Collusion by Stuart Neville Read Free Book Online Page A

she had an honest streak in her. He laughed out loud.
    ‘What’s so fucking funny?’ she asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ he said. He turned onto his side and slipped his arm around her waist, pulled her in close to him. She took his hand and placed it on her plump breast.
    ‘Fancy another?’ he asked.
    ‘Already?’
    He squeezed. ‘Me? Sure I’m always raring to go.’
    ‘Bastard,’ she said.
    It took an hour and a half to drive north through Ardee, Carrickmacross, and Castleblaney before hitting the outskirts of Monaghan town a few miles south of the border. The Traveller had bought a ten-year-old Mercedes from a dealer he knew near Drogheda. It was a big, wallowing estate with 200,000 miles on it. An automatic with plenty of room in the back if he needed to stash anything or anybody.
    The Bull had described the place well, even drawn a map. The Traveller stopped at junctions as he got nearer, traced the shape of the words on the map with his finger, and matched them to the road signs.
    He remembered the word ‘alexia’ as a shadow, how a doctor explained it to him in broken English fifteen years ago. Another name for it was acquired dyslexia. Something about the piece of Kevlar they dug out of his head, how it fucked up something in his brain, made written words turn into a jumble of criss-crossing lines.
    The doctor had told him he’d never read anything again. That didn’t bother the Traveller at first; he’d never been one for books. But when he re-entered the living world, the lack of words became an obstacle. So he had trained himself to memorise the letters as shapes, all twenty-six of them. He could study a word, judge each letter in turn, and decipher its meaning if he tried hard enough. But more than one or two words, and it might as well be Chinese. It suited him to let the likes of Bull O’Kane think he was illiterate. No one ever suffered for being underestimated.
    Another thirty minutes and he found Malloy’s place, just as it was getting dark. An old cottage set back a hundred yards from the road with a single-track lane running up to the small garden.
    He stopped the car halfway along the lane, far enough so the Merc couldn’t be seen from the road, and not too close to the cottage. He pulled the IMI Desert Eagle from under the seat. People said a Glock or a SIG was a better combat pistol, and they were probably right, but the Desert Eagle was a big bastard that scared the shite out of anyone he pulled it on. It was noisy, too. If you needed to take someone’s head off in a crowded pub without worrying about heroes, it was the one. It sounded like the end of the world, and it could stop anything with its .44 load.
    Lights glowed behind drawn curtains up ahead. He got out of the Merc and walked towards them. If the Traveller lived in a place like this, he’d have a dog. A big, mean one. He kept to the grass verge to silence his footsteps and listened for growling as he approached.
    Kevin Malloy had a wife, the Bull had said. She might or might not be in the cottage. Malloy was still bedridden from his injuries. It was a simple job, really. Get in, do anyone inside, grab any money, wreck the place, get out. The cottage stood black against the hills behind. Just twenty yards now. The wind changed direction.
    There, a low rumble as a dog caught his scent. The Traveller froze, listened, waited. The Eagle’s heft felt good. Solid, like the power of God in his hand. He started towards the house again.
    The rumble turned to a growl punctuated by gasps. He could hear the animal’s excitement and fear. No sign of it in the shadows yet. He listened for another sound: the high jangle of a chain. No one would leave a big dog loose out here, but he wanted to be sure.
    It launched into a clamour of barking, then, the low bass vowels of a deep-chested animal. The Bull said Malloy was an arsehole. If he was an arsehole he’d have a dog he thought made him look hard. Something stupid and brutal, maybe a Rottweiler