.

"In those exact words?"

"Of course not." I mime a pelvic thrust. Dave cackles until Amy shoots him a look.

"I mean it. There's something really weird about it."

We nod and change the subject.

We see the flashing lights long before we reach the roadblock. The police have shut off the street with sawhorses and tape, and the area behind the blockade is lit by the blue lights of three patrol cars. Behind the patrol cars are two fire engines, an ambulance and a medical examiner's truck. A uniformed policeman calls to us from behind the sawhorses.

"You'll need to take a detour, guys."

"What happened?"

"Car accident."

We look beyond the patrol cars and see the crumpled remains of what might well have been a car. It looks as if it picked a fight with an office block, and the office block won.

"Bad one?" Dave asks.

The cop doesn't answer, but he doesn't need to. The look on his face is answer enough.

Amy shivers.
 

We don't really talk much after that.

CHAPTER THREE

It's just after nine p.m., and Dave and I are crouched down behind an SUV in the Majestic car park. Way back when, the Majestic was a movie theatre, the place where teens would go on a Friday night. The projectors and the popcorn are long gone; now, it's a bingo hall that's closed through the week and packed senseless at weekends. Amy says it's a special building, a great example of Art Deco, whatever that is. It's a nice looking place, though.

"Are you sure about this?" Dave asks.

"We've talked about this a million times," I say. "We'll be miles away before they get to their cars."

"I feel like I'm eight."

We're both wearing big overcoats. They're not exactly stylish and they don't exactly fit, so we do look a bit like little children fooling around with a dressing-up box. But we didn't choose them for their style. We spent the best part of an afternoon going through charity shops until we found the coats with the biggest pockets -- pockets that, right now, are filled with evil-looking vials of green liquid. I ordered them from an obscure website about six months ago. Planning is important.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

We walk into the Majestic and wait until the bored-looking attendant takes our money and hands over a pair of tickets. I give one of them to Dave as we walk away from the ticket booth. "I'll take the left," I tell him. "You take the right. And we do it on three."

Dave smirks and salutes.

We split up and wait until another bored attendant checks our tickets, tears them in half and hands us the stubs. I nod at Dave.

"See you in there."

I'm standing in one of the boxes, looking down over what used to be the main auditorium of the cinema.  The cinema seats are long gone, replaced by regimented banks of tables, but the god-awful orangey carpets, drapes and ornate wall coverings remain. All I can see is hair: row upon row of immaculately coiffed hair, some of it bottle blonde, some of it an unholy shade of blue, most of it white or grey. Above the hair, at the very far end of the hall, a clearly bored man of about my age is standing in front of an enormous board of numbers. Every few seconds he hits a button, one of the numbers lights up and he reads it out as repeater screens throughout the halls display the lucky number and red LEDs on the tables do the same.

He appears to be reading out the numbers to a badly decorated hall full of dead people.

They're not really dead, but they're doing a very good impression of it. Other than the caller's voice, which is terrifyingly loud through the PA system, the entire hall is silent. Every single head is bowed, its owner staring at her numbers, not moving a muscle. You could probably die here and nobody would notice until it was time to go home. I'm not kidding: one of the cashiers at work used to have a job here, and he told me that during one of his shifts somebody had a heart attack halfway through a game. The person next to them thought they'd won and congratulated them.
 

Even if I live to be a hundred years old, I'll never understand how anybody could call Bingo fun.

This, though… this is going to be fun.
 

I look over to my right, and Dave is level with me in the box on the other side of the hall. I nod, and we both put our hands in our pockets.

"One," I mouth.

Our hands grab the vials in our pockets.

"Two."

We take our hands out of our pockets, making sure we don't smash any of the vials too early.

"Three."

You'd think we had a choreographer. First, the right arm, then the left, dozens of vials twisting and spinning and sparkling as they pass through the beams of the downlighters and uplighters and spotlights. As they rise they look like little green butterflies, fluttering away. There's something beautiful and almost hypnotic about it, but only three people see it: Me, Dave and the bingo caller. He's looking at us, his mouth making an O shape.

The vials' ascent slows, and then stops. They start to fall.

We're already turning as they tumble to the ground.

In a patter of tiny impacts the vials smash and the liquid escapes, ready to do what it was born to do.
 

Stink.

I'm no scientist, but I reckon that if one stink bomb is pretty much unbearable in an enclosed space, then a few hundred stink bombs would produce something you'd tell your grandchildren about. Not that I'm going to hang around to find out.
 

We're at the doors before anybody even gets a whiff. Dave is shouting and laughing at the same time. It takes me a moment to work out what he's yelling.
 

"House!"

It's Amy's turn to buy the beer, so we head for her apartment. Although Amy's place is physically identical to my one -- second floor, security entrance, one bedroom, a lounge and a small kitchen -- the interiors are very different. My place usually looks like the aftermath of a robbery, with stuff all over the place, t-shirts thrown over radiators and the odd abandoned sock hiding under a cushion. Amy's place, though, is pristine. You know those programmes where they go to some famous person's house and try to guess whose place it is? They wouldn't have a clue if they were looking around Amy's apartment. It's not that she's house proud or anything; it's just that she's not the sort of person who feels the need to fill every available inch of space with stupid porcelain pigs, or to cover the walls with posters. Where my place resembles an explosion in a tramp factory, Amy's apartment is more like a showroom.

We hit the buzzer and Amy lets us in. She's not her usual self: when she opens the door there isn't a beer in her hand, she isn't grinning, she doesn't say anything sarcastic and she doesn't ask us what we've been doing, even though she's holding the newspaper and I know for sure it'll have been updated with the stink bomb attack by now.

"Amy? You OK?"

She gives me a wan smile. "I'm fine," she says. "Just a bit shocked. You know that car wreck we saw? It was Comedy Jim."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. It's in the paper." Sure enough, there's a photo of Comedy Jim.

"Does it say what happened?" Dave asks.

"It says he was speeding. He lost control, went off the road and hit a wall. Paramedics tried to save him but he was too badly hurt."

"Jesus."

Amy looked at me. "Don't you think that's weird?"

"Weird?"

"Comedy Jim? Speeding?"

"Well…" Amy does have a point. He got the nickname Comedy Jim because there was nothing remotely funny about him: everything he did was slow, measured and sensible. He talked so slowly that if he started saying something to you in January, he probably still wouldn't have got to the point by July.
 

"The paper says he was doing over seventy," Amy says. "You've both been in his car. Seventy?"

She's right. We have. We didn't hang around with him or anything, but he tended to turn up to the same parties and -- being sensible -- didn't drink, so we occasionally blagged a lift home from him. Comedy Jim was a lot of things, but he wasn't a boy racer. Quite the opposite. Cautious didn't begin to describe his driving style. Most sensible people stop at junctions and wait until they're sure nobody's coming the other way. Comedy Jim would stop at junctions and, it seemed, wait until the seasons changed. Most people who accepted a lift from Comedy Jim took the bus after that. It might be full of crazies, covered in unspeakable stains and driven by a maniac, but at least the bus would get you where you wanted to go before you were too old to remember why you were going there.

"Yeah, that's true," I say. "Sounds like his car malfunctioned. The chip, maybe, or the software, or, I dunno, the fuel cell or something. Shit. That's horrible."

We sit in silence for a while. Eventually, Dave goes through to the kitchen, brings back three beers and hands them out.

"To Comedy Jim," he says.

We clink bottles.

"Comedy Jim."

Dave and Amy have been part of my life for a long, long time. Dave and I grew up on the same street, went to the same nursery, went to the same school, were in the same classes, chased the same girls. My parents were friends with Dave's parents, and we spent most of our childhoods running in and out of one another's houses.
 

Our parents were similar too. We were both IVF babies, which means that we don't know who our biological mothers are: we're from donor eggs. We've spoken about it from time to time, and neither of us wants to try and trace the donors. Our mums were -- are -- our mums. Do you know what I mean?

Like most IVF babies, our parents were already old when we turned up. That's usually the case: the procedure costs so much money that you can't even think about it when you're worrying about a mortgage, trying to pay the bills and all the everyday stuff. Unless you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth and a huge trust fund waiting for you to grow up, IVF is one of those things you can't do until you're on the wrong side of fifty. My mum and dad were in their late fifties when they had me; Dave's were a few years older.

In some ways that's a shame -- I mean, my dad tried his best, but when we played football together he got tired really quickly; when he tried to talk to me about sex when I was a teenager it freaked me right out -- but, you know, I was a happy kid and I loved my parents. Still do, even when my mum phones long-distance for no good reason at the worst possible time and says goodbye four hundred and thirty-two times before actually getting off the phone. I know Dave feels the same way.

Our parents are still around, although when Dave and I got an apartment together it wasn't long before our respective folks upped sticks and headed for somewhere warmer. Which is probably for the best. When we all lived under the same roof we argued a lot; now we only see each other a few times a year, I really enjoy their company. It's a bit like that with Dave, actually. When we shared an apartment we got on each other's nerves, but since we've moved to separate flats we get on just great.

Amy is different. She wasn't an IVF baby: her mum was one of the few people unaffected by whatever it was that threw a spanner into people's reproductive systems. Her parents were quite young when she came along -- her dad was thirty-one, I think, her mum twenty-nine -- and her dad's job (something to do with the army) meant they moved about a lot when she was young. Amy moved about a lot when she was older, too, but for different reasons: her dad died in an industrial accident when she was eleven and her mum died of cancer two years after that, so she spent three years with various family members before striking out on her own.
 

I met Amy when she ended up in some of my classes, the new girl in town. I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, and Amy had been parcelled off to a distant aunt -- but this time, she stayed. I don't think it was that her other relatives didn't love her; I think it's more that they didn't know how to handle her. Amy's never talked about it and I wouldn't dare ask, but I get the impression that in her aunt Cathy, Amy finally found an equal, someone who cared for her but who also knew exactly what shit she was pulling. They argued constantly, but there was always a real warmth to it. They were like a couple who'd been married for decades, fighting like tomcats while trying to hide the grins. Amy was devasted when Cathy died but, being Amy, she got over it.

Amy scares me sometimes. She's always pretty intense, and when somebody's as smart as Amy that intensity can be terrifying. She doesn't do it often -- she's never done it to Dave or I -- but she's one of those people who can take somebody apart with a couple of words.

She's also the smartest, funniest, coolest person I've ever met, and I'd crawl over broken glass if she asked me to.

I'd like to talk about something else now.

I'm dumping my stuff in the locker room at work when Steve, one of the other barmen, gives me a nod.

"Sleazy Bob's doing the rounds tonight," he says.

"Ah. Thanks for the heads-up."

Sleazy Bob is Robert Hannah, the casino's general manager. He isn't related to the Hannahs who founded the place and gave it its name -- even if he were, it wouldn't matter; they shipped out and sold out to a conglomerate from Dubai more than ten years ago -- but he doesn't exactly go out of his way to correct people if that's what they think. Over the years plenty of gullible and grasping staff and a fair few customers have been under the impression that if they're nice to him, he can make nice things happen to them. You can see how he got the nickname.

He tried it on with Amy once. She never told us the details, but he's been visibly wary of her ever since.

If Sleazy Bob is doing the rounds, that means he's showing a bunch of suits around the place. Investors, maybe, or more likely another bunch of high rollers waiting to be impressed.