Love You Dead

30 Friday 27 February

Jodie Bentley was a no-show. As Tooth had expected. As he had predicted. As he had told his paymaster, Sergey Egorov. If the Russian asshole had listened, Tooth wouldn’t be standing in an icy wind, in falling sleet, freezing his nuts off. He’d be on a plane back to New York from Brighton, England, with the memory stick that Egorov had paid him one million dollars to recover. He always took his payment up front; he didn’t need to do cash on delivery, because he always delivered.

He stood in a fleece coat, fur-lined boots and Astrakhan hat, a short distance up the hill at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. At least, he figured, Walter Klein could take comfort in the fact that his casket was more luxurious than the jail cell he’d probably have spent at least the next fifteen years in. A plane, taking off from LaGuardia, thundered overhead. He heard the distant clatter of a helicopter and the even more distant, mournful honk-honk of a fire engine. Below, the funeral cortège was leaving. A long line of black limousines — a grand cortège, he thought, for a scumbag whose assets had all been frozen.

But Tooth wasn’t here to judge the man.

A siren wailed. Another plane roared overhead. He put a cigarette in his mouth, cupped his hand over his lighter flame and lit it.

He waited, smoking it down to the butt, until the last vehicle had left the cemetery gates, then trampled it out in the grass. He walked back to his rental Ford, climbed in, started the engine and put the heater on full blast. Then he drove out of the cemetery, too. He headed to the storage depot where he deposited his gun and knife, then on to JFK Airport.

He dumped the car at the Sixt rental area in the parking lot, called his client from a payphone there and updated him.

‘Go to England,’ Egorov instructed him.