Dead in the Trunk: A Short Story Collection

by Craig Saunders

  Craig

  About the Author:

  Craig Saunders is the author of many novels and novellas, including Deadlift, Rain, A Stranger's Grave and Spiggot. He has stories forthcoming from DarkFuse, and more fantasy tales set in the world of Rythe.

  He lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and three children, likes nice people and good coffee. Find out more on Amazon, or visit:

  www.craigrsaunders.blogspot.com

  www.theislandarchive.blogspot.com

  www.facebook.com/craigrsaundersauthor

  @Grumblesprout

  If you liked this, you might like another short collection 'The Black and White Box',

  Or, some of my longer work

  Bloodeye

  Spiggot (sample follows)

  The Estate

  (All links UK)

  Please read on for free samples of my work, and samples from Iain Rob Wright and Ian Woodhead.

  Novel Sample

  Spiggot

  by

  Craig Saunders

  (Published Grand Mal Press)

  Part One

  A Short History of Spiggot

  Or

  Spiggot’s History

  Prologue

  A bullet’s home is in a body. That’s what it’s born for.

  The bullet currently in Spiggot’s ribcage already had his feet under the table, a warm Horlicks to hand and his pipe on the go.

  ‘Aw, shit,’ Spiggot coughed, sneaking a peek from his hiding place at Sammy ‘The Bastard’ Maloney. The Irishman stood on the front step of his semi-detached shithole whipping his revolver left to right, looking for another target.

  A curtain flicked across the road. The gun bucked in Maloney’s hand.

  Spiggot slid down the wall. He left no blood. The bullet hadn’t made it to the back door. As he crumpled against the aging brickwork the bullet seemed to wriggle, nestling itself further into his lungs.

  ‘Come and get it, copper! I’ve got seven more where that came from!’

  Copper? thought Spiggot. Nobody called him copper anymore. It would almost be sweet if he wasn’t in agony and stood no chance of wrestling the gun from the crackpot Irishman who either couldn’t count or didn’t know a revolver only held five or six shells to start with and by even an idiot’s calculations, less once you’d fired it.

  Shattering glass and a bang vied for Spiggot’s attention, but he was on the verge of passing out and couldn’t figure out the relative velocity of the sounds. They seemed to arrive at his ears at the same time. His eyes felt heavy. He tried to reach a cigarette in his jacket pocket but his arms were leaden, like the bullet was some parasite, turning him into one of their kind. Waves were roaring in his ears, just like the time he’d been to Cromer, walking on the beach. Rain was lancing through his summer jumper…waves were crashing…

  No. Not waves. A car.

  His eyelids fluttered open. The battle cry of a tuned-up scud coming down the street drowned out Sammy’s deranged ranting. The car flew by him and he managed a smile. His vision might be blurred, but the hunched form of the driver earnestly concentrating every fibre of her being on controlling the powerful vehicle was unmistakeable.

  He counted to three…shortly before he could complete his countdown came the chunky sound of the car mounting the kerb, then, a second passed, and a more meaty thud echoed around the suburban street.

  Music to his ears. The finale; a tortured scream of pain and shrieking metal torn on brick.

  The big Irishman’s gun fired one last time before it fell silent. Spiggot’s eyes slipped closed, his slowing heart in time with the cooling tick of the scud’s ruined engine.

  When he opened his eyes again, Trout was leaning over him. She spoke urgently into her mobile, pressing one hand against his leaking chest. He could barely feel it. He hoped she wouldn’t crush his cigarettes.

  ‘Trout,’ he said. His voice sounded too soft to his ears. He could barely hear himself over the waves that were crashing in his head. ‘Told you.’

  ‘Told me what?’ she asked, concern etched in every line of her face.

  ‘…do…ah…someone an injury…phoo…driving like that.’

  She smiled and brushed his hair from his eyes gently.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m fully comp...’

  ‘No, no! That’s not how it starts! For fuck’s sake! That didn’t even happen.’

  ‘I’m trying to make it exciting! The formula. I told you about the formula. We need a bit of heroism. A fiery start, a bit of action…’

  ‘Balls. Just get out of the way and go and do the hoovering like you’re paid to. I knew you’d cock it up.’

  ‘If we start where you want, no bugger will read it!’

  ‘At least I’d be telling the story. Telling it how it happened. There wasn’t any gunfire. It wasn’t like a movie. It’s not bloody ‘Die Hard’. He’s just an ordinary guy. Maybe a dick, but certainly not Danny De-fucking-Vito. Now go on, leave me alone. You can do the interludes, like we said in the first place.’

  ‘Erm, you sure you mean Danny DeVito?’

  ‘Who fucking cares?’

  ‘I’ll just wait ‘til the interlude, then, shall I?’

  ‘Yes. Shoo. People’ll be getting bored already, if I let you ramble on all day. Bring me my tea at six. I’ll be a while.’

  *

  Part One

  A Short History of Spiggot

  Or

  Spiggot’s History

  Prologue

  ‘…and so he says, “Oi! That’s my fucking cat!”’

  The room burst into laughter. A few sputtering smoker’s coughs joined the fray.

  Spiggot had a knack for playing the crowd, even though the joke was puerile. Francesca Trout gave a small prayer of thanks to the gods of PC that she’d missed the beginning. She let the door fall shut behind her, screwing her eyes up to see through the smog and smiling with no small satisfaction as the laughter drained and gurgled back into throats and all the way down to the bellies where it came from. Then the looks came. The sullen ‘bloody woman, spoiling our fun, what do you think we’ve got wives for…anyway, shouldn’t you be at home making pie?’ looks.

  She was inured to their looks. Trout put her hands on her hips and squinted meaningfully at her partner through the dim haze.

  ‘Spiggot. I’m rolling in five whether you’re with me or not,’ she said, and turned without waiting for his reply. The smoke swirled as she pulled the door open. She let it swing shut on the springs.

  Francesca didn’t need to hear the court commiserate with its jester. She knew from her short experience the sort of thing they would be saying. Same shit, different day.

  She trumbled down the hall to the elevator, muttering quietly to herself.

  A trumble, for those who don’t know, is a kind of ambling waddle, perfected by ladies cursed with knock knees and rotund behinds. Francesca Trout’s behind was shapely, but there is an addendum to the trumbling rule: it can also be achieved by a lady who is in the throes of self doubt. It is a lady’s equivalent of the male shuffle, perfected by everyone with a penis in adolescence when mildly embarrassed or put upon.

  Trumbling, she reached the lift and pressed the call button. She heard sniggers from the smoking room down the hall, counted under her breath to ten (in Chinese, English numbers had long since become boring). The sniggers were momentarily louder. The elevator tinged and she stepped in, holding the door open for her partner as he shuffled along the corridor.

  Her nails, perfectly manicured, tapped out a rhythm on the control panel.

  Spiggot got in beside her, tugging at something, probably earwax, in his weird left ear that looked like half a Spock. He said nothing as she allowed the doors to close. Francesca pressed the button for the basement.

  She watched Spiggot out of the corner of her eye. Not many people can manage this with any degree of accuracy while looking straight ahead, but Francesca had been gifted with extraordinary sight. She could wat
ch two things at once, thanks to a lazy left eye which drifted off, most commonly, to the left.

  Spiggot, she thought with customary ire. He was perfectly suited to this new world. Old school was back in fashion.

  His lips were pursed as he was pulled at his chin, a habit he hadn’t broken since he’d shaved his beard off when grey began peeking through. She knew he’d been proud of it, like a younger man would be off his first pubic eruptions. She thought it had made him look like a slightly dodgy ventriloquist who visited children’s parties and made all the adults careful and uneasy in some indefinable way.

  Beards don’t hold the same importance for a woman as they do a man. He’d tried to explain it to her once. All she heard was ‘blah, blah, blah, I like to entertain at children’s parties’.

  Spiggot stood staring at the door, seemingly ignoring her. She knew he wasn’t though.

  Spiggot, who last night had made a clumsy pass at her over an Indian and two glasses of wine. Spiggot, who thought his shit smelled of Chardonnay. Spiggot, with his grinning and dirty jokes and dirty soul, telling cigarette stories to his fawning audience in the smoking room. No doubt he had told them what a good lay she was, even though she wouldn’t sleep with him if he had ten inches of inflatable flesh between his legs and chocolate lips. In short, Spiggot.

  It was like being annoyed with a puppy for taking a dump on your finest afghan rug.

  She took a deep clarifying breath. Then she counted to ten, just as her therapist had told her in her weekly appointments…uno, dos, ting.

  The door opened and Spiggot pushed past her to get out.

  She scowled darkly as the overhead lighting tinkled to life.

  ‘What do you reckon, Trout?’ he said cheerfully. ‘Your turn to drive again?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody driving. You drive like a girl in a tutu with antlers for feet.’

  ‘What’s got into your pants today?’

  ‘Nothing, thankfully,’ she said shortly, sliding into the unmarked car and slamming the key card into the ignition. She placed her thumb over the ignition pad. The car roared into life and she gunned the accelerator.

  Spiggot ducked in beside her and hastily buckled his seat belt.

  Tires squealed. The car fired toward the ramp. Spiggot, as always, clutched his knees hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

  ‘Do you have to do that every time?’ he said with relief after they had shot out into traffic without a fatal incident but with plenty of cars furiously honking behind her.

  ‘Every time,’ she nodded.

  She couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice. Being a woman in a man’s world had its little advantages. You had to pull back points where you could.

  *

  Chapter One

  The scud screeched to a halt outside MacDonald’s at 10.25am. Spiggot unclasped his knees and rolled his shoulders until the knots there eased.

  ‘Ready?’ said his partner, like there was nothing wrong. Spiggot, not the most perceptive of men (strangely, a lack of empathy was often a good thing in a detective, even if it did make for poor people) guessed that there was, in fact, something wrong. The speedometer had read 170km at one point on the bypass. He couldn’t get his head around kilometres, but he knew it was bloody fast. Faster than normal.

  Trout slammed the car door behind her and stalked toward breakfast. Spiggot bolted after her.

  His partner did not have a healthy attitude toward anger. She drove at breakneck speed when she was pissed off at something. It couldn’t be him. He’d even paid for dinner last night. Perhaps she’s on the rag, he thought, or one of her ubiquitous nieces had noted how she was beginning to sag around the neck, like the first cracks in the polar caps that preceded an iceberg breaking free. But then that shouldn’t be a surprise to her. He had pointed it out to her just last week.

  Spiggot beat Trout to the door and held it open for her.

  ‘Ladies first,’ he said with a smile.

  She threw him a black look and strutted past him.

  Bloody hell, he thought. That’s what I get for trying to be a gentleman. She’s definitely on the rag.

  He followed her into the stark antiseptic glow of the Macky D’s. He smiled his sweetest smile at Trout and stepped up to the counter.

  A young lad with fewer spots than was strictly requisite for a fast food servant greeted him.

  ‘A big breakfast and two bacon and egg muffins, if you please, young man,’ said Spiggot. Spiggot wasn’t really old enough to be calling anybody young man (that right is reserved for grandparents and the senile, quite often the same people) but that didn’t stop him.

  ‘Trout, what you having?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve got a banana.’

  ‘Banana’s no way to start the day. You want to keep regular like me. Need a bit more meat in your diet, eh?’

  Francesca pretended not to notice Spiggot’s sly wink.

  She took a corner table while he waited for his food. Hideously patterned walls and cheerful pictures assailed her as the wafting smell of processed meat and thwarted ambition came from behind the counter. She took her banana out of her purse and took a small bite.

  Spiggot came toward her bearing his usual breakfast. ‘Breakfast of champions’, he called it.

  ‘Here, misery guts. Got you a coffee.’

  Like a puppy, she thought. Just a puppy. Ickle wickle puppy, aw, look at his big old droopy eyes, his cutesy flopsy ears…

  Nope. It wasn’t working.

  She took the coffee with grace and a small ‘thank you’. She drank it black. She’d never had a problem with her weight, but she knew fatness was just a jellyfish lurking in the dark, waiting to sting your ass and make it swell to twice its size if you weren’t careful. She took her coffee black, avoided embarrassing pregnancies, and ate bananas for breakfast and lunch. A girl could go far on a banana.

  Spiggot’d have a field day with that one.

  ‘So, shit duty tonight, eh? What do you reckon? I could do you a favour. You go and keep the drinks coming and I’ll keep an eye out for our bird.’

  ‘You know I don’t drink on duty, Spiggot, and you know just as well that you don’t drink while you’re on duty with me.’

  ‘Alright, no need to snap. You’re a bit testy this morning. Got the painters in?’ He took a bite of his sausage patty, cooked with Lo-Lard™ (50% less fat!). You couldn’t even get full fat bloody fat anymore.

  Francesca practised her German numbers in her head out of spite. Ein, Zwei, Drei…

  Spiggot had a thing about Germans.

  ‘No, I have not, as you so eloquently put it, “got the painters in”. Also, I would not discuss my period with you if I did.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, mildly taken aback. She could see him thinking…perhaps her girlfriend didn’t call her last night…one of the many things Francesca knew about Spiggot was that he automatically thought a woman who wouldn’t sleep with him must be gay. There seemed to be a lot of gay women in the world.

  ‘Didn’t mean anything by it, of course. Just, you know, wondered.’

  ‘Of course,’ Francesca said coolly, taking a sip of her coffee. Even the coffee tasted of grease. At least they didn’t actually dunk burgers in it…did they?

  ‘Free today, then. It doesn’t kick off ‘til three. Dinner’s sorted. Buffet, so I hear. Any ideas what we can get up to ‘til it’s time?’

  ‘We’re going to get there early, check on the cameras. First, I’m going to talk to my source.’

  ‘Ah, can’t we take the day off? It was my landlady’s birthday last week. I should really get her a present.’

  ‘You can do what you like. I’m not your boss. But I’m driving and I’ve told you where I’m going.’

  Fucking hell, she’s pissed off at me. That, he thought (with some satisfaction), is why I don’t have a girlfriend. The fact that Spiggot hadn’t had a girlfriend since 2012 didn’t cross his mind. To some extent people whose brains work in a socially acceptable way have to
fill in the blanks and make some deductive leaps of tortured reasoning to understand Spiggot’s mental processes.

  He reasoned thus: She’s not bad, it’s just that she’s a bit, well, harsh, last night could have been a mistake, thank god I knocked that on the head, not that I wouldn’t mind a bit, but she’d be a real ball breaker, probably a tit wrangler, but then I’d have a pop at a lesbo, even if it was just for a laugh, gammy eye, mind, and my partner to boot, still, I would, I suppose, egg’s a bit rubbery this morning. Hmm, nice tits.

  ‘Well,’ he said, stretching. ‘Time for my morning sports. Regular as clockwork, me.’

  He got up and left Francesca quietly fuming.

  *

  Spiggot thought a bit of a cooling off would do her the world of good. He smiled at a couple of ordinary punters on the way to the can, said good morning to a single mother sitting by the toilet who was checking him out, and pushed through the door to the toilets. It was dark for just a second, something Spiggot had yet to get used to about motion sensitive lights. The lights tinkled and he could see again.

  He chose the gents, one of the easiest decisions he would have to make all day.

  The first cubicle was free, but he checked the rest out of habit. Only when he was satisfied all were empty did he lock himself in the first cubicle.

  He dropped his trousers, tugged on his knob for a while, then squatted on the bog.

  Whistling a pointless tune to himself, he prepped for his morning Olympics. Nice and comfy. Deep breath. Then, in the closest thing Spiggot would ever get to a Herculean effort, he began his warm ups. Clench, relax, clench, relax. Veins popped in his neck. His face turned red.

  Feeling sufficiently prepared for a good effort this morning, he gripped his knees and began.