Howard Linskey - The Drop

I was going to argue the toss but I felt indescribably weary. Watching Laura virtually foaming at the mouth as she continued to bollock Sarah, I suddenly got a vivid insight into my future; a sexless, mundane place, punctuated by meaningless rows over nothing on the way back from Ikea. I knew deep down that, if we still had something worth saving, I could have turned things around. I could have forced her to listen, told her I loved her, made her see that Sarah and I were little more than longstanding, platonic friends. I could have got her to believe me. I was sure of it. I just didn’t want to. In fact, all of a sudden, I didn’t give a shit.

Sarah was fighting her corner. ‘I only stayed to make sure he didn’t have a concussion. That’s meant to be your job, but you didn’t care!’

‘Don’t give me that, you little slag. Do you think I don’t know what’s been going on? That I haven’t seen the way you look at him, like you want to have his bloody babies!’

Sarah’s face reddened. She looked like she was just about to explode and knock Laura out. It was time to intervene.

‘Laura,’ I said it very calmly and very quietly and because of that they both turned to listen to me, ‘I realise you are upset but what you think has happened hasn’t happened, though that’s not even what’s important right now.’

‘What?’ she asked me incredulously, ‘what do you mean it’s not important?’

‘No,’ I assured her, ‘the important thing is this; if you keep calling my good friend Sarah here a slag, very soon she is going to get really tired of it. She is going to walk over there and grab you by the hair then she is going to bitch-slap you all round my apartment and throw you out.’ For the second time that morning Laura’s mouth gaped open. She looked at me, then she looked at Sarah who nodded at her slowly for emphasis, but I wasn’t finished. ‘More to the point, I’m going to do sod-all to stop her. Have you got that?’

Laura broke down then. Her body seemed to crumple, her face sagged and the tears flowed freely. I was surprised by the fact that I didn’t care about her tears any more. There had been a time when I would have done anything to stop her from crying. Now I think I had become immune to them. I just wanted her to shut up and go away.

‘You can come back tonight for your things, I won’t be in,’ I told her as she turned away from me, ‘make sure you take your candles, your throws and all of your bloody cushions with you.’ Then I added for good measure, ‘now fuck off out of my flat.’

When she finally stopped sobbing long enough to say something, she turned back to me and wailed, ‘don’t you love me any more?’

‘Love you?’ I asked her as if she was completely mad, ‘I don’t even like you!’

Laura went without another word.

Sharp brought a bloke down to my flat to make an identikit drawing, so I didn’t have to go into the station. He told the artist it was for my protection.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I gave him some bullshit about you being an innocent caught up in a gangland feud.’

‘I am,’ I said, which made him laugh out loud though that wasn’t my intention.

The artist quizzed me about every aspect of my attacker’s features, as his hand skimmed over his pad. With a last confident stroke of his pencil, he finished and turned it round to show me the result. There, looking right back at me, was an unmistakeable likeness of Weasel-face. I noted with satisfaction that if you knew him you would have recognised him, except now that same face would be sporting stitches where the broken shard of urn had sliced deep into his skin.

After the identikit guy had gone, I asked Sharp, ‘what next?’

‘Officially, I’ll be circulating his image round all the nicks in the area. On the assumption he’s an outsider, I’ll be concentrating on other forces. I can’t see a local villain wanting to rob one of Bobby Mahoney’s men,’ he shrugged, ‘might as well dig his own grave.’

‘And unofficially?’

‘I’ll get a copy of the sketch and send it round that other little world we are familiar with, till one of our grasses comes up with a name to match the face. If he’s out there, if he’s known, we’ll get him eventually.’

Sharp had the right idea. If we found anything it would more than likely be through a grass. There’s a lot of shite spoken about the criminal code. People bang on about it as if the last thing any villain would ever do is grass up another crook to the police. What a load of crap that is. The city is full of informants, from the lowest dealer on the street right up to the very top. At street level, a dealer might keep himself out of nick if he informs regularly to a local DI or DS. Some of them just do it to eliminate the competition and the police are cool with that, as long as they get the arrests.

We are no different. When some cocky young fucker starts dealing blow or selling guns, sets up a brothel or starts a crew that does robberies, we get to hear about it sooner rather than later. Then we pay them a visit. If I do it, I make sure Finney is there to back me up. The message then goes out to them like a biblical prophecy. And Lo’ the Lord said ‘all the world shall be taxed’. The only difference being that their local lord is Bobby Mahoney and the tax in question is a percentage of their estimated earnings. If they are sensible, they pay. If they are not they get another visit from Finney. This time he is on his own or he might bring some of the other lads down with him. They always pay after the second visit, if he has left them in a fit state to do it, that is. We tax our local villains and no one should feel too sorry for them. Everyone else in the country has to pay tax and it’s not as if they are declaring their income to the Inland Revenue.

Sometimes we take another tack though. From time to time, if it suits us, we will shop their whole operation to the Northumbria Police, removing our competitors at a stroke and gaining us some much-needed goodwill in the process. How do you think a corrupt cop like Sharp becomes a DS in the first place? By busting-up crews we tipped him off about.

So don’t talk to me about a code. There isn’t one.

It took a few days for the bruises to heal and I was wary of everybody for a while, strangers coming towards me, people walking too close behind me. For a day or two, I had Palmer watch my back from a distance but there was nothing, so I told him to stand down. I had more important things for him to be doing.

Bobby seemed to find the whole thing faintly amusing. While he took it seriously on one level – someone had the cheek to burgle my flat to try and find some dirt on us – he was pleased I had seen off my assailant and done him some damage. I was right, it did seem like he was more trusting of me after that. After all, I was hardly likely to arrange a serious beating to deflect suspicion, was I?

Finney surveyed my bruises as they changed colour, eventually settling into a sickly, jaundiced yellow and said, ‘you got a comprehensive tuning there.’

‘You should have seen the other guy,’ I said.

‘I saw the blood,’ he admitted, ‘turns out you were harder than I thought.’ Since he’d always assumed I was soft as shit, this was a pretty back-handed compliment.

I’d been trying to steer clear of Sarah for a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I had no regrets about Laura, none at all. I was just annoyed it had taken me so long to realise how barking mad she was.

Sarah texted me a few times, checking I was okay, which was nice and for the next few days I got some light-hearted messages about what she was doing, how bored she was, how daft her mates were, that sort of thing. I always replied eventually but I made out like I was well busy, which I was. Trouble was, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. To tell the truth, I was beginning to crave her.