Crusher Read Online Free Page A

thought it worth something. But how would a smackhead have got into the house and crept upon my dad without him noticing, even with earphones in? And what would a smackhead have wanted with all those pages of scribble and ancient dog-eared photocopies of news cuttings?
    My dad once mentioned a writer he’d known from Northern Ireland whose gritty tales of Protestant extremists got him bullets in the post and death threats over the phone. He’d fled to England, to an undisclosed address. “I’m pathetic,” Dad had said. “For a minute I actually envied the poor bastard. Someone gave a shit about what he wrote.”
    Is that what my dad had done? Pissed someone off with his script? Was that why all the notes were taken, and his laptop? I didn’t even know what the story was about—he’d changed it so often I’d stopped listening. It started off being about a guy under witness protection, then it had turned into a cop drama, then been about bent bankers and politics …
    With the laptop gone, how was I going to find out? He’d backed up the stuff onto a memory stick, yeah, but last time I’d noticed, it was still plugged into the laptop, and now it was gone too.
    The door burst open again, and Prendergast entered, a manila folder in his hand. He stood there staring at me, then jerked his thumb at the PC. “Coffee, milk, no sugar. You want anything?” This last to me. I shook my head.The PC hesitated, and Prendergast glared at him. “And take your time, all right?”
    Reluctantly the PC left the room, and Prendergast shut the door behind him. He sighed as he slipped off his jacket, draped it over the back of one of the chairs and sat down heavily opposite me. His grey-green eyes were red-rimmed; they looked as if they’d had a sense of humour once, but had become pickled in cynicism.
    “So, what was it about?”
    “What was what about?”
    “This bust-up you had with your stepfather.”
    “We didn’t have a bust-up.”
    “Pull the other one. You’re a bloody teenager. They argue about bloody everything. Drugs, was it? You were dealing again, and he found out?”
    “I don’t deal in drugs.”
    “Come on, Finn. Three months’ youth custody, expelled from school, it’s all in your record.” He tapped the folder. “Weren’t doing very well there anyway, from what I’ve read. Failed every exam you ever took. Not surprised you turned to dealing, it’s the only way you’ll ever make a decent living.”
    I said nothing. There was nothing to say. Prendergast opened the folder and pretended to read it.
    “Diagnosed as suffering from dyslexia. From the Greek, meaning thick as shit.”
    Did he think he was being original? I’d heard that same pig-ignorant gag a million times.
    “I have a job. I work at Max Snax on Ealing Road.”
    “Yeah, yeah, selling chicken-burgers—that’s just a cover, isn’t it? The punters come in, you slip them something under the counter, another twenty quid and sir can go super-large?”
    I let him talk. He was smirking again.
    “There was no
intruder
, was there? Your stepfather lays it down—quit dealing or get out of his house. You sleep on it, you think, his house? This could be my house. Why don’t I just get rid of him? And you take his bowling trophy or whatever it was and you clout him over the head a few times and you leave him there, bleeding his brains out, and you jog to your dealership job and serve deep-fried crap with crack all day like nothing’s happened. End of your shift, you jog home, come in, get your mobile out and you say
‘Someone’s killed my dad.’
 ” Prendergast put on a little-boy-lost voice. “But I’ve listened to the call you made. You’re all calm and collected. You’re not upset, you’re not surprised. Because you don’t give a shit. You just won the raffle.”
    The worst thing was, he was right about the last bit. It was like I’d felt … nothing. Maybe I’d been in shock, maybe I still was, maybe it just hadn’t hit home