Dead Simple

and raised him.
    Confidently pulling out his wallet, Grace raised him further. Trevor then raised him several more times in succession, until Grace finally lost his nerve, peeled some more banknotes from his wallet and saw him.
    Then he puffed nervously on his cigar as Carter flipped over his cards, one by one.
    Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
    A running flush – 7,8,9,10, Jack on the bounce.
    ‘Bloody brilliant!’ Croke said.
    ‘’Well played!’ Bob Thornton exclaimed. ‘My God, that was well hidden!’
    ‘I picked them up,’ a near-ecstatic Trevor Carter said. ‘I picked them up!’
    Grace sat back in dismay. It was a hand in a million – maybe even longer odds than that. Impossible to have predicted. And yet he should have realized, from the uncharacteristic strength of Trevor’s betting, that Trevor knew he had him beat – and seen him much sooner.
    ‘I reckon your supernatural powers need a bit of topping up, Roy,’ chirped Croke.
    Everyone laughed.
    ‘Fuck off!’ retorted Grace more good-naturedly than he felt. Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper was right. People were laughing at him. Here it was light-hearted, among friends. But there were others in the Force for whom there was no joke. If he wasn’t careful his career could be stalled and he could find himself sidelined.
    And right now he was down the best part of three hundred quid.
    And by the time the remaining three games had been played, Grace had managed to increase his losses for the evening to four hundred and twenty-two pounds and fifty pence.
    He was not a happy bunny as he took the lift down to the underground car park of the block. As he walked towards his Alfa Romeo parked in the visitors’ section, he was still so cross with himself and his friends that he barely noticed the mud-streaked BMW X5 that was driving in.

23
    ‘Yeeha!’ Davey, soaking wet, unlocked the door of his Portakabin, then kicked it wide open and strutted in. ‘Yeeha!’ he announced to the television screen, which was always on, to all his buddies who hung around on the screen. He paused, water trickling down his baseball cap and off his oilskins and muddy wellingtons onto the foam carpet, to check them out. James Spader was in an office, talking to some chick he did not recognize.
    ‘Wasted ’bout two hundred of them darned vermin. Know what I’m saying?’ Davey said to James Spader in his best Southern drawl.
    But Spader simply ignored him, kept on talking to the chick. Davey picked the remote off his bed and pointed it at the television. ‘Yeah, well, I don’t need you either, know what I’m saying?’ He changed channels. Now he saw two guys he did not know, face to face, arguing with each other. Click.
    James Gandolfino was walking through the cars in a Mercedes-Benz dealership, towards a handsome woman with long black hair.
    Davey zapped him and he was gone.
    He surfed through a whole bunch of channels, but there didn’t seem to be anyone interested in talking to him. So he walked over to the fridge. ‘Just gonna git me a beer from the minibar,’ he announced, pulled out a Coke, flipped it open with one hand, drained half the can, then sat on the bed and belched. His watch said 2.21.
    He was wide awake. Wanted to talk to someone, to tell them about all the rabbits he and his dad had shot tonight.
    ‘Here’s the thing,’ Davey said, then he belched again. He checked the pockets of his oilskins, pulled out a couple of live shotgun cartridges, then hung the oilskins on their hook on the door. He sat on the edge of his bed, wearily, the way he’d seen Clint sit when he was easing off his boots, and dropped his wellingtons one after the other onto the floor.
    Then he fondled the two unspent cartridges. ‘They’ve got your name on them,’ he informed Sean Penn, who was walking towards him. But Sean Penn wasn’t in the mood for conversation either.
    Then Davey remembered. There was someone who would talk to him. He knelt down on the floor, reached under the bed for the walkie-talkie, then pulled out the aerial as far as it would go. Kerloink!
    He pressed the listen button and heard the crackle of static. Then he tried the talk button.

24
    Michael, wide awake, was crying. He did not know what to do, he felt so utterly helpless. It was after two in the morning, Friday morning, he was meant to be getting married tomorrow. There were a million things that needed to be done.
    Who or what the hell had taken the breathing tube? Could it have