Maxie’s Demon (7 page)

It had got me known as the Prof, for a while; but that suggests some respect. It’s the truest
nickname that sticks, and for about five years now I’d been Waxie Maxie, aka the Fifth Wheel.

‘Something happened,’ he said slowly. ‘Too strong a signal from the radio station, maybe?’

‘I wouldn’t think so. Enough radio energy to do that – God, I don’t even think a national transmitter’d be enough. And it would have fried the thing, not exploded it. Fried everything in its path, I’d have thought.
Something explosive in the phone. The battery, now – there are some weird chemical mixes in those nowadays. Maybe one of those might react wrongly and explode.’

‘But
it wouldn’t hurt the phone at your end – wait a moment, how come you’re not burned?’

‘Maybe because it was a payphone, and I was just holding the handset. It was the body of the phone that got hot. It didn’t explode.’

He shook
his head, then winced as his burn-tightened skin cracked a little. ‘Beyond me. I suppose I will go and kick ass at the phone company. This phone box of yours, I’ll have a look at that too. As for you.’ He considered. ‘You still want your money?’

Dangerously put. ‘Well, I did get the car – it wasn’t my fault—’

‘Huh! But you have had your uses, true. Maybe I give you a second chance. You know
Parker Street corner, along from the showroom? Be there tonight, ten sharp; don’t go near the showroom. Dark clothes. Look for a blue Ford van.’

‘Er – OK – registration?’

He shrugged. ‘Haven’t made up the plates yet. Fee is one hundred pounds, flat.’

Not much, but a lot more than I had now. ‘OK, but what …’

He snorted. ‘You think I’m putting announcements in the papers? Ten sharp. Be there
or I’ll be looking for you. Seriously.’

I swallowed. ‘Sure, sure. Ten sharp.’

I watched him
lounge out. His minders, who’d been gassing to Chaddy, glanced at me with mild surprise, and as they fell in behind him I saw to my horror that one of them was holding something that looked a lot like a petrol can. No doubt about it, Ahwaz was playing rougher.

‘Hey, Mr Lucky!’ yelled Chaddy. ‘Go make
me a coffee, will yer? Three heaped sugars, an’ don’t go spillin’ it all over the bleedin’ place!’

I closed my eyes an instant. Take a lesson – never demand coffee from someone you’ve just dropped in the shit. Sugar is good at concealing tastes, so my revenge really was going to be sweet.

I was a bit dubious about taking up Ahwaz on his evening jaunt, but not too seriously. If he’d really wanted
to do me an injury he could have, without all the palaver. I wouldn’t be in any more danger on a street corner at ten than I was here. So I got through the rest of the day with as light a heart as you can manage in that sort of place. Towards the evening I was even able to tickle the peepshow takings enough – Chaddy being suddenly seized with a violent stomach upset, and going home in a cab –
to take Trace, one of the late-shift girls, for fish and chips, and pick up some suitable clothes.

So at ten of a cloudy night there I was on the corner, well fed, comfortable in a leather motorcycle jacket and intact jeans, and with a couple of pints and a whisky chaser under my belt to keep the wind out. Very comfortable, but I began to regret the pints. No sign of a van, so I nipped around
the corner and took advantage of the side of an anonymous parked truck. Until, that is, the door flew open and Ahwaz stuck his head out, and I narrowly missed my right shoe.

‘You! What the hell do you think you are doing?’ he hissed.

‘What’s it look like! You said a blue Ford …’

‘That is our transport!’ he snapped. ‘Get back out there and watch!’

Fortunately just
then the van rolled to a stop,
and Ahwaz and one of his minders spilled out of the truck. The other one leaned over and threw the van doors back, and I was bundled in before I could finish zipping up. I made for the front seat; I usually do the driving on this sort of thing. But the gorilla at the wheel didn’t make way, and I ended up sandwiched between him and Ahwaz. Around about this point in the movies somebody slips a
cheesewire round your collar from behind, but I still felt reasonably safe, the more so as Ahwaz was busily directing the driver, who was in a rebellious mood. I was even brave enough to ask where we were going.

‘The seaside,’ grunted the ape in the back. ‘Bring yer bucket ’n’ spade?’

I didn’t quite like the sound of that. ‘And … uh, what’s the deal? What’ve I got to do?’

Ahwaz shrugged. ‘Some
lifting – real lifting, I mean, not stealing. And keeping your mouth shut and not messing about. Otherwise it will not just be me you are dealing with, but Stifaoin O’Faolain.’

My heart went down through the floor pan and bounced along the road behind. ‘What, Stevie Fallon? Christ, you’re not getting mixed up with that bugger, are you? He’s bad news, he’s bloody mad. Used to run dope for the
IRA—’

‘I know. Shut up.’

‘Horse, even – I mean, he’s really evil—’

‘Shut it, I said. We are picking up a shipment from him, you help load it into this van and transfer it back here, and you do not need to know any more about it. Sit down and enjoy the ride.’

I’d been
sussing any chance of jumping out, at a roundabout even, but I was too firmly wedged. It was an unpleasant situation, like Nagasaki.
I sat back miserably, caught between the gorilla’s armpits and Ahwaz’s aftershave – distilled from genuine polecats – and watched the scenery. This sounded like the hard stuff, or at least a big run of hash, and I didn’t like that one bit. I hadn’t much use for hash since the cancer scare, beyond an occasional puff when it was going around. And I wanted nothing at all to do with the hard
stuff, not as pusher, certainly not as user, not even as middleman. Ahwaz had a nice line in cars already; he needed his head examined going for more, especially this way.

Something occurred to me; from the look of things his goons thought so too. There were tensions flying about in here, none of the usual oafish backchat, and Ahwaz was visibly fretting and peering at his watch and map all the
time. Well, anyone dealing with bastards like Fallon is likely to do that; nobody wants to get deeper into their clutches than they have to. Then a cold light dawned. That would be why they’d brought me along. I was expendable. Fallon could saw my head off and they’d just stand there giggling. Nice thought.

And that
was how it turned out. We weren’t really going to the seaside proper, just along
the Thames Estuary, the kind of little bay smugglers had probably been passing through for hundreds of years, though Ahwaz only grunted when I said that. Moonlight filtered patchily through thin bits of cloud, and the river was a sullen black mirror. You could only see things as highlights against it, and thorn bushes and nettle patches don’t have any.

Somewhere out there was a boat, though I
never saw it, and coming ashore, barely visible in the gloom, was a very big inflatable, lifeboat style, with a very quiet outboard. It seemed to be riding extremely slowly, and as it drew in to the bleak and miserable patch of marshy shore I was currently sinking into, I realised why. It was towing something, something big and below water that dragged, and could be conveniently cut loose. And sure
enough, as it reached the shallows the top of a heavy black plastic sack broke surface like the Loch Ness Monster, bulking high. Not quite high enough, though; you wouldn’t go to this much trouble for mere pot. This had to be higher-profit stuff, and that meant nasty. More crystal than a chandelier, probably.

‘Right,’ muttered Ahwaz, ‘you get down there and greet him. Be nice to the man, give
him what he eats, but keep your eyes open. Help him get his stuff in. We’ll be right back here.’

I swallowed. I knew what Ahwaz had in mind. Go down to the shore all open and above board, and a couple of squirts from a machine-pistol would let Stevie keep his crack and beat it, as you might say. And if you think that’s paranoid, it’s because you do not deal with the likes of Stevie.

Certainly
nobody seemed in any hurry to hop ashore. ‘Isn’t trust a wonderful bloody thing?’ I said to the darkness, and mooched down to the muddy edge, and waved my arms. There was a moment’s silence, and then the boat nudged the bank and Fallon himself jumped ashore. I knew him by sight, a lanky thug with a face like a mangy wolf and a grin without a bare ounce of Irish humour. He was looking a bit bulkier,
ten to one because there was a flak jacket under his windcheater. Maybe he had some ideas about Ahwaz, too.

‘I’ve seen you about,’ he said without enthusiasm. ‘Where’s the wog?’

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. ‘Back there. With company. I’m supposed to help you unload.’

‘OK,’ he muttered, gesturing to the other figures in the boat. ‘Faster the better. The filth have got the area lousy with
radar. You come help drag this lot in.’

A line was passed to him out of the boat, and I glimpsed something that was almost certainly an Armalite barrel. Shuddering, I hauled in the sack. Fallon left me to it, adding a laconic hand only to heave the formidable weight on to the bank, a rustling, multilayered bulk swathed in duct tape. I could feel tight lumps shifting.

‘Open it!’ came Ahwaz’s
voice. ‘Carefully! And check what’s inside!’

Fallon flicked
a knife open. It slashed through the tape in a scalpel stroke, though I had the feeling that wasn’t what he kept it for. Inside was exactly what I expected, plastic-wrapped parcels of white crystal, twenty-five of them, each about as heavy as a sugar bag. ‘Check it!’ said Ahwaz.

‘You bloody check it!’

‘D’you want your money or not?’

‘I wouldn’t know horse from horseshit! I don’t do this sort of stuff!’

Fallon sucked in his breath impatiently. ‘Sod this! I’m not hanging around for the filth to zero in on!’ He caught me by the scruff of the neck and dug the knife under my chin. ‘You check it or he can, but if I haven’t got my dosh in five minutes flat, it’s you floating face down out there – got it?’

‘All right,’ said Ahwaz.
‘Choose a bag, bring me it. From the bottom of the pile.’ But when I tried to hand him the plastic sack, he shook his hands away sharply. ‘You hold it!’ He unclasped a pearl-handled knife and stabbed it gently, then touched the tip of the blade to his mouth. He tasted, spat and nodded. ‘That’s it.’ The driver produced a briefcase and opened it. ‘Give the man this. Bring back the envelope. Then
get the others loaded up.’

I reached in for the fat envelope, puzzled. It wasn’t just for a middleman Ahwaz wanted me; he would have been safe enough with his goons. And he seemed desperate not to touch anything—

I stopped dead. He wanted me to. I didn’t have gloves on. He’d got a bag of heroin back there with my fingerprints on it, and nobody else’s. He’d have a few more in this heap. And he’d
have me. With that kind of evidence he’d have me by the short and curlies; he could shop me to the cops with a plausible story, do me and get in good with them at the same time. I had a record, not a bad one, but with that kind of form who’d believe me? Chances were I’d go down till I was tripping over my beard. He could turn me in tomorrow, or keep me slaving away for him till doomsday because
it would still be a shade better than prison. He could rule my life—

‘C’mon,
c’mon!’ snarled Fallon. I must have frozen where I stood, and Ahwaz knew why, because I could hear him laughing.

I stopped him so fast he nearly choked. It was stupid, I shouldn’t have dared; but my blood was roaring in my ears. After what I’d been through these past two days I wasn’t half as scared of Ahwaz as I should
have been; he didn’t glow green, for one thing. I’d been pushed too far. I jumped to the bank’s edge and stood there, teetering in the mud, with the envelope held high to fling.

‘This’ll sink like a bloody stone!’ I yelled. I saw the sudden movement in the boat, my blood froze, but I couldn’t give in now or they’d kill me anyway. ‘Even if you shoot me—’

I knew my mistake the moment I’d said
it. Never give people ideas, especially those who don’t have too many of their own. Ahwaz was bright enough to hold back, but not Fallon’s goons. Somewhere out there two lonely brain cells met and cuddled, and the rifle swung up; I could see it clearly, a faint, dull gleam in the night, and I didn’t even have time to be afraid. I heard the shot, deep and strange and hollow, not at all the flat whip
crack I’d expected. A wind sang past me, too close; but there was something wrong with it—

I felt nothing. But
the rifle barrel flew up and discharged skyward with a shocking crash in that silent night, and the flame danced on the black water like fireworks. Then the rifle tipped down into it with a flat splash, and a bulky outline fell forward as if diving after, but landed writhing on the inflatable’s
side. Fallon’s face, behind his scrubby beard, stood out pale in the shadows, eyes gaping in their deep sockets; but it was past me he was looking. There were no doors there, but it felt as if somebody opened one all the same.

There was another boat. This one you could see, though you wouldn’t be too happy about it – not because it had a searchlight or Customs markings, nothing nice and normal
like that. You saw it by its own light, just a little, a glimmer, like sea phosphorescence. It was a sailing boat of some kind, not enormous, and it was gliding speedily in to shore with its two sails taut. The trouble was, there was barely a breath of wind. And what there was wasn’t blowing in that direction. And there wasn’t a soul to be seen on board.

Now at this point, of course, the sensible
man gets going, and God knows I’d had plenty of practice only last night. But the moment I tried to move there was a noise like a hippo on heat, and the muck slurped lovingly around my nice new trainers, and I almost fell face down in the clag. I caught my balance, then wished I hadn’t. The mud might be safer. There were figures leaping ashore, dimly seen; there were shouts. Any minute now there’d
be the helicopter with the searchlight, and the megaphone bellowing, ‘Armed police!’ They were running straight towards me.

But the sound of those
shouts – not nice, respectable cop shouts, not even the Drug Squad. More like Manchester United fans – then suddenly I was covered in mud splatters and the stampede was parting around me and trampling past. Half-seen shapes, dim as ghosts but all too
solid, in weird, patchy getups and streaming hair, waving ill-defined objects that glinted with dull menace.