The Drop

wasn’t exactly Pretty Woman. It’s not what I’d have called easy work having some fat, sweaty Herbert lying on top of you and it certainly wasn’t for everyone but they didn’t have to do it. They could leave whenever they liked. We never held a gun to anyone’s head or kept anybody against their will and they weren’t that hard to replace.
    ‘He not in?’ I asked Elaine.
    ‘He was,’ she replied, ‘I’ll fetch him,’ she wandered away down the corridor and we watched her go. Just as she reached the end I saw Maggot coming the other way. He clocked us, spotted Finney and his eyes went wild then he turned round and pegged it. Whatever Finney had done to him last time, Maggot wasn’t up for a repeat performance.
    ‘Maggot!’ I shouted, ‘don’t fucking run. Christ.’ I took off after him. Finney was the hardest man on our books but he was no athlete. He wouldn’t be able to catch Maggot when he was pegging it away like the devil himself was after him.
    I tore down the corridor and Elaine flattened herself against the wall as I hurtled by. I went through a door that had a little lounge area beyond it. No sign of Maggot. Two bored-looking girls in smart black cocktail dresses were sitting there sipping tea, waiting for their next John. We didn’t want them sitting round in their skimpies. It made the place look less respectable. They looked up and I was about to ask them which way Maggot was headed when, ahead of me, a door banged and I ran on down a little flight of stairs that led to the showers, sauna, jacuzzi and the tiny rooms the girls took their clients into.
    ‘Shite.’ There were too many doors, they all looked the same, white painted, deliberately neutral and I didn’t know where any of them led to. Fuck it, I thought and I ran right through the one that looked most likely to be the back door.
    I nearly knocked over the naked girl who was in the middle of giving a middle-aged business type a hand job on his lunch hour. Nadia looked at me like I’d gone mad. He almost had a coronary. ‘Oh fuck, no please. I’m sorry. I only wanted a massage. She grabbed me. Please, let me go,’ he pleaded.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s alright, I’m not the police.’
    ‘Shut up Tony,’ she scolded him sharply, properly aggrieved at being accused of a sexual assault, ‘he’s one of us,’ then she turned to me and hissed, ‘are you going to fuck off?’
    ‘Back door?’ I gasped and she pointed.
    This time I tried the door first before I opened it. When I got a crack of daylight I went through, just in time to see Maggot at the other end of the back yard, rounding the corner which would take him out and down the side of the building. Predictably he ran straight into Finney, who’d come round the front at a more leisurely pace. Maggot swore and skidded to a halt like some cartoon character in a chase scene. I half expected smoke to come from the heels of his shoes. He turned back, saw me and realised he had nowhere left to run. Maggot backed away from Finney, heading for the crumbling brick wall that covered three sides of the back yard. His eyes were darting around as he desperately searched for somewhere to go.
    ‘What you going to do now Maggot?’ asked Finney, ‘shit bricks and build a wall?’
    Finney saw him eyeing up the actual walls like he was about to attempt to climb them.
    ‘Don’t be fucking stupid. You’re going nowhere,’ barked Finney. Maggot was terrified. When I drew near I noticed for the first time that he had a large red mark in the centre of his forehead. It looked pretty permanent, the kind of scar you are never going to lose completely.
    ‘Look at you,’ said Finney, staring at the red spot he had presumably inflicted, ‘you look like a fucking Hindu or something,’ Finney advanced on Maggot, ‘never, ever run away from me again you cunt,’ and Finney gave Maggot what he would have described as ‘a little slap’.
    Maggot sat on the sofa, holding a damp towel hard against his right eye to dampen down the bruising caused by Finney’s ‘little slap’ - a blow that had knocked him off his feet and propelled him several feet across the yard. We were back in the knocking-shop’s lobby. The girls who did not already have clients had been told to go for a walk around the block.
    I was about to start questioning Maggot when a vaguely familiar figure came into view. A pale-faced overweight bloke, dressed in a dark blue business suit and tie emerged from