Consequences - A Noir Serial Novel

The Day After (Part I)

2012-02-03T01:11:00.001-08:00

The Witness

Nicole was back in the city. It had struck her as her only option when she's seen the harm that man had done, when she'd seen the courage of that old woman, to talk about her nephew. Then it had become real. Then it was no longer just about her own safety. She had tried to call Hale, but with no response.

The Murderer

He was at a crossroads in his career. He could let this man inherit the mantle and all that came with it. He could retire. Or he could continue, could finish the business he had started, could see it through until it was over. He had never walked away from a job before. The leather jacket would sigh once more onto his shoulders before the day was over.

The Detective

The world outside seemed relentlessly cheerful. Bright sky, singing birds. Even the traffic's omnipresent roar had been reduced to a quiet hum. None of it was working its charm on Hale, who awoke with the same thought he'd gone to bed with, that the killer had not been caught, but that, until another body happened, the case would be shut for Hale. The only way forwards was to discredit Mike Wilson, the detective who'd caught this one, to prove that this wasn't the right guy for it. He had no love for Wilson, but he was still a detective working under him, he was still Hale's responsibility, and Hale hated the idea of hurting his career like this. His morning shower did nothing to wash the dirty feeling from him. The simple breakfast did nothing for his vague nausea. Even staring at the painting of the tree wasn't helping him. He set out anyway, only to be accosted on his way to his car by a bright faced young man with gelled brown hair.

“Detective Hale?”

Hale growled in the affirmative.

“Okay if I ask a few questions?”

A slight groan from Hale. This would be the best way to throw dirt on Wilson's case.

“Alright, shoot.”

“For this matter, which I believe you've been working on for some time, to be solved so quickly by another detective not attached to the case, how does that make you feel? Inadequate?”

“What the fuck paper do you work for?” Hale snapped

“Metro.”

“That free paper on the busses shit?”

“The same.”

“Okay, well, it's a bit like catching Al Capone on tax evasion. Only its not Al Capone, it's Pudgy Dunn, and you didn't get him for tax evasion, you got him for slacking off his job as a bouncer, and it doesn't matter anyway because in a couple of days he's just going to walk into a diner and wind up eating sawn-off.”

The Metro hack was peppering the outside of Hale's car with question about who Dunn was, and how that related in any way to the case, but Hale was too busy driving anywhere else to listen.

Anywhere else wound up being the tower of glass that was headquarters, unsurprisingly enough. He rode the lift up to the sixth floor, where Wilson was being treated like some kind of hero. Wilson spotted Hale, and came over.

“No hard feelings, Hale. It's that the case is broken that matters, not who broke it. We're good right?”

“Of course we are. I'd never want to take this away from you.”

Wilson sighed dramatically. He was probably genuinely concerned, but he'd overplayed his reaction. He looked up at Hale's face, cocking his head to one side.

“Thanks, that's really great.”

“I mean, why would I take something I don't want?”

“What do you mean, don't want? Case of the century right here!”

“Young though the century is, I hardly feel 'Detective responds to call about body, finds body, blows everything out of proportion' is the case of the century so far. It might be a nominee, but it'll face tough competition from 'Where's that place? You know, the nice place? The one that serves those bagels with cheese and wine? I like that place. We should go there.' The worst part is, I hear that nice place sponsors the awards committee, so you just know they'll be biased. Face it, Wilson, you didn't solve shit. And you caught a sick man, but not by any deductive powers, prowess or process. You got him because of an anonymous phone call. So well done, Wilson, but if this is a career high for you, you really need to find a new job. Maybe you could bust tables over at that nice place.”

Hale was ready to keep going with his tirade, but a rough shove from Wilson had stumbled him back a few steps. Hale moved forwards, Wilson lunged forwards, the desk sergeant threw himself between them with startling agility.

“You, Wilson! Back to your fucking desk! Hale, get the hell out of here, we don't need you antagonising the room. Go work a case or go back home, but be jealous somewhere it won't get you punched.”

Hale stalked out and swung his body into the lift. His hand reached for his flask, before he remembered: cameras in every lift. Wait until the car. The doors opened at the ground floor, and he saw Cassandra Drake, the journalist from Margaret's place. He nodded at her in acknowledgement, she hadn't proven so bad for one of her type. She moved over to him, a concerned look on her face.

“That doesn't seem like him to me.”

“Sorry. Want to try that again with some context?”

“I just got done interviewing Weatherby. He cops to the Fitzgerald torture, and he's right for that, but he doesn't feel right for serial killing.”

“As a police officer, I cannot discuss details of an ongoing investigation.”

“So it is ongoing? He doesn't seem right to you either?”

“I never said that.”

Hale managed a quick wink and smile as he left, Cassandra scribbling away in her notepad. Dissent strewn with a couple of rags, Hale could start actually following up some questions. Hadn't the sergeant asked him to go work a case?

The hospital was his next location, to hunt Alex Fitzgerald. It turned out Fitzgerald was a recent release though. After some light prodding and some heavy bureaucracy, Hale got the address. Some trendy apartment on the young and hip side of town. When he got there, he recognised it as the building he'd tailed that witness to. He'd been back once after that, but she'd split town. He didn't particularly blame her. It botched his investigation, so he could resent it, but from an objective view, he couldn't blame it. He moved over to the bored blonde behind the counter, who was flicking through a newspaper, and showed his badge.

“Which apartment belongs to Alex Fitzgerald?”

“None of them.”

“None of them?”

“Not if he doesn't get his backrent to me soon.”

“Right. The guy was tied up and tortured for two weeks, you know that, right?”

“Money's money.”

“Right. Oh, and Nicole Taylor. Is she back?”

“Yeah. Got back yesterday.”

“Thanks. Which apartment is Alex's again, without the clever answers?”

“One next to Nicole's, on the right.”

“Thanks.”

Hale moved slowly and painfully up the stairs. He felt just about as fine as he could when walking on an even surface, but climbing stairs seemed to put his body at an angle and stress it didn't like, and it got back at him by reminding him about the beating Sam Phillips had given it. He knocked on Nicole's door first. There was a long pause. He knocked again, louder. Long pause. He called out who he was. Then he turned, and moved towards Alex's door. As he did, he heard Nicole's creak open. He turned to see her looking cautiously at him.

“You read the papers, watch the news?” he asked

“Not much before, lived on them after.”

“Makes sense. So you know we've got someone in nick for it then?”

“Yeah. Last night was the first night I really slept since then.”

Hale took a proper look at her. She seemed exhausted, worn out by the world. He gave up resenting her flight, it had punished her enough. He smiled.

“You look like you need more. Someone will want you to go and make an id on this guy in secrecy, don't worry, but you'll need to be in a fit state of mind to know. You grab some kip, okay?”

She smiled back, said she would, and shut the door. Hale tried Alex Fitzgerald's door next. After a pause, he heard shuffling footsteps, and a fat brunette with a face like old leather answered.

“Yes?” she asked in a voice too young for that body

“Alex Fitzgerald? He in?”

“He is, but he's out of it.”

“And you are?”

“His nurse. He's on a private healthcare plan. He preferred to be treated at home. He's resting right now. That's very important. You come back another time, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Over her shoulder, Hale could see the punk that him and Diamond had kicked information out of talking in hushed tones to a gorgeous Asian brunette. What the hell was he doing in a classy house, talking like that to a classy looking dame? He shook it off as he crawled down the stairs. One last person who could tell him about Nicholas. Time to visit Betty Phillips again.

The street seemed to be decaying under neglect even worse all around Betty's place, which only served to place her house on an even higher pedestal. He stood once more on the doorstep, and knocked once more, questioning himself as he did. The light, nervous feeling in his head made him feel like a stupid young man, made him question his own motives for being here. It was just business, right? Then why the slightly faster pulse, why the inane observation of little details the way nerves make you? Hadn't she said that she seemed to draw violent men into her orbit? What exactly did that say about him? Was he just another violent man come to circle around her lustily? He had to stop questioning himself, Betty had swung open the door. There she stood, one leg bent at the knee and hooked behind her ankle, one hand on the door, one against the wall, sleeves, gloves and tights to hide the bruising, gold hair framing her face like the border on a painting, lips slightly pursed, eyes flicking up and down quickly, taking everything in. He could have stood there and taken everything in for days. That would have suited him fine. He pushed himself on instead.

“Mrs. Phillips. I'd like to ask you about Nicholas Weatherby, and your relationship with him.”

She brushed that one aside. “Short, meaningless, nothing.” Her voice took on a more urgent tone “Look at you, Hale. You look like you got hit by a bag of rocks.”

“You know,” Hale sighed “You're the first one to comment on that. I can't look that bad.”

“Well, you did a good job on the cover up, but if you look closely, it's bad. Come in, sit down.”

He stepped once more within those red walls, once more into the sitting room, where he fell into a sofa. When Betty came in, there were once more two black coffees in two deep blue cups. They sat next to each other and sipped. He spoke first.

“Back to the questions. Nicholas -”

She cut him off “Jesus, Hale. We're not talking about my exes. We're talking about what happened to you. What happened to you?”

Hale rubbed his eyelids tiredly, then turned to look at her and gave an exhausted laugh

“One of your exes.”

She looked him in the eyes, put her coffee down, took his from his hand. Her fingers played a little around his.

“Sam?”

“Sam. You should see him. He came off worse.”

“You did this for me?”

“I can't stand a man who does that.”

She kissed him gratefully. He fell back onto the sofa and gave into it. As his hand ran under her shirt, up her back, and unhooked her bra strap, he felt like the man under that tree.

The Survivor

Betty Phillips' day started with the sun peering in around the edges of her curtains, with the songs of birds a light counter melody to the brisk, friendly conversation on the street, and with Betty groaning in pain as she slid herself inch by inch from her bed to her bathroom. She set the bath running and carefully pulled her nightgown off, pausing to wince when she wasn't careful enough, when she had to move her arms and legs more than she was ready to. She sat back against the bath and listened to it slowly fill up with water, legs splayed out, vision not yet in focus, eyelids marching downwards, trying to shut again, hands gripping onto the edge of the tub. Eventually, she lifted herself enough to turn the taps off and slide into the scalding hot water. After the initial sting, she felt herself relax, felt the bruises start to soften up, felt she could get through the day. Not that there was much to get through in the day. She'd asked for time off and got it. She hadn't said it was her husband, had said she'd been mugged. Didn't want to make herself any kind of victim, to get any kind of sympathy or concern from her co-workers, that sickly, nasty, pitying way they'd shelter around her and offer to get her anything she wanted, humiliate her with kindness, badger her and make her feel small, like she couldn't do anything. Didn't want one of them telling the police now that she knew who it was, didn't want to relive it, just wanted to be out of it. Wanted to distance herself. So a mugging. A random crime. Still a source of sympathy, but the anonymity and randomness of the assault meant that there would only be one kind of response, not all the different ways those at the office would react. She could go in, explain it to Kennedy, take some time off. Which is what she had done, and now she had it, and now she found herself just contemplating it all day. She thought about going in, but there she'd be confronted with it in that pitying way, and she refused to be pitied. Better to get herself back to strength at home, with it lurking in the edges, than to be made weaker at work with it laughing in her face.

Afterwards, as she sat in her dressing gown and watched the news with her coffee and cereal, she saw the main story. They had caught the serial killer, they thought. Good news, until the identity. Nick Weatherby. Found torturing Alex Fitzpatrick. Work would be hell right now, a real media circus. She was glad of her day off. Still, best to call the boss, just in case she was wanted in. That'd look better. Maybe she could get overtime for it. She could use the money. She called Kennedy's house first, just in case he was there. She didn't think he would be, she was just prolonging the real phonecall. His wife answered. Her voice had that low, swinging quality that drunks get when they've had their medicine.

“Who's this?” she swung

“Betty Phillips. I was wondering if your husband was in?”

“Bastard's gone and left. Gone and left.”

“For work?”

“For the day. Jealous bastard. Jealous bastard's gone and left.”

“Yes, well, thank you.”

Betty hung up before she could be treated to intimate details of why exactly the bastard had gone and left. The next call was to Kennedy's desk at the office. It picked up halfway through the third ring.

“Yes?” came Kennedy's voice.

“It's Betty Phillips, sir. Was wondering if you wanted me to come in?”

“Anything but!” Kennedy burst out “Anything else at all! Seems Nick's been talking to some journos, is saying he did all this for you! This place is a blasted circus as is, you'd only be making things worse! If anyone comes to talk to you about it, distance yourself from it, you hear me?”

He hung up. Betty sat back and thought about what he'd said. She shivered at the notion that it was all for her. Just another example, she thought wearily, of my habit of making violent men fall for me without wanting it, without knowing it. Nick seemed so sweet too. But then wasn't that what you always heard people say? That he seemed sweet, that he was just quiet and ordinary, that and etcetera.

An hour later, she was dressed. The doorbell rang. A bushy haired brunette in light shades of brown and heavy boots was at her door. She introduced herself as Cassandra Drake, crime reporter for the chronicle. Betty waved her inside in a rather absent manner. They sat down in the front room, and Cassandra had just opened her mouth to start the questions when she caught a glimpse of Betty's bruises.

“Good god. What happened to you?” Cassandra asked. Betty's reply barely escaped through gritted teeth

“Don't pry. I know that's all your lot are good for, but don't. And don't play sympathy either. I'm no-one to you, I'm a couple of lines at the end of a small column on the fourth page. You don't know me as anything else, and keep it that way. I've no interest in telling you the story of bruises. If you like, I'll tell you the story you came here to ask me for. I'll gather you round the fire, I'll sit you on my lap, I'll pull the book out, I'll tuck you in, I'll whatever, but we'll keep this to a professional relationship, if you don't mind. You ask me a story, I tell you a story. I ask you to leave right after, you leave right after. Okay?”

“Okay” sighed Cassandra “I've just got through talking to Nicholas Weatherby. He did it all for love of you is the blurb on the back of the book. You want to fill in the introduction?”

“Right. Me and Nick. It lasted two, three dates, then it just kind of petered out, the way things do when one party is no longer interested.”

“That's not quite the story he sells.”

“That's the story I sell, and if you want to pick who's more credible, why don't you go up to my bathroom and check to see if I've any co-workers tied up there?”

“Okay. Okay. When you split from him, did he take on any obsessive kind of tendencies towards you?”

“Don't they all, for a week or two? But no, after the usual post-relationship sad eyes across a room and words almost said, he was normal. Nick was normal. That all?”

“I guess that's all. I have contacts in battered women shelters if you want”

“Get out.”

“I'll get out. I'll just leave this here.”

Cassandra laid a card on the glass coffee table and made a quick move to the door. Betty sat there, staring at it for a while, before picking it up and tearing it into tiny pieces.

Hale came by later. He looked as beaten up as she did. She was happy to break the strictly professional conduct with him. He was strong enough to make her feel safe, but she had initiated everything. She was in control of him. She'd sent him after Sam in a way, she'd used him as an arm of vengeance and now she used him as a comforting arm to wrap around herself. She was in control of it all, and as they made love in the bedroom, she felt like the painter who'd done that tree painting. All toil for those she chose, all love and comfort for those she chose. Her strokes and brushes certainly got the desired effect from Hale.

She was woken by a knocking at the door. Hale was still in bed, they had fallen asleep together afterwards. She hastily got dressed, and opened the door to a very serious looking man, who wanted her to come and identify a body they believed to be her husband.

Footsteps ringing out, sounding wrong, sounding out of place, disturbing the sleep, disturbing the quiet, mechanical calm precision that the men and women in their lab coats and their gloves presided over their court with. A window. Glass between her and a cold metal table, and a plain white sheet, and a woman in all the usual gear. The sheet is pulled up. Betty nods once, not quite believing it, not quite yet at grips with all of the years of love, of hate, of violent emotions and violent actions, of the life they'd created together, of the house he'd broken, of the string of violence that had followed in his wake, in all of it lying there, dead on a cold metal table. Was it Hale? Was this what she'd sent Hale to do? Did she have that much power over him? Was he that dark and twisted inside? Could she control him if he was? She answered their questions. Any enemies? Wouldn't know, he's been out of town since we separated. How was he for cash? Wouldn't know, he's been out of town since we separated. Did he use drugs? Never when we were together. After that, I wouldn't know, he's been out of town since he separated. She ran away from that place, from all the questions, all the worries. She spent a long time sitting in her car, staring at the front of her house, deciding whether or not to go back in. Leaves in trees kept time with her shallow breathing.

Without Love - Part II

2011-11-22T18:26:00.001-08:00

Without Love: Part Two

The Detective

Detective Hale was following Sam Phillips into a lapdancing club. The boy who took Hale's money looked about fourteen. There had to be some law against that, Hale thought. The innards of the club were suggestively red, from the carpet to the paint on the walls. It was hot and dark. An unused snooker table sat lonely in the corner. Three poles dominated the room, which was otherwise dotted with deep leather sofas, which nervous men and falsely confident women lounged together on, as the drinks came fast, hard and expensive, like everything else in the club. Sam went and talked to some pink hair, tattoos and piercings type who looked like she'd stopped in on her way to school. Hale took a seat with a view of them. A blonde with deeper curves than a race track swayed her way over dressed in black lingerie underneath a see through green dress. Her hair fell over her shoulder the way one line falls into the next in Shakespeare. She sat next to him, placing her hand on his thigh and looking warmly into his eyes. Soft music spilled from her lips. Her name was Louise. What was his?

Deep eye contact, kisses gently on his lips, moans in his ear, all of these leave a deeper impression on him than the open breasts, the gyrating on his lap, the suggestive thrusts. None of it affects him the way that having eyes look at him once again in that way does.

Detective Hale was following Sam Phillips down forgotten roads that seemed never to have held human hope. Detective Hale was following Sam Phillips past empty houses with the blank stares of dead men. Detective Hale was following Sam Phillips towards the abandoned industrial estates on the edges of the city. His phone vibrated in his pocket. It was the office calling again, trying to get him to come in. They thought they'd got the man responsible for the murders across the city. The first time, Hale had snapped that he refused to believe it was him, that the style was wrong, that they'd merely found a man who liked to use knives to cut people, that they could find a lot of those anywhere in this city, that maybe they thought they were solving a murder on the Orient Express, and that maybe they'd like to work their little grey cells and actually work on finding the killer. He'd told them he was chasing down a lead on the actual killer, and that he'd waste his time on their bullshit later, and he'd just kept following Sam Phillips. This time, he just looked at the phone. turned it off and closed distance with Phillips. He'd had him alone for some time now, he had just been waiting for the call to come so that it wouldn't interrupt him later, when he was alone with Phillips. He was about ten feet away now, and Phillips turned around, having heard him. Hale sprang forwards, and connected with a strong shot to Phillips' jaw. Phillips staggered backwards, putting a hand on a nearby lampost to steady himself. Hale moved in closer and hit Phillips in the guts, but Phillips had been expecting this one and had tensed his abdominal muscles. They were impressive muscles, and the punch probably hurt Hale's hand just as much as it had hurt Phillips, who raked at his eyes, then threw an elbow into the side of his head as he lowered his head. Hale knew he would fall, so landed on his back to keep his arm good for punching. Hale lashed out from the ground with a kick at Phillips' shin, and threw himself jerkily to his feet as fast as he could while Phillips took a step back. Phillips came at him with a haymaker, which Hale ducked, throwing a shot up at Phillips' chin as Phillips moved forwards. Phillips was rocked back by the uppercut, but managed to get his hands up to protect his face from the follow-up jab Hale threw. Phillips took a half dozen agile steps backwards, and his left hand moved into his pocket. Sensing a knife, Hale lunged for the arm in question. The two went down, Hale on top. Hale moved his knee to pin down Phillips' left arm at the elbow joint, and caught a few punches to the chin from the right, which were too awkwardly angled to hold any real power. Sensing this, Phillips wrapped his right leg so that his ankle was touching the back of Hale's knee, and swung his body to the left, tripping Hale onto his back. Phillips got his hand free and out came the padlock, which swung down to strike Hale on the nose, bringing a sharp cracking sound and a flow of blood which outlined Hale's lips. He brought the arm up again, down again, but was caught at the wrist by Hale, who also brought a knee up into Phillips' groin. Phillips rolled off, and both him and Hale pulled themselves quickly to their feet. Phillips swung for the temple with his padlock, but Hale stepped nimbly back. Phillips kept going with the swings, Hale continually dodging back, until Hale stumbled briefly backwards on a raised curb, at which point Phillips moved in quickly with a downwards blow to the top of Hale's head, producing a thick thudding noise. Hale lay on his back in the dirty alleyway, with an exhausted Phillips standing over him. Phillips squatted down and searched Hale's pockets with his right hand, his left staying on the padlock. He found a wallet, and opened it up, muttering “Who the fuck are you?” to himself as he did. He saw that the man prostrate in front of him was a detective and cursed under his breath. He threw the wallet onto Hale's chest, stood up, and started to walk away in the direction Hale had come from, only to be tripped by Hale, who hooked his arm around Phillips' ankle, bringing him face first into the cobbles. Hale moved quickly across and threw the padlock as far from the two of them as he could. Phillips turned over, and saw a fist descending on his face. It was a sight that repeated itself, with a painful end each time, until the detective chose to move away, leaving Phillips groaning in agony on the floor.

The Returning Husband

On the edge of consciousness, Sam Phillips heard the running footsteps of a woman, shoes clattering against the cobbles. Help was coming. That was something, at least. He wondered, as he lay there, who this Detective Hale was, and what his reason for that was. The idea that some answers would come when the affair received a proper looking at, that some light would be cast on this whole thing gave him a touch of comfort. His thoughts were on that woman's shoes, willing them to run faster, to move him quicker towards the truth. He thought of that light of truth even as he slipped back under the dark waters of unconsciousness.

The Detective

Hale was full of nerves and pride as he moved away, hitting hard on the flask until he stopped shaking. He'd done the right thing, he was sure of that, but for Phillips to have seen his name was deeply regrettable. He threaded the back streets, knowing he should have finished Sam Phillips off once that had happened, but there was a line and he refused to cross it. He knew there was a dodgy pipe somewhere in this area, he'd encountered it on the last murder he'd had to investigate back here – someone who'd killed a prostitute working in the area. It had turned out to be the pimp, as it almost always is. A beating gone too far. Hale had almost gone too far himself back there, would have liked to, but had held himself back somehow. He reached the pipe and threw water across his face, staying there for a good half an hour before the bleeding stopped and his face was clean. He limped his way back to where his car was parked, keeping an eye out in case Phillips had found his feet, and drove to headquarters to check out this man they claimed was the killer.

The Returning Husband

Sam woke up again and rose to his feet, with no small help from the walls of the alleyway. He leant against them, breathing hard, fast, desperate gulps of the filthy air. One hand running against the wall, he moved forwards carefully, his head hung like a blind man's. His hand ran along the ridges and craters of the old wall, feeling the history of the city beneath his fingers. Again came those footsteps, running towards him from behind, clattering angrily on the cobbles. He turned clumsily, almost stumbling on the effort. Fire erupted at the base of his ribs and he let out a scream of pain. His head snapped down to see the bushy brown hair and scarred body of the prostitute he had taken on his last trip to this district, her hand shaking on the handle of a rough made shiv, which was halfway engulfed below his ribs. Shocked out of all action, he could only stare in horror as the knife was shakily removed and stuck in again, removed and stuck in again, removed and stuck in again. He stumbled backwards, and lay face up on the cobbles, blood trickling around the edge of the knife, still in his ribs. He saw her move over and pull it out, wipe the blade on his trousers. Her face carried shock and pride in it. The two mixed to make her look almost beautiful, almost a woman again, not some refuse of the streets. He heard again those footsteps clatter away from him. She had made sense. Sam understood the kind of desperation that gave birth to that kind of crime, the kind of drowning sensation that makes you lash out whenever you can, just to assert some power, just to gulp some air before the next wave comes over you and sinks you again. Hale was his true murderer, and as he prepared to slip one last time under those dark waters, he still had no idea why.

The Detective

Hale threw excuses around, learnt that the killer had been kept in the interrogation room, waiting for him. Wilson grinned and preened, looking as though he had the deeds to the world sat in his breast pocket. Hale ignored him, moved into the cold, grey room and sat across from their chosen scapegoat, eyeing him up. He was a big man, strong too, certainly strong enough to cause the kinds of wounds Hale had seen on the victims. He had trimmed hair, blonde, and angry eyes, blue. He was wearing a light grey suit over a plain white shirt. The suit looked expensive, but the shirt didn't. His tie was a black affair, with small red spirals under the surface, visible in a certain light. Hale spoke first.

“You're something of a celebrity, you know that?”

Silence met him.

“The boys in the office, they all think you're this big bad killer we've had on our hands lately. Are you?”The voice was full of shock and pride. “No.”

“All I am” the voice continued “is a man who did something for a woman.”

“What woman?”

“Cute little blonde at the office I work at. Betty Phillps.”

Hale hid his shock, but his eyes softened a little as the voice continued.

“Nothing special to look at. She's pretty, sure, but a kind of pretty that's fashionable these days. The kind its fashionable with are a painfully stupid, senseless kind. Betty wasn't.”

No, thought Hale, she wasn't. The voice carried on

“I'd been alone a long time, and she came to me, a couple of weeks ago. I can remember how proud I'd been, that she came to me. How proud I still am, to be honest. She'd just got through with her last boyfriend, which she got through at a powerful rate. That was just how she was, I suppose. I knew it wouldn't last long, but I took her up on her drink. I took her up because it had been a long and lonely time for me since I'd moved here. I knew it wouldn't last long, but she was something I could remember afterwards, something that went right for me that way. It meant a lot more to me than to her when we got home that night, I could tell. I just lay there in her bed, after it was over, wide awake, unable to believe what had happened. She went quickly to sleep after that meaningless kind of chatter that happens in bed between a man and a woman after sex. Me? I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep at all. I lay there and watched out the window, saw the sun come up, heard the birds sing. We kept going after that. It never quite had the spark of the first night, but it was nice. Anyway, I heard this Alex guy making jokes about her, calling her a slut making her way around the office, and wondering when it was his turn, and I called him on it. We were in a bar, and maybe I'd had a few, but I got angry, real angry. He laughed at me and moved on. The next day, he made a point of making this point in the office, to her face, when I could hear. He's higher up than me, and without the beer in me, I didn't have what it takes to call him on it. I slunk away, pretending I didn't hear. Betty was real mad at me for that, left me. I took the next day off work. Just sat at home, brooding. When the office shut up for the day, I let myself in. I checked Alex's desk, and managed to find a letter that mentioned his home address. I'd gone there just to talk to him, and he'd laughed in my face. I punched him on angry instinct and he fell and he cut his head on a table, badly. Knocked himself out, too. I ran on auto pilot then. I took him back to mine. I couldn't tell you why. It just came real natural to me. I took him back to mine and I stuck him in that tub and I gagged him. Then I had a bottle of wine and thought about what had happened. I knew it was my job if I let him go, I knew I'd see time too. But the job came to me first and foremost as a worry. Funny how our priorities go all out of shape like that, isn't it? Anyway, it came to me, quite drunkenly, that I should kill him. So upstairs I went, with a knife from the kitchen. But I couldn't do it. I tried, but I couldn't. When I finally brought the knife around on him, it was so half hearted that all I did was cut him, not even that deeply. But the feeling it gave me, it was such a powerful, redemptive feeling, like I was in control at last, like I hadn't been in control my whole life but now I was. It was such a rush. So I took my time with him since then. Every day, back from work, drink a bottle, cut on Alex. What was scary was that after the third night, I didn't even need the bottle any more. I was enjoying it. No, that's not right. I was always enjoying it. It felt natural after a while is all. I made my mind up. I knew if I got caught, it was jail, and I knew that time was taken off for confession. So I'll confess. I'll put all of this in writing. But not to the other ten. They weren't me. They were done out of a different kind of sickness. They were done out of a sickness without love.”

Without Love - Part I

2011-11-15T21:51:00.001-08:00

The Thief

Roy was awoken by a knocking at the door. He rolled from bed tiredly and crossed the room in slow steps. He wondered who would be knocking at this hour. Some small part of him hoped it was Jen, but she wouldn't come over unannounced like this in the dead of night, not outside dreams anyway. Maybe this was a dream. He opened the door, and saw an ugly bald pitbull standing next to James Diamond. Maybe this was a nightmare.

“You don't look too pleased to see us, Roy.” James sneered.

“Please, come in.” Roy waved a hand over his shoulder tiredly as he slumped back inside, stopping by the pack of cigarettes on the windowsill on his way back to bed. He pulled one out and struck a stray match against the wall to light it. He slumped back down on his bed, taking a deep drag. James wasn't best pleased.

“What's with the attitude, Roy?”

“You've already got me harder than you should have, and I haven't done anything since. Maybe you're just a nasty product of my brain.”

“I'll be quick about this.”

“Can you? Is that a service you offer now? Because I would have paid extra.”

James strode angrily across the room, but was held back by the bald pitbull.

“Oh, so you're good cop, right?” Roy joked helplessly

The pitbull marched across and shoved Roy down with his shoe, pinning him to his mattress.

“I'm just about the worst cop you'll meet when you get on my bad side. But I'm sensible enough to give you a chance first. Now there's this asshole been beating his wife. James seems to think you might know the guy. I'll kick your little misdemeanour under the rug if you can tell me where to find him”

The pitbull held the photo out for Roy.

“Yeah, okay, I know this guy. Let me see the piece of paper.”

“What piece of paper?”

“One that says you'll make things go away.”

The pitbull produced it quickly and carelessly, dropping it next to Roy. Roy reached across to it, flicked over it. It looked official. He couldn't really kick up a fuss anyway. This guy looked ready to beat the table scraps out of Roy.

“Okay, yeah. Couple of nights ago, he kicks the crap out of me outside Bourbon. That's why I remember him. Day after that, I see him again, he doesn't recognise me, hands me a cigarette and tries to talk to me about my job.”

“You have a job?”

“No. He seemed out of it, like he thought I was someone else.”

“Drugs?”

“Not this one. He had it way too together. Didn't have the right look about him.”

James stepped into the conversation

“You'd know that look, wouldn't you Roy?”

“I'm not exactly in the nicest neighbourhood. I hear there's this real classy squat over on Boar Lane, but round here, everyone knows that look, you see it so often.”

“I'll bet that's all it is, Roy. How about we toss the place, bring you in on possession.”

“You'd have to plant the plant in here, James, and it's already tossed enough.”

James lunged forwards. The pitbull shot James a warning glance, stopping him like an emergency brake on an underground train. He ground his heel into Roy's throat then relaxed it.

“Tired of this banter. Why don't you tell me if you saw him any other times?”

“I saw him leaving a bed and breakfast over on Elm Lane.”

“When?”

“Yesterday, when I was on my way into the city.”

“Remember its name?”

“No, of course I don't remember its name. I remember it was a B and B, okay?”

The pitbull stared for a long time at Roy's face. He seemed satisfied. He picked up the sheet of paper, growling something about handing it in to a judge later today, and him and James left. James shot him a snide smile as they were leaving. Roy's hand scattered across the mattress for the cigarette he'd dropped when he'd been pinned down, and he took several deep drags to calm himself, before killing it in the ashtray and moving back to bed. He needed some rest. He'd narrowed in on the voice on the answerphone. Tomorrow, while the voice was at work, he planned to sneak into his house, look for some clue to where Alex was. But not before he'd got some sleep.

He didn't sleep the whole night. He just lay there, staring at the ceiling, considering everything. Considering how he never really seemed to be without a foot on his chest, unless he was being shoved in the back towards someone else's goals. Jen had done it without thinking, but a part of him still resented her for it. For bringing more trouble into his life. His thinking before had been that he could break in. He was going to jail anyway, why not do a little more? Odds were he wouldn't be caught, and if he was, then it didn't make so much of a difference if he was going there anyway. But now freedom stretched in front of him. But freedom didn't seem to mean anything. Freedom just meant different hands shoving him, different feet pinning him. Freedom just meant this cell. So he'd do this, for Jen. He'd do this for something to do. He'd do this because if he didn't do this, he'd be lying awake in a tiny, dirty, smoky box, remembering all the things he'd never done.

Roy steeled his nerves the whole way through the bus ride. He'd found the voice on the answerphone talking behind him when he visited the offices pretending to deliver a parcel. He'd memorised the narrow, smiling face, the smooth dark hair, the tall awkward figure, and waited outside. He'd followed the man onto a train, which took him to one of those small villages that hangs on the side of the city like an embarrassed friend. He'd moved at a distance, keeping the man always in sight, until the man moved to a detached house on the side of a hill. He'd marked down the number and left. Today, with the voice on the answerphone at work in the city, Roy was sat on a bus that trailed towards leaving the city, before it eventually turned around, trapped within like its passengers. Roy took the last stop before it turned around and walked the rest of the way, listening to the insistent chirping of birds in the trees, the meaningless chatter of children on their way to school, the occasional swoop of a nearby car. Were it not for the reason of his visit, he might even enjoy himself, but he was too nervous. He climbed the gravel road up the hill anxiously, sure that each turn, each bend would bring him to the house, being constantly disappointed until he began to wonder if this wasn't just an infinite road. Eventually, he came to a black and white house front, with a well tended garden and a varnished wooden gate. He hopped agilely over it, and winced each time his foot crunched into the gravel drive. He moved around the side of the house, looking for an opening. Not seeing one, he felt greatly aware of how open he was out there and decided he had better just get in now, if he was getting in at all. He wrapped his fist in a cloth he'd brought for this occasion, and shattered the window. To his heightened nerves it sounded like a bomb going off. He considered fleeing, but adrenaline pushed that thought out of his head. He'd come this far. He needed to finish things. He slung himself through the window and found himself in a kitchen slash dining-room, plates still in the sink, shelves full of ingredients, but nothing of real interest. It joined onto a sitting room. Roy removed and flicked through the books on the shelf, in case anything fell out. One, a sappy looking novel named A Good Day For The Roses, carried a picture of the voice on the answerphone with a cute blonde woman Roy assumed to be Betty. The page it was stuck in held an underlined passage

Eventually, I move on to the bathroom, get undressed, and slip into the water. Every inch of my skin burns, waking me up through the sheer pain of it. Better than coffee, I swear. I go about washing myself, when my head strikes the wall by sheer tired clumsiness. From my nose, which has never been quite right, blood begins to trickle. I tiredly lie back and let it flow. I'm too damn tired to let a little blood move me. I open my eyes and move into position to stare at the blood. It's flowing heavily now. Ribbons of it move around beneath the surface of the water, swirling in delicate patterns. I rub my eyes tiredly, not realising that some of the blood has got on my fingers, and is now on my eyelids. Great. This is exactly the sort of start I needed for today. I want to get out of this bath, but not enough to move. I just lay back and wait to stop bleeding. It's almost pleasant. When I lean forwards, I see that the blood has turned the water a kind of muddy brown. My head feels light, and I start to feel a little high.

Struck by a sudden impulse, Roy moved quickly up the creaking stairs and started pushing upstairs doors open. After a bedroom and a study, he found the bathroom. Pushing the door open, he was smacked in the face by a metallic smell. He moved inside, and, turning to the right, was confronted by a hideous sight: Alex, Jen's brother, stripped of all his pride and power, skin networked in narrow, deep cuts, silent, unmoving. Long legs bent at unnatural angles in the short tub, so that his knees almost touched the pathetic stubble on his chin, forming a useless shield over his scarred chest. His eyes murmured quietly. He was sleeping. Roy muttered something about Alex being a son of a bitch. His hands and feet strapped together, he looked like a grotesque baby in the womb. His mouth was covered too, and behind him, a shower was running, draining most of the blood from the tub, if not from him. Roy dashed downstairs and made use of the house phone. He watched from the village pub to make sure the emergency services came and managed to pull himself, sweating, onto a bus once they had.

When the next knock at the door came, he was sitting on his mattress, streaming news live, to see if the story had made it, to see if he'd been seen breaking in. He moved reluctantly over to it, and saw Jen looking up at him smiling, tears in her eyes. She hugged him tightly. He took a few steps back, taking her with him, and pushed the door shut.

“Thank you” she whispered.

“For what?” he joked lightly

“Idiot. You're the only one I told about him.”

“Heh, it was nothing” he laughed.

She lifted her head and looked up at him. She opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came. He stared down into her eyes, and bent his head down. His lips pressed firmly against hers. He moved his tongue slowly into her mouth, enjoying the warm sensation. They kissed for a half a minute, before she pushed her hands firmly against his chest, and jerked her body back. She looked angrily into his eyes, and her voice was full of anger

“Is that why you did it?”

“Is what why?”

“For this?”

“No. It was for you. It was all for you.”

She pulled herself away from him

“No it wasn't! It was all so you could get close to me like this, wasn't it? It wasn't for me, it was for you! It was so I'd thank you the way you wanted me to! Fuck you, Roy, you selfish prick! Fuck you for making me think you were better than that!”

And she was gone. And he was alone, again. He moved back to his mattress, taking another cigarette as he did. He saw an attractive young woman in a smart suit in front of the city's main police station.

“An air of cautious optimism here, as police believe they may have finally caught the man responsible for a series of violent murders throughout the city, when Alex Fitzpatrick was found tied up in the home of Nicholas Weatherby earlier today. Fitzpatrick and Weatherby had both worked for SFA Solicitors, and had been understood to be having a personal dispute of some kind, which might explain the more prolonged approach to this crime. Fitzpatrick was discovered when an anonymous call was placed from inside the house, alerting the authorities to his presence. Police are currently looking for the person who made the call, and details are sketchy at present as to whether he was an accomplice, and if not, how he knew about the victim's location. The officer in charge of this case, Detective Hale, was unavailable for comment at time of reporting. I'm Anna Gilmore for North News, and that's all for now on this story. More details as they come.”

Stooping

2011-11-08T21:40:00.001-08:00

The Detective

Hale dreamt that night. He dreamt of blood and cobbles, of songs in the dark that stopped playing when he started listening, of Betty's soft pink smell, of the judging eyes of Clark Andrews, the dead man who had been with her before, of eyes forever shut that leered hungrily from bleeding alleys. He dreamt that night, but only when he could stand to sleep. When he couldn't, he just lay there and stared at the painting on the wall, wishing he was under that tree, wishing he had that man's safety.

In the morning, he got up and went straight to the courts. He'd cleared time on a magistrate's schedule, cleared time to sweet talk her until she gave him the power to shut Last Round down. He arrived too early and went across the road, to chew suspicious meat from the fast food chain in betweens sips of something that was hot, black and bitter, but wasn't anything he'd ever call coffee. The place was empty, save for some teens yammering in the corner and a man who wanted to be angry, but just didn't have the energy for it any more, who looked at him whenever he looked out the window. The teens were leaving in the middle of Hale's staring contest with that man, when one of them called out “Ain't you that detective?”

Hale turned around, and saw a spotty kid hiding greasy hair under an ugly cap.

“Must be someone else.”

“Nah, mate. You're that one they was talking about on the telly. Here, my mum says you're fit.”

“Tell her I'm flattered, but not interested.”

“Here” he asked his mates “Hear this guy? He ain't interested. What you saying? Saying my mum ain't good enough for you?”

“Would you rather I said I wanted to fuck her? Would that make you happy? Need a new dad, son?”

“Fuck off, mate. My dad says you're shit. Says that if you're chasing this knifey fucker, he'll never get caught.”

“Yeah well, he's jealous of me and your mum, isn't he?”

“What was that?”

The guy was getting threatening now, but it was undermined by his two friends laughing at him, and the girl rolling her eyes.

“Leave him, Carl.”

There was a silence. Carl thought for a while, like he was trying to find something clever to say. He grinned. Apparently he'd found it.

“Here, I think she likes you, mate. Becky likes old cock, she does. It's how she does so good at school. Fucking sucks them all, doesn't she? You wanna go, mate?”

Apparently, after finding it, Carl had thrown it away, on account of preferring the old routine. Hale didn't. He looked at the table, and saw that Carl's hand was pressed against it. With a fast hard movement, he swept it away with his own hand. Carl stumbled, and Hale grabbed him by the side of his head, slamming his cheek against the table. Hale spoke calmly.

“Now look, kid. You shouldn't have brought school up. You've just reminded me that's where you should be. Truanting is against the law. But it's a bit beneath me. I go in with a bunch of truants, off school so they can drink white shite and touch each other on the park benches, they're gonna laugh. Say that's all old Hale's good for any more. And maybe it is, but I've still got my pride, see? So how about this? You lot scarper and go show someone else how grown-up and tough you are, or I take you round the back and beat the skin off you with my belt while that girl you're trying to impress watches.”

Carl, Becky and the stooges scarpered. Hale finished his breakfast in peace, then moved over to see Jane Thomas, a magistrate he'd always been friendly with. Jane was the same age as Hale was, but the years had been kinder to her. She smiled as he came in, and waved in the vague direction of a chair. They exchanged the usual pleasantries the usual way, then got down to business.

He was feeling pleased with himself for once, as he strode proudly from Jane Thomas' office, and into a plain, sterile hall, filled with the families of petty criminals and dull voyeurs waiting for the next minor scandal. Accessory. Harriet Mannings, co-owner of The Last Round, was an accessory to ten murders that had been committed within the city. Accessories were punishable to the same extent that the actual guilty party was. Of course, she was an accessory by omission. Were she to change her tune, to give up her information, this charge would disappear. Accessory. He rolled the word around some more, drinking deeply of it. He was even in good spirits when he pulled out his phone in response to its high-pitched, tinny chiming. He didn't recognise the number. He rejected the call, and moved quickly outside. He shook a cigarette loose from his pack, and jammed it into his mouth. His thumb scratched at the flint of his lighter a few times before it stayed alight long enough to be any use to him. He called the number back, his cigarette dangling from his lips in its usual manner. No answer greeted him. He hung up.

Across town he rode, over to The Last Round. The cobbles sank slowly under the litter as he pushed along. To see the south side in daylight was a surreal experience. Too often had he been called out there in the dead of night or the early hours of the morning, when the sun was peeking through the alleys, curious as to who the latest victim had been. Streets which had held suspense and threat were mere collections of cobbles and buildings seen in the light. The broken glass, leftover of empty bottles and shattered needles, glittered in an almost beautiful way in the early afternoon sun. The light bounced off their clear perfection, reflected back on dusty windows and dirty cars. Hale sat in a prism of light outside The Last Round. He moved out of his car, and pushed the door open. Dust and damp hung in the air. The only other person in the bar was Harriet, behind the bar as ever, who looked bored, and called out across the gloom. Hale moved through the gloom, and as he got closer, she recognised him. The cheerful look vanished from her face, replaced by a superior smile.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“You owe it to one thing. Your choice. I spoil you, you know that, right?”

“Do try to reach the point before the regulars get here.”

He pushed himself onto one of the stools, and looked up at her, grinning.

“I'll have the regular, Harri.”

She looked scornfully down at him.

“Oh well. Not really time anyway, I suppose. What with having to cart you off as an accessory.”

“Excuse me?”

“Accessory to no less than ten counts of murder.”

He reached into the wide, deep pockets of his jacket and pulled out the official charge.

“Could happily serve you with that. Gets same charge as if you committed them yourself, you know.”

“You weren't blustering then?”

“I seldom am. I just let people think it. Greatest trick the devil ever pulled and all that.”

“Who saw you come in here?”

“No-one. I'd say they're all at work and school, but we know better than that, don't we, Harri?”

“Okay, then we can talk.”

“I'm flattered. So, spill.”

“The two men I saw, the ones trying hard to fit in, they had an argument before they left.”

“About?”

“The fairer sex.”

“Women in general?”

“In particular. Betty something.”

“Phillips?”

“That's it. Seemed they both worked with this Betty woman. They were behaving like two dogs fighting over a bit of meat. All a bit sickening.”

“Thanks. Anything else you could tell me?”

“Such as?”

“Name of the other man.”

“Alex.”

“You remember all this well.”

“It's been sticking in my head since you came to visit.”

“Been running around your brain, have I?”

“Husband like mine, neighbourhood I live in, any man with a job tends to run around the brain.”

“Even when they disappoint terribly as far as intelligence goes?”

“Even then.”

“Well, I'm flattered, but I've got to go. Murderers to catch and all that.”

“Say hi from me.”

Hale raised his hand over his shoulder, and walked out into the prism of light. Nothing could shake his good mood today. Finally, some headway was being made. Prince's Lane was next. He'd try once more to make sense of Betty Phillips, who had seemed so much like the kind of woman he hated, but had surprised him. Maybe she'd surprise him with a useful piece of information this time. Maybe he could move on from this case. Maybe he could deal with the simple, easy kind of murders. The ones done for simple, easy reasons. Love and money. That's all it boiled down to, in the end. Maybe they'd offer him a promotion. He'd turn that down, of course. Maybe just ask to get better pay. He felt the maybes slipping through the cracks again, and frowned as he opened his car door. He'd go to Prince's Lane, and get some definites from Betty. Some answers in black and white, for once.

When he got there, he got black and white. Deep black bruises coloured her pale skin. A particularly nasty one above her right eye. A cut lip. A limp. Long sleeves, hiding more underneath?

“Who?”

“Come on in, Hale.” She smiled weakly as the words staggered out of her strained throat.

He came in.

“Who?”

“Look, I suppose you had a reason to call?”

“Who?” His voice grew more insistent.

“No-one. It's nothing, is what I mean. Not as bad as it looks.”

It was the kind of lie that hung in the air like the smell of old cigarettes in an ashtray. Pointing out the lie would have been idiotic. Betty spoke up again, a quiet noise from somewhere deep in her throat that still held power and pride.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Don't want to talk about it? Fuck that, Betty. You promised me, remember? That you'd call if anything like this happened again.”

“What are you, five? People break promises, Hale. Besides, its not your business.”

“I'm paid to protect everyone in this city. All us police are. It's my business.”

“Well, if he kills me, then you can make it your side of the business. More a domestic matter than Murder and Manslaughter. Don't want to make you stoop.”

“I wasn't planning on calling this in.”

“I don't want to make a big thing of this. He won't be coming back.”

“No. He won't.”

“Why the fuck do you care so much?”

“I just do, okay? I got into this to help people, and fuck if I'll stand by and watch people get hurt.”

“Sit down in the sitting room. You still take your coffee black, right?”

“Look here -”

“Sit down or get out.”

He sat down, and watched as she left. He'd found his flask again, and took advantage of that, the tiny neck clattering against his teeth as the warmth spread through him.

“Who?” he started up again, even as he took the cup from her.

“Look, if this is all you're going to -”

“This is all I'm going to. I'm not letting this go.”

“It was my husband, okay?”

“Husband?”

“He left a good few years ago. For these kind of reasons. I've bumped from him again to him again ever since. I seem to attract the violent type. Fuck, maybe I like it. Maybe I subconsciously get off on this shit. I don't even know any more.”

“Who is he?”

“Sam Phillips.”

“Got a picture?”

"You're not gonna let this go, are you?"

"No."

“Let me go see.”

As she slowly moved off, Hale thought he saw a slight smirk at the corner of her mouth. He ignored it and downed his coffee, scolding his tongue. She came back as he was mopping sweat from his forehead. She handed him a picture of a hard-faced young man with black hair and eyes like needles, that seemed to cut through the picture and right into you. He was leaning casually against a wall, and Hale wondered how long he'd had to work at looking so casual. He had the lean, tough body of a fighter, worrying Hale a little as to how following this through was going to go for him.

“He's gone grey since.”

“Whereabouts can I find him?”

“Bourbon was his favourite spot. If not there, some dive on the south side. He liked to hang out on the south side. ”

“Bourbon or the south side. Thanks. I'll be off.”

“Not going to finish your coffee?”

“It's already finished.”

Bourbon was a classy, quiet kind of joint. Hale got himself a pint of Guinness and settled down in a corner seat, obscured, but with a view of the bar. He took the drink as slowly as he knew how to and watched. At first, it was quiet, the only people who came in were people who worked on their feet all day, looking for a quick fix, and the people who just needed a drink every few hours, popped into any bar they passed, downed a double or two, and moved on. Spend enough time as one, and you'll know them by sight, better by the smell. Hours passed this way. Hale was on his fourth pint when the students came rolling in, stinking of sex and cigarettes, dressed as firemen, nurses, police, doctors, the whole emergency services represented. They stayed for a pint or two if they were quick, and moved on to the next spot as the first hints of night started to slip quietly around the bar. Then came a few hoary old men. Hale didn't bother checking his photo. None of them had the quiet tension about their body that a fighter carries wherever he goes. A young couple came in, ordered the same frilly drink, and sat in the corner opposite Hale, holding hands and sipping gently. Hale began to see Bourbon as a lost cause and moved on. He knew a guy who worked he south side. He'd talk to him. Name of James Diamond.

The station Diamond ran was the same compressed, hollow building giving the impression of being about to fall down that Diamond had inherited, but it brought a smile to Hale's face to see Diamond still had the same sweeping power and confidence about him.

“Hale!” he roared “Good to see you, my man!”

“You too, James. It's been too long.”

“Too damn long. I guess business brings you here.”

Hale pulled the photo from his pocket.

“Any trouble from him at all?”

“None, sorry.”

“Recognise him?”

“Can't say I do. What's his name?”

“Sam Phillips.”

“Nothing ringing a bell, I'm afraid. How important is it?”

“Important.”

“Okay, then I'll tell you what. I know this damn punk called Roy Kyle. He tends to see a lot. He's set for trial for some petty shit he pulled earlier. If he can help, would you offer to get him off it?"

From A Certain Point

2011-11-02T06:35:00.001-07:00

The Survivor

Betty lay there breathing tarmac and blood, listening to the sound of Sam running again. She dragged her arm to up the rear bumper, then her body up to lean against the boot. She lay back on it, her feet dangling from the end, and let air back into her lungs in deep, grateful breaths. Slowly, with much cursing, she moved her legs, arms and body around. Not full mobility, but nothing broken. She took some small measure of comfort from that. She spat blood on the tarmac and shut her eyes for a moment, the cool metal of the boot against the side of her face. She pulled herself along to the driver's side, opened the door, and fell inside. Her legs screamed as she lifted them fully in and used one of them to pull her door shut. Her hand reached out and pushed a button, a reassuring click told her the doors were locked. After some time, she moved up and got ready to drive. She looked at her face in the mirror, at the welts that would become ugly dark patches in time. Despite all of that, she had still come to feel, with all that had happened, as if it had all happened to someone else, as if she was just watching, powerless to help, so used to it that she was almost beyond caring.

The Witness

Nicole sat in a wide, sweltering hotel room with a large window that opened for maybe two inches. The walls were cream, with two sides going for that acne'd effect, and two post-pubescent. A lopsided wooden desk held a large television from which news stammered out. Nicole sat in an almost comfortable chair positioned between the desk and the bed. She kept the door in eyesight at all times, and had closed her curtains. She stared at the television through bloodshot eyes, steam from the sixth coffee that night rolling in front of her face. She had barely slept. She knew that leaving the city should have brought her safety. A bigger part of her knew that she probably would've been taken already if there was anything to fear. But these were the rational parts, the parts which shut down when confronted by a threat to one's life. The fear of something coming for her in her sleep, some long shadow slashing the life from her was the same fear that keeps children awake at night, convinced of monsters in every shadow. It was coming up to seventy two hours without rest, and those hours had carved their mark on her. The television was on simply to keep her mind busy. Simply to give her a point of focus other than that night in the city. The TV news was recounting an interview of an old woman, who had lost her nephew to the slasher. A shock ran through Nicole watching this, watching the world she had been trying to flee catch up to her so easily. Her head turned sharply to the door, as though she expected to see him burst through. Her eyelids began their descent, and she brought the mug to her mouth quickly, fumbling it in her tiredness. Scalding coffee poured onto her lap, staining the cheap hotel chair and burning her. She yelped briefly in pain, and stamped her foot on the ground repeatedly, slowing gradually to a trot. Still, she did not move. She found herself paralysed with the absurd fear of some unknown assailant waiting for her, who would strike when she moved to the bathroom to clean herself. A dark stain in her lap, she waited through the night.

The Journalist

Someone in the office who Cassie owed a favour was sick, but was supposed to be covering a string quartet, playing in the dining hall of the Kennedys for some charity function. Cassie had been successfully lured into doing it for her, on the grounds of the owed favour, and more potently on the grounds that it might be nice to get away from all the murders for an evening. Cassie didn't know much about music, but the performance had drawn her in. The parts all seemed to be their own, could be listened to and enjoyed separately. Together though, as they dovetailed into one another, they wove a more complete story, a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. She wondered about the process of that. Did the composer take each piece one by one as its own story, and build each one atop the other? Or was it designed from the start in parallel, four tracks running together, feeding off each other's energy? Journalism was a little like that, she supposed. You wrote a piece, but you had to feed into the overall narrative of the world around you.

Those who weren't sipping wine and listening to the performance were staring in discomfort at the left hand side of the room, where, at a small wooden table, a man dressed in formal understatement was being cooed over by the young, beautiful wife of Mr. Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy was a tall, slim woman with pointed elbows and knees, red hair sliding across her back in graceful ringlets, and dainty little fingers that played absently with the jacket of the man sat next to her. She was wearing a strapless dress in deep red tones, which shimmered over her like stones skipping across a pond. The piece drew towards its conclusion, and the snobbish looking blonde on first violin informed everybody that they'd be taking a break. Mr. Kennedy got up, and strode across the room. Cassie leaned forwards to hear them better. Mr. Kennedy was loud, obviously angry, but the other man's voice was quiet and controlled, so that only Kennedy could be heard.

“I want you out of here...My wife, damn it...Right in my own home...Don't give a good damn if we do have business together, we shan't after this...What do you mean, I'll regret it more if we don't?...Damn you, get out of my house, out of here”

The man stood, as did Mrs. Kennedy. She was as exaggerated and melodramtic as her husband in her protests, and all the drama was more than the table could take. In Kennedy's animated argument with her, the table was knocked, and the bottle of red wine upon it was spilled. The quiet man reached quickly for it, saving most of it, but got a fair bit on his hands doing so. He stood, watching the couple for a moment with furious eyes, the wine dripping from the tips of his fingers. He moved quickly away, to the balcony across the room from Cassie. Cassie was intrigued, and could not help moving closer. He heard the man ask in a frustrated voice for a cigarette, explain that he didn't normally have more than one a day, but that that whole experience left him needing one. The voice had a musical lilt to it, but it felt discordant with the other music that night. Cassie thought to herself that she might be cursed. Even getting away from the crime beat for an evening, violence and jealousy followed in her wake.

Through Other's Eyes

2011-10-26T02:25:00.001-07:00

The Murderer

Saturdays were his compromise to the working week, the day on which he rested. But contracts, clients and money existed for the length of the week, and so he would only afford them one day out of seven to recover. Come Sunday, it was business again, as though the last twenty-four hours had meant as little as a dream.

The Witness

Her hands shook like leaves in the wind, and her heart was running the hundred metre dash at the Olympics. She hunted for her tobacco and papers. The kill made, she set to preparing it for the fire, but it fell apart in her hands three times. She slugged from the bottle by her bed, but the hands still shook. Needing to escape, as though the light headed feeling was the fault of her apartment, she struggled with her clothes. Victorious, she broke out. As she walked towards the sea, she saw a car trying desperately to start, stranded hopelessly in the morning air. On seeing the narrow, glistening expanse of the beach before her, and seeing that it was empty, she turned to walk beside it until she found a bus, by which she could move into the city centre, fearing to be alone. She shook, and held onto the edge of the bench she chose to sit on. The bus finally came, and she managed to tumble loose the money needed, before taking the only available seat, behind a redhead with a paperback, whose perfume washed over her, the way the sea drowns a rock. It amazed Nicole that the woman in front's paperback wasn't drenched by the perfume dripping from its reader's flesh, that the ink did not run, and that the pages did not tear upon a single breath. Nicole watched the streets crawl past her window, before stumbling off the bus, muttering thanks to the driver. In a daze she wandered the streets. She stopped into McCoy's, one of her old favourite haunts. McCoy's was a café lifted out of the city's blitz years. The roof was high, the chairs wooden, small and old. It had a green colour scheme and two levels. Nicole stumbled through an order for a coffee and some toast. The coffee would keep her alert and the toast seemed fortifying. She liked that idea, fortifying herself. Becoming impenetrable. She took a seat at the back end of the balcony level, hidden from outside sight by the curtains which lay half way down the windows, commanding a view of everyone else, of which there was only a couple getting towards old, who sat at her feet making harmless, comforting small talk. The toast, she considered, as it arrived, would also serve as a kind of hangover cure, something to soak up the fear she was drunk on. Her coffee arrived, and she quietly slipped some bourbon from her flask into it when the waitresses' back was turned. She dragged it out, and dragged the second cup out longer, while she waited to stop shaking. You can only wait for something so long, so she moved back onto the streets. People washed over her, a mass of bodies surging through the streets to work. Nicole found herself overwhelmed, and ducked into an alleyway, but that only made things worse, as she remembered what she had seen in another, different alley. Compelled by a violent curiosity, she snaked her way across town, to that other alley, and saw the usual morbid crowd be angrily dismissed by a scruffy, stocky bald detective, who looked like he'd been born in a bad mood which had only gotten worse. Nicole felt a wave of faintness seize her, and she fell to sit on a stone step, trying her best to make it look natural and failing. The bald one came over, cigarette dangling from his lip like he was Humphrey Bogart.

“You don't look so good there” he grumbled

“Sorry” she mumbled

“You okay?”

“First time seeing a body.”

“That so?”

“That so.”

“Now, I don't want to call you a liar, but I've been Murder and Manslaughter over a decade now. I know what people look like, first time they've seen a body. And I know when it's more than that. You want to tell me how much more?”

“No much more, that's how much more.”

“I don't want to call you a liar, but if you keep lying, you won't give me much of a choice.”

“I'm not lying!” she burst out angrily, drawing in stares from the rest of the street. She turned and stormed off as best she could. She quickly hailed a taxi, and took it back to her apartment. She stumbled up the stairs, and fumbled with with her keys, finally gaining entrance. Inside, she saw that Joe was dead. Over the years, much had come close to breaking Joe, but nothing ever had. Joe was the last of four wine glasses Nicole had bought on moving in. The other three had broken in a series of accidents, all of which had befallen Joe, and all of which had failed to break him, despite the odds. Joe had come to stand for the unbreakable human spirit to Nicole. No matter what happened, Joe was okay, but now he was dead. Outside the window, Nicole heard two men talking about the state of things today. Mostly office stuff, complaining about this manager and that supervisor. Their conversation brought a smile of sympathy and amusement to Nicole, the frustrations familiar to her, but then, the conversation took a violent turn, and a hushed, dangerous note entered their voices. Nicole shut her window and put on some music, wanting some kind of escape from seeing and hearing the violence which simmered beneath her window. She moved into her room to get further away from it. Her room could have been spacious, were it not for the neglect. Old clothes, matches, empty bags of tobacco, dropped papers, overflowing ashtrays, coffee stained tables you had to examine carefully to see the original colours of, bed with a too small sheet, meaning one corner was always uncovered. It was getting to Nicole too, so she left, not knowing what to do. A knock came at the door. Nicole clutched a wine bottle by the neck, and waited. It came again. She moved carefully to the door, and slid the chain open. She saw the detective from earlier, and looked at him for the first time. His breaths came in long, deep gasps, and his eyes looked like they were trying to push through the back of his head. Nicole didn't blame them. There was nothing there worth staying for. This was obviously a man who the recent killings had sapped the vitality of. Nicole shut the door, and let him in, warning half-heartedly that

“I've told you everything already. I was just walking past there.”

“That's not true, miss-”

“Taylor. How'd you find me?”

“Followed you. Not exactly ethical, I know, but there it is.”

“Hell, you were just doing your job. You after him?”
“Yeah, I'm after him. I feel like I'm chasing a spirit. He's always just left wherever I go.”

“I take it they turned you down for the PR job?”

“Yeah. I was just sad to hear the initials weren't pessimism and realism.”

Nicole laughed a little at that, her arms and body shaking enough to be noticeable, so long as you were looking. The detective flinched back, and Nicole looked down. She was still holding the wine bottle. She dropped it, and shrugged.

“I'm a little nervous, I guess.”

“From all those murders you haven't been seeing?”

“Something like that. I could use some for drinking, and only alcoholics drink alone. Will you join me?”

“Only to save either of us from being alcoholics. Twelve steps are about eleven more than this old body can handle.”

She went away, and poured red wine, a fine vintage, into two mugs.

“Last glass broke today, sorry.”

“Wine is wine, and wine is always fine.”

“Sure thing, Detective Seuss.”

The detective's turn to smile.

“Hale, actually. Look, this chit-chat is fun. But not why I'm here.”

“Alright. Just give me a sec.”

Nicole downed her wine, and felt around for her tobacco. Hale passed her a cigarette, struck a match on the door frame, and lit it. She smoked it in that grateful, blissful way that anyone truly needing a cigarette smokes one. The kind of smoking that can be more accurately called making love to the cigarette. Hale let her enjoy her moment, then opened his mouth to push her along. She raised a hand, indicating that she didn't need pushing.

“I was out last night. Out with the people from the office. I wasn't enjoying myself. Can't none of them leave the office in the office. Everyone but me had their cubicle slung across their back. So I made my excuses, and I left.”

“Where were you drinking?”

“The Gilded Hoof, over in old town. Know it?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Anyway, I was walking back, when I heard a sound like weeping. I've been caught drunk enough to break down before, and I'd want someone there for me if it happened again, so I went to check it out. It wasn't weeping. As I got closer, I knew that. I got closer, and I saw a tall, lean man towering over this dark, huddled form in an alleyway. The man had a knife. It wasn't weeping. It was laughing. He was laughing. This harsh, hard laugh, that echoed off the walls of the alley. It's being echoing around these walls.”

“When was this?”

“A little after midnight.”

“You get a decent look at him?”

“Not really.”

“Did he get a look at you?”

“I don't know. I've been worrying over that all day.”

“I'll set up a police watch over the place.”

“That'd be great, thanks.”

They shook hands, and Hale left. Nicole waited for him to leave, and set about doing the same herself. She threw some clothes loosely into a rucksack, and called a taxi. After staring out the window until the end of time, she saw one pull up. She moved quickly and quietly down the stairs, and climbed in, greeting the driver by means of the word “station”. He was a fat man with brown skin and yellow teeth. If you squinted, he had hair.

“You okay? You look scared” he asked

“Just been one of those days.”

“I hear you. Everyone's on edge these days, it doesn't take much to get pushed over. Just the other day, for instance, my daughter comes back late, and with this killer about, I'm up all night, just scared that its her this time. It's not, but there was one last night. Could've been her, easy. I don't know how I got up this morning, except that I had to.”

Nicole stared out at the city, trying to see it as something it used to be. But it wasn't, no matter how much staring she got done.

The station's high glass ceilings, low hanging lights and anachronistic blend of modern tiling and old, reliable stone workmanship was a disconcerting blend which, in her current state, drove Nicole to a deeper panic. A series of booming explosions in her chest echoed in her head when she bumped into a tall, lean man, with short, greying hair, and a wistful smile on his face, but he merely apologised, and moved away. Nicole was safe. Nicole was going wherever she could. Nicole was leaving the city.

The Returning Husband

The people crushed around him, the noise surrounded him. Everything moved in fast forward, and he felt like a tiny moving piece in a huge unintelligible puzzle, which told him he was home at last. Lost in the moment of coming home, he had accidentally knocked into a nervous looking, slightly plump woman, who had a way about her that stuck in the mind. He moved out of the main station, and onto the streets. It had been at least six years since he last walked these streets, and the cobbles seemed to sing with joy beneath his feet, like a chorus of loving parents. He stopped in at his favourite bar, back when he used to live here. A nice little place called “Bourbon”, dark wooden floors seats and bars with splashes of scarlet to add colour. The blues wrapped themselves around his head. He didn't recognise the bartender, who, aside from a scrawny looking kid at the other end, was the only other person here. He moved up to the bar, and ordered a single of Jim Beam, no ice. He sipped it gently, drawing a remark from the young, fat, bearded man tending bar.

“You roll it around the mouth, take it slow. Making you a connoisseur or broke. Which one?”

“I can't be both?”

He put his coat on the back of his stool, and went to the toilet. When he came back, the kid was gone. He felt in his pocket for his wallet, to get another drink. His hand rolled across his package of cigarettes, and he changed his mind – he fancied one of those. He plucked it out, and realised one was missing. The coat went back on, and he hit the streets, to find that kid. That kid was at the end of the street, lighting up his cigarette. He ran after the kid, who saw who he was, and panicked, but didn't panic quickly enough. The kid was shoved roughly into a side street, struck across the face, a boot planted in his ribs, another breaking his nose. The grey haired man's violence was swift and brutal. Afterwards, he lit up one of his own cigarettes, gave the kid another kick.

“A thief, just a common thief. You didn't even take anything of value, anything to make it worth the beating.”

The tall, grey man walked away. He didn't feel like drinking any more. He felt like going home, and as such, caught the first bus in that direction. He looked over his fellow passengers. There was a blonde hipster complete with flat cap, over-sized glasses, patches on his jacket, corduroy trousers and trendy footwear, who seemed to be of the opinion that because he looked so ridiculous in an ironic fashion, it made him somehow above the rest of us. There was a lad trying desperately to look tough, banging out his 'chunes' from his phone. Innit. Sam sighed. No point even going into the pocket for him. There were couple of Asian men who stank of tobacco, kept up a staccato of loud jokes in their native tongue and gave harsh laughs. There was a dark skinned young woman in bright colours and furred boots, reading the latest glossy magazine, and a stunning redhead halfway through a novel you could kill a man with. He heard a voice call out “Hey Sam”, and saw an old friend near the back. He went to join him.

“How's it going, John?”

“Ah, not so good.” his friend sadly replied.

Sam remembered now. John's wife had recently left him. Sam had felt that one himself, and so he had sympathy. Sam held greater hopes however, hopes of a reconciliation that had brought him back, so he also had pity for John, and that nasty emotion had been clouding his brain, so that he hadn't heard a thing John had said, up until the last sentence of what he gathered had been quite the monologue

“The despair you last saw me wear has changed for a kind of accepting melancholy, which is better, and which is also worse.”

Sam felt that the kind of person who could reveal himself in such language on public transport was a kind of disgusting emotional exhibitionist, and so made his excuses and rang the bell to get off at the next stop, while John railed on about the past, and the present. John had the kind of brain that was incapable of seeing consequences, incapable of seeing a future. The kind of brain to which the past and the present were all that existed. Nothing else was, nor ever would be real to that sort of brain. The bus couldn't pull up to let Sam out fast enough, as far as he was concerned. In the future, the bus would be pulling up, and he would escape, no longer intellectually suffocated. He was capable of thinking about things like that, you see. When his prophecy came to pass, he strolled the streets to the house where he once had lived. A small, cottage-like place on the corner of a road, looking out of place to everything around it, like it belonged a hundred years ago, in a field somewhere, and was deeply surprised to find itself in the city. He loved the house, it was full of memories. He knocked on the door, wearing a look of deep concern. He had to fight from turning it into a sneer when the door was answered by his former sister in law, a cool, hard blonde who reminded him of steel on a winter's day. She had never liked him. He'd seen her with other people, and she'd fluttered like a butterfly, eager to please, and easy to like. But with him, she had always had more about her of the wasp than the butterfly.

“What would you like?” she asked curtly.

“I heard the news. I knew they were close. I came to comfort her. I still love her, you know. I hate to see her hurt.”

“Which is why you came all this way, just to see her hurt.”

“Look, Linda. I don't see any need to be such a bitch about all this. Just let me in.”

“So you can cause her more pain? No thanks. We have enough of that. We're not buying today.”

Linda swung the door shut. Sam's foot stepped into the frame, catching it.

“Look, you're the little sister. Stop playing big sister. Stop playing grown-up altogether, while you're at it. It was never your best role.”

“Stop playing caring husband, it's one you've never been convincing in.”

“Wrong. But correcting you is worthless. I could pull up evidence, thrust it in your face, but that would be worthless.”

This had made Linda furious, and Sam had forgotten how loud she could get when furious. He didn't care for the angry sort who had lost all rationality, and stood there rather impatiently, waiting for what he considered meaningless bleating to stop. He didn't expect it to bring the younger, stronger version of himself to the door. Him, twenty years ago, sharp mouth, large hands and deadly confidence all rolled into a body in its twenties, with decades of love and hate ahead of it. The young man stepped out, and stared Sam in the eye. His voice was low and cold. Aunt Linda was clearly an influence.

“I suggest you leave.”

Suggest. That was the word he'd used. Suggest. It struck Sam that a subtler suggestion would have been made with a gun in his ribs. He left, filled with the bitterness of failed plans and rejection. He went and sat at the bus stop again. The only other people at the bus stop were one of those insufferable young couples, cooing to each other when their lips were free about how wonderful the other one was, about how lucky they were, and so on. Nothing new was said a thousand times, as Sam sat alone on the wall, and began to form a new opinion of humanity. Humanity's struggle, as he grew sickened by the display, seemed to him one between the tongue and the brain. The weaker the brain, the more the tongue worked. The brain fought the war with subterfuge and sabotage, rather than the tongue's method of carpet bombing, which meant you could never tell when the brain was winning, save for a serenity one could almost mistake for peace, if one still believed in that out-dated notion. The bus crawled along the road, and he pulled himself on board, buying a ticket to the heart of the city. He watched intently out the windows, and saw office buildings beginning to close down for the day, the trendy bars beginning to open up for the night, snatches of sweet, sad guitar sailing through the open window he sat beside, plucked out by a bearded old man with a half dozen pieces of silver at his feet and all the beauty of the world at his fingers, a fighting couple in the streets, on who his eyes sadly lingered, and dark alleys, in which he was sure all manner of terrible things were sold and done. He finally saw a brick building in a compound with iron fencing around it, the Hotel San Luca. The Hotel San Luca lit up the street with neon letters, which had been warped by spring's heavy winds, causing several of the letters to bend like the seductive swaying of hips. A large Calor tank sat outside, standing guard, and the rooms were arranged in the tacky roadside manner which dominates movies, but which real examples of are rare and more than a little jarring. The sign proclaiming room cost had never been finished, leaving a pound sign alone, which was probably an underestimate of their price, but not by a great deal.

The Hotel San Luca was a contrast from the moment he stepped within its doors. Quiet, calming colours welcomed him in, but the atmosphere was anything but. He could hear the loud, cheerful yells of people trying to convince the world of their joy. One person trying to convince no-one of this was the woman behind the desk. A tired, frustrated woman in her mid thirties, with a formless kind of body with badly dyed hair on top, wrapped in an ugly green uniform. Her face made a passable imitation of a smile at Sam, and she asked if she could help him.

“Sure. I'd like to book a room.”

“Be twenty for a basic room, each night.”

“Fine by me. Give me a week.”

“Any preference?”

“As far away from them as I can stay.”

“Good choice. I should maybe come visit.”

“Maybe. Can I have my key?”

Money and key swapped hands. He saw that he had room 415.

“Your name?”

“Sam Phillips.”

“Great. Thank you, Mr. Phillips, for staying at the Hotel San Luca. We hope you enjoy your stay.”

They had her well trained, thought Sam, as he walked towards the elevators. Someone should get Linda like that. He smiled at the thought, and rode the foul smelling elevator to the fourth floor. His room was the usual cheap affair. Everything plastic or plywood, and paintings that had as much expression as a mute. The sheets didn't scratch, so that was something. He set off back to Bourbon, to finish the drinking that had been interrupted before.

His evening there wasn't going as he'd hoped either. He was trying to enjoy the atmosphere and his whiskey, trying to pull himself together from his failure with his wife, but a loud, middle-aged, fat, boorish man in black shoes, suit and tie, which hung loosely over an untucked white shirt. A beard hid most of his face, which was a blessing, and his eyes had sunk so far into his face that it took faith to know they were there. He was loudly proclaiming his love for the latest big pop group to a group of people almost certainly too young to be drinking in here, who looked either amused or bored. Looking him over, Sam could see that this was the kind of man whose youth had slipped between greasy fingers, and who was trying to greasily pick it up again, with little success, and much mess. He stepped outside for a smoke, but even that didn't help. The voice would probably carry if he went across the road and stuck his head in the public toilets. Back in he went. The enthusiast had finally seen one of the young ones laugh at him, and had slunk away, hurt. He had spotted Sam. Sam groaned. He ordered another double. He could tell he would need it.

“Ah. A whiskey man. Man of good taste. I'll have one myself.”

“Good for you.”

“Man, kids today, huh? Got no respect at all, ain't that right?”

“Fuck off.”

The man pulled him by the arm, and shoved his face into Sam's, snarling.

“What was that?”

“I said fuck off. You are a man without critical faculty, who takes everything he hears, reads and sees exactly as it is, exactly as popular opinion says he should. Which makes you the worst thing in the world – boring. And I can stand a bore, if he's a quiet bore. But you're not. If you feel like taking a swing, take one. I'm sure you'd throw them just like you see in the films. That's cool. I throw them just like a man who's used to having to throw them. We'll see which is better.”

Sam turned back around, ignoring the man to his left. He downed the whiskey, and left. “Well” he called to the fuming man, “are you coming?” He stood outside, and looked in, smoking a cigarette and smiling. The man disappeared within, meaning he was leaving the back way. Sam stubbed out his cigarette, and went back in. One of the youths, a short man in a uniform shade of blue came over. His shoes gave up the uniform for brown, but holes had set in like asbestos, revealing socks underneath in the company colours. Blonde hair curtained a round boyish face wearing a smile he probably thought was charming. Sam ignored him, sat back down, and threw more fire down his throat. The kid said

“That was awesome, man! Dude, you really showed him.”

He had a rich voice, not deep nor powerful, but with the quality of an old forgotten quilt you slept in as a child.

“Uh-huh” was the grunted reply

“Seriously, let me shake your hand.”

“No thanks, it's busy with whiskey.”

“That's cool man, that's cool. You know your priorities, I respect that. Not much of a whiskey man myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why do you like whiskey?”

“Do you just announce every thought that enters your head? I suppose there are so few of them that they're worth celebrating. Let me know when you feel another one coming. I'll organise a parade.”

The kid moved off, and Sam finished his whiskey. He moved huffily out of the door, frustrated at what had become of his favourite bar. He stalked the streets. Nothing was right, nothing was the way it was. He didn't even get to see Betty. His favourite bar had lost all its good patrons, had traded them in for loud-mouths. Nothing was right. He realised he'd been walking in a bad mood for some time, without noticing his surroundings. Looking around, and taking note for the first time, he found himself in a retired industrial yard. The streets were littered with broken bottles, cigarette packs, used condoms and old needles. Lights flickered in attic rooms, the streetlights long since abandoned, the wind whistling through the alleys at the sides of the large, desolate square in which he stood, towered over by grim grey blocks that once held a great workforce, and now held addicts and prostitutes who slumbered fitfully. A voice called weakly out to him from a nearby alley. He went to investigate. The voice was so quiet, so full of rocks and pain that determining age or gender was impossible. He kept his hand in his pocket, finger gripping the end of a padlock, which he always kept with him to swing at anyone he might need to. As he drew closer, he saw that he needn't worry. The voice had belonged to a pair of sad, cold eyes that sat in a bruised face that might once have been beautiful. Her lips were trying to pout, but too busy trembling to manage it. She thrust her chest out, revealing it even more than the tight fitting denim tank-top did, and stood in a way which showed off a pair of long legs, whose fishnet stockings almost but not quite hid the needle-marks.

“You want a good time, honey?” she cooed in a scared voice.

He took a step forwards, and she moved backwards out of some animal instinct, clearly sensing he was a dangerous man. He moved forwards again, and she restrained herself this time, but was still obviously afraid. Closer up, he could see that some of those bruises were fresher than the morning air.

“How much?” he asked

"Be-b-b-be fifty q-q-q-quid," she said.

"Too much for the kind of mouth that stutters" he replied, taking hold of her chin, and kissing her roughly on the mouth. She had a tongue like sandpaper, and teeth like knives. He started to walk away.

"W-W-Wait a minute!" she cried out

"How much does that cost me?" he asked, not bothering to turn around.

"Thirty. We'll need to find some place though" she whined, forgetting to stutter.

He took her by the hand, and led her out to the square. He walked confidently across it, opening up the door opposite them. Graffiti and stains it was best not to think too hard about covered the walls. He listened, and heard the kind of silence that follows a death in the family. Up the stairs, stepping over the glass and metal that littered it, and through a broken door, where a mattress smelling of piss waited in the corner. He pulled her into the room and threw her roughly onto the mattress. He jammed his fingers inside her, moving them in and out angrily, and bit her breast. He grabbed her hand and placed it on the zip of his jeans, her trembling fingers undoing him. He let out a satisfied grunt as he replaced his hand with his cock and hammered her into the mattress.

Cigarette dangling from his mouth, he put his clothes back on, and carelessly tossed a twenty and a ten at her. Whistling cheerfully, he left the disgraced and broken woman in the hovel, and stepped out into the dead square. He moved out of it, and got far enough away to call a taxi driver who wouldn't know where he'd been. After some time spent standing under a bent streetlight, a taxi came down the street, and stopped in front of him. Sam moved to the back, and told him to go the Hotel San Luca. The driver was getting towards old, with a hairline beating a hasty retreat, a gut overhanging his waist, brown skin and teeth the colour a kid paints the sun.

“Good night out?” the man asked

“Tiring, mostly. Haven't been in town for a long time.”

“How long?”

“A long time. I'd rather not talk about it.”

“Alright. So, how long are you staying for?”

“I get back here, and I remember what its like, you know? Lost my job down south, so I see no reason not to stick it out. It's a good city.”

“It's definitely an interesting one.”

“Yeah. You must have some real stories from here.”
“We're like doctors or lawyers, we can't tell what goes on in here.”

“I thought most of you were doctors and lawyers when you came over, and just couldn't find the work.”

That just brought silence on to the rest of the journey, until Sam arrived at the Hotel San Luca. He stepped into the bar, which had the actual bar on one side of the room, up against the wall. The tables were wooden and of a putrid green colour. The seats on the too-small chairs were of basket material. Venetian blinds cut the view outside into bars and the word restaurant was painted onto the windows, fooling no-one. The floor was in tiles of a burnt colour which seemed to suggest a recent fire, presumably not the effect they were going for. A dutch angle black and white of the Eiffel Tower dominated the room, as if to remind guests of all the better places they could be. A high chair collected dust in the corner. Anyone who brought children here would, Sam hoped, be immediately stripped of their right to be parents. The crowd of loud men were still there, but their number had dropped to three. He ordered a pint of sour and tepid beer, and pretended it was worth the pound and a half he'd paid. He grabbed an empty chair from the loud table, and took it across the room to the corner table it had obviously originally belonged to. One of the men came across to him, sober enough to stand, so long as there wasn't a strong breeze. He told Sam that chair belonged to a friend of his, who was out for a piss.

“He should have done it in the beer. Would've improved the flavour. Pretty sure the chair belongs to this table, too.”

“Give it back, mate, you know what's good for you.”

“Never pretended I knew that. Grab another one. We're in a room of chairs.”

“Maybe he wants that one.”

“Maybe I do.”

"How's about you and me step outside and drink pints of fist with blood chasers?"

Sam removed the padlock from his pocket, and moved it to the temple of the drunk, with the kind of speed that suggested a magnetic pull from within the drunk's head. The drunk dropped. His friends, a tall, athletic man with a tattoo across the front of his throat, and a fat man with craters in his face, stood up and moved as quickly as they could across the room. The fat one tripped over a table in his drunkenness, leaving Sam with the athlete. The athlete swung a haymaker, and Sam stepped back. It was a good punch, but it only caught him lightly on the end of his chin. He lashed the padlock from where it stood at his side, up between the legs of the athlete, who fell to his knees. Sam stepped nimbly behind the athlete, and delivered another blow, this time to the back of the athlete's head. The fat man was beginning to stand, but a quick swing fixed that. Sam turned to the bartender. He walked across the room, and put a twenty on the bar.

“They started it.”

“Sure.”

“Call the police and the ambulance. Leave me out of it. I just came in off the street, and with my hood up, you couldn't make an identification from pages of photos.”

“I'm bad with faces anyway.”

“Just about the most important skill in the world, that.”

He started to leave, but a short, hairless man with a crooked nose and cracked lips, wearing a wifebeater and jeans came in, zipping them back up. He took a look around the room, and moved towards Sam. Sam swung the padlock carelessly around his finger, in tiny, deadly arcs.

"Be missing.” Sam advised.

He went missing.

Sam moved across to the desk, and told the tired shapeless woman he'd changed his mind. He wasn't going to stay here after all. He got his money back, and hit the streets to find somewhere else to crash. Half an hour later, he found a desolate little bed and breakfast, whose owners seemed surprised and over-joyed to have a guest. He settled quietly in for the night, reading a newspaper he had been given by the old couple who ran the place.

The Journalist

A pair of brown boots with an army of straps and buckles laid siege to her from her feet to her knees. Loose fitting black leggings took over from there, up to a grey sweatsuit with a black cat lounging thoughtlessly in the corner, as though it had been passing through and chosen by chance to take a nap. A black scarf hung around her neck like the arms of a child. She was rather plain faced, with round glasses and bushy hair of a light brown shade, which ran to her elbows. She looked lighter than the morning sun when the first rays dance through your windows. Hands in black fingerless gloves held her morning coffee like a vice, as she waited for the world to come into focus. One of her colleagues, a middle aged man who was something of a fixture in the office came over to her desk, paper in his hands.

"A wonderful thing, this modern age. A man can break every rule he has and never leave the house."

“What's that?”

“Story here about a guy busted from too much drugs and prostitutes. Seemed to be the neighbourhood vacuum, sucking all of them up. Eventually, that caught the police's attention, as it will, and he was caught. Turned out he'd ordered all of it delivered, by various means. Buy in bulk, and use one of thousands of websites that'll give you a woman for the night, and an infection for life.”

“Huh. Anything else good?”

“Review of this thing called Zeitgeist.”

“Yeah, I've heard of it. It sounds like left-wing idealist dreams, preaching a perfect world to the kind of people who dream of it in every shot of whiskey. The kind of stuff designed to light up that part of the brain that gets excited whenever it hears anything it already believes. The easiest part to light up after the part that lights up whenever it hears something it doesn't. We're awful easy to manipulate, aren't we?”

“You woke up cheerful.”

“I woke up early. Cheerful and early are mutually exclusive.”

“The bosses want me to let you know that you've got to go out and look for the human angle on this murder thing. Interview a relative of the deceased.”

“Which deceased?”

“Jesus, any of them.”

“Great. I'll go harass the grieving. Why do we do this job, Bruce?”

“Because it pays us, Cassie.”

“Oh yeah.”

“There's a list of names, addresses and phone numbers in the database. Get calling.”

“I'll do it in person. I don't feel right asking people this over the phone. I've a better chance of getting them to agree in person, besides. Sell the second reason to the bosses for me, would you? I'll owe you a drink. I'll owe you two if you wait for me to leave before you sell them on it.”

“I do too much for you, Cassie.”

“Yeah, you do. I'm grateful, you know.”

“I know. Me and my free drinks have known for a while now.”

She printed off the list of names, and left the building. Once outside, she took out a pipe and tamped it down carefully, before striking a match on the side of the building and lighting it. She took a deep drag, and that thoughtful look it is impossible for pipe smokers not to get entered her eyes. The pipe had not been cleaned for some time, and as such had the dirty, sweet taste that lingered in the mouth, like the taste of coffee in a cup that has held too many coffees, with not enough cleaning, or of going down on a woman after a night of whiskey. She looked up at the building for a moment. It was a squashed looking building, with more glass than brick on the outside, giving Cassie the constant feeling of surveillance. The windows all carried vertical blinds the shade of chewed cardboard. The roof slanted ever upwards, never reaching a peak, only a window or, at best, the flat surface atop the building, where the journalists stood on smoke break, and stared at the city, inwardly denying how little they knew it. She got in her car. First things first. Back home to dress more respectably and clean her pipe.

Home was a trendy apartment in a building that resembled an office complex from the outside. She waved lazily at the middle aged blonde, who was wearing her usual bored face. It had been worn too often, and looked a little wrinkled. It could do with an iron, Cassie thought. She put on one of the few dresses she owned. A simple blue, the colour of a lonely evening, with a tiny brown belt across the waist that looked like it couldn't hold a child's finger in place. It was purely decorative, but Cassie had a thing for buckles. It looked elegant without being flashy, and could easily be used for both professional and personal business. Out on the street, on her way to her car, a kid on his way to school smirked, and asked

"Why are you dressed like that? It's not the sixties."

"It isn't?"

"No."

"Guess I slept in."

She climbed into her car, and set off for an hour of doors shut in her face. Some were slammed in anger, some were slowly, sadly pushed shut, but they were all shut. The next house she came to had a man standing outside it. He was a squat, bald man in a scruffy leather jacket and jeans, a black shirt, and a red tie. He watched her get out of the car, and waited for her to approach. He growled at her, as though he were a dog ordered to guard the property.

“Take it you're that journalist.”

Cassie was a little taken aback. “That's me.”

“Get out of here.”

“Excuse me?”

“I got a call from a couple of the victims' families. Seems you've been harassing them. Stop it. Don't you have any shame?”

“I'm doing a job here. That's all. I don't like this part of it, but I like having food on the table enough to grin and bear it.”

“You're just a twisted little kid, prodding a dead dog with a stick, seeing if it'll whimper.”

“Charming. And you are?”

“Detective Hale, Murder and Manslaughter Division. Feel free to print that quote about you maggots. Your kind could do with getting attacked for once, so you know how you treat the rest of us.”

“Well, Detective Hale, Murder and Manslaughter Division, how do you feel about beating women?”
It was Hale's turn to be surprised. “What?”

“Because you're going to have to do it if you want to stop me going up there.”

Cassie marched forwards. Hale put a hand on her elbow to stop her, and warned her “I can do your career some serious harm. Make something up, bring you in on some trumped-up charge. You won't get convicted, but the dirt will stick. Dirt always sticks.”

“Sounds like a lot of bluster to me” was her reply. She went up the driveway. He followed. They stood outside the front door. He looked at her.

“Well, aren't you going to knock? It's what you came for, isn't it?”

Angry, she turned around. As she opened her mouth to reply, the door was pulled open from the inside, and a short woman wearing old age with dignity and grace faced the two of them. A soft, solemn voice greeted them

“Hello Hale, why don't you and your friend come in?”

Hale looked chastened, and his reply was quiet and gentle “She's not a friend, Margaret, she's a journalist.”

“Well, both of you just come in anyway.”

Margaret turned, and walked back inside. They followed. It was a warm, inviting place. Deep yellow walls, soft beige carpets, old black and white family photos on the wall. Opposite from the door was the kitchen, which Margaret had moved to.

“I know you're two sugars, and a little milk. How do you take your tea, miss -”

“Cassandra. I'll have it black, one sugar, please.”

“Okay, well you two make yourselves comfortable in the front room.”

Cassie and Hale moved into the front room, and sat on a feathery blue sofa that threatened to swallow them. Hale hissed across the sofa at her

“Margaret's one of the few good people left in this city. Don't you even think of hurting her.”

Cassie chose not to react. She didn't want to start an argument in this woman's home. Margaret came back, and handed them their teas.

“So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

Cassie hesitated a moment. Hale didn't.

“This one wants to ask you about Herbert.”

Margaret's face fell for a second, but was quickly all composure again.

“Oh yes. Hale said you were a journalist. You don't seem to have pen and paper out, though.”

“You'll talk to me?”

“At this age” she said, full of sorrow “your family visits less, you can get about less, and your friends die. I'll talk to anyone. Hale here has been sweet enough to visit me socially since we first met. Just once a week or so, but it's nice.”

“What relationship did you have to Herbert?”

“He was my nephew. Sweet young thing as a kid, but he never seemed to get away from those rebellious teenage years.”

Hale growled “I'll stay here, make sure nothing gets said that shouldn't.”

Margaret simply patted him on the knee and smiled at him like she would a son.

The Returning Husband

Sam was sitting under the shade of a bus shelter, watching the stray cars hum past SFA Solicitors. A young man in a tired out delivery uniform went in. The man can't be much older than his own son, Sam thought. His mind had been full of the cold hard eyes, eyes that couldn't even raise an emotion as profound as hatred, had to settle on disgust, with which Chris had looked at him. Those eyes that used to glow eagerly, those eyes that used to adore him. The tone, as Chris suggested he leave, was so far removed from the yells of 'higher' and 'faster' when Sam had swung him that to think the same throat had produced them was a profoundly confusing experience. The young man came back out. Sam whistled him over, and spotted a broken nose. This man had obviously been through some things recently. He watched the man's face go from looking pleased, to looking surprised, to looking curious, to looking apprehensive as he came over. It was a familiar face, although Sam couldn't exactly place it.

“You smoke, son?” Sam asked. The man ran a hand through his hair and looked all around him nervously.

“I'm not offering dope or asking to bum one off you, don't worry.” Sam said. When there was no reply, he tried a joke “Don't worry, I'm not gonna tell mum and dad on you.” A weak grin answered him, and Sam finally got a sentence out of the young one.

“Uh, yeah, thanks, that'd be nice.”

There was some trouble pulling it out, the pack being new. It finally came out, creased at the end by Sam's fingernails. The young man stuck it in his mouth, and struck a match by the tip. It burnt a little to one side. He held the match out to light Sam's, and they stood awkwardly together.

“Job hard?” Sam ventured

“Um, yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Really hard.”

“You alright? You seem nervous.”

“I am a little.”

“How long you been at it?”

“Being nervous? Don't really remember not being nervous.”

“The job.”

“Not long, I guess. Look, I gotta get going. Thanks for the smoke.”

“No problem. What's your name, son?”

“Roy.”

“You keep calm, Roy. No problem you can't get rid of.”

“Thanks.”

Halfway through the pack, a dozen or so buses coming and going, loading and unloading people like a factory, at the end of the working day, Roy was back in Sam's sight, dressed differently, waiting around a corner, watching the same door Sam was. People were moving out in bunches, then separating to go to the bar, the car or the train. Sam watched Roy pick one of them to follow. Pickpocket? Why would a wallet man be so precise about his target, turn up earlier in the day, even? Private detective, looking for evidence of infidelity? Roy didn't look anything like the man Sam had hired all those years ago, when he thought Betty was stepping out on him. He was an interesting one, that Roy. Good at the follow game too. Keep some people between them, take the other side of the road, this one knew the tricks. Sam felt oddly proud. He stopped letting his eyes follow Roy follow some suit, and he moved them back to the door. Another few minutes, and Betty graced his eyes. She was moving to the car park. Sam did the same. He rounded her at her car. Her face ran through shock, denial, anger and acceptance so fast that a therapist would have got vertigo. She settled on a hard-edged kind of way of looking at him, and if its edges were hard, a man could get some nasty cuts off her voice.

“Sam.”

“Betty.”

A pause. Then he asked her how she is, as if they'd bumped into each other buying food for the week, and the grand total of their experiences together had been a hundred such chance meetings. Her response was more to the point.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I came to see you. To see how you were doing. I heard about Clark. I knew you two were close.”

“Real close since you left.”

“I haven't been with anyone since you, Betty.”

“I've lost count, Sam.”

“Do you think that means you win? That you beat me?”

“No. I'd never want to confuse you on our roles.”

“One time, Betty! One fucking time!”

“That doesn't excuse it.”

“No, but it shouldn't erase that we were happy together for ten fucking years now, should it?”

“No, it shouldn't. Yes, it does.”

“How can you just stand there and be so goddamned cool about all of this? We have a son together! A son I never get to see!”

“Because you've ceased to exist to us, Sam. I'm talking to a nasty man, who can't get a single reaction past disgust and pity off me. And that's all you'll get from Chris, too. I've made sure he knows the kind of man you are.”

Sam snapped inside. His hand reacted to the break without any conscious knowledge on his part. It sprang up, Betty fell down. Tears flooding down his face, boots raining down onto Betty on the hard tarmac, Sam coming to, staring down at her, running from her.

Family Business

2011-10-19T13:12:00.001-07:00

The Thief

Roy Kyle had long and powerful legs which would have made him the object of many a lustful stare had he been a woman. They were covered by tattered jeans, which wore the stains of mustard, coffee and that strange, unidentifiable dirt which clings to the streets. He was skinny enough that you could probably see his ribs if you squinted, even through the baggy white t-shirt over them. His face was outlined by a thin beard and sideburns, the same dusty blond colour of his hair. A prolonged and boring forehead hung ominously over two elongated eyebrows, which seemed to bracket his thin, slanted eyes. His nose was a steep slope, launching off onto war torn lips, which were now clamped tightly in frustration.

He was a man ruled by a simple generosity. If you wanted for anything, and he had it, then it was yours. Money, food, cigarettes, they were yours if they were his. This philosophy of kindness dominated his life, but not so much as his naïve assumption that the same generosity was the generosity of the human condition, that all who suffered this condition were subject to being so free with their belongings. It was this childlike belief that had led to his reputation as a thief, and to his current predicament.

His current predicament was that he sat in the back of a police car, again, being driven to the station for booking. Again. The only thing worse in his mind, than a chatty taxi driver, was a chatty police officer, and this one could talk until you were deaf, or wished it, at least. As he listened to the man talk, he began to wonder if the man knew what he was talking about. As the man went on, he began to wonder if the man knew what that felt like. Questions. Rhetorical questions. He answered them his own way, before you had a chance, in a long, round about way that didn't satisfy anyone. Sitting in the back of the car, Roy Kyle wished he'd just been told stealing was wrong. It was what the speech amounted to, and much quicker. Like an Ayn Rand novel, the point could be summed up in a sentence, the point was that simple, you just had to put up with a lot of lecturing to get to the same level of understanding you got from the first sentence. The car reached the station, pulling slowly up to the sad, tired building, pulling so slowly up to it that Roy felt the man in the driver's seat could see his lecture drawing inch by inch closer to running out of time, and wanted to extend it. He was pulled out of the car by professor policeman, and lead into the gaping maw of bureaucracy. The desk sergeant, an old man with a face like a death, flicked his eyes up.

“You again, Roy?”

His eyes flicked down again, and he lazily pointed the way to the holding cells to the lecturer. Into a tight steel box went Roy. He tried to make himself comfortable in the cheap plastic chair. He tried every time he came in here. Legend has it that one day, when the stars are right, he'll succeed. He looked up at the clock. He gave it five minutes before Officer James Diamond came in to sort out what had happened.

What had happened was that Roy had been walking the city out of sheer boredom. He was almost out of money, having given most of what was on him to a homeless woman he had happened to pass. One of those depressing hot dog vans was parked in sight. The smell made Roy hungry. He walked over, and ordered a hot dog from a boyish young man with a bright yellow t-shirt, bright yellow hair, and arms you could push a brick wall down with. Roy had been turning over his situation with Jennifer, and that had eaten his concentration whole, so that the table scraps weren't enough to check the price first. He grabbed the hot dog, and took a bite. He was asked to pay, and turned out half a pound short. He didn't think that was worth worrying about, so he walked off with his food. The young man had over-reacted, that was the problem. It was the young man's fault, really, in Roy's mind. He leapt the counter, upsetting cheap plastic bottles of ketchup and mustard as he did, and went after Roy. Roy ran. He was tired and hungry, and he couldn't have taken the young man in a fight if he'd been well rested and been on a proper diet for a month. As Roy ran, he considered just how easily angered today's youth were. Back in his day, they knew what was worth kicking off over. These kind of thoughts made Roy feel older than any thirty-three year old should ever feel. His healthy lead on the obsessively chasing man made him feel a little younger, at least. Roy sprinted round corner after corner, the footfalls of the younger man letting him know he wasn't free yet. Fifty pence. The man was willing to go to these lengths over fifty pence. Roy still couldn't get over it. His shock at kids today was interrupted by the sight of a car left unattended, while its driver bought beer at an off-licence. The car was old and beaten up. It's paint scheme was a fascinating blend of mud and scratches. To Roy, it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. He yanked the door open desperately, and got in the driver's seat. He ignored the curses of the beer-buying man, and drove off from the scene at break neck pace. Once out of sight, he stopped to finish his hot dog. He wiped his hands before opening the glove box to find out who the car belonged to. He drove over to the man's house, intending to park the car in the driveway. He no longer needed it, and judging by the pitiful distance between the off-licence and the owner's house, the owner's need wasn't pressing. Turned out the owner had walked home and reported the car stolen. The officer was taking a report from him just as Roy pulled up the driveway, and Roy had found himself in the back seat of the police car in a matter of minutes.

In came James Diamond. Roy checked the wall. Eight minutes. Diamond was losing his shine. That wasn't meant to happen.

“Grand theft auto," James boomed"You're a big boy now, huh?”

“Wasn't like that” Roy protested.

“What was it like?”

Roy explained. The way he said it made it pretty clear, as far as he was concerned, that he was just borrowing it. Diamond disagreed.

“Taking without permission is theft, Roy. You never learn, do you? We've gone easy on you before, but I can see that this time, we're going to have to teach you the hard way.”

Roy sighed by way of answer.

“Hard time, Roy. The only way you'll learn. You just need to remember not to drop the soap, okay, because the judge is going to throw the book at you.”

Tough talk. Tough talk bored Roy. But Roy was under Diamond's power, and if Diamond wanted to throw out the kind of clichés that action films feel are beneath them, then Roy would indulge him. Roy was real, real scared, and real, real sorry, if that was what Diamond wanted. Right now, he'd kidnapped Madeline McCaann on his way to shoot JFK, if it would shut Diamond up. Roy just wanted to get home, to his habitual indulgences like freedom from a barrage of stupidity. After confessing the full story, he was left waiting in the cell while the story was checked with the car owner and the brash young man. Diamond came in to let him know it checked out. He was to be held overnight, but that was all, as he was not considered a flight risk.

The cell in which he was held was cold and sterile. It reminded Roy of a time when, as a boy, his dog, Milky, had run away. Eventually, after frantic days of searching, his mother had got a call, letting her know that Milky was at a nearby kennel. When Roy and his mother had got there, they had seen Milky sadly staring into space, then grow so happy that she could not stay still, ran in short circles near the bars with excitement at her release back to those she loved, who loved her. Roy sat on his bed, and hoped the insane hope that somehow, Jennifer knew of his imprisonment, and that somehow, Jennifer would come and pick him up. He hoped that hope through leaden eyes, and cavernous yawns. He hoped that hope until finally, sleep took him, and he dreamed that dream. But how could she have known? Would she even have come if she did?

In the morning, ignoring the growled threats of James Diamond, Roy left the station, and went to a box in a wall with dirty windows and dusty floors, with worn plastic tables and scavenged furniture, with damp floors and posters left over by the last tenant, showing fast cars, hairy guitarists, and naked women. Just a box in a wall he was happy to call home. He crawled onto his mattress and slept fitfully.

Roy woke up, and searched around his bed. The first thing he found was a pack of cigarettes. He opened it up, but it was empty. He moved groggily to the ashtray that sat on his windowsill, in front of curtains he never opened. He rummaged through it, and found a dog-end that was more end than dog. He lit it up, and got three, maybe four drags off it. He rummaged in his pockets and found his phone. He gave Jennifer a call. It rang, and years stretched in the box in the wall while Roy waited for her to pick up. When it went to voicemail, he hung up. He called the number he'd been given for a public defender. A voice you could wrap yourself up in answered.

“Hello, Clive Dipman's office. Can I help?”

“Hi. I'd like to make an appointment to see Mr. Dipman please.”

“Okay, no problem. When's good for you?”

“Uh, any time.”

“We have a spot at three. Will that do you?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.”

Roy hung up. Before his phone had reached his pocket, it started ringing again. He answered, and the rich voice had half a laugh in it.

“Going to need your name.”

“Oh, yeah. Uh, Roy Kyle. Thanks.”

There was an awkward silence before the rich voice asked gently

“Anything else you need?”

“Was kind of hanging on in case there was anything else you needed to know.”

“There's not. I'll see you at three, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Roy hung up, feeling truly embarrassed. That was what it took to make him nervous and useless. A pretty voice. He had a few hours to kill until three, so he went out for a coffee, stopping for a pack of cigarettes on the way. Roy took a seat in the smoking garden out back. Shaded under a large orange umbrella, he had an almost full view of the café through the open door. He saw the deep red mushroom shaped stools, the warm yellow walls, the chatter and the clutter of the busy baristas rushing to and from tables. The rush died down, and Roy began again to hear the mellow jazz wind its way gently towards him. He began again to see the street his favourite café perched on. He cheerfully watched the bustle from his private sanctuary. Wait – was that Jennifer just then, striding angrily towards some unknown place? He ran out of the café, and called her name, but to no avail. He went back inside, killed another few cups, and set off for Dipman's office.

Dipman's office was on the fourth floor of one of those skyscrapers with a dozen different cheap outfits to every floor. From the outside, the skyscraper at the end of Hardy Lane appeared to be a prosperous building, with open floors, neon lights, and an array of plants at the front. On closer inspection, the open floors were merely large offices that had sat empty for so long, no-one could recall the last time something had lived in there. The neon lights flickered like a candle in a breeze, and the plants were either rubber or dying. He rode the elevator up, and regretted it. It reminded him of his holding cell. He stepped out onto a floor that wasn't busy because it was Sunday, but probably wasn't busy at nine on a Monday morning either. He wandered lost, until he found a plywood door with the words “Clive Dipman, Public Defender” on a sign nailed roughly to the front of the door. Roy could see the nail holes from previous tenants, who had since gone out of business. The skyscraper on Hardy Lane was where bad business went to die alone, where no-one would notice it. Filled with confidence, he opened the door and found himself in a facsimile of a doctor's waiting room. Stack of magazines, glass front to the reception desk (fake glass, now he looked closer), blue cushiony chairs, and the latest chart hits playing not loud enough that you could hear it properly, but not quiet enough to ignore. He walked up to the desk, and saw a woman lounging carelessly behind the screen. Her feet were bare, except for the transparent stockings which hugged her legs. The only article of clothing she had on was a shimmering red and silver dress that exposed her arms and all but a few inches of her legs. Her hair was a deep inviting shade of red, worn loosely down to her bust, and her lips were ripe and pouting. She was a little pudgy, but the only part where that impaired, rather than enhanced her beauty was her face, giving her small eyes the look of a pig's. She smiled up at him

“You must be Mr. Kyle.”

“Yeah. And you are?”

“I'm Claire. Nice to meet you.”

Once again, Roy was showing off his mastery of the awkward silence. Claire broke it

“Shall I show you in?”

Claire stood and lead him to the only door that wasn't marked Ladies or Gentlemen. Roy couldn't help noticing her long, sleek legs through the transparent stockings she wore. He'd been inside, and a man gets urges when he's locked inside. She opened the door for him, making the fair assumption that he wasn't even up to that right now. Roy caught Dipman stealing a glance at Claire's legs too. Roy stepped into the office, and Claire shut the door behind him. Dipman broke the silence immediately

“Transparent stockings!” His eyes light up as he made this exclamation, so that Roy could tell that it was the finest invention of the last century, so far as Mr. Dipman was concerned.

“So” he continued, taking on a fatherly tone “tell me all about”

Roy told him all about it. Dipman's idea seemed to be, and he pressed it insistently, that Roy plead guilty to all charges. Roy did not feel guilty, did not feel he deserved this. Dipman went back on the attack. Talking thrilled him deeply, and he could not stop doing it. Words came in salvoes, bombarding Roy, Dipman gasping between words and elongating his last word until he could summon the next. Words, words and words washed every inch of Roy's skin. Roy felt that he had been a fly on the wall the last twenty four hours, listening to the thoughts of others. Just a fly, kept on the wall by a pin through its guts, forced to listen to nothing but words without meaning. Just once, Roy wanted to hear something that had meaning.

“Look” he cut in “will you defend me or not?”

“I'll defend you.”

“Then defend me.”

A tense silence hung in the air after his outburst. From the thin, withered lips of Dipman, came a nervous laugh.

“Well, that's that out of the way, I suppose.”

Roy smiled, and they were able to get on with the details of it.

Roy came out of the office feeling good about himself. He nodded to Claire, and made his way out of the building. Once he was out, he again began to feel alive. He called Jennifer up, and got an answer this time.

“Yes?” came a tired voice
“Hey Jen. It's me. Wondered if you wanted to go grab a drink?”

“Little early.”

“Then some coffee?”

“Little late.”

“You alright?”

“No, not really.”

She hung up. Concerned, he quickly tried to redial her, but she wouldn't answer. He caught the first bus he could to the kitchenware store she worked at. It was a small building, and the cramped together desks, cabinets, knife arrays and so on made it feel smaller. He stood in the centre of the room, about three steps from the entrance, if you had short legs. He saw Jennifer come out of a storeroom, not looking her usual self. She was wearing silver sandles, which would have revealed the supple, toned feet of a yoga lover if the light wasn't bouncing off them, blinding Roy. Rolled up jeans wrapped their folds tightly around her ankles, as though making up for her feet's immodesty. Her jeans were unbuttoned, giving her almost the effect of one of those construction worked for a fifties coke ad. She looked like she should be leaning against the pump at a petrol station, enjoying the cool refreshing taste of, well, you get it by now. A deep black shirt sobered the affair, and the angry, focused look of an animal denied food sat heavy on her tired face. She was a woman without confidence, which is one of the most miserable things to encounter in this world, for the happy, cheerful glow which can make any woman out-rank Venus was not only absent, but could so easily be present. The tragedy of missed opportunity and regret is the kind which can destroy a life. He waved. She turned, and moved impatiently towards him.

“What's up, kid?” he asked in a friendly manner

“Why'd you come here?” was her unhappy retort

“You sounded down. I care, so I'm worried.”

“Look, can you go?”

“No, not unless you're okay.”

“Right. Fucking hell.”

She turned to the sharp faced brunette at the counter.

“Gonna go on a break, okay?”

It was okay. Jennifer turned back to Roy.

“Let's go outside. I don't want to talk about it in here.”

Roy had a feeling of happiness that it would be talked about, and hope that there was something he could do to help. Jennifer had a feeling of unhappiness that it would be talked about, and hope Roy would let her deal with it. They got outside, and faced one another. Roy looked lovingly down at the soft face, with strongly defined features, like a table with a cloth hung over it. Jennifer stared with hard eyes up at Roy's face, resenting the look in his eyes. It came out.

“Look, I've got to get away from all this, I'm going mad in this city and getting nowhere with anything, I need out I need out fast, don't make this harder.”

The words were all sucked in on one long inhalation, giving them a bizarre, rushed feel, and causing them to sound almost backwards. Roy used a cigarette as an excuse to try to make sense of what had been said. Once it made sense, he spoke slowly and carefully

“Why are you leaving?”

Jennifer took a deep breath, seemingly calmed by her venting.

“It's my brother. He's dropped all contact. And with this serial...”

Her voice broke up at the end, and she fell into silence. Roy put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but she moved away from it and back inside.

Roy knew what he had to do.

Jennifer's brother, Alex, was a solicitor, and probably lived every nasty stereotype about solicitor you know, and at least two you don't. When Roy had met him, Jennifer had told him that Roy “had no ambition”, a deliberate misunderstanding of Roy saying he had no ambition for money. Alex had laughed and said “keeping yourself from disappointment, eh?”, and clapped him on the shoulder. Jennifer laughed too, and Roy just sat there and smoked, his puny cigarettes trying to add to the air of cigar smoke. The air in Alex's apartment had been like that both times he'd gone. It had smelt of stale tobacco smoke, to which new smoke was regularly added in the hope of freshening the air. He was still remembering the air as he boarded a bus to the fashionable side of town. He took a seat across the aisle from two punks in leather jackets and ironic t-shirts, and behind a redhead with a weighty paperback. She wore plain grey stockings and a floral top beneath a black jacket. With a light blue headband and an innocent smile Roy had caught as he passed, she looked the picture of happier days, was the only person Roy felt he could say for certain had been a child at some point. Roy suffered his usual literati womaniser dilemma. He liked women who read, but approaching them was ruder than usual because they were reading. Short of some casual stalking, how was he to get their attention? The best way, he supposed, was to read the same book in view, but his rucksack didn't have room for a bookstore – not since they'd started putting coffee shops in every one, at least. Across the aisle, one of the punks made a vulgar joke involving a goat. His friend gave him a pity laugh, and he responded with the kind of grin and voice that made him resemble nothing so much as one of those hacks selling grills on late night TV.

“That's the one joke I'll make. Enjoy it.”

The redhead chose this moment to leave, which showed impeccable taste, but left Roy feeling sorry anyway. Roy passed the time staring out the window, and pretending the other passengers weren't there, until he started to notice that the dirty bars and dusty streets had been replaced by trendy coffee houses and modernised office blocks. He pressed the button and got off, just as the comedian was starting to break his one-joke promise.

Between him and Alex' apartment, there lay a wide park, which he crossed. Trees bordered the path, casting faint shadows across it. Beyond them were wide grassy expanses speckled with fallen leaves. Beyond that even further, however, Roy could still see the grey concrete of the city pressing in on him. Of the many powerful trees he passed, one in particular caught his eye. It seemed at first to be a huge tree, not only tall but wide. As he walked around the side of it, however, he saw that the branches merely hung low, spreading their red wine leaves across the ground, giving the impression that the tree existed on a grander plane, like a dog with its hackles up. A great grass cutting tractor hummed and sliced methodically across the park, spilling green behind it like an obscene fountain. He saw a slapshot formation of rock and water, amongst which a half dozen or so children played and laughed, a faint sound beneath the rumblings of the tractor. He watched how the middle class yuppies lived. Mostly, from what he could see, they lived on bicycles, iPhones and Starbucks, and he counted a dozen dirty looks when he lit a cigarette. He lit the next one with the end of that one when it finished, getting a weird kick out of shocking the clean living trendsters of this neighbourhood. He came to a building sandwiched between two office blocks, and which looked like one itself, if it weren't for the sign proclaiming it an apartment complex. He figured it was for the people who couldn't stand to leave the office, which fitted Alex to a tee. Roy didn't know what he expected to find there, he'd really just done this the way he did everything, it was the idea that struck him at the time. He walked through the black front door into a locked waiting room, the only real feature a glass screen, which fronted a desk. Behind that desk sat a bored middle aged blonde, who stared into the middle distance as if a better job would appear there. She was disappointed to only see a skinny, scruffy, kinda-nervous kid with smoker's teeth. Most people were.

“Can I help you?” she lazily asked

“Here to see Alex Fitzpatrick.”

“That guy? Haven't seen him for weeks. I need to. He owes rent. No answer from his apartment. Even went in, once. He ain't there, kid.”

“I'm looking for the guy. He seems to have disappeared.”

“That's a real shame.”

“Look” Roy said, moving over to the counter and leaning forwards on it. He gave her his best impersonation of a charming guy. It wasn't bad, and most people let him off for how hard he tried “I need to find the guy. If you help me out, I can get him to pay his rent for the month.”

“Help you out?”

“Let me in. You said it yourself, he's not there.”

“Yeah, but what if he showed up some time when I wasn't around?”

“He's behind on rent. You're showing prospective tenants around, you know, the kind that pay.”

She laughed “You don't look like you could afford a night here, kid.”

“Yeah, well, I can't. But let's keep that between us.”

She rolled her eyes. “Wait here.”

She moved upstairs, grumbling all the way. The concept of work had clearly been a reality she wasn't prepared for. She came back downstairs.

“Uh, I'm sorry, sir, he doesn't seem to be in. Feel free to go knock yourself, if you like.”

Roy winked at her, and went upstairs, to find the door slightly ajar. He pushed it gently open, and stepped in. It was a room of reflections. Roy saw himself a dozen times, just stepping in, off the windows, the mirror in the hall, the mirror on the wall, the sleek black breakfast counter. He stared around a room full of things he could never afford, from the bookcases full of leather bound texts, to the big screen TV, to the leather sofas. Flicking idly through the kitchen, he reckoned most of Alex's ingredients would set him back a month's worth of money, but with the way the government was handling benefits, that hardly said anything about the price. He spotted an answerphone at the end of the counter. Seven missed calls. The first one really put the hook into Roy. A lonely male voice sighed, and began, but it was what was in that voice that grabbed him. A cold, hard quality like steel, lying under the sadness. A voice like a knife in it's sheath.

“We need to talk about what happened at the bar after work last night, between you and Betty. Look, I get that you don't care for her, I get it, okay? And maybe you're right, maybe she is an awful person. But I've been lonely. I've been lonely a long time, and maybe, just maybe, I'll be less lonely with her, so I guess I kind of love her for that. It's been a long time since I loved anyone, and I won't have you speak of her the way you did. This is a warning. I don't want to hurt you. I want you, and I want her, I want you both in my life. But if you make me choose, I will. Like I said, I don't want to hurt you, so just back off, Al. For both of our sakes, if not for hers.”

Roy took a note of the number, and of the name Betty. He scratched that idea, crumpled it up and set it alight. A better one had taken over. He opened up his rucksack, and lifted the answer phone. It sat comfortably in there, like that was where it had always belonged. He left a note where it had been - “Me and Roy eloped. Off to find true love. Hugs and kisses, your answerphone.” If Alex was stopping into the place, was still around, he'd be sure to find that. The rest of the apartment served to tell him that Alex really, really liked the novels of Mickey Spillane. Roy's opinion of Alex as an awful, awful man confirmed, he left quietly. It being a Sunday, he figured Alex's firm would be shut. No matter, he would use today to find an outfit that suggested delivery boy, and something to deliver. For once, looking like a man who has never had enough money in his entire life was going to pay off. As he left the apartment, he almost ran headlong into Alex's neighbour, a short, plump blonde with eyes like ropes, pulling you into her, and a disarming way of looking you up and down, as though wondering how best to cook you.

“Hey there. You uh, you seen Alex?”

“Nope. Not for days. No sound either. Usually, I can hear him through the walls. One of the perks they never advertised, for some reason. I take it you didn't find him in there. You try under the bed, sweetie?”

“I'm his uh, brother from out of town. He gave me a key, so I could crash at the place if I needed to.”

“Right”

She carried the middle sound on for miles, raising her eyebrows. She locked her door “don't want you catching a peek at my bed...yet”, and moved off, whistling. Roy had no idea what to make of her. He didn't really try, although for the rest of the day, she haunted his mind, and seemed to perch like a hungry cat on every street.

Police Business

2011-10-12T02:36:00.000-07:00

The Detective

Detective Hale was starting to take this business very, very personally.

The stocky, scruffily dressed detective, wearing no hair on his head aside from two deep, black, bushy arches that perched atop his eyes, stared grimly at the pavement, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lip, dancing up and down as he muttered and wrote notes, mutters and notes he could do from memory by now. There was no connection, that was what was getting to him. Sure, someone had been slashed to death in the city, but was there a witness? Of course not. But aside from the blindness of the city, the absence of any person in the bustling hub of the city who was there to see, or hear, they had nothing in common. Women and men of every class, race, political allegiance, every shoe size, taste in movies, favourite drink, and way of eating a sandwich. There was nothing but blood on the cobbles to tie them together, no-one could even prove that any of the victims knew each other. The chief medical examiner, a slim brunette with rimless glasses and a yellow smile came across to him.

“Same as it ever is?” he asked

“Same as it ever is.”

“Who've we got this time?”

“One Jack Hammond, twenty years old, deep wound entering beneath the rib cage from behind, and slicing upwards, into the lungs this time. Victim most likely died from shock, judging by the blood, which has pooled in the body rather than all come out.”

Hale turned to the crowd that was gathering; a hub of bleak, voyeuristic faces that peered and peeked around each others' shoulders. He walked towards them, raising his voice. “Well, any one of you see, hear anything? Know anything? Know our victim here? Nope? Great! Why don't you move on? There's nothing to see here. Nothing you can't see again in a few night's time.” He turned, and cast his eyes at the pavement. Lying there, outlined in blood, face frozen in anguish, arms spread out as though parachuting, lay what had once been Jack Hammond.

Hale walked off, throwing away his cigarette, which skittered across the cobbles, landing and extinguishing itself in the blood. On his way back to the office, he tried to straighten out his head on who was doing this. Always from behind. Sometimes one, sometimes several, until the killer hit an organ. The killer must feel the impact, organ tissue must feel different, or maybe it was something in the way they struggled and then stopped. Mad, sure, but with an order to it, and a real cleverness. Hale doubted the killer had seen any time sectioned. The real genius of it was that nothing tied them together. With old Jack, you could at least know he had a thing about whores. With this one, what did he have a thing for, besides killing? Hale remembered the counsellor the department had made him see. That smirking would be father figure would have said there was repressed homosexuality in the repeated stabbings from behind. Hale was supposed to what then? Watch the next pride march for the man looking wistfully at it when he thinks nobody's watching him? His disjointed line of reasoning was interrupted by another one of the random stops implemented recently. That's how they caught the Yorkshire ripper. Just a random search. Hale had nicked one of the bobby's little brothers for attempted murder about a month ago. Since then, he'd been randomly stopped every time, had even had the wheels slashed once while he was parked. Hale checked his brakes every time he left, but that was all he was really worried about. The hassle over, he arrived at the tower of glass, and rode the lift to the sixth floor, into that den of tired, fallen faces and glowering eyes staring at reports, trying to find the next angle. He almost made it to his desk before Wilson, one of the detectives working under him, came over. Wilson had neat blonde hair, eager blue eyes, a well-maintained body, no nasty habits and a little brown on the tip of his nose if the bosses had been by lately. Wilson was the poster child for either ladder climbers everywhere or the Hitler Youth, Hale couldn't decide which.

“Another of his?” Wilson asked.

“Another of his.”

A nasty smirk spread across Wilson's photogenic face.

“Maybe you should hand it over to me then?”

“Your time will come, Wilson. Rate you're going, you'll be lead detective here soon enough, and then you can have the ulcers, pack a day habit and hair loss that come with it for free.”

“Rate you're going, you'll be fetching my coffee when that day comes.”

“Could be. But for now, you're supposed to be fetching murderers. Maybe you can go tell them your five year plan for personal advancement. It'd be even better if you ushered them into a twenty-five year personal advancement session at Armley.”

He moved into his cubicle, and tried to think. But thinking's one of those things you do without thinking. The moment you try to force it, you wind up staring at the emotionless grey walls with that far off look in your face. Hale did that for about half an hour, then set to rummaging in his desk for inspiration.

“Well” thought Hale “Where is it? How are you going to go about your day without it?” He put all his fine career skills into it, really canvassed the area. But the case had gone cold. “There it goes” he muttered “Greatest case of your life, and you come up shorter than the difference between the right and wrong way to treat a woman. You busted it, Hale, you damnable fool. Looks like you've got to swallow your pride, and go hat in hand to buy a new hipflask.”

A call came through to his office before he could escape. The shrill call echoed around, hanging in the air. He picked it up.

“Detective Hale's office.”

“Hale” came the voice of the desk sergeant “We actually got a lead on him.”

“Goddamn. Who?”

“Betty Phillips. Lives over at 142 Prince's Lane.”

Prince's Lane was a middling area of the city. Had been beautiful once, but students had moved in, and the street had started to fall apart in the centre of it. The edges, the outside, they were fine. But there was the slow, sad decay of neglect in the centre, and it was only a matter of time before it consumed the street. He knocked on the door of 142, the one beautifully maintained house. He admired the vines creeping quietly up the front, stopping short of scaling the windows, too shy to be seen. A blonde answered the door. He'd seen the blonde before, or maybe he'd just seen her kind of blonde before. The petite, cute, giggly type, who flutter their eyelids at you until just had to buy them a drink. Their eyes were fluttering up and down at such pace that they needed a drink just to cool them down. Yeah, he knew her, although he'd never met her before, now that he thought about it.

“Hello?” she asked in the exact same friendly tone she'd address a lover or a burglar with.

“Detective Hale. Murder and Manslaughter division. Was told you had something for me.”

“Oh, of course, come on in.”

She turned away from him, and walked back through the house, her bare feet clapping across the panelled wood floor. “Something to drink?” she asked.

“Coffee'd be great” he replied, stepping within the red walls of that place. He scanned the walls. A lot of painting of Africa, done most likely by Europeans who'd been once, if that. Only one caught his eye. A large, powerful tree, shading a man from the sun, whose oppressive rays had left others in the field bent over, mopping heads, struggling. But this man, he knew he didn't have to, because he was protected. He was loved. Hale looked at this picture for a long time, and it is impossible to say just what he thought as he stared at it, only that he stared at it.

She returned, a large, blue, steaming mug of black coffee in each hand.

“You take it black, right? I tried calling, but you didn't seem to hear. The Tree got you?”

“Yeah, I guess it did. And black's great.”

“I figured as much. All those police shows I watch. Always with the black coffee. Shall we go in to the sitting room?”

They went into the sitting room. Hale sat on a sofa the colour of the ocean on a summer night, and she placed herself just far away enough that he couldn't feel her breath on his face, but if they leaned forwards at the same time, he just might. Hale started with the questions immediately.

“So, I heard you had some information about the recent murders.”

“Well, I don't want to give you too much hope. I didn't see any of them happen, you understand. It just so happens that I worked with one of the victims.”

“Which one was this?”

“Clark Andrews.”

'Number eight' thought Hale. The last one but one.

“So you work at SFA Solicitors then?” SFA Solicitors was the kind of law firm that gave lawyers their bad reputation. Dirty tricks pulled to get dirtier clients whatever they wanted, which was seldom clean. Civil stuff only, not criminal, but only in a technical sense of the word.

“Yeah, but don't hold it against me” she laughed. “I'm a researcher, I go out into the field and gather information. Kind of like you, I guess, just for the bad guys.” She flashed a smile and continued. “Anyways, I was working on a case for Clark. He was defending some fast food joint from allegations that it had used rotten meat. The freezer had busted, and they pulled in a cheap fixer for it, rather than a good one. The usual wages of sin stuff. But a few days before it happened, he turned up at mine one night, terrified.”

“How late are we talking?”

“One, maybe two. He was shaking all over, but it wasn't cold, because he was sweating. He looked half dead. I guess in a way he was. He wouldn't talk in much detail, but I knew he'd been at the Last Round, you know, that dive on the south side. And there, he had met someone. And that someone, well, that someone had put the terror in him, and had made it stick. I gave him a sofa to sleep on, drank coffee and watched out of my bedroom window. Nothing happened, and I kicked him out in the morning.”

“Why didn't you tell us this before?”

“My boyfriend at the time was the jealous type. I didn't want him hearing Clark had been here overnight. Anyway, he's gone, and it seemed safe to talk.”

“Safe?”

By way of answer, she rolled up the sleeve on her left arm, to show a spot where her soft, pink flesh had turned a bluish grey.

“What's his name?”

“It doesn't matter.”

Hale gave her a card. “Thanks for the help. And if he, or anyone else does anything like that again, you call, and you give me his name.”

“I'll be fine.”

He could see he wasn't getting anywhere with this. It made him angry. He'd seen it happen to his mother too many times as a child for hearing about this not make him want to go and break the man's face. He got up to leave. She followed him to the door, and picked up the painting of the Tree. She handed it to him.

“Take it” she smiled

“I couldn't.”

“Take it," she repeated "My ex gave it to me. I don't like the reminder any more. You have it.”

“I think that's accepting a bribe, miss Phillips” he said, grinning at the corners

“Oh, come on, who'll know?”

“Tell you what. I'll take the picture, if you promise to call any time you're in trouble like that again. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They shook hands, her fingers so soft that Hale was amazed that the callouses on his hand didn't wear her hand down like sandpaper. They parted.

Hale stood outside, the painting under his arm and the mid-day air in his lungs. 'Well, goddamn,' he thought. 'A lead. A real, tangible lead. Somewhere to drive to, questions to ask, real police work to do.' Hale felt the same cautious optimism he felt watching his favourite sports team. They'd always start so well, and even though they'd let him down, he thought every time that this time they just might win, before remembering bitterly that he supported the Big Cats, so named for the town rivalry between his home town and Wakefield, whose team were the Wildcats. The subtle observation was that rugby players were big. The Big Cats played with the same skill they picked names. And then he'd be at the bar with the rest of the ever-disappointed fans, as if the next pint would change the way things had gone.

It being Saturday, SFA was shut for the day, so Hale had to call in to the office to get a track on the owner, Phillip Kennedy, whose sleek, powerful house loomed over him across a lawn that rose and fell like waves, parted by a winding gravel driveway. He held down the buzzer, and a tired voice answered

“Yes?”

“I'm here to see Mr. Kennedy.”

“He's not expecting visitors. Are you sure you aren't here to see Mrs. Kennedy?”

“Unless that'll get me in, no. I'm here on police business.”

“I'll have to ask to see a badge.”

“Kind of hard through all this steel.”

“Wait there. I'll be down.”

Hale sighed, and smoked while he waited. Eventually, out came a youngish man dressed all in black. Hale pitied the man in servant's clothes in this weather, but had no pity for him in any other weather. We're all servants, was Hale's philosophy. Even this killer, even if he didn't know it, and even if they never caught him to teach him it. There were too many evens in that sentence, Hale realised. He preferred a world of certainties. He tiredly showed the man his badge, and was admitted into a house as impressive and devoid of personality as the outside. Money is wasted on the unimaginative, Hale thought. A middle-aged man with a portly figure and spatterings of white atop his black hair came down, and shook Hale firmly by the hand, before asking if they could go somewhere quiet to talk. They went somewhere quiet to talk, into a library on loan from the nineteenth century.

“You don't seem too surprised to see me.” Hale began

“Well, it's a bit of both, really. I'm unsurprised to see you, because we've talked before, back when Andrews was murdered. I'm surprised because I thought we covered everything. So, as you can see, it's a bit of both.”

“Yes, well, there's been a new development, which I wanted to discuss with you. Regarding Betty Phillips.”

“Ah, yes. Betty. Nice girl, when you get down to it, but she has a fiery temper, so she can be a bit of both, I guess.”

“More specifically, her relationship with Clark Andrews.”

“I had quite forgotten. Yes, that.”

“It's come to my knowledge that he visited her in a worried state, shortly before the murder.”

“Oh, did he? Didn't know that.”

“He did. How well did you know Mr. Andrews?”

“Well, my relationship with him was a bit of both professional and social, to be honest. I was very impressed with him, he was one of my finest employees, so naturally, I took an interest in him as a partner in the firm. Which meant dinner, drinks, the like. Reaching a verdict on his character, as it were.”

“Right. Well, in that case, can you think of anyone else who Andrews would go to with his troubles?”

“Well, he was quite friendly within the office. But then again, he never really got close to anyone but me or Betty, so I suppose he must have had a more active social life outside of it. So as for whether there's anyone I know he would have gone to, no, I'm afraid not. But he must have had someone else out there, or else the loneliness would have broken him.”

“Right. Well, thank you.”

“I was glad to help, although a little sad to be reminded of this tragedy. It was a bit of both, really.”

Hale was quickly coming to the conclusion that these words were this man's gods. That Andrews was dead wasn't good, but it probably wasn't bad, either. It was a bit of both, really. As for Hale, he preferred a world of absolutes. He was right. The world was wrong. One of them would win. Smart money was on the world. Hale left quickly, thanking Kennedy for his time. Kennedy just sat there and stared at the walls. Hale wound his way through the maze to the front door. Standing on the stairs was a red head with legs that belonged in an art gallery. She had pouted lips, fingers that idly played with the banisters, and a nightgown as transparent as her intentions.

“Hello there. And you are?” he asked

“Mrs. Kennedy. At your service.” she replied, stretching each word out as if enjoying their taste on her lips.

“I can see that.”

“What were you and the old man talking about?” she purred

“Murder.”

“Don't you want to question me in private too?”

“Well, I'd love to" he sighed "but that ground has been trod a lot of times before, and I wouldn't turn up anything new.”

“You could try.” she replied, twining one of her legs around the bainster

“Actually, you know what?" Hale snapped "I just remembered what else me and your husband talked about. He's thinking about having you spayed.”

She stormed up the stairs, the angry, thumping sound of a child sent to bed early following her. Out of curiosity, Hale listened for the angry slamming of the door. It never came, but that could just be on account of the size of the place.

The Last Round, Hale's next port of call, was a dive on the south side, but probably not a dive as far as the south side was concerned. Of the buildings around it, less than half had broken windows, and the litter was not quite so bad that the cobbles were completely hidden. Stepping inside, Hale was bathed in a dim glow, which he was able to barely see the bar through. It was the early evening, but already the place was reasonably full of unreasonable types. In black boxes mounted on the walls sat sheets of coloured plastic with a cage across them. The smell of weed imposed its presence on that place. Coarse, cruel laughter mingled unevenly with the dark murmurs that sat in the corners, eyeing everything with the same suspicious glare. The walls, floor, ceiling, bar and tables were in a shade of brown to put you to sleep. The stools had had a colour once, but what exactly that was is anyone's guess. In this respect they resembled the drab, violent sorts who filled the place. The only colour they had were the men's tattoos and the women's make up, both packed on so tight as to drown the flesh. He made his way through, and stood at the bar, and waited to be noticed by the fat, middle aged blonde who moved up and down the bar at a speed Hale imagined would tire younger, slimmer types. It wasn't long for him to be spotted.

“What'll it be?”

“You work here a lot?”

“I'm wife of the owner. We're the only ones as do work 'ere. Well, I'm the only one as does work 'ere, the lazy sod drinks 'alf our stock himself.”

Hale supplied a picture of Andrews he'd picked up from the office on his way to The Last Round.

“See him?”

“Once. Remember he stuck out. Was dressed right, trying to fit in and all, but he didn't act or sound right. Only one bloke as would talk to him. Never seen him before, neither, nor since. Tall bloke, 'andsome like, wearing a leather jacket. Wouldn't mind seeing him again.”

“If you do see him, give me a call.” Hale passed her his card, the one that said “Murder and Manslaughter Division” on the bottom. Her face turned at once, and her entire manner changed. She became business like.

“Wait 'ere.”

She left, and came back down with a man sober enough to pour a drink. Hale got the sense that the man had enough experience pouring a drink, that he couldn't get so drunk that he couldn't repeat the trick. The woman beckoned him upstairs, and lead him into a sitting room. She brushed empty cans and bottles from a sofa, and the two of them sat down. She spoke, and when she spoke, her voice changed. Gone was the thick accent. In its place was the smooth, articulate and pregnant with pauses speech of the well educated.

“So, what's happening?” she asked

“You changed.” he replied

She leaned forwards on the sofa, turning her head to him“You know Marx?”

“Know of him.”

She rested her head in her palm“He didn't publish all that viva la revolution stuff because he wanted a revolution. It was because he didn't want to be another bourgeois body when the revolution came.”

“Your face changed too, when you saw the badge.” Hale said

“What is an actor without an audience?”

“Why give the act away to me?”

“Because I like to believe those charged with the most important job in our country are women and men of intelligence.”

“Your face changed too much for it to just be that. Tell me about the man.”

“Which man?”

“Both.”

“The first one, I recognised as an outsider immediately. A fellow pretender. He wasn't that bad, to give him his due. That's all.”

“That's not all.”

“Of course not. But there is so much to know about a person, and I saw him but the once. That is all that I know of that particular unique being.”

“Another answer” snapped Hale “which serves not the question posed, but my sense of your intelligence. Well, my sense of your intelligence is this: you have, since we met, utilised it to the purpose of hiding something. I don't know what, but I know, and that's enough for now. But soon, it won't be enough, and if you don't have the intelligence to show me what you're hiding, I'm going to seek all across your life on whatever trumped-up charge I can, and expose every secret you have, right up until I find the one I need.”

Hale stormed out, leaving the woman on her throne of beer cans. She didn't look surprised. She was probably smart enough to see that coming. She didn't look worried either. Mostly, she looked like she knew it was all bluster. He pushed his way back through the pub, and stood once more on a sad street in a lonely city. Across the road, he saw a fellow officer pushing a tall young man into the back of a car. He watched the car until it turned a corner. He stood staring at the space where it had been. Eventually, he sighed, lit a cigarette, and walked away from it all.

Prologue

2011-10-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

The Murderer

In the morning, he drank coffee, and that was business between him and the morning. In the car to work, his eyes would flick dangerously to reports, as he skimmed blind across the busy roads. He never crashed. Once there was a scrape, but general consensus is that it was the other driver's fault. Business was all he knew from nine to five, profits, bottom-lines and quarterlies, four quarters of the day, excluding a half-hour for a whiskey and a cigarette, always at twelve-fifteen exactly. If he was in a meeting, out would come the bottle and the Camel, regardless. When he got home, he undressed and grew organically into casual clothes, covered by a thick, tired leather jacket that sighed onto his shoulders. Then he went into the streets, and what he did was business for the detectives the next morning, who sighed deeply, lit up another cigarette, and chalked up another slashing victim with no witnesses. They were used to it by now. It was business as usual. Business, just business. Nothing personal in it at all. When you make your business personal, you make your business fail.