The Price of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

likely. There’s one family in the estate, about four or five branches of them all told," Leonard said. "They’re notorious around here, always up to something."
    He looked around him furtively before passing a slip of paper to me, as if we were approaching the security check at the airport and the paper was a wrap of coke.
    "Couple of registration numbers I think might be involved. White transit vans both. The second one of them is Vinnie Butler’s."
    As I was walking to my car, a blue BMW pulled up outside the house and a petite, expensive-looking woman in her sixties with short auburn hair and a fur coat got out. She looked out over the council estate with pursed lips, including me in her dismayed sweep, then clipped up the drive of the Leonards’ house. When the door opened, she ignored the children who had run to greet their granny and were frolicking around her legs, instead embracing Annalise and laying her daughter’s head on her shoulder as if she were a wounded bird.
     
     
     

THREE
     
     
       The broken bicycles and trashed stereo systems were strewn around the laneways and greens of Michael Davitt Gardens, a sure sign Christmas was on its way. Some houses had gigantic inflatable Santas and Rudolphs in their tiny gardens; some had flashing lights on their roofs, or tinsel and spray snow decorations in their windows; some were boarded up with bolts on their electricity meters. The pavements were carpeted with dog shit and broken glass; pizza boxes and fast-food wrappers festooned the gates and boundary walls; old trainers and plastic bottles filled with gravel hung on cords lassoed around telephone wires. There was nothing breathing on the street save for a few sullen dogs.
    The two reg plates Leonard had given me were both for white Ford Transit vans; I had already spotted half a dozen on the estate; it was the vehicle of choice for plasterers, roofers, any tradesmen who had to carry a lot of bulky materials around with them, alongside anyone who, strictly speaking, wasn’t a qualified tradesman at all, but who fancied his chances quoting low for a building job, completing half or three-quarters of it badly and then doing a bunk, or robbing your house and driving away with all you own, furniture and appliances included. Their drivers cut you off on the roads, and they let their kids ride up front in the cabin without seat belts, let alone car seats; they felt invincible in their white metal crates and drove accordingly. I didn’t like white Ford Transit vans and now I was parked four doors away from Vinnie Butler’s, trying not to look conspicuous in a forty-two-year-old Volvo with RIP scraped on the hood. I might have been many things, but at least I wasn’t the cops.
    Kids were drifting onto the streets: soon they’d be all over me, or at least, my car; not for the first time, I questioned the stupidity of driving a conversation piece, particularly when I didn’t have any of the lingo: if something went wrong with it, I called Tommy; his telephone number was the extent of my auto know-how. I called Tommy now to see what he knew of the Butlers. His phone went straight to voice mail, so I left a message. Tommy was a reliable guide to the dodgier citizens in south Dublin and north Wicklow, not least because he’d invariably had dodgy business dealings with all of them at one time or another.
    I waited fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour, reading the same headlines over and over in yesterday’s
Irish Times
and trying to ignore the three young lads across the way from me playing street hurling with a tennis ball. That’s how I almost missed Vinnie Butler: when the ball smacked off my windshield, I turned to see the lads scarpering around the corner; when I turned back, Vinnie Butler’s Transit van was pulling away from the curb. I pulled out after him, drew up behind the van at the junction that led from the estate out onto the main road, and tailed it onto the N11 and south for a few miles