Not Dead Enough

27

Skunk was feeling a whole lot stronger. The world was suddenly a much better place. The heroin was doing its stuff – he felt all kind of warm and fuzzy, everything was good, his body awash with endorphins. This was how life should feel; this was how he wanted to stay feeling forever.

Bethany had turned up, with a chicken and some potato salad and a tub of crème caramel she had taken from her mother’s fridge, and all the shit-heads had left his camper, and he’d boned her from behind, the way she liked it – and the way he liked it too, with her massive ass pushing into his stomach.

And now she was driving him along the seafront in her mother’s little Peugeot, and he lounged in the passenger seat, tilted back, staring out through his purple lenses at his office. Clocking each of the parked cars in turn. Every kind of car you could think of. All dusty and sun-baked. Their owners on the beach. He was looking for one that matched the make and model that were written on the damp, crumpled sheet of lined notepaper on his lap, his shopping list, which he had to keep looking back at because his memory was crap.

‘Have to get home soon. My mum needs the car. She’s going out to bridge tonight,’ Bethany said.

Every fucking make of car in the world was parked along the seafront this evening. Every fucking make except the one he was looking for. A new-shape Audi A4 convertible, automatic, low mileage, metallic blue, silver or black.

‘Head up to Shirley Drive,’ he said.

The clock on the dash read six fifteen p.m.

‘I really have to get home by seven. She needs the car – she’ll kill me if I’m late,’ Bethany replied.

Skunk looked at her for a moment appreciatively. She had short black hair and thick arms. Her breasts bulged out of the top of a baggy T-shirt and her plump brown thighs were scantily covered by a blue denim miniskirt. He kept one hand up under the elastic of her knickers, nestling in her soft, damp pubes, two fingers probing deep inside her.

‘Turn right,’ he instructed.

‘You’re making me horny again!’

He pushed his fingers even further up.

She gasped. ‘Skunk, stop it!’

He was feeling horny again too. She turned right at traffic lights, past a statue of Queen Victoria, then suddenly he shouted out. ‘Stop!’

‘What?’

‘There! There! There!’ He grabbed the wheel, forcing her over to the kerb, ignoring the squeal of brakes and the blast of the horn of the car behind them.

As she pulled the car up, Skunk extracted his fingers, then his hand. ‘Fucking brilliant! See ya!’

He opened the car door, stumbled out and was gone without even a backward glance.

There, halted at the traffic lights on the opposite side of the road was a dark metallic blue Audi A4 convertible. Skunk pulled a biro out of his pocket, wrote down the licence plate on his sheet of paper, then tugged his mobile phone out of his trouser pocket and dialled a number.

‘GU 06 LGJ,’ he read out. ‘Can you have them for me in an hour?’

He was so pleased he didn’t even see the Peugeot driving off, the wave of Bethany’s hand, nor hear her brief toot of the horn.

Brilliant! he thought. Yeah!

Nor did he see the small grey Ford, sitting at the kerb a couple of hundred yards behind him. It was one of a five-car surveillance team that had been tailing him for the past half-hour, since he had left his camper.