Driving Big Davie (Dan Starkey) (20 page)

The other cop helped me lift it out. He gasped when he felt the weight of it. 'Christ,' he said, 'there must be millions.'

Davie nodded. 'There is. So close, and yet so far away. Now get in the fucking boot.'

'In the . . . ?'

'Just fucking get in.'

The cop climbed in.

Davie indicated for Cody to follow.

'We'll suffocate in there,' he said.

Davie nodded. 'That's the plan.'

Cody climbed in. Davie slammed the boot.

'We're not going to travel about with them in the boot, are we?' I asked.

'Of course we're not, you fucking bonehead.' He nodded towards the Land Cruiser. 'From now on in, we travel in style.'

I thought Davie was being remarkably calm about it. But then he wasn't doing the driving. I was behind the wheel of a stolen police car. Next time we got stopped he'd claim to be a hitch-hiker called Norris and I would go straight to San Quentin without passing my lawyer's office.

'Relax, will you,' he kept saying.

'That's easy for you to say.'

'Look Dan, the only two people who suspect us of involvement in killing The Colonel are those two clowns, and they're not even interested, they just want the gold. They won't even report that they've had their car stolen. It's not a police car — look at it, man. It's not equipped like one, is it? Where's the radio, where's the cuffs and all the crap we carry? They carry the siren about to impress people. What would they say anyway? First of all they wouldn't be able to handle the shame of having their car stolen, second of all they'd have to explain exactly what they were doing, and third even if they did call it in and the cops caught up with us and shot us dead, someone else would get the gold. So relax. We're home free.'

'No,' I said. 'Home is where the heart is.'

He smiled. 'You old romantic.'

'They're not really going to suffocate, are they?'

'Of course they won't. I came out here to help you get The Colonel, not to become a serial killer. They'll flounder around in the dark for a while, but eventually they'll work out there's a catch on the inside of the boot. They'll be fine. And look, they don't go away empty-handed. They get a free car out of it. It's worth over
five hundred
dollars.'

'As opposed to the millions we have in the back.'

Davie shrugged. 'Millions to someone. At the moment it's worth nothing to us. We can't go into McDonald's and slap one of those babies down on the counter and say, "Give us a Happy Meal." We have to find someone to sell it to.'

'You're right. How hard can that be? We just stand on a street corner like Del Boy. Shouldn't take long.'

He gave me a filthy look but didn't respond. He was right about one thing though. We were travelling in style. We were up high, the air conditioner worked without belching fumes at us, we were ant free and there was a great sound system, although it was kind of wasted on the Kris Kristofferson CDs in the multi-player. However, they made wonderful Frisbees. We trawled the radio for something suitable and ended up with a 1960s station whose every other record seemed to be Van's 'Brown-Eyed Girl'. When I was fourteen and suffering either from flu or puberty, lying in bed all miserable or ecstatic, I asked my dad to buy me the 'Brown-Eyed Girl' single from Aquarius Records just down the road from our house. He brought home 'Brown Girl in the Ring' by Boney M instead. I wasn't greatly surprised. This was the man who called Sylvester Stallone 'Victor Stallion' and thought George Formby had been the World Heavyweight Champion.

'What
are
we going to do with it?' I asked. 'The money? The millions.'

'We'll divide it up. Split it in two. Fifty-fifty.'

'And what's the first thing you're going to buy?' It was a dangerous game to get into, but irresistible.

'Nice car. Aston Martin. Big house. For my mum. Holiday home somewhere. Mauritius . . . I hear that's nice. Invest in the stock market, kind of fancy that. And I'll put a bit aside just for gambling. Monte Carlo. What about you?'

I shrugged. 'I think Trish has her eye on a new table for the kitchen.'

Davie smiled. 'You're not really cut out for this, are you?'

'Never claimed to be.'

'Yet trouble seems to follow you around.'

'That is indeed my destiny.'

'Yeah, Obi-Wan.'

We had left St Petersburg far behind and were continuing our journey south. We turned off outside Naples and ate lunch at a restaurant overlooking one of its beaches. We laughed and we talked and we wandered across the _ sand. To anyone who even noticed us we probably looked like just an average gay couple on holiday.

It was only when we got back on the road that the stormclouds really began to gather. Literally. There's nothing subtle about Floridian weather. Back home you can have grey clouds for days, weeks or months, it might rain every day or it might not rain at all. It can spit for
years.
In Florida, you see grey clouds, you start to batten down the hatches.

'I don't like the look of this,' I said.

'Spot of rain's not going to hurt us,' said Davie.

At about this time, lightning started to crackle across the sky.

In Florida they don't do their lightning by half measures either. At home, lightning looks as if a couple of fairy-lights have short-circuited. In Florida it's the end of the world. BOOM BOOM BOOM, went the thunder, CRACK CRACK CRACK, went the lightning. And then the rain started. I know you're getting sick of this, but at home — rain? Well, it can get you a bit damp. Occasionally you might get soaked. In Florida, on that road, in the sudden dark, it felt like we were under artillery attack. The rain pelted out of the clouds in thick sheets which smashed us, hammered us, flooded the roads and reduced visibility to fuck-all squared in a box in the time it takes a normal individual to chew an Opal Fruit. I kept driving, thinking we would pass through it, but it just went on for ever. We were crawling along, lights on full; my face was almost pressed against the windscreen, trying to make out the cars in front.

'This is crazy,' Davie said.

'Tell me about it. Christ, look at it.'

'We're going to get written off,' Davie said.

'We're going to be the richest corpses in America.'

Somewhere in front of us there was a sudden flash of light and a loud crack as a lightning bolt narrowly missed a car. Or else it really was artillery. I knew the Yanks were jumpy since September 11, but shelling us seemed a bit over the top. I would have given myself up at a polite, 'Excuse me.'

'Dan!'

I slammed on the brakes and just managed to stop us rear-ending the car in front. I'd been too busy admiring the lightning. Horns sounded from behind. To our left a massive truck roared past inches from us, impervious to the conditions or the danger. Big places have big weather, but this was Mother Nature's spectacular revenge for crushing her ants, or introducing them to E numbers. Either way I'd had enough.

'We have to get off the road, Davie, this is madness.'

'Just pull over onto the hard shoulder, wait for it to pass.'

'No. You can't even see the bloody markings — someone'll slam into the back of us. We need to get right off this road. I'm turning off at the next exit — we'll hole up somewhere for a couple of hours.'

I managed to keep us alive long enough to reach the next exit; I was expecting a motel or a McDonald's, but there were only farms and shacks and trees. If anything, it was even more dangerous because the road was narrower and there was no division between us and the oncoming traffic. Several times we were pressed heart-stoppingly close to flooded ditches as cars veered unintentionally across the invisible divide.

'You do know where you're going, right?' said Davie, wiping sweat from his brow. His hair was sitting dank on his head. He'd been as cool as a cucumber with a gun. He'd been in control. But this was beyond anyone's control, apart from Gandalf.

'South,' I said, 'then east.'

'I
know
that,' he snapped. 'But here and now, you know where you're going?'

'Of course I do.'

'It just looks to me like you haven't a clue.'

'Of course I know. We're going — straight ahead.'

'Where are we, Dan?'

'We're south of where we were, and we'll shortly be turning east. For fuck sake, Davie, I can't see the fucking signs.'

'Well, why don't you stop and ask someone?'

'Who? They're all in their fucking bunkers. Besides, I know where we are.'

'Ask directions.'

'You ask directions.'

'You're fucking driving.'

'And you're fucking doing nothing. You ask.'

'Ask who?'

'I don't fucking know.'

I drove on. He probably had a point, but I wasn't willing to concede it. It was Northern Irish politics in microcosm. I just drove. It didn't really matter where we were. The big weather was everywhere.

'It's getting heavier,' Davie said.

'Yes, I can see that.'

'How can it get heavier? It makes what we had earlier seem like a light shower.'

'I can see that too.'

'I'm only pointing it out.'

'Well, you don't need to.'

'Is it my imagination, or is the road getting narrower?'

'It's your imagination.'

'It is, you know.'

'Okay, so what do you want, a fucking framed certificate?'

'I just want to know that I'm on a road not a fucking dirt track.'

'It's not a dirt track. It's a road.'

'I just want to know we're not going to get stuck and some fucking big alligator isn't going to crawl out of the Everglades and bite my one good arm off.'

'Would you ever wise up? We're nowhere near the Everglades.'

'Oh yeah? Weren't we going south, didn't you start driving east about twenty minutes ago? Have you seen a sign? Hold on, I'll roll the window down and ask those fucking flamingos.' He mimed the action with extravagant arm movements. 'Hey mate, we're nowhere near the fucking Everglades, are we?'

I sighed. 'This is madness. Whose bloody idea was it to pull off the interstate?'

Davie cleared his throat.

'Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.'

'Then turn back, get back on it.'

'I can't. I've no idea where we are, and this road is too narrow, and it's starting to flood and
I'm
starting to worry about getting eaten by alligators, and I'm not entirely sure our insurance covers us for being dismembered by crawling fucking handbags.'

'Great,' Davie said. 'Fucking great.'

'It's not my fault.'

'Well, whose fault
is
it?'

'Yeah. I'm responsible for the rain. That's right. Don't be such an arse.'

'Huh.'

'Huh.'

We drove on. The rain got heavier. The road
was
getting narrower. Davie cursed and moaned and made sarcastic comments while I tried to maintain the stiff upper lip, mostly for his benefit, or to annoy him, because I was frantic inside. I've never been any good at physical manly-type things, like changing a light bulb or wiring a plug. The last time I had a flat tyre I put the car up for sale. Negotiating Mordor on a bad night was way beyond the limits of my experience or ability.

'Really, now, finally, turn back,' Davie said, 'or we're going to die.'

'We're not going to die. Just a little bit more,' I said.

'It's a fucking
Land
Cruiser, Dan, not a boat.'

'We'll be fine.'

'Oh yeah,' he said. 'Have faith.'

He rolled his eyes, then pressed his forehead against the glass. I drove for another five or fifty minutes, then finally stopped. 'Okay,' I said. '
Now
we'll turn back.'

'You just had to,' Davie said, 'go that extra mile. Just to make it
your
decision.'

'Don't be so childish, Davie. You get your way, and I still get criticised. I can't bloody win.'

'Yeah, right.'

The thing about Land Cruisers is they always advertise them on TV in much the same way as they advertise tampons: no matter how crap you're feeling, you can still go out show-jumping and water-skiing and mountain-climbing. The Land Cruiser could leap over volcanic rock, ford suddenly raging streams, negotiate snowdrifts and conquer sand-dunes. Unfortunately, it could do bugger all about being driven backwards into a water-filled ditch. It could do sod all about the back wheels slipping into six feet of floodwater and then upending the rest of the car. It couldn't toss life-jackets to us as we scrambled out of the windows and dragged our sorry arses through the muddy water. It couldn't give us a hand or a round of applause as we hauled ourselves up the mucky, slippy bank to some kind of safety. It couldn't do anything but sit there filling with water.

Finally we stood on the bank, soaked, caked in mud, miserable, the rain teeming down around us, the lightning still cracking out of the sky and the farts-of-God thunder rolling angrily around us, looking down at our stolen vehicle filled with gold and floodwater.

'Fuck!' Davie exclaimed angrily.

I joined him.

'That's just fucking brilliant.'

'I did my best, Davie.'

'Oh yeah.'

'Well, how was I supposed to know there was a ditch there? You didn't exactly get out to check.'

'You didn't fucking ask me to!'

'You could have volunteered. You knew I couldn't see anything.'

'You seemed to know what you were doing.
Now
I realise you didn't have a fucking clue. Now I realise what a wanker—'

'Aw, shut up.'

'No,
you
shut up.'

'Oh yeah, you're the big man, sank our car.'

'I'll fucking sink you.'

'Aye, you and whose army?'

'What age are you Davie, twelve?'

'Old enough to beat you, you stupid fucker. You've just driven millions of dollars' worth of gold into the fucking river.'

'I didn't do it on purpose.'

'Yeah, sure.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'I don't know what it's supposed to mean. Take a guess.'

'What the fuck are you talking about? You saying I drove in there deliberately? Like any sane individual would do that, out here, the weather like this?'