Sergio put his pistol neatly back in the glove box, wrapped in a white handkerchief. He exhaled, letting out all the pent-up tension of the previous fifteen minutes. Tomas crossed the street and pulled open the door, settling into his comfortable seat. Sergio waited until his brother had clicked his seatbelt in and handed over his own pistol to be stowed, then set about slapping the marginally-younger man over the head again and again.
“What the hell is your problem? What is wrong with you?”
Tomas tried futilely to bat away his brother’s attack. “What’s your problem, hey? We got the stuff out the safe!”
“We got it alright,” said Sergio. “Only with my plan, that’s all we would have gotten! Not a triple murder rap into the bargain!”
“So?” said Tomas. Sergio let off his assault and threw the car into gear.
“So,” he said as he made the tires screech going round the corner at the top of the road. “Every cop in this godforsaken city would not be hunting for our heads this time tomorrow. Are you really this dense, or is it some kind of practical joke to you? I mean it must take work. Sometimes I doubt we’re really related, you know.”

The redhead cocked her hips sidewards and blew a kiss at the camera seductively as Anna pressed the shutter button. The red light below the glass eye of the video camera blinked off, and the smooth voice of the director from beside her said:
“Great, Candy. Great.” He sounded bored. He always sounded bored, somehow. “Now, get some clothes on.”
The redhead pouted and strode behind the camera, sliding on a threadbare robe.
“Where’s George?” said the director. “We need to shoot his side of the scene as well before we get to the goods.”
The goods. That was what he called the limp, lifeless faux erotica that he produced on a practical assembly line to make ends meet. Anna wondered what his sex life was like privately. Was it as perfunctory, as formulaic as the stuff he filmed? Or did he plumb ever more eccentric depths of perversion in the search for thrills his work couldn’t give him?
“Hey,” said the production assistant, tapping Anna on the arm. “Call for you.” She glanced over at the director, who shrugged.
“We’ll probably keep the lights set up the same anyway,” he said. “Go talk to your boyfriend.”

“Anna?” said the breathless voice on the end of the line when she picked up the phone, laying off the hook on the end table. The house had been pretty expensive for the day, but it was the only actual location in what was laughingly called the script.
“I’m here. Listen, we’re in the middle of shooting. What’s wrong?” she said.
“I just wanted to check you were alright,” said the voice. “I wanted to hear your voice.”
“Alright, so you’re dying?”
“What, I’m not allowed to be sentimental now?”
“It just seems out of character. Look, I’ll see you tonight, okay? I’ve got to go and make sure they point the camera in the right direction.”
“Goodbye Anna,” said the voice. She sighed.
“Bye, Tomas.”
She wondered if all career criminals were this needy.
When she got back to the ‘set’ she found they had started without her.

Tomas put the payphone down and pulled the door open.
“I couldn’t do it, Sergio,” he said. His brother groaned. “I said I’d see her tonight.”
“Well, call her again! Tell her not to come looking for us. If we’re not on the train by seven we may as well turn ourselves in to the police right there!”
“I can’t call her, she’s working,” said Tomas pathetically. Sergio growled in the bottom of his throat. How he had ended up related to a man like this he couldn’t fathom. It was probably his mother’s fault. Slave to his passions.
“Get out of the box,” he said. “I need to call Franco.” He pulled Tomas away from the receiver and stepped in, dialling Franco’s number rapidly.
Tomas glanced up and down the street. Red-brick buildings rose square and sharp-edged either side of the road, seemingly endless apartments over the street-level stores and cafes. Their own place wasn’t around here – Sergio had too much paranoia about calls being traced to make the call from a local phone. He wondered where Anna was shooting today. That lousy director she worked for had her up and about way too early in the morning.
Sergio was talking animatedly to Franco – trying to displace some of the blame for the situation at the house onto Tomas, and failing to make himself look much better in the process. He hung up and sighed.
“What’s up?” said Tomas. Sergio laughed bleakly.
“I’ll tell you what’s up. Sixty percent of our cut is up. We’re barely breaking even on this thing. And that’s if we get away.”
“I don’t know what you’re worried about. We didn’t leave any witnesses, did we?” Tomas said, puzzled.
“Yeah, but the cops tend to take issue when you kill three people in their home in broad daylight. They reckon that’s the sort of thing only cops ought to get to do. Makes them feel silly for going through all that headache to get there, if we can show up and just amateur hour our way into it.”
Tomas nodded knowingly. All he knew was that it had been a thrill. “So we leave tonight.” Sergio nodded. “And when do we come back?”
“We don’t, Tomas.” Sergio opened the car door and sat down in the driver’s seat. “That’s the point. Come on, we need to go to Franco’s.”

The director had decided to go handheld for most of ‘the goods’, which saved a lot of time on camera set-ups for the small price of wearing Anna’s patience for the smells, sights and sounds of real sweat and imitation sex as thin as they could possibly be worn. The first day on the set of one of these pictures, you could get hot and bothered over seeing a couple of beautiful people play-acting going at it like rabbits, but that went away pretty soon after the first day. Now it was mechanical.
“Anna, let’s do that bit again from the other side, for coverage,” said the director, gesturing to the writhing mass of nudity half-lit by the sun coming in the big screen door. “Back up a little bit, you two. Now, we’ll start from the top of the page.”
Anna glanced at the script. At the top of the page, in small letters, was printed: they fuck.
The director gave a signal, and George and Candy were in the throes of mock passion again. “Get a little closer, Anna,” he said. “Give them something to look at.”
Anna rolled her eyes and shuffled closer, panning the unblinking lens of the camera over George’s chest, then Candy’s. Going lower than that risked calling attention to the fact that their positioning was, frankly, all wrong. Still, they were quite good at pretending they enjoyed it.
“What the fuck is this? Who’s in the light?” said the director. A shadow passed over the two bodies in Anna’s viewfinder, and she looked up.

Sergio knocked on the screen door again, peering through. He hoped he had the right house, or he was about to catch hell from the naked couple that he could just about make out inside.
The door slid open, and he was greeted by some assistant, close-cropped hair and piercings.
“What d’you want?” she said. What he did next was key. He tried to think of the times he’d seen Tomas and Anna together. Moon-eyed, simpering. Pitiful.
“Is Anna there?” he said, forcing his voice to quaver a little bit in the way that he had heard it on the phone earlier.
“She’s busy. We’re shooting a feature for Degeneration Video,” said the assistant. “It’s a thriller.” Sergio looked past her to the tableau of nudity on the floor inside and realised with a tiny flash of embarrassment that they were both glaring at him. And there was Anna, crouched and blinking into the light!
“Anna! I need to talk to you!” he shouted over the PA’s shoulder.
“What?” she yelled back.
“Can you come over here?”
“I’m going to stay where I am! I’m working, Tom!”
“Listen, Anna! I didn’t want to do this on the phone, but we need to go away for a while, me and – and Sergio! I don’t know when I’ll be back, Anna! I wanted to say goodbye!”
Anna had straightened up and was now walking over, squinting.
“Tomas?” she said. Then her eyes widened. Goddamn observant woman. “Fuck this,” said Sergio, and reached to his belt for his gun. A swing sideways and before she could react the punky PA was down for the count. Sergio yelled something along the lines of “get on the ground”, and everybody did apart from Anna.
“Take me to Tomas. Is he alright?” she said. Shit.
“He’s fine,” said Sergio, twisting her wrist behind her and jabbing the gun into her back. “No funny business.”
“Why the gun?” said Anna.
“So I can shoot you if you ask stupid questions,” said Sergio. “Now let’s go.”
As he pulled her towards the exit, he heard the director yell after them: “Leave the camera!”