Free KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) by Frank Lean Page A

joke!’
    Just then Mangler gave a loud growl.
    ‘Someone’s coming,’ Janine whispered.
    I pulled out the Glock and held it on my lap.
    We waited in suspense for a few moments and then a fox barked. Mangler bared his teeth but Janine calmed him. The children didn’t wake.
    Janine put her hand on the gun.
    ‘Where did you get that?’
    ‘One of our visitors left it. I’m just looking after it for him.’
    ‘Dave you fool, you know there are armed police out there just waiting for a chance to shoot you and you go round with a gun.’
    ‘Your idea of leaving a message at Topfield’s a good one,’ I said, trying to change the subject. ‘It’s the only point of contact I have with these …’
    ‘Stop it! Give it to me. This thing’s going to end up in the deepest part of Loch Lomond.’
    ‘But Janine, it gives us protection. It’s only ironmongery.’
    ‘Yes that’s what I’ll tell the Police Complaints Commission when they approve of the police shooting you because you were carrying an unlicensed firearm. Some good that’ll do us!’
    I held onto the gun.
    ‘All right, Dave, we’ll strike a bargain. Give me the gun and I’ll go to Scotland like a good girl and get out of your way while you do whatever you’ve got to do.’

 
    8
    Tuesday: 3.15 a.m.
    I phoned Bob’s private mobile number from a public call box. I had no idea of his location apart from Manchester.
    Janine had dropped me off at the end of Deansgate before heading off towards the M62 and the M6 north. I was disarmed but as Janine well knew Bob Lane has a brother, Clint.
    Clint’s real name is Vincent Anthony Lane. He was nicknamed Clint by his own father after a film star. No, not Clint Eastwood but Clint Walker who starred in a cowboy series called ‘Cheyenne’ which capitalised on his massive height. Walker is six foot six, a mere child compared to the height Clint Lane eventually reached, but Lane senior was impressed enough to dub his growing son ‘Clint’. The name stuck and is virtually the only legacy any of the family received from their father of whom none of them will speak but who was no longer on the scene when I became acquainted with the Lanes.
    In terms of weaponry Clint counts as heavy artillery.
    Clint has served as my bodyguard before. In a very special way Clint is equivalent to a whole squad of minders. On one occasion he’d defended me from an angry crowd by swinging a twelve foot long steel scaffolding spar round his head.
    Clint’s a gentle giant, over seven feet in shoes and socks and built like a main battle tank but his intellectual development hasn’t matched his physical. He’s not ‘care in the community’ or anything. Well, he is in a way. That is, he’s had some care and still needs it but he functions well in most situations.
    Jan has taught him to read: slowly but he does read and what’s more he remembers what he’s read.
    Clint was married to Naomi Carter, who was Jan’s nanny when she was still trying to make a go of her journalistic career writing on women’s issues for the Guardian and other papers. Naomi eventually dumped him saying she wanted more excitement in her life, sad woman. She’s now working as a carer in an old folk’s home in Nottingham.
    To my mind life with Clint had to be more exciting than that.
    Clint works on a farm. The constant hard labour, involving lifting awkward animals, bales of hay, and even pulling tractors out of ditches has developed his physique to frightening proportions. He has to have most of his clothes specially made.
    The local thug community are in terror of him. Unfortunately those two fire bombers weren’t locals. They definitely weren’t local knuckle-draggers, not the steroid-crazed types you’d expect at a firebombing party at all. I replayed the attack over and over in my mind.
    We’d been very, very lucky.
    If things had gone as they’d planned we’d have had no chance. I shivered and not from the night air. Paranoid I may be after