Simon Kernick: A Good day to die

Slippery lit one of the Marlboros with a match and opened the window, letting in a fiery waft of pollution. He chucked the match out and immediately shut the window again. 'Christ,' he said, taking a long drag. 'Is it always like this?'

'Always like what?'

He waved his arm expansively. 'Like this. You know, hot, smelly and noisy.'

'You get used to it,' I told him, wondering at the same time if he actually would, or whether I'd deny him the opportunity. He'd been right when he'd suggested I thought he deserved to die. I think he probably did. He was almost certainly a killer himself, with few redeeming features and not even the first semblance of a conscience. But if there was a way of avoiding a murder and still getting our money, I was keen to take it. And no one, apart from Slippery and me, would ever know the truth.

'So how long have you been out here for now, Dennis?' he asked, puffing on the smoke again. 'The whole time since you disappeared?'

'Pretty much.'

'You know, I couldn't believe it when I read about what you'd done. I really couldn't. You always struck me as one of the good guys. You were obviously a very decent liar.'

I knew the bastard was baiting me, but I ignored it. 'I couldn't even begin to compete with you in the bullshitter stakes, Slippery. I reckon the only time you ever told me the truth was when you spoke to confirm your name, and you've even managed to change that now. Or half of it, at least. What happened? Didn't you think you'd be able to remember it if you changed the first part as well?'

'I always keep it simple, Dennis. There's no point trying to confuse things.' His voice was even, but there was an underlying irritation in it. I'd obviously annoyed him a little, which suited me fine. 'And what's this fucking Slippery business?'

'Don't you remember? It was the name we used to have for you in CID. Slippery Billy West. On account of your ability to wriggle out of every situation we put you in.'

He snorted loudly and derisively. 'What? And you ain't a wriggler? How many people did you kill? Six? Seven? And here you are with a nice suntan, living the life of Reilly. You've wriggled just as well as I ever did, mate, and don't pretend otherwise.'

The car fell silent as we crawled through the traffic past the turn-off to the harbour, before finally speeding up as we came out the other side of Puerta Galera. The road here was relatively new, the best in the north of the island, and I'd soon passed all the crawling jeepneys and built up a half-decent head of speed. The sea appeared to our right through a coconut-palm grove — a brilliant, cerulean blue — but almost immediately the view was obscured by a ragged huddle of tin and wood squatters' shacks that had sprung up by the side of the road. In the Philippines, you're only ever one step away from abject poverty.

'So,' I said eventually. 'You know why I had to come here. What about you? What are you running from this time?'

He opened the window and chucked out his cigarette butt. The air outside was clearer and fresher now that the traffic had thinned. He didn't answer for a while and I thought that maybe I'd upset him, but then he sighed loudly. 'Something I should never have got involved in,' he said at last and he sounded like he meant it.

'Isn't that always the way?'

'I'm normally a good judge of these things,' he said, which is something I would probably have agreed with, 'but I fucked up this time.'

'What happened?'

He turned and looked at me carefully. I think he was trying to work out whether it was something he wanted to tell the man who, for a short time at least, had been his nemesis. I got the feeling that his instincts were erring on the side of caution, but that he also wanted to talk about it to someone he knew. Criminals love to tell people about their crimes but in general it's not very practical for them to do so, so when they're in the presence of other criminals (and I suppose to Slippery I was one), they tend to let rip.

'I did a job for a bloke. Your sort of job. A hit.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah. I got approached by someone I knew to take out a bloke in London. The pay being offered was ten grand and I needed the money. It was a rush job, though. That's why I should have turned it down. I didn't have time to put him under surveillance, find out about him, or anything like that. I was told I had twenty-four hours to put him in the ground. That was it. So I told them I needed fifteen grand for a job like that, we did a bit of negotiation and I settled for twelve.'

He sat back in his seat and drummed his middle and index fingers against the side of his face in a rapid and irritatingly noisy tattoo. I suddenly remembered it as a habit of his from the past. He used to do it during interrogations, usually when he was mulling something over.

'The problem was,' he continued, 'I didn't have a clue how I was going to do it, and I didn't have time to come up with any sort of proper plan. I reckoned I was going to have to knock on his door, hope it was him who opened it, and let him have it there and then. The client said he wouldn't be armed, so it should have been no problem. Anyway, I drove down to the victim's place the next night and I was waiting outside in my car, just checking everything out and psyching myself up to make my move, when I got a call on my mobile. It was the client again. He told me that our man was at home, but was about to go out to an all-night cafe in Clerkenwell to meet someone. If he got there and met the other bloke, then I had to take out both of them.'

He sighed. 'And that was my second mistake. Rather than just say I was outside the target's house and ready to pop him there and then, I sniffed the chance to make some more cash. The client sounded really worried, like he was getting desperate, so I told him it would cost more to do two. Twenty grand in all. He was pissed off, but, like I explained to him, it meant a bigger risk for me, and so he went for it. He hung up, and then a couple of seconds later the target came walking out of his place, and I just watched him go when I could have taken him out.'

I couldn't believe Slippery's stupidity, especially after telling me the importance of keeping things simple. He was no master criminal, but he'd always been pretty good at covering his tracks, so to make a sloppy and extremely risky decision in order to pocket a few more quid showed what I'd long suspected: that his successes against the forces of law and order had finally made him think he was untouchable.

'And it fucked up?'

'Well, that's the thing. Not at the time, no. I got the directions to the cafe and went straight down there. Then I just walked in with a crash helmet on, spotted the target chatting to the geezer he was meeting, and went straight over. They were the only customers in the place and they were so deep in conversation that they didn't see me until it was too late. I pulled my shooter, and that was that. Two bullets in each of them, then head shots just to make sure. Only one witness, the bloke behind the counter, and he did the right thing and kept his mouth shut and his hands in the air. I reckon the whole thing took about ten seconds.'

'So what went wrong?'

He shrugged and started the old finger tattoo again. 'This is it, I don't know. The whole thing happened a few weeks back, and there was a bit of a hoo-hah in the papers because one of them was a copper. I didn't know that, of course. I'd never have touched him if I'd known he was Old Bill.'

'That's nice to know.'

'Not 'cause I respect them, but because it's too much hassle. Anyway, I got paid the full amount and I didn't hear nothing more about it until a couple of days ago, when I got a phone call out of the blue from the client saying I had to get out of the country, and fast. I asked him why, and he said he had information that the coppers investigating the murders were on to me. He didn't say how they'd got so close, but he was pretty convincing. Course I wasn't keen on upping sticks, but when he told me that he had a false passport and a ticket to the Philippines, and that someone would meet me there with ten grand to get me settled, I decided he had to be serious and that it was probably an idea to take him up on his offer. And that's it. The rest you know.'