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by Aidan Thorn

“Where does your pal get his information from, Danny?” Joe asked as the pair loaded a brand new 60-inch 4K Samsung TV into the back of the van, next to an Xbox One and a Sony sound plate. “I mean he’s always spot on.”

“Never you mind, lad. You just concentrate on breaking backdoors and keeping your gloves on when you’re inside. I’ll worry about where the next load is coming from, alright?”

They swung a door each and shut the back of the van.

“I’m not being funny here, right, but it don’t seem right, you and me taking all the risk breaking in and nicking the stuff and us having to kick back twenty percent to some faceless fucker that doesn’t even get his hands dirty.”

“Okay, so what do you suggest we do?”

“If we could find out how he gets the information, and get it for ourselves, we wouldn’t need to lose all that cash. Fuck, we’re already losing because we have to fence this stuff through Tony Ricco’s crew … It’s hardly worth doing it when you think about it.”

“Hardly worth doing it? Tell me, what else have you got going on at the moment that’s so fucking hot?”

Joe had to admit work wasn’t exactly easy to come by. Ricco had the whole city tied up on the crime front for anything that paid well and there was no way he’d be putting guys like Joe and Danny, who’d been in and out of the prison gates more times than a postal van, on his staff. Robbing houses of electrical goods and flogging them for peanuts was as good as it was going to get.

“Now get in the fucking van, next stop we’re looking at another big TV and the one after that we’ve got a brand new washer/dryer to pick up.”

Joe did as he was told. They moved on to the next two houses, and sure enough picked up a big TV and a brand new washer/dryer.

***

The trash cart sat in the middle of the road, pissing off the rush hour commuters. Lenny lifted the lid of a recycling bin as he wheeled it to the cart to be emptied. He took out his phone and sent a text:

MacBook Air — 13 Kings Road.

The cart hoisted the bin up and its contents fell in, cans, cartons and a MacBook Air box. Lenny didn’t mind being a bin man — the work was dull and he definitely did get his hands dirty, but then not in the same way that Joe and Danny had to.

Aidan Thorn is from Southampton, England, the home of the Spitfire and Matt Le Tissier, but sadly a city more famous for Craig David and for being the place the Titanic left from. Aidan would like to put Southampton on the map for something more than bad RnB and sinking ships. His first short story collection, Criminal Thoughts, was released in 2013 and his second, Urban Decay, was published by Grit Fiction in 2015. In September 2015 Number 13 Press published Aidan’s first novella, When the Music’s Over. 2016 has already seen the release of Paladins, a charity anthology which Aidan curated for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, and later in the year his second novella, Worst Laid Plans, will be published as part of Near to the Knuckle’s novella series.