Maxie’s Demon by Michael Scott Rohan Page A

that brought me back to these thugs or bandits or whatever they were. They could have taken the money right out of my hand. Or the hand with it, for two pins. They had a claim, and they were pretty good at getting straight to the point, and the edge too for that matter. I couldn’t make them out. Every time I thoughtabout them my head ached and my mind blurred. It must have been the dope floating about. They couldn’t really have been the way I saw them. Almost like the ghosts of the old-time smugglers or pirates who’d used the marsh, who’d maybe been sunk in it often enough, by the revenuers or their rivals. Or strung up on lonely marshland gibbets to rot away, bit by bit, tarred so they’d last as a warning,creaking in the icy sea breeze …
    Actuallyit was quite warm. I still shivered and looked behind me, not eager to see a dangling silhouette against the baleful skygleam. I didn’t, and what’s more I didn’t see the smelly boghole in front of me either, before it swallowed my foot to the knee and threw me flat in some brambles. It bred a healthy scepticism.
    I was being paranoid, that was all. Tento one they were just a raggedy-arsed gang of wild men, diddyboys or travellers or something, who’d come in to bust up a big dope deal – for the cash, not the dope, which is risky to market. That would explain why they kicked the stuff around – and got themselves and me an incidental high. I got some crazy ideas, they forgot the money. I didn’t; but then I was just a bit saner to start with, maybe.So, tough titty on them. To the victor, the spoils – especially if the victor doesn’t leave a forwarding address.
    Trouble was, the victor didn’t know what to do next. I couldn’t go anywhere like this, not without somewhere to dry off and warm up and get a few hours’ rest. I’d be conspicuous, I’d be remembered, leave a trail. Did I dare go home? It was a risk, but then so was anywhere, the wayI was now. I was rationalising, the rat heading back to its hole; but I didn’t see that at the time.
    The envelopewas getting battered, so I tucked it inside my shirt, giving myself a chest for a change. All the long way home it crackled and creaked against my heart. It was a bloody long way, too. By the time I got off the marsh, after much slipping and sliding and falling in pools of God knowswhat, it was nearly two. No buses running, not much traffic, no cabs and no free rides, at least when they stopped and caught the pong of marsh all over me. The Gollum look was not in that year.
    For that matter there weren’t many shifty little marsh-sodden characters wandering around with a small fortune up their jumper, traces of powdered heroin all over them and four drug-runner corpses someway back along their tracks. It made me feel a tiny bit conspicuous. So I had to be very careful about hitching. I mean, suppose I happened to thumb down a cop car—
    It didn’t bear thinking about. And I even had to make myself pass up a nice little MG I found down a back road, standing empty suspiciously close to a cosy hay barn. I didn’t dare risk getting nicked with this much on me, not to mentionthe traces of snow, and with my luck I probably would.
    Mind you, I was already inside and fiddling for the ignition leads before I thought twice, but that’s the force of habit for you. I was strong, though, and left the hayloft lovers to wonder why someone had filled the driver’s seat with slime and frogspawn during their little passionate interlude. Another one for the X-Files.
    Eventually Islopped and squelched my way to a late-night garage, stuck a coin in the carwash and hopped through it. I came out the other end soaked and foaming at the ears, but at least I didn’t smell, except of low-grade car shampoo. I really was Waxie Maxie now.
    Wet is pathetic when ponging is not, so a kindly soul gave me a place in the back of a car transporter and eventually dropped me off not five hundredyards from home. Round there five