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buried in a tomb inside a small mausoleum. And yeah, I know where it is.
And
…’ He looked them over one by one.
    ‘I’m gonna go and rob the bitch.’
    *****
    They stared at each other for a second or two in stunned silence.
    Charlie was the first to speak. ‘Is this a joke?’ he asked. ‘You’re gonna rob a grave? A grave? Someone’s final resting place. A sacred place. You’re saying you’re gonna go and loot it?’
    Marco stared vacantly at him for a second. ‘Yeah,’ he then replied.
    Charlie looked away from him for the first time in what seemed like ages.
    ‘And where do
we
come into it?’ Nick XR2 asked, a suspicious look on his face as if he was only half buying what he was hearing.
    ‘What do you mean ‘we?’ Charlie snapped. ‘Aren’t you hearing this properly? He’s talking about robbing graves.’
    ‘He’s talking about free money, Charlie,’ Nick XR2 countered.
    ‘Re. En armatia…’
Charlie replied solemnly.
    ‘What isn’t a sin in life, Charlie?’ Nick XR2 responded.
    Charlie sighed and looked away again, defeated.
    Nick XR2 turned his attention back to Marco. ‘So, where do
we
come in?’ he asked again.
    ‘I can’t do it alone, otherwise I would. We gotta be at least six-handed.’
    ‘Six man job?’ exclaimed Nick Black. ‘Just to loot a grave?’
    ‘Yeah,’ Marco replied. ‘One lookout. One creating a diversion. Four doing the lifting.’
    ‘It’s gonna take four of us to lift the lid off a coffin?’ asked Nick Black with an incredulous stare.
    ‘It ain’t a coffin,’ Marco informed him. ‘It’s a tomb—a loading vault in fact—sitting inside a mausoleum; eight by four by three and a half, with a granite outer casing that, give or take, weighs around two hundred keys.
You know how heavy that is?
To get a clearer idea just picture yourself trying to pick up a sedated polar bear…’
    Nick Black took another toke on his spliff and reflected. ‘Yeah, that’s pretty heavy,’ he said.
    ‘And you have to lift it off from the floor up,’ Marco added. ‘It won’t slide off. It’ll take at least three of us, but probably four. I don’t wanna risk getting there and realise we’re one man light.’
    ‘You mentioned a diversion,’ said Nick XR2.
    ‘Yeah. I scoped the place out. There’s a guard on the gate who can see the mausoleum from where he’s stationed. We have to divert his attention ’cos there’s a chance he’ll see us and I wanna kill all chances of this going tits up.’
    ‘So, you’re not just any old petty inner city criminal then,’ Nick Black noted.
    Marco ignored him.
    ‘Why don’t you just do it at night?’ Nick Black quickly asked once he realised his quip did nothing but sent tumbleweed rolling by. ‘Then you won’t need
any
lookouts.’
    Marco looked him square on, that gleam in his eye again. ‘No offence, but I don’t fancy being stuck in a graveyard at midnight with a bunch of geezers I’ve just met. Besides, you wanna go traipsing in a cemetery after dark?’
    Nick Black glanced away, his mind’s eye conjuring up the scenario. The gloom, the stone angles staring at them in the moonlight, the gravestones where things below stirred once they caught a scent of their blood…
    A shiver raced up his spine, and he began nodding his head vehemently. ‘Yeah, yeah, I get your point,’ he said and took another long drag of his spliff.
    ‘Anyway,’ Marco continued. ‘There’s plenty of the good stuff to go round, so the extra men won’t make a big difference to each man’s cut.’
    ‘How much we talking exactly?’ enquired Nick XR2.
    ‘You like caviar for breakfast?’ Marco answered with a wry smile. ‘Look, a lot, yeah? Like I said before, greedy bitch. I know for a fact there’s a ring on her middle finger sporting an emerald the size of your left testicle.’
    ‘Well, that’s no good to us ’cos he’s got raisins for testicles,’ Nick Black said.
    Nick XR2 grabbed his nuts. ‘The word you were actually