Free A Dark and Broken Heart by R.J. Ellory

whirlwind of shit I can bring down around your life if you screw with me. Today I killed three people. Three white people. Three pedophile loser scumbags sure, but I killed them for pissing me off less than you are pissing me off right now .”
    But once again, I say nothing. I was raised up polite, see?
    And it is then—just then—as I am thinking these thoughts, as I hold the lighter to the tip of the last cigarette I will smoke before I get out of the car and start down the other side of the street, that my cellphone goes off .
    I think, “What the hell now?” and I take it from my pocket and turn it over, and I see the name flashing on the screen .
    And my heart stops for a moment. My heart stops and my stomach sort of swallows itself, and I feel the hairs on the nape of my neck stand to attention, and I feel my scalp tighten . . .
    The phone won’t stop .
    I hesitate, my finger hovering over the little green telephone, and then I push it .
    “ Yes,” I say, and already I can hear it in my voice. The edge. The nerves .
    “ You gotta come see him,” the voice says. And it doesn’t matter whose voice it is. It could be the president of freaking Cuba, for all that itmatters. It’s just that the message will have come from him, and him directly .
    “ Get me Madigan,” Mr. Sandià will have said, and there won’t have been the slightest doubt in his mind as to whether or not I would comply .
    “ Now?” I ask, like six feet of stiff shit .
    “ No, dickhead,” the voice says. “Why don’t you come next Christmas? ”
    The line goes dead .
    Oh fuck, I am thinking. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck .

13
PROMISE ME
    H is name wasn’t always Sandià. His name used to be something else, and something before that, but none of these names was the one with which he was born.
    Now he was just Mr. Sandià, and this was the name by which he was known and the name that everyone used.
    Anything that went before didn’t matter.
    Madigan sat for a while in the smoke-filled car.
    He felt nauseous, light-headed. He wished he hadn’t taken the lithium back at home, and then he thought that the smartest thing to do would be to take another one. And so he did.
    He chewed it dry, and it tasted bitter in the back of his throat, and he took the empty cup from Chicken Shack and pulled off the lid. There was a half inch of melted ice water in the bottom. He drank it, sucked the last ice cube into his mouth and chewed it. He lit another cigarette, opened the window, tried to breathe deeply and couldn’t. His chest was too tight. Everything was too tight. He loosened his tie, his top button, even his belt. He opened the door and let the cool air in, and then he slammed it shut and started the car. He tried to clear his throat. It was tourniquet-tight. His fingers drummed nervously on the wheel.
    Come on , he thought. Lithium, lithium, do your worst .
    He was at the junction of a 119th and Pleasant before he could even get his thoughts straight.
    Mr. Sandià wanted to see him.
    That morning he—Vincent Madigan—ably assisted by three dead scumbags, had busted one of Sandià’s houses. Sandià’s courier and accompanying entourage had been massacred in a hail of gunfire, and all the money had gone. Four hundred grand, give or take some change, more than three hundred and sixty of which was in a bag under the floorboards on the upper landing of Madigan’s own house. Next to that bag were several boxes of pills—everything from Demerol and Quaaludes to Dexedrine andBennies. Besides that there were three unlicensed handguns, a Tec-9, about ten grams of coke, and a half dozen wraps of smack. What a field day Walsh would have. And what a fun time Madigan would have explaining it all away. Walsh had nothing. IA never had anything. They relied on informants and snitches within the division, and they never got them. They said they did, but they lied, just like most everyone else. Walsh was not only chasing Madigan, he was after Charlie Harris