The Curious Case of the Missing Moolah (A Stanton Brothers thriller) Read online

  I heard the faint ping of a mobile phone alert.

  Molly reached into a small pocket on the left of her gown, pulled out a phone and studied the display with a faint smile. She indicated towards the coffee with a waft of her free hand. “Do it however you wannit. I gotta take this.”

  She tapped out her reply on the way back to the kitchen. Mark leaned forward and poured milk into one of the mugs. His movements were jerky and his jaw muscles tightly flexed. He cast a narrow-eyed glance in my direction. It let me know that he was unhappy with the situation. But despite his anger he kept his mouth shut.

  I knew what he was thinking – that we shouldn’t be dabbling with Alan’s property – but I didn’t share his concern. Had it been a better man than Alan Piper I would have considered Molly out of bounds.

  But it wasn’t, so I didn’t.

  Besides, after the morning I’d had I needed something to cheer me up. And I also knew some things that Mark Kandinsky didn’t.

  Alan had at least three regular mistresses that I knew about and the grapevine spoke of several others, which meant that exclusivity wasn’t an issue. Rumour was that they had an open relationship that allowed Molly to come and go as she pleased. And other rumours were that she dabbled in the local meat markets as much as her boyfriend. Neither cared what the other did so long as it didn’t interfere with their arrangement.

  Molly re-entered the living room with a big smile on her face but it faltered when her phone beeped again. She rolled her eyes after reading the display and let out a loud huff.

  “Problems?” I asked.

  “Oh, just Alan being Alan,” she replied. “Wants to come round.”

  “Meaning we should leave,” Kandinsky growled and downed his drink in one.

  My erection subsided. “Much as I hate to admit it, he’s probably right.”

  Molly shook her head, moved gracefully around the table and plonked herself between us. Her left hand rested lightly on my upper thigh. She looked deep into my eyes. “No need to leave just yet. He’s not going to be here for another couple of hours.”

  Molly’s hand drifted upwards until her little finger was resting in the nook where thigh meets genitals. My erection returned and throbbed until the excitement was almost too much to bear. All thoughts of leaving departed my brain along with the blood flow.

  She leaned in so close I could feel her body heat. The floral scent of shower gel drifted off her skin. Her breath was warm against my flesh and smelled of toothpaste and mouthwash. She fixed me with a hypnotic gaze, unwilling to break contact, pupils dilating until I could barely see the blue of her irises.

  Finally I turned towards Mark, expecting to see him storm out in disgust; but his head was tilted back against the sofa and he was staring at the ceiling glassy-eyed. I looked down and noticed that Molly’s right hand was rubbing against his bulge in a fast, frantic motion.

  She opened my fly with her left, picking at the buttons deftly and without struggle. My cock poked through the gap and stood to attention. Molly didn’t say anything to break the moment. She stared into my eyes for a few moments, smiled briefly, then lowered her head and started sucking, moving her left hand up-and-down my length to increase the pleasure. The excitement was almost to much to bear.

  It had been several months since my last encounter, and Molly knew exactly what she was doing, so I began to worry about an early finish. I closed my eyes and pictured things that turned me off. Eventually the excitement receded and I relaxed, finally able to enjoy what was happening without worrying about coming early.

  After a while, I realised that Molly was now using both hands and her mouth. I opened my eyes and watched Mark lift Molly’s dressing gown. He pulled down his jeans and entered her with a couple of quick thrust. She pulled me out of her mouth and gasped momentarily, then lowered her head and started sucking again.

  I tilted my head, took a deep breath and studied the cracks in the ceiling. I focussed my mind until it was someplace else, separate from my body, and thought that this was a very nice way to get over my bad start to the day.

  6.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been dozing but it can’t have been long, because my mouth wasn’t desert dry and I didn’t have the pounding headache and indigestion that nearly always follows daytime naps. I opened my eyes.

  I was slumped against the arm of the sofa with pants and jeans around my ankles. Mark was asleep on the other side of the sofa, also with his underwear and trousers around his ankles. I gazed at my watch – I’d been asleep for about twenty minutes worth of post-orgasm downtime.

  Molly was wearing her dressing gown again, now all creased and sweaty, gazing at us from the kitchen doorway with the mobile phone in her hand. She smoothed down her damp hair and adjusted the dressing down until it looked presentable.

  “I think it’s time you lads left,” she said in a cold tone.

  “How about another coffee before we go?” I replied, grinning at her.

  “How about you both piss off.” Her gaze was as chilly as blue ice. “You’ve had your fun. Thanks for the orgasm, and all that, but let’s not get clingy about it. I wanted a shag, that’s all, not a relationship. Certainly don’t want you two hanging around like a bad smell. And I sure as hell don’t want you here when Alan arrives.”

  When I realised that she was serious, my grin faltered and died. It wasn’t that I believed we’d made some sort of connection, I’m not that fucking naïve, but I had hoped that she might have seen me as more than just ‘The Help’ from now on. One look at that contemptuous expression of hers soon put paid to that.

  “Fair enough.” I pulled up my pants and fastened them, then I jostled Mark until he awakened. He shook his head a few times, rubbed his face, giving it a few soft slaps to chase away the lethargy, and grunted like an animal. He pulled on his jeans, stood up and reached on the floor to get his jacket.

  Molly opened the front window to chase away the stale sex smell. She sprayed the air a few times with an atomiser, which made the air smell like cheap scent and sex. She wrinkled her nose a few times. “Go out the back way,” she said. “It’ll be faster.”

  “No messing with you is there, sweetie?” Mark said, pulling on his jacket.

  “I’m not your sweetie,” she replied.

  Mark just smiled at that and shook his head. He gave me a look that said let’s get the fuck out of here. I put on my jacket and we moved in the direction of the kitchen. Molly blocked our exit.

  “Think you’re forgetting something.”

  “Such as,” I replied.

  “My money.”

  “Oh, right.”

  I took the envelope from my jacket pocket and placed it in her hand. Then I patted the envelope and gave her the nicest smile I could manage. “Are we done now?”

  She stepped aside. “We’re done.”

  We exited through the kitchen, into the overgrown garden and out onto the street through the big wooden gate.

  And that’s when my bad day really turned to shit.

  7.

  I closed the gate and looked at Mark, who returned a bitter smile and said: “Ever get the feeling you’ve just been used?”

  “All the time. It’s called day-to-day life.”

  He chuckled briefly and without humour. “Guess I’m gonna hafta get used to it.”

  “Don’t, otherwise you’ll end up bitter like me.”

  “Too late there.”

  A light drizzle, as fine as dust, drifted on the breeze. It must have been raining for a while because the pavement and the road were soaked and slippery underfoot. I zipped up my jacket and walked in the direction of the car, now sandwiched by a brown Ford Fiesta with heavily rusted paintwork and a grey Nissan Micra on the driver’s side. The Micra had been parked about a foot and a half away, making it impossible to open the driver’s door.

  I pointed. “You see this?” I said, looking at Mark. “Some idiot can’t park properly but they’re too fuckin’ lazy to correct the mistak
e.”

  Mark tutted. “Fuckin’ arsehole.”

  “I’ll hafta get in on your side.”

  I moved around to the other side of the car. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Fiesta, looking in the direction of one of the bungalows facing him. I knocked on his window. He turned and looked up at me. His features were small, delicate and squashed tightly into the centre of his huge round face. He brushed at his black combover before he wound down the glass.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you see who parked the Micra, mate?”

  “Nah, fella. Just waiting for me Mam.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No worries,” he replied.

  I turned away and pressed the key fob, unlocking the car. I was opening the door when I heard the man cough to get my attention. “Here, fella.”

  I spun around and saw that he was pointing a big gun with an even bigger silencer in my direction. Before I had time to react, two balaclava-clad men dressed all in black jumped up from behind the garden fence opposite. They levelled pump-action shotguns in our direction, stepped around the open gate and separated, with one coming towards me and the other moving towards Mark.

  The man who pushed the shotgun under my chin was thin like a whippet, with long pipe-cleaner limbs and a loping gait. He moved about jerkily, as if excited or high, and fixed me with his icy blue gaze. “Is you a hero?”

  “Define hero.”

  “A fuckin’ daft cunt who’d risk his neck for his boss’ money?”

  “Then I’m not a hero.”

  The other man said similar words to Mark who, like me, had his hands raised high in the air. We looked at each other briefly. Whippet Man got my attention by smashing me in the cheek with the gun barrel. I hissed and angled my glare back in his direction.

  “Oooh, you’s looking a bit radged there, mate.”

  “I’m not your fuckin’ mate.”

  He jammed the barrel under my chin, pushing me up onto my toes.

  “Thass right, cunt, you isn’t,” he said. “Butcha better start getting friendly, quick smart, or I’s gonna unload into your fuckin’ head, like.”

  “Whaddaya want?” I asked.

  The gun barrel pressed into my windpipe.

  “Don’t get clever,” he replied. “You already knows what I want.”

  “It’s in the boot.”

  He sniggered. “I know. We’s been following you fags for a while. Open it now, an’ don’t get clever.”

  I walked over to the boot and unlocked it. I opened one of the compartments and pulled out the burlap sack. I held it up for everybody to see.

  “An’ the rest.”

  “That’s all of it.”

  I felt the gun barrel against the nape of my neck, forcing my head forward. “You remember what I sez about being clever?”

  “Was that something about not doing it?”

  “Thass right,” he said. “Clever cunts tend to lose their heads.”

  I opened the other compartment and pulled out the black plastic bag that contained the morning take, which I also held in the air. I looked down into the compartment at the small automatic that was hidden inside, almost out of view. I considered grabbing it for a second, but then came to my senses and realised that it would probably be the last thing I’d do. I didn’t want my legacy to be as the silly bastard who died trying to protect his boss’ money.

  “Step away from the car.”

  I took a couple of steps back.

  “Throws the cash through the driver’s window of the Fiesta. Be fuckin’ careful about it, like, or you’ll be missing a head.”

  I hesitated, trying to work an angle, but I was all out of angles to play.

  “You hear what I sez?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do it.”

  I walked over to the Fiesta and tossed the bags past the smirking driver into the passenger seat. Then I raised my hands in the air.

  “Hands behind your head. Lock your fingers.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Back up onto the kerb.”

  I took a few steps back, and noticed that Mark was already there - face down on the ground with his hands behind his head and the other gunman watching over him.

  “Whatcha waiting for, cunt? Assume the position.”

  I got on my stomach and kissed the wet pavement. Damp soaked into my jacket and jeans and chilled me to the bone. The man reached down, stole the car keys and mobile phone from my jeans and pocketed them.

  “Count to a hundred,” he said. “If I sees you trying to get off the floor before we’re gone, I’m gonna get out an’ end youse both.”

  The Fiesta’s engine fired up with a cough and it pulled away from the kerb before screeching to a halt. Smoke drifted up from the tarmac as the tires spun in an effort to get traction on the slippery surface then the vehicle swung around the corner and skidded out of sight. I heard the driver’s door of the Micra open and listened to the sound of men struggling to get in the vehicle. For a split second, I thought about jumping to my feet and making a run at one of them, but I knew it probably wouldn’t end well. All I had to do was wait until they were around the corner and out of sight. The car belched like a fat man with indigestion and stuttered backwards – even from my limited viewpoint I could tell that the driver was weak – before moving around the corner and out of view.

  I leapt to my feet, went to the garden with the open gate and pulled a rock from ground. I moved to the passenger side window and used the rock to break it. It shattered at the second attempt. I unlocked the door, cleared the glass off the seat and reached into the glove compartment. Grabbed a spare set of keys I kept in there and climbed through until I was behind the steering wheel. Kandinsky dropped into the passenger seat as I was turning the key. The engine came to life. I reversed out into a skid, shifted it into first and roared around the corner, narrowly missing a vehicle coming the other way that blew its horn angrily as I raced up the road.

  Hitting speed bump after speed bump, I felt every impact, from leap to landing, and pushed my foot down until the pedal was as low as it could go. I screeched to a halt at the junction leading to Cargo Fleet Lane.

  I looked left and right. Left would take me south in the direction of Marton or Normanby; right would take me up towards Middlesbrough or South Bank. Just as I was about to make a decision, Mark shouted: “Middlesbrough. They’re gonna head towards the town centre.”

  I didn’t argue, didn’t ask why. I accelerated out and turned right, then Kandinsky yelled at me to take a left. I swung into Cranmore Road, cut around a couple of slow moving cars, and hurried along, ignoring the other vehicles when the road became a single lane, never stopping, barely slowing down.

  I accelerated right at the junction into Ormesby Road, sending several cars skidding to a halt, then crossed through a set of traffic lights going from amber to red and screamed up King’s Road. I veered left onto Westbourne Grove and shouted at Mark to keep his eyes on the traffic. By the time I approached Borough Road I slowed down considerably, so that my passenger could watch the other vehicles. His head jerked from left to right, scanning the roads, peering down side streets, but I knew that it was hopeless. There were too many roads for them to go down, too many turnings for them to make, even if we had guessed their initial direction correctly.

  I told Mark to forget about finding them. When he tried to protest, I said we needed to get off the road, sit down somewhere and think about what had just happened.

  I turned left onto Albert Road, parked and paid at a machine. We went for a short walk to a cafe on Linthorpe Road, sat in the corner of the room and started wracking our brains.

  8.

  The café was small, quiet and almost deserted. We shared the place with a couple of elderly men sat at separate tables reading their newspapers, a young, neatly dressed waiter who spent most of his time behind a small counter and an elderly red-faced woman working in the kitchen, which could
be seen through a serving hatch in the wall behind the counter. Gentle music drifted out from a radio that was on a shelf next to the serving hatch, preventing the place from being uncomfortably silent. The smell of burnt filter coffee and recently fried bacon wafted in from the kitchen.

  Mark supped his black coffee and put the cup back on the table. He turned his head, looked out of the window and watched the traffic and the pedestrians making their way up and down Linthorpe Road. He took an occasional deep breath and held it for a long time before exhaling. I knew that he was replaying the robbery in his head, pausing the re-run every now and again to study a significant detail or view it from another angle. I knew this because I was doing exactly the same thing.

  Neither of us had said a word to the other in the five minutes that we’d been here. A waiter had brought us coffees along with bacon sandwiches that remained untouched. I wasn’t sure about Mark, but every time I thought about food my stomach turned and tightened. Whenever my mind wandered from the robbery to thoughts of Alan’s money that tightness spread like a disease from my stomach to the oesophagus, the muscles constricting until the pain was almost too much to bear. It felt like a hand was closing over my windpipe, preventing me from breathing. Whenever it happened, I closed my eyes and thought about something good until the moment passed and my muscles unclenched.

  Finally, Mark turned away from the window and gazed at me. “We need to tell Piper.”

  I shook my head. “If we do that we’re fucked.”

  “He can help us.”

  “He could help us but he won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter to him either way,” I replied. “One way or another Alan’s gonna get paid. If we get his money back from these knuckleheads, and that’s a big if right now, then he puts it in the bank or under his mattress or wherever the fuck he puts it and all will be right with the world. But if we don’t get Alan’s money back then it becomes our debt to him, payable at the usual eye-watering rate. There was just shy of ten grand in the boot of that car. Half of ten grand, plus what I owe for my brother, puts me up to my eyeballs in the shit. That’s me wiped out.