Surrender Read Free

suicide?’
    ‘Not unless he stabbed himself in the back. Snow was a tricky bastard, but not that tricky.’
    I was sorting all this through. Niki died twelve months ago, stabbed in the back. Snow had finally admitted killing Niki. Now Snow was dead. Sean was watching me as I ran this through the old minus-two-megabyte soft drive called my brain. When I’d got to that point, he answered the question before I had a chance to ask it.
    ‘It looks like Snow was stabbed between the shoulder blades with a seven-inch boning knife.’

CHAPTER 2
    I wound down both back windows of the car so Wolf could hang his head out one side and his tail out the other. I could hear the percussive flapping of his tongue against the glass, punctuated by little yelps of pleasure. That’s one of the great things about dogs — they remind you how simple happiness can be.
    As I waited for the lights to change, I thought about the last time I’d seen Niki. Not that time in the coffin. That wasn’t Niki any more. The last time Niki and I had talked, we’d argued. Well, actually, I’d argued and she’d gone quiet. She’d done that since she was a little girl whenever she was upset or frightened: she’d just pull into herself and go very still and silent. Inaccessible. It used to drive me mad. I hated the way she could remove herself so totally like that, and it just made me yell at her even more. Twelve months ago she was removed for good. No amount of yelling was going to change that.
    I slid the car through the intersection and up Pirie Street. Wolf whimpered with desire as he breathed in the aroma of greasy fried chicken from the KFC. It’s never had that effect on me, but thenWolf has a similar response to week-old possum carcasses so maybe that says something about the Colonel’s secret ingredient.
    Niki and I had argued about her working at the club. When she’d first told me she was occasionally dancing at a strip club for extra money, I’d given her the lecture about how women who sold their bodies undid all the good work of women before them. How women had fought to be treated as equals, not property to be bought, sold and discarded. How it was soul destroying to sell your body for money. I might even have mentioned slippery slopes and thin edges of wedges.
    Yeah, exactly. I’d never learned to keep my mouth shut or my opinion to myself, despite that being suggested to me on a regular basis by a number of people in my life. Niki wouldn’t remember what our mother had sounded like because she’d died when Niki was born, but I was six years older than my baby sister and I remembered. When I did that slippery slopes speech I suspect I sounded just like her. By default, when our mother died I’d taken on the role of Niki’s surrogate mum. I don’t know which of us hated that more.
    When my lecture ran out of steam, Niki peered at me in what I suspect was a mirror image of my own squint, and told me that actually she found dancing ‘empowering’. I guess she’d heard me use the word and was using it right back at me for effect, but maybe not. Maybe dancing around a pole while a whole bunch of men drooled into their laps did empower her. What did I know? She’d invited me to come along and watch her some night. She said she was ‘a really hot dancer’ and guys loved her.
    At barely twenty with a girl-next-door face and a gorgeous, sexy body, it was no surprise to me that the guys loved her. Or that she was a hot dancer. What did surprise me was how much I hated her doing it. I’m far from being a prude and I had plenty of girlfriendswho’d stripped and danced ‘exotically’, though I’d be hard-pressed to explain exactly what made sliding up and down a pole ‘exotic’. I’d always been cool when friends did it, but for some reason I hated that my little sister did.
    I pulled into a park outside Gemma’s place and wound the back windows up enough so Wolf could still stick his nose out and sniff the breeze. He gave a