by Declan Burke
‘Sorry, Frank. It’s the whole deal or nothing.’
‘Everything, right?’
‘Absolutely. It’s standard practice, Frank. My hands are tied.’
Frank’s left foot was tapping out an involuntary Scottish highland fling. ‘That’s a pisser, Doug.’
‘Oh, and Frank? This being an unusual kind of deal, I was hoping you’d meet me halfway?’
‘Halfway? How?’
Doug cleared his throat. ‘Audra’s been asking about those pills you dropped on her before. The Vervocaine?’
‘Nervocaine. What about them?’
‘She’s wondering if you could see your way to, y’know, sliding her some more without all the hassle of getting a prescription. She’s pretty busy these days.’
Audra my skinny white ass, Frank thought. Nervocaine being one part anti-depressant, it was the kind of speed-based diet pill that worked wonders for a guy who was having a problem with his putting, ironing out his yips.
‘I don’t know, Doug. I have to account for every last pill that goes out.’
‘The way,’ Doug countered, ‘I have to keep an eye on every insurance policy that goes across my desk.’
‘I hear you. I’ll see what I can do.’
‘You free this afternoon?’
‘I’m booked solid, Doug, but I’ll find you a window. I’d hate to think of Audra suffering. Three-thirty at your office?’
‘Actually, if it’s not too much trouble,’ Doug said quickly, ‘how about we meet around four-ish, say outside the Canadian Embassy. I have to get to the, um, bank this afternoon anyway.’
‘And you’ll have that policy with you.’
‘I’ll do my best, Frank. It’s all pretty short notice.’
‘I appreciate that, Doug. And I’ll see what I can do about the Nervocaine.’
‘Four-ish.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Karen
Karen waited twenty minutes after Frank left, then turned off the office lights, set the alarm and sauntered down the wide stone steps to the tree-lined street. She wheeled the bike out from beneath the steps, straddling it while she adjusted her helmet, then stamped the starter and revved the bike raw.
Heads turned, prim lips tutting, but Karen didn’t give a damn. Karen was off to see Anna and she wanted everyone to know. She roared off down the quiet street and cut out into the heavy lunchtime flow. Horns blared. Karen flipped them the bird.
In the beginning it had been difficult for Karen to tell anyone, even Madge, that she was putting Anna into care. For one, Karen hated to admit she wasn’t able to cope on her own – more than anything else, it had been her resilience that had helped Karen survive her father. But then Anna came along, which was when Karen realised that pride was a luxury no adult woman could afford. At least, not if she had a conscience.
Then there was the stigma. People’d ask, how come Anna’s in care – which meant, the way Karen heard it, how come Anna’s not normal? Karen didn’t care about any stigma, but she felt for Anna, the way Anna got labelled a freak – although, she had to admit, Anna was oblivious to what people thought about her anyway.
Sure, yeah, Karen’d be the first to admit it – Anna was wilful, awkward and vicious when provoked. But then, if they were valid reasons for a lock-up, it was only a matter of time before the boys in the white coats came looking for Karen.
She throttled back, turned off the dual carriageway, took the long straight incline down into the valley. It was the solitude out in Pheasant Valley, the quiet, that had finally made Karen aware she was being banged from both ends – the world saying it was wrong to put Anna into care and label the girl a freak, but at the same time making it impossible for Karen to look after Anna herself. A voodoo blend of physics and economics: Karen couldn’t be in two places at one time, and if she stayed home to mind Anna, they’d both wind up homeless and starving.
Which was why, when Karen went visiting, she liked the world to know all about it. Okay, revving the bike, flipping the bird – these were not things the world expected from a responsible adult. But Karen had seen this movie once, about Caligula, the Roman emperor, the guy insane and wishing the world had a single throat so he could strangle it all in one go. Sometimes, still buzzing after pulling a job, Karen wished the world had a single till, so she could stick the whole place up in a one-off job. And not for the money, either.
Although, turning in the gates of Pheasant Valley, the rear wheel skidding, spitting gravel, Karen had to admit that the money came in useful. Once Karen’d realised she wouldn’t be caught, she’d started wondering about what to do with the proceeds. Which was when she’d got out the brochures, started looking around, finally settling on Pheasant Valley, a former country retreat shooting lodge set in twelve acres of woodland. Sure, it was pricey, and Karen was pretty sure Anna didn’t get all the treats Karen left behind, but it was a damn sight better than the last place. At least out in Pheasant Valley Karen’d never spent her visiting time scraping ripe faeces out of every last nook and cranny on Anna’s body.
She parked up, got the helmet off, shaking her hair out as she crossed the cobbled courtyard. Once inside she steeled herself for the onslaught. She hadn’t been to visit for three days now and Anna would be full of the joys, hoo boy, a force of fucking nature, bounding towards Karen with the broken, shambling gait that seared Karen’s heart.
She staggered backwards as Anna reared up and clamped on: when Anna wrapped a hug around she was a weird hybrid of limpet and squid. The thing about that was, Karen was the only person Anna liked to hug.
So Karen let it go on until she was about to pop, then gasped: ‘I brought chocolate, Anna. Chocolate.’
Anna was a fiend for chocolate, especially the new Willy Wonka bars, which were especially thick and chewy. Karen didn’t like to watch Anna eat, the way the stuff got all tangled up and stringy in her huge teeth. But then Karen had to admit, etiquette wasn’t really Karen’s thing: in the past she’d screwed guys who’d damn near gone face-first into the pasta over dinner.
So she stood and watched Anna chewing and snuffling, telling her what a good girl she was, a good girl, as she prepared to tell Anna the worst news the girl could ever hear. Karen feeling faintly ridiculous, knowing Anna wouldn’t understand anyway.
And maybe she would, who was Karen to say?
‘Uh, Anna?’
Anna barely glanced up, licking now at the silvery paper inside the chocolate wrapper. Karen hunkered down to stroke the crown of Anna’s head.
‘Anna? Rossi’s on his way.’
Anna’s yellowy eye widened. She looked up, licking at some brown dribble hanging from her upper lip and growling way back in her throat.
‘It’s okay, hon,’ Karen said, taking Anna’s face in her hands, cupping her beneath both ears and kissing her on the forehead. Anna squirmed pleasurably and wriggled free of Karen’s grasp, the huge tongue lolling in anticipation of a game.
Doyle
Sparks, the desk sergeant, stuck her head around the door to Doyle’s office.
‘Some guy just got mugged in the financial district,’ she said.
‘Woah,’ Doyle said without looking up. ‘Stop the press.’
Doyle was having a tough day trying to decide how to file her latest case-load – alphabetically, chronologically or by stench. All the dying fish wound up flopping around on Doyle’s desk.
‘This guy,’ Sparks said, popping a gum bubble, ‘forgot he had a briefcase. I mean, that the mugger took it.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Did I mention he’s a doctor?’
Doyle put down her coffee. ‘Pretty absent-minded for a doctor, wouldn’t you say?’
‘For a plastic surgeon, yeah, I’d say.’
‘He’s a plastic surgeon?’
Sparks crossed her eyes and made sucking sounds.
‘Who’s with him now?’ Doyle said.
‘Hansberry.’
‘Okay. Ring Hansberry’s wife, ask her to
hold for him. Then give it five minutes and call him out to the phone.’
‘Will do.’
‘Hansberry say anything about Nervocaine?’
‘Hansberry’s too busy scoring an invite out to Oakwood for some big boys’ marbles.’
Doyle mimed sticking a finger down her throat. ‘Cheers, Sparks. That’s another one.’
‘Fight the power,’ Sparks said, bunching a fist and touching it to the side of her head.
Doyle pushed her files to one side and scrabbled around for a pad and pencil, trying to decide if she felt lucky. Like, actually felt it, the tingle. Sometimes Doyle just felt lucky. Sometimes she even got lucky, caught a few breaks when she really needed to, which was how she’d made it all the way to the glass ceiling at the age of thirty-four, a little earlier than she’d planned but nothing she couldn’t coast through without breaking too much sweat.
Mainly Doyle couldn’t be doing with the politics, the boys-together bullshit, the boozy late nights that played havoc with her skin and left her washed out, bloated. Then, this one time, Doyle’d been sent on an errand, all the way out to Oakwood with an urgent message for the Super, incommunicado during Wednesday’s brisk nine with the deputy mayor, a retired judge and a twice-convicted drink-driving barrister out on a shrink-approved afternoon’s recreation and rehabilitation.
Doyle diverted home, grabbed her vampiest spikes, then changed out of her trainers in a bunker off the sixteenth green and waited until they were all ready to putt before tottering across to the Super, churning tiny divots in the immaculate turf. Doyle didn’t have to run any more errands after that. But they gave her the back office, the one with no window near the holding cells, and dropped all the dead fish on her desk.
The upside there was, Doyle wasn’t under any pressure to score results. She was running a one-woman show and getting nothing but laughs, so no one expected too many arrests, convictions, records of surveillance, reports in triplicate, bullshit like that. All Doyle had to do was keep her books balanced, expenses down, so Doyle spent most of her time riding around in her car working up the kind of mileage people might expect from a busy detective. Although, usually, she didn’t abuse the system any more than the system abused her.
The plastic surgeon was probably nothing, routine. The guy unlucky, wrong place, wrong time. But one of Doyle’s dead fish was prescription drugs, black market, Nervocaine being the latest, a diet pill three parts speed to one part anti-depressant, one part MDMA. Busies up the body, ran the unofficial sales pitch, loosens out the head. Exactly the kind of thing, Doyle reckoned, a slicer might run as a sideline, super-sizing scripts to soi-bored socialites still twenty pounds shy of committing to your actual liposuction.
Besides, it irritated Doyle that a doctor wouldn’t remember losing his briefcase in a mugging. Doyle’d lost a few handbags in her time and could remember each and every one, damn near every last thing in them, old lipsticks, cinema stubs, the works. One, a boxy Chanel-a-like, beaded, retro and very French, Doyle still wanted to cry when she remembered it.
Maybe, she thought hopefully as she passed Hansberry in the hallway – Hansberry holding the receiver away from his ear, a pained expression on his face – maybe the surgeon was in shock, concussed. It was hard to credit, sometimes, the things people confess to concussed. Plus, later in court, a guy claiming concussion wouldn’t be the most reliable witness as to what he did or didn’t say.
Doyle swept into the interview room and checked the tape wasn’t running before sitting down, beaming a smile.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Doyle. What was in the briefcase?’
Frank
Frank thought he was doing okay. Tipsy, sure, after his gin-and-tonic lunch, and a little peaky from the mugging. But mostly okay, bearing up. Apart from the wobbly crown on his front incisor, courtesy of a punch flush on the lips, Frank was pretty much tikkity-boo.
All Frank had to do was remember that the woman detective was only doing her job, that she wasn’t prosecuting the vendetta being waged against Frank by every woman everywhere. Just hold that thought, Frank told himself, and we’re home free. He breathed through his nose. Keep it simple, he thought, low-key.
‘So you’re saying,’ Doyle said, ‘he was an escaped lunatic.’
Frank nodded. ‘Completely fucking dingbat.’
‘Is that a professional diagnosis?’
‘I’m a surgeon, miss, not some fucking dream-chaser shrink.’
‘Fair enough. But just watch the language, sir. Thanks.’
‘Language?’ Frank was outraged. ‘The bastard called me a moolie motherfucker. A jungle-bunny spade-chucker.’ Frank tugged his cuff back off the wrist. ‘That’s a tan,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to Majorca.’
‘Maybe he was just colour-blind,’ Doyle suggested.
‘You’re saying I look black?’
‘Would that be a problem for you?’
Frank thought fast. ‘Would it be a problem if it wasn’t?’
Doyle frowned. ‘What?’
‘See?’ Frank said. ‘Not as easy as you think, is it? Not so straightforward. Next question.’
Some fucking day, Frank thought while Doyle consulted Detective Hansberry’s notes. First off Margaret tries to screw him for five grand. Then he gets mugged. Frank, ringing Doug’s mobile, wondering what was taking Doug so long, found himself embroiled in a tug-’o-war over the briefcase with some skanger on the plaza outside the Canadian Embassy. Frank getting himself a smack in the puss for his troubles.
The only bright spot Frank could see was that Doug had turned up before the cops arrived and had handed over the insurance forms before he realised Frank’s stash of Nervocaine had gone west.
‘Any sign of those cigarettes?’ Frank said.
‘They’re coming, yeah.’ Doyle flipped a page in her notebook, sucked on the end of her pencil. ‘Now, a description. You get a look at this guy?’
Frank considered. ‘Tall,’ he said. ‘About six-four, six-five. Wide as a house. Plug ugly.’ He thought some more. ‘Had a scar, from his eye to his ear, down the left side.’
‘His left or your left?’
Jesus wept. ‘His.’
‘And you haven’t seen him,’ Doyle said, gesturing at the mug shots littering the desk, ‘in any of those.’
Frank picked some imaginary lint from his tie. ‘I don’t know. He looked like a ratty skanger. All these scumbags look the same to me.’
‘And all he took was the phone and the case.’
‘The case?’
‘The briefcase. The brown leather satchel.’
Frank felt a gin-heat rush to his cheeks. ‘But I didn’t have a briefcase.’
‘So you’ve said.’ Doyle picked up Hansberry’s pad, flipped back a page. ‘But here it says a witness saw the guy grab your case. A doctor’s bag, he called it.’
Frank cleared his throat. ‘He must have been mistaken.’
‘An unusual thing to make a mistake about, sir. Wouldn’t you say?’
Frank groaned.
‘Tell me again,’ Doyle said, flipping over a new page of her pad, ‘how you came to take the half-day today.’
Ray
Ray, swivelling in the leather chair in front of Terry Swipes’ cherrywood desk, said: ‘So where’d you get them?’
‘Get what?’
Ray nodded at the window behind the desk. ‘The double-rolled bamboo.’
‘Funny thing, Ray, but the whole curtain frammis slipped my mind. I’ll get on it first thing in the morning.’
‘Sarcasm’s the lowest form of wit.’
‘Says the guy who paints cartoons.’
‘They’re murals, Terry. The Last Supper, Da Vinci’s, was a mural.’
‘This is what I keep hearing. So what exactly are you looking for?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Ray admitted. ‘Something remote, maybe even a lighthouse. You have any lighthouses?’
Terry pushed a leather-bound folder across the desk, a portfolio of prop
erty, just one of Terry’s bewilderingly diverse array of legit cover operations.
‘There’s a tower in there somewhere,’ he said. ‘Bona fide. Parapets, the works. Folks used to shoot arrows and shit off the roof, pour down boiling oil.’
‘Yeah?’ Ray flipped through the laminated cards. ‘Much work needed on it?’
‘Plenty. The last owners, I’m guessing, didn’t pour down enough oil. Anyway, what’s wrong with a normal house?’
Ray shrugged. ‘I’m just liking the idea of living outside town. Like, way out. Maybe even an island. You do islands?’
‘You want it badly enough, can pay for it, I’ll get you Greenland.’
Ray flipped on past the lakeside cottage, run down and a little too crowded by trees for Ray’s liking, but – from its picture – basically solid. ‘I look like an Eskimo to you?’ he said.
‘It’s a job, killing seals and shit. I mean, you’re out of work now, right?’
Ray, still flipping but thinking about the lakeside cottage, nodded. ‘Looks like it, yeah.’
‘The shylock won’t like that.’
‘There’s a lot of things the shylock doesn’t like. Me, for one. I’m just doing him a favour by jumping.’
‘You’re definitely out?’
Ray slid the folder back onto the desk. ‘Definitely.’
‘Because the shylock’s a prick.’
‘Mainly.’
‘Mainly?’ Terry leaned in, elbows on the desk, hands joined. ‘There’s a frau involved?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
Terry chuckled. ‘You’re going legit for a Jane?’
‘Since when is that a crime?’
‘Since always, but it’s your funeral. Listen – it’s short notice, I know, but something’s come up.’
‘Spare me. One last job?’
‘That’s up to you. But this one is strictly you-me, no shylock. Terry junior picked it up.’
‘Go on.’
