To Die For Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cole?’
    ‘Of course Bobby Cole. The casino job.’
    ‘That was Cole’s casino?’
    ‘Didn’t you know?’ King said.
    ‘No.’
    Robbing Cole was madness. He wouldn’t rest until he had us all strung up. Maybe he’d killed Simpson. And Beckett. If he had, why didn’t Kendall realize it? But then, maybe he did. Maybe he was distancing himself from the whole thing.
    ‘Who told you I wasn’t safe?’ I said. ‘Was it to do with the Ellis thing?’
    ‘We didn’t hear it from Ellis,’ Daley said. ‘That was just bad luck, even Ellis says so. He blames Caine for that.’
    ‘It was Dave Kendall told us,’ King said. ‘Last week. Said he was worried about you, wouldn’t be putting any more work your way.’
    Kendall. That explained his behaviour earlier, why he’d felt he needed a bodyguard. He must’ve thought that I’d heard he was throwing shit on my name.
    ‘I never liked Kendall,’ King was saying. ‘Never trusted him. He talks too fucking much.’
    One of Daley’s kids, a small blonde thing, ran into the room and stopped dead when it saw me. It stared at me with huge eyes and mouth agape. Then it remembered it had legs and turned and ran from the room.
    Daley said something to me about the kid’s name meaning something or other in Dutch.
    ‘My mum was Dutch, see,’ he said.
    Something King had said was getting caught somewhere. It didn’t fit. When Daley finished giving me his family history, I said to King, ‘Last week?’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘You said he told you this last week.’
    ‘Yeah. After I saw you that time in the gym I called him up and told him we wanted you for the jeweller’s.’
    ‘This was before the casino job?’
    ‘Yeah, of course.’
    I felt a weight in the back of my head.
    ‘Did you tell Kendall that you’d seen me about the jeweller’s?’
    ‘No.’
    Kendall.

4
    Things didn’t make sense. Kendall had told King I was no good before we’d done the casino job. So why hadn’t he warned Beckett? Kendall wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t risk fucking Beckett up. Another thing, Kendall had told me that it was the raid on Ellis and Simpson’s death that made me look suspicious: two jobs, four deaths, two missing cash hauls. I couldn’t argue that the combination made me look guilty of something, or unlucky as shit, but to sling mud at me before the casino job... that didn’t make sense.
    I was thinking these things as I trudged up the stairs to my flat. When I opened the door, I held my arms up high in a blocking motion. I didn’t know why I’d done it – the old instinct, maybe. The first blow landed on my right shoulder. Pain shot through my back, my ribs. I gritted my teeth and fought the wave of nausea. The second blow came from the left. I moved quickly, leaning into it, killing its power, but it caught me on the side of the head and sent an electric shock into my neck. Everything spun around and blurred, but I was used to that sort of thing. I hunched over and barged into the direction the blow had come from. I glanced off someone. I threw a left jab, felt it connect with gristle and flesh, felt the smash of bone, heard a grunt and a heavy crash. There was another flash on my right. I stepped back through the doorway. Something whooshed through the air in front of me. It was a baseball bat, I could see now. My right arm was deadened and I’d be unbalanced if I used my left. I charged the man with my shoulder. The two of us fell through into the kitchen, smashing into the sink at the far end, shattering the chipboard cabinets like matchwood. I grabbed shirt, skin, whatever I could. I heard a yelp. I used my body as a pivot and threw the man over my shoulder. I saw a grey mass land heavily on the floor, heard the air rush out of him in a cry of panic and hurt. I raised my foot and stomped on a head. I slammed my foot down, again and again, putting all my weight into each blow. After a while, the grey mass stopped moving. There was a slimy mess on the floor. My shoe