Филип Керр - A Five Year Plan

‘There’s two more boatloads of money to think about. You’ve got a lot more bags to carry upstairs before your ass can sit down in the front lobby.’

‘I know that. I was just askin’ the time. I thought you might be pleased to help me out, you being the proud owner of the Rolls fucking Royce of watches.’

‘Be dawn soon.’

‘Do I look like a fuckin’ vampire? If I want that kind of shit I’ll wait for a cock to crow. Numbers. That’s what I like to hear. Tick fucking tock. On account of my citified ass and urbane fucking ways.’

‘What are you, Stephen Hawking or something? It’s nearly 3 a.m. What difference does it make? I’ll tell you if we’re behind schedule. First thing I do when I get back to Miami, I’m going to buy you a watch, Al. That way you’ll know when it’s time to shut your mouth. Now let’s move before some of these supernumos on their boats start to get curious about what’s happening. I’ve killed enough people for one evening.’

‘That shit still bothering you?’

‘Oddly enough, yes, it is.’

‘Chill out. Like I said before, it was you or them. An accident.’

‘That doesn’t sound like an accident.’

‘Sure it does. An unforeseen contingency. That’s all that happened. You want to find your cloudy ass a silver lining damn quick, pal. I don’t want you goin’ Leonard Cohen on me. Lift your eyes to the good news with which your situation is replete. First, that you are now one rich motherfucker. And second, it could have been them Feds you greased. The real ones. Think how lower than snake-shit you’d be feeling now if it was that Fed bitch you’d terminated instead of the other one.’

At Quantico Kate had learned that the secret of escaping from handcuffs, as perfected by the likes of Houdini, was a simple one. You had the keys.

When keys or picks were not required you needed a spring-loaded cuff and a sharp tap in the right place. But mostly Houdini had a key up his ass or a tiny pick inserted in the thick skin on the soles of his feet. Even with a pick, Kate did not think she could have worked all the levers inside the tiny keyhole. That was the kind of skill for which you needed years of practice. Besides, she was particularly careful of her feet. She kept a piece of lava on the side of her bathtub at home, and regularly visited a chiropodist. Health and fitness were important to her. She did yoga to help her relax and keep her body supple. And periodically she was a vegetarian. Howard had said that it made her too thin, but then his idea of what a woman ought to look like was Anna Nicole Smith. It wasn’t as if Kate was flat-chested or anything. Just feminine. Finely boned. Not some fantasy fuck built by Goodyear. Once Howard had said that finely boned was just another way of saying scrawny. This was not long after she had confronted him with the evidence of his adultery. Why had he needed to have other women? Didn’t he find her attractive? Was there something wrong with the way she looked? It was her own fault for asking. She was slim. Graceful. Willowy. Rangy, even. The only time Kate felt scrawny was when Howard, looking for a quick fuck, tried to squeeze into the shower cabinet alongside her. The hell with him, the fat bastard. Slim and slender was what she was. But not so slim that the cuffs were about to be squeezed off like a tight bangle.

Once, when she was a kid back in T’ville, she had got her head stuck between some railings and her mother had called the fire department. For half an hour her older brother had teased her that they would have to cut through the railings with an oxyacetylene torch, which might also burn through her neck. But in the event, they had simply covered her head with thick industrial soap-liquid and slid her out. And now, sitting on the floor of the head, staring at the waste-pipe under the basin, she thought she might try something similar. In the closet were several bottles of shampoo and shower gel that Kate was able to pick up with her feet and then place in her manacled hands. It wasn’t long before her hands and wrists were covered in a thick oleaginous green treacle of mixed soaps. Kate’s hands weren’t much wider than her wrists; at least not when the metacarpal bones of the thumb and little finger were squeezed together; and Dave had been too ashamed of himself to have made the cuffs uncomfortably tight on her wrists. Behind the surgical tape stretched across her mouth, Kate cursed him and, determined to ignore the pain, began to pull at the glutinous cuffs as if her life depended upon it.

Dave threw the last bag of money onto the deck of the Britannia and returned to the Juarista to fetch the scuba equipment. Back on board the chosen getaway boat, he stripped and climbed into a wet-suit under Al’s grim and increasingly bleary gaze.

Al shook his head and shivering, said, ‘Rather you than me with that Lloyd Bridges shit.’ He looked circumspectly over the side of the boat and then spat into the water. ‘Water don’t look so clean.’

Dave thought of saying something about the bottle of vodka in Al’s hairy paw and a possible reaction with the two Scopoderm plasters he was still wearing on his forearms, but thought better of it. Al’s job was finished. From here on in, more or less everything was down to Dave.

‘What does that shit mean, anyway? Scuba. I never did know.’

‘Means Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus,’ Dave explained. ‘It’s an acronym.’ He hauled what looked like a life-vest made of black rubber over his head: attached to the front of the rubber were some tubes, a mouthpiece and a green cylinder about the size of a household fire extinguisher.

Al frowned. He said, ‘That’s it? That’s your tank? I got a bigger tank than that on my fuckin’ soda siphon.’

Dave nodded. ‘This is a Draeger closed-circuit system,’ he said. ‘A rebreather. It catches the exhaled breath, producing no bubbles. It’s comfortable and very light.’ He passed the straps under his crotch and then around his waist. ‘Pure oxygen, no mixture, makes it ideal for shallow work. And it’s very small, as you can see.’

Al looked over the side once again. He said, ‘How deep is it down there anyway?’

Dave was watching the sky. The sun was coming up now. They were running a little behind schedule but he was glad of that. He hadn’t particularly cared for the idea of making this dive in the water of the Duke’s floating harbor in darkness. He said, ‘Bout twenty feet,’ and tested the supply from the mouthpiece. He hoped twenty feet was right. Oxygen was toxic at anything below thirty-three feet.

‘Well,’ said Al, and took another drink. ‘Rather you than me. That’s all I can say.’

Dave spat into his face mask and rubbed the spittle around the glass. He laughed and said, ‘Al, I’m gonna take a wild guess here. You can’t swim, can you?’

‘Lots of people can’t swim.’

‘Sure. And lots of people drown every year.’

Al grinned back. ‘Not if they don’t ever go swimming. You ask me, it’s mostly people who can swim and who go swimming who get their asses drowned. Let me ask you a question. Which of the two of us is more likely to get himself drowned at this particular moment in time? You or me?’

‘You’ve got a point.’

‘Absolutamente. On account of you’re the dumb motherfucker who knows how to swim and how to use a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Right?’

‘Comforting thought,’ admitted Dave, and collected up his searchlight and his knife.

‘QED,’ shrugged Al.

Dave grinned. ‘QED?’

‘Yeah, that’s another of them acronomes. Means the kind of shit that speaks for itself.’

‘I know what it means,’ said Dave, retiring to the stern of the boat and climbing onto the ladder. ‘I just wondered if you knew what the letters stood for?’