by P. T. Reade
Prologue
I was dead.
My body just hadn’t realized it yet.
I tried to climb to my feet, but the muscles in my arm had given up long ago and I collapsed to the rain-soaked dirt. The comfortable numbness of defeat welcoming me.
“Get down.”
As I lay there, thunder rumbling and icy droplets stinging my face, I stared at the twisted form of death above me, and I knew the painful truth. This was it. All of my searching, all of my fighting, for nothing. I’d have laughed if I could have remembered how.
Then the voices came again, calling for me to surrender my struggle against the inevitable, dragging me from consciousness.
“Give it up,” they echoed.
I glanced at the bitter rain clouds as colored stars wheeled overhead and time slowed to a crawl. The monster lifted his arm to finish it, and I watched him swing the weapon at my head, beckoning me beyond.
“Blume?!”
Then it all went black.
Hard Fall
A Thomas Blume Novella
P.T Reade
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ONE
Two Weeks Earlier…
They called it autumn here.
I stared at the cheap hotel for a moment, trying to ignore the weight of the hip flask in my jacket. It was only 1.30 in the afternoon, certainly too early to start. Not that the time would have stopped me, but I needed to be at least a little sharp for what was to come. The best idea I came up with to curb the craving was to check out my notes for the latest lame-ass job I’d scraped together from the poor sap only a shade more desperate than me.
I studied the building for a while, trying to understand the allure of dropping down money to stay in a room where the filth of humanity had stayed before me. Parked on the far end of the lot, my car faced the hotel office and the majority of rooms. They were all connected together by a walkway that had been painted a melancholy shade of hospital green. The tone of the place and the drizzle of rain just gave the Newham Inn an air of sadness.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror. The steel blue eyes and hard features of my father looked back. The dark hair now streaked with gray was pure Mom. The rest of the unfortunate state belonged to me.
Thomas Blume: respected New York Police Detective, decorated hero, widower, loser.
With a sigh, I sat forward and waited. The rain teased the roof, just hard enough to make that hypnotic beat on the top of the car — a noise that made me realize how badly I wanted a nap. I didn’t know why I was tired, maybe it was the booze. I certainly didn’t feel like I had done much over the last week.
I remembered reading once that people with jobs behind cubicles, the cogs in the corporate machine staring at computers all day, could become more fatigued than those in manual labor. Something about the screen that did it to them. If that were the case, I figured sitting in a rain-streaked London parking lot, eyeballing a shady-looking joint like this could do the same to a guy. Was it in New Scientist? The memory refused to materialize, and I decided that either way, I didn’t care. I had a job to do and needed to stay at least slightly alert.
Then I felt the smoke curling inside me again. The need for a drink twisting my insides, beckoning sweet numbness and with it the familiar pangs of anger, like hot coals in the pit of my stomach. My old man had died with a dependency on booze, and I had spent my whole life trying not to become him. Here I was making his mistakes all over again. The move to London had done this to me. Drinking was the only way I knew how to cope with the hand I’d been dealt.
The memory of that night haunted me, constantly dragging my mind back to a life, a happiness that was no longer mine. What happened to them had hollowed me out, eaten me away like a slow creeping cancer, until all I had was this grimy excuse for a life. Death seemed to follow me ever since.
Now here I was on the other side of the world, in a city I was rapidly growing to hate. Picking up crappy jobs like this just to get by.
When the silver car pulled up, I was almost relieved. The tormenting thoughts vanished in a brief wash of adrenaline. I was nothing if not dedicated. I had once had a very promising career with the NYPD and the sense of honor, dignity, and perseverance was still ingrained in me. Somewhere. Even for a joke of a job like this, I had a sense of duty.
Yes, I hated these little nickel and dime ‘favors’, but work was work…and I had always done every job I’d ever had with as much professionalism and dedication as I could, which right then wasn’t much.
I watched the car park on the other side of the lot. A portly man got out and walked directly to the office. When he walked inside, I looked to the car again and could make out the shape of another person in the passenger seat. I was pretty sure I knew who this was, and I realized then and there that this could very well be the easiest job I’d ever had. Thirty minutes on the job, and I was about to get to get paid in record time.
Moments later, the man came back out. He looked to his car and gave a little nod. With that, a curvy woman stepped out of the passenger seat. She held a gaudy-looking umbrella upward to the sprinkling drizzle. As it fanned open, it blocked my only clear shot of her face.
“Damn,” I muttered.
I watched the couple head down the little breezeway that connected the rooms. They stopped at the second-to-last entrance, and the man unlocked the door, letting the woman in first. She closed her umbrella, but I was still unable to see her face. The man entered and closed the door behind him.
I took a small bag from the passenger seat and sat it in my lap. Grabbed my digital camera and powered it up. Cameras had always made sense to me. In fact, photography was one of the few remnants from my old life that I clung to. The simplicity of frame and shoot was somehow comforting.
I also took out a stick of gum. Pushed it into my mouth and started slowly chewing in an effort to bury the need for a drink.
I tried to think of the last time I had taken a woman into a cheap hotel room. It had been during college — easily twenty years ago. Unless things had changed in the realm of social conventions, I was pretty sure there was nothing new to getting laid in a place like this. I doubted they would spend time talking about the weather or pointing out the decorating expertise of the people that had thrown this shabby dive together. I figured that in the minute and a half they had been in the room, they were probably already halfway to oblivion.
I stepped out of the car and took my time walking across the parking lot. I held my Canon Eos close under my leather jacket so it wouldn’t get wet, and I felt the rain, a steady October drizzle, lightly cooling my head. There was something almost pleasant about it. I made a note in my head, trying to put a few items in the POSITIVES column for London. So far, the NEGATIVE column was winning by a long shot.
I made my way to the breezeway and looked around. There was no one else traipsing around the parking lot or the corridor and really, who would? It was1:30 in the afternoon on a wet Wednesday. This realization hit me hard and made me feel a wave of depression, so familiar since the events six months ago.
I moved along, passing the tiny windows and the doors. I briefly thought of all of the fragments of lives that had taken place behind those doors and windows. Passion, lust, anger, and a healthy dose of deception; something about it was almost poetic.
I let the thought fade out. I did not want to be going down that path, and I was nowhere near a poet.
The second to last window. I stopped, checked the camera, and then looked into the glass. The shades were drawn, but there was enough of a break between the flimsy curtains to see the faintest stirrings of what was going on inside. It appeared that I had been correct. It had taken less than five minutes for them to get naked.
I could have gone without seeing the man’s bare ass as I looked in, though. I saw one of the woman’s hands reach around and cup a buttock. I grimaced, chewing my gum harder.
I’m not getting paid enough for this, I thought.
I checked the breezeway again, and when I saw that I was still alone, held the camera up to the window and waited for a shot. Once the couple got into a rhythm, I was actually able to get a few shots. What I was really trying to get was the woman’s face. I saw it a few times as their bodies shifted, particularly when she was on all fours on the edge of the bed. The cop in me also clocked a line of coke on the chipped table in the corner. The deadbeat in me didn’t give a crap.
I checked my shots on the camera and saw that, while I managed to get the woman’s breasts perfectly in two shots, her face was either blemished by the window’s glare or partially covered by an elbow, her own hair, or the sheets that her head had been pushed into.
Sighing, I pocketed the camera. Really, I had been sure it would come to this. I wasn’t surprised, just…defeated.
Resigned, I walked over to the door and steadied myself for a moment. As I stood there, I could hear the woman moaning in ecstasy on the other side. She was either really enjoying it or was going above and beyond to make the man think she was really enjoying it.
A healthy dose of deception.
I took a breath, then lifted my leg. With a hard and practiced kick that I had used many times in my career in New York, I attacked the door. It flew open easily enough, the chain flying halfway across the room and the frame cracking almost all the way down. I absently wondered if the hourly rate would pay for the damage to the frame.
The man and the woman both yelled at the commotion. Comically, though, it had not startled them enough to disengage themselves from one another. I grinned sarcastically at them and then took out my camera.
Before the woman had a chance to try to hide her nakedness or the man could say a single word to me, I brought the camera up.
“Say seedy motel room,” I said.
It took two clicks for them to understand what was going on. The woman pushed the man off of her and came to the edge of the bed. All of her modesty was forgotten as she looked at me with pleading eyes that were still half-dazed with the cocktail of hormones and drugs running through her body.
“No,” she said. “Please.”
I checked the pictures and saw that I had more than enough now.
“Thanks,” I said. “As you were,” I added as I left I placed the “please make up room” card on the door handle.
I then turned my back and headed towards the parking lot. I heard the man yelling after me. I doubted he would pursue. He looked overweight and not exactly the confrontational type, more a soft middle manager with an easy office job. Besides, he was naked. Not many folks were eager to come running across a rain-slicked parking lot with no clothes on.
I got back to my car and had cranked the engine to life by the time to the woman had come to the door, wrapped in a sheet. She was screaming for me to stop, but I paid her little attention. She was pretty — about 150 lbs, long blonde hair, and breasts too perfect to be real. I wondered what had driven her to this, and beyond that, I pitied the man she was with and more so the man I would be meeting in about an hour.
As I pulled out of the lot, I looked back and saw her staring at me, crying in the rain. The man stood behind her like some idiot sentinel.
Hearts were going to be broken over this, but that wasn’t my problem. I was already thinking about how I would spend the money that was coming to me. I’d have it within two hours and in three, I’d be at The King’s Head down the street.
I looked back in my rearview, but the hotel parking lot was out of sight. All that remained was the dreary East London suburb… and pain. I needed a drink, but one man needed these photographs more.
TWO
Anthony Taylor was broken.
Forty minutes later, I was sitting in my cramped little office space that doubled as my apartment looking across the cluttered desk at the man I had just destroyed. He was quiet, sitting in my guest chair and looking up at the ceiling as if he were waiting for it to mercifully collapse on top of him. I followed his gaze, but for a different reason. There were water stains along the ceiling and a few places where fissures ran like stray hairs along half of the ceiling. The office was a dump (as reflected in the cheap rent), but it contained all the equipment I needed for my work.
When Anthony started to cry, I wasn’t surprised. I was sure he would. Even though he was a well-to-do stockbroker with a sharp suit and more money in his savings account than I would ever see in my entire life, he was still a man. He was also the man who had married the woman in the photographs.
The pictures on the camera that I had just showed him was proof of this. I had taken on other cases like this one, getting the proof that a spouse was cheating. In almost every case, there was anger first and then the sadness. It was like the two emotions towed one another, the anger speeding forward to the surface with the sadness lurking in its wake.
Anthony had skipped the rage. He had known it was coming, but when he saw the pictures of his wife bent over naked in front of another man, a moan of pleasure on her face and a smile on her gasping mouth, the depression and sadness had come right away like rising waves from his stomach.
I watched him crying, close to hysterics, and knew that I should interject somehow. It would have been the kind thing to do. But I was hardly one to offer advice on emotional stability. Hell, I had no idea where to even start. So I just watched him and waited for him to get his shit together. After all, this was a business. There was no room or reason for me to get overly sympathetic with my clients.
It took a while, but Anthony finally came around. He wiped his eyes and then pushed the camera back over to me.
“Sorry,” Anthony said. “That was embarrassing.”
“I’ve seen worse,” I said. It was a lie. Anthony Taylor had fallen to pieces right in front of me, and I didn’t think it was a moment I’d forget anytime soon.
“So who’s the guy?” Anthony asked.
I shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Could you find out? If I paid you more money, could you find out?”
I rubbed my jaw, feeling stubble. The question on the tip of my tongue was How much more? But I swallowed it down and shook my head. “No. I mean, I probably could, but I don’t think it’s the best idea.”
“Name your price,” Anthony said, sitting forward and trying his best to look all business like, but the puffy red eyes and glistening snot under his nose betrayed the attempt.
“I can’t help you,” I said. “Sorry.”
Anthony then stood up and looked like he wanted to take a swing at me. For the briefest of moments, I wanted him to. I probably deserved it. Punishment for my sins. I was looking for an excuse to knock someone’s lights out — and the hell of it was that I wasn’t even sure why, exactly. I’d been feeling that way for a few weeks now.
“Why not?” Anthony said.
“What good will it do if I find out who he is?” I fired back. “What are you going to do? Rough him up? Use it as ammo against your wife? Trust me. I’ve been doing this for too long. It won’t do any good. You might feel better for a few days, but eventually, you’ll regret it.”
He was still fuming, but I could see his posture relaxing. Within a few seconds, he collapsed back into the chair in defeat and rubbed at his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I would do. I just wanted…I don’t know…”
“
Look,” I said. “Sleep on it. Think about what you’d actually do if you knew who he was. It’s for the best.”
He gave a nod and then got back to his feet. He looked dazed, like a sleep-walking man. He stumbled to the door and gave me a half-hearted wave. I thought I should say something…maybe anything, to lift his spirits. But the pictures he had paid me to take, the information he had paid me to collect…it had leveled him.
Besides, what was I going to say: “It’s been a pleasure ruining your life?”
Never again, I decided. I’m done with these jobs.
All I could come up with though was, “See you.”
Taylor gave a thin, featureless smile and then walked out of the door.
When it closed behind him, I eyed the envelope he had handed me when he had walked into my office. I looked through, thumbing the seven hundred pounds. I felt dirty… but not dirty enough to not spend it.
