A Good Day To Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

about it to someone he knew. Criminals love to tell people about their crimes but in general it's not very practical for them to do so, so when they're in the presence of other criminals (and I suppose to Slippery I was one), they tend to let rip.
    'I did a job for a bloke. Your sort of job. A hit.'
    'Oh yeah?'
    'Yeah. I got approached by someone I knew to take out a bloke in London. The pay being offered was ten grand and I needed the money. It was a rush job, though. That's why I should have turned it down. I didn't have time to put him under surveillance, find out about him, or anything like that. I was told I had twenty-four hours to put him in the ground. That was it. So I told them I needed fifteen grand for a job like that, we did a bit of negotiation and I settled for twelve.'
    He sat back in his seat and drummed his middle and index fingers against the side of his face in arapid and irritatingly noisy tattoo. I suddenly remembered it as a habit of his from the past. He used to do it during interrogations, usually when he was mulling something over.
    'The problem was,' he continued, 'I didn't have a clue how I was going to do it, and I didn't have time to come up with any sort of proper plan. I reckoned I was going to have to knock on his door, hope it was him who opened it, and let him have it there and then. The client said he wouldn't be armed, so it should have been no problem. Anyway, I drove down to the victim's place the next night and I was waiting outside in my car, just checking everything out and psyching myself up to make my move, when I got a call on my mobile. It was the client again. He told me that our man was at home, but was about to go out to an all-night cafe in Clerkenwell to meet someone. If he got there and met the other bloke, then I had to take out both of them.'
    He sighed. 'And that was my second mistake. Rather than just say I was outside the target's house and ready to pop him there and then, I sniffed the chance to make some more cash. The client sounded really worried, like he was getting desperate, so I told him it would cost more to do two. Twenty grand in all. He was pissed off, but, like I explained to him, it meant a bigger risk for me, and so he went for it. He hung up, and then a couple of seconds later the target came walking out of hisplace, and I just watched him go when I could have taken him out.'
    I couldn't believe Slippery's stupidity, especially after telling me the importance of keeping things simple. He was no master criminal, but he'd always been pretty good at covering his tracks, so to make a sloppy and extremely risky decision in order to pocket a few more quid showed what I'd long suspected: that his successes against the forces of law and order had finally made him think he was untouchable.
    'And it fucked up?'
    'Well, that's the thing. Not at the time, no. I got the directions to the cafe and went straight down there. Then I just walked in with a crash helmet on, spotted the target chatting to the geezer he was meeting, and went straight over. They were the only customers in the place and they were so deep in conversation that they didn't see me until it was too late. I pulled my shooter, and that was that. Two bullets in each of them, then head shots just to make sure. Only one witness, the bloke behind the counter, and he did the right thing and kept his mouth shut and his hands in the air. I reckon the whole thing took about ten seconds.'
    'So what went wrong?'
    He shrugged and started the old finger tattoo again. 'This is it, I don't know. The whole thing happened a few weeks back, and there was a bit of a hoo-hah in the papers because one of them was acopper. I didn't know that, of course. I'd never have touched him if I'd known he was Old Bill.'
    'That's nice to know.'
    'Not 'cause I respect them, but because it's too much hassle. Anyway, I got paid the full amount and I didn't hear nothing more about it until a couple of days ago, when I got a phone call