Free The Stretch (Stephen Leather Thrillers) by Stephen Leather Page A

card.’
    ‘Trish! Why didn’t you ask me first?’
    ‘Because you weren’t here. I thought you might be late again.’
    ‘I was visiting your gran.’ Sam took a triangle of pizza. ‘And you know I hate pineapple.’
    ‘Fruit’s good for you. How is she?’
    Sam sat down at the table opposite her daughter. ‘The same, pretty much. She’s not going to get better. It’s not that sort of illness.’
    ‘Yeah, I know. We did it in biology last year.’
    Sam took a bite of pizza while Trisha went to the fridge and poured her mother a glass of milk. ‘So how’s school?’ asked Sam.
    ‘School’s school. It’s not going to get better either.’
    ‘Soon be over. Then you’ll be off to college or university.’
    Trisha sighed. ‘Don’t start, Mum.’
    ‘I’m not starting. It’s just that an education’s important. You know that.’
    ‘You left school at fifteen and you did all right.’
    Sam laughed and put down her slice of pizza. ‘Oh, Trisha, come on. I’ve been a kept woman for almost a quarter of a century. That’s hardly an achievement.’
    ‘You’re a wife and mother. You brought up three kids. You made a home.’
    ‘And that’s what you want to be? A housewife?’
    Trisha grimaced. ‘No bloody way. But I’m just saying there are options, that’s all.’
    ‘That’s exactly what college will give you. Options. And don’t swear.’
    ‘Bloody isn’t swearing, Mum.’
    Sam arched an eyebrow and Trisha threw up her hands. ‘Fine, I won’t express myself.’ She stood up. ‘I’ve got homework. Don’t stay up too late, you need your beauty sleep.’
    ‘Thank you very much,’ laughed Sam.
    After Trisha had gone upstairs, Sam opened a bottle of white wine and sat on a sofa in the sitting room with an old Eagles CD playing on the stereo as she read through the file that Patterson had given her. The financial details didn’t make any better reading the second time. The cheque that Warwick Locke had promised her would keep her creditors at bay for a week or so, but without a major injection of capital the whole house of cards was going to come tumbling down. The only salvation lay in the contents of Terry’s safe deposit box.
    Later she went upstairs and showered. As she stood in the bedroom, towelling her hair dry, she saw a flash of light through the curtains. She switched off the bedroom lights and peered through the window. A car was parked in the road outside the house. A big car.
    ∗      ∗      ∗
     
    Frank Welch popped two breath mints in his mouth and sucked on them as he stared at Sam Greene’s house. Welch had been inside the house twice, both times with a search warrant. The first time, four years earlier, Welch had been gathering evidence against Terry Greene’s drug-dealing empire, but the house had been clean and Welch and his team had walked away with Terry and Sam’s insults ringing in their ears. The second time had been equally unfruitful – it was only when they went to the apartment where Terry was staying that they’d discovered a pair of Terry’s shoes with spots of blood on them, blood that was later identified as being Preston Snow’s. Not absolutely conclusively of course, but the police genetics expert gave evidence that there would have to be of the order of two hundred billion people on the planet for there to have been anyone else with the same DNA profile. That was good enough for Welch, and for the jury.
    Welch cupped his hand over his mouth and exhaled, then sniffed cautiously. All he could smell was the mints. Sam’s jibe at his bad breath had hit home. It had been a recurring problem since his school days. He wasn’t a smoker, and it didn’t seem to matter what he ate or how often he cleaned his teeth, he could see people turn away if he got too close, a look of disgust on their faces. Welch himself could never smell anything amiss, which made it all the worse because he never knew from one day to the next how serious his bad