by S. B. Caves
It was just before noon when she finally found the courage to leave the bathroom. The inside of her stomach was still a rough tide but she had been dry heaving for the last hour or so, and the hangover wasn’t going to get much better than that for a long while. She brushed her teeth, dressed, washed her feet and found plasters for the cuts, then gingerly made her way out into the awful sunshine.
When she got behind the wheel, she wasn’t sure she could face driving. At this rate, the way her head was feeling, she’d end up ploughing into another vehicle. She sat there a moment gathering her strength, beads of perspiration dotting her forehead and upper lip. She rolled the window down, welcoming the frigid breeze, and then started the engine.
The traffic was light and she made it to the warehouse in half an hour, driving with a thumping drumbeat in her skull. She parked by the gates of the industrial estate and walked to the door, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, and then pressed the buzzer.
‘Oh, it’s you… sorry, I mean hi,’ Colin said, his face breaking out in a friendly smile as he opened the door. ‘I thought it was a delivery.’
‘Hello Colin,’ she said, inviting herself into the warehouse. Her voice was crackly. ‘Is the boss man here?’
‘Jack?’ Colin shook his head. ‘No, he’s called in some emergency time off.’
She suppressed a smile and said, ‘Oh really? Did he say why?’
‘No. He just said he had to take the rest of the week off, but he’d be popping in for a few bits and pieces.’
‘How did he sound?’
‘Funny.’ Colin shrugged, scratching the back of his head. ‘He didn’t sound himself. Actually, I tried to call him back because one of his regular customers popped by and had a question about an order, but the call wouldn’t go through. Is he OK?’
‘Well,’ she began shakily, ‘we had a bit of a fight yesterday.’ She paused for Colin’s condolences. When he didn’t offer them, she said, ‘I think he was a bit upset. You know what he’s like. He just bottles everything up.’
‘Yeah,’ Colin said, biting his thumbnail uncomfortably.
‘I thought we might have to break up and he took it really badly,’ she said, studying Colin’s reaction. The boy was as thick as two planks. He was avoiding eye contact and chewing his thumb as though it was the first thing he’d eaten all week. ‘You know we’ve been thinking about getting married, don’t you?’
‘Um, no, I don’t think so.’ May didn’t say anything, just stared at him with her bloodshot eyes until he felt obliged to add, ‘Actually he might have said something about it. You know, he doesn’t talk very much.’
‘Well, I expect he did. He was very excited.’ She leaned close and said in a low voice, ‘Between you and me, the wedding probably will go ahead but don’t go spreading it around.’ She waved her hand, gesturing to the warehouse.
‘Oh no, I won’t. So, do you want me to tell him you came by, or…?’
She shook her head and nails drove through her skull. She winced, swallowed and said, ‘No, he’ll only grumble. Honestly, he’s so silly sometimes. Don’t mention I came by. I’ll catch him at home and we’ll patch things up.’ She smiled and rolled her eyes. ‘All right, hun, well, don’t work too hard.’
‘Don’t worry, I never do,’ he said, laughing nervously.
She headed back to the car. In the sober light of day, she could see just how stupid this whole thing really was. After replaying it in her mind, she realised that he was probably just frightened. They had both failed at marriage before, so she could understand his fears; they weren’t completely irrational. They had both survived the plane crash of divorce and here she was trying to book tickets for their next flight. He had every right to be apprehensive. God, she could be such a bubble brain sometimes.
On the way to his house, she thought about stopping at a florist to pick him up a bunch of roses to say sorry, but knew they’d probably just make him uncomfortable. Most presents she got him usually did. Instead, she just continued with a renewed sense of determination, and the closer she got to his house, the more excited she became. She turned the CD player on, skipped to track 6, and belted out ‘Edge of Heaven’ for motivation. Their love really was just like a George Michael song, wasn’t it? It was emotional, it was timeless, and it was perfect. Well, now she was going to roll her sleeves up and get her man back. She was singing along with the stereo, almost screaming out Yeah, yeah, yeah! on the chorus with George, thumping the steering wheel triumphantly. A hangover couldn’t stop her now, oh no, she was flying.
Just as she turned onto his road, she saw Jack leaving his house and walking toward his van. She caught her breath at the sight of him, felt a low current of electricity tingle in her stomach. That initial jolt of excitement quickly transformed into a nervous, jagged pain in her guts.
He wasn’t dressed like he usually would be for work. He was wearing black jeans, a black jacket and black boots – the same black suede boots she had bought him for a birthday present just this last September. He looked like he was on his way to burgle a house.
‘And just where the fuck do you think you’re going?’ she said aloud, her nails digging into the steering wheel. She thumbed the volume down and felt the moisture evaporate in her mouth. A brutal thirst gripped her throat so suddenly that it almost trigged a panic attack. She fought against her tongue to swallow, rolled the window down and took a large gulp of air.
Her initial confusion transformed into a complicated alloy of emotions. There was fear, oh there was always fear somewhere, and then there was scalding hot anger. She resisted the very tempting urge to scream and stomp down on the accelerator. She wanted to ram the car into his legs, pin him beneath the tyres and question him. Instead, she idled at the end of his road, her eyes unblinking, and waited for him to pull away from his parking spot.
It didn’t take long to realise that he wasn’t on his way to the warehouse, and he wasn’t on the way to her house either. She started to sweat and gasp and the hysteria escalated with each street she passed. She could not remember a point in her life when she’d had to exercise this much self-restraint. Every impulse in her body wanted to accelerate straight into the back of his van, but she somehow kept her composure and her distance.
She was so blind with rage by the time he finally pulled over that she wasn’t even sure what area she was in. She’d followed him onto a dual carriageway and off it a few miles later, then tailed him into a nice, posh neighbourhood. When he parked up, she reversed and slotted her car into a space where she had a clear vantage point of his van. Normally she had trouble with reverse parking on her left, but she performed the manoeuvre so slickly her tyres didn’t even touch the kerb. It was then she noticed the licence plate. Why would Jack change it?
He was getting out of the van.
‘Jack, please. Just turn back,’ she whispered as the first notes of ‘Careless Whisper’ played.
He was walking up a path, approaching a house. Whose fucking house was this?
He was knocking on the door and…
‘No,’ she said. She could feel the hairs on her forearms prickle as the anger boiled her blood. She wanted to scream, to punch straight through her windscreen, to walk over to him and rip his head off. Her hand went to the door handle. She thought about getting out, but she couldn’t. All she could do was watch.
The front door of the house opened and she saw a woman answer. May became boneless. She raised her hand to her mouth and bit down on it until she could feel the bones grinding against her teeth.
The woman followed Jack to his van. When the woman got into the passenger side, May tasted blood.
Chapter Fourteen
Very few things made Dillon as uncomfortable as these special errands that Craig sent him on. That was surprising when he stopped to think about it, because over the years the two of them had taken some insane and unnecessary risks together. They had driven all around the country with enough cocaine packed into a spare tyre to p
ut them both away for a quarter of a century apiece. Even rolling up to the Dutchman’s house hadn’t set his stomach squirming the way it was now.
Dillon leaned against his car, fidgeting with his phone, which was no good because he had to keep his focus on the school gate. He pocketed the phone but kept his hand on it, tapping the screen with his thumbnail, clearing his throat every few seconds. At once, the gentle calm of the neighbourhood was abruptly broken by the clamour of excited chatter, yelps, squeals, peels of manic laughter. The pupils of Blair Academy were funnelling out of the buildings and scurrying across the schoolyard in disorganised clusters. Dillon was dimly aware that there were a few other adults by the gate, parents awaiting their children. Dillon, who was visibly too young to be a parent of any secondary school child, hoped that he looked like an uncle, or someone’s older brother, but wasn’t confident that he did.
A teacher made it to the school gate ahead of the children to stand sentry. Dillon looked at her, and saw that she was inspecting him the way she might a pupil who made some minor deviation from their school uniform. She had a stern, pinched face and an awful haircut, and there was something strangely intimidating about her. Perhaps it was because Dillon couldn’t imagine her ever smiling, or having fun, or wearing something other than those dreary clothes, as though she were not even a real person but a piece of property that belonged to the school.
For his own part, he had dressed as conservatively as he could, swapping out the tracksuit for a pair of jeans and a plain jumper, but he knew the disguise did little to mask his intentions. And he knew that the teacher, whose glances he caught in his peripheral vision as he watched the chaos of children nearing the gate, had him figured out. He supposed it was difficult not to look like a creepy older guy trying to pick up impressionable girls, because that’s exactly what he was doing. If the teacher came over and began an interrogation, he’d put her in her place with as much mock outrage as he could muster. He was there to collect his little cousin to give her a lift home; that was his story and he was sticking to it.
The more he overthought things, the hotter he seemed to become. The kids were making a racket and the volley of sounds made him jittery. That, combined with the different music from a dozen or more mobile phones, was giving him a headache.
The pupils bottlenecked through the gate and lingered around, packing the pavement. Dillon caught the smell of body odour baked inside the boys’ blazers, pungent and unmistakeable. Losing the battle to that was the light and unobtrusive fragrance of female body spray and bubblegum. He watched the girls particularly, trying to avoid the smooth, bare skin of their legs or the confident heave of their budding breasts, and trained his attention on the faces. He could barely remember what this Tara girl looked like, and thought she might appear a damn sight different in her uniform. He removed his phone, his thumb nimbly sliding across the screen as he wrote her a message: I’m by the gate. Where are u?
The teacher craned her neck over the crowd to get a better lock on Dillon. She wasn’t interested in the little game of push-and-pull two boys were engaged in over a football, nor did her concentration waver when a nearby group of girls screamed before breaking into gales of hysterical laughter. The children were invisible to her now. There was only Dillon, and the threat she instinctively knew he posed.
When he saw the teacher’s eyes narrow, Dillon thought about getting in the car and driving off. Common sense had told him to park a few streets away to avoid suspicion, but as usual he ignored it for the sake of convenience. His patience wouldn’t have stretched long enough to play a game of text message tennis in order for her to find him.
‘Come on, where are you, for fuck’s sake?’ he said under his breath, his fingers curling tightly around the phone. His eyes flicked toward the teacher, who now had her chin angled slightly upward like an animal scenting danger in the air. Dillon knew she was a few seconds away from cutting through the throng to begin questioning him. He felt for the car door handle, ready to back down the instant she made her move. He didn’t even want to be there, let alone endure the embarrassment of any veiled accusations that she would undoubtedly throw at him. After all, he wasn’t the one that wanted to fuck some underage girl – so why did he have to feel like the pervert?
The teacher began to walk, her lips parting in preparation for speech. Dillon opened the car door casually. In his other hand, the phone vibrated. He looked at the screen and saw a message that read: I’m by the gate.
His jaw tightened. She had basically batted the exact same message back to him, which was of no use to anyone. For the life of him, Dillon would never understand what Craig liked about these young girls. What kind of conversation could you have with someone that wasn’t even old enough to buy cigarettes? Of course, maybe that was the attraction: less talk, more action. Whatever it was, the whole thing made Dillon embarrassed and uncomfortable. He had a daughter who would one day be old enough to attend secondary school. Would some fucking monster be waiting by the gates, to…? He pushed the thought away angrily. Fuck this, he didn’t need it.
He got into the car, started the engine. In the wing mirror, he saw the teacher hustle around a row of over-animated boys in an attempt to keep up with him. Some juvenile part of Dillon wanted to wind the window down and give her the finger, to embarrass her in front of all her students, but instead he drove. He looked down the road in preparation to make a U-turn, and saw Tara on her phone, waving an arm in the air. His phone began vibrating, but instead of answering it, he cruised on over to where she was standing.
The stupid girl hadn’t even realised he was parked beside her. He honked the horn once. She jumped, almost dropping her phone, and then laughed. Dillon checked the rear-view mirror, saw the teacher talking to another member of staff and pointing at his car.
‘Hurry up,’ he told her.
Tara opened the door, yelled something to another girl on the other side of the road, and then got in.
‘You all right?’ she asked with casual ease, as though talking to someone she’d known forever, as opposed to a man she’d bumped into a week before. The top two buttons of her shirt were undone, her tie hanging loosely over a hint of bra. ‘Where’s Jerome?’
Jerome was the alias that Craig gave all these nitwits that he picked up. It was his pet name, he said, although Dillon had no idea what that meant. They had been at a petrol station, filling up, when Tara and a couple of other girls were leaving with sweets and cans of pop. She was wearing leggings and a hooded jacket, not particularly provocative, but she had the confidence to make a beeline over to the car where she saw Craig staring. She had asked, in the assured voice of someone much older, whether Craig wouldn’t mind buying her some cigarettes. Craig had obliged, taken down her number and said he would give her a call.
And here she was. Craig never liked to pick the girls up from school himself, said he had too much of a profile. The truth was, he had been sniffed out once by a vigilant headmaster, and had never wanted to chance his luck again. From then on, it became one of Dillon’s duties by default.
‘Jerome’s waiting for you at home.’
‘OK,’ Tara said, reaching out to turn the music up without asking. This wasn’t her first time at the rodeo, he knew, and that made Dillon anxious.
Dillon wasn’t sure why, but his stomach was twisting into knots. All his instincts screamed at him to pull over and kick her out, to let Craig know that now wasn’t the time to be messing around with young girls, not with everything going on. He should have trusted his gut.
Chapter Fifteen
Craig Morley had already made two rather serious errors. Three if you included the age of the girl that was currently in his bedroom.
The first error was bringing the heroin back to his flat. He knew it was a stupid, irresponsible thing to do, but he shrugged it off, told himself he had no other choice, which he supposed was true. Was he to entrust it to that fucking dildo, Dillon? He’d probably fall asleep and leave it on the train and cause a bo
mb scare. No, he had to keep an eye on it, be close enough to reach out and touch it at any time.
The second error, while not as serious as the first, was still careless of him. Letting people know his location was a bad move. Because he couldn’t be bothered to drive to her house, he had told Veronica to come to him for the initial smuggling interview. And now he had this sixteen-year-old girl naked in his bed. Well, she said she was sixteen, but his experience told him otherwise. She was fifteen at a push, but as long as she maintained the façade, he wasn’t going to ask for a passport to prove it. He had spent the majority of his day drinking brandy and smoking weed, and now his rational mind was struggling to fight through the chemicals. He was just starting to realise that sleeping with this girl in his flat would be a terrible thing to do – who knew what she’d seen? – but she was already out of her school uniform and he was stiffening; nothing he could do now. Young girls had big mouths. It was trouble no matter how he chopped it up.
He began to unbuckle his belt, thinking that as soon as he was finished with the girl he was going to move the duffel bag somewhere else, maybe stash it in a storage facility, when he heard the crash of broken glass outside. His hands froze instinctively. Then, when he heard the oop-oop-oop of a car alarm, his car alarm, he knew he’d made another mistake in parking the Merc on the estate. It was a robbery waiting to happen.
He hurried to the kitchen window, which gave him the clearest view of the car park. He couldn’t tell from this height but it looked as though his windscreen was shattered and the lights of the Merc were flashing. Why would someone smash the windscreen if they were trying to steal his car? He raced back to the bedroom, snatched the cover off the girl and said, ‘Up! Now!’
