Bubblegum Smoothie (8 page)

“No.”

“Me neither. He’s… he’s obviously being used by our actual perp. Seems the sort of guy who’d do anything for a few shiny coins.”

“And the sort of guy who’d find it very hard to defend himself if he were pinned for it.”

“Which is why it’s very important we get our… Oh shit.”

Martha’s car slowing to a halt was all the confirmation I needed of the shittest possible scenario.

“Why the hell does traffic always stack up when you actually want to go somewhere?” Martha said. She slammed the steering wheel and slumped back onto the driver’s seat.

I tried to breathe. Tried to keep my cool. I could see the Black Bull in the distance, beyond the mass of cars. It was swelteringly hot, too. Unbearable, even though Martha’s air con was on full blast. Note to self: buy a portable handheld fan from Amazon when you get your Fun Funds reinstated. Buy a top of the range one. One you can take everywhere.

One you’ll probably only use once.

“I mean, you drive to the doctor’s, there’s never any traffic. You drive to some shitty court hearing, there’s never any traffic. You drive to your bloody death, there’s never any… Wait—hey! Where are you going?”

I was already half out of the car when Martha spoke. “I’m gonna run. Gonna take a look and see if I can get a head start. I’ll meet you down there.”

“Run? But Blake, you—”

I slammed Martha’s door shut. Stood in the middle of the traffic. The looming white-painted walls of the Black Bull beckoned me.

Bring it on.

I wove through pile upon pile of cars and got to the front of the traffic lights. People looked at me funny through their windows, but then who the hell were they and what did I care? I had important shit to do. I had to get to Gus. I had to question him before the police did. I couldn’t let Lenny lock him up for murder. Damn my stupid big mouth for blurting out his name to Lenny. If I’d really thought about it, I could’ve got to Gus in plenty of time.

I moved towards the pavement between the steaming hot engines of cars and I realised the traffic didn’t stop at the typically offending lights.

There was a gridlock. A complete gridlock, right in the middle of the crossroads. Cars honked at each other. The lights were green now, but nobody was moving at any real speed. A boiling hot day and everyone was stuck in a jam. What wonders
that
would have on the collective mood of miserable old Preston.

I ran into the middle of the crossroads, through the gridlocked traffic, which barely moved. The Black Bull got closer. To look at it, the gridlock went on to there. Traffic was… well, it was moving much easier beyond that. Maybe something had gone down. An accident, something like that.

I crossed over onto the pavement. Kept on jogging and remembered why the hell I’d given up jogging in the first place, as a nagging stitch gnawed at my ribs.

Breathe deeply. Taste the Lockets. Let them guide you…

The beer garden of the Black Bull was close. It was surprisingly empty for a sunny day like today. Emptier than it had been earlier. Which was strange, because more people would be finishing work now. More people would be…

And then I saw him.

I saw him in the middle of the pelican crossing. He was surrounded by a small crowd of people.

I slowed down. Felt a twinge in my gut, although I couldn’t place it.

Gus was lying in the road. The people around him, they were laughing. Jesus. He’d not passed out, had he? Had too much to drink? That would be just typical. Just perfect for his reputation.

It was as I got closer that I realised that the crowd around him weren’t laughing at all.

The cars causing the gridlock were outside the Bull. In fact, Gus was the one causing the gridlock. Everyone in those cars were staring through their windows.

Staring with horror on their faces as they looked at the man on the ground.

And the people surrounding Gus. They weren’t laughing. They were crying.

I gulped as I got closer. Gulped a nasty regurgitated Locket, which wasn’t quite as tasty coupled with what was in front of me.

I looked down at Gus’s body. Looked down at the blood pooling out from underneath his mass of weight.

“He’s—he’s dead,” a pale-faced man with greasy, curly locks said. “He’s… his pulse. He’s dead.”

As “Move On Up” blasted from the sound system of a nearby car, I stared at the pile of shiny coins spilling out of Gus’s static hand, out onto the road.

THIRTEEN

He speeds down the road and he can’t stop smiling and laughing.

His car bounces with the booming sound of “Move On Up.” He plays it over and over again, louder every time, each listen just getting more and more joyous.

But the joy is for what he is about to do. How he is going to finish off the third victim. How much fun he’s going to have with her.

He looks at the pocketknife, wrapped in clear plastic, on his passenger seat. He didn’t want to kill the fatso, not really. Now don’t mistake this for sentimentality—he had no problems killing anyone. And he always knew he was going to kill fatso at some point. But he’d been an easy ticket. An easy part of his jigsaw puzzle—easy to bribe. And he’d helped get him his knife, helped with the girl on top of the squad car. He’d been a great help.

“Rest in peace, fatso,” he says, and lifts an imaginary glass into the air.

But as he turns onto his street, something niggles away at him. Dissatisfaction.

And that dissatisfaction comes in the form of the greying, checkered-shirt-wearing snoop and his disgusting he-she
it
friend.

Just the thought of him makes his heart speed up. Makes his palms clammy. Because he wasn’t a part of the plan. If he hadn’t been snooping around, maybe fatso wouldn’t have had to die just yet. He is a problem. A problem that needs to be dealt with in the same way as all problems.

Carefully but ruthlessly.

He pulls up into his driveway and hits a button to raise his automatic garage door. It lifts, he pulls in, then he gets out of the car whistling along to “Move On Up,” used penknife in hand.

He closes the garage door, watches the light slip away.

And then he opens the manhole in the middle of his garage and he climbs down.

When the smell of sweat and blood hits, he is excited again. He listens for her mumbles. Listens for her wails of pain. He needs to have more fun with this one. Needs to have more fun with her because what happened with fatso was unplanned. Unplanned, reckless, but necessary.

What happened with fatso will put him even more in the spotlight. The moment the numb-headed police saw fatso putting the second victim’s body atop the squad car, the game changed.

But it’s okay. He’ll be finished way before they can stop him. He is one step ahead.

Or two and a half.

He climbs down into the darkness. Hears her mumbling behind her gag. Smells piss and shit, and fuzzes inside at the thought of cleaning up after her.

He clenches his Killswitch knife in hand. Walks over to her. He can hear her shaking in the darkness. He wonders if she thought that maybe he’d gone forever. That maybe, someone would come to help her while he was gone.

He hopes so.

He leans right into her face. Listens to her heavy, shaky breathing. Smells her sweat.

“Hello, lovely,” he says. “Time to work on the other fingers.”

He clutches her finger and she screams out beneath the gag as he presses against her bony hands.

All the time, the sound of “Move On Up” dances around his head.

And all the time, as he cuts and as the screams get louder, the irritating-as-hell face of that grey-haired, checkered-shirt nosey bastard scratches at his mind like a cat’s claws.

He knows what he has to do.

Careful but ruthless.

FOURTEEN

I’d barely been working this case a day and already I was wishing I hadn’t been working it at all.

I sat with Martha in the Olive Press in town. Italian food, decent prices. To be honest, I didn’t really enjoy restaurants. I found the atmosphere forced, the appreciation of average food overwhelmingly annoying.

But hey. Normal people ate in restaurants. I had to blend into the crowd every now and then.

“Just funny,” Martha said. She was crunching on a slice of crispy margherita pizza.

“What is?” I asked. I stuck my fork into my bowl of rubbery fettucine au saumon and slurped at the over-savoury sauce. The sound of glasses clinking together, the sight of waiters buzzing around camply… it was all getting too much. I was looking forward to a good kip.

“How caught up in other people’s business we can get. I mean… that guy, Gus. He was kind of sweet.”

Sweet wasn’t the word I’d use for fat-bellied Gus. But I got Martha’s point. Gus’ death had been a real blow. Just when we’d figured out he was being bribed by the killer in some way… poof, out his life goes like a dodgy bulb.

I chewed at my pasta. Craved a Domino’s pizza. “So we’ve got a killer who picks on random girls, pays other people to do his dirty work, and somehow knew we were onto Gus.”

“And don’t forget the squad car,” Martha added.

I swallowed down the congealed lump of food. “Which direction are we going in here?”

Martha sipped back some water, obviously struggling with the bone-dry pizza. “I’m just saying. The police have no ID on the girls yet, which suggests the killer knows what they’re doing. We have a mystery squad car turn up out of nowhere. And we have Gus suspiciously dropping dead the second after we tell Lenny he might know something.”

“I’ve got it—Lenny’s the killer.”

Martha laughed. “I’m not sure that guy could catch a fly with spray, let alone kill one. What d’you think?”

“About Lenny? Oh, he’s definitely a killer. A killer of my faith in the police’s logic. But I… I dunno. I mean, sure, there’s the car, but Lenny already said a car went missing a while back and, naturally, they just wrote it off. As for the method kills, sure, but who’s to say it wasn’t just Gus’ ‘turn’ to die in this killer’s mind? I mean assuming he
was
stabbed by our perp—which we can safely assume he was, and the police will be crawling along with us on that theory in no time. But what if the perp didn’t need him anymore?”

Martha crunched at another slice of pizza. “I guess it’s just working out what this guy wants.”

“Mmhm,” I said.

I thought back to the photographs of the first girl, then to the second girl sprawled across that squad car. Eyes gouged out. Fingers snipped. Breasts cut off. “I think it’s safe to assume we have a woman-hater on our hands. A misogynist.”

“Or a jealous housewife.”

“Or a jealous housewife, sure. Doesn’t match Gus’ description of a guy in a hoodie, but maybe he was even dumber than he looked. But it’s damned near impossible to form a clear M.O. without knowing who these girls are.”

“Nothing from Missing Persons?” Martha asked, coughing up a stray piece of crispy pizza base.

“Nah. Nothing likely until after forty-eight hours. Most parents, spouses, leave it a day before they face the reality that something might have happened to their precious. And then the police leave it a bit longer anyway. So it’ll be tomorrow at least before a missing person report is actually taken seriously.”

I put my fork down. My stomach tensed. Couldn’t stand another bite of this God-awful pasta.

“And your problem with waiting ‘til tomorrow is…?”

I wasn’t expecting Martha to say this, but I could feel my cheeks were warm and my jaw was clenched so she’d obviously picked up on how I was feeling. “I just… we’ve lost two people already. Three people counting Gus. That’s in the first day. I just don’t want this bastard killing anybody else, not while we can do something about it.”

Martha raised her thinly-applied eyebrows. “Very ‘loving citizen’ of you. Ever thought about applying to Neighbourhood Watch?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’m just more worried that my cut of money might fall with every death.”

Martha whistled. “Oh there he is. The lovey-dovey Blake I know. How’s life with such a cold heart these days? Nobody to warm it up?”

I looked down at my pasta bowl and considered taking another bite until I remembered it tasted like shit. “No.”

Martha tutted. Shook her head, and looked around at the other tables, at the customers all tucking into their meals. “You’ll have to settle down some day.”

“Why’s it always me who ‘has to settle down?’ What about you?”

“I’m an extenuating circumstance, Mr Dent.” She propped up her breasts, stuck her chest out. “Although I do think I’ve got it more as a woman than I ever did as a man.”

“You’d scrape a 5/10 if I didn’t know you were a man. And your Mart self, well, he was pretty low on the scale. So it’s an improvement I suppose.”

Martha puffed out her lips. Sipped at her water. “Charming as ever. Forget I asked why you don’t have anyone to warm that stony heart of yours at night.”

I wanted to tell Martha to back off the relationship questions. I didn’t understand society’s obsession with “settling down,” with “finding the one.” It always seemed counter-productive to me, even when I was in my late teens. Sure, I’d had a few short-term relationships, and sure, I’d had my fair share of one-night stands. But the idea of settling down was never appealing to me. Settling down? More like unsettling down.

And to this day, no couple had made me think otherwise. Not my parents—God bless them—not my old friends, nobody.

“Settling down causes the problems that we’re trying to fix,” I said. To be honest, it came out a bit hammy, and sounded better in my head.

“Jesus, Blake. Just let it go for ten minutes. I mean
I’m
interested in this case, but you’re just obsessing. Trust the police to do their bit. We can only follow their lead.”

“Wait, did you actually just say ‘trust the police?’ Or did I hear you wrong? Please tell me I heard you wrong.”

Martha sighed. Planted her glass down hard on the table. “They hired us… you… for a reason. If they need your help, they’ll call you. You know how they work these days. You know how they’ve worked for years. Any chance they can get to let someone on the outside do their work for them, then take all the credit, they’re gonna take it. So let it drop for ten bloody minutes.”