Page 50 of Tell No One
Delaney took a quick glance around, then pulled the door closed as they left.
“What are you going to do with what’s in the boxes?” Tag asked.
Delaney walked past the car over to an area of thick shrubbery. He upended both boxes in the middle, then returned to the car.
“Fertiliser,” Tag muttered as Delaney dropped in beside him.
“It was us or them. Give me your gloves now.”
Tag peeled them off. Delaney put them in one of the empty boxes with his. On the way back, they’d be dropped into a rubbish bin.
“I feel as if I’ve stepped into the middle of someone making a film,” Tag said. “It’s as though none of it is real, but I can feel the bruises around my throat where that guy tried to choke me, the ache in my ear from his gun, the place on my back where the glass stuck in me, and I can still see two dead bodies lying on the floor with bullet holes. What I don’t feel is…bad about any of it. That’s what I can’t get my head around. I should feel bad and I don’t. Except, we’re not going to get caught, are we? Because I really don’t want to go back to prison.”
“They’ve gone, their car has gone. When they don’t get in contact with whoever sent them, it will be assumed they’re dead, or possibly, depending on what they were sent to get, that they’ve run, but no one’s going to find anything other than a burned-out car that might not even be linked back to them if they used false names.”
“What would you have done if you hadn’t been able to use the crematorium?”
“Buried them. It would have been a lot more work and riskier.”
“Did you ever think about calling the police? Tell them two guys had tried to kill us?”
“No. It would have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.”
“What do we need to do when we get back?”
“Make sure there’s no trace of what happened, then leave taking all the rubbish with us. I need to change cars.”
“And houses.”
“Yes.”
“I’m an inconvenience, aren’t I?”
Delaney didn’t answer.
“Well, I know I am. A liability and an inconvenience. I’m sorry. I know I talk too much and—”
Delaney reached out and put his hand over Tag’s mouth. It wasn’t to shut Tag up. Well, it was, but not for the reason Tag would think.
“I need to take a leak,” Delaney said.
He pulled off the road into a layby, switched off the engine and signalled Tag to get out of the car. As they walked away from the vehicle towards a waste bin with the boxes, Delaney said, “I might have fucked up.”
“Did you pee in your pants?”
“Do I even need to say I didn’t? There might be a tracker in the car, possibly a microphone.”
Tag sucked in a breath. “Then someone’s going to have heard me muttering ‘shit, fuck and bugger’ all the way to the crematorium. Along with ‘I can’t do this. I really can’t do this’, then ‘wow, look at me. I’m doing it’. I don’t think I mentioned the size of your cock this time. Sorry.”
Despite everything, that made Delaney chuckle. “The tracker is much more likely than the microphone.”
“But the car was in a locked garage.”
“That nobody should have known about. Even so…”
He stuffed the gloves in the bin, then the ripped-up boxes, and headed back to the car. “I’ll check the car when we get back to the house. Careful what you say.”
Tag nodded.
