Shatter the Bones Read Online Free PDF

‘Well bring him in then.’
    ‘Ah…’
    He stopped, one hand on the doorknob. ‘Greg: what did you do?’
    ‘It wasn’t me! It was just … well we caught him trying to do a runner over the back fence, and Ellen was handcuffing him, when the biggest dog you’ve ever seen in your life comes tearing out of the bushes. And we kinda had to leg it. Barely got back inside with the arse still in our trousers. Left him cuffed to the whirly washing line thing.’
    ‘In the name of…’ Logan closed his eyes. Counted to ten.
    ‘Sarge?’
    ‘Whirlies aren’t fixed to the ground, Greg: the metal pole goes into a little hole. All he has to do is lift the thing up and he’ll be off!’ Logan wrenched the bedroom door open.
    A woman crouched in the corner wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of ripped jeans. Stick thin, all elbows and ribs, sunken eyes glittering like polished coal. Hands cuffed behind her back. Chapped and faded lips, pulled back over yellowing teeth. ‘We didn’t do nothing!’
    A small child – couldn’t have been more than three-years-old – was perched in her lap, wearing a filthy pair of Ben 10 pyjamas. Snot silvered the wee boy’s top lip, something brown smeared around his mouth.
    One of the forced entry team was standing over them, fiddling with a mobile phone.
    Logan brushed past, making for the window. ‘You better not be updating your bloody Twitter account, Archie.’
    The pudding-faced constable blushed and stuck the phone in his pocket.
    Logan stared into the back garden. There was a man in the middle of the wilderness, fighting with a rotary washing line while a black dog patrolled the knee-high grass around him. Shuggie Webster.
    At least Ellen had been bright enough to cuff him to the complicated lever joint that attached the four arms to the pole.
    He was getting a bit enthusiastic … Hauling, tugging, swearing, trying to break either the handcuffs or the whirly, getting tangled up in dirty yellow washing line. A big ugly fly caught in a plastic spider’s web. He turned himself upside down, both feet planted against the whirly’s arms, straining.
    Logan opened the bedroom window. ‘He’s going to dislocate his wrist if he isn’t careful.’
    PC Ferguson sidled up. ‘Don’t get any brighter, do they?’
    ‘Hoy! Shuggie!’
    The man froze, still dangling upside down.
    ‘Cut it out. You’ve been caught.’
    The dog stopped its patrolling and turned to bark and snarl up at them.
    The constable with the mobile phone appeared at Logan’s shoulder. ‘Bugger me… That’s a big dog.’
    The stick-thin woman shoulder-charged Archie, hands still cuffed behind her back, sending him stumbling into Ferguson. Both officers went crashing to the bedroom floor in a tangle of limbs and swearing.
    She shoved past Logan to the open window. ‘Shuggie! Pull the thing out the ground, you daft fuck!’
    Logan grabbed her, tried to haul her back, but she lashed out with a knee.
    Boiling oil flared out from his groin, curdling in the pit of his stomach, making his knees buckle. He steadied himself against the tatty wallpaper. Oh Christ that hurt.
    ‘Shuggie! PULL THE FUCKING WHIRLY OUT THE GROUND!’
    Outside, Shuggie finally seemed to understand. He squatted down as far as he could with one wrist cuffed to the articulated joint, wrapped his other hand around the pole, and hauled the whole thing out of the ground. He teetered for a moment, turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, then fell on his bum, tangled in the yellow plastic washing line again.
    ‘GET UP YOU DAFT CUNT!’
    Logan cleared his throat, gritted his teeth, grabbed the skeletal woman again and threw her onto the bed – she bounced off the mattress and went spinning over the other side, disappearing from view with a thud.
    The little boy wailed, tears and snot running down his puffy pink face.
    PC Ferguson was back on his feet, leaning out of the window. ‘COME BACK HERE YOU WEE SHITE: YOU’RE STILL UNDER