Sheena hammered and yelled, and after an eternity Diane, bleary-eyed, opened the door to let her in.
“What the hell d’you look like?” Sheena said.
“Fuck you, too.”
Sheena followed her through into the living room, a single light bulb burning bare from the ceiling, old sheets tacked across the window. Butt ends and beer cans cluttered the stained carpet; piles of old magazines and free newspapers littered the corners. Aside from a sagging two-seater settee, the only items of furniture were a green plastic milk crate topped with a cushion and a television set Diane had bartered from one of the blokes who lived on the floor above, who’d almost certainly nicked it from the old lady on the floor below.
Diane’s little boy, Melvin, was wobbling around precariously, face smeared with jam, dummy sticking from his mouth, nappy hanging low.
“Who’s in there?” Sheena asked, nodding toward the kitchen.
“Just Lesley,” Diane said. “Shooting up.”
Sheena reached for her cigarettes, lit up, then wandered into the other room. Lesley was just lifting the heated spoon away from the gas ring.
“Here, fuckin’ hold this.”
Sheena steadied the spoon while Lesley, eyes narrowing in concentration, bit down into her bottom lip and drew the contents up into the syringe. With her free hand, she lifted up her skirt and, still squinting, slid the needle into a vein high in her bruised inner thigh.
“Oh, Jesus,” she cried, eyes closing. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, yes. Oh, oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck! Oh, sweet fuck!”
She pulled the needle out and tossed it in the sink, a thin ribbon of blood running down her leg.
Great, thought Sheena, now that’s over perhaps we can get round to sorting out what we’re going to do about this fucking gun.
It had been chaos: bloody chaos. Blood down the side of her skirt and top, smeared across her face-and Diane freckled with it, gobs of it tangled in her hair. Jason and Valentine cursing and moaning.
Valentine had dropped the gun when Jason stabbed him and it had fallen inside the car; Sheena, not thinking, not thinking clearly, scrabbling on the floor to pick it up. Pushing the door open, one foot on the ground, she had been about to fling it out into the dark when she realized her prints were now plastered all over it. The toilet block was less than fifty meters away. Running hard, almost losing her footing not once but twice, she barged open the outer door and lunged into the dark. Whenever the council replaced the overhead bulbs, they were smashed within the hour.
Sheena kicked off her shoes and tugged down her tights, wrapping them around the gun before jamming it behind the cistern in the last cubicle, where it had remained, undiscovered, until Lesley, alerted by a phone call, had slipped in to collect it.
Now all Sheena wanted to do was get rid of it-but at a price.
Sheena knew Raymond Cooke through her younger brother, Nicky, who had used Raymond as a fence for much of the stuff he burgled round the neighborhood, Raymond ever eager to replenish the stock of his shop at knock-down prices. The shop, a single-story place in Bobber’s Mill, with a storeroom up above and a flat over that where Raymond lived, had belonged to Terry. But in the terms of Terry’s will, both shop and flat were Raymond’s for as long as he wanted. And Raymond, whose only previous work experience had been hauling great tubs of offal and bone around an abattoir, had very much wanted to stay where he was.
So on that Monday afternoon, when Sheena pushed open the shop door and went in, it was Raymond who glanced up from behind his copy of the Mirror and wondered if he didn’t recognize her from somewhere.
“Look around,” he said, ever the smooth businessman, “take your time. Any questions, be only too happy to oblige.”
Sheena surveyed the array of electrical goods piled high, everything available for a small down payment, easy terms, generous discounts for cash. There were car radios, mobile phones, microwave cookers, binoculars, cameras, laptop computers; CDs arranged alphabetically from Abba and Aphex Twin, by way of Oasis to The Verve and Warren Zevon.
Sheena fidgeted with the hem of her halter top, several inches of bare flesh between it and the belt that ran round her little black skirt. What she’d do, next chance she got, have her belly-button pierced like Diane. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” she said.
Raymond set down his paper and smiled. “Should I?”
“Ray-o, that’s what Nicky used to call you. Used to be dead skinny, didn’t you? You’ve filled out; grown up, I suppose. Handsome.”
Sheena was standing close to the chair, almost within reach, but not quite. Raymond, with his check shirt loose outside his jeans, a thin band of sweat darkening the faint mustache along his upper lip.
“Sheena, right? Sheena Snape?”
Sheena nodded and smiled.
“How is Nicky?” Raymond began, then realized. “Oh, no, look, I’m sorry. I forgot, I …”
“S’all right.”
“Shane, then. Is he …?”
“Still inside, yeah.”
Raymond looking at her, starting to weigh up his chances, no bra beneath that top, he was sure of that. Eighteen’d she be now? Maybe not that. A year or so younger than he was himself. “So,” he said, “you just happen to pop in by accident, like, or was there something, you know, you wanted?”
Not looking at her now, staring; the end of his tongue like a bit of lamb’s liver flopping between his lips. If one of us has got to fuck him, Sheena was thinking, I’m buggered if it’s going to be me. Besides, she remembered, if what Nicky had said was true, Raymond only fancied them really young; rumor was he’d knocked up his cousin when she was not long out of junior school.
“I might have something,” Sheena said, “you’d be interested in.”
“Yeah?”
“Something to sell.”
“Oh, yeh?”
“Only, you know, I’d have to be certain.”
“How’s that, then?”
“You could handle it, of course.” She gave him one of those smiles and thought poor Raymond was going to wet himself there and then.
“Try me,” he said. If Sheena came any closer, she’d be sitting in his lap.
“Okay.” She slipped the bag off her shoulder and snapped it open before holding it toward him.
“Fuckin’ hell!”
“Exactly.”
The pistol lay among lipstick-smeared tissues, a foil-wrapped condom, sticks of sugar-free chewing gum, a strip of instant photos of Sheena and Jason they’d had taken in a booth down by the bus station. A chromed Beretta; most likely, Raymond thought, a.38. He reached his hand toward it and Sheena swung the bag away.
“So? You interested or what?”
“I might be, yeh.”
“Might’s not good enough.”
“Okay, then, say I am.”
“How much?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
Raymond shrugged. “Where it’s come from, how hot it is.”
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”
“Say it’s been used, right? Some blag? Shooting, even. Got to be worth a lot less’n if it’s clean, nothin’ the law can tie it into. See what I mean?”
“So?”
“So where’d you get it?”