“It ain’t mine. Belongs to a friend.”
“Where’d they get it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s have a look at it again.”
This time when she stood next to him, Sheena let her hip brush against his upper arm.
“Seventy-five,” Raymond said.
“Bollocks!”
“Hundred, then. Here y’are.” Leaning forward, he slid a roll of notes from his back pocket and peeled off five twenties, holding them toward her. “Take ’em, go on.”
“Two hundred,” Sheena said and Raymond laughed and shook his head. “It’s gotta be worth at least that much.”
“Not to me.”
“How much, then?”
“I told you, a hundred. Tops.”
“Ray-o.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile and touched his shoulder with her hand. Through the thin material of his shirt, his skin was slippery and damp.
“Okay,” Raymond said, shifting less than easily, “I tell you what I’ll do. You give me till tomorrow, let me ask around.” He broke off, reading the expression on Sheena’s face. “Don’t worry, I won’t use no names, nothin’ like that. But if I can come up with a buyer, anything over the hundred I’ll split it with you, fifty-fifty. How’s that sound?”
Sheena wasn’t sure how it would sound to Diane or Lesley. But the last thing she wanted to do was go traipsing around all over town with a bloody gun in her bag, chatting up every crooked bastard in the city.
“Let us have the hundred now,” she said, “and it’s a deal.”
Grinning, Raymond put down two twenties, one on each knee. “There. Forty. Gesture of faith. For now. Less maybe you want to figure out some other way of earning the rest?”
Sheena snatched the notes and stuffed them down into her bag. “Tomorrow, right?” she said, opening the door. “You better have somethin’ sorted.”
Raymond was on his feet now, staring at her, not bothering to hide the bulge in his jeans. As Sheena told Diane and Lesley over Bacardi and Coke in the pub, she’d as soon go down on the Alsatian dog next door as give Raymond Cooke a blow job.
Raymond, back from the bathroom and still giving himself a good scratch, weighing up the implications of what he’d just seen: Jason Johnson’s picture, all snuggled up, lovey-dovey, with Sheena Snape, a strip of them, there in her bag; Jason, who everyone knew was stuck up in Queen’s, after nearly getting his brains blown all over the Forest by some shooter who was rumored to be Drew Valentine; and, nestled up next to the photos, this gun that somehow Sheena had laid her hands on; Sheena, who’d been sitting there in the car, knickers round her neck the story went, when the gun went off against her boyfriend’s head.
Raymond chewed on the fleshy inside of his mouth and wondered what the odds were on the gun in Sheena Snape’s bag and the one that’d nearly killed her boyfriend being one and the same?
Like his Uncle Terry would have said, whatever the situation, Ray-o, what you have to do, think careful, figure out how you can make things work out best for you. Least risk, most profit. Most times that’s the way. Once in a while, though, what it pays to do, up the ante, risk a little more, capitalize on what you’ve got. Nothing ventured, Ray-o, nothing gained.
Standing there, Raymond could feel the damp gathering in the palms of his hands.
Thirty
Lorraine had been going through the motions at work, going through the motions at home. She would catch Sandra looking at her curiously every once in a while, but that aside, the children seemed to have settled back into their argumentative selves. And Derek was taken up in a flurry of paperwork as the firm’s owners prepared to launch a new range of colored papers in the coming autumn. Fifty classic and contemporary shades, each one available in a range of finishes, including several stunning new embossings.
In the kitchen, she scraped away the remains of the evening’s ready-to-eat lasagna and slotted the last of the plates into the dishwasher. The kids were upstairs pretending to do homework. Derek had taken his coffee back into the dining-room with his charts, closing the partition door behind him. Lorraine’s coffee remained near the sink, barely touched. She tipped it away and reached inside the fridge for the opened bottle of wine. Maybe later there’d be something she could watch on TV. Wind down. Something that would make her laugh.
She glanced up suddenly and saw him. Standing at the end of the drive, just beyond the far edge of the lawn, staring in. The glass fell through her fingers and she screamed.
Derek came running from the other room. “What? Whatever is it? What’s the matter?”
Her skin had frozen and now her eyes were closed.
“Lorraine? What …?”
When she opened her eyes again, there was no one there.
Somehow the glass had broken against the sink and blood was spooling from the fingers of Lorraine’s right hand.
“Lorraine …”
“It’s nothing. I saw … I thought I saw …” Sandra stood in the kitchen doorway, Sean pressed close against her side.
“Saw what?”
“There was somebody … someone …”
There was only her own face, reflected in the glass. Derek seized a hammer from the drawer beside the sink and went outside.
“Mum, what is it? What’s happening?” Sandra asked, frightened.
“It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s just your mum being silly.”
“You’re bleeding,” Sean said.
“Am I? Yes.”
Derek was on the pavement, looking first toward the field, then back along the street.
“What’s Dad doing?” Sean asked.
Despite herself, Lorraine smiled. “Being brave.”
After he’d come back in, she let Sandra pull the tiny slivers of glass from her hand with the tweezers and stood, patient, while Derek dabbed on Savlon with a ball of cotton wool, then smoothed three small plasters across the breaks in the skin.
It wasn’t until later, upstairs in bed, that Derek said: “It was Michael, wasn’t it? That’s who you thought you saw?”
“Don’t be daft, how could I? He’s miles away.”
“I know, but that’s who you thought it was, right?”
She rested her head against the fleshy warmth of his upper arm. “No, Derek, no. I swear.”
He didn’t believe her, of course. Lorraine’s imagination working overtime. With a small sigh, he leaned over and kissed her head. And Lorraine, she was certain whom she had seen and Michael it was not: it had been that prison officer, Evan, hands in the pockets of his blue zip-up jacket, anxiously staring in.
Raymond had been sniffing his way, rodent-like, from one dark corner to another. He finally tracked Tommy DiReggio to the drinking club on Bottle Lane. Tommy was sitting at a corner table behind a three-card straight, king high, and he wasn’t about to shift for anyone, so Raymond ordered a lager and black, and perched on a stool as patiently as he could.
When Tommy had pocketed his winnings and promised in twenty minutes he’d give them all a chance to get even, he went with Raymond into the back room and listened to his proposition. A Beretta, was that what Raymond had said? Well, Raymond nodded, just, say, for instance. Yeh, of course, Tommy laughed, for instance. Understood. And sure it was possible, a couple of hundred for a clean shooter, no history; without that guarantee the price dipped a lot, but still not below three figures. When Raymond pushed him a little, Tommy agreed he could maybe find a buyer himself for only a twenty per cent commission.
So Raymond downed his lager and scuttled out into the darkness, other agendas pressing on his mind, and Tommy DiReggio filed away the information, something to be passed on for a price, a promise of advancement, a debt needing to be squared.
On the corner of Thurland Street and Pelham Street, Raymond paused outside the entrance to a small cellar club he knew was frequented by Anthony Drew Valentine. And word was that Valentine was back on the street.
Raymond shuffled into the doorway of a shop selling discount jeans and suddenly he was remembering when he had stood outside that club before. A night-what? — a little over three years ago.