Peter James: Love You Dead

She hastily finished packing her bags, transferred the packet of white powder from her clutch to her handbag, then looked at the suitcase, debating what to do with it. She stepped out, looking around cautiously, went a short distance down the corridor and put it in the laundry room, then hurried back and phoned down for a porter.

For the next few minutes she paced around, nervously waiting. When the doorbell pinged a few minutes later, she checked the spyhole before opening the door. She asked the porter to get her a taxi to Newark Airport, gave him a twenty-dollar bill and said she would see him outside.

Again, warily, she went out into the corridor and took the elevator down. She scanned the almost deserted lobby before she stepped out, feeling relieved it wasn’t under siege from the paparazzi. She cancelled the limousine she had booked for the morning, checked out, fearful that Romeo Munteanu would appear at any moment, and hurried out through the revolving door into the bitterly cold Manhattan night.

The porter showed her the suitcases, safely stowed in the trunk of the yellow cab, before slamming the lid.

Moments later she sat back in the cramped rear, as the elderly, turbaned driver headed out across Columbus Circle.

‘Newark?’ he said. ‘Which airline?’

‘Change of plan, I’ll tell you in a minute,’ she said, tapping the Google app on her iPhone, searching for any flights out of here, on any airline, to the UK tonight. Or, alternatively, any flight out of here tonight to anywhere.

Three minutes later, Jodie said to the cab driver, ‘LaGuardia, please.’

A siren wailed.

Shit. Her nerves were jangling.

A police car screamed alongside them, Jodie held her breath. But it carried on past them down Central Park South and bullied its way through the stop lights at the junction with Fifth Avenue.

She pulled her laptop out of her handbag, opened it and inserted the memory stick she’d found in the suitcase. After some moments a new icon appeared on her desktop. She double-clicked to open it and, as she had suspected it might, a password request popped up.

She pulled the stick out and zipped it in an inside pocket in her bag. She knew someone in England who’d be able to discover its contents easily enough.

Then she looked at the bag of white powder. The high partition in front of her, with its television monitor showing the news, silently, and the Perspex shield made it impossible for the driver to be able to see her. She looked around carefully to ensure there was no CCTV camera in the rear, then opened the seal, wetted her finger, dipped it in and put it in her mouth.

Cocaine.

Shame to waste it, she thought. Shame to chuck it, but she’d be mad to keep it. She balled her left hand and put a pinch of powder onto it, cursing as the cab braked sharply, nearly throwing the bag and the laptop out of her grasp. Then she sniffed hard, with each nostril in turn. And felt the instant rush.

It was good!

From past experience of buying cocaine she had some idea how much street value this bag contained. Thousands of pounds’ worth.

Within moments of inhaling the drug, her nerves were steadying and she began to feel great. Really great! Oh yes! Result, lady!

She took another snort, and resealed the bag. She needed to get rid of it, she knew, but she was reluctant. This was good stuff. She was about to replace it in her handbag, to have a final hit at the airport and then bin it, when she had a sudden reality check. How long before Romeo Munteanu woke up? What would he do when he did and found the cash and his cocaine stash missing? It was pretty unlikely that anyone with that amount of cash in a suitcase hidden under a bed was likely to be engaged in something legal. Equally, in his drugged state, he might just be irrational enough to call the police and give them her description.

They had sniffer dogs at airports. Was it worth the risk for a final snort?

Of course, she could repack as soon as she got out of the taxi when they reached the airport, and put the drug at the bottom of her suitcase.

But should she?

She wasn’t thinking straight, she knew.

She had still not decided when she saw, through her window, the first signpost for LaGuardia Airport flash past.

It was barbecue night at the Shark Bite Sports Bar. Which meant that in a while the regulars would be drunk and stuffing their faces with charred chicken, cremated steaks and disintegrating fish and crustaceans.

Tooth, a short, wiry man with a shaven head and an angry face, sat out on the deck area overlooking the creek at the south end of Turtle Cove Marina, accompanied by his associate, Yossarian. He was constantly slapping his exposed legs and arms, which were under assault from mosquitoes. Smoke from the barbecue was getting in his eyes and really pissing him off.

The Caribbean evening air was 36 degrees and the humidity was high. Dressed in khaki shorts, a singlet printed with a picture of Jim Morrison, and flip-flops, he was perspiring. He was smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette and drinking a Maker’s Mark bourbon on the rocks. Yossarian sat beside him, twitching his nostrils at the smell of the meat, and occasionally lapping water from a bowl on the wooden decking.

The dog was an ugly mutt. It had different-coloured eyes, one bright red, the other grey, and looked like the progeny of a Dalmatian that had been shagged by a pug. It had started following Tooth along a street in Beverly Hills a few years back, when he was casing a house for a hit, and had ignored all his attempts to shoo it away. So he had ended up bringing it back to this island with him. He wasn’t sure who had adopted who. And he didn’t care.

It was getting to the end of Happy Hour right now, and the air-conditioned interior of the bar was full of ex-pat Brits, Americans and Canadians who mostly knew each other, and got drunk together in here every Thursday night — and most other nights, too. Tooth never talked to any of them. He didn’t like drunks. He was content to be with his loyal, sober associate.

There was a roar of laughter from inside the bar. It was wild some nights. A few years ago two Haitians who had tried to rob the bar had been shot dead by a customer. It was that kind of a place.

This island that he had called home for the past decade was a paradise for tourists, and one of the assholes of the Caribbean to the US border authorities. Around seventeen miles long and five wide, Providenciales — or Provo, as it was known to the locals — sat midway between Haiti, Jamaica and the southern tip of the Florida Keys.

The British made a pretence of policing it, and had put in a puppet governor, but mostly they left it to the US Coastguard, who had a base there, to deal with — or ride roughshod over — the corrupt and inept local police.

It was why Tooth chose to live here. No one asked questions and no one gave a damn. They left Tooth and his associate alone and he left them alone. He lived in a ground-floor apartment in a complex on the far side of the creek, and his cleaning lady, Mama Missick, looked after the dog when he was away on business.

The mosquitoes were particularly bad tonight. He didn’t do mosquitoes. Hated the critters. He’d long ago decided that if he ever met God — unlikely, as he didn’t believe in Him — the first question he would ask was why He had created mosquitoes.

To piss everyone off?

He was pissed off right now. His right ankle, where he had been bitten a short while ago, was itching like hell. Given the chance, he would nuke every mosquito on the planet. But right now he had another more important issue. Business. Or rather the lack of it.