Dead Man's Grip

attractive. Jobs hadn’t exactly been flooding in just recently. Even without seeing this house, he knew about the wealth of this family. This was a good gig. Better not to blow it.

He picked up another ball, rolled it and hit another strike, all ten pins down.

‘You’re good, aren’t you?’ the man said, a little grudgingly.

Tooth did not respond.

‘You’ve been to a place in England called Brighton? Like in Brighton Beach here in New York, right?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘You did a job for my cousin. You took out an Estonian ship captain in the local port who was doing side deals on cargoes of drugs.’

‘I don’t remember,’ he said, again being deliberately vague.

‘Six years ago. My cousin said you were good. They never found the body.’ Ricky nodded approvingly.

Tooth shrugged.

‘So, here’s the deal. In this envelope are the names and all we have on them. My sister’s prepared to pay one million dollars, half now, half on completion. She wants each of them to suffer, real bad. That’s your specialty, right?’

‘What kind of suffering?’

‘Rumour has it you copied the Iceman’s stunt with the rat. That right?’

‘I don’t copy anyone.’

The Iceman had been paid to make a victim he’d been hired to hit suffer. The client had wanted proof. So he wrapped the man, naked, in duct tape, with just his eyes, lips and genitals exposed. Then he left him in an underground cavern filled with a bunch of rats that had been starved for a week, and a video recorder. Afterwards his client had been able to watch the rats eating him, starting with the exposed areas.

‘Good. She’d appreciate you being creative. We have a deal?’

‘One hundred per cent cash upfront only,’ Tooth said. ‘I don’t negotiate.’

‘You know who you’re fucking dealing with?’

Tooth, who was a good six inches shorter, stared him hard in the eye. ‘Yes. Do you?’ He shook another cigarette out of the pack and stuck it in his mouth. ‘Do you have a light?’

Ricky Giordino stared at him. ‘You got balls, I tell you that.’ He hit the reset button again. ‘How can I be sure you’ll deliver? That you’ll get all three hits?’

Tooth selected another ball from the chute. He lined himself up, ran, then crouched and sent the ball rolling. Yet again all ten pins scattered. He dug his hand in his pocket and pulled out a plastic lighter. Then he held it up provocatively, willing the man to try to stop him.

But Ricky Giordino surprised him by pulling out a gold Dunhill, clicking it open and holding up the flame to his cigarette.

‘I think you and I – we’re pretty close to understanding each other.’

Tooth accepted the light but did not reply. He didn’t do understanding.

40

Self-confident, successful, tender and empathetic man, 46, likes rock & classical music, Belgian chocolate, bushcraft, integrity and loyalty. WLTM intelligent and warm female 40-50 to share so many things.

Bushcraft?

Carly was curled up on the sofa with a glass of red Rioja in one hand and Top Gear about to start on the television. The Sunday supplements were spread all around her. It was her first drink since the accident and she needed it, as she was feeling very depressed.

The page of the Sunday Times she most looked forward to each week, the Encounters dating column, was open in front of her. Searching, as ever, not for Mr Right, but for someone to at least go out with and have fun with.

Bushcraft? What the hell did that mean? She’d learned from long experience that much of the wording in these ads had a subtext. How did this bloke get his rocks off? By walking around naked outside? Going back to nature? Shooting animals with a bow and arrow? The rest of him sounded fine. But bushcraft? No thanks.

Maybe if he had written fossils instead or archaeology, subjects that would appeal to Tyler, she might have given him a whirl. But she had visions of a bearded weirdo clambering out of an elderly Land Rover in a Davy Crockett hat and grass underpants. Nothing would surprise her any more.

It had been a long time since she’d slept with anyone. Over a year now and that last one had been a disaster. And the one before that. All the dates had been bloody disasters, with Preston Dave just the latest in the long line of them.

He’d sent her three more texts this weekend, each of which she’d deleted.

God, five years on and at times she still missed Kes so much. Often clients told her they felt confident with her because she was so tough. But the truth was, she knew today more than ever, that she wasn’t tough at all. That was an act she put on for them. A mask. The Carly Chase at Work mask. If she had really been tough, she’d be able to leave her clients behind at the end of each day. But she couldn’t, not with a lot of them.

Kes used to tell her sometimes that she cared about her clients too much, to the point where it was getting her down. But she couldn’t help that. Good marriages, like theirs had been, gave you a wonderful inner strength and sense of fulfilment in life. Bad marriages, as she encountered every day, in the tears and trembling voices and shakily signed statements of her clients, were a prison.

The Argus had been running stories on the accident every day, except today, when, being a Sunday, fortunately it wasn’t printed. The front-page headline on Thursday had been the $100,000 reward put up by the dead boy’s family for information leading to the van driver’s identity. Her photograph had been on the second page: Brighton Solicitor Arrested At Death Crash.

She’d been in the paper again on Friday, yesterday too. It had made the national press also, with a big splash in the tabloids, as well as being in the Sunday Times today. It was big news that Tony Revere was the grandson of the New York Mafia capo Sal Giordino. She’d even had reporters phoning her at the office, but on the advice of Acott, her colleague and also her solicitor, she had not spoken with them. Although she had badly wanted to – to point out that she had not caused the accident, or even collided with the cyclist.

It seemed that everything that could possibly go wrong, in the house and in her life, was all going wrong at once. A dark gloom swirled inside her. That Monday morning feeling arriving an unwelcome twelve hours early, as it had done for as far back in her life as she could remember, way into early childhood.

Sunday evenings had been worse for her since Kes had died. It had been around this time, five years ago, that two police officers had turned up at her front door. They’d been contacted, via Interpol, by an RCMP officer from Whistler in Canada, asked to inform her that her husband was missing, presumed dead, in an avalanche while heli- skiing. It had been a further four days of anxious waiting, hoping against hope for some miracle, before they had recovered his body.

She often thought of selling the house and moving to a different part of the city. But she wanted to give Tyler some continuity and stability, and several of her friends, and her mother, whom she adored, had advised her in the months immediately following Kes’s death not to make any hasty decisions. So she was still here, five years on.

The house wasn’t particularly attractive from the outside. It was 1960s red brick, with a double garage beneath it, a clumsy extension, plus ugly secondary double-glazing put in by the previous owners which Carly and Kes had been planning to change. But they had both particularly loved the huge living room, with its patio doors opening on to the large, pretty sloping garden. There were two small ponds, a rockery and a summer house at the top which Kes and Tyler had made into a male domain. Tyler liked to play his drums there, while Kes liked to sit and do his thinking and smoke his cigars.