Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page A

facing towards the immigration doors by the looks of it, so it had only caught them from the back as they stood over one of the bodies. Both their faces were obscured by the camera angle but all the same I had kn o w n with a lurch in my gut who they were the instant I had seen the photo.
    But what I didn’t understand as I stared at the pixelated image, was why Wibble and Charlie had each come to a riot armed only with a medium sized stuffy bag.
    *
    As the split had come about over the last few months it had made me reassess everything I had seen so far in my dealings with Damage, Wibble and The Brethren, and made me question my understanding of what I had seen.
    It was a moot point now I guessed , but it had made me wonder. The big mystery in my mind was still who had killed Damage and why. Knowing now about where the club politics had been heading I asked myself if it had actually been Thommo who’d moved against D amage in a bid to become national P rez ?
    I had always dismissed the thought before as i t seemed to me that it would have been a very , very risky plan without some serious back up given D amage ’s position, contacts, and importance to the club’s business.
    But the present situation cast it all in a new light. W hat , I wondered to myself , if the roots of this went back further? What i f Thommo had believed he actually did have back up? Serious back up? What if the Yank s had put him up to it? To stop Damage who had been planning t he split that Wibble had then gone on to execute ?
    Did that also explain the decision about succession? T hat Thommo had t ried to become P rez but had been held off by the D amage loyalists led by Wibble? If so, that could explain why it was so sudden , and why it had been a triumvirate , as a way of balancing, at least temporarily, the potentially warring factions .
    It would also explain the beef between Wibble and Thommo which had always seemed to me to have had a real personal edge to it.
    *
    But back at the here and now, t hey had worked out the practicalities , I’d give them that.
    When I’d got out last time it had been in a hurry and I’d had to make my own arrangements. ‘We ain’t no fucking travel agents , ’ Wibble had growled at me when I’d started to ask about where I should go. And to be honest, once I’d got my head around the fact I was still alive at all and started thinking straight, I realized of course that The Brethren were the last people in the world I wanted knowing about where I was intending to hole up.
    This time it seemed was going to be different.
    Bung and the striker were here to collect me , but I had time to pack some things .
    ‘Oh don’t worry too much, we won’t be that long,’ said Bung vaguely, when I asked how much to take. The plan was they would d r ive me back over the border and across to Belfast airport. Bung and I were to fly back , and he would sort me out with a hotel room once we got there, the striker got the balls ache of the ferry and then slogging it down from Stranraer to get the car back.
    The striker wasn’t saying a word, but then I didn’t expect him to. Strikers very much lived a speak when spoken to sort of life. Training , Damage had called it. While a full patch was around, a striker would always defer to let them do the talking. The hierarchy and etiquette was ferociously strict. A striker had to give respect to a patch, not only of his own club, but of any other friendly club, since as the logic went, even as part of another club, the man had earned his patch, whereas the striker hadn’t. A striker couldn’t even call a club member ‘brother’; he hadn’t yet earned the right.
    ‘ So Bung’s your sponsor huh? ’ I asked.
    The guy stayed dumb until a shrug from Bung let him know he could respond , but even then he just nodded warily .
    ‘ You want to ask him what happened to the last guy .’
    ‘ I don’t give a shit what happened to the last guy ,’ he said .
    OK , so he had to hold