'Why aren't I surprised?' Felix asked, but he was talking to himself. Lifting both buttons using tweezers, he dropped them straight into separate evidence bags, carefully dating and labelling each bag.
It took him no more than fifteen minutes to take positioning shots, with another ten for body shots and five for close-ups of the wound itself. In that time he stopped twice to drink from a second flask and when that ran out he calmly switched to a third and used that instead.
Perspiration rolled from the fat man's face as he worked, and the air around him stank of whisky and sour sweat. But never once did he stumble or even look drunk. He just snapped off each shot, checked the quality on the little screen at the back of the Speed Graphic and moved on, looking for the next angle, his next shot. He had a professional's tolerance for the drug of his choice. Raf had seen it before, up close and way too personal, every single day of the year he had spent in New York with his mother.
Chapter Nineteen
Seattle
Hitting America aged fifteen was different. So different as to be unforgettable in a life where everything was unforgettable. No flight attendant held his hand on the trip out and he travelled regular, legs cramped into a tiny gap between the edge of his seat and the sloped chair-back of the passenger in front.
Next to him sat a black-eyed girl wired into a Sony Dance-Master, the thud of Hold Me Down hissing from earbeads as her long fingers danced over the touchpad of a Nintendo to an entirely different beat. She smelled of toothpaste and a cheap powdery scent. Beyond her was a window seat, empty except for a Tibetan bag with an untouched magazine poking out of the top.
ZeeZee desperately wanted to ask if she'd mind if he took the window seat but didn't know the words ... It wasn't that she didn't speak English. She did. Confidence was his problem. His school outside Edinburgh was strictly single-sex. Which meant tarting the smaller boys was a regular pastime for most of his year: talking to girls wasn't.
PanAmerican called the seats regular but most of the regular passengers were further forward, drinking free vodka shots and eating complimentary cashews while watching Hollywood's finest on the screen in the wall of their bunks.
The seats at the rear of the Boeing were for students, casual workers, girls hoping to find work as nannies: the kind of people who didn't travel often, bought their own tickets and couldn't believe just how few US dollars they got in exchange at the bureau de change. Not that ZeeZee had forked out for his own seat.
Providence had paid for it.
Providence in the form of a man in the Lyons Coffee Lounge at Heathrow who walked away from his table and forgot a leather pouch he'd put on the chair beside him. Until then ZeeZee had been running away to Paris to find bar work. By the time the man hurried back to where he'd been sitting. ZeeZee's plans had changed and Seattle was on the cards, almost literally.
While the man filled out a form to reclaim his pouch from Lost Property, where ZeeZee had left it, ZeeZee was off buying dollars from a FirstVirtual auto-teller in Arrivals, using a deposit card he'd extracted. Selling half those dollars back to a different machine in Departures took him a minute and gave ZeeZee enough paper money to buy a cheap, one-way ticket to Seattle-Tacoma. He had to show the girl at PanAmerican his permanent US visa. But once she'd swiped his passport through a reader and the visa came up valid she was all smiles, even when he bought the cheapest stand-by she had.
The deposit card he flushed away in a men's room on the way to his gate. Some kind of warped morality made him buy a cut-price ticket. And it was only after take off that he realized the owner would just claim a full card against insurance and ZeeZee could have travelled first if he wanted.
'You wanna borrow this?' The girl was holding out her magazine, one hissing earbead carefully cupped in her hand where she'd half unplugged herself from the music. He didn't recognize the accent.
'Hold Me Down,' ZeeZee said, nodding at the bead, 'the ice-hot FP remix ...'
She looked at him then. Glanced, without realizing it, at his white shirt and grey trousers. He'd ditched the jacket and striped tie but nothing could make what he was wearing anything other than what it was, half a school uniform.
He didn't mention that he only recognized the mix because some jerk in his common room had downloaded the Belize Sleez compilation and had played it to death.
'End of term?' she asked.
ZeeZee shook his head. 'Just had enough.' He took the offered magazine and was surprised she didn't immediately pull away when his fingers accidentally brushed her hand.
'What about you?' ZeeZee tried to make it sound like he always talked to strange girls on planes.
She smiled and named some city he didn't recognize, except to realize it was probably in the neutrality corridor between the Soviets and the Berlin alliance. 'I've got a student visa,' she added, 'but I intend to find work in Seattle. You don't know anywhere?'
He didn't, but she still told him her name and lent him a spare set of earbeads, toggling the DanceMaster onto split so they both got the full mix. Twenty minutes later, when thelights dimmed and an attendant came round with covers and all the couchettes tipped back, ZeeZee and Katia ended up under the same blanket.
The blanket was PanAmerican blue, logo-laden along all edges, with holes all over to trap air. It came vacuum-wrapped in foil and it was only after they had both struggled to rip open her packet that Katia discovered the easy-release tab.
'Dumb,' said Katia and ZeeZee smiled slightly nervously. He kept on smiling as he pulled the single blanket over both of them. And if Katia noticed his fingers shaking she didn't let him know. Instead she just rolled onto her side, facing away from him, and curled up with her head rested on her arm.
'Listen,' she whispered.
So ZeeZee did.
The new track was like nothing he'd heard before. A young boy's voice soared in a language he didn't recognize above a famine-sparse synth line that bled into a gull's cry and ended with a softly-building loop of whale song. BaghavadGhya. Not his taste, but it went with the ying/yang tattoo on her wrist and the grey titanium stud piercing the bridge of her nose.
Settling down, the girl shuffled herself backward until her bare heel just touched ZeeZee's ankle. And it seemed natural, somehow, for him to rest one hand on her leg and gently stroke the brushed surface of her chinos, feeling her warmth beneath as he moved his hand in time to the music.
When she didn't complain he kept going. And the next time she shifted, he suddenly found it easier to reach the seam that his finger had been tracing along the inside of her knee.
'That's neat
He wasn't sure that was what she actually said, but he muttered agreement anyway and shifted his fingers higher. He didn't quite have the nerve to trace the seam all the way to the top, so he settled for smoothing his hand gently up over her hip.
'No.' She tensed as his fingers reached the softness of her very slight stomach, only to breathe out again as ZeeZee hurriedly moved his hand, finding instead the swell of one breast through her thin green T-shirt.