Coffin Dodgers (8 page)

I don't know what to say. My brain is firing in twenty-two different directions, none of them good. "The good news?"

"The good news is that unless you give me a very good reason to, I'm not going to come back to see you when I am on duty," Burke says. "And believe me, that's very good news."
 

"What's the bad news?"

He takes another sip. "If you ever come to me again to waste my time with some half-arsed conspiracy theory, whether it's to cover your tracks or because you've banged your head and imagined all kinds of nonsense, you'll wish you'd never been born."

I can tell by Burke's expression that he's not exaggerating. "Do we understand each other?"

I can't think of anything to say, so I just nod like an idiot.

"Good," Burke says. He finishes his drink and leaves.

Burke has barely left when Amy comes over.

"What was all that about? I take it he wasn't here to see you because he thinks you're a really cool guy?"

"He's downloaded the data from my car's black box," I explain. "No tampering, no virus, no mechanical fault."

"Do you believe him?"

"I believe him when he says that if I come to him again, he'll make me wish I'd never been born," I say. "But I was in the car. He wasn't. I don't care what the black box says. The car went nuts and nearly killed me."

"So if it's not a virus, and it's not a mechanical fault, and nobody's been messing with anything…"

"I don't know, Amy. I really don't know."

 
Burke keeps his promise. He doesn't come back to see me on duty or off-duty, although I do see the back of his head a few days later when another dead resident is being wheeled out of the casino's back entrance. We get a lot of that. It's not what you think, though. The days when casinos were run by gangsters and full of lowlifes are long gone. We're a respectable establishment with a respectable customer base. But that customer base is old, and some of the residents take advantage of some of the more personal services that you can get if you know the right people. A little bit too much Viagra, a little too much excitement and a few illicit substances send their blood pressure into orbit, and it's not uncommon for their hearts to pop like balloons. Of course the police investigate each one, but they don't usually need to wait for the post-mortem to find out the cause of death. This one is no different.

Over the next few weeks, things return to normal. To nobody's great surprise my car is declared a write-off, and the insurance company sends me a cheque that's low enough to be insulting but not so low that you'd storm their offices with petrol bombs and Stanley knives. I scan job adverts when the bar is quiet, but don't see anything interesting or anything that I am qualified for. Amy comes over to bitch about the customers, Dave continues to go on disastrous dates, and we all meet every night or second night for beer.
 

If anyone is trying to kill me they're being very subtle about it.
 

You've probably noticed that whenever we're not working, we don't hang around at work. That's partly because when you've spent all day being nice to customers, the last thing you want to do at the end of your shift is spend any more time around customers, but it's mainly because I don't get gambling. I can barely remember the rules of Snap, let alone Poker. Betting on where a spinning ball's going to end up doesn't really grab me. And I know enough about slot machines to stay as far away from them as I possibly can.

Slot machines are amazing. I'm fascinated by them. Did you know the casino makes about three-quarters of its cash from the slots? Forget about card tables and roulette wheels: they provide the glamour to lure people in, but they don't bring in the big bucks. The poor buggers feeding the slot machines do that.

Most people reckon the slots are fixed, but I don't think they realise how amazingly, incredibly fixed they are. See the blue ones over there, the ones with the giant golden coins above them? The odds of hitting the jackpot are 300 million to one against. Only one person's ever won the jackpot in the whole time I've worked here, and that turned out to be a software glitch. No, the casino didn't pay out.

When I say they're fixed, I don't mean there's anything underhand or illegal going on. The fix is in your head. Slot machine makers know more about psychology than any shrink does, and they're experts at making sure that when you push the machine's buttons it pushes your buttons. The whole idea is to keep you excited, to keep you in the game until you run out of money.

Those signs telling you this machine pays out 81%, that machine pays out 79%? All true. But those numbers are averages, and those averages are counted over hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of plays. Sure, the machine will spit out four-fifths of what goes in -- but that doesn't mean it's going to do it tonight, let alone do it for you.
 

There's no point in trying to cheat, either. Try to attach a hacking tool to one and an alarm goes off in Mission Control. Try to hack the wireless network -- not the public one, the secure one all the machines use -- and security will be on you before you can smirk. Learning the patterns? Good luck with that. The formulas are massive, and anyone doing suspiciously well on the slots quickly gets their very own CCTV camera. If you think you can beat the house you've been watching too many movies. Either that, or you're just nuts.

There's only one way to make money from slots: run the place where people play them.

The more normal things get, the more bored we become. It isn't long before two things happen. Dave and I start talking about another prank, and I get fed up with begging lifts and walking. The insurance money isn't enough to get another car, and even if I had the cash I'm a bit wary of getting one. I know what Burke said, and what the black box reported, but I know that something happened, and I'm in no hurry to have it happen again.
 

So I decide to buy a motorbike. Maybe it'll make Amy see me in a whole new light. An edgy, rock and roll kind of light. I tell her about it when she comes over mid-shift.

"You bought a what?"

"A motorbike."

"You're an idiot."

This is not the reaction I was hoping for.

"Matt, those things are dangerous. If you'd been on a bike when you had that crash, you wouldn't be here."

"If I'd been on a bike, I wouldn't have had the crash in the first place."

Amy's right, but I'm right too. With cars, computers do pretty much everything. They're so complicated that with some of them, you need to do a degree in computing before you can even find the accelerator. Motorbikes are much simpler. The engines are cleaner than they used to be, of course -- the anti-pollution laws cover everything with an engine, whether it's a ten-ton truck or a lawnmower -- but all the important stuff happens via cables, and pedals, and chains, and things you can see, touch and hit with a hammer. If a car computer goes crazy it throws you sideways through a hedge. Bike computers don't go crazy, because bikes don't have computers. Or at least, the kind of bikes I can afford don't.

"They're still dangerous. You know what doctors call them?"

I bought my one from a doctor. He called it a motorbike, and he was only getting rid of it because he wanted a bigger, faster motorbike. I don't think I should tell Amy that.

"They call them donorcycles, Matt. They're lethal."

"Oh, come on, they're not that bad. You know me, I'm not a maniac. I'm not going to be hammering around corners in the middle of the night at two hundred miles per hour. And anyway, the insurance money wasn't enough to buy a car."

"You'd be better off with bloody roller skates." And with that, she's off.

Amy's in a better mood by the time she, Dave and I end up back at mine for beer, although I'm sensible enough not to talk about the bike again. I think Dave's about to bring it up, but I shoot him a look and he talks about work instead.
 

After the shop talk Dave and I start talking about our next prank. As ever, Amy spends a lot of the time giving the distinct impression that she thinks we're hopelessly immature, but before long she's chipping in with suggestions for targets or flaws she's spotted in our cunning plans. She's usually right. When we were talking about our last prank but one, the bowling green thing, Amy said we were taking too big a risk. At the time, we thought she was being overly cautious, but of course we were nearly caught. She's not the kind of person who likes to say "I told you so", although we give her plenty of opportunities. Amy never looks back.

Dave and I are pretty sure that the next prank should be the golf club one. Of all the targets we could choose, the golf club is the most visible and the most annoying. It's where the pillars of the community go when their secretaries say they're in a meeting, and the car park is always full of the latest, most expensive, most vulgar cars, driven by people wearing trousers that can burn your retinas from three hundred yards.

"Do you need to do all eighteen?" Amy asks. "Surely everybody starts at the first hole? Won't the other seventeen holes be a waste of time?"

Dave and I have talked about this. "We're thinking it's better to be safe than sorry. Maybe people get halfway through a game one day, then they come back the following day and pick up from where they left off."

"Do they?"

"No idea."

Golf is something I just don't get. It's completely incomprehensible to me. I've tried to read the rules but they don't make any sense. If you told me that after the fifth hole, all the players stripped naked and slapped each other on the arse, I wouldn't be surprised. Horrified, yes. Surprised, no.

"What's the security like?" Amy asks.

"It's not really Fort Knox up there," Dave says. "The clubhouse is pretty tight -- it's got a serious alarm system -- but we aren't trying to get in there, so that doesn't matter. Outside, there's not much. A camera on the gate and a single security guard patrolling the grounds in a golf cart. The green's pretty much unguarded."

We talk about various details -- how we'll get in, how long it'll take, whether the stuff we're going to use will actually work -- but even Amy can't find any serious flaws in the plan.
 

"Tomorrow, then?" Dave says.

"Works for me. Amy? Want to come?"

Amy smiles. "It's not really my thing," she says. "Don't get caught."

CHAPTER EIGHT

The plan was simple enough when we talked about it, but now that we’re actually doing it we’ve spotted a couple of little flaws. The first is that golf courses are a lot bigger than you might think, so covering eighteen holes involves a lot more walking than we’d anticipated. The second is that we’re absolutely freezing. And the third is that there is some kind of animal in the grounds, and it’s really freaking Dave out.
 

Did I mention what the plan actually is? It’s not the most spectacular prank we’ve ever undertaken, but I still think it’s pretty funny. We’re painting the flagpoles at each hole with anti-climb paint. You know the stuff that they put on lampposts and other things to stop vandalism? The paint that sticks to whatever you put it on, but the outside never dries? Yep, that stuff. I ordered it online. I don’t know much about golf, but I do know that when somebody’s trying to get a ball into the hole their golfing partners take the pole out -- and when they do, they’ll discover the joys of anti-climb paint. We’re hoping that when they do, their first reaction is to rub their hands on their trousers. Let’s face it, a big white handprint can only improve the pattern on the average pair of golfing trousers.

I’m beginning to wish that we’d actually checked the rules, though, because if Amy’s right and everybody starts at the first hole then we’re wasting a lot of time trying to do all eighteen. So far we’ve done three, and we’ve been at it for nearly an hour.

Dave stiffens. "I think I heard it again."

"Dave, I've told you. It'll be a squirrel or something."

"I don't like squirrels," he says.

"They're not exactly scary, though, are they?"

"I'm not scared of them."

"So why are you so jumpy?"

"I don't like it when I hear things and I don't know what the noise is. That's all."

"Fair enough."

Dave turns away and scans the horizon. I manage to resist temptation for all of sixty seconds before yelling "AAAAAGH!" at the top of my voice. Dave jumps so high he's probably dented the moon.

"Sorry," I say. "Couldn't resist it."

Dave doesn't say anything. He picks up the tin of paint and walks towards the next hole.

I know he's going to get me back, but right now I'm too busy laughing to care.

Seven down, eleven to go. We're getting bored now.
 

"How about we do one more and then call it a night?" Dave says. "I think eight holes are enough. We need our energy for drinking tomorrow. Today. Tomorrow. You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I think you're right. Okay. One more."

Dave leads the way and we begin to climb the hill towards the next hole. He's about halfway up when he turns, makes a shushing motion with his finger and crouches down. I crouch too.

Dave points towards the top of the hill and cups his hand to his ear. I don't hear anything at first, but then I hear what Dave heard.

Somebody's up there, and they're not alone.

Given that we're trespassing and committing what the police would call Acts of Criminal Damage, the sensible thing to do would be to go back down the hill very quietly and get the hell out of here. Dave looks at me and raises one eyebrow, but he's just looking for confirmation; he already knows what I want to do. I nod and we crawl -- quietly and very slowly -- up the hill to see what's going on. Of course we do. The clubhouse closed hours ago, so whoever's up there isn't having one more drink before shutting time. Something's going on, and it might be interesting.

There are three golf carts parked in a rough semicircle at the very top of the hill, facing away from us, the polished panels reflecting the pale blue moonlight. The drivers, occupants, whatever, must be looking down over the city. Even from where we're lying, it's a hell of a view. What we can't see, though, is who's in the carts. We can smell them, though, or at least we can smell one of them. Even from this distance there's a strong whiff of cigar smoke.