The Drop (12 page)

‘He wanted to know why the Drop was late.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘I said we had a little local difficulty, that it was nothing to get bent out of shape over, that everything was under control.’

Finney grunted, ‘He believe you?’

‘Who knows?’ I said, ‘maybe.’

I wasn’t going to tell Finney what else Amrein had mentioned; the man SOCA had on the inside of our firm. Like I told Amrein, there were only half a dozen men with enough information to really bring Bobby down and Finney was one of them.

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I
was expecting a sombre mood at the Cauldron and was more than a little surprised to hear the sound of raucous male laughter coming from the bar, which was closed to the public this early. We’d still got problems, big bloody problems and I wondered what was going on to make everyone so damned cheerful. I walked in to find Bobby, Jerry Lemon, Finney and Mickey Hunter all having a bottle of Newcy Brown together. Bobby spotted my incomprehension and walked over to me.

‘You’re back in my good books son,’ he said, slapping a huge hand on my shoulder, ‘for now.’

‘Really?’ I asked, trying not to sound pathetically grateful, ‘why’s that then?’

‘That little tip you gave me the other day?’ he said, eyes sparkling.

‘What?’ I asked, more than a little surprised, ‘the one you said was a non-runner?’

‘That’s the one,’ he nodded at me, then actually winked, ‘well it came in didn’t it, and at very long odds,’ and he smiled a beatific smile, before repeating, ‘very long odds,’ then he patted me on the back, ‘have some Geordie champagne,’ He thrust a cold bottle of Broon at me and, even though I don’t normally touch the stuff, particularly this early, I took a big swig.

I supposed I should have been delighted but I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was glad that a plan I concocted for Bobby, to rob a casino that was a little less secure than it should have been, had come off. It was on the outskirts of town, in a side street, not many passers-by, and we knew they kept too much cash on the premises. Most importantly, the idiots weren’t paying protection money to us, or anyone else. I figured it was prime to be turned over at the end of a busy night. We put a lot of surveillance work into that place but when I initially went to Bobby, he rejected my idea.

He must have been desperate for some extra cash by now to replace the Drop, because he had been willing to take what he had seen as too big a risk. From the way Bobby was talking, it reaped us a better-than-expected dividend. There’s nothing like an earner to get you back on the right side of the boss and now he was all smiles - and the rest of the crew might even remember why I was on the payroll in the first place, now they had some money in their pockets because of me. I was an ideas man and none of them ever had an idea in their lives, except Bobby.

The thing was, even though he had given my plan the green light and set a heavy duty crew onto it, he had done it without telling me, which meant he still didn’t fully trust me. It continued to trouble me even as I downed my beer and laughed along with the rest of the boys.

‘I do like a successful day at the races,’ laughed Bobby.

‘Aye,’ said Hunter, ‘and here’s to our very own king of the tipsters,’ they raised their glasses to me.

I had to content myself that my plan had led to a successful job, with no casualties or arrests. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do for now.

Bobby did get round to asking me quietly about the missing money and I answered him honestly, ‘nothing conclusive yet, but we are turning over every stone, believe me.’ He just nodded but didn’t say another word.

I had a couple of drinks that day, more than a couple if I’m honest, as I moved from place to place trying to fathom what was going on around me. I got one of our lads to drive me around on the pretext of following up some leads but really it was just an excuse to leave Bobby, Finney and the rest celebrating on their own while I got the fuck out of it.

When I finally got back that evening, Laura had, as usual, opened a bottle of white wine. Before I met her, I only ever used to drink beer, now it was a nightly ritual to lose our stresses in the bottom of a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I chose one of our big wine glasses and poured it almost to the top, sitting down heavily on the couch.

‘Bobby still giving you a hard time?’ she said breezily, as if Newcastle had just lost again; another thing she didn’t seem to understand the seriousness of.

‘That’s one way of describing it.’

Laura leaned forward in her chair, tilted her head to one side and gave me her wide-eyed empathising look.

‘What’s happened?’

I wasn’t sure how to put it into words but then I figured I should try. There was something about her pitying, supportive look that spurred me into making an effort, ‘suppose you had an idea, a good idea but your boss rejected it as… too risky… in the context of an overall business plan?’

‘Right.’

‘Then, because things changed, he suddenly decided that your idea was worth the risk after all, so he went ahead with it and it worked.’

‘Right,’ she said, frowning, ‘but that’s good isn’t it? If it worked I mean.’

‘But… ’

‘There’s a but?’

‘There’s a but. He didn’t tell me about it, implementing my idea that is. Until he had actually gone ahead with it.’

‘Right,’ she kept saying ‘right’ but this time she said it doubtfully, ‘I’m not sure I… ’

‘Which means he still doesn’t fully trust me, don’t you see?’

‘Well,’ she thought for a moment, ‘not really. I mean could he not just have forgotten to tell you?’

‘No.’

‘It’s not all bad surely? I mean, you’ll get credit for this idea won’t you?’

‘Yes but that’s not what I care about right now. It’s the trust thing that’s worrying me.’

‘I know, I do know what you mean,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘it’s like with the Watson case, when Thomas wouldn’t hand it over to me without continuing to be involved. It was like he just didn’t trust me to do a good job.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, with respect to you Laura, it’s not like that at all. The consequences could be very different.’ I actually wanted to say ‘why does it always have to be about you?’ but I managed to not go down that road.

‘Alright,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘if you think your boss doesn’t trust you any more, here’s a radical idea…’

‘What?’ She gave me a challenging look, ‘no, seriously I’m interested, I really am, honestly. What’s your radical idea?’

‘Think the unthinkable,’ she offered enigmatically.

I creased my eyebrows together, in what I hoped was a silent way of conveying the question, ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Leave.’

‘Leave?’

‘Yes,’ she said, almost triumphantly, ‘why not. If you’ve had enough, just leave. Go and do something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. What would you like to do?’. She was acting as if I could turn up for work at an RAF base tomorrow and start flying Tornado jets instead.

‘In case you haven’t noticed, my Curriculum Vitae is a little unorthodox; graduated from college, worked for a notorious gangster… That’s it. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to get me into Microsoft.’

‘I’m only saying… ’

‘What?’ I interrupted her, even though she hates that, ‘what are you saying? You’ve used that big lawyerly brain to help me and you’ve come up with a whole new radical idea? Leave? Simple as that, leave?’

‘Why the fuck not?’ she raised her voice.

‘Why the fuck not? I’ll tell you why the fuck not, because I don’t work for Marks & Spencer or the local council. Get real. You don’t leave a job like mine. It doesn’t fucking happen. Bobby won’t allow it. He’s not going to give me severance pay and a bloody carriage clock.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ I almost screeched, ‘are you fucking mental? Because I know all about him and his business. He’s not going to let me go off on a gap year, is he? Don’t you know anything?!’

‘No!’ she was still up for a fight, ‘I don’t know anything and why is that? Because you never tell me anything! I don’t know what you do for Bobby because you keep telling me I don’t want to know. I know you’re not a gangster because you’ve told me that one over and over again but it seems you do work for one. So what does that make you then eh? Sometimes I think I don’t even know you at all.’

‘You didn’t mind me working for a gangster when it was all about corporate hospitality and money coming in, expensive presents and holidays in Thailand. You didn’t mind me working for Bobby Mahoney then. You even like the guy.’

‘I do not!’

‘Yes, you do. Don’t deny it Laura. Wandering over to chat with him, flirting with him at his parties, laughing at his jokes, so some of that gangster glamour rubs off on you.’

‘I laugh at his stupid jokes because he’s your boss.’

‘Bullshit. It’s so you can go back to your chambers and tell everybody you’ve had a barbeque at Bobby Mahoney’s house, the home of Newcastle’s most wanted. With all of those divorce cases it’s the closest you’ll ever get to any real crime but believe me, it isn’t so glamorous when you’re stuck right in the middle of it.’

‘You’re a complete bastard sometimes, do you know that?’ she said and she climbed off the sofa, ‘you’re so cold and you can’t even see it.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘I don’t want to hear any more of this,’ she said and she walked out of the room.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I called after her, ‘is that what you tell the judge when he says something you don’t like? “I don’t want to hear any more of this” and then you walk out, eh!’ .

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I
’m not some exercise Nazi but I do like to stay in shape. That morning, I did my twenty minutes on the treadmill then some weights then changed for the pool. It wasn’t busy.

It was a modern place, all pristine, white tiles and new age background music that sounded like whales shagging. There were a couple of wrinkly, old blokes sitting around and a middle-aged wifey doing lengths. I’d done mine and was about to go into the sauna and sweat for ten minutes but I stopped by the side of the pool to get a drink from the water fountain. It was near the entrance to the female changing rooms and as I bent my head towards the water I saw her. As my head was at an incline, I got a view of her that started with her bare toes and rose up over her slim, tanned legs and into the white ‘V’ of her bikini bottoms, a little pair that just about covered her lady bits. It was enough to keep her decent but there wasn’t a lot in it. Her stomach was still tanned from months of travelling abroad during the summer and her breasts swelled over her bikini top in a way that left one of the old geezers in the pool standing there with a look of undisguised longing on his face. Her long, blonde hair was tied back for the pool.

‘Hello David,’ she said, smiling at me like she knew exactly how good she looked.

‘Sarah,’ I said, resisting the temptation to say something cheesy like ‘you’ve grown’. I just about managed to avoid sounding like Sid James and instead I said, ‘haven’t you got a proper swimming costume?’

She frowned at me like she didn’t understand what I was talking about, but she knew alright. Sarah Mahoney had to know the effect she was having;
on the middle aged bloke pretending to read by the pool as she dropped her towel on one of the loungers next to him, on the old geezer who had stopped staring at her and shuffled off out of there sharpish, in case he got a lob-on for the first time in years, and on me. She must have known the effect she had on me

I was not supposed to find Sarah Mahoney distracting. In fact an inner voice in my head was already cautioning me that even acknowledging the fact she had grown into a very hot young girl indeed was tantamount to suicide. Bobby did not want his pride and joy, his most precious possession, letched at by members of his crew. Bobby, though he makes a lot of his money out of the sex trade, would prefer it in fact if Sarah didn’t have a boyfriend at all until she was at least 25, then immediately married the first nice, harmless guy who took her out. He’s from the old school and what he definitely, categorically does not want is one of his closest men eyeing her up in the swimming pool. Not when he has tasked him with looking after her tonight at her big birthday party.

There is however one slight problem, something that Bobby is in fact quite unaware of. Sarah Mahoney has the hots for me, has done for a very long time. Sarah has fancied me since she was about 16 in fact, before her cute, hard-bodied figure lost all of its puppy fat. I know this because she has made it clear. As crystal. She doesn’t come out and say the words exactly but she can flirt for England.

‘So,’ she said, as she laid her big bath towel out on a lounger, ‘what you doing?’

I shrugged, ‘nothing too knackering, a few lengths. I come here the same time every morning.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling, ‘dad said.’

Of course. I’d mentioned it to Bobby. He must have told her in passing and, the first chance she got, she came down here.

‘So what are you doing here?’ I’m not sure what I’d do if she said ‘I came down here to see you’ but thankfully she took the politician’s tactic and answered a different question to the one I actually asked.

‘Dad bought me a membership.’

‘Nice birthday present.’

‘It was a graduation present,’ and she smiled, ‘he got me the car for my 21
^st
.’

‘Oh yes, the car,’ I was with him the day he picked it out for her down at the dealership, making sure it had every possible safety feature, ‘happy birthday by the way.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Do you always get up this early for a swim on your birthday?’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’

I nodded and looked around us at the plush surroundings of the spa, ‘not a bad gift for graduation either is it? I got a wallet when I got my degree.’

‘Yeah, well, Dad was chuffed. I was the first to get one in our family.’

‘Same here. Of course your old man doesn’t realise they aren’t worth the paper they’re written on these days,’

‘Oi.’ she said.

‘I mean, a trained monkey can get a degree in Media Studies.’

‘True,’ she agreed, ‘but I got a first in Business Administration,’ and she tilted her head to one side and gave me a shitty look like she was saying ‘shove that up yer arse mate’. I have to admit it’s a look that made her seem cute, pretty and endearing all at once.

‘So,’ I said, ‘you swimming or just here to pose? I’m not sure the old guys in here can cope with the excitement.’

‘At least you admit it’s exciting,’ she said, ‘I’ll go in if you’ll keep me company.’

I shrugged, ‘I’m not in any hurry,’ I said, knowing that I should have just told her I was finished then left. It would have been a lot safer but I told myself it was okay, because the one thing I was absolutely not going to do was put my job and my life in jeopardy by fucking Bobby Mahoney’s only daughter. Bobby Mahoney’s gorgeous, young daughter, I thought to myself, as she sashayed ahead of me into the clear, blue water. Bobby Mahoney’s gorgeous, young daughter who fancies me, I concluded, as I watched her cute little bum disappear beneath the surface. She leaned forward and was off, gliding effortlessly through the water.

We did a few lengths then swam over to the corner of the pool where they have three strong jets that you stand under. The water comes down so hard it massages your neck and back. It’s almost as good as a real massage. Normally it’s just relaxing. Of course it’s a bit different when you have a stunning blonde in a tiny white bikini standing opposite you with water cascading down over her breasts and shoulders. The little sod, I thought, she definitely knew how bloody good she looked.

All I got from her was that Mona Lisa smile, ‘how’s your wife?’ she asked, knowing full well that Laura and I were not married.

‘Fine,’ I answered, ‘busy, you know.’

‘Busy,’ her face creased up while she pretended to contemplate this for some hidden meaning, ‘poor you,’ she said, like I was being neglected.

‘Since I’m busy too… ’ And I shrugged under the water as if it was no big deal.

‘Course,’ she said, like I was telling her porkies. She kneaded her neck under the water jet with her hands and this pushed her chest out. I had to force myself to look away from her breasts. The water was making her nipples hard. They were jutting out through the material, which was sticking to her like clingfilm, ‘great here isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Wonder if you can hire it privately,’ she said as she looked at the small collection of oldies around us, ‘you know, for an hour or a morning or something.’

‘Dunno,’ I said, ‘it would cost you.’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, ‘worth it though. You could go skinny dipping.’

I laughed at the notion.

‘Would you,’ she said, daring me, ‘go skinny dipping?’ and her eyes locked onto mine. They were deep and blue and inviting.

I didn’t answer her for a while. ‘Maybe,’ I said and she smiled, ‘if I was on my own,’ I added.

She frowned, ‘where’s the fun in that?’

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I’ll buy you a coffee.’

‘We can’t go yet, we’ve not had a smelly shower.’

‘We’ve not had a what?’ I asked.

‘Follow me,’ she told me as she climbed out.

She stood behind me, leaned past me and pressed the button on the shower, then pushed me gently into it until I was under the spray. ‘Tell me that’s not fantastic,’ she challenged.

It was fantastic. I’d assumed the two open shower booths behind the pool, half-hidden by a walled enclosure, were just conventional showers, which was why I’d never been in them. It turned out they were a part of the spa experience I’d been completely unaware of. The water felt great. It was hot and bracing and smelled of something girly.

‘Breathe in,’ she ordered and I did, ‘what’s that smell like?’

‘Like a tart’s window box,’ I told her and received a thump on my back for my troubles.

‘It’s ylang ylang and patchouli.’

‘I think I know them. A couple of Thai hookers?’ and she gave me another thump.

‘Stay there,’ she ordered when the water stopped automatically after a couple of minutes. She leaned forward again so she could press the other button. It was harder to reach and I could feel her left breast pressing against my back for a moment. Next thing, I was shocked by a fine spray of ice cold water.

‘Jesus,’ I hissed.

‘What about that one?’ she asked.

I breathed in, gasped more like, ‘Polo mints,’ I told her, barely able to say the words.

‘Sort of,’ she said, ‘it’s mint anyway. Wakes you up doesn’t it?’ I stepped out once it was over, ‘admit you like my smelly showers,’

‘Not bad,’ I said, ‘although I don’t want to be reeking of My Ding-a-Ling and Me-Julie when I’m out with the lads tonight.’

‘Ylang ylang and patchouli,’ she corrected, leading me out of the way by my arm so she could get in under the hot spray she’d just activated, ‘and don’t wind me up. You’re not out with the lads. You are coming to my party and you know it.’

‘Party?’ my turn to frown at her, ‘what party?’

‘Cruising for a bruising shit bag,’ she told me.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said dumbly, ‘now I remember. We are all off to Pizza Hut and your dad’s ordered a cake with some candles. I think he’s hired a clown as well.’

‘Only clown there tonight will be you. We are off to Café 21, appropriately enough, for dinner, then those who aint too old to cut it, will be going clubbing.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I admitted, ‘your dad told me, asked me to arrange a driver for your lift home.’

‘He didn’t!’ her little face dropped at the thought of a gnarled gangster like Finney picking her up outside some cool club, ‘who is it?’ I gave her an apologetic look and spread my palms in a ‘little old me’ gesture, ‘really?’ she seemed thrilled, ‘honestly?’

‘Fraid so.’

‘Things are looking up!’