John Harvey - Last Rites

“Set it down.”

Raymond placed it next to the money.

“That loaded?” Valentine asked.

Raymond shook his head.

“Leo.” Without looking back, Valentine reached a hand over his shoulder and Leo slapped a full clip into it; before Raymond knew what was happening, Valentine had pushed the clip into the pistol and snicked the safety off with his thumb.

“Oh, Jesus,” Raymond said and felt his insides start to melt.

The tip of the gun barrel was only inches from his face. “Thing about Jason Johnson,” Valentine said. “I never did get quite close enough to that skinny bastard. Which must have been why I missed.”

Raymond closed his eyes and started to jabber meaningless sounds. When the barrel end touched, cold, against his forehead, immediately above the bridge of his nose, he shouted “No!” and in the middle of his shout he heard, or thought he heard, a double click.

Nothing happened.

Raymond forced himself to open his eyes.

Valentine was sitting there with the Beretta in one hand and the clip of ammunition in the other, a fat smile all over his happy face.

“Jesus,” Raymond breathed. “Jesus, oh Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“There,” said Valentine, barely able to contain his laughter. “Didn’t your daddy tell you it was good to pray?” And he reversed the pistol so the butt was toward Raymond. “Your turn. Maybe now you should take a shot at me.” He tossed the clip high through the air toward Leo. “Long as we all know it ain’t loaded.”

By now, everyone was laughing and even Raymond, who had long since learned it was important to be able to take a joke, especially if you were on the wrong end of it, laughed along with the rest.

They were still laughing when the door to the restaurant came crashing in and two men followed through fast, both dressed in black from head to toe, black balaclavas covering their faces, narrow slits for the eyes. One was armed with a shotgun, the other with an Uzi submachine-gun.

“What the fuck …!”

Raymond half-rose, three-quarter turned, the Beretta still in his hand.

A burst from the Uzi hurled him back and across the table in a clumsy cartwheel. Five bullets threaded through him, neck to pelvis; he was probably dead before he hit the floor.

“What the …”

The man nearest to Valentine smacked the barrels of the shotgun hard across his head and Valentine cannoned off the wall and sank down to his knees, spitting blood.

At the back of the room, the Dutchman moved his hand carefully away from the handle of his semi-automatic and stood to attention.

“Okay,” one of the men said, his voice strong but muffled. “The money. Who’s holding?”

First the Dutchman and then Leo emptied their pockets: close to thirty thousand between them. With the eight hundred Raymond had scattered across the floor and what the others were carrying, there was close to thirty-two all told.

“That’s it,” Leo said. “That’s all there is.”

“Is it fuck!” one of the men said and the other one lifted the suitcases, one at a time, up from the floor. They took one each and backed toward the door.

“Stick your head out too soon, you’ll get it shot off.”

Nobody moved, not till they’d heard the roar of a powerful engine, the squeal of tires. And all the while, Raymond’s blood spread slowly across the stained and pitted floor.

They were in Helen Siddons’s office, Resnick, Norman Mann, and Siddons herself. Despite the relative warmth outside, the windows were closed tight and the air was thickening with blue-gray smoke.

“So what we’ve got,” Siddons said, “this sorry article, Raymond Cooke, shot to pieces for no reason anyone can think of. A penny-ante restaurant raided in the early hours of the morning by two heavily armed men who got away with a couple of hundred from the till, a couple of Rolexes, and small change. That’s the cock-and-bull story they’re offering us?”

Drew Valentine, Leo Warner, and two others had been questioned by teams of officers since first light and so far none of them had deviated from their prearranged story. The interior of the Cassava had been searched and photographed by Scene of Crime. Raymond Cooke’s body had been shipped out in a heavy-duty plastic bag to the morgue.

Before the police had arrived, there had been time for Valentine and his crew to effect a minimum of salvage work, if not as much as they would have liked. First off, the Dutchman and his brother had been bustled into their car and clean away; by now, they were safely out of the country. Second, the Beretta had been stashed out back in a bin of vegetable peelings and old bones, from where it had been taken, wrapped and weighted, and thrown into the River Trent. If Valentine had had his way, and the time, that was where Raymond’s body would have been, too. Less to explain away.

“You knew him, Charlie. This Cooke. His being there, that time of night, it make any sense to you?”

Resnick shook his head. “Not right now, no.”

“Not dealing then, working for Valentine.”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Norman?”

“Cooke, I don’t see as he matters a toss one way or another. No, this was serious, a rip-off. Some other gang’s come in, taken Valentine for everything he’s got.” He shook his head, cleared his throat. “Christ knows what they got away with, thousands, probably, cash or kind.”

Siddons picked up her coffee cup, but it was already empty. “Any idea who might have been responsible?”

Mann laughed. “Too many. Could be someone lightweight, chancing his arm, looking to move up. I might’ve reckoned Jason Johnson for it, if he’d not already been nursing a sore head. If it’s not that, it’s one of the big boys, out to keep Valentine in line, make a tidy profit on the side.”

“Come on, Norman,” Siddons said. “Get off the bloody fence. You’re the one supposed to have your finger on the pulse. Or is that just so much bullshit?”

The look in Mann’s eyes was smarting and dangerous. “Bullshit, nothing. You want to know what I think, the way this was planned, executed, I’d say this was a major player, confident, not afraid.”

“Names?”

“Planer, that’s where my money’d be. Not that he’d risk dirtying his hands himself. No one too close to him, either. He’d bring somebody in from outside. Manchester, London. Whoever it was, they’ll be well home by now, late breakfast, celebration. Champagne. Bastards.”

“And it’s not worth picking him up? Planer?”

“Not unless you want him laughing in your face.”

Siddons scraped back her chair and walked to the window, stared out. “Charlie, you go along with that?”

“Norman’s area, not mine.”

“Listen,” Mann said. “Either Valentine knows who ripped him off, or he’s got a pretty good idea. And he’s not about to sit around and do nothing about it. We might not be able to lay a hand on Planer, but that’s not to say Valentine won’t find a way himself.”

Siddons knotted her hands tight. “That’s the one thing, the one thing I dreaded, the likes of Valentine taking the law into their own hands.”

“Bread-and-butter stuff,” Norman Mann said with a smile. “Slag-on-slag. Long as they stick to shooting themselves, why not keep our heads down, let ’em get on with it?”

“And if another Raymond Cooke gets in the way?” Resnick asked.

“Own up, Charlie,” Mann sneered. “Who the fuck cares about an arsewipe like that?”

Resnick didn’t recognize her at first, sitting close against the wall adjacent to his office door. Save for a few stray wisps, her red hair was hidden beneath a dark beret, the only makeup careful around the eyes. She was wearing a plain, button-through dress and flat shoes. Terry Cooke’s former common-law wife.