Criminally Insane by Conrad Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

was like him, but he wasn’t. “I thought we were partners in this?”
    “No. I offered you half of any cash we recovered, nothing more. The drugs are not in the deal.” Gecko had stored some previously captured narcotics in a lockup, but it had been broken into the week before. He had his suspicions as to where the drugs had gone. Things were coming to a head. “I am doing this to take the shit off the streets and put the scumbags out of business. What is the point in letting you re-circulate them?”
    “There will always be drug dealers to kill as long as people want to get high. Fuck them, let them have it.” His partner shook his head. He couldn’t comprehend why Gecko wouldn’t want the revenue from the drugs. It would be compensation for his loved ones. Gecko had lost people dear to him. The money could take the sting out of that. “Look what happened to the stuff you left in your lockup. You left them lying around and someone nicked them.”
    “I think you took the drugs from the lockup.” Gecko stared him in the eye,looking for a reaction. “I think you broke in and stole them.”
    “Fuck you!”
    “Who else would know they were there?”
    “Anyone could have broken into it,” his partner retorted. His eyes widened as he manufactured an answer. “It was probably a couple of kids looking for tools to rob.”
    The Gecko stood up and looked out of the window. “I have seen men lying a million times. Some men lie to protect others and some men lie to protect themselves, either way, I can spot them a mile away.”
    His skill had been making liars tell the truth and identifying it when it came, and he had been the best there was at the time. Sometimes their faces came to him in the night. Especially the ones that had told the truth; no matter how much pain they had suffered, they had stuck to the same story. They were the ones he felt guilt about, not the liars. They could rot in hell, but the innocent ones haunted him. Of course, it was difficult to tell at first. Most liars were convincing until the pain became too much, then they broke, and everyone had a breaking point. Gecko hadn’t been responsible for who the government took to interrogate.
He had been responsible for extracting the truth from them. Many times, they had taken the wrong people. Too many times; and they were the ghosts that haunted him, them and the voices of his family.
    The streets below the hotel window were crammed with drunken revellers staggering from one bar to the next, and the base lines of a dozen tunes mingled into one never ending beat. Three teenage girls ran across the cobbled street, looking for cover from the pounding rain. They huddled beneath one coat as they ran. One of them caught her heel in the cobblestones and she tumbled, grazing her knees as she fell. Gecko could hear her cursing and her friends screeching with laughter as they took shelter in a doorway. They giggled, pointing towards the fire and the commotion at the top of the street.
    They were three hundred yards from Connections nightclub, overlooking Concert Square. In recent years, the big brand bars and hotels had moved into that quarter of the city and transformed it from a maze of dirty backstreets to a booming social hub. Smoke still billowed above the roofline of the buildings as the firemen tried desperately to quell the flames. Something inside Gecko yearned to go back in time and live his youth again. Maybe life would be different if he had chosen another path. The truth was he couldn’t go back. No one could.
    “Take your half of the money now and go. We need to stick to the plan. I’ll contact you when I’m ready to move again.” Gecko sighed. He inhaled smoke from the cigarette again and watched it curl against the glass as he blew it out. His partner was a liar. He had told him he was ex-army but over time Gecko had realised it was a lie. There were too many inconsistencies in his stories. Gecko had spent the majority of his working