Where the Dead Men Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

They’ll feel it down there. Jesus. Shitstorm that’s coming.’
    *
    I walked down to the twenty-four-hour garage for the other Sundays. Papers getting fatter as their readership thinned. Walking back across the bridge in the sharp cold air I checked my phone, scrolled down my Twitter feed:
    Kevin Gallacher @kevinrjgallacher1h
    Batten down the hatches. Hope I’m wrong but this cld be worse than 2005. Last thing Glw needs w Commie Games arnd corner. #gangwar
    Hope I’m wrong. Like fuck you do, Gallo. I checked Moir, too, in case he’d mentioned the killing, but his last tweet was two days old.
    Back at the flat I slapped the stack of newsprint onto the table and fetched a final beer. The English qualities had nothing. Not a wing, not a par. There was a page six lead in Scotland on Sunday ( Killing Sparks Fears of Gangland Feud ). But the redtops gave it a show. GANG WAR was Gallacher’s splash in the News of the World . He quoted a source close to ‘underworld kingpin Hamish Neil’ saying reprisals were certain: ‘The Walshes won’t know what’s hit them.’ Aye they will, I thought: Hamish Neil.
    But Torcuil Bain in the Mail had pissed on us all. They’d splashed with a photo of Swan in a Rangers jersey: soccer starlet slain. Swan was twenty-six; hardly a ‘starlet’. But it turned out he’d trialled for Rangers. Bain had dug it up, Swan’s football career. Schoolboy international. The teenage trial with the ’Gers that didn’t work out. Signed for St Mirren: a leg-break crocked him for a year, cost him a yard. Free transfer to Morton. Dropped down to the Juniors. By this time he was an enforcer for Maitland, but he kept turning out, skippering the local team. On an inside page there was the squad photo of Blackhill United, Swan with the captain’s armband, a strip of suddenly sinister black, as if he was in mourning for himself.
    A gangland execution with Old Firm overtones. Driscoll would be spitting. We’d led with Swan but the Mail would bury us anyway. I looked again at the front-page photo. The bleached-blond spikes. Silver sleeper catching the light. The royal-blue jersey with the lager logo splashed across the chest. He must have been useful, to try out for the Huns. He’d skippered Blackhill to last year’s Junior Cup Final. I thought of the weekly write-ups, the match reports in trundling soccerese, some good work down the left saw Swan release Cunningham . It wouldn’t be hard to target Billy Swan. No need to monitor his movements, study his habits, establish a pattern. All you needed was next week’s fixtures, there in black and white in the local paper.
    Bain’s piece had another scoop: According to eyewitness reports, the killer was dark-complexioned, possibly of Eastern European origin . From the footage you could hardly tell a thing about the killer, but I knew what Bain was doing. You never lost sales by blaming the Roma. But a stopped clock’s right twice a day and according to Lewicki one of the Roma gangs in Govanhill was working with the Walshes. Frighteners. Disciplinaries. General enforcement. The Walshes farmed these tasks out to their Slovak buddies. Maybe hits were being subcontracted too.
    I pushed the papers away. The TV was still running in the living room. The weather forecast. More snow. Snow in October. I thumbed the remote and killed the picture. There was an ominous rumble in the flat, low throbbing knocks like a rumour of battle. I snapped the box-room light on. The tumble-drier. The clothes flopped in drunken heaves, collapsing onto each other and chasing round again. I watched Angus’s vests, the days of the week in a tangled swirl, and padded through to bed.

Chapter Three
    I woke up at seven and jumped in the shower. I don’t sleep in on Sundays, never need the alarm. Sunday’s my day with the boys and my body clock knows it. I’ve got two sons from my failed marriage. Roddy and James. Nine and six.
    I kissed Mari’s temple and lifted my keys. Angus’s door