Read Online Gone Cold by Douglas Corleone - Free Book Online

she said, yawning as she gazed out the windshield. “ Shit. It’s beginning to snow. Some holiday you boys are taking me on.”
    “At least it’s not brutally cold,” I said as I stepped out of the vehicle. I’d opened the door expecting to shiver, but unlike my final night in D.C., there was no wind. Not so much as a breeze.
    “Can’t last though,” Zoey cautioned.
    I turned to her. “You know Springburn. Where should we start?”
    “Bishop’s, Highland, Shevlanes,” she said with a shrug. “Makes no difference, really. They all attract the same sort.”
    Along with dive bars, the road was littered with rundown churches. Black iron gates discouraged trespassers from trampling their overgrown lawns, defacing their cracked and crumbling tombstones, their statues of saints thick with bird shit.
    In the distance stood a group of cement blocks, thirty-some stories tall.
    “Projects?” I asked.
    Ashdown said, “Here in the UK, we call them council houses. Sounds more sophisticated, doesn’t it?”
    In the past couple of years I’d witnessed poverty in so many of its ugly forms, from the Podil district in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to the La Carpio slums in the Costa Rican capital of San José. Watching needless human suffering in a world where so many have so much never got any easier.
    “Let’s start there,” I said, pointing to a brown brick cube on the corner. A collapsing sign hanging against the side of the structure read THE OLD SOAK , which Ashdown explained was British slang used to refer to drunkards of long standing.
    Zoey said, “I fancy it already.”
    As I gazed across the street, I laid out the plan. “I’ll head in first, order a beer. Zoey, you come in after ten or fifteen minutes. Act like you don’t know me.”
    “Shouldn’t be much of a challenge, should it, little brother?”
    I ignored her comment for the moment but damn well meant to address it later.
    “Detective,” I said, “you’ll keep an eye on the place in case we need backup. You all right for an hour or two?”
    “Of course.”
    As I turned and started toward the bar I heard Zoey asking Ashdown for money.
    “Since when do you pay for your own drinks inside a pub?” Ashdown sneered.
    “Oh, bugger off,” she shouted. “Maybe it’s not drinks I’m bent on paying for. Ever think of that?”
    Once I stepped onto the curb on the opposite side of the street, I was mercifully out of earshot. I opened the metal door to the Old Soak and was immediately greeted by an odor I couldn’t define. That and a middle-age male bartender who eyed me up and down as though I’d just told him I meant to rob the place.
    There were only two other patrons in the pub, both elderly gentlemen seated at the bar, staring into tall glasses of ale. I flashed on a street sign I’d seen just a few blocks back. Depicting a pair of stooped-over stick figures, it read: WATCH FOR THE ELDERLY . Implied in that warning, I now realized, was that Springburn’s elderly might well be drunk out of their gourds. At least the two old soaks seated at this bar clearly were.
    As I took a barstool I motioned to the tap and said, “Pint of Tennent.”
    The bartender didn’t say a word, didn’t crack half a smile, just grabbed a cloudy pint glass from the drain board behind him and started the pour.
    I drank down half the pint in a swallow. What I really craved was a double espresso, something to sharpen the senses rather than dull them. But when in Rome, and all that. And from the looks of the place, had I ordered anything sans alcohol, the bartender would have swiftly tossed me out on my British-American ass.
    Ashdown was right. Had I come to Glasgow alone I’d never have gotten answers. At least not without a gun. And a willingness to use it.
    But now we had a far more effective weapon in our arsenal.
    And several minutes after I finished my first pint, she stepped inside the pub with a disarming smile painted across her ruby-red lips.
    “Shot of your