Dead Centre - Andy McNab [45]
‘Don’t get up, mate.’
Still no smile.
I held up my hands. ‘Dave, I want to call a truce. End-Ex. I’m sorry about what I did. I fucked up. Simple as that.’
‘Yes, you did.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘But you know what? Fuck it.’ He slapped the arms of his chair. ‘When you’re in one of these fucking things you realize life’s too short to get pissed off about stuff like that. So fuck you, and fuck the problem. What do I care? I’m living in a soap, am I?’
That was good enough for me.
Where the up-and-over door had once been there was now a stud wall. There were no windows in here – just three sets of fluorescent lights. The brew kit still sat on a table against the opposite wall. The Smarties and Thunderbirds mugs were still going strong. I wondered if he’d saved the Easter eggs they’d come with.
He nodded at the CCTV monitor. ‘Nice motor. You kill someone for that?’
‘Yeah, I did.’ I made my way to the desk. ‘So, how’ve you been?’
The last time I saw Crazy Dave he was balding, with a moustache, like Friar Tuck in a 1970s porno. Now all the hair had gone, but the moustache was still hanging on.
‘Fucked.’
‘So I can see, mate. The Charles Bronson look ain’t doing you any favours.’
He gripped the arms of his wheelchair, lifted himself a couple of inches out of the seat and held himself there, perhaps something to do with his circulation, or to stop pressure sores developing on his arse. ‘Yeah, well, we’ve both got life sentences, haven’t we?’
He careered round the desk in a maroon space-age chair. It looked as though it could use some go-faster stripes. ‘But at least I can get out on the piss when I want to.’
‘Can you do a wheelie in that thing yet?’
He reversed, jerked, and the front wheels came up. He grinned like Evel Knievel. But we both knew that was as good as it was going to get. Crazy Dave had been invalided out of the Regiment after a truck driver from Estonia bounced him off a motorbike on the M4 and forced him to take the scenic route. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d borrowed my Suzuki 650. Six months in Stoke Mandeville hadn’t sorted him out. His legs were still useless.
8
HIS NEXT PARTY trick was to get us both a brew.
‘So – you come here with something you know, or something you want to know?’
‘BB.’
‘The principal’s wife getting a seeing-to again, is she?’
‘That’s the least of my worries. Do you know who the wife is?’
He spun round to face me with a bag of sugar in his lap. ‘I don’t get involved at that level. The job’s gone through about three or four middlemen before it gets to me. They wanted a BG for a mother and a child. I pick – I used to pick – the best available at the time.’
I shook my head. ‘Mate, how come you were the only one—’
‘To give him work?’
I nodded. ‘He was even a nightmare on the tsunami job, when there wasn’t anybody to shag. What’s he got on you? Is he giving you one as well?’
He spun back round to the kettle and put the sugar down. ‘Shit!’
‘Touched a nerve, have I?’
The wheelchair raced towards the door. ‘No – a shit, I need a shit.’
I followed him into the garden.
‘Look, Nick. He finished that anti-piracy job after about six months. That was fuck-all to do with me. I gave him a job with the oil companies looking after the pipeline in Georgia. It was a good little number in Tbilisi. But he fucked up by falling out with the company over expenses.
‘Then I gave him a job working for an American family in London, which he fucked up big-time. I think the husband was a computer mogul, downloads, some shit like that. While the husband was away, BB started thinking with his cock again. He reckoned that if he got in with the wife, she’d divorce the guy and give Wonderboy access to a big wad of cash.
‘The problem was, he pissed off a lot of other people along the way. He was going round acting as if he was running the job. It was a big one. There were nearly thirty of them on the team, looking after the family in the UK, and the husband as he bounced around the planet selling his downloads or whatever the fuck it was.
‘Anyone who got pissed off with