Rock Solid

by Paul Slatter

  “What?”

  That was enough, he had their attention now, the whole café was listening. Picking up the phone, Patrick took it off speaker, slapped it to his right ear and leaned back, stretching his left arm out above his head and said out loud, “Buffy’s talking to Tom, he’s all over it—can’t wait to get started.”

  And heard Sebastian say back, bringing him down to earth, “All over what Patrick? We can’t afford anymore names. Besides you’re not proven yet. You won’t get names till you’re proven. You were lucky to get Adalia Seychan as it is.”

  And Patrick thought, you’re getting luck mixed up with bullshit—and in his book, the two seldom went together. Everything was concocted, even if he was shooting from the hip and flying blind, which, of course, was how he’d made himself rich. He said, “Adalia’s so excited.”

  “You said she just got the copy, so she probably hasn’t read it yet,” Sebastian said, then carried on, “you need to remember, Patrick, I’m having as much fun as you are just watching you have fun, but I know you Patrick—so don’t get too carried away.”

  Sebastian put down the phone and, picking up Fluffy, walked to the window and looked outside to Mazzi Hegan’s red Ferrari out in the parking lot. Was it all getting too much, this makeover he was allowing Patrick to indulge in at his expense? For the movie, no probably not, signing Marsha was still the hidden bonus to all this nonsense. He’d steer the ship in when the time came and all would come good. After all, look what had happened with the ‘BlueBoy’ campaign and you couldn’t have gotten crazier than that. Besides, Fluffy was getting on, so he may as well have a bit of fun. Running his hand across the little dog’s head, he gently squeezed Fluffy’s ears just the way he liked it and looked back out to the carpark to see Chendrill arrive in his Aston, then waited and watched as the big guy and Dan got out.

  They sat in Sebastian’s office, Chendrill with his backside against the window ledge, Dan in the comfy chair with his feet up. Sebastian back behind his desk. It was good to see them both. He said, “Dan’s mother’s not happy you’re saying?”

  She wasn’t, she’d found the latest version of the script obviously thrown across the room and laying within inches of the previous version on the floor and decided to give it a go. Chendrill carried on, “Yeah, she’s crying. I said I’d come down here and speak with you myself.”

  Dan’s mother was crying? This wasn’t good, Sebastian thought and stood and walked over, placing his hand on Dan’s shoulder as if it was him who was upset and said to him, “Is she okay? What on earth could it be that has done this?”

  And before Dan could say a word, Chendrill answered for him, “Dan’s good, he doesn’t care—he just came because I said I’d take him to McDonalds on the way back.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah she was crying because she’s worried about Dan getting into something that’s going to stay with him all his life. You know with all these posters of him up everywhere—it’s a mother thing.”

  Then Dan piped up, his voice as nonchalant as a kid in his late teens could get. He said, “She’s worried about me playing it out as a girl who wants to be a guy who travels in time and comes back from a hundred years in the future with a mechanical dick and a big one at that.”

  Sebastian stared at him for a moment trying to take it all in. Then simply said, “What?”

  And Dan said, “Yeah that’s what I thought when I read it, but I’m getting used to being pointed at now since you got me plastered all over town in Mazzi’s underpants. So what the hell. Besides, it ain’t that bad to be honest, it could be cool.”

  Sebastian stared at them both. Chendrill shrugged his shoulders saying, “I haven’t read this version.”

  Then Sebastian said, “Neither have I, but I will this evening.”

  Then Dan said, “Truth is, it’s better now though than the other piece of shit. It’s got this hot sexy chick in it and all who can’t walk and gets taken through time by Patrick so as she can walk again.”

  “Patrick?” Sebastian asked, the surprise in his voice unmistakeable.

  And Dan said, “Yeah, he’s in it as well. He’s got a guest role, he’s in love with her and gives her his spine. At least it’s original.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Archall Diamond sucked on the place where his trademark tooth used to be, then stared at his mouth in the mirror. His wisdom teeth were at the back. He knew that much because that was where your brain was and that’s where his biology teacher had told him wisdom came from—telling him he needed to get some and stop putting the lab mice to death with the switchblade he carried so everyone at school would know he was cool.

  The thought of having them out was worrying him. After all, there was nothing wrong with them and they weren’t hurting like his new girl said they were. But she obviously needed an excuse to see him again and that’s why she’d said it, but now it had escalated and the dentist was scheduling him in to pull them, saying it was best and that he needed to get them out or they’d cause problems for the others and he didn’t need that with him having the new one put in at the front like he was. What a fucking dilemma.

  He moved away from the mirror in the bathroom and opened another packet of tablets he’d bought off the plastic Paki made for him by the Swedish scientist professor guy and popped another tablet. He liked the way they made him feel happy and also liked the feel of his dick getting hard in his pants as it pushed against his jeans. She’d like that as well, Alla would, he could go in there to the dentist’s basement and hang out, tell the guy his wisdom teeth were playing up and getting sore and she could see his dick in his jeans.

  He’d do that, show it to her, turn her on.

  Then he got the call from Steven, who said, “You’re right. This guy Chendrill’s been checking you out.”

  And he had been, Chendrill out there, making some calls, digging into stuff, poking his nose around. And now Steven on the end of the phone letting him know so. Archall Diamond said, “What’s he been saying?”

  “Wants to know if Paawan was fucking your girl.”

  “Well he weren’t.”

  “He was also seen down looking around your boat.”

  Fuck me, Archall Diamond thought as he wandered around the kitchen feeling his dick swelling at the same rate as the lump in his stomach. He said, “Well it’s a good boat.”

  And heard Steven say back down the phone, “Yeah but he wasn’t trying to buy it. He wanted to know when you last used it. They keep records, you know?”

  “Who does?”

  “The guys at the marina, in and out and all that, they the ones who told me, said he’s got a nice car.”

  He did, Archall thought. But if he had one, he’d change the wheels and get some LED rigged underneath. It was all good, he thought, yeah he’d drowned that flashy fucking birdman, yeah he had, but he hadn’t used the boat. He’d just used that to work out the current flow of the riptide as it sucked everything out into the sound. He’d used his pickup, stuck him in that after he’d let the jack go on the motherfucker as he tried to skate under the car after he’d waited there in the garage listening to the guy fuck his girl upstairs, her pretending to come like she had, then after the pair of them laughing, giggling like school kids.

  Then Paawan coming out the back way through the garage thinking Archall had gone on a run into the interior, dropping a package for another gang and scoring thirty grand like he did for doing nothing but keeping ten above the speed limit. Him standing there in the garage like he just got home, catching the birdman by surprise, then telling him how he just got the Merc lowered and the new LED’s put in, wondering if he’d like him to jack it up so he could crawl under to have a look, see if the guy would do that and try to whip out the other side like a rat or try and get past Archall standing there big and strong with a wrench in his hand. He couldn’t get over the top because Archall had blocked that up as well, hanging heavy metal objects from hooks drilled into the ceiling. The birdman played i
t cool like it was normal for him to be at Diamond’s place with his girl at four in the morning, then taking a look, seeing the glow from the neon underneath the chassis as Archall turned it on, he said to Archall, “Yeah, they look good, how many you got?”

  Archall had told him, “they’se all LED diodes, RGBW’s, can give you’s any color you’s wants depending on ya mood.” Archall jacked up the car a little more, giving the guy a taste of freedom under the vehicle, showing him the door, knowing he’d take it, remembering how fast the fucker was when they were kids and how the guy could whip himself under a moving freight train for fun—in one side, out the other, then back again as twenty tons of steel passed above him.

  Then the birdman, quicker than he thought, bent down looking at the lights, and moved like a rocket. Archall Diamond’s hand fumbled for the hydraulic trolley jack’s release and twisted its lever around quickly, thinking the fucker had got away. But he hadn’t. When Archall had walked around to look, the guy was there, stuck right at the edge like a rat in a trap who’d almost made it, the birdman right there on the garage floor unable to breathe as the weight of the Merc with its tinted windows and low-profile tyres and super sexy LED lights on the bottom crushed the air from his body until he went unconscious.

  Then he’d been quick, just in case his girl came down. Jacking the car up again, he pulled the birdman from underneath and lifted him as he struggled to breathe into the back of his pickup truck—with its enclosed roof and inner tubes, pump and chains inside—sliding him in next to them, closing the back, and quietly driving off out towards the Fraser River.

  The sun was nearly up when he arrived, Paawan in the back, out cold, but still breathing. The river flowing fast, pulling debris from along its banks as the ocean’s riptide sucked the fresh water from its veins. He opened the back, putting the inner tube over the birdman’s head and securing it tight under his arms, connected the electric pump, turned it on, and listened to the little motor whirring away, blowing it up tight around Paawan’s chest as he secured the chain around the flying man’s feet until the tube was right under the guy’s arms—the tube now looking as though it would pop. He covered the birdman with camo netting, wrapped another tube around his feet, blew it up, then pulled out a pin he’d taped to the inside of the window and pricked three small holes in the tube below the birdman’s face, then another six in the one around his feet. He dragged him out into the mud at the side of the bank, getting his feet wet, and pushed Paawan out into the water, let him go into the current, then watched as the water took him away.

  Then Archall said to Steve on the other end of the phone, “I ain’t drowned no one, right.” And in his mind, he hadn’t—he’d just floated the guy off and if he couldn’t swim, it was his problem, even if he did have a punctured lung and a chain wrapped around his feet.

  As Archall Diamond pulled on his dick through his jeans, he heard Steven say back, “You’re the only one who’s ever mentioned drowning.”

  “Yeah, well he probably thinks it if he’s asking about my boat.”

  Then Steven went quiet and, starting to get really worried, said after the longest pause, “Like I said before, you’re fucked if you think you been clever and gone and done something stupid.”

  ******

  Charles Chuck Chendrill had been snooping. He’d been digging around into Archall Diamond’s past. So far, he’d been told Diamond had worked for Rasheed, which he already knew, but some were saying he’d been trying to carry on where Rasheed had left off. Somehow Archall Diamond had gotten hold of Rasheed’s funds and was renegotiating deals; and at the same time, it seemed as though he was giving away what Chendrill could only surmise were the blackmailer’s pills, which had somehow made it into the country despite Malcolm Strong’s breakdown and subsequent confession. He’d heard nothing about a feud between Paawan and him though, and nothing about Diamond’s girl Nina and Paawan. Although good sources had said she’d flown the coop just like Rann Singh the blackmailer—but that wasn’t surprising.

  He’d done something though, Chendrill knew it. He felt it in his bones when he’d met him and heard him talk. It was just a matter of time before all the pieces of the puzzle came together; had he still been on the force, he’d have already brought the guy in and let him talk his way into a life sentence behind bars. But times change.

  He took the highway out of town and watched his speed over the bridge. There was another guy he’d heard about and wanted to chat to, someone who’d hung with them when they were kids, but got away from it all, gaining a scholarship and taking himself off to university. And now he worked as a pharmacist for a franchise in White Rock. Word had it that Steven was now Diamond’s counsellor and the first thing he saw in the man’s face as he looked up and spotted Chendrill walking through the sliding door and up the aisle towards him, was fear—fear first, then panic as he passed the toothpaste, resignation at the condoms, and finally just as Chendrill breezed by the hairbrushes and reached the counter, acceptance. Then before Chendrill managed to say a word, Steven blurted out, “It’s not illegal to talk to someone, right?”

  And Chendrill said, “Depends what you’ve been talking about.” Steven told him Diamond had approached him, getting him to look at the pills, breakdown their medicinal quality; then, he asked if he could mix them with baby powder or laxative like he’d heard the big boys did so as he could double his yield.

  Chendrill kept quiet, listening, Steven doing all the talking as they sat on a wall out front. Chendrill using up the man’s break time.

  “I said you can’t mess with perfection. There’s nothing bad in them, just herbs. There’s not even any Sildenafil in them—although apparently even the guy who sold them to Archall thinks there is. Besides, they were already packaged. I said just sell them and get more, you know they work, whatever herbs this guy from Cape Town put in them work miracles.”

  Chendrill said, “I’d heard the guy who made them was from Stockholm?”

  “Wherever, I think Archall’s given almost all of them away. I haven’t even seen the man more than three times and two of them were on the same day. He just keeps calling, said I’d be getting ten grand a month just for counsel.”

  “Counsel for what?”

  “Stupid stuff like finding a dentist.”

  “Really—for that tooth?”

  “You’d take that, wouldn’t you? I’m no different than some smart mouthed lawyer saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘do this’, ‘do that’. I’m not the one doing anything illegal.”

  And Chendrill said it again, “Depends what else you’ve been talking about.” Then he carried on and dropped the bomb right there and then to see what the man’s face would do when he heard him say,

  “What did you tell him to do after he dropped Paawan’s body out at sea?”

  Steven felt as though he was about to throw up. Fuck, what had he done getting involved with such a shithead as Archall Diamond? If he’d paid him ten grand a week instead, it wasn’t enough to be feeling as frightened as he was now. And he hadn’t even done anything. He said, “Diamond didn’t like Paawan there was no secret there. We all thought he was cool when we were kids, you know the way he danced with death, cool and stupid at the same time, throwing himself under the freight trains like he did. Diamond tried it once, trying to keep up with the guy. Got under the first wheel and then froze, thought he’d have the courage, as Paawan made it look so easy. But Diamond couldn’t move, his body wouldn’t let him I suppose. He started crying and all Paawan kept saying was lie flat, you’re cool, lie flat and let it pass; and when it did we see he was okay, and he’d just pissed himself with fear—that’s all. We all laughed till we cried, but Paawan didn’t. He felt sorry for him, put his arm round him. Diamond fucked him off though and has hated him ever since. Paawan was a good guy, wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  And all Chendrill said was, “Was?”

  And then Steven went silent, staring at the floor. Then looking up said, “Yeah—was. I’m not certain, but
something inside tells me you’re not wrong.”

  ******

  Archall Diamond stood outside the front of his house and stared at his low rider Mercedes with its tinted windows and duck pond for a roof. It wasn’t going to do, not with having a classy girl like he did now—even if she was married and couldn’t walk at the moment. He needed to get it fixed if he was going to impress her once she got out from the surgery and left the loser backstreet dentist who was going to make him light up the room with his new front tooth. Light up the room, he thought. Light up Alla real good, as well, with his smile like the old days—one that could lift her out of that chair and carry her off to his new pink, terracotta-lion-guarded super mansion home he rented in Surrey.

  He pulled the phone from his pocket and felt the tug on his dick. He dialed Steven and when he answered said, “I need to find a place that can sort out this roof on my Mercedes. I was thinking of going to one of those car wrecking places where they have those big magnets and strapping the car down to the ground, swinging the magnet over the top and let the magnet pull the dent out so as we don’t chip the paint. You know, just like those miracle dent guys do who the dealers use to make their cars look cool again. What do you think?”

  Steven sat there on the wall, with his phone in his hand on speaker phone for Chendrill to hear and looked at him. There was no doubt between the two that the guy was a moron. Steven said into the speaker, looking to Chendrill as he did, “Yeah that should do the trick.”

  They both heard Archall Diamond say back, “Yeah I thought so—so you going to find me one then? Make it a big one, tell the guy I’ll pay it in cash.”

  “What about the place on Annacis Island called Joe’s? They’ve got a big magnet on a crane there,” Steven said, still looking at Chendrill like they were friends, and hearing Diamond say ‘thanks’ and hang up. He said, “See that’s all I do, just answer stupid questions, that’s all.”