A Good Day To Die (3 page)

'All right,' I said. 'I'll do it.'

2

Tomboy drank the rest of his beer and ordered another one from Tina's daughter. He then spent the next few minutes flirting with her while she leaned against the table opposite, a cloth in one hand and a smile on her face that was wide enough to be friendly but had little in the way of depth.

He said he bet that all the boys were chasing after her, and told her what a pretty young thing she was. She was a pretty young thing too but I doubted if she was a day over sixteen - while Tomboy was, if my memory served me correctly, the grand old age of forty-two, which made the whole thing look a little tasteless. He winked at me now and again, between jokes and compliments, just to demonstrate that it was nothing more than light-hearted banter, but I could see the hint of desperation in his act. He might have thought he was messing about, but, like a lot of men whose
looks are fading as their waistlines expand, he needed to believe he still had that elusive 'something' the girls always go for. Unfortunately, he didn't. As well as being about three stone heavier than he had been back in the old days in London, the booze had reddened his nose and cheeks and scattered them with clusters of broken veins, while his precious blond locks - the pride and joy of his youth - had been reduced to a few desperate strands on top and a scraggy ponytail at the back.

But that didn't stop him. He asked Tina's daughter what she liked most in a man. 'Apart from the obvious,' he added, chortling.

She giggled. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Don't ask me that.'

'You should make it multiple choice, Tomboy,' I told him. 'You know, A: beer gut; B: loud London accent. That sort of thing. It'd give you more of a chance.'

'Sense of humour,' she said, looking pleased with herself. 'That's what I like.'

Tomboy turned my way with the makings of a glare. I think he wanted to say something - a similarly barbed comment aimed in my direction - but remembered that he'd just asked me to kill someone, so decided to let it go.

'You have a good sense of humour, Tomboy,' said Tina's daughter. She didn't say the same to me, but then I didn't know her as well.

Tomboy smiled. 'Thanks, love.' But he'd lost
interest in the banter now. Like an unwelcome heckler, I'd messed up his routine.

He quaffed the rest of his second bottle of beer and announced he had to go. He had things to do, he said. Phoning London, for one. Letting the man called Pope know the job was on.

I finished my own drink in silence, still watching the outriggers in the bay, but with nothing like the pleasure that I'd taken in the view earlier. I liked Tomboy, and hadn't meant to piss him off. He was a big man with a big personality, and he'd been good to me since I'd arrived at his Philippine hotel three years ago, on the run and without a friend left in the world. So I figured that I owed him. But killing someone on our very own doorstep? That felt like one payment too far.

Which was one reason why I still wasn't sure whether I was actually going to go through with it or not. The other reason was that I'm no cold-blooded murderer. I've done jobs before. Blacklip was one, and there were others before him in England. Jobs where I've had to end the lives of people who deserved it. Drug dealers; child molesters; the worst kind of criminals. They weren't many in number, and they never interfered with the work I did as a detective in London's Metropolitan Police, so I never thought that I was doing much wrong. However, all that changed three years ago, when I made a mistake and shot some men I was told were bad guys, but who were
actually anything but. That's what I mean about not taking things at face value. People lie. They also double-cross, even the ones you're meant to trust. Anyway, the result of that particular mistake was that I ended up on the run, with the police, Interpol and God knows who else after my blood. None of them were successful, and after a long and indirect journey, I made it here to the Philippines, going into business with a man who used to be one of my best informants back in the old days, when I was still on the side of the forces of law and order and people had known me as Detective Sergeant Dennis Milne.

Originally, Tomboy had owned a hotel and beach bar on Siquijor, a tiny island way down in the south of the Philippine archipelago, and I worked for him there. When I'd arrived it had been doing quite well, but then the Islamic rebels of Abu Sayyaf began to extend their kidnapping and bombing operations closer and closer to where we were, and the visitor numbers had slowed to a trickle. Tomboy and his Filipina wife Angela had sold up at a significant loss just over a year earlier and we'd headed north to start again in the Puerta Galera region of Mindoro, a large island a few hours' boat and taxi ride from Manila. It was a lot busier here, and a lot safer too. Unless your name was Billy Warren, of course.

I paid my bill and left Tina's daughter a fifty-peso tip, then headed out onto the narrow concrete walkway that was Sabang's equivalent of a
promenade, stepping over a couple of three-year-old kids playing on the ground with a mangy-looking puppy. I made my way along the beach, past a group of local men who were stood watching a cock-fight on the sand in front of the boats, then cut into the narrow, dirty backstreets of the town. The journey took me past the ramshackle stalls selling raw meat and fish, where the women gathered to barter in staccato tones; through gaggles of raucous schoolkids, heading home in their immaculate uniforms; past cheap tourist shops and girlie bars; across planks of wood that acted as bridges over the streams of effluent-laced water trailing beneath; under washing lines; through people's backyards; past noisy games of pool played under tin roofs. And all the way I nodded to people I knew, greeted a few of them by name, breathed in the hot, stinking air, and thought how much I loved this place. The vibrancy, the heat. The freedom.

When I emerged at the other end of town and stepped back onto the promenade, the sun was setting in a blaze of gold and pink above the headland in front of me.

It was beautiful. It should have made me happy.

But I was too busy thinking about the fugitive coming from across the sea, and wondering whether he was going to be the man who ruined it all for me.

3

Two days after the meeting at Tina's Sunset Restaurant, I drove the potholed road from Sabang to Puerta Galera, a gun in my pocket and a lot on my mind.

East Brucal Street's a quiet and surprisingly leafy little road about fifty yards long and dotted with mango trees, just off Puerta Galera's raucous main drag. The Hotel California, halfway down it, is a small, two-storey establishment with an open-air restaurant on its second floor that fits in nicely with the surroundings. It's owned by an ex-Vietnam War veteran who's not the sort of man you'd want to get in an argument with, but who was quite friendly with Tomboy and could be trusted not to take too much notice of who was passing through his establishment. At three hundred pesos a night for a double room with bathroom, it's a good-value
place to stay. Particularly so for Billy Warren, as his one night there had already been paid for in cash by Tomboy.

It was two thirty on a hot, sunny Friday afternoon and the street was quiet. A couple of cars were parked up but there didn't seem to be anyone around. I pulled up ten yards past the front of the hotel, outside a collection of rusty corrugated-iron sheets that had somehow been fashioned into a shop selling house plants, and dialled the mobile number I'd been given.

Warren answered after five rings. 'Hello?' The tone was neutral, a little rough around the edges, and not betraying any nerves.

'My name's Mick Kane,' I told him without preamble. 'I've been told to deliver something to you, and to give you certain instructions. I'm outside, just up the street in a blue Land Rover. Can you come down?'

'I've never seen a blue Land Rover before,' he informed me helpfully.

'Well, now's your chance. You can even have a drive in it if you want. There's a bar at the Ponderosa golf club. It's fifteen minutes up the road. It'll be quiet up there this time of day, so we can talk.'

'So, you want to take me for a drive, do you?' His tone was suspicious, but there was something mocking in it too, as if he was letting me know he knew my motives. 'Here I am all on my lonesome in a fleapit of a country where, according to the
BBC, life is dirt fucking cheap, and I've just been invited to get in a car with a man I've never met before, but who's apparently got a load of money for me, and go for a country jaunt?'

'Listen, I don't mind how we do it,' I told him. 'My job's to give you the case I'm carrying and provide you with a few instructions to help you on your way. You can just come out and grab it if you want. It makes no difference. I just fancied a drink, that's all.'

'Has it got aircon, this place? I'm not going anywhere without aircon. Not in this heat.'

'Of course it has,' I lied. 'And it's got nice views, too. You'll like it.'

'We'll see,' he said enigmatically and hung up.

This guy fancied himself, no question; and he wanted me to know he was no fool. I've met plenty of men like him before. Men who are sure they know the score on everything; who are streetwise enough that they can smell trouble a mile off. But everyone's got a weakness. It's just a matter of knowing where to look.

Five minutes passed, and I was just about to phone the cheeky sod again to see what the hell he was playing at when he emerged from the hotel entrance, dressed in a white, short-sleeved cotton shirt and jeans. He made his way straight to the car without looking around, which meant that he'd been watching it from his hotel room. Fair enough. I'd have done the same in his position.

He was medium height, early forties, with short dark hair and a thick moustache that followed the curves of his mouth and didn't look right on him at all. He had a muscular build that suggested he worked out regularly, and his face was fairly nondescript in so far as nothing actually stood out, except perhaps that it belonged to a man who knew how to handle himself.

I couldn't help but smile as I watched him approach in the rear-view mirror. So the man I'd once known as Billy West had changed his name - or part of it, anyway. I hadn't seen him in maybe ten years, but he didn't look much different than he had done then. Except for the 'tache. This was a new edition, and presumably part of his disguise. Because there was no way Slippery Billy West wasn't on the run. The man had spent a lifetime struggling to extricate himself from the jaws of justice, and with more than a little success too, especially where his dealings with me were concerned.

I'd first come across him back in London around 1991, when my colleagues and I in CID had put him under surveillance on suspicion of gun-running. He was an ex-soldier who'd served in the Falklands conflict and Northern Ireland, and who'd ended up being court-martialled when he and a fellow squaddie had held up an army payroll truck at gunpoint and relieved it of its contents. That was the only time, as far as I was aware, that he'd ever spent
any time behind bars. Our surveillance of him for the gun-running lasted close to a month, and when we nicked him and raided the lock-up he was using for his business, we recovered three handguns and an AK-47 assault rifle. But in court, Slippery claimed to know nothing about the weapons, and used as his defence the fact that he wasn't the only keyholder to the premises, which was true. Two of his cousins, both of whom did work for him now and again, were indeed keyholders, and in the end it came down to the fact that it couldn't be proved beyond doubt that he was the one the guns belonged to, particularly as there were no prints on any of them. So he'd been acquitted.

I had the same trouble with him again a couple of years later when, acting on intelligence, I'd led a raid on his flat in King's Cross in the hunt for a significant quantity of cocaine. Unfortunately, the bastard had reinforced not only the front door but the bathroom door too, for a reason that quickly became apparent. We'd managed to batter down the front door after much effort, but by the time we'd got inside he'd already made it to the bathroom, along with his stash. I'll always remember the frustration I felt as we tried to force open the second reinforced door before he flushed the whole stash down the toilet. What was worse, we could hear him doing it. And he was whistling a jaunty tune at the same time, as if the sound of us trying to break into his place was the most natural thing in
the world. After about five good heaves with the Enforcer, we'd finally got the door open, only to find old Slippery sitting comfortably on the throne with his trousers round his ankles, a recent copy of the
Sun
in his hands. He even managed a loud fart to add to the authenticity of his situation, before greeting me with a cheery 'Morning, DS Milne, I wondered what that noise was.' Which was him all over. As cocky as they come.

All that was left of the suspected half-kilo of cocaine he'd been in possession of were five plastic bags each containing trace amounts of the drug, which turned out to be enough to warrant only a two-hundred-pound fine.

Three weeks later, the guy who'd supplied us with the information that led to the raid, a former business associate of Slippery's named Karl Nash, was found dead in his Islington townhouse. At first his death was thought to have been due to a heroin overdose, but further investigation revealed that he'd been asphyxiated. There was, of course, an obvious suspect. Nash and Slippery had fallen out very publicly, but although Slippery was arrested and questioned in connection with the murder, there was insufficient evidence to proceed.