The Drop

over and over again but it seems you do work for one. So what does that make you then eh? Sometimes I think I don’t even know you at all.’
    ‘You didn’t mind me working for a gangster when it was all about corporate hospitality and money coming in, expensive presents and holidays in Thailand. You didn’t mind me working for Bobby Mahoney then. You even like the guy.’
    ‘I do not!’
    ‘Yes, you do. Don’t deny it Laura. Wandering over to chat with him, flirting with him at his parties, laughing at his jokes, so some of that gangster glamour rubs off on you.’
    ‘I laugh at his stupid jokes because he’s your boss.’
    ‘Bullshit. It’s so you can go back to your chambers and tell everybody you’ve had a barbeque at Bobby Mahoney’s house, the home of Newcastle’s most wanted. With all of those divorce cases it’s the closest you’ll ever get to any real crime but believe me, it isn’t so glamorous when you’re stuck right in the middle of it.’
    ‘You’re a complete bastard sometimes, do you know that?’ she said and she climbed off the sofa, ‘you’re so cold and you can’t even see it.’
    ‘Is that a fact?’
    ‘I don’t want to hear any more of this,’ she said and she walked out of the room.
    ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I called after her, ‘is that what you tell the judge when he says something you don’t like? “I don’t want to hear any more of this” and then you walk out, eh!’ .

NINETEEN
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    I ’m not some exercise Nazi but I do like to stay in shape. That morning, I did my twenty minutes on the treadmill then some weights then changed for the pool. It wasn’t busy.
    It was a modern place, all pristine, white tiles and new age background music that sounded like whales shagging. There were a couple of wrinkly, old blokes sitting around and a middle-aged wifey doing lengths. I’d done mine and was about to go into the sauna and sweat for ten minutes but I stopped by the side of the pool to get a drink from the water fountain. It was near the entrance to the female changing rooms and as I bent my head towards the water I saw her. As my head was at an incline, I got a view of her that started with her bare toes and rose up over her slim, tanned legs and into the white ‘V’ of her bikini bottoms, a little pair that just about covered her lady bits. It was enough to keep her decent but there wasn’t a lot in it. Her stomach was still tanned from months of travelling abroad during the summer and her breasts swelled over her bikini top in a way that left one of the old geezers in the pool standing there with a look of undisguised longing on his face. Her long, blonde hair was tied back for the pool.
    ‘Hello David,’ she said, smiling at me like she knew exactly how good she looked.
    ‘Sarah,’ I said, resisting the temptation to say something cheesy like ‘you’ve grown’. I just about managed to avoid sounding like Sid James and instead I said, ‘haven’t you got a proper swimming costume?’
    She frowned at me like she didn’t understand what I was talking about, but she knew alright. Sarah Mahoney had to know the effect she was having; on the middle aged bloke pretending to read by the pool as she dropped her towel on one of the loungers next to him, on the old geezer who had stopped staring at her and shuffled off out of there sharpish, in case he got a lob-on for the first time in years, and on me. She must have known the effect she had on me
    I was not supposed to find Sarah Mahoney distracting. In fact an inner voice in my head was already cautioning me that even acknowledging the fact she had grown into a very hot young girl indeed was tantamount to suicide. Bobby did not want his pride and joy, his most precious possession, letched at by members of his crew. Bobby, though he makes a lot of his money out of the sex trade, would prefer it in fact if Sarah didn’t have a boyfriend at all until she was at least 25, then immediately married the first nice, harmless guy who took her out. He’s from the old school and what he definitely, categorically does not want is one of his closest men eyeing her up in the swimming pool. Not when he has tasked him with looking after her tonight at her big birthday party.
    There is however one slight problem, something that Bobby is in fact quite unaware of. Sarah Mahoney has the hots for me, has done for a very long time. Sarah has fancied me since she was about 16