Free Killing Mum_Kindle by Allan Guthrie Page B

said, louder.
    "You know, I'm so sorry, but I'm just grateful she landed on the cushion. No harm done. And whatever Maggie thinks, the drink has nothing to do with it, it's just me, you know me, clumsy..."
    She babbled on. She'd never liked Maggie. The fact that Maggie was twenty years younger than Carlos had a lot to do with it. And Maggie had never warmed to her as a result. After what had happened with Sofia, the temperature of their relationship had grown decidedly cool. He tuned his mother out. Picked up the magazine, flicked through it. Gardening magazine. His mother didn't have a garden. Well, she shared a garden with the other members of the tenement, but there was a lawn, and that was all. No reason that she should have a gardening magazine. Maybe she was thinking of coming round to his, giving it a make-over.
    She could leave his fucking garden alone. God, she knew how to make him angry.
    When she returned with coffee — milk jug and sugar bowl on a tray, despite the fact that neither of them took sugar, and a selection of biscuits which he knew neither of them would touch — he asked her about the magazine. " You renting an allotment or something?"
    "Not mine," she said, her cheeks turning pink.
    "Whose, then?" he said.
    She pressed the plunger on the cafetiere . Her hand was shaking. "Just a friend."
    Just a friend. She'd had a few of those since George died. "A good friend?" he asked.
    "Well," she said. She poured a cup of coffee for him, half a cup for herself. "Well, yes, I'd have said so at one point. But now I'd have to say no."
    "Sorry to hear that," Carlos said. "You want to talk about it?"
    "I doubt any good would come of that." She reached behind her, pulled a bottle of vodka from the side of the settee. "Don't say a word." She unscrewed the top. "This is my house. My vodka. I can do as I wish."
    He said nothing, picked up his cup, drank his coffee. She made good coffee. Hadn't always been that way. When he was a kid her coffee tasted like crap. He remembered his dad drinking cortados . Coffee the way it should be drunk. But back then Carlos's palate was too immature to appreciate it. And by the time he was old enough to do so, Pablo Morales had disappeared from their lives.
    "So," she said, pouring a generous amount of vodka into her cup. "Work's slow?" She screwed the top back on the bottle.
    "Yeah," he said, but he could have said anything. She'd already decided what she was going to say next.
    She took a sip of her drink, blinked slowly. "Plumbing," she said. "It's never too late."
    " Cago en tu leche ."
    She frowned, pouted her lips. "Something about milk?"
    Something about shitting in it, but he wasn't about to tell her that. "I'm very fucking sorry I never became a plumber, Mama."
    That's right. Now she'd snapped to attention. He'd never match up to the late George Anderson, his mother's second husband, plumber fucking extraordinaire. Carlos changed the subject. Last thing he needed right now was more anger he didn't have an outlet for.
    Things were about to get complicated.
    "Mum," he said. "This may seem like a strange question, but you haven't annoyed anybody recently, have you?"
    She grinned, lips quivering, exposing dull yellow teeth. "Me? Always annoying people."
    "But annoyed somebody very badly."
    "I usually annoy people very well. Ask Maggie."
    "You know what I mean."
    "What a strange question." Her eyes shone, twin beams of pencil torches. He watched her eyelids come down, the left slightly quicker than the right. Then they rose again. "I really have no idea what you mean."
    The tanning salon was a front. Carlos had bought it many years ago from Florida Al, a fat Geordie who liked to wear Hawaiian shirts. Carlos wasn't sure why the fat lad wasn't called Hawaiian Al, but nicknames don't always make sense. Al had been using the salon as a base for a gun-running operation. All Carlos did, he just took his concept up a league. Gave it the balls that fat verga never had.
    Carlos didn't kill