Nine Lives Read Online Free PDF

place had given up cleaning and maintenance a long time ago. The place was a complete dump. It was dirty and dank, and there was some strange thumping noise coming from the bathroom upstairs. Saqib had grabbed the pizzas without thanks or payment and told him to get the hell out. Pissed off and feeling used, the boy had walked through the hallway to the door, alone.
    As he turned the handle he’d suddenly spotted a handgun resting on a table by the entrance.
    Like a kid in a sweet shop, he couldn’t resist. Fuelled by his feelings of being used the boy had grabbed the weapon, tucking it into the folds of his coat and then left. Thank you guys , he’d thought as he rushed off down the street, the pistol hidden inside his jacket. He couldn’t wait to show his friends.
    Another gunshot brought him back to the present, as the second boy fired at the glass targets again. He checked his watch. 8:55 am . He had to be at work in the shop for his Mum before 9:30am which meant he also had to take the gun back, something he was dreading. But much as he didn’t want to, he didn’t have a choice.
    ‘Bad news. I need to go,’ he told his friends. He turned to the third boy, who was yet to fire the weapon. ‘Want to try before I leave? I need to take it with me.’
    The third teenager nodded eagerly.
    Taking the weapon from the second boy, he aimed at an empty jar, closing one eye like he’d seen Clint Eastwood do in all his movies.
    He pulled the trigger and the jar exploded.
     
    Four thousand miles away the overweight man from the yacht was about to break the habit of a lifetime for the second time that day.
    People called him Henry, but that wasn’t his real name. He’d adopted it at the age of thirteen after watching the gangster movie Goodfellas . To this day, he could still remember the first time he saw the film and the tremendous effect it’d had on him. As an impressionable young boy looking for an identity, it had changed his life. He’d started wearing the suits and tracksuits the actor Ray Liotta wore in the movie. His voice suddenly developed a New York twang. And he started calling himself Henry after the lead guy in the movie, Henry Hill.
    A number of older boys around him had seen this as opportunity for humour. With a short attention span, Henry the boy had never sat through to the end of the movie so he hadn’t discovered that the character Henry Hill ended up being a rat for the FBI. They’d made cheap jokes, mocking him, deriding his stupidity; to his frustration, Henry knew he was too young to retaliate. Some of his tormentors were nineteen or twenty, far bigger and stronger than him.
    But he’d been patient and he’d waited, never forgetting who’d ridiculed and teased him.
    And when he was sixteen and been given a job as a halcone for a Riyadh cartel, he’d asked his new friends for some help on a private matter.
    They’d gladly agreed.
    To this day, his favourite method of killing someone was lifted straight from the Mafia stories that came out of New York. He had the person held down and sedated, and when they were unconscious their feet were passed through the holes of a cinder block, the gaps then filled with quick drying cement and locking their ankles tight.
    He liked to be there when they woke up, watching that first moment of confusion and vulnerability as they wondered where they were. He would wait until the moment they realised their feet were lodged in over seventy pounds of cemented concrete.
    By then, they were already being carried towards the water.
    He’d often wondered what went through someone’s mind as they went beneath the surface, dropping like a stone. Death was certain. They’d know they had less than a minute to live. Did they fight to the end? Did they pray? Try to hold their breath? He smiled. If he could, he would watch every single one of them land on the seabed. He’d seen it once, when he’d ordered an associate who’d betrayed him thrown into an aquarium. The