Page 145 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Like I said, we found that motorbike?—”

“You found the motorbike, but you were looking for the rider.”

“Shit. What do you have for me?”

His eyes became sly, cautious, sleekit.

“Spill it, son,” I said.

“Prelims: you’re not interested in a bit of petty larceny, now, are you? From a professional standpoint?”

“Was it in Carrick?”

Killian smiled. “It was well out of your jurisdiction. It was at the airport. That’s not even the RUC, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. That’s the Belfast International Airport Constabulary. Whatever you did at the airport is not my concern.”

Satisfied, Killian continued. “So I’m running a wee team at the airport. Distraction and lift with my cousin Kate, you know how it is.”

“Sorry, what are we talking about here?”

“Kate’s a redhead. Sixteen going on twenty-five. Distraction and lift. Standard stuff.”

I had never heard it called this before, but it was easy enough to grasp what he was talking about. “Your cousin distracts male travelers at the airport by asking about a gate or a flight or something while you steal their bag or their wallet?”

Killian shook his head. “I don’t do the lifting. It’s a three-man job. Kate distracts them, I keep watch for the peelers, and Luke, me partner, he gets accidentally jostled into the mark by the crowd and lifts whatever he can and he hands it to me. If it’s a wallet, I strip it of its money and leave it on a seat. Someone’ll turn it in, and the mark’s usually so happy to get his passport and credit cards back, he doesn’t give a shit if the money’s gone. Kate is the key. She’s so fucking innocent, they never associate her with the wallet going missing. Nine times out of ten, they actually think they left it there on the seat.”

“Nice little arrangement. And what if it goes wrong?”

“Almost never goes wrong. Luke’s so deft at the lift and the handover that if they catch him, he doesn’t have the wallet on him. It’s already with me.”

“Almost neveris the key phrase, I’m guessing here.”

Killian nodded. “Almost never. And yesterday was one of those almost-never days...”

“I’m listening.”

“So yesterday we’re doing the morning rush-hour flights at Belfast International and we’re doing a healthy business.”

“What’s a healthy business?”

“We have a hard limit of ten marks in a session and then we call it quits and go. The airport police are fucking eejits, if you’ll pardon the expression, but even eejits catch on eventually.”

“What happened?”

“We were on mark number eight and we’d taken over four hundred quid. Healthy score, you know? And I let Kate pick the marks. She’s an old hand and she can weed out the troublemakers and the undercover cops. And she starts doing the old song and dance to this guy, asking him for gate thirteen, and Luke takes his wallet and I get ready for the handover, but this fucking guy, I can’t believe what I’m seeing, he grabs Kate by the wrist and has her on the ground and with his other hand he has Luke by the wrist and has him on the ground. Christ, he’s fast. Nobody’s that fast. But he is. Amazing. So they’re on the ground and the airport fuzz come running over and I’m about to get the fuck out there when I look at his face and it dawns on me that I’ve seen it before.”

Chills. Fucking chills down the spine, man.

“Motorcycle Man.”

“Motorcycle Man.”

“Are you sure?”

“I never forget a horse or a face.”

“So what did you do?”

---