The Drop

names.
    When Laura finally answered her mobile I asked, ‘It’s me, when you booked the hotel, did you book the rooms in both our names like I asked?’
    ‘Eh? Er, I don’t know, yes, I think so, why?’ ‘You think so or you did so? This is important.’
    ‘I can’t remember,’ she wailed, ‘you’d been shouting at me. I don’t know and I’m very tired. Where are you?’
    I ignored her question, ‘you don’t know?’
    ‘No, I don’t know, which bit of that last sentence did you not understand?’
    ‘I could have been killed tonight because you didn’t do what I asked. Bobby was trying to find me and when he phoned the hotel they had no record of me staying there. He didn’t think to ask if they had a Laura Collins in their hotel because he probably can’t even remember your surname. Jesus, I don’t understand you sometimes. It was the only thing I asked you to do!’
    ‘Oh shut up David,’ she shouted, ‘stop exaggerating. Your boss is not going to kill you.’
    My God, was she deliberately trying to wind me up? ‘Have you forgotten who I work for?!’
    ‘No! I haven’t!’ she shouted, ‘in fact I am sick of hearing about it!’ That was a bit rich, since I had to listen to every banal detail of her working day the minute she walked through my door each evening.
    ‘You stupid bitch!’ I screamed at her. My answer was the dead sound of her mobile being switched off, ‘Laura? Laura!?’ I didn’t know why I was still shouting at her. She had already gone.
    I’d had a shit evening. By now we were well into the early hours and getting nowhere. Finney and I had spoken to everyone and come up with zilch. My eyes were burning with tiredness. I was just starting to contemplate getting home for a few hours shut-eye to shake off the jet lag and start afresh in the morning, when the mobile began to vibrate in my jacket pocket. It was Vincent phoning from Privado.
    ‘I’m sorry to bother you so late man,’ he said.
    ‘I’m not sleeping.’ I told him, ‘what is it?’
    ‘Well… I’m afraid… ’ he seemed reluctant to come to the point.
    ‘Go on.’ I prompted him.
    ‘… it’s your brother like.’
    This was the last thing I needed. I persuaded Finney to drop me at Privado and leave me to it. I could always borrow Vincent’s car or get a cab if I needed one and I didn’t want Finney to see Danny in one of his states. Vincent was waiting by the door for me when I arrived, which I appreciated. He was either a very good bloke or he hadn’t heard about my fall in prestige now that I was the man who’d cost Bobby Mahoney a small fortune. He led me into the place.
    Privado was a low-rate, lap dancing bar just off the Quayside that Bobby controlled. It was pretty busy. It looked like the credit crunch wasn’t stopping men from coming in here and parting with large amounts of cash for a quick flash of a girl’s tits. The blue lighting was so subdued you would have had to squint to see anything though, even when the lass pressed herself right up against you, but they still turned up. There were half a dozen girls in the room, dressed in, or slowly removing, their bra and pants. The men looked drunk, sitting on their own around the leather seating that lined the bar’s walls. The girls made them sit on their hands so they didn’t get tempted to touch what they were supposed to just be looking at but that clearly hadn’t stopped Our-young-’un from disgracing himself. They straddled the men, perched on their knees and gyrated while they draped their long hair in the guy’s faces or rubbed their breasts together a couple of millimetres from their slavering mouths. The routines were all pretty similar but the men didn’t seem too bothered by the lack of variety.
    I saw one girl I recognised. Michelle had just climbed off a guy’s lap then bent down in front of him so he could stare at her arse. She gave her bum a half-hearted smack, but her eyes told me how bored she was. Who was she trying to kid, I thought, but then I saw the look on his face. His mouth was open wider then a guppy’s and his eyes looked like they were about to roll right up into their sockets. Clearly he thought this whole spectacle was an unrestrained display of raw, female sexuality, not the student-loan-busting source of revenue that Michelle viewed it as.
    It took a while to cross the floor while the girls were doing their thing. I had to virtually step over one of them as she writhed on the ground. The