Howard Linskey: The Drop

Finney chucked the keys at one of the bouncers and he moved the car off the double yellows. The other one hastily unclipped the red, velvet rope that was meant to give the place a veneer of class and stepped back out of our way to admit us. We walked passed the lass who took the money, Julie I think her name was, and she smiled at me. I found myself wondering if she would testify if I didn’t make it out of the building alive. Would she fuck.

The thought kept going round and round in my mind; the Drop didn’t happen so, right now, I was about as popular in Newcastle as Dennis Wise. I was already wishing I was on the return flight back to Thailand.

We climbed a steep flight of stairs covered in sticky, lager-encrusted, maroon carpet and I got a brief glimpse of the dancefloor ahead of me with the 80’s style smoke machine billowing till the place looked like it was on fire. The club was slowly filling up with pissed-up, randy young blokes and bored-looking but equally drunk lasses. They were gyrating to Rihanna’s ‘Disturbia’ . For some reason it sounded jarring and ominous, the bass thumping at probably the same rate as my heart, but I knew that was just my overwrought mind fucking with me.

I caught the eye of one girl in particular. I don’t know why she stood out but she looked desolate. She was sitting on her own and had more than likely just realised her friend wasn’t coming back for her, probably getting her tits felt in the taxi rank outside. She’d soon be on her way back to some apprentice sparky’s flat because he’d told her he played for Newcastle reserves. I looked into her doleful, hurt face and wanted to tell her ‘pet, you think you’ve got problems?’

It was two more flights to the inner sanctum and when I got there Bobby was sitting behind his big, solid oak desk, waiting for me. There were a couple of senior members of the firm there with him; Jerry Lemon, as usual in a T-shirt, all bare arms and prison tatts, filled with so much pent up aggression I was always expecting him to have a heart attack. Standing next to him was Mickey Hunter looking uncomfortable in a supposedly smart jacket, a tie strung so loosely round his neck you could see the top button of his shirt. I wanted to march up to the big fellah and pull it taut so he didn’t look like such a scruff. He obviously felt obliged to dress smart in Bobby’s nightclub but it just didn’t suit him. He ended up looking like a manual worker forced by his missus to wear a good suit at his niece’s wedding.

Even our bent accountant Alex Northam was there, in a tweed suit that was far too old for him. He was one of those middle-aged guys who can’t wait to get old so they can tell everybody how far back they go.

I’d known these guys for a long while but they all avoided my gaze now. I wondered if any of them had put in a good word for me or if they couldn’t wait to dance all over my grave. No honour among thieves.

While not quite as violently psychotic as Finney, Bobby Mahoney was still a man to be reckoned with, even in his late fifties. He might have had the grey hair and lined face of a man contemplating retirement, but you could still put him in a room full of twenty-year olds and I’d bet he’d be the only one left standing at the end.

He didn’t look pleased to see me.

‘Alright Bobby?’ I said, knowing that he wasn’t.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ the big booming voice silenced every one else immediately. It was so sharp it made Northam twitch in alarm.

‘Thailand.’ I told him as defiantly as I could manage. Rightly or wrongly, since I’d done nothing wrong I was gambling that my best form of defence was a little bit of defiance, mixed with a healthy dose of bemusement. ‘Why?’

Bobby climbed to his feet and came out from behind his desk. Jerry Lemon and Mickey Hunter parting like the Red Sea so he could get at me. My mouth was dry and I didn’t like the way his enormous fists were balled up. I was preparing myself for a bad beating.

‘What happened to the Drop?’ he asked me outright.

And this is where it got difficult for me, because I wasn’t supposed to know it hadn’t happened but Finney knew that I knew and he was standing there with me, so I had to be convincing. If I started looking shifty because I was denying all knowledge of what had happened to the Drop then Bobby might start to wonder why and draw the wrong, dangerous conclusion.

‘I don’t know, I was away. I’ve been on holiday remember.’ Then I acted like it was just sinking in, ‘what do you mean “what happened to it?”’

‘You were responsible for the Drop!’ the volume rose to a dangerous level. He crossed the floor towards me and the others started looking elsewhere; their shoes, the framed prints of half-naked Pirelli calendar girls on the walls, anywhere but at me, ‘don’t take me for a cunt Davey,’ he hissed at me when he was right up close.

The situation was serious enough for me to immediately stop acting defiant. ‘Yeah, I know Bobby, but I was on holiday so Geordie Cartwright said he’d do it,’ I said this quietly, hoping to calm the big man down, ‘just like he always does when I’m on holiday. He said he’d clear it with you and he’d take Maggot down there with him.’

He walked right up to me and stopped just in front of my face, so he could take a long look at me to see if I was lying. They say Bobby Mahoney can smell a lie. ‘Well he didn’t fucking clear it with me and he didn’t take Maggot with him.’ He was up so close to me I could smell the stale tobacco on his breath.

‘You’ve spoken to Maggot have you?’ I asked.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Finney wryly, ‘we spoke to him alright.’ By his tone I realised they must have put the fear of God into the poor bastard to make sure he was telling the truth. Finney was famous for his powers of persuasion, his trademark weapon of choice being a nail gun. He had a fondness for putting nails through people’s hands, leaving them stuck to their kitchen tables, garage doors and, in one memorable case, the skull of a deceased accomplice.

‘You didn’t ring me,’ I offered, surprised that this was not the first thing he’d thought of. I didn’t have a fancy mobile with an international connection but I wasn’t hard to trace.

‘We phoned the hotel you gave us,’ said Jerry Lemon, ‘they said you weren’t staying there,’

‘That’s bullshit,’ I said, ‘I was there. I’ve been on the same fucking resort for ten days. Laura brought back half the gift shop. Course I was fucking there.’ And then a thought suddenly struck me.

Laura.

Laura made the booking.

Oh Christ.

‘So, what’s happened then?’ I asked, looking to deflect them from the subject of my strange absence from the hotel register. For a second, I thought Bobby was going to belt me and when Bobby Mahoney starts belting people he doesn’t stop. Believe me, I’ve seen it. It takes Finney and all his mates to drag Bobby off once he’s started and by then it’s usually too late.

‘Nothing happened!’ he snarled, ‘the Drop certainly didn’t happen and Cartwright’s disappeared.’

‘Shit!’

‘Yeah, shit’s the word. A whole heap of shit and we are all in it, particularly you. The first I hear about it is when I get a call to tell me the Drop’s late. The Drop’s never late so I know something’s wrong straight away and I look into it sharpish. Turns out nobody can find Cartwright and nobody can find the money. Only thing anyone knows is it didn’t fucking get there. So my question, once again, is where the fuck have you been?’

I am bright enough to realise that he is not talking literally. I know if I even say the words ‘holiday’ or ‘Thailand’ again I am liable to get a beating that would not entirely be undeserved. ‘I’m sorry Bobby, I really am. I fucked up,’ he doesn’t seem to know how to react to that level of honesty. He’s clearly not used to it. ‘I should have made sure the Drop was in safer hands than Cartwright so you had nothing to worry about.’