Remote control, p.27
Remote Control, page 27
‘Because we need loads of money, and we’re much nicer than they are, so they wanted us to have it.’
I looked at her in the rear-view mirror. She knew damned well I was lying.
I said, ‘You want a job?’
‘What?’
‘Count this money.’
She opened up the bags and wallets and piled all the notes in her lap.
‘More than a million dollars,’ she said at length.
‘Maybe count it once more to check.’
Five minutes later I got the more realistic figure of $336. The Clueless girls were wrong. Daddy was a diamond.
*
We started seeing signs for Florence. That would do me fine. The town was 60 miles away, and it was about five twenty in the morning. It would be getting light by sevenish and, if possible, I wanted to be in a town before dawn. I’d dump the Dodge, and we’d have to find some other transport. Whatever, we needed to get to Florida.
About ten miles short, I saw a sign for a lay-by picnic area with toilets and an information kiosk. I pulled in and took a free map of the town and surrounding area. Kelly was semi-awake as we parked up. I opened the door and got out. The birds were singing and I could just make out the pre-dawn. There was a little nip in the air, but you could tell it was going to be a nice warm day. It felt great to have a stretch; I stank of sweat and had a layer of grease on my skin; my eyes were stinging and no doubt were bloodshot and swollen from lack of sleep. The pain in my neck still made me walk as if I had a plank of wood strapped to my back.
The map showed a train station in the town; not necessarily helpful, but it was a start. I got back into the car and started to get the bags and wallets together to dump. All were expensive leather. A couple were even monogrammed. Inside one of them I found heroin and a lump of pot in tin foil. The spoiled brats had obviously been Easter ‘breakers’, college kids using up all their hormones before the next term. Mummy and Daddy worked their arses off and provided for these kids and they thought the world owed them a living. Fuck ’em, I was glad I’d robbed them. I laughed; there was a good chance they’d be too embarrassed even to report it. They were probably still sitting there blaming each other and trying to think of a way of getting piss stains off leather upholstery. I dumped everything in the bins.
We drove towards the station. It looked as if the town centre was terminally ill but big efforts had been made to keep the patient alive; the old historical centre had been rejuvenated, but it seemed that every shop sold scented candles, guest soap and pot pourri. There was nothing there for real people, no life in it at all.
We got to the station, and it could have been any station in any American town, full of the homeless who stayed there because it was warm. It reeked of bodies and decay. Drunks were sprawled on benches that nobody in their right mind would go near in case they got their head bitten off.
I looked at the destination boards. It seemed we could get to De Land by train, with a bus transfer to Daytona. It was just before six a.m.; the train would be arriving at seven.
The ticket office was already open and looked as if it had been modelled on a Korean 7-Eleven, wire mesh everywhere, painted white but chipped. I could just about see the large black face behind it that was demanding to know where I wanted to go.
An hour later we got on the train, found our seats and collapsed. Our carriage was no more than half full. Kelly cuddled into me, dog-tired.
‘Nick?’
‘What?’
I was busy looking at the other passengers. They all looked like me, frazzled grown-ups looking after kids.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To see a friend.’
‘Who’s that?’ She sounded happy at the idea. Probably she was fed up with my company.
‘He lives near the beach. His name is Frankie.’
‘Are we going on vacation with him?’
‘No, Frankie’s not that kind of friend.’
I decided to keep the conversation going as she would be asleep in no time at all. The rhythmic sounds and motion of the train would soon send her off.
‘Who is your best friend? Is it Melissa?’
‘Yes.’
‘How come she’s your best friend?’
‘Uh – we ride bikes together, and go to each other’s houses a lot. We have secrets.’
‘What kind of secrets do you have?’
‘Silly, that would be telling! Who’s your best friend?’
That was easy, but I wasn’t going to say his name. If we were lifted again, I would hate it if he was mentioned and put in danger. The sun was starting to burn through the windows; I leaned across her and pulled down the blind.
‘My best friend is called … David.’ It was about as far away from Euan as I could think of. ‘Just like you and Melissa, we tell each other things that no-one else knows. In fact, he has a daughter who’s just a little bit older than you. No-one else knows about her apart from David and me – and now you!’
There was no reply. It seemed she was starting to doze off. I carried on anyway, I didn’t know why. ‘We’ve known each other since we were seventeen and we’ve been friends ever since.’ I started to stroke her hair. I was going to talk more, but found it really hard to tell her. I couldn’t put it into words. Euan and I were just there for each other and always had been. That was it really. I just didn’t have the tools to describe it.
31
FRANK DE SABATINO HAD BEEN crossed off the Christmas-card list of LCN – La Cosa Nostra – in Miami and, for his own protection, had been sent over to the UK on a Federal witness protection scheme. I had been one of the team tasked with looking after him for the three months he spent in Abergavenny before returning to the US. I remembered Frankie as about five feet five inches and seedy; he had very black, tight, curly hair, which looked as if it had been permed in the style of a 1980s football player. The rest of him looked like the football itself.
The FBI had been investigating LCN in south Florida – they don’t use the word Mafia – and had discovered that de Sabatino, a thirty-four-year-old computer nerd who worked for one of the major players, had been skimming off hundreds of thousands of dollars from their drug operations. The government agents coerced de Sabatino into gathering evidence for their prosecution; he had no choice because otherwise he would have been arrested and LCN told what he’d been up to. LCN members in prison would have done the rest. Pat had had a good relationship with him during the job, and we’d later joked that maybe that was why he’d got out straight afterwards. I now knew that Pat had liked to sample the goods a bit too much.
Frankie’s clothing had been anything but low profile; to him, subdued meant a pale orange shirt with purple trousers and alligator-skin cowboy boots. Whatever he was wearing, his fat would push up against his shirt. It didn’t take much imagination to see him as a bit of a pervie. The last I’d heard of him, he’d been given a new identity after the trial and, very surprisingly, had voted to stay in the United States – and, even more weird, in Florida. Maybe the shirt selection wasn’t so good elsewhere.
I’d thought again about calling Euan, but what could he do for me at the moment? I decided against; better not use up all my resources at once. Frankie would help decrypt the PIRA stuff, then Euan could help me once I was back in the UK.
We got to De Land station just before two p.m. and the transfer bus was waiting to take us to the coast. After so many hours of air-conditioning on the train, the heat of the Florida afternoon hit us as if I’d opened the door of a blast furnace. Both of us were blinking like bats under the clear, oppressive sky, surrounded by people with tans and summer clothes. The electronic information scroll at the station told us it was 78 degrees. We boarded the hot bus, sat down and waited for the PVC to stick to our backs as we chugged along the highway to Daytona bus depot.
It was an uneventful trip. Occasionally from behind us would come the sound of rolling thunder, and a blur of chrome, leather and sawn-off denim would flash past with the distinctive, explosive bubbling gurgle of a Harley-Davidson. I’d forgotten Daytona was a Mecca for bikers. From the bus window, the roadside diners looked black with them.
Two hours later we trundled across the bridge over the inland waterway into downtown Daytona. We prised ourselves off the seats and I reclaimed our bag. The first thing I did was buy us two freshly squeezed orange juices. As we walked from the shelter of the bus depot, I could feel the sunlight burning through my shirt.
At the taxi rank I asked the driver to take us to an ordinary hotel.
‘What kind of ordinary?’ he asked.
‘The cheap sort.’
The driver was Latino. Gloria Estefan blasted out of the cassette player, he had a little statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard, a picture of his kids hanging off the mirror, and he was wearing a big, loud, flowery shirt de Sabatino would have died for. I wound down my window and let the breeze hit my face. We turned onto Atlantic Avenue and I found myself staring at a massive white ribbon of hard-packed sand that stretched to infinity. We drove past diners, beachwear and biker shops, Chinese restaurants, oyster houses, 7-Elevens, parking lots, tacky hotels, then yet more diners and beachwear shops.
This whole place was built for holidays. Everywhere I turned I saw hotels with brightly coloured murals. Nearly all had signs that said ‘Breakers welcome’. There was even a cheerleaders’ convention going on; I could see scores of girls in skimpy outfits strutting their stuff on a playing field outside the convention centre. Maybe Frankie was there, sitting in a corner, ogling.
‘Are we there yet?’ Kelly asked.
The driver said, ‘Two blocks more on the left.’
I saw all the usual chain hotels, and then ours – the Castaway Hotel.
Standing on the sidewalk outside, listening to Gloria’s singing disappearing into the distance, I looked at Kelly and said, ‘Yeah, I know – crap.’
She grinned. ‘Triple-decker crap with cheese.’
Maybe, but it looked perfect for us. What was more, it was only $24 a night, though I could already tell from the outside that we’d only get $24 worth.
I came out with the same old story, plus us being determined still to have our Disney holiday. I didn’t think the woman at the desk believed a word I was saying, but she just didn’t care, so long as I gave her the cash that went into the front pocket of her dirty black jeans.
The landing our room was on was filled with boys who didn’t look college material on vacation. Maybe they were in town because they’d heard about the cheerleaders.
Our room was a small box with a pane of glass in one wall. The floor had a layer of dust that it would have been a shame to clean, and the heat bouncing off the breeze-block made it feel like the black hole of Calcutta.
‘Once the air-conditioning is on it’ll be OK,’ I said.
‘What air-conditioning?’ Kelly asked, looking at the bare walls.
She flopped onto the bed and I could have sworn I heard a thousand bedbugs scream. ‘Can we go to the beach?’
I was thinking the same, but the first priority, as ever, was the kit.
‘We’ll go out soon. Do you want to help me sort everything out first?’
She seemed happy at the suggestion. I gave her the .45 magazines from the Lorton turn-off shooting. ‘Can you take the bullets out and put them in there?’ I pointed to the side pocket of the bag. The mags didn’t fit into my Sig but the rounds were the same.
‘Sure.’ She looked really pleased.
I didn’t show her how to do it because I wanted to keep her busy. I hid the back-up disk inside the bed, using one of the screwdrivers to rip the lining. Then I got the washing kit out and had a shower and a shave. The scabs were a dark colour now and hard. I got dressed in my new jeans and grey T-shirt. Then I got Kelly cleaned up too.
It was 4.45. She was still getting dressed in black trousers and a green sweatshirt as I leaned over to the cabinet between the two beds and pulled out the telephone book.
‘What’s this when it’s at home?’ I pointed a thumb at the TV.
‘The Big Bad Beetleborgs.’
‘The who?’
She started to explain, but I wasn’t really listening; I just nodded and agreed and read the phone book.
I was looking for the surname De Niro. It was a crazy name for him to have chosen, but I remembered that was what he’d renamed himself: Al De Niro. For somebody who was supposed to spend his life in low profile it wasn’t exactly the most secure, but he was Al and Bob’s biggest fan. The only reason he’d got involved in the drug scene in the first place was that he’d seen Al Pacino in Scarface. His whole life had been a fantasy. He knew all the dialogue from their films, he’d even entertained us in Abergavenny with passable impressions. Sad, but true.
Needless to say, there was no listing under A. De Niro. I tried directory enquiries. They couldn’t help, either. The next step would be to start phoning all around the State or to get a private eye on to it with some story, but that was going to take a lot of time and money.
I got up and walked over to the curtains, scratching my arse until I realized Kelly was watching, and pulled them back. We were two bats in the bat cave again, exposed to the deadly sunlight. Craning my neck round to the left I could just about see the ocean view I’d paid an extra $5 for. People were strewn all over the beach; there was a young couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and families, some with tans and others like us, the lily-white ones, who looked like uncooked chips. Maybe they’d come on the same train.
The boys from the room three along had obviously finished wiring in the sound system from hell because heavy bass music began banging through the walls. I could picture the dust dancing. They came onto the landing; all four of them had loud vests on and shorts that went down to their knees. They looked drunk and were putting cream on their new, still scabby, tribal armband tattoos.
I turned to Kelly. She was happy enough that the Beetleborgs had saved the world again, but looked bored. ‘What are we going to do now?’ she said.
‘I’ve got to find my friend, but I’m not sure where he lives. I’m just thinking about how to go about it.’
‘The computer geek you told me about?’
I nodded.
All very nonchalant, she said, ‘Why don’t you try the Net?’ She wasn’t even looking at me; she was now back to watching the shit on the TV. Of course – the bloke is a computer freak; there’s no way he’s not going to be on the Internet, probably surfing the porn pages for pictures of naked teenagers. It was as good a starting point as any. Better than my private eye idea anyway.
I walked over to the bag. ‘You can use the Net, can you?’
‘Of course. We do it at pre-school.’
‘Pre-school?’
‘Where you go before school starts so parents can go to work. And we use the Net every morning; they teach us how to use it.’
I started to get the laptop out, feeling quite excited about this girl’s genius. The grunge brigade outside were now shouting stuff from the landing. It was hormone time.
I suddenly realized that, even if there was an internal modem and Internet software on the laptop, it would be no good to me. I didn’t have any credit cards I could use to register with and I couldn’t use the stolen ones because they’d need a billing address. I put the laptop on the bed.
‘Good idea,’ I said, ‘but I can’t do it on this machine.’
Still looking at the TV, she was now drinking a warm Minute Maid that had been in the bag, using both hands on the carton so she didn’t have to tilt her head and miss anything. She said, ‘We’ll just go to a cyber café – when Melissa’s house didn’t have a telephone for weeks, her mommy used to go to the cyber café for her e-mail.’
‘Oh, did she?’
Cybercino was a coffee shop with croissants, sticky buns and sandwiches, with the addition of office dividers to create small cubicles. In each was a PC with a little recess for food and drink. Pinned on the dividers were notices about session times, how to log on, and little business cards advertising various sites.
I bought coffee, Danish pastries and Coke and tried to log on. In the end I handed the controls to a more skilled pilot. Kelly zoomed off into cyberspace as if it was her own backyard.
‘Is he AOL, msn, CompuServe or what?’ she demanded.
I didn’t have a clue.
She shrugged. ‘We’ll use a search engine.’
Less than a minute later we were visiting a site called InfoSpace. She hit the e-mail icon and a dialogue box appeared.
‘Surname?’
I spelled out De Niro.
‘First name?’
‘Al.’
‘City?’
‘Better leave that blank. Just put Florida. He might have moved.’
She hit Search and, moments later, up came his e-mail address. I couldn’t believe it. There was even a Send Mail icon, which she hit.
I sent him a message saying I wanted to contact Al De Niro – or anyone who was a Pacino/De Niro fan and knew ‘Nicky Two’ from the UK. That was the nickname de Sabatino had given me. There were three Nicks on the team. I was the second one he’d come into contact with. When we met he would do his Godfather thing, holding out his arms, saying, ‘Heyyy, Nicky Two,’ as he gave me a kiss and a hug. Thankfully he did that to everyone.
The café would open the next day at 10 a.m. Our session fee included the use of the Cybercino address, so I signed off by saying that I would log on at 10.15 tomorrow to retrieve any messages. The risk was small that his e-mail was being monitored and somebody could make a connection between me and ‘Nicky Two’.
By now I was hungry and so was Kelly, and for more than sticky buns. We walked back towards the main strip and stopped at our favourite restaurant. We ordered to go and ate our Big Macs on the walk back. The temperature was still in the 70s, even at this time of the evening.
‘Can’t we play minigolf?’ Kelly said. She pointed to what looked like a cross between Disneyland and Gleneagles, with trees, waterfalls and a pirate ship, all made to look like a floodlit Treasure Island.
