The Last Big Job (9 page)

Swallowing hard, he wrapped his fingers around the slimy piece
of meat which he carefully lifted out, trying to get as little
blood as possible on his hands.

‘
You said you were going away, Bill. Where to?’

‘
Back home for a while. Got something to do.’

‘
Urgent?’

‘
Necessary, shall we say?’

Loz looked at the meat in his hand. That, too, stunk.
Obviously not the freshest meat in the world. Not that a lion would
care.

‘
What should I do now?’ There was an expression of distaste on
his face.

Billy Crane groaned with annoyance. ‘Give it to me, you
pathetic git!’ He snatched the meat from Loz’s hands and said,
‘Here I’ll show you.’

He made a show of weighing the meat in his hands, then without
warning he slammed it into Loz’s face and wound it round like a
custard pie, smearing blood all over Loz’s face. Before the other
man could react in any way, Crane had thrown the meat down and
gripped Loz’s throat crashing him hard up against Nero’s cage,
rattling the mesh.

Nero was stunned by the flurry of movement. He
roared.

The fingers of Crane’s right hand circled Loz’s throat and
lower jaw, pinning him against the cage, squeezing, distorting
Loz’s face like a cinematic special effect. Crane’s left forearm
was crushing Loz’s throat, using his victim’s shoulder as a lever
to apply pressure and make him gurgle.

Loz’s eyes were wide and terrified. The thought of Nero only
inches away behind him made him twitch fearfully but it was the
unleashed anger of his boss that made him wet himself in
fear.

Crane was nose to nose with Loz.

‘
I pay you good money to pick up sensible, trustworthy mules
and you go and choose that silly bitch. I am so fucking annoyed,
Loz, you would not believe it. I am struggling to express
myself.’

‘
I don’t know what you mean,’ Loz croaked.

‘
Well, I’ll tell you,’ Crane’s voice grated dangerously. ‘I
got a phone call not very long ago to say that she was picked up at
the airport. Not because of a routine check - I could have lived
with that - but because of her behaviour and her stupid boyfriend’s
behaviour. Two fucking drunken louts. So why did you pick her, Loz?
Why?’

He crashed Loz’s head against the cage again.

Behind, Nero bristled and growled, fascinated by what was
happening. His black eyes shone with anticipation.

‘
She seemed OK, honest, Bill. But you can’t fucking
tell.’

‘
Why pick
her?’
Crane insisted. ‘I have lost a lot of money over this and I’m
not happy, not one bit.’

Loz closed his eyes and whispered, ‘She gave me a blow
job.’

There was little to be gained by lying to Crane. Better to
admit things than submit to his interrogation
techniques.

Crane relaxed his grip slightly. ‘A blow job? Fifty grand’s
worth of coke for a blow job? Is that how you recruit them? It is,
isn’t it? That’s a superb way of seeing if they have all the
necessary skills for the job, isn’t it? “Will you suck my cock?
Well then, you must be a good drug carrier”.’

He let go and stood back.

Loz coughed, massaged his throat, took his eye off Crane. A
mistake. He never saw the fist coming. All he knew was that the
front of his face exploded in a searing white light of pain. He
sank to the ground, dazed. He didn’t see the knee coming either as
Crane drove it into his face.

Loz pulled himself slowly up the cage on to his hands and
knees, his head drooping loosely between his arms. He could tell
his nose was broken, crushed, and his cheekbone possibly fractured.
Blood poured out of his nostrils, blobbing on to the floor with
strands of snot and saliva.

But Billy Crane had not finished with him yet. His rage had
not subsided.

He hauled Loz to his feet and hurled his face against Nero’s
cage. The huge beast, 108 kilos of rippling muscle and sinew,
launched himself through the air, his huge paws spread wide, claws
extended.

Even though there was the mesh between them, Loz cowered away
with a scream just a nano-second prior to Nero’s full weight
crashing against the cage. The lion rolled away backwards and
regained his feet in one flowing, feline motion. The smell of blood
and fear was starting to drive him wild.

And still Billy Crane had not finished.

With a roar himself, he took hold of Loz’s brightly coloured
shirt, pulled him roughly on to his feet and pinned him against the
cage again. Tipping Loz off-balance, he dragged the unfortunate man
along the cage, winding up its inhabitant, who paced angrily behind
Loz. The latter screamed, shrieked and provoked even more of a
response from Nero.

In
all, Crane dragged Loz up and
down the cage four times. By the end of this Nero was emitting
unworldly noises which seemed to come from the very pit of his
guts; noises more akin to a wild African night than a balmy one in
the Canaries.

By now, Loz had taken the leap beyond fear. The whole episode
had become unreal to him following the massive blows to his face.
It was like a nightmare from hell.

Panting heavily, Crane threw Loz to the ground, where he
snivelled like a baby.

‘
Fifty fucking thousand pounds,’ Crane gasped. ‘You arsehole.
What is that worth, eh? An arm? A leg? An eye?’

He bent down and withdrew Nero’s food tray from the cage and
flung it clattering across the roof. There was now a gap of about
four inches high by ten long in the netting at floor
level.

‘
Or a hand?’ Crane said. His eyes blazed anger and
retribution.

Loz’s face snapped up at Crane as the implication of what had
been said struck home. ‘No, Billy,’ he uttered in disbelief.
‘Please. . . I don’t deserve this. No way do I deserve
this.’

Nero roared in his ear. Crane bent towards him
menacingly.

Almost as soon as she inserted the key into the lock, Danny
lost her nerve. She fell against the door for support and butted
her head against it in an expression of frustration at
herself.

This is stupid, she thought bleakly. It’s two in the morning -
no time to be returning alone to a house which holds such tragedy.
I need moral support for this.

She took her mobile phone from her pocket and tried to
remember Henry Christie’s number. ‘Phone me any time,’ he’d told
her. Oh yeah, she thought sardonically. He’d really appreciate me
calling him at this hour, wouldn’t he just? His wife would be none
too happy either.

The fleeting image of Henry asleep in the same bed as his wife
made Danny wince with jealousy. She slid the mobile back into her
pocket, put the key into the lock once again, turned it and pushed
open the door.

A musty aroma wafted to her flaring nostrils.

She looked towards the closed door of the kitchen.
Where it had happened.
And stepped across the threshold on to a pile of letters
which cracked beneath her shoe. Geena had been collecting the mail
for her, but it was about two weeks since the task had last been
done. There was a small mountain of the stuff, mostly junk. She
stepped beyond it into the hall, closed the door behind her and
stood there for a moment in the darkness. All she could hear was
the beating of her own heart and the nervous rasp as she inhaled,
exhaled, shallowly.

Her hand reached for the light switch.

The light came on, illuminating a familiar scene.

In
sudden flashback, she saw
herself, three months before, treading slowly down the hallway
carpet in her bare feet, a dressing gown wrapped tightly around her
naked body. Walking with trepidation towards the closed kitchen
door from behind which had come the boom of a shotgun being
discharged.

She swallowed in the here and now, hardly daring to move. Then
she stepped forwards and the unexpected noise from her house alarm
almost made her leap out of her clothes, skin and bones. The
movement sensor fitted above the kitchen door had picked her up and
set the house alarm going, giving Danny one minute to get to the
control panel and switch it off.

‘
Hell, Christ!’ she yelled, covering her ears.

She had forgotten about the alarm, something she’d had fitted
in response to problems experienced prior to Jack Sands’s death.
She ran down the hall, ducked under the stairs, desperately trying
to recall the code number to deactivate it.

Her own collar number.

She tapped it in and the cacophony ceased as quickly as it had
begun, leaving a hollow ringing in her ears.

At least the episode had achieved something. She was now right
by the kitchen door, only inches away from the handle.

Without further ado, she grabbed it, opened the door, flicked
on the lights and stepped into the kitchen.

Danny’s bleak thoughts concerning the whereabouts of Henry
Christie were way off the mark. Not only was he
not
in bed with his wife Kate, he
had not slept on the marital bed for almost two weeks. At that
moment in time he was leaving a very sophisticated night club in
Manchester’s city centre, with his arm thrown around the shoulders
of one of the biggest and most feared villains in the North of
England.

Jacky Lee believed himself to be one of the elite hundred or
so men in the country who were considered by the cops to be the top
of the tree, crime-wise. One of those crims who lead flash
lifestyles, drive big cars, own big houses, screw second-rate
models, knock about with footballers and pop stars, and who have no
visible means of support. The police know their way of life is
financed by crime, but because they cleverly distance themselves
from the sharp end, they are rarely caught.

However, Lee’s belief had been somewhat dented six years
earlier when he found himself in front of a Crown Court jury in
York, facing drugs importation charges for which he subsequently
received eight years in jail. Good behaviour got him out in four,
when he immediately slotted back into business.

Lee and Henry Christie stumbled out of the club, down the
steps. A Roller had pulled up, a black BMW behind it, all tinted
windows and menace. Lee and Henry clambered into the back of the
Rolls, laughing and joking drunkenly.

Lee was definitely the worse for wear, well inebriated. Henry
was stone cold sober, but acting pissed. Inside himself he was
worked up like a coiled spring and needed to keep his wits firmly
about him. He was operating in dangerous territory.

Lee leaned over the driver’s shoulder and gave him
instructions to take them to his apartment in the city - a
penthouse down south. Then he slumped back next to Henry and gave a
deep sigh of contentment.

‘
Jesus, it’s good to be back with you,’ he said to Henry,
slapping the policeman’s knee in a manly way. ‘I really missed our
crack when I was inside that fucking place, you know.’

‘
I missed you too, Jacky,’ Henry said. ‘We had a scream back
then, didn’t we?’

‘
Aye lad, we fuckin’ did that - and did some good business
too.’

A change suddenly came over Jacky Lee. He became silent,
pensively watching the lights of the city flash past from the
Rolls. His expression was hard and he no longer seemed
drunk.

‘
Y’know,’ he said at length, ‘I fuckin’ thought and thought
about why I ended up in the slammer. I truly believed my operation
was watertight.’

Something in Henry’s throat constricted. A peculiar feeling -
nausea combined with dread - grumbled in the pit of his
stomach.

‘
I been over it all again and again, boy. Workin’ it all back
in my mind. Retreading everything I’d done, who I’d met, who I’d
dealt with, and I really, really struggled to see why the cops
moved on to me. I even got a private detective to go over all the
witness statements against me to see if there was any clue in them
as to who might’ve dropped me in it with the cops, and to check out
people I know. Just out of curiosity, like.’

Henry’s controlled outer-body language did not betray his
inner turmoil. He feigned a stifled yawn of indifference and
belched. He folded his arms and allowed his head to drop back on to
the soft white leather headrest. ‘Any conclusions?’ he asked Lee
laconically, closing his eyes.

‘
Oh yeah, too fucking true.’ Jacky Lee’s eyes bored across at
the side of Henry’s head. Henry opened his own slowly and clicked
his tongue as though there was a nasty taste in. his mouth.
Actually there was. It was a taste called terror. But even so, if
Lee thought he was going to rattle Henry into spouting a confession
of some sort, he was wrong.

‘
And?’ Henry asked.

‘
I thought about you. I thought you could’ve been the
one.’

Shit. Henry’s mind raced whilst his face remained impassive.
So this was it, he thought. The time of confrontation. The moment
Henry dreaded happening. He knew that his reaction to Lee’s
statement was crucial as to whether he, Henry, lived or died. The
significance of the following BMW struck him at that moment. The
hit team.