Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Stupid place to hide—phone doesn’t work. Waited till we went by, looked back, there he was. We crossed the Marine Highway, he crossed with us and back again.”
    “Shit, he’s after me. I, I owe a guy some money …” John began and trailed off, embarrassed.
    “I owe a guy some money too,” I said.
    John looked me in the eye and for some reason we both started laughing.
    “You know, we’re both a couple of fuckups,” John said.
    “We’ll lose him by cutting over the railway lines. Course, if chain-smoking has killed your lung capacity …” I said.
    John grunted. We ambled back behind the Royal Oak pub and pretended to take a piss against the wall. As soon as we were out of sight, we legged it into the shadows, climbed over the car park wall, scrambled over the wire fence that led up the railway embankment, cut over the railway lines and up the other side. We threw ourselves into the field and hit the road running.
    We looked back but the tail had to be still looking for us in the shadows of the Oak’s car park. Laughing, breathless, we parted ways.
    “Last we’ll see of that bastard,” John yelled, waving at me as I walked up the road.
    “Aye,” I yelled back happily.
    I laughed. John laughed. And if only we’d bloody known. The man, of course, was none of the things I’d suspected he was. No. Someone quite different. For two lines of force were converging that night. Two pieces of information. Two motivators. From the man following me. And from what Dad was about to tell me when I got home….
    The house. A bungalow on a side street near the supermarket. Overgrown garden, peeling paint, Greenpeace posters, a peaty smell from the blackened chimney, boxes of recyclables in the yard. “A disgrace to the street,” some of the neighbors called it.
    Da stood in the kitchen checking his flyers for the millionth time. The place a mess of papers, even more of a mess than usual. Da was running for the local council as a Green Party candidate. He was up against the popular deputy mayor. Poor Da, on a hiding to nothing. One could only hope that it would be such an easy campaign for the deputy mayor that he wouldn’t smear Da with his son’s mysterious resignation from the police.
    “Dad, what are you doing up, it’s almost one o’clock?” I asked.
    “Working,” he said.
    “Dad, please, I hate to be a broken record, but everyone agrees you won’t win.”
    “I know I won’t win. Not this time, maybe not next time but soon. Momentum is growing. Speaking down at the Castle Green for an hour this morning.”
    “Dad, can you lend me some money?”
    “You know I can’t.”
    “I don’t mean a lot, I mean, like twenty quid.”
    “Alex, I’m trying to run a campaign, I’m totally strapped,” he said, his melancholy blue eyes blinking slowly. He yawned and ran a bony hand through his short gray hair.
    “Listen, if I get more than five percent of the vote in the election, I get my thousand-pound deposit back and I’ll give you money for anything you want.”
    “Yeah, white Christmas in Algeria, pigs flying, and so on.”
    “Why Algeria?”
    “Why not? There’s the Sahara.”
    “Well, because there’s also the Atlas Mountains in Algeria, where it might actually snow, so your little analogy—”
    “Dad, are you going to lend me any money or not?” I interrupted.
    “Alex, I don’t have it,” he said sadly and shook his head.
    “Ok, forget it,” I said.
    I opened the cupboard and tried to find a clean mug to get a drink of water. The kitchen was as messy as the rest of the house. Old wooden cupboards, filthy with dust and stains. Fungi in Tupperware, weird grains in bags, chai teas, bits of food that had long since become living entities. It was as if he’d cleaned nothing since Ma died six years ago. I’d only been back living here for the last two months, ever since they foreclosed my mortgage, but it was so disgusting I was thinking of moving in with John.
    “Don’t forget the dry