Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [13]
Creed picked one up, licked his finger and rubbed it across the paper, leaving smears of saliva on the girl’s body. He lazily traced her legs, collecting the white powder on the tip of his finger.
Coming through from the kitchen the short young guy called Russell saw what he was doing. Russell was the Mayans’ runner; their errand boy. He nodded and smiled at Creed, eager to like and be liked. ‘Coke is a pretty lady, huh? It should always be wrapped up that way.’
Creed smiled back. ‘Going somewhere?’ he asked. Russell was putting on a jacket.
‘Downstairs to take delivery of the pizza from the pizza guy. The elevators don’t work and he won’t come up.’
‘How untrusting of him,’ said Creed. Creed could see that Russell didn’t quite get the joke but he laughed promptly anyway; eager to please. Russell nodded to everyone in the small living room and went out.
‘If he’s not back in five minutes, count me out of this deal,’ said the black man called Larner.
‘Give him ten,’ said Miss Winterhill. ‘That’s a lot of stairs he has to climb. You’d think they could get the elevator going in this place.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Larner. He was sitting in an armchair opposite the couch, with the coffee table between himself and Creed.
The third woman, Miss Winterhill, sat in the matching armchair, close to one of the tall windows. Behind her the New York skyline seemed to ripple and shimmer and for a moment Creed wondered if this was the effect of smoking too much boo. Then he remembered that all the windows in this building had been blown out in some kind of civil disturbance years ago.
Tenants had only recently moved in to reclaim the wreck. The whole place had been gutted and converted into small condominium units for affluent young business people who worked in the city. The younger Mayan brother was one of them and, although he had spent fifty thousand dollars on furniture, he hadn’t got around to replacing the glass yet, in much the same way as the building’s owners had put in expensive wood‐inlaid floors but failed to repair the elevators. Instead of glass the windows had temporary sheets of transparent plastic film stretched and heat‐sealed over them.
Watching the plastic twitching in the wind, Creed put his finger in his mouth and lazily rubbed the last of the cocaine into his gums. Then he drank the dregs of one of the beers from the table. A pleasant numbness was spreading above his gums, a happy variation on the feeling of being at the dentist. He leaned across the coffee table and smiled a wide stoned smile at Larner.
Larner ignored him. The black man was clearly uptight, chain smoking. But Creed didn’t mind that. Larner basically seemed to have his shit together. He was the owner of the plastic gun on the coffee table – surrendered as a gesture of goodwill.
Larner couldn’t keep still, constantly shifting around in the armchair, full of nervous energy, but that didn’t bother Creed either.
Miss Winterhill, on the other hand, was sitting motionless, not smoking, not drinking, utterly composed. Creed’s impression of her was of a rich, tight‐assed bitch who lowered the tone of what was otherwise a perfectly respectable drugs deal.
The younger Mayan brother came into the living room holding a bottle of cava.
He opened it with a dramatic popping of the cork and poured three glasses, handing one to Miss Winterhill, setting another in front of Creed, who was still working his way through the left‐over beers, and took the last one over to the black man. ‘Hey Larner, relax,’ he said. ‘You look tense.’
‘That’s because I am tense.’ Larner whipped the cigarette out of his lips and discarded it, flicking the butt neatly into a pottery ashtray that Creed thought looked pre‐Columbian before immediately lighting another one.
Larner inhaled smoke and lifted his cigarette. He pointed at the city that lay beyond the billowing plastic of the high window. ‘See out there? My family are out there waiting for me.’
The Mayan brother listened patiently. ‘Right now they know I’m in the