'Pope wants you dead, and he's hired me through a mutual acquaintance to make sure you get that way.' He started to shift in his seat and I had a feeling that he might try and go for me, so I kept talking, still staring at the road ahead. 'Now listen, I've got no intention of hurting you. Like I told you before, I'm out of that game now, and if we play this right, you can walk away in one piece and completely off the hook, and I can still get my money.'
'How are you going to manage that?' he demanded, his eyes boring into the side of my face.
'Because Pope doesn't just want you dead, he wants you to disappear off the face of the earth as well, which means we've got scope for faking your demise.'
'He's going to want evidence that you've done the job, though.'
'Of course he is. He's a criminal, so he's not going to trust me, but there's an easy way round that. He wants photographic evidence that you've been killed. If you look in the glove compartment, you'll see a Coke bottle filled with fresh rooster blood, which looks exactly like its human equivalent.'
'Lovely.'
'It pays to make the effort, Billy, as well you know. There's also a small jar of black paint that we'll use to mark the entry wounds of the bullets. All you have to do is lie on the ground, act dead while I pour the contents of these two bottles over your abdomen and do a bit of a paint job so it looks realistic, and then I'll stand back and take a couple of snapshots. They'll get sent back to Pope, he'll be happy with a job well done, I'll get paid, and that'll be that. You head down south and live quietly and anonymously, because with the British police and presumably Interpol after your blood for two murders, it's in your interests to lie as low as possible, and I'll never mention your name again.'
'How do I know you ain't gonna kill me anyway?'
I slowed down as a jeepney in front of me stopped to pick up passengers by the side of the road. 'If you're a shooter then you should know better than anybody that your best weapon is the art of surprise. I've just told you exactly what I've been hired to do. Now why would I bother saying anything if I still intended to kill you?'
He thought about that one for a few seconds, then opened the glove compartment. Seeing the blood-filled Coke bottle and the paint, he shut it again and lit another cigarette. At the same time, I overtook the stationary jeepney. 'That bastard,' he said, taking a drag. 'I knew I should never have trusted him. And the ten grand in the boot?'
'Behave. It doesn't exist. Be thankful that you've still got your life. So, are you in agreement with my plan? It's a lot better thought out than the one you used for your little job.'
'You want me to lie in the dirt and have chicken blood splashed all over me while you do a David Bailey?'
'That's about the size of it.'
'It doesn't seem like I've got much choice, does it?'
'No,' I said. 'I don't think it does.'
He emitted a loud sound of consent that sounded like someone impersonating a fart.
'I'll take that as a yes, shall I?'
'All right,' he grunted. 'Let's do it.'
4
A mile short of the resort of White Beach, there's a left turning that leads up to the Ponderosa, Mindoro's only golf course, a truly terrible collection of nine holes built high up on the side of a steep, forested mountain, where the wind whipping across the greens makes hitting a decent shot next to impossible, but where plenty of the expats try on the basis that there's nowhere else for them. I've never liked golf so I've not given it a go myself, although they do have some spectacular views over Puerta Galera and the islands beyond. Some say that on a clear day you can even see Manila eighty miles to the north, although I never have and wouldn't particularly want to either.
The road starts smoothly enough, which is useful as it's so steep, but quickly degenerates into a dusty, potholed and winding track, like so many of northern Mindoro's roads. The money's been made available more than once to pay for resurfacing them, but it always seems to disappear into someone's pocket before a square foot of tarmac's been put down.
On the way up, while Slippery was complaining about the road's state after banging his head on the roof for the second or third time, I asked him how he knew Pope.
He responded by asking how I knew him, which I recalled as another irritating habit of his from old. Answering a question with a question.
'I don't,' I said. 'A friend of mine here does.'
'He's a solicitor — a bent one. I was up on some charges and he represented me.'
'And got you off, no doubt.'
He nodded evenly. 'He did, yeah, and we kept in contact after that.'
I thought about this for a moment. I hadn't figured Pope as a solicitor. I had him down more as some sort of gangland Mr Big, since he obviously had such influential friends. It surprised me that they might include someone from within the team investigating the two murders that Slippery had committed. Defence lawyers and coppers rarely mix well, not when you consider that the former are always trying to fuck things up for the latter, and making far more money in the process.
'And when Pope, your brief, asked you to commit murder for him, you weren't a bit shocked?' I asked.
'No,' he said simply, reaching into his shirt pocket for the cigarettes. 'I wasn't.'
'Don't light up now,' I told him. 'We're almost there. You can have a celebratory smoke afterwards. To usher in your new life.'
He grunted irritably, but put the pack back in his pocket. 'Don't try anything, Dennis. And I mean that. I'm no fucking pushover.'
'I have no doubt about it, Billy. You were always the hardest, and dare I say it, the slipperiest target I ever chased. I'm not going to try anything.'
I slowed down as the road flattened out just before it came to a blind bend, still a good mile from the golf club. There was a slight grassy incline on the right where I could pull up without blocking anyone else coming either way, not that there was much chance of that. On the way up we hadn't run into anybody and the Ponderosa's not the busiest of places, especially on a weekday.
I managed to get right up onto the verge and cut the engine. 'We'll do it down there,' I said, pointing to a path that led into bushes.
'Why there?'
'Because it needs to be a place where no one's going to disturb us, so they don't wonder what on earth we're doing. Believe it or not, there's hardly any places on this island where you can go without running into someone.'
'I'm watching you,' he said, all semblance of his earlier good humour now gone.
'You're getting paranoid,' I told him and slowly took the snub-nosed.38 revolver from the waistband of my jeans, showing it to him as I did so. I then placed it in the side pocket of the driver's door so that it was out of sight. 'See? I'm now unarmed.' I gave myself a quick pat down and leaned forward in my seat so he could see I wasn't bullshitting.
His expression relaxed a little. 'All right, all right. Let's get this over with, then.'
'Bring the bottles with you, can you?'
He retrieved them from the glove compartment while I pulled a small digital camera out of the storage space between the two front seats, and then we both got out of the car. I clicked on the central locking and waited for him to join me. There was a gentle breeze in the air and it was cooler now that we were over a thousand feet above sea level. The only sound was the incessant chatter of the cicadas in the undergrowth.
We started walking down the path in single file, with me leading. The route ahead opened up into grassland and a hundred yards to our left a huge ravine appeared, beyond which another forest-covered mountain rose up. In the distance, beyond the mountain, I could see the sea and the red-and-white telephone mast that stood on the hill overlooking White Beach — the only sign of man visible in the whole spectacular vista. Take that away and we might as well have been standing there a thousand years ago.
