A Reason to Kill by Michael Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

out there. Get me my piece and I’ll watch my own back.”
    “They’ll be very low profile. And you’re on sick leave. I can’t authorise for you to be armed off duty.”
    “Get round it, Tom. Put me down as being on duty. If you think I’m at risk, do the paperwork and bring me a gun. Because if you’re right and I wind up shot like a rat in a barrel, you’ll have made it easy for him.”
    Tom pulled into the kerb outside the nondescript maisonette that was fronted by a postage stamp open-plan lawn. He hadn’t answered Matt, and didn’t need to. They both knew he’d pull strings and make sure that Matt had the resources to defend himself with, should the perp make a play for him.
    Tom let Matt hobble on the hospital-issue aluminium crutches, but stayed as close to him as a mother hen, just in case he lost his balance.
    In the kitchen, they settled to smoke, drink coffee and run through what little they had. One bonus of Linda not being there was that Matt could now light-up in the house, and not have to go outside or into the garage to feed his habit.
    “Any ideas yet on who might have given us up to Santini?” Matt asked, wanting to talk and keep his mind off Linda being gone.
    “No. I looked at everyone who knew where Little was stashed, and came up blank.”
    “We have to nail him, Tom. If he’s in Santini’s pocket, then every move we make will be compromised. Get me a list of everybody who knew about the operation. Something might click. Or at least we can eliminate some of them and see what we’re left with.”
    Tom reached into a pocket and pulled out a couple of folded sheets of A4 copy paper. “I’m ahead of you,” he said.
    Matt gave him a quizzical look. “You said I was out of it. Why the change of heart?”
    “Because you’d go after it like a dog with a fucking bone. I don’t need a loose cannon, and anyway, being a victim makes you the only cop on the case I can really trust.”
    “That could be a false premise, Tom. It could have been me, or Donny, Bernie, Keith or Tony. The hitter wouldn’t have known or cared if he took Santini’s man out.”
    “You really think ¯”
    “No, Tom. I don’t believe for a second it was one of the team. But I don’t know for a fact that it wasn’t. What about the cop on the inside? Hasn’t he heard anything?”
    Nick Marino was an undercover cop; a DC who had worked his way into Santini’s organisation. He was still on the bottom rung, little more than an errand boy and driver. It took time to build up trust and get anywhere near Santini, his son, and the inner circle that ran the show.
    “Not a whisper,” Tom said. “But there was a big party at Santini’s club on the night following the hit. It was common knowledge what they were celebrating. My man is all eyes and ears, but they don’t stay one foot ahead of us by running off at the mouth. It’s like a fucking Mafia family. They don’t trust their own shadows. They expect us to try and get close. Remember Joey?”
    Matt had met Joey Demaris a couple of times. He’d worked undercover, supposedly got close to one of Santini’s lieutenants, but had been sussed, and vanished. That had been over a year ago. Joey had been murdered, of that they were certain. But without a body there was nowhere to go. Joey was no doubt at the bottom of the Thames estuary wrapped in chicken wire and weighted with breeze blocks, or maybe in the foundations of a new high-rise office block. The possibilities were endless.
    “What’s the latest on the Page woman?” Matt asked.
    Penny Page had made good progress, physically, but had blanked out the incident; her mind closing down to escape the horror of what had happened.
    Tom scowled. “She’s in the Twilight Zone. The doctor says it’s disassociative amnesia. She doesn’t remember a thing. She’s a blank page, no pun intended.”
    “Do they expect her to get her memory back?”
    “You know how anal the medical profession can be. They let me in to