The Boss Read Online Free PDF Page A

is stupid anyway. Our taxes are way too high, anyone can see that, but do they reduce them? Do they fuck. They stick to every penny like glue and so you get the ridiculous situation where you can buy booze so cheap in France and Belgium that it’s worthwhile for somebody like Steve to make a three-hundred-mile round trip to Calais, with the ferry and all, just to stock up. Not just worthwhile; he makes a living out of it. So he’s a smuggler, big deal. Smuggling’s not wrong, it’s just a symptom of unjust taxation.
    I would love to have been a smuggler. OK, well, I am, sort of, but I mean a proper smuggler, bringing gin in from Holland during the eighteenth century. I’ve got a book somewhere, which Nan gave me on my ninth birthday, which shows these guys in their big heavy coats and fancy hats, with pistols in their waistbands and knives in their boots. There even used to be women involved, including some really tough characters, and I used to daydream for hours about being one of them.
    It was only years later I came to appreciate another virtue of smugglers. I’ve always loved rebels, and any man who just doesn’t give a shit for the authorities has got to be at least a bit of a turn-on. That matters to me more than looks, more than how in he is, more than money or anything like that. A smuggler would be just perfect, some really big man with a devil-may-care attitude who’d fuck me bent over a barrel of gin while he held off three excise men with his pistols . . .
    What I got was Steve, with his beaten-up Ford Transit and a penchant for risky blow jobs. Still, at leasthe wasn’t likely to get hung, drawn and quartered at the drop of a tricorn hat, which was something. It’s just not a very romantic image – jeans and a hoodie – although who knows, maybe in three hundred years’ time girls will be daydreaming about the smooth, reckless lager and fag smugglers of the early twenty-first century?
    We’d chosen a night run, because the ferries are so much cheaper and there’s generally less hassle, or that’s what Steve said anyway. I knew the real reason, which was producing just a little tiny tingle in the back of my mind. The knack is getting the timing right. You go over on the last ferry that lets you catch the hypermarkets, then mess around in Calais for a bit and come back at dead of night. That also meant I’d be driving back at least some of the way, so I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift with the music, thinking of that huge smuggler, swearing defiance as he eased himself into me from behind.
    By the time I woke up we were off the motorway and passing the complexes where the Channel Tunnel comes up. Steve had driven fast and we had plenty of time, allowing me to swallow a Diet Coke and a bag of crisps before we got in line. After that it was simple, a familiar but enjoyable routine. Through Customs, ignoring the temptation to tell them we were international terrorists on our way to a conference on hijacking techniques, onto the ferry and up to the highest deck to watch the sea while Steve stuffed his face with burgers and chips.
    In no time we were in Calais and loaded up in not very much more, up to the limit of what the van could take but not another ounce. That’s another problem – if you’re too greedy. The police lurk on the A20 andpick anybody up if they’re down on their axles, which is an offence. It makes them almost as big a risk as Customs. We didn’t want to chance that, which was another good reason for coming back late at night, taking the back roads out of Dover and joining the motorway further up.
    We ate at a French seafood restaurant, my choice, and Steve’s second meal of the evening. It didn’t seem to bother him, with his hands folded complacently over his stomach as we sat outside drinking coffee afterwards. He looked tired and I was wondering if he would just doze off, but I