Free DONNA AND THE FATMAN (Crime Thriller Fiction) by Helen Zahavi

of there.
     
    * * *
     

CHAPTER 8
     
     
    Once they’d cleared Heath Drive he cut the speed. He might not know how to start a car, but he knew about stuff like that. You keep your right foot light on the pedal, you don’t go shooting off up Redington Road, panicking all the decent folk. Be like having a sign on the back of your car: Phone in my number, cause I’m a robber. It’s things like that that he knows about, being quite a knowing guy. So having cleared Heath Drive he cut the speed, then just cruised along, went sailing along. Nice and slowly, sweet and easy, like he did it every night.
    He palmed the gearstick into fourth. Cold air was blasting from the vents, droplets forming inside the windows. He switched on the heater, listened to the fan. And then he asked, apropos of nothing much:
    ‘How much you get, then?’
    She didn’t react. You might even have thought that the girl hadn’t heard. She merely said . . . 
    ‘We eating soon?’
    . . . and turned her head to look at him. He was a good-looking boy, and she liked to look. There was stubble on his cheek, for he didn’t care to shave too much. Just now and then, when he got the urge. He said he’d do it, if she wanted, but she told him not to bother, for she likes her men to look like blokes, she likes them post-pubescent.
    He hung a right into Arkwright Road.
    ‘You hungry, babe?’
    ‘Well . . . not exactly.’
    ‘But you wouldn’t say no?’
    ‘Might pass the time.’
    ‘So how much you get, then?’
    Because he hadn’t forgotten.
    ‘Get, Joe?’
    ‘Get, babe. Off of Henry.’
    ‘What makes you think—’
    ‘I can smell it, can’t I. You got that money smell.’
    He was coasting down, engine in neutral.
    ‘I’m interested, that’s all. I mean it’s no big deal.’
    She frowned at the dashboard.
    ‘You just want to know . . . ’
    ‘I’m a curious bloke.’
    ‘And it’s finders keepers. Right, Joe?’
    ‘Right.’
    She wrapped her arms around the bag and clutched it to her belly.
    ‘I got plenty, Joey.’
    She nodded to herself.
    ‘I’m loaded, see.’
    He slipped into first.
    ‘What you probably mean . . . ’
    He went sharp left.
    ‘ . . . is that we’re loaded, sweetheart.’
    She watched the buildings go floating by and drew a large D on the misted-up glass.
    ‘Yeah,’ she muttered. ‘Probably.’
    Stuck in the queue at the lights by the station. Six lanes of traffic, their engines revving. Noise and filth and aggravation, the eternal stink of the Finchley Road. He adjusted the mirror, rooted for a fag.
    ‘So how’d it go, then?’
    She touched a filling with her tongue.
    ‘All right, I guess.’
    ‘No problems . . . ?’
    ‘Not really.’
    He crushed an empty pack in his fist and chucked it in the back.
    ‘Did you wipe my debt?’
    ‘I sort of wiped it.’ She watched a lad on a mountain-bike go threading between the cars. ‘I also wiped your job.’
    ‘Never liked that job.’
    ‘Say thank you, then.’
    ‘Thank you, then.’
    The lights went to orange.
    ‘You see it, did you?’
    ‘See what, Joe?’
    ‘His thing,’ he said. ‘The Henry thing.’
    She picked up the pack of loose tobacco and pulled out a generous pinch.
    ‘Might have caught a glimpse.’
    He released the handbrake.
    ‘I’ve seen it too,’ he said. ‘Such as it is.’
    He was holding the clutch at biting point.
    ‘Bit small, I thought.’
    ‘Minute,’ she agreed. She wrinkled her nose in pained distaste. To think of what he’d wanted her to do. The cheek of it. The total fucking nerve.
    ‘Made me stop in Holland Park,’ Joe said. ‘Had to take a leak.’
    ‘Right in the park?’
    ‘In Addison Road.’
    ‘That’s Shepherd’s Bush.’
    ‘You the A to Z?’
    She peeled off a paper and started rolling him a fag.
    ‘So you stopped the car . . . ’
    ‘And he had the leak. Did it all over this redbrick place. Right in the porch, right on the door.’
    She shook her head.
    ‘Not nice, that, is it.’
    Joe nodded