Incinerator Read Free Page B

business and offer professional advice.
    True, she’d been there when my mother was attacked, and come with me to the hospital where they tried in vain to rescue her, and stuck by my side through the purgatory of questions that had followed. Nicky had held my hand at the inquest when the details made me want to weep or throw my chair through a window or both. OK, she was more than just my lawyer, but Delroy must have been imagining the rest. Nicky was way older than me, way smarter, way classier.
    So what if she worked out at our gym, andcame running with me? It had come up in conversation that her house was just not far from the Thameside path where I ran most mornings. And early one morning she’d overtaken me, and since that day we ran together a few times a week, and talked about nothing in particular, but that didn’t mean she had the hots for me … did it?
    Lost in thought, I took a while to catch on that whoever was at the door wasn’t coming in and wasn’t going away either. Winnie’s voice was growing louder and shriller and more insistent, and I was just thinking I should go and find out what was happening when I heard someone push their way into the house, ignoring Winnie’s protests, which by now had risen to a shriek. While Delroy groped behind him for his crutch, I kicked the chair back and pushed through the bead curtain into the hall.
    A shaven-headed bloke the size of a wardrobe was standing in the hallway blocking the entire front door, his arms folded and his fat mouth a tight grim line. Winnie was in the doorway to the front room, scolding someone loudly in such a thick Caribbean accent I couldn’t understand a word she was saying,but I got the gist: someone had barged in to rob them. Delroy and Winnie had nothing worth stealing, I knew, but details like that never bothered the twitchy lowlifes that roamed this area looking to fund their next fix any way they could. Not that the gorilla in the doorway looked like your typical smack addict, but I figured I’d help Winnie out first and analyse the intruders’ motives later.
    A bloke in his mid-twenties, shorter and slighter than the first, emerged from the front room lugging Delroy’s cheap flatscreen TV under one arm and ignoring Winnie’s protests. There was a sour tang of stale tobacco from his clothes, his fingers were stained yellow with nicotine, and he wore his greasy hair in a daft old-fashioned quiff with sideburns that almost reached to his broad, square chin. All he needed was the glittery jumpsuit and the tacky gold sunglasses.
    “Would you mind putting that back, please?” I said. It sounded absurdly polite but I knew that was the approach Winnie would prefer.
    Elvis weighed me up and dismissed me with a glance. “Look, just mind your own business, kid, all right? And there won’t be any trouble.”
    “There’s already trouble,” I said. “Winnie, get in the kitchen.”
    “No, Finn, this is not your problem,” said Winnie, but there was a catch in her voice, and when I looked at her face I saw she was crying, and a surge of indignation sent adrenaline coursing through my body. Through everything that had happened to Delroy she had never lost heart or given up hope, and to see her humiliated now filled me with a rage I could barely contain. All thanks to those two leather-coated creeps carting Delroy’s worthless crappy supermarket TV out the front door.
    I strode out after them. They were headed for a big shiny Merc parked at the curb with its boot open. By now I knew these two were definitely not typical burglars, but I didn’t care any more.
    “Yo, jerk,” I said. “I asked you nicely.”
    Elvis turned, the TV still under one arm, and sighed as if I was a parking ticket he’d have to tear up. He glanced at his glamorous assistant. “Sean?” he said wearily.
    Sean the Wardrobe turned back and lumbered towards me, smirking. He was big and packing plenty of muscle but he moved like ahippo with piles, and that