Free The Front by Mandasue Heller

now.’
            Mal laughed. ‘Better get a move on, man! We’re well ahead of you here!’
            ‘Twelve grand,’ Ged said quietly, smiling in spite of himself.
            ‘You’re joking!’ Mal looked up wide-eyed. ‘Twelve thou? And you’re only halfway through?’
            Ged nodded, leafing rapidly through the notes. ‘Fifteen now.’
            ‘And there’s another nine hundred here.’ Sam gave a childlike grin. ‘Bloody hell! We should open our own supermarket if this is the kind of dosh they make in a week!’
            ‘Sack that!’ Mal laughed. ‘We’d make more in a tits-’n’-tush shop! Bluies and vibrators, an’ that!’
            When the money was all counted and heaped in neat piles on the table, they sat and stared from it to each other in wordless wonder. It was Sam who finally broke the awed silence. Whistling long and low, he shook his head slowly, wiping a glistening sheen of sweat off his forehead onto the back of his hand.
            ‘Man, that’s beautiful. How much altogether, Ged?’
            ‘Sixty-eight thousand, six hundred – give or take a few quid,’ said Ged slowly.
            Mal and Sam couldn’t keep the grins from creeping across their faces. Sixty-eight thousand pounds! More money than they’d ever seen in their lives. Jumping to their feet, they threw their arms around each other and danced around the room, yelling: ‘Yes! Yes!’
            Breaking the dance, Sam squatted down beside Ged. ‘How much is that each?’
            Ged cast him a sideways glance, a small smile lifting his lip. ‘Twenty-two and a half, and some small change.’
            ‘Oh . . . my . . . God!’ gasped Mal, dropping to his knees and staring at the pile in wonder. ‘Lee only expected about ten gees altogether!’
            The mention of Lee brought them back down to earth with a bang. How could they have left him lying back there, not even knowing if he was dead or alive?
            Ged’s conscience pricked him sharply. Clearing his throat, he said, ‘Um – better split it four ways. Just in case, yeah?’
            ‘Yeah,’ Sam shamefacedly agreed. ‘How much is that, then?’
            Ged did a quick calculation. ‘Seventeen thousand.’ He smiled, shrugging lightly. ‘Still not bad, eh?’
            ‘This calls for a celebration!’ Mal rubbed his hands together greedily. He was rich! Rich! ‘Sam, go and get some cans out of the fridge while me and Ged share this out.’
            Splitting the pile roughly, Mal pushed half across the table to Ged, while Sam, feeling more than a little left out, sloped off to the kitchen to get the cans.
     
    It took Suzie almost fifteen minutes to half walk, half run to the shops. When she got there, she was more relieved than she’d ever been in her life to find nothing amiss. No police vans, no crowd of onlookers – nothing. Only too aware that this could soon change, she hopped over the low fence and ducked into the dark undergrowth.
            Already petrified, her nerves jarred at every sound as she began her frantic search for the discarded mask. Every twig she stepped on seemed to echo loud and clear through the still night air, and every leaf rustling in the slight breeze became a forest in a raging storm.
            When she’d been at it for ten minutes, paranoia began to take hold. It suddenly occurred to her that the police might have already been. They could have been, taken the bodies away – and the mask – and be lying in wait at this very moment, praying for an idiot like her to come along and wrap the whole case up for them. She was a sitting duck!
            Her heart was already firmly lodged in her throat when she heard the car turning onto the road behind her. A shock wave coursed down her spine as it came closer and closer. Crouching lower as the approaching headlights illuminated the bushes, she winced as a prickly branch