Shredder Read Online Free PDF Page B

British teeth, blackened and yellow and pointing in all directions. He raised the blade to the level of my chest, and I knew that in the next instant it would flash across my face and open it to the bone. “A scar is a lesson. It goes deep enough, you’ll never forget it.”
    “For God’s sake, you don’t even know why I’m here—”
    He grinned. “I don’t give a damn.”
    One brisk kick sent the blade flying over his head. It bounced off a wheelie bin behind him and went skittering off across the concrete. I heard Old Cardigan curse, and glimpsed him turn to go after it, but at that moment I was busy piling backwards towards the wall behind me, making sure the largeguy with his arm around my neck slammed his big beardy head hard against the iron drainpipe.
    He grunted in pain and his grip weakened, and I grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm, holding his hand locked back while I turned to his pal, Little, who was piling towards me in fury, his right fist pulled back over his shoulder. I let him throw the punch, dodged to my right, and slammed my free fist square into his pockmarked face, feeling the gristle crack and flatten. He yelped and clutched his nose as blood and mucus squirted through his fingers.
    It gave me time to push Large away, far enough to land a hard kick to his solar plexus with the ball of my foot. While he staggered, wheezing and gasping for breath, I swung him round in a circle, hoping to drive him headfirst into the brick wall, but he collided heavily with a dustbin instead. The clang was gratifying, but it meant he wasn’t out of the fight just yet—and now Little had recovered, wiping blood and snot off his face and onto his pastel-green polo shirt, and he came back at me twice as hard.
    The lid of the dustbin had come to my hand as Large slammed into it, and now I grasped the handle almost instinctively and raised it like a rusty metal shield, diffusing Little’s flurry of punches. Hesnatched at the rim, hoping to wrench it out of my hands, so I let him have it, in the nose again to start with, then ramming it against his cheeks and jaw as he stumbled backwards.
    By now the old man had found the razor and was cleaning it on an old tissue. Little had fallen back against the pub’s back door, his legs liquefying, while Large was slowly getting to his feet. Grasping the handle of the bin lid firmly, I slammed it down on the back of his head a few times to encourage him to stay on the floor.
    Old Cardigan was smiling his ghastly black smile; he was crouched, the razor once more in his right hand, circling it slowly, inviting me to come and try my luck. I didn’t need luck; I didn’t even need the dustbin lid. Chucking it aside, I strode forward, seized the old man’s razor hand in my left and grabbed his thin bony old face in my right.
    “You know what gets my goat about old people these days?” I said. “They think they have nothing to learn and they never sodding listen. I came here to talk to the Guvnor, not listen to some nasty old fart witter on about his childhood.” Old Cardigan was still grinning, and he hadn’t dropped the blade. His bony left hand had closed around my right wrist,as if to pull it off his face, but his grasp was light and feeble as a cobweb. I forced his right wrist upwards until the cutthroat razor was a finger’s breadth from his eye, and all he did was twist his head to the side and offer me his jugular. He had balls, for an old guy, but I noticed he’d missed a bit when shaving that morning. Ironic.
    “What the fuck’s been going on here?”
    I looked behind me. Large was on his hands and knees, shaking his head; Little had slumped away from where he’d fallen against the pub’s back door. Standing in the open doorway was a heavyset guy in his late twenties with a golden tan and thick black hair cut so short it stood up. His clothes were expensive and well-cut, concealing the extra bulk he carried around his shoulders and midriff. He struck me as a