Midday, page 24
I’m certainly safe now. There’s no catching up with me here. I adore Rome so much. There’s character on every street. But it’s been slightly lonely, living here for seventeen weeks without much company. I made friends with a Dutch couple, who were staying in the first hotel I was living in, but ever since they went home I’ve had nobody to share a drink with. That’s all about to change. I look at my watch and release an excited puff of my cheeks. Two minutes past twelve. I’m so excited about our new life. My favourite thing about Rome is these rooftop terraced bars. There is no better place on the planet to be on a bright day. It’s not hot, but the glare of the sun is making me squint. My eyes take in as much as they possibly can from this height. The Hotel Forum overlooks the Colosseum and the grounds of the Roman Forum. In the distance you can just about make out the steeples of Vatican City. That’s a country all to itself. The smallest country in the world. I’ve walked through it twice now, laughing at the hypocrisy of Christianity. Religion is a joke, but it’s a funny joke – ye gotta give them that. The big tourist attractions aren’t the reason we’ve hungered to live here. It’s the tiny nuances of this ancient city that made us crave living here. My stroll down Via Margutta and Via Gregoriana this morning still had the same effect on me that it had the very first time I walked it ten years ago. I love the effortlessness of the architecture. Nothing’s flashy, but it’s all beautiful. It makes Dublin seem really ugly. Rome makes every city unimpressive by comparison, in fairness. I take another sip of Château Petrus as I breathe in the excitement of today through my nose. That’s the sort of wine I can drink now. I just paid almost two thousand euros for this bottle. I guess that’s what multi-millionaires do. As I place my glass back down onto the table I hear a faint shuffle of footsteps brush the patio ground behind me. My stomach flips over.
12:00
Darragh
Prison isn’t bad. We’ve a games room here. There’s an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 in it. I’ve been masterin’ FIFA over the past few months. Nobody can beat me Man United team. Prison’s a bit like a boys’ club. It’s fine once your cell door is open, but when you’re locked up it can get a lil borin’. All you have for company is your own mind and that often plays tricks on itself. I look at the clock on the wall of the meetin’ room. It’s just ticked by midday. Jennifer is always late. I bet she’s not here for at least another ten minutes. I’m not bothered. It’ll be more of the same. She’ll try to get me to plead guilty again. I left so much DNA at the fags’ apartment that she feels I’ve got no chance in me trial. They found me fuckin’ cum all over the television. Fuck it. I never thought of that. I don’t know what I was thinkin’. The cops are tryna get me to rat JR out but I ain’t givin’ in. I’m stickin’ to our plan.
This prison doesn’t look like anythin’ I’ve seen on the telly before. It’s actually a bit modern. It’s clean. It’s certainly cleaner than my bedsit. The bed’s a bit uncomfortable, but that’s me only real complaint. The mattress is so thin it’s like sleepin’ on an ironin’ board. But I’m slowly getting used to it. The screws are fine. Most of them are keen to get along with the prisoners. They just want to get through a work shift without any drama. There’s a couple of dicks, but most of them really couldn’t give a shit. I haven’t had a run in with any of them. In fact, I haven’t had a run in with anyone. The prisoners seem okay to me too. I just keep meself to meself. There are a few guys that I play computer games with but that’s about it. It’s winner stays on down in the games room so my company can change every ten minutes. I’d like to be known as The FIFA King but that nickname hasn’t really caught on. I guess you don’t get to come up with your own name in prison. I’m not bitter about gettin’ caught. I think we were just unlucky. Me lawyer says there were three phone calls made to the cops at around twelve o’clock on the day of the murder. They know who two of them are. Michelle and Noah from the banks. Vincent caved at the last minute, tryin’ to save Ryan’s life, and told them everythin’. But he fucked up. He got his pussy-ass boyfriend killed. I hope he’s carryin’ that guilt around with him. The cops seem to think it was my partner who made the third call. I don’t believe them. JR would never have ratted me out. We’re too close. They keep tellin’ me I can halve the amount of time I’ll have to spend in prison if I give him up, but that’s just not gonna happen. I’m going to get through this on me own. My trial’s supposed to be only two months away but me lawyer seems to think it will be delayed past that. She’s not happy with me. I can sense it. She really wants me to rat JR out. She doesn’t understand the rules of bein’ a gangster.
When I’m alone in me cell I think through the mornin’ of the murder again and again. Sometimes I get a little paranoid about JR’s involvement. It often flashes through me mind that he wanted to keep all that money to himself. But why did he give me fifty per cent of every other robbery we carried out? It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve added up in my head that he musta made me over eighty grand in the short few months that we worked together. And why did he set my computer up on the day to make it look like I was home all mornin’? He gave me an alibi. He gave me the disguise. Besides, JR rang me to warn that the cops were on the way. Why would he do that if he was trying to frame me? None of it adds up. He’s hardly an enemy. He’s a good friend. A great friend. Probably the best friend I’ve ever had. In fact, he’s definitely the best friend I’ve ever had. My lawyer and the cops have a different twist on it though. They haven’t a fuckin’ clue. They just want to put an end to this whole thing. One prisoner told me they have quotas to reach anyway. My lawyer would benefit from me taking a plea deal and reducing my sentence. She has a reputation for plea deals and that’s how she gets so much business. I like her though. Jennifer must be over fifty but she’s hot. Her face ain’t great. She’s got a few scars dotted around her cheeks. I’m not sure if it’s from acne or a knife. But she has that Latino body all men drool over. Big ass, big hips. I like spendin’ time with her even if she does try to bully me a bit. She complains that I don’t say enough in our meetings, but that’s because all I’m ever thinkin’ is how much I’d love to bend her over and fuck her South American brains out. Besides, even if I did want to give JR up, I don’t really know that much about him. I know his name, that’s about it. In fact, I don’t really know his name. I know his initials. Billy, the barman who introduced me to JR, told me once that he thought his name was Jack somethin’-or-other. I think it began with a B or a D. He says JR looked like a guy a mate of his used to play golf with years back. He wasn’t a hundred per cent sure though. But even if I went down that road, I have no idea where Billy is now. The last I heard he was moving to Galway to become a barman at some jazz club. I don’t even know Billy’s surname. I could look into it, I suppose. Maybe I will in the future. But I’m certain JR will contact me at some point. We can hardly talk now. These cunts are trackin’ everythin’ I do. JR will have to wait it out, probably for another couple of years. That’s a shame. I miss him. We spent so much time together. I certainly have the time on my hands to be patient. I have to shut out the bullyin’ from Jennifer and the cops. I can’t let it play on repeat in me head while I’m in me cell alone. I’d probably ask for a less annoyin’ lawyer if Jennifer’s ass wasn’t making me dick hard.
I guess the good thing about prison is me urges to kill seem to have gone away. I still think of the faces of the three men I’ve murdered. I can only remember the first two from the photographs that appeared in the newspapers over the days after their deaths. But Ryan’s face is very clear to me. I can even hear him talkin’ to me sometimes. I feel a sense of success over the cops that they think I’ve only murdered one man. I may have to spend the rest of me life in prison, but I still got away with murder – twice! I’m a proper fuckin’ gangster. I’m gutted I got caught but I’m fine with how my life’s gone. If I had the chance to go back in time to meet JR in the Deer’s Head, I’d do it all over again.
12:00
Vincent
I never returned to the penthouse. I couldn’t. Chelle and her husband Jake organised the collection of my furniture and all my possessions. I’ve never set foot in any of the banks again either. My colleagues understood. I told them I was moving to Sydney to live out the rest of my life where Ryan always wanted to live, that I was dedicating the rest of my existence to his memory. The bank sorted me out with a very handsome redundancy package. They rushed it through as quickly as they could. Half a million euros. Thank you very much. That added to the €890,000 profit I ended up with for the sale of the penthouse. I couldn’t leave Dublin until the police finished their investigation, though. There was a period of two weeks where I was under serious consideration of being involved in the crime. Nobody at the bank thought I had any part in it but one of the detectives did. He came down very hard on me. Even my tears of self-guilt didn’t give him reason to sympathise with the fact that my boyfriend had just been murdered. I suppose he was just doing his job. The other detective looking into the case was always on my side. Maybe they were just playing the good-cop, bad-cop card. It seemed that way to me. But after a couple weeks of intense uncertainty, they relieved me of any involvement. They’re still on the lookout for whoever escaped with the cash. Darragh Galligan isn’t giving up his partner in crime. That freak wasted no time in putting a bullet through Ryan’s head. My ex-boyfriend died instantly. I imagined Ryan’s face every minute of every day for the next three months. I couldn’t get what he would have gone through that morning out of my mind. But I was keen to put that whole life behind me.
The glare of the low sun makes me blink as I push through the glass door. It reminds me of the morning of the killing. A waiter greets me with a friendly smile but I don’t need his assistance. I know who I’m looking for. There’s no mistaking the back of that head. It’s always had more hair on it than mine. He feels my presence and spins around just before I get to him.
‘We did it,’ he whispers into my ear as he bear-hugs me. We squeeze each other so tight that I feel our organs kiss. I guess we are as one.
‘Yes, we did,’ I reply before leaning off him.
I never doubted my brother would pull this off. Jack had new passports and identifications set up for us through his contacts with his old mates, and I set out a plan to spread the money without any suspicion. We’re both Canadians now. Stanley Lam and Roy Gagnon. Fucking Stanley! I’ve actually become very fond of it ever since Jack first told me what my new name would be. It’s grown on me over the past few months. The paperwork is official. The guys Jack knew from his gangland days know all the tricks with that sort of shit. The real Stanley Lam and Roy Gagnon are dead, but their deaths have never officially been recorded in Canada. We are them now. I taught Jack how to spread the money throughout Europe. The main bulk of the eight million is dotted around four different banks in Switzerland, but we’ve bank accounts in London, Brussels and here in Rome. Between us, we possessed the expertise to pull this off. We just needed to make sure the execution of the morning went without a hitch. I knew what the rough tiger kidnapping plan was, but Jack purposely didn’t tell me when or exactly how we were going to pull it off. We planned it that way so that my fear would be very much real on the day.
We both fell in love with Rome separately. But I didn’t even know he’d been to the Italian capital up until recently. We were shit at being brothers. It was only after Frank and Karyn died that I began to look at my brother as a real person. He was always just in my life as my ‘brother’ before, whatever the fuck that is. But we grew really close when we were both going through rough patches in middle age. Frank’s murder happened around the same time I found out Ryan was fucking kids. The only people we could turn to were each other. We learned how to share our feelings. Now we’re about to share the rest of our lives together – as multi-millionaires, in our favourite place in the world. Hopefully there’s a lot of days to come. We’re both classed as middle-aged, but with him one year over the fifty mark and me one under it, the chances are we’re both over the halfway line.
It was Jack who raised the initial idea of robbing ACB. But he was genuinely only joking. We laughed at the thought. We were two genuinely nice guys whose lives got turned upside down at the exact same time. But the more we joked about the plan, the more it came together. It actually became a no-brainer. We were shocked we could both be so dark. We figured out a way to get rid of both Ryan and Darragh in one genius swoop while helping ourselves to our dream lives. I felt that we deserved our dream lives. We’d both been served shitty hands up until that point. I try not to think about Ryan at all. I don’t feel a huge amount of guilt. He wanted to die. I’m not sure if Bob Nugent wanted to die, but he deserved to. The shit I saw that sick fuck doing to young kids in videos he posted to Ryan as TeenCum069 was vomit-inducing. He left a few hints in the forums about who he was and where he was based. It didn’t take long for Jack to track him down to use him as the ultimate test for Darragh. We had to know if he could kill. It all fell into place for us. The serendipity of it all would almost make you believe in fate. Jack and I had always arranged to meet up here on the rooftop of the Forum Hotel at midday exactly six months from the day of the robbery.
Darragh’s upcoming trial gave me a big problem. I was due to be a key witness for the prosecution. My lawyer fought hard to keep me away from the courts. The police weren’t happy but I was finally pardoned on the grounds of personal grief. The detective who had come down hard on me during the investigation turned out to be my hero. He told the courts they had more than enough evidence to put Darragh away for life without me needing to take the stand. The little fucker had actually wanked all over our apartment during that morning, spraying his juice all over our TV. You couldn’t make it up. Besides that, there’s a mountain of evidence stacked against him. He even had the gun he killed Ryan with in his pocket when he was arrested. He’s clearly not a bright little prick at all. Jack nailed it. He got everything spot on. So did I. I was brilliant. Not only during the morning of the robbery, but in the months after it. I had to play the victim to perfection and I fucking nailed it. Everybody was smothering me with sympathy. Even the board members went out of their way to fawn over me after flying over from America. They have a plaque dedicated to Ryan in each of their Irish branches now. That makes me laugh. The only time I almost came out of character was when Clyde Sneyd snuffled under my arm at Ryan’s funeral to cry into me like a little baby. I should’ve been given an award for the straight face I kept as I patted the top of his head. And to think somebody once told me I couldn’t act!
A Note from Bloodhound Books:
Thanks for reading Midday . We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads to help others find and enjoy this book too.
We make every effort to ensure that books are carefully edited and proofread, however occasionally mistakes do slip through. If you spot something, please do send details to info@bloodhoundbooks.com and we can amend it.
Bloodhound Books specialise in crime and thriller fiction. We regularly have special offers including free and discounted eBooks. To be the first to hear about these special offers, why not join our mailing list here? We’ll never share or sell your details to anyone else.
Readers who enjoyed Midday will also enjoy
StandStill by J.A. Marley
Cargo by J.C. Mac
Acknowledgments
