A Silent Death by Peter May (book recommendations website txt) 📕

head struck the paving stones he felt blood flooding his mouth. Light filled his head. As he blinked to clear it he looked up and saw Alvarez standing over him, legs apart, a pistol held two-handed at arm’s length and pointing directly at his chest.

All thirty-eight years of Mackenzie’s life spooled backwards through his mind so fast that they were gone in a moment. How short life really was, how insubstantial and fleeting all those burdensome memories, scattered in an instant like the ashes of his aunt in the flower garden at the cemetery. Breath escaped from his lips in a long sigh and he screwed his eyes tight shut in preparation for the bullet that would kill him. He wondered if it would hurt. Did pain outlast life, straddle the divide? And what next? Darkness and silence? Like Cristina’s aunt?

But a shout pre-empted the bullet. So piercing and prolonged that it forced him to open his eyes again. Alvarez was still there, the gun still pointing at Mackenzie’s chest. But the man’s eyes had lifted and were focused beyond them both, back along the lane. Mackenzie craned his neck and saw Cristina silhouetted against the sunlight in the street behind her, pistol drawn. She held hers too in a double-handed stance, its muzzle directed straight at Mackenzie’s would-be killer. She could shoot him before he could raise his weapon to fire at her. If he shot Mackenzie she would kill him. It was a classic stand-off. And Mackenzie found himself an almost neutral observer. Having already accepted death, he had somehow banished fear.

He looked back up at Alvarez. The man was caught in an agony of indecision that seemed to last a lifetime, before finally he took a calculated risk and simply turned and ran, sprinting off into the gloom, almost certainly fearing the bullet in his back that never came.

Cristina arrived to kneel beside the prone figure of Mackenzie, breathless and glistening with sweat. Fear and darkness dilating her pupils so that they almost obliterated the irises. She holstered her gun. ‘Señor, are you alright?’

Mackenzie wiped blood from his face with shaking fingers. ‘Apart from a busted nose and a split lip, I think I might live.’

She helped him to sit upright and produced paper hankies from somewhere for him to hold to his nose. He spat out blood and his words were muffled by his hand and the hankies. ‘You know they say that if you save a life you are for ever responsible for it?’

‘Do they?’ She seemed unimpressed.

‘Apparently.’

‘Well, Señor, I think you are big enough and ugly enough to look after yourself.’

He shook his head. ‘Except today. When you did it for me.’ He felt a huge wave of gratitude towards her. ‘Gracias señora. For my life.’

She helped him to his feet as a perspiring Detective Gil finally appeared, fighting for breath, at the far end of the lane. When he saw them he leaned forward to support himself on bent knees. ‘He got away then?’ he gasped.

Mackenzie said, ‘No, we gave him a business card and he promised to call.’

*

By the time they got back to Zhivago’s, both the restaurant and the wine store were closed. There was no sign of the staff. Everyone had gone. Mackenzie had stopped the blood leaking from his nose, and from somewhere Cristina managed to produce wet wipes to clean the dried smears of it from his face. They stood in a disconsolate knot under the blazing sun in the car park, certain that eyes were trained upon them from behind smoked glass windows in the Russian club across the road.

Gil said, ‘If the financial branch can make the money laundering stick, then maybe we would have leverage against the owners of this place to reveal the identity of their customers.’

‘No time,’ Mackenzie said. People always quoted the maxim, follow the money. And they were right. But it always took too long.

Gil nodded. He knew it, too. He shrugged. ‘Well . . . I’ll get back to the office and see what I can do.’ He fished a business card from a back pocket and held it out for Mackenzie. ‘You can get me at this number.’ Mackenzie took it, and a look passed between them. Gil found a reluctant smile. ‘You can pass it on to Alvarez when he calls.’

As the Kia slipped out of the car park, leaving Cristina and Mackenzie leaning against the bonnet of his car, Mackenzie’s phone rang. He lifted it from his breast pocket.

‘Yes?’

‘Señor, is Cristina with you?’ He recognized the Jefe’s voice at once, and something in its gravitas put him on immediate alert.

‘Yes, she is.’

‘Shit!’

‘What’s wrong?’ He glanced up to see Cristina looking at him apprehensively.

‘What is it? she demanded. Mackenzie held up a finger to silence her.

The Jefe said, ‘I was hoping to make this easier for her, but I don’t see how. It’s Antonio. Her husband. He’s . . .’ Mackenzie heard him gasp his frustration. ‘There’s been an incident.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Ana is close to hysteria. Cleland has been gone for hours, leaving her in the dark and silent world which only technology can penetrate. A world into which she has been plunged alone once more since his departure. She doesn’t know if he simply unplugged her computer, or whether he turned off power at the mains. But living without her technology now is almost like trying to breathe without oxygen.

Her distress is heightened by an increasingly pervasive and unpleasant odour. Sandro has not been over the door since early this morning, and it is just possible that he has been forced to empty his bowels somewhere in the house. In the last half-hour he has been repeatedly pushing his nose against her leg. Finding his head with her hands she has felt his anxiety. He is almost certainly whining, perhaps barking too. Though it would be so unlike him. And he is not responding to her attempts to calm him.

She gets out of her