“What?” Bobby asked in a flat, dead tone that was supposed to be full of meaning.
“I only, only, only—” She stuttered into silence.
He prodded her chest with a stubby finger. She could smell the booze on his breath.
“You really think this is all about Tom Fucking Jorgensen?”
“No!”
“You really think I have researched, booked, paid for this entire fucking vacation, taken you to all these beautiful places, brought you out here to this stinking backwater… all because of Tom Fucking Jorgensen and his shitty piece of marble?”
She paused before answering. In three years of marriage Bobby had reduced her to tears only once and that was in Cancún over a sexual demand she regarded as irrational, unnecessary and intrinsically unhygienic. The memory still smarted. She didn’t understand why it wouldn’t go away.
“I didn’t. It just seemed, I don’t know—” All the wrong words tumbled out of her mouth.
“Jesus!” Bobby roared. “Jesus Christ!”
He gunned the accelerator, rammed the Clio into first and let go of the clutch. The little car lurched bravely forward with a gut-wrenching start, veered to one side and impaled itself on a small dried mud mountain which appeared, to Lianne anyway, to contain the stump of a fence post at its heart. They were now pitched up at an awkward, sickening angle. The front right wheel screamed impotently as the mud mountain levered the entire right front end of the Clio into thin air.
Bobby stared at Lianne accusingly. “Fucking wonderful,” he grunted. “Oh so fucking wonderful.”
She was crying, trying to choke back the sobs.
“Don’t do this to me, Lianne. Not today. You’re not in Cancún now. You can’t go phone that animal you call a father and get him to come round and threaten to beat my brains to a pulp just ”cos you got a headache or something.“
Telling her old man had been a mistake. She knew that all along. But Bobby had asked for it. He crossed the line in Cancún. She needed to let him know that.
“Bobby—” she blubbed.
He stared out the window at the grey river and the sluggish movement of scum on its surface.
“Yeah?”
“I can smell gas,” she said, suddenly serious, the tears drying almost instantly under the rising presence of fear. “Can’t you?”
“Jesus,” he gasped and punched at her seat belt then stabbed open the passenger door. She smiled at him, glassy-eyed. He’d done it for her. Before he unfastened his own belt.
“Bobby—”
He pushed her out the door. “Get out for chrissake. Dumb stupid bitch—”
Bobby Dexter took one last look to make sure she was safe then turned round, flung a few things from the back seat out onto the ground and rolled out of the crazily skewed car himself. He was so drunk he did a quick one eighty and wound up on the cold, hard earth banging his elbows painfully. Bobby got in a good chunk of swearing about that.
He pushed himself upright with a weary hand, picked up his things, then checked she’d got herself well distant from the smell of gas. Lianne watched from the side of the road, a good ten yards from the dying Clio, her hands clasped behind her back looking like a schoolgirl waiting to be told what to do.
He walked over to join his wife.
“You OK?” he asked. He looked a little worried about how far this was going. That was something, she thought.
“Sure.” She’d stopped crying. He looked glad of that. It was something.
There was a sound from the car, a sort of breathy whoosh. They watched as a thin finger of flame flickered out from under the hood and worked its way up the windshield.
“Now that…” Bobby said, “is what I like about rental vehicles. They can do this sort of shit in front of your eyes and you just get to stand back and enjoy the show. Wish I’d hired something bigger now.”
The low scuttering wind caught the flames, rolled them over the roof of the Clio, sent them swirling inside the window, eating up the seats where, just a minute or so before, Bobby and Lianne Dexter had sat arguing. Then, with a sudden roar and a puff of heat and smoke, the Renault was ablaze, devouring itself in a cloud of black smoke and flame.
Lianne clung to her husband’s arm watching the spectacle. Bobby was right. This was Avis’s problem. This was what they were for. Why they charged the kind of prices they did.
“What are we going to do now, Bobby?” she wondered. Then she looked at him and found, to her relief, Bobby Dexter was smiling, happy once more, for the first time in hours.
He held up one of the things he’d taken from the back seat of the car. The metal detector they’d hired that very morning somewhere near the hotel in Rome.
“What we came here for,” Bobby Dexter said. “Daddy’s going a-hunting.”
She ventured a laugh and wondered if it came out wrong. Maybe it did. Maybe not. It didn’t matter anyway. Bobby Dexter wasn’t listening. He was working his way down to the river, walking over the odd, boggy ground that felt as if it might give way beneath them at any moment. He had the headphones on, listening. And pretty soon Bobby Dexter was laughing too. Something must have been coming through loud and clear. Lianne walked to join him. They were just twenty yards short of the river now. There wasn’t another soul around for miles. Anything they found here now was surely theirs.
“Hear that?”
She took the headphones from him and held one earpiece to her head. It was beeping like crazy, like a kid’s game from years ago.
“Fucking Tom Jorgensen,” Bobby spat and she didn’t dare look into his eyes when he was talking like this. “I’ll teach that big fat bastard. Get me the gear.”
HE WAS SKULKING in the little coffee bar around the corner from the Questura when Barbara Martelli walked in, dressed in her immaculate black uniform, helmet in hand, her long, blonde tresses bouncing above her collar with each step.
“Nic,” she said, looking surprised. “You’re back at work?”
“First day,” he replied, glancing at his watch. “When I decide to turn up.”
“Ah.”
“How are you, Barbara?”
“I’m fine. I’m always fine. And you?”
He drained the macchiato. “Yeah.”
“In case you forgot, this isn’t the café the cops use.”
“So why are you here?”
She laughed. Barbara Martelli was about his height, with the kind of figure that turned every head in the station and a shock of blonde curls that seemed too full to squeeze inside that small black helmet. Her face was wrong for a cop. Too attractive, too ready to break into a smile. She looked as if she ought to be on the TV, announcing the weather or introducing some show. Instead she just floated around Rome on her big bike, handing out tickets with such charm the word was some people simply started speeding the moment they realized she was on their tail.
Back in the old days, before the shooting that put him on his back, fighting demons, Nic Costa wondered sometimes whether she was sweet on him. A couple of the guys egged him on to ask her for a date… provided he told everything afterwards. It didn’t happen. She was just too perfect. She topped every driving exam, behind the wheel and on the force motorbikes. She was a tidy shot too, a talent that got her into most diplomatic assignments. Barbara Martelli was just a little too perfect to touch.
“Sometimes you have to escape for a while, Nic. Is that what you’re doing? If so it’s a little early. You have to get back in the ring if you want to hear the bell.”
“I’m having a coffee,” he mumbled.