The Drop

kind?’
    ‘Handgun,’ he said, ‘a Sig Sauer, one of those flashy pistols the cops have in the States.’
    ‘I know what a Sig Sauer is. Did you get him one?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘On whose say-so?’
    ‘Well,’ he looked at me dumbly, ‘yours.’
    ‘Mine?’
    ‘He said you’d asked him to get a piece in case things got a bit hairy down south like.
    ‘He said what?’
    ‘That’s what he said. You mean you didn’t… ’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’
    ‘Christ, I’m really sorry man,’ he told the wall behind me, ‘but it sounded legit. I mean I’ve known Cartwright as long as I’ve known any of you and, well I mean, why would he lie?’
    ‘That’s the big question,’ I wasn’t really annoyed with Hunter. It’s not as if we have written orders or signed requisition sheets for his bent weaponry, and he could hardly phone me on a land line and say ‘is it true you asked Geordie Cartwright to get tooled up in case you had a spot of bother with some southerners?’ We didn’t work like that. A lot of what we did, strangely enough in our game, was based on trust, that and the fear of a sickening retribution afterwards if you were caught doing something that was against Bobby’s interests. So what would drive a mild bloke like George Cartwright to get a Sig Sauer from our armourer and collect the Drop all on his own?
    ‘When was this? What time?’
    ‘Last Monday afternoon… No, Tuesday; I remember because the Toon were playing their cup replay that night and we were talking about it. We didn’t think they’d get a result… And of course they didn’t… They were knocked out… So we were right like.’
    I held up a hand, ‘yeah, yeah, did he say anything else? Was there anything odd about the way he was handling himself?’
    ‘Well he seemed a bit distracted I suppose, looking back on it.’
    And I understood why he was distracted. He was scared -but what would scare him so much he needed a gun? Answer that question and we were closer to the truth. Whatever it was, the gun hadn’t done him any good in the end of course. Geordie Cartwright still wound up dead.

FOURTEEN
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    T he massage parlour was an understated little building that looked like a doctor’s surgery, perched at the end of a residential street in an area that was almost but not quite the suburbs. Its frosted glass windows and discreet signage, which indicated it was the place to go to with a sports injury, was intended to ensure no one objected too much to its presence.
    I didn’t know what the neighbours really thought about having a knocking shop on their doorstep but they didn’t make too much of a fuss about it. The whole operation was designed to be as discreet as possible, to avoid attracting the attention of the police or any self-appointed moral guardians in the neighbourhood.
    To be fair, we ran a good, clean operation. All the girls were volunteers and there was absolutely no trafficking of any kind. We only put willing lasses into jobs like that. The police knew it was a brothel, everybody did, but they didn’t give a shit.
    I walked in first, so as not to startle Barry Hennessy, aka Maggot, but it looked like he wasn’t there. Instead we were met by Elaine, our housekeeper. She took the bookings, vetted the clients as they walked in and looked after the girls, making sure they were all right, earning money and paying us our proper cut. It was 30 quid to get through the door, which included the straightforward massage, not that anyone ever wanted just that. The rest was negotiable with the girls but a basic service, including a BJ and a shag would set you back another £100, which was cheaper than dinner for two in a lot of Newcastle’s restaurants these days. The girls kicked another £20 back to the house, so we took 50 quid for providing them with a safe, secure environment where they wouldn’t get beaten up, ripped off or arrested for soliciting. They took home £80 a punter and with a steady stream of clients they could earn upwards of £300 a shift. Put another way, that’s £60,000 to £70,000 a year for lasses who would rather be doing this than earning minimum wage on a check-out till.
    The girls here weren’t drug addicts or nymphomaniacs. They were paying off debts their no-account blokes had left them with, putting themselves through college or bringing up their kids, feeding and clothing them, and they were doing okay but it