‘They just do hops – one strange place to another. A lot are around Indonesian and Malaysian islands. Some of them are internal American flights, or flights around South America and the Caribbean. Burgess sells nearly every seat on each flight, even though Cozy has never seen anyone buying them.’
‘So it made him suspicious?’
‘It wouldn’t have done, he says. He would have just thought that it was good business, that he was too slow to grab or too inexperienced to find. But then a group booking came into the shop, just before Christmas. It was all legitimate, a party of single men going on a luxury outing from their social club or something. Cozy knew they were only going to Miami, for the New Year. But he noticed that Burgess had them booked to fly all over America. They were down for a couple of flights each day. If they had really taken them, they would have spent the whole of their holiday just whizzing from state to state without leaving an airport.’
‘How much business of this kind was Burgess doing?’
‘Millions, in turnover. Burgess takes a commission on each flight sold.’
‘I don’ know,’ said Estela. She had folded the counterfoils up now and resealed the bag. ‘Let someone else work out how he was doing whatever he was doing.’
Theresa said, ‘Do you know these companies?’
‘Two of them. They’re partly owned by men in Colombia and Bolivia. Burgess is laundering cocaine money. The third company, Fly-East, is probably heroin.’
‘He’s laundering money from both cocaine and heroin?’
‘Yes. But perhaps it’s all part of the same deal. I heard there are plans to merge some of the different cartels operating on the Pacific rim. Maybe Burgess is helping build a super-cartel.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘Me? I think I will dance. We can’t sit powdering our noses all night.’
Estela slid back the catch, squeezing past Theresa to leave the cubicle. Theresa felt her headache reignite, annoyed that Estela had been so casual. But at least she had taken the bag.
At the washbasin mirror, a girl wriggled to pull her dress straight over her butt. Her friend was at work, teasing the front of her hair into a fan-design. Estela stopped to check on her make-up. Theresa watched her smooth the bow of her upper lip with her finger, re-examine the labial texture, and decide to use her lip-pencil to reassert the desired effect. Theresa twitched impatiently.
‘Don’ hurry me, Theresa. I’m not a girl any longer, I need time to put right what nature is set on putting wrong.’
Theresa stopped. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
*
In the lounge bar, Michael Cross still had the same seat, half-turned, talking to a man he called Uncle. Not really talking, it was more that he was nodding. Cozy was standing apart from the group. He was looking around, managing not to look awkward but failing to look at ease.
Theresa looked at him. ‘Who are you waiting for?’
His eyes sailed past Theresa’s face. ‘The glamour puss is back. What are we getting involved in?’
Estela was out of the toilets. She had worked the shoulders of her dress lower so the material now hung from the top of her arms and stretched tight over her bosoms. Somehow, she had persuaded each breast to poke a little higher out of the top of the dress. Cozy was not the only one to have noticed her. As she came back through the lounge bar, she was swinging her hips in a preposterous burlesque.
‘What is she up to?’ asked Cozy.
Theresa didn’t know. She watched the long pendulum of Estela’s torso navigate around the heads of the seated drinkers. Was this a Latin move, a solo salsa or lambada? She looked like a stripper. When she came to a halt, her hips were slung at forty-five degrees and her arse sticking out like a mantlepiece. Theresa looked around the table to see what kind of reaction she had provoked. Nearly everyone’s eyes were on Estela. Only Michael Cross reacted differently. Theresa believed she saw her headache flit across the table and hit Michael between the eyes. He flickered in pain.
Estela inclined towards the table. Tilting slightly at the waist, she was playing her bosom to the gallery, rotating her balconette across all the seated heads.
‘Anyone care to dance?‘
Theresa pulled Cozy’s elbow: ‘Come on, I’ve had enough of this. I’ve got to go somewhere – and you’d better drive me.’
Estela saw Theresa and Cozy leave, but only from the corner of her eye. A quiet commotion to the rear distracted her. The Taz-Man came spooling out of the shadows. Two taller boys trailed at his shoulder.
‘Hey. We together again.’
Estela passed him a zero-shaped smile, a modellish pout. Everyone looked from Estela to the contender.
The Taz-Man gave Estela two hands, both huge. When Estela slipped her hand between them, he held on to it tightly – he did not look as though he was going to let her slip out in a hurry.
‘Estela, I wanted to ask, what kind of name’s that?’
‘A star’s name, honey. What kind of name is Taz-Man?’
‘Short for Dee-Evil Taz-Man. First name Dee, second name Evil, last name The Taz-Man.’
‘First name Estela, last name Santos.’ Estela had made no move to release her hand.
Chapter Twenty Five
Amjad felt the rain made him invisible, like he were unseen, all-seeing, half in his body and half in the air. He continued to watch the door of the Passenger Club and he continued to have no idea why he was doing it. He had turned off the tape of Sufi chants. They had worked too well, managing to both relax him and thrill him with desire. What he needed, now, was to empty himself while keeping himself on edge. He tuned his radio to the local news.
It was blowing hard tonight. In the tiny gap between the top of the door and the window, through the space that he’d left to stop his breath clouding the inside of his cab, the wind blew spits of freezing drizzle. How many degrees just above zero was Manchester tonight? Amjad lit another cigarette. If he’d known he wouldn’t be working again this evening, would he have brought himself a quarter-bottle of whiskey? Or would he have carried on with his no-drinking regime? Muslims should not drink, because they end up acting stupid when they do. That’s what he’d decided, seeing his cousin Iqbal crying over a dumb Indian film. He’d told him, make some black coffee. Turn off that Hindi crap and put on a Jackie Chan video – stop acting like a fucking wanker.
On the other hand, in this pissing weather, he should do what the Brits did. Drink whiskey because whiskey works like an eighteen-tog duvet in pissy Manchester rainstorms. It was like looking into a wiggly mirror, trying to see through the night rain. Hardly anyone had entered the Passenger Club in the last hour and he was up past one o’clock without being paid for it. He saw a couple leaving the club, that was it. Strange that they were white; he had thought the Passenger Club was getting a bit heavy for the white kids. They crossed over the paved front and passed in front of his Nissan – a dark-haired girl hurrying ahead of a long-haired boy.
They walked over to a yellow Marina he hadn’t even noticed before. That was strange, too. He had heard the TV people describe the car involved in the shooting that afternoon as a charcoal-grey BMW. He knew it was a yellow Marina because his nephew Mohammed Amir had seen everything. It had been better than Jackie Chan, Mohammed had said. The back doors flew open and this ugly fucker, with a pony tail, kind of cartwheeled out of the back. He took a Smith and Wesson off this black lad and came up shooting. If Mohammed had had his camcorder with him, he would have sent it to Hong Kong. Give some of those directors a few ideas for top action sequences, no messing.
When the couple had driven out of sight, Amjad returned to his stake-out. The bouncers were still at the door, keeping out from the rain. Amjad watched them stamp their feet and blow on cupped hands. He bet they wished they were wearing more than shellsuits. The bouncers over at the Gravity wore Crombies. That was more like it, more the style for standing around past one in this weather. Mohammed Amir said the Lexus was driven by
the head man over at the Gravity. The one who walked like a body-builder but was built like a brickie, a beer-gut on him like a bin-liner filled with water. That was one thing the TV people had got right: they said that the security team from the Gravity were involved in the incident. The story was repeated on the local radio news before the announcer turned to a new story: a group of New Yorkers, from the Bronx, had decided to leave their flat in Whalley Range. They said that they found the area too violent, they had all been mugged too many times. The radio played a snatch of a taped interview. Amjad didn’t know what a Ho was, but the New Yorkers seemed to have a problem with that, too.
There was another couple leaving the club now. This was what he’d been waiting for – the Tasmanian. He hadn’t expected to see him with the Latin woman. Now she was tied up with this bad motherfucker, Amjad did not know what to think. He could see that she had her arm looped through his as they came out of the door. She had withdrawn it by the time they got to the pavement, but only so that she could hold her coat above her head and keep her hair from getting wet. Amjad would have said she was too classy for a shit-eating smack dealer.
The man’s BMW was parked right out front of the club, in a position of honour. The classy Latin let the gangster walk ahead of her to the car, holding his car keys in front of him like Captain Kirk holding his Fazer. He scooted around to the front and once he was inside the car, the woman started towards it and opened the passenger-side door. Amjad could see the man had turned towards her side of the car. When she was in, he leant over. Amjad guessed that they were snogging – what the fuck was this about? Now she had pulled away from him again, he was nodding. Turning to the front, he put his hands on the wheel. Amjad saw the headlights come on. They were going to move off.
Amjad started his own car, but left his own headlights off. He had to think. If he just pulled out behind the BMW, he would be too obvious. If he followed them with his headlamps off, the bouncers at the Passenger Club would notice and guess what he was doing. If he turned the lights on, then the Latin and her lover would see him.
He threw the Nissan into reverse as he started its engine. He decided to back around the corner to his rear. Then he could pull out with his headlamps on, as though he was coming from around the corner. He would probably pass by the BMW before it had started, but that was good. No one would guess that he was tailing them if he was ahead of their car. There was only one direction they could go, unless they wanted to head into a dead end. Amjad knew he could slip back on to their tail when he reached the dual carriageway.
As he crossed in front of the headlight beam of the BMW, Amjad kept his eyes to the front. He didn’t want to risk stealing a glance. He tried to keep his speed moderately slow so that he didn’t end up too far ahead of their car. He had his eyes on his rearview mirror as the BMW pulled out from the road by the Passenger Club. He saw it turn in completely the wrong direction, showing him its red tail-lights as it headed into the maze of dead ends beneath the prefab hulks of Moss Side. Shit. Amjad resisted the urge to throw a u-ee or a handbrake turn. He would have to play it cool. Find a place to turn around naturally and then follow every road until he found them again. What were they doing, trying to lose themselves in the undercroft of Moss Side? She couldn’t intend to give that motherfucker a gobble.
*
The Taz-Man’s BMW was sunk in the shadows of the undercroft. He stretched a hand over to cup Estela’s belly then dragged it across the ruffled material of her tight dress until he had hold of her right breast. Estela bent towards him. His skin breathed with the leathery scent of Fendi aftershave; the open pores on his cheeks grew wider as she drew herself on to his lips. His tongue flipped into her mouth, pushing forward as a kind of foretaste, and retreated. She cupped the hard flatpack of his breast in her hand. He was a bull of a man, short but meatily solid. His tits felt like a weightlifter’s; his nipples prodded at his T-shirt. She got the teat between her thumb and forefinger and gave a long slow tug downwards. She felt a wave run through his body until, where their hips touched, the spasm hit his crotch and ended in a short involuntary writhe. Estela dropped her hand into the space between his legs. His cock had begun to unfurl inside his over-sized jeans, she felt it tense, relax and grow against the back of her fingers. She wriggled against the leather seat of the BMW and settled on a better position. From here, she could press her palm against his cock and begin to massage it through the black denim.
‘Baby wants to ride that Mother? I tell you, I’m gonna do you a big favour.’
When did the American strain seep into his Mancunian accent? It had begun the moment he got hot. Even as they were walking out of the Passenger Club, it was ‘Mother’ this, ‘Mother’ that, in a hybrid dialect – it wasn’t exactly fake, it happened only as he began to lose his judgement and control. It happened as she stroked around the curves of his tight black ass while they waited for the cloakroom girl to fetch her coat. Estela couldn’t say it was unattractive.
‘You want this mo’, baby. I tell you, it’s sweet as you – you gonna get along with it fine.’
She pulled at the top edge of his flies, the buttons popped in sequence all the way down to the crotch. Estela slipped her hand inside and reached the base of his cock, at the point where it had slipped out from the front of his shorts. She hooked a finger underneath it and drew it out from his trousers. Half-hard, it lay like a question-mark against his lap. She partially covered it with her hand and looked up to his eyes. He had them open. They were kind of piggy. The scar tissue that had built up around his brows made his eyes appear to recede. Traces of acne lay on his cheeks like black maggots. She should have kept her eyes on his dick – that looked as though it could be a thing of beauty, a joyous foreskinner. The Taz-Man was ugly in the face but there was a grace to his body that pumping iron hadn’t completely erased. Estela chose to look him in the face because that was a part of her technique. She got him to focus on her eyes.
‘I want to suck you, sugar. I want you in my mouth.’
He mumbled unintelligibly but with commitment. Estela had him hooked. She kept her eyes turned up towards his as she went down on his cock. If the position inside the car was less cramped, she would have kept her eyes on his throughout. Big puppy-dog eyes turned up in special pleading with his cock half-way down her throat, that turned hetero men inside out with emotions they could not handle. She opened wide and took all his dick in her mouth, easing outwards as it shrugged off the last traces of flaccidity.
‘Stay with it, sugar, stay with it,’ he said.
She pulled back her teeth, cushioning their sharper edges with the flesh of her lips. She pumped, up and down. His cock was fully hard, fully eight inches long – she estimated. It felt to have more than an inch over the average. The Taz-Man’s right hand was cupping the back of her head, but he was not pressing down. She forced herself to surge forward. The helmet tipped against the back of her throat and nosed through. Estela drew back before she quite gagged and controlled the flood of saliva. With the next push, her mouth was full of spit but his dick was fully lubricated. He could fuck her in the face; she had her throat open wide enough for a sword-swallowing trick.
He was panting hard, but trying to keep his crotch still. She had him, he had already given in. He was trying to keep her as shallow as possible, trying to rein her back from the depths. He had only ever had it licked before, she could tell. He had never fucked a throat. She pulled upwards, fixing him a soaking and crooked smile that dripped with saliva.
‘I don’ believe I’m so hot and wet. You’ll fuck me hard, won’ you, Sugar-Devil?’
The Taz-Man nodded, uh-huh. He was still trying to control it, breathing with an exaggeratedly slow rhythm. Yeah, I’ll fuck you.
Estela felt for the mechanism that would collapse her whole seat backwards. Taz-Man had half-turned and lifted himself up. He had one knee bent on the driving seat, the other leg straight out under the wheel. He was trying to wriggle out of his jeans. His cock swung outwards with
its own inertia – it had a rare curve to it, standing upright before curving downwards. It was distinctly thicker in the middle than at the ends; it looked like a leaping porpoise wearing a saddle.
‘I’m so ready for you, sugar,’ she said.
Lying almost flat on her seat, she was getting her legs as wide apart as possible. With her hands in her crotch, she ripped at the press-studs that secured the bottom of her lycra body-stocking. His ears seemed to be cocked to the sound each stud made as it burst. He had his pants to his knees, now. He began to manoeuvre himself between her legs.
‘I am so ready. I wan’ to give you the biggest surprise,’ she said.
He heard the velcro rip – perhaps he thought it was another layer of clothing. Estela pulled the Luger out as the velcro bands holding it in place slipped away.
‘Look,’ said Estela. ‘It’s as big as your cock.‘
She held the Luger with two hands. Pointing upwards into the Taz-Man’s face, for a moment it mirrored the angle of his drooping cock. Then the cock withered and shrank, just like the Taz-Man. He collapsed into his driver’s seat. Estela swung her legs to the side, off the dashboard, and tucked them to one side. Now that she’d got her breath back…
Her voice came out in a hard Manchester drawl, ‘It looks like you’re out of fucking business.’
His tail between his legs, he still had just enough testosterone dribbling around his body to ask her what she wanted.
‘The whole fucking show—we want all of Manchester.’
*
Amjad pulled around the dumpsters and saw the driver’s seat door swing open. The gangster came out naked butt first. When he was fully out, and had edged backwards a good four yards from the car, the woman followed. She was feet first, relaxedly elegant as she brought her legs together and straightened out of the car. She wiggled the gun towards the trunk of his car. The man hobbled that way, trying to pull his trousers up as he went. Amjad saw the woman turn swiftly and pull the keys out of the ignition switch. She never let her gun leave the man.
Acid Casuals Page 17
