Sins of the Father (10 page)

Which, in retrospect, explained the deep discount he’d received.

So he was feeling hostile and running on too little sleep, up way too early and glowering at the noisy and seemingly pointless construction as he stood on the street and tried to get his head together. It wasn’t quite raining—more like a foggy drift of floating moisture that clung to his hair and shirt, and made him feel like he was inside a cold humidifier.

When Micki Rose finally showed, she announced her presence by pretending to rabbit punch him in the back of the neck.

“Walk with me,” she said, heading off down Princes Street without waiting to see if he would follow. Even though she was a foot shorter than he was, he still had to walk fast to catch up to her.

She was a scrappy little spitfire, barely a hundred pounds and built like a twelve-year-old boy. She dressed like one, too, favoring expensive trainers, loose-fitting track pants, and video-game T-shirts that easily disguised whatever deadly weapons she inevitably was packing. At thirty, she still looked underage, and took full advantage of it. With her natural-blond ponytail, big, wide-set blue eyes, and upturned button nose decorated with a delicate spray of freckles, she was the dictionary definition of cute.

On the outside, anyway.

Micki had the words
Schemie Girl
tattooed in Old English lettering arching across her hollow belly, a local phrase Peter didn’t completely understand. At first he thought it might be slang for a con artist, but discovered that it meant something more like “hood rat” or “white trash.” She showed this tattoo often, with a kind of defiant pride. But trash or not, she was hands down one of the smartest operators Peter had ever met. Razor sharp and utterly fearless. Ballsy, but never reckless or impulsive.

Her scams always paid off, and paid off big. But if someone crossed her or got in the way of her score, she’d take them out without a second thought.

He would never act on it, or even admit it, but he had developed a serious crush on Micki. She certainly wasn’t his type, physically, but there was something about her cold, ruthless brilliance that attracted him like a cat to a laser pointer. He could never resist her games.

“This is the setup, right,” she said as soon as Peter caught up with her. “Been working this politician, a real pillar of the community by the name of Stephen Keith. Word is he likes ’em young and flat as pavement, so I reckon I’d better investigate. Find out firsthand, like. I was thinking straight-up blackmail, but then I learn that he’s got a piece of a bantamweight champion called Lucky Munro. A big piece. So…”

“So you snap some candid shots of Mr. Pillar-of-the-Community,” Peter said, swiftly catching on. “Use them to lean on him to have his boy throw the fight, and then clean up on an underdog bet.”

“Close,” she said. “Only it’ll be video, not stills—and you’ll be the one doing the filming. I’ll be too busy being the star. Then, see, we each put down twenty-five thousand euros, and make it back times ten, easy. I take a ten-percent finder’s fee off the top, naturally, but the rest is yours to walk away with. Only no one else can know about this fix, and I mean
no one
. If word starts getting around, it’ll skew our odds, and then where will we be?”

“Where indeed?” Peter agreed.

“So.” She stopped short, looking up at him with a sharp, appraising gaze. “You in?”

It sounded like a sweet setup. A sure thing. He knew it would be, too, because he’d known Micki for years and she’d never, ever laid a bet that hadn’t paid off. She was too careful. Too thorough. Every contingency planned for, and every angle covered.

There was just one problem.

Peter didn’t have twenty-five large in his hip pocket. It had been a real lean stretch, and it would be tough to scrape together twenty-five
hundred
on his own. But he knew a way to get it.

Normally he wouldn’t even consider borrowing money from someone like Big Eddie Guthrie. But on a sure thing like this, he could turn the debt around in under a week, avoid the draconian vig, and still walk away with a healthy take.

* * *

Big Eddie’s office was above a chip shop. It had been lavishly decorated with more money than taste, but the thick, oily smell that drifted up from below reminded Peter that the thin veneer of class was just that.

That went for Big Eddie himself, as well, sitting behind his ostentatious mahogany desk in his bespoke suit, diamond pinkie ring flashing, but you could still smell the rough, working-class sweat underneath the sweet miasma of his pricy cologne.

A bored Eastern European supermodel wrapped up in sparkling couture bandages that barely covered the legal minimum of her long, thoroughbred body was sprawled decoratively on a nearby sofa, chain-smoking and staring into her phone. Big Eddie shooed her out with a wordless tilt of his gray stubbled chin. She didn’t even pout.

“Sit down, Bishop,” he said in his thick Scottish accent, gesturing to the sofa recently vacated by the supermodel. “I must admit, I’m surprised to see you. Tell me, what dreadful misfortune has forced you to darken my door? Woman trouble, is it?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Peter said, taking the seat he’d been offered. The sofa was modern and very low, making him feel a little awkward. There wasn’t enough room between it and the desk for him to stretch his legs out straight, so he had to bend them up so his knees felt almost as high as his shoulders. It had to be a deliberate move on Big Eddie’s part, forcing him to scrunch into this undignified position and look up at the Scotsman in his tall desk chair.

“Well, then,” Big Eddie said, leaning forward in a mocking parody of earnest concern. “What exactly
is
it like?”

“I need twenty-five grand,” Peter said. “I can turn it around in five days.”

“Pounds or euros?”

“Euros,” Peter replied, shifting his uncomfortably bent legs.

Big Eddie nodded, taking out a small calculator from a desk drawer.

“Right,” he said, punching buttons and scribbling in a leather-bound note book. “Collateral?”

Peter put a hand into his messenger bag, knowing that if he hesitated for a fraction of a second or showed anything but nonchalant confidence in this moment, he’d be screwed.

He extracted a slender file folder containing a sheaf of documents proving his five-year ownership of an upscale New Town property over on Albyn Place, and agreeing to transfer ownership to Big Eddie in the event that he was unable to pay back the loan within the agreed-upon time frame. Every page was a fake—and not his best work, given the time constraints—but he’d backed it all up by hacking into the local records and doing some creative editing, in case anyone decided to dig deeper.

He hoped it would hold up.

Then Peter sat back on the torturous sofa, slinging one arm over the back in what he hoped was a casual, relaxed pose while Big Eddie looked over the contents of the file. The Scotsman’s weathered face was stoic, revealing nothing.

“Right,” he finally said. “You’ll have your money at…” He raised a hairy wrist, checking the time. Unlike Peter’s, his Rolex was real. “Half-seven tomorrow night.”

Then he stood, reaching out to shake Peter’s hand. Peter lurched to his feet and took the offered hand. It was surprisingly large, and squeezed his fingers just a little too tight. Big Eddie smiled, his blue eyes bright and disturbingly merry.

Peter had a little twinge of doubt in that moment, wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake.

But he trusted Micki. She’d never let him down. It was a sure thing.

Nevertheless, he felt a lot better once he was out of Big Eddie’s office—and out of range of that cheerful predator’s smile.

The next step of Micki’s carefully orchestrated plan involved wiring up her chosen love nest with hidden cameras. To that end, Peter paid a visit to a techie kid named Russel who could hook him up with all the necessary equipment.

Russel McNee was a tall, scrawny blond guy with glasses and a sardonic, gap-toothed grin. He was always home, day or night, and didn’t seem to have any source of income that would pay for his historic apartment on the Grassmarket, or support his expensive hobbies of espionage tech and robotics. Peter figured he either had family money, or was living off the illicit information he was able to gather by spying on his wealthy neighbors.

When Peter arrived at Russel’s cluttered bachelor pad, the kid was sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating Chinese food out of a take-out container and watching what had to be the single worst television program of all time on a massive flat-screen television. It looked as if it must have been shot in the late 1970s or early 1980s. There was goofy-looking guy with brown curly hair and what looked like a tiny middle-aged woman dressed up like a little boy. They were singing, badly.

Russel seemed to think this was the most wonderful spectacle of all time. When Peter walked in, the kid pointed at the screen with his chopsticks.

“You know what the best thing about the Krankies is?” he asked around a huge mouthful of some kind of slippery orange noodles.

“The fact that it’s not available in America?” Peter guessed, shaking his head at the painfully unfunny antics on screen.

“No, it’s the fact that they’re married.”

“Married?” Peter frowned. “What, the guy and the woman in the school-boy uniform?”

“Not only are they married,” Russel said, raising a thin, white-blond eyebrow, “They’re swingers. A couple of nasty perverts, they are. I’ll bet she wears the Wee Jimmy costume in bed.”

On screen, the man bent over and the woman kicked him in the ass, laughing and hamming it up for the camera.

Peter shuddered.

“I really didn’t need to know that, Russel,” he said, prying his eyes away from the television. “Have you got my order?”

“I surely do,” Russel replied, unfolding his long legs and leaving the box of Chinese food on the floor. “Right this way, sir.”

A large black cat appeared from between two boxes and headed over to investigate the abandoned noodles while Russel started digging through the piles and clutter.

“Ah, yes,” he said triumphantly, lifting a cardboard box that used to hold bottles of Irn-Bru. “Here’s everything you requested, plus extra cable and batteries which I’ve included out of the goodness of my heart.”

“You’re a saint,” Peter said, extracting a manila envelope full of clean credit cards under a variety of fake male names. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

Russel took the offered envelope in exchange for the box, checked the contents briefly. Then gave Peter a big hammy grin and a thumbs up.

“
Fan dabi dozi!
” he said.

* * *

The next stop was the Lambshead Inn—a small boutique hotel that Micki had chosen for her command performance. It was perfect, tucked away in Newington apart from the tourist throngs along the main drag. The room she’d chosen—the one her accomplice at the desk would insist was the only one available—sat on the top floor. Directly above it was a low attic space that ran the length of the building.

That would allow Peter to install the main camera in the central light fixture, and then run a cable to the room next door—where he’d be set up with his laptop, monitoring the action. He had two other small, wireless black-and-white cameras he would install as backup, but the image quality wouldn’t be quite as sharp. It was important to Micki that the mark’s face be crystal clear and unmistakable in the footage.

The room was girlish and romantic, decorated in a flouncy Victorian style that did nothing for Peter. Lots of lavender and ruffles and chintz. On a pink velvet settee across from the bed was a stuffed toy dog, bearing a label proclaiming it to be a replica of the famous Greyfriars Bobby. Peter couldn’t resist enlisting the faithful canine’s assistance in this caper.

He made a small incision in the dog’s belly and pulled out few handfuls of acrylic filler. Next, he carefully removed one of the black plastic eyes, slipping it into his pocket. He pushed the rectangular body of the wireless camera into the dog’s belly, arranging it with the camera lens set into the hole where the eye had been. Then he used the complimentary sewing kit to stitch up the incision and set Bobby back at his post.

From where he sat, the pooch had a clear view of the bed.