To Kill For Read Online Free PDF Page B

boxing us in. I threw the car into reverse and piled into the third. The impact threw me forward. My head smashed the steering wheel column. The Makarov flew from my hand. Next to me, Paget’s man had bashed his head into the windscreen and shattered the glass. He fell back, blood lacing his forehead. He sat for a moment, dazed, mouth open with shock. When he saw what was happening, he woke up, fumbled with the door and managed to get it open. He fell out and two men out there grabbed him and hoisted him up and bundled him into the waiting car.
    The cars reversed. They burned rubber and straightened up and drove off with squealing tires. The whole thing had taken seconds. I was seeing double after that blow on my head. I groped for the car keys and got the car started, but I stalled it. When I got it started again, I couldn’t see the cars and I knew for sure I’d fucked it all up.
    I’d recognized the men, though.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Cole lived in Chigwell, in one of those mock Tudor jobs with a lawn the size of a football pitch. It was close to 4 a.m. by the time I got there, but there were lights on in the downstairs rooms. His driveway was full of cars, one of them with a bashed-in front.
    I stashed the Makarov. I wasn’t at war with Cole and he would’ve had the advantage on me anyway. There must’ve been a dozen guns in that house.
    There was a brick wall where his property met the pavement, and a large cast iron gate with security number pad. I jumped over the wall and clumped up his driveway, all the time feeling that I wasn’t in control of things, all the time feeling that I was a fucking idiot.
    I banged on the front door. The door opened and a small bald man peered up at me. He hobbled forward, one leg stiffer than the other as if it had been injured somehow. I pushed him aside and walked in. I could hear men chattering away and laughing. I followed the sound and stepped into a huge lounge, warm and thick with smoke, decked out with expensive reproductions of expensive antique furniture and cheap ornaments and messy abstract paintings that looked cheap and probably cost a fortune.
    There were eight or so men sitting around the place. It looked like one of them soirees; a nice evening at the Coles’, weapons optional. They turned as one when I entered, drinks and smokes in their hands, and sneers and aggression on their faces, and thin knowing eyes. The laughter dropped away.
    At the far end, behind a built-in bar, was Bobby Cole, a short man, heavy and muscular but moving towards fatness with neatly cut dark hair and sharp eyes. But, in spite of all the power and wealth he showed, I thought I saw strain in the way he slumped a bit, and tiredness in the lines under his eyes and in the colour of his skin, which had lost its tanned glow.
    He was mixing a drink for some thin dried-up blonde who sat slouched on the barstool before him. He didn’t bat an eye when he saw me.
    He raised the glass and said, ‘Drink?’
    â€˜Where is he?’
    â€˜You tooled up?’
    â€˜No. Where is he?’
    The men shuffled a bit and looked at their drinks and pulled on their fags and that sort of thing. Conversation confused them and, besides, they didn’t know what my place in things was. Cole could see that and I knew he was going to have to play with me a bit, just to show everyone that he didn’t answer to monsters who plunged into his house in the middle of the night. Regardless of what he owed me, he had to show who was boss.
    â€˜My wife,’ Cole said, raising his chin towards the woman. ‘Marjorie.’
    The woman looked at me. Her skin was a sort of orange colour, her hair was a yellow, her nails red, her dress short and green. She was drinking some kind of blue stuff. She looked like one of the abstract paintings, only not as expensive. Whatever the blue stuff was it was alcoholic. She was sloshed and trying not to show it. Her eyelids drooped and she