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dancing dust. Consequences. This was what Baxter meant. That actions had reactions. Except there came a point where you had to stop worrying, else you’d never get anything done. So he’d shot a guy on the way out: so? The guy would live. All they had to do now was not get caught, and they’d had to do that anyway.
    Trent mumbled something nobody heard.
    Arkle said, ‘I’m going for a piss.’ He didn’t need one especially, but those Chinese pensioners were weirding him out. Wasn’t there something oriental they should be drinking: gin slings or tiger beer? Instead of Guinness?
    When he’d left, Baxter said, ‘He’s losing it.’
    Trent shifted. ‘He’s always been losing it.’
    ‘This is worse. The crossbow? He’s going mental.’
    ‘It was under his coat. I didn’t even know he had it until –’
    ‘I don’t blame you.’
    They both knew Trent couldn’t have stopped him if he’d been a traffic light.
    ‘So what you saying?’ Which whatever it was he’d better say fast, because Arkle would be back soon. And Trent didn’t think Arkle wanted to hear it, which meant nobody in the immediate area wanted to be near Arkle hearing it either.
    ‘I’m saying’ – and Baxter leaned forward: ‘I’m saying he’s going to blow it, Trent. Soon. And that’s not something we want to be caught in the middle of.’
    ‘We’re okay so far.’
    ‘Skin of the teeth. Think about it, that’s all.’
    Baxter leaned back and the conversation was over. Trent took a pull on his lager, and felt his body start to relax.
    In the corner, a trivia-quiz machine went through its endless routine: snippets of games, each of which guaranteed a fifty-quid payout, unless the snippets weren’t telling the whole entire truth. Somebody had lit a cigarette, and the sunlight vectoring from window to bar billowed suddenly with blue-grey smoke, the way a river swirls with mud when you drop rocks into it. It took Trent a moment to notice that the cigarette was his.
    ‘Kay coming?’ he asked, without knowing he was going to.
    ‘No.’
    ‘She all right?’
    Baxter said, ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’
    ‘No reason,’ Trent said.
    Arkle appeared through the door from the toilets, and stood surveying the scene for a moment, as if presented with an unexpected vista. It wasn’t clear whether he’d lost track of where he was, or was just momentarily appalled by it. On his way back he paused by the Chinese men, or Trent assumed they were Chinese, and said something, pointing to their pints of Guinness. The Chinese men looked at each other. Arkle said something else, or maybe the same thing again, and this time pointed to the bar’s top shelf and its row of bottles: the usual suspects, plus a couple of fairly exotic interlopers, notably more dusty than the rest. The barman arrived. Arkle kept pointing, and the Chinese men were served with a couple of glasses of one of the exotics. Then Arkle nodded, satisfied, and came to join Trent and Baxter, wiping his shaved head with his big right hand as he approached; letting it rest there a moment as if he were about to test his skull’s strength; see if he could squash it in his own grip. It was the kind of competition, whatever the result, Arkle would figure he’d won. Which was a good reason for not getting involved in serious disagreement with him.
    Sitting down, he said, ‘So what I’ve been thinking is, maybe it’s time we did things a little differently.’
    They looked at him.
    ‘I mean, Price? Seriously? He’s taking half of everything we earn.’
    ‘He sets it all up,’ Baxter said in a neutral tone.
    ‘So? How hard could it be?’
    He began humming, a tune Trent didn’t recognize, though it was a safe bet its composer wouldn’t either. Down the bar, the two Chinese men rose and went.
    ‘You know,’ Arkle said, ‘I’ve got a good feeling about the way things are going.’ Though he wasn’t happy about the unfinished glasses they’d left behind them.
    ii
    ‘They come