The Drop

living, well mostly, and it doesn’t bother her. I mean, it’s not as if I’m a gangster exactly, not really. I don’t go telling her the details of my day but she knows I work for Bobby Mahoney, so it’s obvious I’m no chartered accountant.
    We’ve been together more than two years now, and I am beginning to think she might be the one. We’d been bickering a bit lately, a lot actually if I’m honest, but I reckon we were just over the honeymoon period, that’s all. We’ve both been working hard and we needed a rest. This holiday could have been make-or-break but it’s been great; lots of late nights, long lie-ins, lounging by the swimming pool, then back to the hotel for some of that lovely, unhurried, afternoon sex you only ever seem to get when you’re on holiday. If only life was like this all the time.
    And Laura is loyal, which helps. Loyalty is a rare and underestimated commodity these days. At least it is in my game. You want my opinion? You can’t put a price on loyalty. So I have landed on my feet with Laura, no one can dispute that. Even Bobby thinks she’s alright, for a posh bird.
    It’s funny now, looking back on it, how I had no inkling, no instinct whatsoever, while I was lying there by the pool, soaking up the sun that hovers over this part of Thailand like it just loves the place and never wants to leave, that everything was going so badly wrong back home while I was away. I can honestly say that, right then, I really did have no idea just how much shit I was in.

ONE
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    F inney was there to meet us at the airport so I knew, as soon as I saw his pug-ugly, scarred face that it had all gone tits-up.
    I spotted him easily. He towered over everyone else; the relieved parents collecting back-packing teenagers, the minicab drivers on autopilot, holding up their cardboard signs with the names of self-important businessmen hastily scrawled on them in biro. We were tired by now. The plane from Bangkok to Heathrow was bang on time but the connecting flight back to Newcastle arrived an hour late, which tells you everything you need to know about this country.
    Laura hadn’t noticed Finney. She was too busy restoring her lifeline, as she called it, attempting to wrestle her mobile phone from her handbag while simultaneously dragging the smallest of our two cases, mine obviously, along behind her on its squeaky wheels. I could hear them squealing in protest with every step, because they were full of handcrafted, wooden nick-nacks she’d insisted on buying but had no room for in her own case. That was full to bursting with the clothes she’d packed in Newcastle but hadn’t worn on the holiday because they were too bulky for the heat. ‘Why do you need three different dresses for every day we are out there?’ I’d asked her before we left, as I sat on her case and tried to flatten it. Now, I was dragging Laura’s case behind me, feeling no happier for being right.
    Ten days later, we were back in Newcastle and the look on Finney’s face told me. I was in trouble.
    There was no greeting, no small talk from the big man, all I wanted to know was why he was standing there, his huge frame dwarfing those flimsy, metal barriers at the arrivals gate, gnarled fists bunched like he was about to start a fight.
    ‘What?’ I asked him simply.
    ‘Bobby needs a word Davey,’ he said in that unmistakeably nasally Geordie voice of his, which had been caused by the iron bar that broke his nose years ago. I was reliably informed that it was the last thing the guy with the iron bar ever did.
    ‘Now?’ And he just nodded.
    ‘What is it?’
    He looked over at Laura, who was still a few yards behind me but preoccupied by voicemails from her girly mates and her bloody mum.
    ‘It’s the Drop,’ he said and I immediately thought, oh shit.
    Laura didn’t take the news well. ‘He needs to see you now?’ she asked, as if I’d been called in at late notice for a shelf-stacking shift at the Co-Op. ‘Christ David.’
    I realised she was jetlagged but then so was I, and I could have done without the grief, because she was embarrassing me a little in front of Finney. I might have been a new man compared to most of our mob but, if she carried on like this, the word would go out that I was pussy-whipped.
    ‘You know who I work for.’ I hissed the words at her and was relieved when she fell silent. Finney lifted Laura’s case into the boot of her Audi and I