Murderous David Hickson (best thriller novels of all time TXT) 📖

“Four days and eight hours.”

“Plenty of time,” said Chandler. “We’ll figure it out.”

“If you say so, colonel.”

“We’ll even have a bit time for R and R. This is a truly magnificent spot.”

“You can see why the Portuguese fought so hard for it,” I said.

“Yes indeed. It’s the tragedy of this continent, isn’t it? Everybody wants a piece of it.”

Twenty-Two

Fat-Boy looked good in his grease-stained overalls, like a genuine dockworker, and I told him so.

“They don’t fit,” he complained, and indeed a large portion of his belly pushed the dirty, white T-shirt through the front of the overalls where the buttons had popped.

“You look the part though,” I said. “None of these dockworkers fit into their overalls.”

“Part!” he scoffed and crunched the forklift into forward gear without engaging the clutch. The engine whined as it built up a head of steam and we started crawling back along the quay towards the crane. “That’s what this is to you, isn’t it, Angel?” said Fat-Boy. “Just a big game.”

“Of course it is. Are you doing this for the career-building opportunities it offers?”

Fat-Boy turned to face me and his lazy eye drooped scornfully.

“Who needs a career when there are seven million, eight hundred and twenty thousand little American soldiers floating into harbour tonight?”

“I thought it was seven million, seven hundred and something.”

“You need to check the prices, Angel. The banksters run it up and down all the time. It’s been moving in our favour this week, we’re up sixty thousand dollars on last Monday.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Good?” said Fat-Boy. “What the fuck do you mean, good? When last did you make sixty thousand American dollars in a week? That’s sixty thousand dollars each, for me, you, the colonel and sex bomb. Each.”

“Wow,” I said, but Fat-Boy glowered at me. Keeping his eyes on the path ahead was unnecessary given the slow walking pace at which we were proceeding, so he turned the bulk of his body to face me.

“What’s your problem, Angel? This whole time you’ve been fucking up. It’s like you’re trying to fuck it up for all of us. Because of you doing that government work, we’re not gonna be driving our gold into our warehouse tonight. We’ve gotta sneak it out before big Blondie arrives, and hope to hell he doesn’t come looking for it.”

“Is this the fastest this thing goes?” I asked.

“It’s a forklift,” he said. “Not a fucking sports vehicle. I had three hours to arrange it, and this is what we got.”

“Why don’t I get out and walk?” I suggested. “I’d have time for a cigarette before you get there.”

Fat-Boy turned forward again to consider the crippled crane a couple of hundred metres ahead, its arm leaning out over the water like a disobedient soldier mocking all the other cranes standing to attention. Beneath the crane an operator was enjoying one of my cigarettes, while he kicked at the broken concrete counterweights lying scattered around its base.

“You think he’s noticed those blocks didn’t break by themselves?” asked Fat-Boy.

“I shouldn’t think so. The holes were pretty small, and the guy who made up the charges knew what he was doing. The residue would be hard to see.”

“He could smell it though.”

“Not over the stench of the sea. Robyn said they bought the story. Even agreed to let us cast the new counterweights right here to save time. I’m surprised they didn’t phone back and ask why we’d arrived with this lousy piece of machinery though.”

“I had three hours,” complained Fat-Boy, and his eyes narrowed as he spotted an opportunity to fight back. “You and sex bomb not doing the dirty anymore?”

“None of your business.”

“The colonel said to me I wasn’t to mention it, so I knew right away.”

“We could wedge a brick onto the accelerator and I could roll you along the quay. We’d have time for that cigarette.”

“I knew you’d be trouble. I said that to colonel the first time he told me about you, and the little job you had going. I said to him: that war hero of yours, colonel, he is going to bring us nothing but trouble. I said that to him, and I was right. We were happier when it was just the three of us.”

“But you weren’t earning sixty thousand dollars a week.”

“The price of gold can go down as well as up,” said Fat-Boy.

We rolled forward in silence a few metres.

“Have we done enough frames?” I asked. “It looks like there were more counterweights than the number of frames we rigged.”

“I thought you two were like destined to be together or some shit. You and sex bomb Robs. What happened to all that? Sex bomb see the light?”

The crane operator tired of kicking at the concrete and walked over to the frames we had laid out and tried kicking them instead.

“You’re all wrong for her anyways,” said Fat-Boy. “You damaged war heroes are full of shit. All your post-traumatic stress. You can’t give her what she needs, and she knows it.”

The crane operator found that kicking the wooden frames wasn’t any more entertaining, and he called out to us as we entered the last fifty metres.

“Why you guys do this here?”

“New approach,” Fat-Boy called back. We had already established that the crane operator responded better to communication from Fat-Boy than me. The crane operator was also a large black man. He had huge nostrils and a shaved head, but unlike Fat-Boy, he had enough muscles to make you think the crane was an unnecessary accessory.

“You could have just brought the new ones in on a truck,” said the operator.

Fat-Boy shook his head to show how little the operator understood about crane maintenance, although at thirty-five metres the subtlety of the head shake was probably lost on the operator.

“Better this way,” called Fat-Boy. “We cast the concrete right here and load it up without waiting the full seven days.”

The operator turned back to the frame nearest him and gave it another kick.

“Boat coming