How To Kill Friends And Implicate People (2 page)

THREE

SAM

15:51

The black cab clipped me as it overtook. Its wing mirror brushed my elbow and then the bullhorn handlebars of my bike. The cabbie didn’t even slow down to see if I was okay.

A year earlier, that would have been enough to take me out of the saddle and dump my arse on the pavement. You toughen up fast if you ride a bike in Glasgow. I gripped the bars tight to stop the wobble on the front wheel, and kept pedalling.

That was the first lesson I’d learned on a fixed-gear bike. Pedal
into
the storm. The natural instinct is to stop your legs pumping the minute you hit a problem. Coasting feels like the right thing to do, and a normal bike will allow you to do that. At that point you may as well be on a runaway mine cart. A fixie doesn’t let you coast. Nope. Pedal harder. Keep in control. And, even on the streets of Glasgow, don’t back down from anything.

Don’t show any fear.

It’s like Mad Max out here sometimes.

Except I’m better looking. And not Australian. And don’t need gasoline. Also, my name’s not Max, and I’m not a man. So, it’s not really
anything
like Mad Max, but it’s a fun thing to say.

The cab dropped into the lane right in front of me, then slowed down to take the corner onto Glasgow Bridge. They were really imaginative when they named that one, right?

I kept the bike under control with my right hand, and straightened up in the saddle. With my left hand, I pulled my keys loose from the pocket, and extended my arm out to the side, stretching the elastic cord that was clipped to my shorts. As the cab slowed down before taking the turn, I let my keys touch the side of the car, and scraped them along the black surface.

This time, the driver noticed the cyclist.

And it was glorious.

He honked the horn and turned to swear at me out of his window. Thick veins bulged on his neck, beneath a shaved, rounded head that carried white scars among the stubble. I waved at him and smiled, then got my head down and picked up speed as I crossed the junction at the bottom of Jamaica Street. On the left, as I cycled under the railway overpass, was a small pedestrianised area. Skater kids and Goths gathered there to do, well, whatever it is skater kids and Goths tend to do. They’d seen my revenge on the cab, and they clapped and cheered as I passed.

My earphones beeped to tell me I had a call. I keep them in while I’m cycling, with my phone strapped into a small pouch on the front strap of my messenger bag. I pressed the button to accept the call.

‘You’re running late.’ My wee brother, Phil. ‘You won’t make it.’

I was delivering a rush order, and I had twenty minutes to get it from a law firm on the Saltmarket, on one side of Glasgow, to another firm on Blythswood Street, on the other side of town.

I made a fart noise with my lips. ‘I’ll make it, don’t worry.’

‘No, you won’t. You’re still down on Broomielaw and you’ve only got six minutes left. You should have gone the way I told you.’

We run two small businesses out of an industrial unit in the Gorbals. One is a detective agency that we took over from our father; the other is a courier firm. Phil operates as the dispatcher for both. We have three other part-time riders out delivering packages across the city. I split my time between the courier work and the investigations. Phil monitors all of the riders using the GPS on our phones. It’s easier for him to allocate the jobs when he can see where we are.

‘Which one of us is out here on the bike?’

I overtook another cyclist. An overweight guy on a shiny new bike. It looked to have a million gears, and he was decked out in the latest cool Lycra from the team that won the Tour de France. I put my right arm out to indicate a turn, and then drifted across into the next lane. I didn’t wait for an invitation. Cars don’t slow down for cyclists. The trick is to just go for it. Let them adjust.

I drifted again, into the filter lane to turn into York Street. The lights turned red and I pressed back on the pedals, locking my knees to bring the bike to a stop.

‘What’s that?’ Phil said. ‘Sounds like you’re stopping.’

‘Traffic laws, kiddo. Don’t worry.’

I disconnected the call and took the chance to take a swig of water from a bottle I kept in my bag. I could feel a car coming up behind me. It was getting too close. Drivers will get right up against the back wheel of a bike in a way they wouldn’t dare for a car.

Then the engine revved.

I looked up at the light, but it was still red.

The engine revved again, and this time the car behind nudged my wheel, almost forcing me off the bike. I turned round to swear at the driver.

It was the taxi I’d keyed. He must have taken a turn to come back across the river. Now he was right on top of me.

The lights changed.

FOUR

SAM

15:54

The taxi pushed forward again. The bike jolted beneath me. Another push like that would either knock me off or warp the wheel. I looked at the driver through the sun glare of the windshield. His eyes were flared and his face was pale.

He wasn’t acting rationally. This was full-on road rage.

There was a line of cars behind the taxi. I couldn’t look to them for help, because all they were seeing right now was a cyclist getting in the way.

I pushed off as the taxi charged forward, skidding my back wheel out of the way just in time. We were in the right-hand filter lane, but I veered left. My pedal clipped the concrete kerb on the other side of the junction as I squeezed between a Volvo and the central divider. The driver blasted his horn and swerved away into the next lane, causing the van behind him to slam on the breaks and let rip on his own horn.

The squeal of more tyres, and the horns grew louder and more insistent. I took a look behind me, and saw that it was the taxi causing the disruption, as my road-rage pal had swerved to follow me, cutting in across the lane of traffic. There was one car between us, but I could see he was already looking to turn into the next lane so that he could draw level with me.

I hunkered low to the frame, and started to power down on the pedals. I swerved into the left-hand lane, which made the traffic behind slow down and block off the cab driver’s options for a few seconds.

I’m a good cyclist. I’m fit and fast. For all that, though, I couldn’t compete with a car engine over any long distance. It would only be a matter of time before the taxi caught me in a straight race.

A gap opened beside me, and I drifted into that lane before a car could fill it. There were now two vehicles between the taxi and me. The traffic in the left-hand lane sped up. The drivers wanted to put some distance between them and us. I risked another look behind and saw the taxi turn into that lane and speed up.

In a few seconds he was level with me. We locked eyes and I saw he wasn’t looking to back down. His hands turned sharply on the wheel, and the cab veered toward me. I moved as far over as I could, keeping a few inches between us, as he drove down the middle of the road now, straddling the two lanes.

There was no divider along this stretch of the road. Nothing to stop me turning into the other lanes of traffic, heading in the other direction. I steeled myself, and did just that, finding a gap between two oncoming cars. Once again I heard horns as the taxi turned after me.

What was it with this guy?

I took a sharp left into McAlpine Street and got a sprint going. I could hear him turn in after me, but I’d figured out a way to shake him. At the top of the road is an MOD building with a gated car park. As I reached the barriers at the entrance, a guard stepped out from the security hut to stop me. I turned past him and bunny-hopped up onto the kerb, squeezing in between the metal fence and the barrier. I heard the guard shouting for me to stop.

I headed straight for the far corner of the car park, where a low wall separates the grounds from the next street over. I climbed off the bike, took a breath, and heaved it over the wall, then climbed after it.

The good news was the taxi was long gone.

The bad news? I had two minutes left to make the delivery.

The extra bad news? The office was a mile away.

I’d been getting faster with each month. I may have given up running, but I still had the same instincts. I was always pushing for a personal best. I’d managed to start doing two-and-a-half-minute miles. I was determined to push on, to try and hit the two-minute mark, but so far it was beyond me. I knew I couldn’t make the delivery in time, but I could hear Phil’s voice saying
I told you so
, and that was all I needed.

I raced down Argyle Street. My lungs were burning and my heart was still threatening to climb out of my ears. I took the third left, straight into Blythswood Street, then powered up the hill. I mounted the kerb in front of the main entrance to the building I was looking for, and dropped the bike onto the pavement.

The law firm was on the fourth floor, but luckily for me, and my lungs, I only needed to get it signed for at the ground-floor reception.

The receptionist was a petite woman named Tina. She was always neatly styled and hidden away under a layer of fake tan, hairspray and lipstick. I was sure her ideal visitor wasn’t a sweaty woman in cargo shorts and a vest, especially one breathing so heavily, but she was used to me by now. This was one of my regular delivery spots, and I’d been to this building a few times in my other job, dressed up much smarter in a business suit.

‘Hi, Sam,’ she said. ‘What we got today?’

‘A heart attack, I think.’

She pretended that was funny while I rummaged in my messenger bag. I pulled out a heavy package wrapped in Manila paper and handed it across. ‘No idea, but it’s for Nicolay & Turner.’

She took the package and placed it down out of sight beneath the desk. I handed over the docket for her to sign and checked the time on my phone. I was one minute late.

‘What time did they want it by?’ Tina said, as she printed her name next to her signature.

‘Four.’

Tina checked her watch and then shrugged. She wrote
16.00
in the space for the time the package was received. She tore off the part of the form that needed to go to the client, and handed the docket back to me, offering up a mischievous smile. ‘Sod ’em.’

‘Thanks, Tina.’

Out on the street I sat down next to my bike and took deep breaths. As soon as I was convinced the world wouldn’t start spinning again, I pulled out my water bottle and took a long swig.

My phone beeped a few notifications. One was confirmation on our courier app that I’d made the delivery. The other was from a dating service my best friend, Hanya, had signed me up to.

The website was vLove.co.uk. It sounded like a Swedish car. Hanya had downloaded the app to my phone and signed me up. We’d recorded my profile video in a bar a few nights earlier. She’d needed to get me drunk before I’d play along.

People could watch my video, then decide whether they liked me or not. If they told the app they did, I’d get a notification to watch their video and see if the interest was mutual.

Every
like
I’d had so far seemed to be from a guy who was obsessed with showing me his penis.

No thanks.

My earphones beeped. I pressed the button on the phone, and Phil’s voice came on the line.

‘I hope you’re not skiving,’ he said. ‘Because we just got another job.’

FIVE

FERGUS

15:00

You’re only as good as your most recent kill.

Frankly, mine was a bit of an embarrassment. Some rich old boot paid me to kill her eldest son, ensuring her estate would fall to her youngest.

Families, right?

It’s really hard to take pride in settling a stupid domestic squabble with some faked auto-erotic asphyxiation. Even harder when I fucked it up. It took three attempts to strangle the guy, because he was heavier than he looked. I’d tailed him for a couple of days before the hit, but he must have practised using posture to hide the pounds, because,
oh boy
he was a solid lump.

The truth was, I’d been sloppy. I hadn’t taken the job seriously. I usually wouldn’t have taken something like this on. I mean, I kill people for money, so I can’t pretend to be a moral crusader. It’s just a job. And I’m good at it. Some people spend their careers developing plagues and diseases. Some people sit in parliament coming up with ways to take money off poor people. Bankers take money off everybody.

They do what they do, with no regard for ethics.

At least I have rules:

No children.

No pets.

No disabled people.

I try to avoid domestics. They’re small and petty. I can’t pretend that everybody I’ve killed has been a bad egg. I can’t even say they all had it coming. But you want the real truth? We could all be said to
have it coming.
Write down the worst things you’ve ever done. Just the top ten. The silent little moments of guilt sitting at the back of your eyes in the bathroom mirror.

Did you break someone’s heart? Were you a bad husband or wife? Lousy mother or father? Was there a time you stole some money from the till at work? Maybe you just cheated on a test. We’ve all done things. One day, these things might come to the attention of the wrong person, and you get me knocking on your door.

Morals have to be flexible when you’re self-employed. Sometimes I can turn jobs down if I think they’re shady, but I’ve still got bills to pay.

So I took a bad job. I didn’t take it seriously. I made a mess of it.

I’m making up for it right now. This one is a more interesting target. Martin Mitchell. A retired politician. ‘Retired’ is a bit of a euphemism. He lost the election. Martin is the kind of figure who is known by his first name. Say
Martin
in Glasgow, and everyone knows who you mean. If you want to put in the extra wee bit of effort, you can call him
Marxist Martin
, the name the press gave him a couple of decades ago.

Back then he was the poster boy, raging against the establishment with dark hair and a commie cap. But years do funny things to a person, and he’s become just another self-serving shill.

If you’ve been an MP for a few years and you get voted out, you get a thirty-grand payoff. He’s been blowing through that with cocaine and hookers at sex clubs, and I think he’s been pissing people off with the amount of attention that’s been drawing.

Bad for the party and all that.

Case in point for the stupid things he’s doing. Right now, at three in the afternoon, in the middle of a heatwave, he’s shacked up in his apartment with a hooker. His dealer was the one who tipped me off. Hookers and dealers are fine to work with. They’ll sell information, and they rarely rat on a hit man. They talk to the cops all the time, sure, but they’re telling tales on each other, not on people like me. It’s just basic common sense not to grass on the professional killer.

Martin lives in a secured building in Glasgow’s Merchant City. That expensive bit where all the wankers live. (Okay, I tried to buy a place there once. I’m a wee bit jealous.) The door on the ground floor has an electric lock, something you need a key card to open. Unless you’re me, and locks are a piece of piss.

He lives on the third floor, but I take the stairs rather than the lift. I like time to think, to plan. Also, I’m a control freak, and I don’t like being in a lift on my way to a job. I made that mistake on a job in New York. The lift got stuck between floors for twenty minutes, and by the time the mechanic fixed it, the target had already gone. It was three more days before I tracked her down.

I took her out in a lift, in tribute to the great gods of irony.

When I get to his floor, I can already hear the sex. Insistent and frantic. Most of the noises are male, but I can hear a woman in the mix, too. There are three locks on the door, but each of them is the same Yale design. That’s utterly pointless. I spring each in turn, and then ease the door open, covering the lock mechanisms with my forearm to muffle the sounds as each latch springs back out. I listen for any give or wobble that might lead to a squeak in the door, but it’s solid.

The hallway is stark, and very white. There’s no furniture out here. The only thing is a small bowl full of pebbles on a dark wooden plinth in the middle of the hall. He probably thinks it’s Chinese or something. I bet he spent thousands on it. The bedroom door is open a small crack. The sounds are coming from in there.

I take a look in through the opening. The window on the far side, the front of the building, is covered by thick curtains. Good protection against paparazzi. Great cover for a hit. Martin is on his back, being ridden by the woman. She’s facing away from me. Her frame is small, with narrow shoulders, and a tattoo of a snake runs down her spine. That must have hurt. She’s resting on her knees and rocking back and forth. No excitement or passion in what she’s doing, but Martin’s into it. There’s
bad
sex, and there’s
guy
sex. This is both. But for someone like Martin, the sex he’s currently having will always be the best he’s ever had.

He’s making most of the noise, commentating on his own adventure.

It’s all:

‘Oh yeah, I’m fucking you.’

‘Yeah, I’m in deep, baby.’

‘You’re riding me, bitch.’

What a charmer.

I step back and look to my right. The door to the kitchen is half open. I can see sunlight from the windows falling on the counter top and a large silver fridge. I head into the kitchen and open the fridge. There are twelve bottles of a trendy German beer. I take one out, making sure not to make too much noise, and then pop the top off with a bottle opener that’s lying out on the counter, taking care not to rip the plastic of my gloves.

I lean back against the fridge and start taking slow sips from the cool beer. I can let him finish.

Even a fud like Marxist Martin deserves the chance to finish one last time, before he’s finished for the last time.