James Craig - Shoot to Kill

Reaching across the bed, Swann picked up the phone next to the radio alarm and called down to the concierge’s desk.

‘Nick? Hi, it’s . . . yeah, yeah,’ he looked over at the girls and blushed again slightly, ‘they were good, yeah. Look, Nick, can you send one of your boys out to get me some fags? Twenty Marlboro, yeah. Great. I’ll pay ’em when they bring them up. Thanks.’ Ending the call, Swann got up from the bed and disappeared into the bathroom. For several minutes the girls were treated to the sound of the young man’s prolonged bowel movement.

‘Oh my God!’ Sandy whispered, as another satisfied grunt bounced off the bathroom tiles.

Kelly raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Just be grateful he actually uses a toilet. One girl was telling me about a guy who wanted to do a shit on her chest.’

‘No!’ Sandy covered her mouth in shock horror. Way back, in the far recesses of her brain, there was the slightest realization that she should be feeling disgusted, rather than just titillated.

‘Yes,’ said Kelly, shimmying into her knickers, ‘and he wouldn’t even pay for it.’

They heard the sound of the toilet flushing, followed immediately by a knock on the door.

‘Gavin,’ Kelly shouted. ‘Your cigs are here!’

Emerging from the bathroom, Swann took a bathrobe from the closet and pulled it on before opening the door. Accepting the Marlboro from the bellboy, he stepped back into the vestibule, picked up a small, navy-coloured Nike holdall that was sitting on the floor, next to a pair of trainers. Dropping the bag on the table, he unzipped a side pocket and pulled out a fistful of fifty-pound notes. Sandy watched as he counted out four and stepped back to the door.

‘You gave that guy two hundred quid for a packet of cigarettes?’ she asked as he reappeared.

Swann looked at her blankly, as if he was struggling to remember who she was. Ignoring the question, he ripped the cellophane off the packet and stuck a cigarette between his teeth. ‘Got a light?’

Kelly dug into her bag, pulled out a packet of matches and passed them to him.

‘Ta.’ Lighting the smoke, Swann sucked it down greedily. Exhaling, he went over to the mini-bar and removed another bottle of beer. Flicking off the top with a bottle-opener, he chugged down half of the beer before letting out a satisfied burp. ‘Good times.’

Kelly was starting to get pissed off. ‘I need a drink.’

Swann gestured at the mini-bar. ‘Help yourself.’

Stepping past him, Kelly knelt down and looked inside. After a moment, she scowled at Sandy. ‘You drank all the sodding vodka.’

Collecting up her bags, ready to go, Sandy shrugged.

‘Get a drink in the bar downstairs,’ Swann said. Reaching back into the holdall, he counted out another wad of fifties and handed them to Kelly.

‘Ta,’ she said, smiling.

Swann looked from one girl to the other. ‘And remember to keep your mouths shut.’

Kelly placed a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t worry, sweetie,’ she said. ‘We’d never talk to the newspapers, would we, Sandy?’

Wondering just how much a newspaper would pay for her story, Sandy hastily agreed.

‘You’d better fucking not,’ Swann hissed. ‘My missus would kill me.’

You should have thought about that earlier , Sandy thought. She was trying to remember the name of the guy who sold all the kiss-and-tell stories to the tabloids . . . Frank – Frank Something? The name wouldn’t come. No matter, Kelly would know. She probably had the number in her mobile already.

‘Your wife,’ Kelly enquired sweetly, ‘has she had the baby yet?’ Swann looked at the floor. ‘Next month,’ he mumbled. ‘On the ninth.’

‘Is that the due date?’ Sandy asked.

‘Suppose so,’ Swann yawned. ‘That’s when she’s booked in for the C-section.’

‘Oh.’ Feeling woozy, Sandy tried to smile at Swann as she headed towards the door. His robe had fallen open and she noticed that his penis had shrunk to the point where it was almost invisible. ‘Don’t worry,’ she cooed, nodding at Kelly, ‘only total slappers go to the papers. We’re not like that.’

Downstairs, Sandy began to feel better. Sitting in the Light Bar, she looked around, scanning the room carefully for a sign of any celebrities. Disappointed not to see any familiar faces, she sucked a mouthful of her Good Time Girl cocktail – Finlandia mango vodka blended with fresh mango and passion-fruit purées, passion-fruit syrup, and organic vanilla ice cream, served straight up.

‘A bit quiet in here, isn’t it?’ she said.

Kelly glanced towards the bar and shrugged. ‘It’s still early.’ She took a hit of her Cinnamon Mule – cinnamon infused with ten-cane rum, shaken with limes and fresh ginger and topped with ginger beer – and leaned towards her friend, lowering her voice slightly. ‘And we’ve just shagged Gavin Swann.’

You’ve just shagged him , Sandy thought tartly. I just gave him a bit of hand relief and let him stick his fingers up my arsehole . ‘How much did he give you?’

Kelly took another mouthful of her drink. ‘A grand.’

‘Nice.’

Kelly frowned. ‘It won’t even pay off my credit-card bill. And I owe my mum another five hundred for a phone bill she paid for me.’

Sandy wondered what had happened to her share but, knowing that it wasn’t worth the hassle to argue, she kept her mouth shut.

‘I’m sick of being bloody skint,’ Kelly moaned, plonking her glass down on the table so hard that Sandy was worried it might break.

Sandy gestured back towards the hotel lobby. ‘Maybe you could go back up and do him again.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Kelly laughed, ‘it’ll take him hours to be able to get it up again.’

‘He could take something.’

‘I don’t think so. Anyway, he’ll probably be asleep by now.’

Taking another sip of her cocktail, Sandy eyed her friend carefully. ‘Would you ever, like – you know – go to the papers?’

‘Nah. Gavin would go mad. His wife would kill him. You heard him, she’s something like eight-and-a-half months’ pregnant.’

‘She forgave him last time,’ Sandy pointed out. ‘When he was in the papers for shagging the secretary of his Singaporean fan club on a pre-season tour. And the time before that.’

‘I know,’ Kelly said, ‘but this time, with a kid on the way, you’d have thought . . .’

‘But you deserve something, don’t you?’ said Sandy, quickly changing tack.

‘I suppose.’

‘The papers deal with this kind of thing all the time. They would do it tastefully. And they’d pay. There’s that guy who sells all the stories.’

‘Frank Maxwell,’ Kelly said brightly. ‘I met him once. Seemed like a decent guy.’

‘We could give him a call.’

‘Maybe,’ said Kelly thoughtfully, as if the idea had never before crossed her mind. She gestured at a passing waiter, signalling for him to bring them a couple more cocktails. ‘Just to get his input.’

‘Makes sense,’ Sandy smiled, ‘to see what he thinks.’

‘What do you think of Alice’s plan to give up dope?’

Carlyle scratched his chin . ‘You can only hope.’

‘I was thinking I might take her to Liberia.’

For a moment, Carlyle was thrown by the change of subject. ‘What?’

‘I need to go out there in a couple of months and thought it might be good for Alice to come along.’ Helen helped run a medical aid charity called Avalon. Set up by three British doctors back in the 1980s, it now worked in more than twenty countries around the world.

Images of child soldiers with AK47s and machetes flitted through Carlyle’s brain. ‘Is it safe?’