Payback by Simon Kernick

Author:Simon Kernick [Kernick, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Fiction
ISBN: 9780552158824
Google: htzUgnvJpdQC
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Limited
Published: 2012-01-01T20:00:00+00:00

Thirty

Tina Boyd lay stretched out on her hotel bed, and laughed out loud.

A wanted man had tried to kill her today, and had come close to succeeding, and not only had she not handed him in to the local police, she’d actually gone into partnership with the guy. Even in a life as dramatic as hers had become these past few years, the day’s events would take some beating.

Although exhausted from all the travelling, she was still wired from the adrenalin punch of having to fight for her life only a matter of hours earlier. Once again she’d come within a whisker of death, yet somehow her luck had held out. Bizarrely, she trusted Milne. She even felt sorry for him after what he’d told her about his years on the run, particularly the woman and the unborn child he’d had to leave behind.

It was possible he could have been spinning her a yarn, of course, but Tina didn’t think so. She might have become something of a cynic over the course of her career - an inevitability, given the violence and the tragedies that the job had flung in her face - but the heartfelt manner in which Milne had told his story rang very true. If it was an act, it was a damn good one. And the thing was, nobody she’d ever spoken to who’d known Dennis Milne had ever described him as a psychopath. They’d thought him a flawed, bitter character who’d betrayed his colleagues and his profession terribly, but still a man who’d been brought low by circumstances, rather than having started off that way.

And he was a useful, if dangerous, ally. Tina might not have agreed with his methods - putting a gun to the head of a man and scaring him so much that he wet himself was brutal in the extreme, and she’d almost intervened - but the fact was, they worked. The man had talked. Others would too. At home, Tina was constrained by a constant stream of rules and regulations, and the rights of suspects were paramount. Out here, and especially with Milne helping her, everything was far more flexible. She knew she would have to watch herself, so she didn’t cross the same line that he had all those years ago. And she knew too that she had to keep her distance from him emotionally. Milne was a criminal. She wasn’t. Their partnership was a marriage of convenience. Nothing more.

And after it had run its course, what would she do then?

That was a question for later.

Hungry suddenly, she ordered a pizza from room service, and while she waited for it to arrive she booted up her laptop. She got out the pages from O’Riordan’s diary that Milne had given her and examined them before Googling the name Omar Salic. There were no relevant matches. The same with Cheeseman. But Milne was right. The meeting had to have had a bearing on O’Riordan’s death, and she wondered if Salic was some kind of pimp with information about the abductions.

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