Cheaters

by JR Carroll

  So Morg was wetting himself. Too bad. Gerald had no qualms about taking out anyone, male or female. Christ, the woman had been warned three times to come good with the five grand she owed. Each time she said she’d get it, and each time she reneged. Well, three strikes and you’re out in any game. And he’d done a clean, professional job, paying her a visit in the morning, enticing her into his rented vehicle with a gram of Ajax in a plastic sachet, garrotting her in the Christmas Hills somewhere around Cottles Bridge, and then dropping the body down the hole. His plan was to dump it, but then he happened across this shaft – nearly fell down the fucker himself. He counted to twelve before hearing it hit the bottom, and there was no bastard about, no house in sight anywhere. Then he’d driven back to her flat and gone through it in case she’d left any leads – names, phone numbers, messages, what have you – in her diary or teledex, that might implicate him or Morg. The place was absolutely pristine when he’d shut the door on the way out and gone down Chapel Street for a late breakfast.

  Keith Morgan was not cool. Despite being a major criminal – or maybe because of it – he was developing an increasingly neurotic disposition. The thing he feared most was not getting done by cops, but by rival drug gangs. He didn’t want to have his hands cut off, like Christopher Johnstone, the Mr Asia guy. He didn’t want to be buried in lime somewhere in the bush. He didn’t want to be fed through a mincing machine and turned into pet food. He didn’t want to be wrapped in chains and dropped in the bay. There were so many ways a man could come undone in this high-profit, high-risk drug caper. He didn’t really want to know Gerald Kamp when he called out of the blue, looking for work, but how could he knock him back? They had been in the big house together. They were mates.

  Keith put in a call back in his pad after dinner that night. One of his mainstay contacts, a well-placed copper, wasn’t impressed to hear the story. He had never heard of a Lewis Kenny, which he considered strange. Keith said it had nothing to do with him, that this Kenny had done it off his own bat, and the cop asked if the girl was a customer of Keith’s. Keith said yes, but he had only wanted Kenny and a couple of heavyweights to put the wind up her. Who were the heavyweights, the cop wanted to know. Frank Gordon and Ricky Panazza, Keith told him. They were both former bouncers from King Street nightclubs who had been de-licensed for brutality. That was unwise, hiring them, the cop said. So it went on. Keith was getting a bit sweaty towards the end of the chat. This kind of thing doesn’t go down too well, the cop told him: standover shit, girls going down mine shafts, that kind of thing, and Keith kept repeating he had nothing to do with it, he just told Kenny to scare the girl. At no time did he mention Kenny’s real name. In the end the cop told him not to worry, that it would be all right as long as the body wasn’t found, or no-one came forward with information. If there were any witnesses, you could be linked, he said, and if you’re linked, I’m fuckin’ linked. So nothing better happen, mate. By the time he put the phone down, Keith was clammy all over and shitting bricks. He couldn’t even get it up Sondra that night; couldn’t keep his mind on the job.

  13

  Danny was so far gone he couldn’t get his overheated brain around it. Everything he did was driven by his passion and longing for Mischa, his need to impress her and so cement their future together. Although he believed her when she said she loved him too, he still harboured irrational fears of losing her. Mischa was an unknown quantity. She was Latvian. You couldn’t really tell what was going on in that closed, foreign mind. She was a strange contradiction: nostalgic, old-fashioned and romantic, a throwback to another time and place, but in other ways self-possessed, detached, distracted – as if she were permanently on something. When they made love she gave herself utterly to him, physically and emotionally, but even so he felt there was some vital microchip in her brain that was holding out on him. There were also times when she forgot his name for a brief moment, when he felt he could have been anyone fucking her. These were the little quirks that fuelled his anxieties. But the sexual chemistry was real, and he counted on it heavily as a basis upon which to build. In bed with her he was perpetually erect, even after coming, and could fuck her two or even three times without losing his hardness. Against this he was also aware that since they hardly knew each other, their passion could cool and die as rapidly as it was born, so it was crucial to stick close to her.

  Danny’s time was now divided between the casino and Mischa’s house in Prahran, which would soon be his house too. His mother rarely saw him except when he arrived home unexpectedly during the day for a change of clothes. She didn’t ask what he was doing, and he didn’t let on. All that mattered was getting back to Mischa. At night and in the mornings they made love, then they would go down the street – to eat, to buy shoes for Mischa or sunglasses for Danny. It was all exciting, whatever they did together. Like all young lovers they repeatedly marvelled at their luck in finding each other; nor could they believe that any two people had ever felt this way. They got into the habit of speaking in hushed voices – in bed, in the car, in restaurants, anywhere – as if to preserve an air of intimacy no matter where they were, to make sure the spell was never broken, or perhaps to maintain the illusion of their separateness from the rest of the world.

  On Saturday morning he was lying in bed – waiting for Mischa to come back from the bathroom, keen to attack her again – when he remembered Geoff Egan’s tip. This was the day; Derby day at Flemington, and the horse’s name was Waltz With Me. He was tossing up whether to go to the course or not when Mischa came into the room, dropping her dressing-gown onto the floor and standing at the foot of the bed facing him naked.

  ‘Stay there,’ he said. ‘Let me look at you for a minute.’

  She gave him a smutty little grin, put her hands on her hips and moved her body around provocatively, making her breasts swing. Then she slid a hand between her thighs and made a show of massaging herself. It was as if she were playing up for the camera. Danny’s cock rose sharply. Seeing it she drew the sheet back, took him fully in the grip of her mouth and went to work. Danny let out a sharp little gasp and shut his eyes. When he opened them again and looked down she was no longer sucking but licking him from base to tip, over and over, taking lots of time and glancing up every now and then to see how he was handling it. While she was doing this her hair cascaded over her face, tickling his stomach, so that all he could see was her tousled head bobbing up and down while he squirmed around. With each upward stroke the hair slid across his bare skin, withdrawing and then returning, like foam on a beach. She licked until he could bear it no longer and then he put her underneath him and, supporting himself on his straightened arms so he could see her cunt rising to meet him, fucked her hard and as deeply as he could penetrate, consumed with the desire to ejaculate as quickly as possible, to give her whatever he had left inside himself. Quite calmly, almost with a look of indifference, Mischa gazed at his face, brushing his leg with her foot and smiling faintly at his torment. His orgasm was short in duration but all the more intense for it, and at the height of his rapture tears shot from his eyes and fell on her face while she ran her fingers up and down his arms and sides and moved her hands all over his quivering chest and stomach. Every part of him was swept away; even his ears, lips and hair tingled.

  In the end he did go to the races, deciding against asking Mischa to go with him on the basis that making money was business, and business had to be carried on with a clear head. Driving to the track he mentally relived some of the morning’s erotica then, snapping out of it, went over a conversation he had had with Mischa afterwards, over coffee – a conversation about Sigmund. Remembering Victor’s cryptic comment about them ‘hitting it off’, he had frankly asked what she thought of Sigmund and she had said, equally as cryptically: ‘He has his bad side, which you know about – and he has his better side.’ Danny had let it go at that, but then she had added: ‘He’s Hungarian, you know. They suffered so much after the uprising. You have to try to understand these people. Th
ey don’t see things in black and white the way we do.’ Neither did Danny, for that matter, but he didn’t say so. What she meant by ‘the uprising’ was a mystery to him. It seemed that all Europe had been embroiled in wars or uprisings forever, like the Middle East conflicts and the Irish ‘troubles’ that had been going on for as long as he had been alive. History – the macro-picture – was not Danny’s long suit, and he had made no effort to understand these events. But her remarks clarified something: by the term ‘these people’, she gave the impression that she meant herself as well as Sigmund. They were something like outsiders.

  The other thing he thought about was the missing girl, Donna Pritchard. He could see her terrified face so clearly, even now. Perhaps she would turn up, he thought. Perhaps she had just wandered off somewhere under the influence of drugs and would show up unharmed. But then, police did not become involved in a disappearance unless they were sure something bad had happened – unless they suspected the person was dead. She was dead all right – murdered. It was the kind of case in which the body was never found, or if it was, years later in the bush or washed up on an isolated stretch of coast somewhere. In his mind Danny saw Lewis Kenny striding by the Petite Fleur, a man on a mission. Then he saw him wave and heard his voice ringing out in the dark, outside the casino: Sleep tight now, both of you, and felt a shivering in his armpits.

  At Flemington the crowd was rapidly building up when Danny arrived just after race one. The sun shone brilliantly, there was a light north-easterly, and the prediction was 28 degrees: perfect conditions. There had not been rain for over three weeks and the track was fast. In fact, there had been some concern that it might be too hard, making horses jar up, so the sprinklers had been on the previous day and during this morning. Waltz With Me was in the third, an open handicap over 1600 metres. He checked out the betting ring, watching the bookmakers set their boards for the second, a thousand-metre sprint for three-year-old colts and geldings, then nosed around, seeing which bookies attracted the biggest bets. He did not place a bet himself. Danny didn’t know much about punting on horses, but then – or so it seemed – not many other people did either. They were all studying form guides, comparing bookies’ prices, scanning the tote board, scratching chins, pulling noses and in general searching for a sign, something – anything – to show them which way to jump.

  He watched the race from the stand, as close to the finishing post as he could get. The mad charge down the Flemington straight was truly one of the world’s great spectacles. ‘Racing,’ says the course broadcaster, uttering the word that is guaranteed to start the adrenalin pumping, then there is a distant rumbling of hooves, muffled at first, and not quite real, like a rippling disturbance in the atmosphere, a prelude to a thunderstorm. Then, as the horses reach the course proper and come properly into view, their tails stream and their sweaty flanks flame out in the sun; spindly legs and massive, corded shoulders and necks strive and strain desperately as riders and horses go for the doctor at the two hundred; silks flash, whips whirl and snap in the air like gunfire. The crowd rises screaming to its feet, obliterating the broadcaster and the final stages of the race as the surging mass of horseflesh thunders past the post and out of sight, the jockeys’ backsides high in the air as they stand straight in the irons and try to rein in their mounts. And it’s all over, on this day, in a tick under fifty-seven seconds.

  By the time Danny was back in the main ring most of the boards were set for the third race. He had more or less settled on a bookie named Rex Brinkley, who was popular with the serious punters, the ones with fists full of hundred-dollar notes. Danny had observed him laying bets in the thousands without batting an eye. Brinkley was a large, middle-aged man with steely hair, a liverish colouring, thick, determined features and a pair of binoculars slung around his neck. His bagman was a reedy little person with ferret’s eyes and a stringy ziff.

  ‘Each way I’ll lay,’ Brinkley repeatedly barked in a gravelly voice. ‘Each way I’ll lay. Each way any runner. Yes, mate.’

  The bagman occasionally chipped in with: ‘Before they go. Before they go.’

  Danny imagined Rex Brinkley to be the kind of bookie who chainsmoked, drove a Cadillac and consumed huge amounts of beer and greasy fried chicken: your traditional bookie, complete with tax problems, heart, lung and blood pressure disorders – a national treasure and a nearly extinct species.

  Brinkley had Waltz With Me at 6 to 1, while most of the other bookies either offered the same or a point under. There were three runners at shorter odds in a field of fourteen, with the topweight in a non-claiming race, Northern Mistral, a clear 7 to 4 favourite. Then Danny saw a Win Only bookie offering 8 to 1 Waltz With Me and he realised he had given no thought to how he was going to structure his bet. Was he going to back it each way or straight out? Shit. If he took it straight out, would the Win Only bookie lay a hefty amount, or would Danny have to divide his bet and run the risk of the horse’s price being wound in before he could get it all on? Don’t be greedy, he told himself; Go with Brinkley, each way. Fifteen grand each way of Sigmund Barry’s money. Work that out at 6 to 1.

  He advanced towards the bookmaker with three wads of ten thousand each in his pockets. Then, a few metres from the ferrety-eyed bagman, Danny experienced the first twinges of doubt. Was he really about to bet thirty grand on a fucking horse? This was not his go, and he had no reason to back it except that a famous jockey had given it to him. Christ, he barely knew Geoff Egan – what if Egan was a shit tipster? What if he was having a lend of Danny for some reason? Why should a man like Egan put Danny, a virtual stranger, onto a good thing? And yet, sitting with him at the blackjack table, Danny had felt the guy was genuine in a way that was unmistakable. Egan was a gun hoop, he had been impressed with Danny’s style at roulette, and that was why he had tipped him the horse. He was a winner, he’d been accepted into an exclusive circle. Egan wasn’t bullshitting, of that he was sure, and he had told Danny about the horse twice, reminding him sotto voce just before Danny had left the Platinum Room with Victor. He’d gone out of his way to make sure the message got through. Egan himself did not have a ride in this race, so the waters were unmuddied as far as a possible scam was concerned. Egan had no personal stake aside from having a punt. Fuck it. It felt right then and it feels right now. It’s just because I don’t like human involvement in gambling – not to mention the fucking animal having a heart attack down the straight. Christ knows how they soup them up. But … here we go, baby.

  ‘Racing.’

  The gates flew back. At the same instant Danny’s heart gave a jump and his hands clenched tight in his pockets. ‘Good even dispatch,’ the broadcaster said, and Danny focused on the bright cerise cap of Waltz With Me’s jockey as the horse hit the ground full of running and in the first hundred metres crossed easily to the fence from its outside draw …

  Mischa, meantime, was in her room getting dressed after a twenty-minute bath, during which she thought about Danny’s slight and utterly scrumptious bod in between pampering her own, paying special attention to the tender parts he’d savaged all morning. Root rat, she’d called him, and so he was. But she had meant it in the nicest possible way. When he’d called her on his mobile on his way to Flemington, he had said he would take her wherever she wanted to go for dinner, somewhere really swanky where she’d never been and, lying in the bubble bath afterwards, she had sifted through the possibilities and come up with The Stokehouse. A venue like that, right on the water’s edge, would be perfect on a balmy night, as it was going to be. She visualised herself sitting by the window with a glass of, what was it, Billecart champagne in front of her, watching the sky turn red while Danny played with her fingers and made love to her with his eyes. Danny Gold.

  No matter where her musings travelled, they always came back to him soon enough. To her taste he had the perfect male physique: lean, lithe, lightly muscled, with skin as hairless and as highly sensitised as her own and which had the burnished quality of the precious metal that wa
s also his surname. She knew well the erotic pleasures of her own flesh and, like her, he became aroused at the slightest stimulation. Skin. It was such a turn-on. Whenever he put a hand on her, anywhere at all, she puckered everywhere and her heart beat that much faster. Lying in bed with him that morning she was touching his thighs and his sexual organs, watching them react and feeling the electricity flowing through him. Lightness of touch was the key to it, and Danny knew that too. She had been sitting up in bed with pillows banked behind her and her hands clasped around her knees. Danny gently pushed her legs wide apart so that they formed an M, then, leaning on one arm, casually traced lines from her left foot, up her calf, down her thigh, then across the junction of her legs – pausing there long enough to give her a brief flutter of pleasure – before continuing on to the other leg and then back again, over and over, while she became increasingly agitated, her eyes fixed expectantly on his hard cock. She wanted so badly for him to hurry up and put it inside her, but at the same time she wanted the teasing to go on. Danny knew instinctively how to make it all happen for her with a real bang. Pretty soon he was dipping a finger into her, testing her wetness, and then without a word he went down and ate her, lingering there for a long, long while, adoringly French-kissing her cunt as if it were her mouth. Mischa’s head went right away from her, so much so that she orgasmed twice, right in his face, and the transition barely registered when his cock did eventually find its way in there – temporarily, as it turned out, because when he was set to ejaculate he suddenly withdrew and pushed it between her lips, and almost instantly she felt and tasted the hot rush of his pearl jam hitting the walls of her cheeks and the back of her throat.