Read A Good Day To Die for Free Online Page B

operated in the mountains behind Puerta Galera, and who still made the occasional foray down to the coast, using their guns against those who didn't see eye to eye with them.
    I didn't like the idea of depriving Slippery Billyof a burial. I didn't know his family situation but I supposed he had loved ones somewhere, and that they'd be left wondering for the rest of their lives what had happened to him. But I had no choice. He'd made his bed and, uncomfortable as it was, he was going to have to lie in it.
    As I toppled him over the edge and turned away, wiping sweat from my brow, I thought about the mysterious Les Pope, the man who'd commissioned this and Blacklip's murder, as well as at least two others. Would he be losing any sleep over his crimes? I doubted it. Like Billy West, I expected he'd just see it as business.
    I pondered that particular matter as I returned to the Land Rover and continued my journey up to the Ponderosa golf club for a much-needed drink and a chance to think about the man whose murder I'd just avenged.

5

    Asif Malik. He'd been a colleague of mine in Islington CID for more than a year during my last days in London. Originally I was his boss, and then, just before my ignominious departure, he'd got promoted to the same level as me, which hadn't been much of a surprise. He'd always struck me as a man who was going places. He was hardworking, bright and, most importantly of all, decent. Most coppers are decent people underneath it all, but some - myself included - get more cynical as the years go by and the crime rate keeps rising. I'd once believed in what I was doing, in my ability, as a police officer working within the strict frameworks the law sets, to change things and deliver justice to the people who needed it. But time, and the growing realization that what I was delivering was nothing more than a sticking plaster for a gaping wound, had corrupted me to the point where both my reputation andmy conscience were now well beyond repair.
    It was possible that Malik had changed too. After all, I hadn't seen him in three years. But somehow I doubted it. He'd always been unflinching in his view that what he was doing was right, and what the people he was trying to catch were doing was wrong. To Malik, life had been relatively simple. There was good and there was evil, and it was the duty of all right-thinking people to try to promote the former and stamp out the latter. That was why it had upset me more than I would have expected when I'd read about his death on the Net three weeks earlier. Because he was one of the good guys, and God knows there aren't very many of them left these days.
    Since leaving home, I'd followed his career on its upward trajectory, in the expat papers and on the Net, from detective sergeant in Islington CID to detective inspector in Scotland Yard's SO7 Organized Crime Unit, and then to his final, brief role as a DCI in the National Crime Squad. It had pleased me to see him doing well. First and foremost, because I'd always liked him. I think he reminded me a little of what I'd been like when I'd started out, before the rot had set in. But there was more to it than that. For some reason, the evidence of his progress helped to ease the guilt I felt periodically over the fate of the only three innocent men I've ever killed - the two customs officers and the accountant whose deaths had led to thedisintegration of my old life, and my subsequent exile. I guess I saw Malik as an extension of me: my good side. The young copper I'd mentored, and sent on to greater things. If I was capable of helping him, then I couldn't have been that bad a man. That's how I'd rationalized it on those occasions when the guilt had begun to get a grip. And it helped, because like a lot of things, there was a degree of truth in it. He had learned a lot from me, and before the secret of my other life had come out, most of it had been good.
    Billy West hadn't even known who Malik was when he'd snuffed out