Blood Is Dirt Read Online Free PDF Page A

nations snapped in the sea breeze, their ropes pinged against the metal poles.
    â€˜The Croix du Sud was back...’
    â€˜Your two million dollars is out there,’ I said, pointing across him back towards the port. ‘About three hundred metres.’
    â€˜You’re still going with me... aren’t you?’
    â€˜Now that we’re away from the bar, the beers and the chasers, now that you can see how black it is out there in the
cocotiers,
now that you can hear the sea and the wind, I thought I’d give you a chance to think about whether you reckon there’s somebody standing out in the middle of that lot with two million in a suitcase.’
    Napier looked to where I’d been pointing. In the bright lights of the Novotel car park I saw the sweat start out on his forehead. He wiped a finger across his brow and dabbed the palms of his hands on his trousers. His tongue came out to try and put some lick on his lips.
    â€˜Where’s this guarantor you’ve just spoken to on the phone?’
    â€˜Lagos,’ he said, turning back, his mind drifting off to a time when this was all over and he was on a flight back to Paris with his cash in the overhead.
    â€˜Why don’t we
drive
in there?’ he asked, the light bulb coming on in his head.
    â€˜We could, but there’s only one way in and one way out and once we’re in there we’re stuck in the car, an easy sedentary target. If we’re on the hoof we can leg it through those palm trees and there’s nobody who’d be able to get a clear shot at you through that lot.’
    They were good words to use, ‘target’, ‘leg it’, ‘shot’, but they didn’t infect his judgement with a germ of terror. He sat in silence, staring into the dash, mouth open, jaw tense, gunning himself up.
    â€˜You don’t think this is a funny place to hand over two million dollars?’
    â€˜No,’ he said, pinching the septum of his nose, thinking about something else now, and then making up his mind about it. ‘If anything goes wrong out there, Bruce, you should... you will get a visit from my associate.’
    â€˜The nonexec one you didn’t tell us anything about?’
    â€˜That one,’ he said. ‘She’s my daughter. The company put her through an MBA, that’s all. She runs her own business, nothing to do with me.’
    â€˜She have a name?’
    â€˜Selina,’ he said.
    â€˜Well, I hope I never get to meet her.’
    â€˜No,’ he said, turning to the window where he set about filtering all the doubt out of his mind while his eyes drank in the blackness of the wind-rattled coconut palms.
    He started out of the car. I grabbed his arm.
    â€˜No talking. Quiet as possible. If they’re out there they’ll know we’ve arrived. The first person to talk is me and’—I whipped the Camel out of his mouth and tossed it out of the window—‘no smoking.’
    We walked to the edge of the tarmac. The security guards at the gate had their backs to us. We dropped off the raised car park and trotted into the coconut palms. We waited a few minutes until our eyes were used to the dark and walked on. The ground was firm between the palms. It wasn’t long before we found the patch of beaten earth and a rough table where the city people came to drink beer and breathe air with a dash of the sea in it.
    I sat on the ground with my back to a coconut palm and watched Napier in almost no light at all sitting on his hands on the table under a palm-leaf lean-to trying to forget about smoking Camels. We sat there for more than half an hour. The wind whistled up quite a few false alarms for us but in the end nobody showed. A little before a quarter to ten I stood up and whacked the back of my jeans.
    â€˜I’ve got to take a piss,’ I said. All the beer I’d drunk sat like a medicine ball in my lap. Napier hissed.
    A car, with its