Inside Straight (19 page)

I watched him in silence. I should've guessed. Of course it was all about him.

He swallowed and sniffed. "Well? What do you think?"

"I think if you dwell on something like that, it'll make you mental." I smiled. "Okay?"

He moved his lips a bit before he spoke again. "Okay."

"Great. Have a good night."

I left the toilets, headed down the corridor towards the gaming floor. Honestly, these homosexuals were all about being the centre of attention. Couldn't get over the fact that his piddly little queer-bash had been upstaged by an armed robbery. It was sad, really.

I pushed out into the club.

Dave was over by the cash desk, leaning against the counter and chatting away to a cashier from the Union. She was blonde, pretty in a vacant kind of way and, I believe, yet to feature on Dave's hit list, which was probably why she was here. With both Douglas and Sandra down, he would've been in a position to ask for staff, and who else was he going to ask for but fresh meat? He turned from his conversation as I walked out onto the floor and frowned at me. "You're not on the night shift."

"I'm on the rota."

"Not anymore. I've got Jeff coming in to cover."

"Well, he doesn't need to, does he?"

"No, he's coming in."

I frowned right back at him, but did it in a comic way. "Well then we'll be overstaffed for once, won't we?"

He walked alongside me as I went into the pit. "I'm not sure you should be back at work. I think you should go home."

"And I think you should back off, Dave. I think you should let someone who knows how to run a pit do their job for once."

"I've got Kevin Nash—"

"In tears in the toilets. He's not doing a double, Dave." I looked at the pit sheet. "He's barely managed to scrape through a day. Look, why don't you toddle off back to your fish cashier and continue your futile efforts to gain entry to her underwear? Because you're just wasting my time here."

He didn't say anything, but his eyebrows had knotted and his mouth hung open. I felt like sticking my pen in there and dotting his tongue. The thought made me laugh, which probably made Dave think I was laughing at him, which I kind of was, and then I shook my head and returned to the pit desk. I noticed the dealers watching the pair of us. Obviously I'd been louder than I intended. I had no doubt that the cashier had heard every word. And that made me smile again.

"Graham, I'm going to accept that you've had a knock on the head and that you're perhaps not feeling very well—"

I spoke to the pit monitor. "I've heard that before. You send me home and the next thing I know, I'm transferred somewhere else."

"I wouldn't do that."

"You
did
do that."

"Seriously, Graham." He drew closer, his aftershave dancing around my tear ducts as he put a hand on my arm.

The skin flared at his touch. I flinched. "Get off me."

"I just think you should—"

I turned, dropped my voice. "I mean it."

Dave removed his hand, stepped back. "Okay. Have it your way, Graham."

"Thank you." I smiled at him. I felt good. I felt released. "You can't keep a good man down, Dave. You should know that by now."

The atmosphere at the Riverside was muted for the rest of the week, and as the robbery rumours spread through the rest of the staff, I felt myself under constant scrutiny.

I was an anomaly. I wasn't supposed to be in. Everyone else on shift that night had taken at least a couple of days off, citing stress or exhaustion. I didn't blame some of them – they were trainees, they'd never been through so much as a kick-off on a table before. That much condensed aggression probably had them questioning their career choice. The others were, as Clive used to say, "having a warm one". I was the only one who kept clocking in, the only one who showed no signs of trauma beyond the stitches in my head. I kept to myself as always – it would be a shame to contradict the consensus opinion of me, after all – did my job and didn't engage on anything other than a professional basis. But now that the story about me standing up for Jacqui had been through the club staff, they regarded me in a different light. Where I'd once been reserved and stuffy, now I was strong and silent, Jason Statham in a Burtons suit. In the absence of any proof to the contrary, I was the hero of the club, which made for a much better working environment. The only member of staff who didn't show admiration was Dave Randall, and I didn't care what he thought about anything.

Meanwhile, I waited for Pollard's call. As far as I knew, his team had gotten away with the money and everything was tickety-boo. I followed the gossip in the club and the news outside, but there appeared to be few if any leads, and if the police had nailed Pollard for the robbery, then they were keeping quiet about it. I found myself checking the burn phone two or three times a shift just in case, and watching the crowd of punters for any sign of Jez or someone who looked like they might have been one of Pollard's lads. It was distracting, and it wasn't long before Dave noticed.

"You functioning correctly there, Graham?" He grinned at me over the side of the pit desk. He'd taken to being extra friendly with me. It made me reach for the calamine.

I looked up from the burn phone. "Excuse me?"

He nodded at the phone. "New, is it?"

"Old. Other one's playing up. This one has buttons."

"I don't hold with the touchscreens. They look good, but they're a bugger if something goes wrong." Dave pulled out his iPhone and stuck out his bottom lip. "Curse of the early adopter, eh?"

"Can I help you with something, Dave?"

"No. I'm just checking to see how you are."

"I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"Yes. When's Jacqui coming back?"

"I don't know." He shrugged, poked at his phone. "Whenever she's ready, I suppose."

"Have you spoken to her?"

"Yeah, I talked to her a couple of days ago."

"How's she doing?"

He frowned at his phone. "Fine, I think."

"How's the leg?"

"I don't know." Another shrug, this time with a certain degree of irritation. He was checking his email. "I don't think it's the leg that's keeping her off."

"Well, it was a traumatic experience."

Dave stopped playing with his phone and looked at me. "You know she's been there before, right?"

I nodded. "She said something about Odessa."

"You know what it's like over there?"

"I've heard stories."

"It's all run by the Ukrainian mob. The whole shebang. Every club in the Ukraine, they all pay their dues to the mob. Course, it makes them a target, too. Crazy stuff."

"Like I said, I've heard stories."

"You like her?"

There was a smile on Dave's face that I wasn't particularly keen to see twice, so looked at the pit sheet. "She's a good manager. Nice person too, from what I could tell."

"Alright, don't overdo it." He opened his eyes wide in mock horror. "Sounds like you
fancy
her."

"Don't be so puerile." I didn't need to see myself to know that I was blushing. I could feel the heat in my cheeks. And when I heard Dave Randall chuckle deep in his throat and push away from the pit desk, I felt the churning in my gut.

I looked up and saw him heading for the rope. The man was a pig about women at the best of times, but it had never burned me up before. Dave liked to have an inventory of discomfort for each employee, and he'd just added Jacqui to mine.

I turned from the desk, checked the sheets, and did a round of clickers. We were up on a Wednesday night with three hours to go, but there was no pride in it. Now that Dave was acting as temporary GM, I was expected to pull in winners as a matter of course. I missed Jacqui's surprise and admiration, no matter how mild it might have been.

What the hell, I might as well admit it, I missed Jacqui herself. I might have been uncomfortable around her, but she was a far more pleasant presence than Dave Randall. If she'd been seriously traumatised by the robbery, then there was a chance that she wouldn't be back at all. It wasn't something I liked to think about, but it was a possibility that made me all the more adamant to leave. Without her, and with the prospect of Dave coming on full-time, there was nothing left for me in Manchester.

Of course, leaving in two weeks' time meant I'd have to get my twenty percent from Pollard sharpish. There was no way I was leaving without it, because the longer it got, the less likely I was to see it. Pollard wasn't a stupid man. If anything, he seemed like someone who planned ahead and used his brain and if he hadn't been in contact, well, there was probably a reason. I just hoped the reason didn't involve him doing me out of what was rightfully mine.

Money did strange things to people. It made them greedy, ignorant and aggressive. I'd seen it on the tables night after night, punters putting down bets like they were body parts with dealers who didn't seem to understand that the money they were paying out wasn't theirs. Pollard was a bigger man than that. He'd participated in robberies before. He didn't make a habit of letting irrational greed cloud his mind, or else he'd have been grassed up or killed already. So it stood to reason that he hadn't called because he was waiting for the dust to settle and the investigation to stall. He was waiting for something else to grab the Met's attention. Then and only then could he go about splitting the take.

An admirable, sensible decision, but one that didn't jibe with my plans or my paranoia. So I used the burn phone. I left messages for Pollard, three of them over the course of two days. And while I waited for a call back, I went to work as usual. I ran the pits every night, I ignored Dave Randall's further attempts to make me blush, and I made a point of booking that week of the fifteenth off. I also went to see my doctor and we went through the medical form. It took less than twenty minutes. When he asked how my skin was, I told him everything was perfect. I didn't want him to refuse to sign the form because of something as irrelevant as my ill health.

On the face of it, I was as composed as usual. At home, I went on the computer and scoured my regular forums for fish to fry. When someone posted something devoid of intellect, I took time to compose and fact-check my devastating response, which would then sit there on my screen like a full stop, killing the discussion stone dead. I was acting out, I knew it. I was picking fights. I was looking for someone to hurt, even if it was just a glancing blow to their pride. And I was doing all this because I couldn't sit still and wait for Pollard to keep my money.

He knew I was planning to leave. That was a problem. Maybe all he thought he had to do was wait me out.

Because after all, what was I going to do, sue him? Get violent? He'd snap me like a Kit Kat.

I finished off one final post about the last episode of
Lost
and how it wasn't confusing and how of
course
they weren't dead the whole time – they weren't really even in purgatory until season six, for crying out loud. It was obvious, and only an idiot would argue otherwise. I hit send with a flourish, then grabbed the burn phone from the table, called the contact number and waited until it clicked inevitably to voicemail.

"Mr Pollard, it's Graham Ellis." I cleared my throat and tried to lower my voice. "This is the last time I'm going to call this number, and the last time I'm going to use this phone. If I don't hear from you by closing time tomorrow night – that's five in the morning – then I'll assume our previous agreement has been superseded by one of your own invention. If that's the case, then first call I'll make on Friday morning will be to Detective Inspector Kennedy. Speak to you soon."

I killed the call, slapped the phone onto the table and breathed out, a low, insistent ache spreading across my chest and a bug-leg itch starting in the palm of my right hand.

The Costa wasn't exactly full, but there were still enough people making enough noise to grate on my nerves.

A man in the corner made obnoxious barking sounds that could have been words into his mobile. In front of him were the largest cup of coffee they did and the crumbled remains of a chocolate muffin. The man's eyes were unnaturally wide, his short-fingered hands in perpetual motion and he was shouting about someone named Dan, who was apparently a friend, but whose nickname was the C-word, apparently now being used as a term of endearment. I looked around, saw the usual single mothers and their children and wondered if anyone was going to say anything. They didn't. In fact, most of the people in here seemed to be deliberately ignoring him. If he didn't exist for the mothers, then perhaps he didn't exist for the children, who were too busy making a mess of their own to pay the swine any attention. I would have said something, but I didn't want to draw attention. I didn't want people remembering me, just in case they remembered the man I was supposed to be meeting here, too.

Jez had called the night before, left a message to meet here. I hadn't heard anything since, but I took it on trust that Pollard would be coming. I sat by the window, watching the road. If his Mercedes pulled up, I'd move us to the back of the place, but I knew if I started out there I'd go nuts wondering if he was just outside.