Fight Back Read online

  Fight Back

  Anna Smith

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Anna Smith

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2019 Anna Smith

  The moral right of Anna Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78747 388 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover designer Blacksheep

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Anna Smith

  The Dead Won’t Sleep

  To Tell The Truth

  Screams in the Dark

  Betrayed

  A Cold Killing

  Rough Cut

  Kill Me Twice

  Death Trap

  The Hit

  Blood Feud

  For Katrina – for all that you are.

  ‘The stars shine only in darkness’

  Prologue

  They had heard nothing since John O’Driscoll went missing six weeks before. It could only mean one thing. And every day that passed with no news made Kerry’s heart sink further. Maybe she shouldn’t have sent him to Spain to oversee everything after the attempted robbery. Even though she knew it was pointless to blame herself, it troubled her that perhaps she could have done things differently. But Kerry Casey was the head of the Casey family now. There was no going back. From the moment she took revenge for the murder of her brother, Mickey, and the slaying of her mother at his funeral, her life hadn’t been the same. This was who she was now, dealing with the scum of the earth, people she would have crossed the road to avoid just a few months ago. And if that wasn’t enough, she was sitting on a three-million-pound stash of cocaine that every gangster from Glasgow to Dublin was trying take from her. It was well hidden, but the Caseys hadn’t even been able to move it on because right now it was too dangerous. Drugs were a filthy, stinking business, and she’d promised herself that she’d be out of them from the day she took over the family. She was one deal away from the start of her dream to make her gangland empire legit. One deal. And none of the hyenas waiting for the Caseys to keel over and die were going to stop her.

  She’d jumped on a plane and come to the Costa del Sol, where Sharon Potter – who’d become her partner in crime – had been holding the fort for the last few weeks after the attempted break-in at the apartments where the coke was hidden. There were two men down already and the body count was rising. Sharon had been the last person to speak to O’Driscoll before he was taken.

  ‘You’re looking very pale, Kerry,’ Sharon said as Kerry slumped onto the chair. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kerry nodded wearily. She put her hands behind her head and sat back. ‘Just tired.’

  Kerry had been throwing up most of the morning but wasn’t about to admit that. This was no time to be weak.

  She could hear approaching footsteps on the marble floor from the hall, and looked as the door opened. She was glad to see her uncle Danny and Jack Reilly, and especially glad to see Jake Cahill among the group of men who entered. They all looked grim as they filed in and sat around the table. Danny came across before he sat and gave her a hug.

  ‘So what do we know?’ Kerry asked. ‘Anything new?’

  Danny looked at one of the other men, a wiry little guy with a shaven head.

  ‘Paul?’ he said to him. ‘You fill us in. You’ve been here longer.’

  Paul cleared his throat and sat forward.

  ‘Okay. Word on the ground is that the Irish fucker, Durkin, is even more heavily involved with the Colombians than we thought. But he’s not getting much of a say and is being shoved around like Pepe Rodriguez’s bitch. That Colombian bastard is the main man down here, part of the cartel from back in his home, as you know. He’s just steamrolling his way through other dealers and set-ups. I don’t know if people are making deals with him, or standing back, or just shit scared. But he’s getting everything all his own way. He’s bringing stuff in and he wants to be the only guy anyone deals with all over the place. I mean that’s never going to happen, as there are plenty of big shots who won’t buy it. But he’s an evil bastard. The stories about him in Colombia are legend.’

  Kerry and the others listened.

  ‘So there have been no phone calls?’ she asked. ‘Nothing to tell us what they want – if it’s them who’ve got O’Driscoll? That’s unusual, is it not?’

  ‘A bit,’ Danny said. ‘I thought we’d have heard by now.’

  ‘Okay. Should I contact him or Durkin or Billy Hill?’

  ‘We should maybe think about it. O’Driscoll would have got in touch by now if he could.’

  The room fell silent. Kerry knew they had to move on for the moment. She turned to Sharon, who had been tight lipped and looked tired. The last time she’d seen her was as she was leaving with her son Tony to spend the next few months in Spain to run the construction of the massive hotel complex.

  ‘How are things with the plans?’ Kerry asked.

  ‘Well, that’s one thing that’s moving in the right direction,’ Sharon said, fiddling with a pen and some papers. ‘The lawyer here is getting good vibes from the town hall down in Marbella. We should be able to start work in the next few weeks.’

  ‘Good. Well that’s something,’ Kerry said.

  Everyone looked up when there was a gentle knock on the door. Jack got up, crossed the room and opened the door.

  ‘Señor, there is a man at the gate with a delivery. He say it is for Miss Casey. Should I send him aw
ay?’

  They all looked at each other. Danny and two of their henchmen stood up.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Danny said. ‘Only a handful of people even know where we are, and most of them are around this table.’ He turned to the man at the door. ‘Is there a car? A delivery?’

  ‘Is in a taxi. Only the taxi driver.’

  Danny, Jake Cahill and Jack moved towards the door.

  ‘We’ll go and check this out, Kerry,’ Jack said. ‘It might be some kind of trap. We’ve got guards outside all over the place. But I don’t like the sound of this.’

  Kerry nodded and looked at Sharon. She felt nauseated. She shouldn’t be this sick with stress, but it had been hanging on her for days.

  They came back to the room, carrying a large box wrapped in plastic.

  ‘We talked to the taxi driver, but he said it was delivered to his office in another taxi,’ Jack said. ‘He didn’t know who sent it. It’s quite heavy.’

  ‘What if it’s a bomb?’ Kerry said. ‘I’m not sure we should open it. Can we get someone in?’

  ‘Christ! I don’t know who,’ Danny said.

  ‘It won’t be a bomb,’ Cahill said, gingerly turning the box a few times. ‘Or if it is, then it’s a crude-looking effort.’ He crossed the room and clicked open his black attaché case as the others looked on. Then he clipped together some kind of gadget and brought it back to the table. ‘This will detect if there are any explosives in the package,’ he said. He pushed a button and scanned the box. The gauge didn’t flash or make any warning noise. ‘It’s not a bomb.’

  ‘Will we open it?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Yes. Go ahead.’

  Jack took out a penknife and carefully took the plastic wrapping apart. Underneath, there was bubble wrap and then a heavy cardboard box, dark blue in colour.

  ‘What is it?’

  Jack shrugged as he slid his knife under and prised the lid open a little. He gave one more tug, and they all stepped back when the lid came off. The stench nearly knocked them off their feet. Kerry was on the verge of throwing up again, even before her eyes fell on the contents of the blue box. She covered her mouth and nose and peered inside, gasping as the recognition dawned on her. It was the bloodied face of John O’Driscoll. There were fleshy, gaping holes where his eyes had been torn out. But it was definitely him.

  Chapter One

  Kerry had woken up in a sweat from a fearsome nightmare where she could hear the agonised screams of O’Driscoll as they gouged out his eyes. She’d been crying, and even when she drifted back to sleep the nightmare chased her, until she finally got out of bed at six a.m., a wave of nausea making her bolt to the bathroom, where she promptly threw up. Christ! This was the third day running she’d been sick. For a fleeting, terrifying moment, it occurred to her that she might be pregnant. No way. Don’t even go there, she told herself, pushing away the image of DI Vinny Burns as she stepped into the shower. She had to get ready to meet Danny and her crew here to work out their next move.

  They hadn’t called in the police yesterday when O’Driscoll’s head had been delivered in a box. The grisly message had Rodriguez’s fingerprints all over it, and the last thing they wanted to do was call in the Spanish cops. Even though some of Kerry’s people on the ground here had good contacts inside the Guardia Civil, it was best to keep the police out of it. Executing O’Driscoll in the way that Rodriguez had was like marking his territory, that this was what was facing the Caseys if they took him on. Kerry was sure he didn’t think they would come after him. But he was wrong. O’Driscoll had been family to her. People like him and Danny and Jack were all she had now.

  *

  Danny came into the room first and Kerry could tell by the look on his face that he had more bad news. She motioned everyone to the terrace and they stepped out of the wide patio doors and sat around the huge glass-top table. The old Spanish lady who had worked in the house for a generation came out with orange juice in jugs and the smell of percolating coffee filled the air from the kitchen. In another life, this would have been a pleasant morning, where the assembled friends could be planning a round of golf. But that was another world. Danny reached across for a jug of orange and poured the juice into glasses, passing them across to people. He sighed and shook his head.

  Kerry looked at Danny and glanced at the others as all eyes turned to him, his eyes baggy from lack of sleep. He looked as though he’d aged ten years in recent weeks.

  ‘I don’t know if any of you have seen the news this morning. But there’s been a headless corpse found in a suitcase in the boot of a car at Málaga airport.’

  ‘Christ almighty!’ Kerry sank back and looked at Danny. ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘Officially, not much,’ he replied. ‘But I’ve got one of our guys to make a call. It’s O’Driscoll all right. Bastards left his credit cards and wallet in his jeans so we’d be left in no doubt.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Sharon said. ‘Cops will have to put that out to the media soon. A Brit butchered on the Costa, it will be all over the front pages tomorrow.’

  ‘I know.’ Kerry nodded. ‘Police will be contacting his family, so we’d better get that done first. I don’t want them getting a knock on the door without being prepared.’ She turned to Danny. ‘Danny. Have you got John’s wife’s phone number?’

  ‘Ex-wife, Alice,’ Danny said. ‘They split about two years ago. She’s a bit flaky. But they have two lovely kids – ten and thirteen. Boy and a girl. They’re great kids and Johnny adored them.’ He shook his head. ‘Fuck! They’ll be in bits, poor bastards.’

  Nobody spoke for a few moments as Kerry tried to think of how the hell she was going to break this to his family.

  ‘I’d better phone Alice. What is she likely to do?’ Kerry asked. ‘Will she phone the cops or what?’

  Kerry hated herself for even thinking this way. She didn’t want the Scottish cops involved at all and sniffing around her doorstep, but she knew it was inevitable. But she wanted to get to Alice first and make sure she kept quiet. She hated herself for that thought too.

  ‘She’s all right. I think so anyway. Part of her problem is she didn’t like O’Driscoll working and keeping late hours, as he did sometimes. To be honest, with Johnny though, it wasn’t all work, if you know what I mean. He liked the ladies.’ Danny paused, but nobody said anything. He rubbed his face. ‘Anyway, I think she’ll be okay. I mean she’s not going to go shooting her mouth off to the papers. We’ll look after her. And the kids.’ He shook his head.

  Kerry was thinking she should fly home and talk to them after making the initial phone call. But there was such a lot going on here, she had to wait to see what was happening. She didn’t even know the kids, but she could only imagine the desolation they would feel knowing that they would never see their father again. She’d known that agonising pain – she hadn’t been much older than that when she lost her own father. When the dreadful details of O’Driscoll’s murder reached the press, as it inevitably would, she would have to find a way to help them through this.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll make the phone call to Alice once we finish up here. But let’s work out how we hit back for this.’ She looked at Jake Cahill who had been sitting, taking it all in, saying nothing.

  The room was silent for a long moment, then Danny spoke.

  ‘I think the quicker we hit back the better. Rodriguez can’t be everywhere. We already know some of his movements from the Guardia Civil contacts who are on detail to keep tabs on him.’

  ‘Are you saying we should hit him?’ Sharon asked, frowning at Danny.

  ‘No,’ Danny said. ‘Not a direct hit at him. But he has several places along the coast here where he does business. Bars that are basically just money-laundering places where he has one or two Colombians to run them. Hitting a couple of them would be one thing we could do. Short and sharp.’

  Kerry thought about this for a moment.

  ‘What about his drugs? Stuff he is moving in and out of the co
untry? Can we hit them?’

  ‘Probably a bit more difficult. But we could, once we get more intelligence. I think we should look at that too, so that we can hit him again and again.’

  Kerry felt perplexed.

  ‘But he’s going to come back every time we hit him. That’s for sure.’

  Danny nodded, and again the table was silent.

  ‘Well, that’s how it goes, Kerry.’

  Christ! The last thing she wanted was another bloodbath on her hands with innocents caught in the crossfire, the way her mother had been at Mickey’s funeral.

  ‘What about these bastards Billy Hill and Pat Durkin?’ Sharon asked. ‘I take it they’ve not been in touch yet.’

  ‘No,’ Kerry said. ‘But they will be. That fat little bastard Durkin will be standing by admiring how the Colombians do business. But I don’t think Durkin has really got the stomach for getting his hands dirty. What do you think?’

  ‘I think any message or talk that Rodriguez wants to make will now come through Durkin. Maybe he’ll be sent like the lapdog he is to ask for a meeting,’ Danny said. ‘I’ll be surprised if he isn’t on the phone before the day’s out, to offer his condolences.’ He paused, looked at Jake Cahill. ‘We could certainly take out a couple of Durkin’s money-earners down here – bars and two flop-house hotels he owns in Fuengirola and one in Torremolinos. That would hurt the Irish prick – and in turn would get the message back to Rodriguez. We know they’re hand in hand now.’

  Jake nodded but he still didn’t speak.

  ‘Okay,’ Kerry said. ‘Let’s look at that. We can meet back here this evening for dinner. By that time I’ll have spoken to Alice. But I’m thinking I should go back to Glasgow in the next day or so. I don’t want to be so far away from everything we have there to find it in ruins by the time we get back. There’s enough vultures over there to think if we’re getting hit, they might just steam in and get something for themselves. I don’t want that to happen.’

  ‘I’ve left some good men in charge, Kerry,’ Danny said. ‘Big Pete’s running the show and he’s got a few reliable guys with him. Also, those wee guys – Cal and the Kurdish guy. I think we should look at putting them to good use.’