Authors: Declan Burke
'I know, hon.' Karen could sympathise, Anna drugged up for two days straight, coming around in a dungeon full of noise with a hangover to beat all. The front of the ferry clanking down now, light streaming in around the edges. Anna growling against the revving engines, someone back there honking because he was stuck behind the van, no one arriving to pick it up.
Karen tugged on Anna's ear and stoically accepted a lashing from her bushy tail. 'What he's saying is, it's never about
him
. Am I right?'
Anna barked short and hard, rammed her flank against Karen's leg.
'Yeah,' Karen said softly, 'I liked him too. But c'mon, the guy has to fit in around us, he knows that. He doesn't, what happens you?'
The front of the ferry clanged down on the dock, the port bustling with delivery trucks, buzzing mopeds, guys like admirals in their white suits shouting orders that couldn't be heard over the revving engines, the ferry's rumble. Karen bent down, hugged Anna to her. 'What happens you,' she whispered, 'is you get abandoned, maybe wind up with someone even worse than Rossi.'
Anna stiffened, then threw back her huge head with a violence that sent Karen stumbling backwards, catching her heel on a metal stud and slamming down hard on the floor, right on her ass-bone. The murderous howl, magnified in the cavernous parking bay, drowned out everything, ferry's rumble included.
When Karen got back on her feet again all she could see was these tiny little black Os, every mouth in the port dropped open.
Rossi
'Sicily's an island?' Rossi said crossing the observation deck, the breeze billowing out the fatigues so he flapped like an old sail. 'Since when?'
'There was an earthquake about two years back,' Sleeps said, looking to Mel. 'That right, Mel? Two years ago?'
'I think it was three,' she said.
'You being inside,' Sleeps said, 'you probably didn't hear about it. Anyway, it broke off from the rest of Italy, damn near sank. Terrible, it was. Millions dead.'
'They tell you nothing inside,' Rossi groused. 'I mean, I prob'ly lost actual family, cousins and shit.' Elbowing in to the rail now, flashing some dead-eye to the guy about to complain, this asshole in a straw sunhat. Letting him know, fair warning, you don't fuck with Rossi Francis Assisi Callaghan. Backed him off a little, got some elbow room, talking space, then plonked down the Futon, put a knee on it and leaned his elbows on the rail. The others huddling in close, Mel in the middle smelling like, it was the only way Rossi could describe it, the Arabian Nights. He up-jutted his chin at the approaching port. 'And this earthquake's why Palmero looks like Calcutta's evil twin.'
'That's not, um, Palmero,' Mel said. 'Not as such.'
'No?'
'It's Palermo's port. The actual city is way back in the hinterland.'
'The what now?'
Rossi feeling beat down, not firing on all cinders, the buzz from the Uzi draining out fast. First all the crap at Dubrovnik, Sleeps bollocking on about Italy's world-famous mediaeval city, how it was traditional, you were going to Sicily for the first time, to ferry down the coast from Dubrovnik. Then Mel, gypping on about the blood on her Louis Futon – although Rossi was wondering who she was planning to sleep on a pull-out bed from a bag that size. Midgets, maybe. Plus they were running low on crizz, Sleeps baggsing, being narcoleptic and all, and a greedy bastard to boot, first dibs.
And if that wasn't enough, Melody starts in about smoking in the car, how she's catching cancer secondhand, getting half-stoned, all the time ready to puke. Rossi was tempted to ask her to pay for half the baggie. Except Sleeps backs her up, says the smoke's drying out his eyes, glaucoma just one more toke away. Rossi tried it hanging out the window but the blifter just went off like a Roman candle. He got in one good draw at 120 kph and nearly inhaled the flaming tip, sparks singing his eyelids.
'The hinterland,' Sleeps explained, knuckling his bloodshot eyes and then waving vaguely in the direction of the mountains, 'being the way-back-behind. We get into Patras, the port, we still need to go cross-country to Palmero.'
'The cruise isn't leaving from this Patras?'
'Patras,' Sleeps said, 'is where the industrial stuff goes in and out. Oil-tankers and whatnot. For cruise liners? It's Palmero.'
'Fuck.'
'We still got nine, ten hours,' Sleeps said. 'Plenty of time. Right, Mel?'
Mel nodded.
'Okay,' Rossi said to Sleeps, 'so the Beamer – I say we booby-trap it. Wire the fucker up to the gas tank so it shorts out when they turn the key.' He gave a wristy twist. 'Ka-
boom
-ski.'
'And fry someone,' Sleeps said. 'Start a manhunt.'
'What, I'm a moron now? I'll be ringing it in, Sleeps. Fair warning.'
'This making it a booby-trap everyone knows about. Besides, you issued many bomb-warnings in Italian lately?'
'You got any better suggestions?'
'Sure. We leave it sitting where it is. Walk away.'
'And get us nabbed on forensics?'
'Forensics?'
'One eyelash'll do it,' Rossi warned. 'I read up when I was inside, DNA, body fluids, all this. You think you're free and clear, then bang, they've matched a sweaty spot to the crack of your ass and you're looking at five-to-ten, hard time, State pen. Maybe Angola.'
Sleeps made goggles of his fingers, stretched out his eye-sockets. 'First they'd need to know it was us driving the Beamer,' he said. 'This being a motor we boosted the other side of the continent. Then they'll need enough reason to chase us into, y'know, Sicily. Which I think is like a foreign jurisdiction for Italy.'
'We got one of their Uzis,' Rossi pointed out. He adjusted the forage cap so it sat low on the turban, angled rakish over one eye. 'Plus, a uniform.'
'Sure,' Sleeps said. 'But that's not exactly something that'll get them swearing out extradition warrants. More likely they'll want to keep quiet about that one.'
'I'm just saying, we don't want to take any chances we don't have to.'
'Other than, say, abducting a cop, or a soldier, we're still not sure which. Then smuggling his assault rifle across the border, this while we're muling enough gak to chill the Foreign fucking Legion. With,' he inclined his head at Mel, 'a volunteer hostage in tow.'
'I'm talking about taking chances,' Rossi said with quiet dignity, 'not what they call adapting to circumstance.'
'Which reminds me,' Sleeps said. 'The guy in the trunk – we booby-trapping him too?'
'Fuck's the point in that? The car's already wired. Like, he's
in
the fuckin thing.'
'Sure. But you're tipping 'em off, remember? So's no one gets hurt, they don't call in any choppers, send an aircraft carrier steaming up from the gulf.'
'Meaning,' Rossi said, seeing it now, 'the guy survives, he can identify us, right? In a line-up.'
'On the remote chance we get ourselves caught, yeah.'
'Be just like a copper,' Rossi said, 'to squeal.'
'It's not so much squealing when you're a cop,' Sleeps said, 'as it's gathering evidence.'
'This is how bogey a cop is.'
'It's his
job
, Rossi. How he gets paid.'
'You're saying he'll do it.'
'Why not? Why wouldn't he say it was us anyway, even if he didn't know us from the Osmonds. See if it was me, I'm due a rocket up my hoop over some tourists swiped my Uzi when I was blind drunk some night? I'd say whatever I was told.'
Rossi, just one of those things, he did his best thinking with a finger in his ear. Now he dug all the way in there, rooted around. 'We can't just dump him over the rail,' he said. The port already close enough to make out cranes, gantries, the ant-like chaos of the docks. 'We'd be seen.'
'Probably, yeah. And besides, if you're going that radical, you could just leave him in the truck, wire the car, tip nobody off. Except we're not doing corpses today.'
'I'm just ruling out options.' Rossi examined the tip of his finger, rolled a little orange ball between the tip of thumb and forefinger, then flicked it into the breeze. 'I say we blind him.'
'
Blind
him?' Mel said.
'Cuts out the wondering if he knows us. Doesn't matter, he can't see us anyway. We could be the Stooges, he's pawing our faces trying to work out who's Curly.'
'I bags Iggy,' Sleeps said.
'Blind him how?' Mel said.
Rossi had a good tug on his lobe. 'Battery acid? Or, y'know.' He held out his thumbs and twisted them upwards, scooping.
Mel put a hand to her mouth.
'Now you're thinking lateral,' Sleeps said. 'But I got an idea, it's a bit more lateral, where no one has to go blind or get dumped over any rails or burned up.'
Rossi squinted so hard trying to work it around he got a burning sensation where his ear used to be and still came up with only one option. 'You want to let him walk away? A cop?'
'Or soldier,' Sleeps said. 'And it's more that he drives rather than walks.'
Madge
'Still no joy,' Terry said, frowning at his phone, Karen's number ringing out again.
'There won't be,' Madge said, looking for culture through the cab's window. Any culture at all, Madge wasn't fussy. Anything other than half-built high-rise apartment blocks, the only relief an occasional splash of graffiti, reds and yellows mainly. Although, that being in Greek, it wasn't much help. 'I was there when Rossi threw all the phones in the lake,' she said, trying to remember how many times she'd said it now, 'and Karen didn't go after hers. No one did, none of us being kitted out with Scuba gear at the time.' She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. 'Ray hasn't been in touch yet?'
'I told you, this isn't my phone.' Terry had explained last night, in detail, taking most of dinner to do it, how it wasn't such a bright idea to bring your own phone on a trip, leaving a record of how you were taking calls in strange places.
'I know it's not your phone,' Madge said. 'What I'm asking is if he's been in touch back home, left a number you can call.' Like any reasonable person might, she didn't add.
Terry grunted. 'Ray's a bit brighter than that.'
'He's bright,' Madge said. 'And we're bright too, not leaving any traces.' Terry nodded. 'So how come everyone's in the dark?' she said.
Terry glanced across. 'You okay?'
'I'm fine, Terry. Really, you don't have to keep asking. If it does get to the point where I'm not fine, you'll be the first to know. Who else would I tell?'
'Alright then.'
'Although,' she said, 'there is something I've been wanting to say.'
'Yeah?'
All morning she'd been wondering, it being Friday already, when exactly her divorce kicked in. Like, first thing in the morning, office hours? Or noon, for some weird reason? Or was she officially divorced from dead Frank already, since one minute past midnight, something like that?
She said, 'Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that Frank didn't die of natural causes. That Ray, just for an example, thought Frank might be a loose end that should get knotted up. Or it might even have been Rossi. Or someone we don't know, had a grudge.'
Terry studying her now, the cab pulling up in front of the hotel. 'This is what's bugging you,' he said.
'Well,' she said, 'if that's what happened, and I admit it's a big if, but if that
is
what happened, then whoever had Frank bumped off basically dropped me in it from a very great height.'
'It'll never stick, Madge. We've been through --'
'That's not the point I'm trying to make, Terry. Just let me finish, okay?'
'Sure.'
'Okay.' Madge, the bellhop coming down the steps now, another guy dressed like a Swiss general opening her door, had this instinct to just keep moving in a straight line for the rest of her life, just keep on circling the globe, repeating nothing. Mistakes, especially. 'I guess what I'm trying to say,' she said, holding up a hand to the Swiss general, pulling the door to again, 'is if I had the person responsible for Frank being dead in front of me now, I think I'd want to tell him it was worth it. Even knowing that I'll have to go back home and act like a loon to try and get off on temporary insanity, wind up all over the front pages, I'm some kind of rabid Black Widow …' She shrugged. 'It'd still be worth it.'