It Wasn't The Bullet (9) “Oh.” said Charlie With that she leaned over and cupped his face in her hands and kissed him lightly on the lips, then wetted them with her tongue. Charlie wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight to his chest and kissed her back. They lost themselves, there was no time, no space, nothing but the physical boundaries of their bodies. The last thing Charlie remembered clearly thinking was that he had only ever felt like this once before and had forgotten the all-invasive emotional abandonment. When they awoke, they found themselves in the bedroom. The bed sheets tangled up and pillows on the floor. Although he felt satisfied and warm inside, way back in his mind was a feeling that he had done something that he shouldn’t have done. He kissed Samantha on the forehead and she moaned, her eyes flickered and opened. Her eyes focused on Charlie’s eyes and she smiled. The room had the musty odour of love making, and she inhaled lustily through her nose. “Can we do that again? I feel like I’ve been at a health spa for a week. Mmmmh.” “Would you like some breakfast? Coffee or tea?” Charlie asked. “No way. I am going to make breakfast for my man. I used to read all these terrible romance novels that always had a paragraph about waking up and feeling like this. And I am going to be romantic and you’ll damn well like it!” She struggled out of his arms and hopped out of the bed. Naked and giggling she skipped down to the kitchen. After the breakfast and a shower Charlie asked Samantha where the nearest town was that had bigger selection of shops than the tiny village post office. She replied it would be Tunbridge Wells, some sixteen miles away. He had taken out a bundle of notes from his bankroll and gave them to her as she headed out to get the bits and pieces they would require for the next day. While she was gone Charlie had time to reflect seriously on the whole of his situation. The stress of imminent incarceration he been put aside, albeit temporally, and he felt comfortable in these present surroundings. He realised he had not grieved for Terry; his anger still pushed those shattered emotions away. It felt like there were two bare wires touching in his brain, arcing and sparking, flooding his thoughts with stroboscopic light. His rage at being shot. He remembered little about it, he recalled being too high, the rain, the fury, he thought he knew who was responsible for his friends murder and that night he spent alone pacing, brooding and getting angrier and angrier until it led him to an uninformed decision fuelled by heroin, cocaine and vodka. He knew where he wanted to go, but he just couldn’t pull the memories together. It was completely blank. It was a terrible feeling not knowing who had tried to kill him. His mind quieted, the white noise stopped and his thoughts became icy clear, the wires held apart by sheer force of will. He would avenge his friend’s death, and he would find out who shot him. It would just have to wait awhile. He drifted to the present and cursed himself for sleeping with Samantha. He should not have succumbed to his desires. He smiled at last night’s recollection; it wasn’t like he wasn’t attracted to her, quite the opposite. Now was not the time to complicate an almost impossible and improbable situation further. He decided to play it out and leave her behind as gently as he could manage. H went into the kitchen and looked in the fridge, much to his joy and surprise he saw four cans of beer. He picked up two of them and took the three steps to the back door, and sat back in one of the weather beaten wooden chairs that were lined up on the small paint peeled veranda. He gazed into the woods and listened to the sounds of the English countryside like he was never going to hear it again. Charlie must have dozed off because he was jolted awake by the sound of Samantha’s car kicking up the gravel on the driveway. He got himself up and went to greet her and help with the couple of bags she had laying on the front seat. She snatched the third black paper bag away from him saying that wasn’t for his eyes. Then she kissed like she had been away for days and headed into the house. Samantha spent the rest of the evening concocting a book of unintelligible letters and numbers. Under Charlie’s advisement, she was using different coloured pens, writing some with her right hand and some with her left to make it appear that there were two people making entries in the log. Charlie busied himself scuffing up some overalls and making them seem well worn. He spent the rest of the time helping Samantha make up numbers and letters and asking to see what outfit she had put together for tomorrow’s adventure. The late evening and night was spent in the same fashion as the previous with the exception of Samantha setting the alarm clock for eight o’clock in the morning. The bell shrieked into Charlie’s dreams and he snapped awake. He gently moved Samantha’s head from his chest and she stirred and murmured something that he couldn’t quite make out. He made his way downstairs to the chilly kitchen and put the kettle on. While he was waiting for it to boil he smoked his first cigarette of the day and gathered the together the makings for a pot of tea. He shouted up for Samantha to get a move on. She appeared ten minutes later bare foot and wearing an oversize bright blue t-shirt, padding into the kitchen she stroked Charlie’s hair then made her way to the sink, where she poured a glass of water. She drank it in one go, exhaled noisily, and said, “Boy, I needed that.” She padded back to Charlie and made herself comfortable on one of the kitchen table chairs, “What time should we leave?” “Fairly soon, it will take us an hour and a half to get round the M25 and I would like to be there before Clay gets there. I will make the phone call at ten” “Ok, Charlie, I will go and transform into Miss Scarlet. I’ll be about forty-five minutes.” Charlie nodded and watched her as she left the room, in another place another time he would have felt completely different. He lit a cigarette and started to put on his disguise. His beard was now acceptable, as a visual deception and his hair, which Samantha had cut fashionably short, had changed his image enough that you would probably have had to know Charlie personally to recognise him. Charlie had chosen to only take one car to St. Albans. They would make a brief pit stop in Gatwick and pick up Ralph’s car; it was faster and less noticeable than Samantha’s. He glanced at the kitchen clock and saw time start to speed up; he called up the stairs for Samantha to hurry up. There was an edge in his voice; tension was beginning to build in his mind. He heard her coming down the stairs and picked up the car keys ready to rush her out of the door and onto their journey. When he turned out of the kitchen and saw Samantha he stopped dead in his tracks. She was a vision of sex. The dark brown wig she had put on completely changed her whole persona, it tied in the rest of the look. Short black skirt with the promise of a garter belt inches away, a bold red tube top filled out by breasts held in check with some form of restraint that created a cleavage that would send a Jesuit priest running toward the nearest sapling. For a noticeable moment he was completely at a loss for anything to say. When he had recovered a bit of his composure under the smirking gaze of a very contented Samantha he said, “Bloody hell!” picked up the holdall containing the props and went out of the back door to avert being even later, and probably saving Samantha the chore of getting dressed up all over again. The change of cars was uneventful and expensive. They left Samantha’s mini in the same car park and headed around the worlds consistently biggest traffic jam and were in sight of St. Albans by ten forty-five. Charlie was half wondering whether they should have got there sooner to put a proper observation of the place but as they came to the small roundabout in front of the pub, he realised there really was nowhere to watch other than in plain sight. He turned left and brought the car to a halt two hundred yards away from the corner. He got out of the car and then clambered in the back door. Samantha started to chuckle at his efforts to put on the overalls in such a confined space. He was doing up the last of the fasteners while he stared into her eyes and reiterated the conversation earlier on the journey, “Samantha, all you have to do is be the centre of attention. Try and get everybody focused on you. I’ll come in when I see Clay arrive, I will look at you, but don’t acknowledge me in the slightest, not even a sly wink or a nod in my direction. If Clay sees it he will suss that we are together and immediately jump to the wrong conclusion. Believe me, this man is a highly experienced undercover cop, he will not hesitate to react in any way that will he deems is necessary to his survival.” He saw that she was looking a bit uptight and nervous, as she well should be, so he craned his face forward and kissed her softly on the forehead, he placed his hand delicately on her cheek and continued, “Now if anything does go wrong, stay where you are, look horrified or whatever emotion is required and try to leave before the police arrive. But it won’t, when you see me leave, wait ten minutes make you apologies and get out. I’ll meet you,” he searched around the road for a suitable place that he could wait unnoticed, “You see that opening just past that red tiled house,” she nodded, “I’ll wait for you there. Don’t spin the tyres in a getaway style, just move off gently and come and get me.” She gazed back into his eyes and sent him a nervous smile, “Oh Charlie, please be careful. I won’t let you down not even for an instant.” She pushed and kissed him hard on the mouth and he opened the door and got out. He turned before he headed toward the pub and saw her give what appeared to be a self-reproaching pep talk, like an athlete might make to his self before the big game, then she executed a slow u-turn. He, too, took a couple of steadying breaths before he headed to the corner and his fate. Ralph’s car sped past him and Samantha never even turned her head, he watched as she turned the corner and the vehicle disappeared into the small car park of the pub. Charlie carried on walking while he removed the tape measure and can of spray paint from the bag. He pulled on a baseball cap and then marched boldly onward to the intersection. As luck would have it, there were two abandoned traffic cones laying injured by an ancient pile of sand outside the brand new drive of the corner house. He glanced briefly around and seeing no one in the vicinity, he scurried to collect them and press the battered objects back into service. Once outside the pub he put down his assistants and the light traffic cursed him but drove around. Then he started to intensely measure nothing in particular and spray hieroglyphics on random parts of the tarmac. All the while he was keeping all his sensory attributes concentrated on picking out one face. There were five cars in the car park. As the Hammers had only been open for about ten minutes, he assumed that one or two of the cars must belong to the staff and the others to early customers or left over from the night before. The last, of course, being Ralph’s. He kept up his non-sensical survey of the road and even answers a question from an irate taxpayer demanding to know why Charlie was going to ‘the bloody council was going to dig up more of the bloody road’; Charlie said it was to make way for a by-pass. He thought the old soldier was going to have fit and broke off his surveillance to watch and listen as the man marched, ram rod straight, cursing ‘the government, lily livered liberals and the bloody spoiled kids of today’ until he was out of earshot. He turned his attention back to the area surrounding the pub; the speckled clock mounted on the wall of the tobacconists across the road said the time was eleven forty-five. In sixteen minutes Clay would be sixty seconds late. As that thought crossed his mind, a dark brown Ford Granada clipped the kerb and bounced onto the aging asphalt of the parking area outside the pub. ‘That just has to be a police car’ Charlie guessed, and the driver stopped and got out of the driver’s seat, he knew that it was Clay. Clay turned to Charlie, and shouted, “Oi! Move those fucking cones, you nearly caused an accident.” Charlie gave him a v-sign and Clay stomped off into the pub. The Tesco’s plastic bag clutched in Clay’s right hand had not escaped Charlie’s attention. He waited five minutes and then gathered up his little friends and returned them back to the heap of sand they called home. Charlie was going to remove the overalls according to the original plan, but now Clay would dismiss the uncouth council worker and probably not even register his arrival in the bar. He took a deep breath and tossed the tape measure and paint down next to the lifeless cones, checked for the tenth time that the small notebook was still tucked into his inside pocket, and headed into the pub. As he walked he realised that his previous assumption of how many people were in the bar was way off. There must have been at least ten people spread along the length of the bar, and completely unexpectedly a colossal rush of jealously smacked him square in the face. Just about all the men were either listening or talking in Samantha’s general direction. If she noticed him walk in she did not flicker an eyelash, she just crossed her firm legs and Charlie got the impression that she was very much enjoying herself. He spied Clay at a corner table, his back to the wall. Classic survival stuff. He was nursing an insipid looking half pint of beer. Charlie turned to the bar and tried to get the barman’s attention. He was engrossed in the giggles and shaggy hair of tarty girl at the bar. He was plenty shocked that he had felt such an unexpected emotion even in the privacy of his own mind. ‘Concentrate’, he chided himself. The bar man finally caught his eye and Charlie ordered a pint of lager and then turned slowly round to look in Clays’ direction while it was being poured. He was pleased that Clay didn’t even take his gaze off the door for an instant; quite surprisingly the beard and overalls had entirely fooled him. He heard the barman ask him for one pound-fifty and he reached in his pocket for the change. All the while his attention was riveted onto Samantha, who suddenly called out, “Eric! Are you going to pour me another drink or not? Stan says he’s going to buy it for me. Come on I just got my new job, and every one is going to celebrate.” ‘Who the fuck is Stan!’ Charlie swore to himself, all the time thinking ‘she is a natural. Just perfect, she had the presence of mind to pull every one’s attention back to her and away from him; who now appeared to be some kind of loser menial worker. Perfect. He gathered together his thoughts and prepared to play a game of bluff. He walked over in Clay’s direction and sat himself down at the table next to him. Charlie took a sip of his beer and placed the glass gently down on the square cardboard beer mat. He lit a Marlboro, and glanced over at Clay. “Nice of you to be on time, Cassius.” Clay was startled and moved his mouth soundlessly, totally surprised. His eyes locked into Charlie’s, he slowed down and got a grip on himself. His anxiety got the better of his outward façade because he put his hand onto the plastic shopping bag to reassure himself that it was still there. “You know this is fucking madness Charlie. If one person recognises you we’re all up shit creek.” There was definite panic in his voice, “Fucking Green is having kittens about this,” he gestured to the bag, and therefore Charlie assumed, his gun, “I’m sure he’ll find out it was me who took it. He’s turning the whole place upside down. He took it into it into his own fucking hands to do the press conference, upstairs is going bloody barmy. What the fuck have you and Green got going? He really wants your balls. Look give me the book and you can take the gun, just never fucking speak to me again.” Without even a slight hesitation he put the bag on the floor and pushed it over to Charlie with his foot. There was a burst of laughter from the bar and Charlie was thinking ‘this is just too fucking easy. Clay is really spooked.’ “Don’t you want to look at it first?” “I don’t have any choice but to believe you, you know what I did, and you know that I’m in this too deep already. I should have just told you to fuck off and left it like that. Or told fucking Albert to kill you!” It sounded to Charlie like Clay was feeling sorry for himself and was into a lot heavier stuff than Charlie had first guessed. He reached into his pocket a set the little notebook down on the table. He took a drag of his cigarette and looked back at Clay, “Here you are. A bit more of your murky past hidden away.” He picked the book up and flicked through it, and then pretending to replace it back in his pocket followed Clays lead and dropped it on the floor. He reached down and picked up the bag. The weight wasn’t right, “Bullets.” Clay tried to appear ignorant, “Clay, give me the fucking bullets.” He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and blatantly handed Charlie the two full magazines that were always with his gun. The laughter continued at the bar, and Charlie was certain no one neither knew nor cared that these two men were in the midst of a clandestine conversation or even alive. Clay got up and bent over in front of Charlie, his face so close that Charlie could smell Clay’s sweat, “I mean it, you fucking evil cunt, if I ever hear from you again I’ll have you fucking killed. The only reason you aren’t dead now is you did save my life. And perhaps my daughter will grow up to be nothing like me if I play fair with you just this once. We’re even. Have a nice life.” Clay straightened up abruptly and walked quickly out of the bar. Charlie sat back in his seat and lit another cigarette form the butt of his last. He drank his drink slowly until he felt his heart rate slow down, then he positioned the gun inside his overalls and followed Clay’s footsteps out of the bar. Samantha, he knew, saw him and reached for her drink. The door shut behind him and closed on a chapter of his life.
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