Sly said, ‘Obviously I want everything figured out, but you know. I’m being looked at for this thing, so I gotta know what’s happened. Who’s running the job?’

Both of them looking straight ahead now, like folks do in an awkward car ride.

Sly said, ‘Did the lawyer set it up? Is it one of Page’s jobs?’

Andre didn’t answer, but he felt like this was going somewhere.

Sly said, ‘I had to get Lamar’s guy off my back. I said I didn’t know anything about it, but maybe it was a Terry Page thing.’

Well, that didn’t bode well, did it? The surfer man wasn’t even a cop, and Sly had still given him the lawyer. That was potentially a major issue. Andre felt like he needed to make an executive decision here.

Sly brought the cigar up for another kiss, and Andre, still being casual about it, said, ‘No look, you’re doing it wrong: you gotta draw it in slow.’

‘I am.’ Frowning, and then talking through his teeth: ‘Dish is fucking shrow.’

‘Yeah, but even slower. Like, sloooowww.’

He couldn’t see it would make a difference—slow or fast, you still got a lungful of fumes. But Sly seemed to take his advice: arched his back a little to put the cigar on an uphill tilt, and drew the smoke in gently.

Andre watched his cheeks hollow, the big man slightly cross-eyed as he watched the flaring ember, but he couldn’t make it a clean pull. He spluttered at the top of the breath, and then hunched into a wheezing cough, hands on his knees and his face approaching beetroot colour, and that was when Andre grabbed him around the neck and hauled him into the pool.

It was a slow tumble, like something from a nature video: an animal shot at the river’s edge. Andre went straight forward over Sly’s shoulders, and for a moment he felt he was going to lose his grip—end up in the water alone, with a lot of explaining to do. But he held on, and with his weight up around Sly’s head there was no hope of balance—no hope of anything except a big splash, and then they were descending in slow motion through the water, falling backward, Sly on top and Andre still clinging to his neck with both arms.

The pool wasn’t deep, and he felt his shoulder blades hit the tiled bottom. Sly shouted something—a long stream of bubbles erupting from his mouth, and a weird aquatic garble that seemed to come from everywhere: more drowned ghost than man.