Bubblegum Smoothie (Blake Dent Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  I shot up. Skipped across the carpet towards my kitchen, which was just off the lounge area. I liked space like that.

  I headed towards the fridge. Headed towards the place where I kept my beer, all my delicious beer.

  And then I walked past the fridge, grabbed a pack of Lockets and emptied half of them into my mouth before I could even get the wrappers off some of them.

  I sucked at the lozenges. Crunched down on them, let the menthol seep through my chest and set my body on fire. I felt better. I licked the honey goo from my lips. Delicious processed honey goo.

  Sure, I’d have the shits later, but that’s how it’d been for years. Life was all about learning to adapt.

  I placed half the packet of Lockets on the kitchen counter and headed back towards my lounge. See, some people had addictions to alcohol. Others had drug addictions, and women addictions, and spending addictions. Some were lonely. Some were too un-lonely for their own good.

  I kind of like spending, and I kind of like spending some time on my own, but if I have an addiction, it’s lozenges. Or specifically, menthol. Don’t ask me where it came from, or why it happened—it just did. Probably stemmed from my youth. My nan used to put three Tunes on my bedside table to “ease my sleep” every night. And then four, and five. It got to the stage where I was pinching her packets and chewing down on every one of them before my head had even hit the pillow.

  So yeah. It probably stemmed from there. There were worse addictions.

  Feeling a lot more at ease, a lot more awake, I headed back to my sofa. Picked up the remote and hovered over the play button. Maybe I would watch some more “Breaking Bad” after all. And hey—I’d have the Groovy Smoothie stand up and running again in a month. Until then, I could sell a few things on eBay. I had some crap under my bed. They could get me by.

  They could pay the bills, God dammit.

  I was just about to hit the play button when I heard the doorbell chime.

  I looked over at the door of my first-floor apartment. Weird. It was… ten o’clock. Who’d visit at ten o’clock? Stu? Sally? The landlord? No. Why would they visit at this time? Why would they visit at all?

  I crept over to the door. Tried to peek outside the window just above it, but unless the person at the door was seven foot five or a serial stilt-wearer, I was wasting my time. I put my hand on the handle. Checked to the left to see that my fire poker was there. I didn’t have a fire, but I figured I’d whack a scrote over the head with it someday. Yes, it had probably cost too much at £400.

  I lowered the handle. Opened the door.

  “Blake!”

  “Lenny?”

  Lenny was standing outside my door. He was still wearing his sunglasses even though it was dark outside. He wasn’t dressed in his suit and baggy trousers anymore though.

  He was in his dark police uniform.

  There were two other people behind him. A woman with an unusually round head, and a fat bloke who looked like he’d never shaved the bumfluff off his top lip in his entire life. Both of them were wearing black police colours too.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Lenny grinned. Grinned with his beaming white teeth, chewing on some gum with his molars.

  “Nice place you’ve got here. Nice place from the earnings of a smoothie stall. I heard about Trading Standards. How’d that go?”

  I couldn’t answer. “Why are you here?”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Lenny reached into his back pocket, squinted at a note in his hand. “Blake Dent, I am arresting you on the suspicion of murder. You do not have to say… God, I prefer the American version of this. The whole ‘right to remain silent’ thing. We’re lame compared to that.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence…”

  Lenny read out my rights, and then the two officers behind him came into my doorway. They put their mucky shoes all over my expensive cream carpet, and snapped some cuffs on my wrists.

  “You’re a shit, Lenny,” I said, as the police dragged me into the warm night air and towards the car. “A double-crossing little toe-rag.”

  Lenny pretended to jot down on his pad. “Double… crossing… toe… was that ‘wag’ or ‘rag’? Anyway, cheers, Blake. I’ll remember to ‘use that one against you’ in court.”

  I bit my tongue. Tried my best not to say anything else.

  All this time I’d spent kidding myself that my past wouldn’t catch up with me some day.

  Looked like “Breaking Bad” might have to wait after all.

  THREE

  “You’d better have a bloody good reason for this, Lenny. A bloody good reason.”

  Lenny sat at the opposite side of the interview room table filing his nails. I wanted to tell him that filing nails was what women and pansies did. I also wanted to get up and throttle him.

  But I was the one in the handcuffs. And there was a very bulky chap standing by the door who I wasn’t too keen on getting the shit kicked out of by any time soon.

  “I told you,” Lenny said. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses anymore, so his bright green eyes were on show. “Suspicion of murder. Something like that, anyway.”

  I swallowed the phlegmy-tasting lump in my throat. Did all I could to push the memory aside. “We’ve discussed this before.”

  “Oh, we have?” Lenny asked. He stopped filing his nails, stuffed the file into his pocket and leaned across the table. “Remind me. What was it we discussed?”

  I wasn’t sure how much longer I could sit here and take this shit.

  “Because, as I recall, you killed somebody. Yes, that’s it.” He tapped his fingers against a document. Lenny and his pissing documents. “Blake Dent. Accused of—”

  “Is this to do with your offer?”

  Lenny stopped right away. He pushed the envelope aside. I tried to breathe in to keep myself cool, but the stench of sweat and ass from a multitude of scrotes who’d sat in here was just too strong.

  “What do you think it’s to do with?” Lenny asked.

  “Lenny, I’m not here to play games. Is it about what I think it’s about?”

  Lenny shrugged. “What do you think it’s about?”

  “The one million.”

  “One million? Two million?”

  I went to punch the desk then thought better of it. Big chap with the dead eyes outside the door was getting pretty twitchy. “The murder. This ‘homicide’ you came to me about. Is that what this is about?”

  Lenny’s sparkling white gnashers revealed themselves. He interlocked his fingers, leaned so far across the table that I could smell the garlic on his breath, and a bad attempt to disguise it with some cheap smelling mouthwash. “Now we’re talking. We need your help, Blake.”

  I sighed. I wanted to shift the collar of my blue-and-white checkered shirt but I couldn’t because of my cuffs. “So you’re blackmailing me?”

  “Not blackmailing,” Lenny said. “Just… giving you an opportunity to help.”

  “So if I refuse?”

  “You’ll most likely be arrested and charged for the murder of—”

  “So it is blackmail?”

  “Not blackmail, exactly.”

  I shook my head. “Okay. So you offer me a million pounds. I refuse, and you go on to say that if I don’t help you catch this criminal, I’ll be charged for something that was cleared up long ago. If I accept, I get the million, and I don’t get charged.”

  Lenny clapped. “Spot on. Jesus, Blake, you’re learning. I swear you get more intelligent every time I see you. They’ll be teaching monkeys how to speak soon. That was a joke, of course. Just a joke.”

  He smiled his trademark smile and I wanted to knock it into the back of his throat.

  “Oh, er, one little thing though. You said if you accept, you get the million and your freedom. It doesn’t really work like that, I’m afraid. You’re a businessman. You know how business works—we pay you a little deposit, but if the transaction falls through…” He s
tuffed his fist into his hand and puffed his lips out. “Poof!”

  “You are.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. So this deposit. This deposit for the… for the thing that isn’t blackmail.”

  “Definitely not blackmail.”

  “How much of a deposit do I get?” I thought about paying off my bills with what I had left in the Fun Funds and using the deposit to invest in a curved TV. Damn. I hadn’t even had a proper chance to look into curved TVs before Lenny and his band of inept shits stormed into my apartment.

  “Well, you get your temporary freedom until you catch the criminal, of course.”

  I paused. Waited for him to continue.

  “And?”

  Lenny frowned. Stuck out his bottom lip. “I’m sorry, Blake, but I hardly think you’re in a prime position to be bargaining for better terms.”

  He had a point. The gobshite had a point.

  “So this criminal,” I said. I knew I’d have to at least show an interest. Show an interest, then get the shitting hell out of the country rather than get myself involved in this mess. I could hide in Mexico. Sip tequilas and knock back Soothers and Lockets to my heart’s content, never looking at a smoothie bar again.

  Oh yeah. I had no cash. That was a stumbling block.

  “I wondered when you were going to ask,” Lenny said. He planted a huge photograph onto the table. Hell knew where he got all these photographs and papers. I swore he had a hidden TARDIS pocket.

  I leaned over the table and I almost spewed my menthol-laced guts up when I saw what it was.

  It was a blown-up photograph of a woman. A naked woman.

  “She was found like this by a dog walker in a stream by Moor Park,” Lenny said, his voice turning serious.

  I examined the photograph. Tried to get my head around it. My mouth cried out for lozenges, at the same time begging to vom them out.

  The girl’s eyes had been removed. Judging from the blood around her mouth, so too had her tongue. As had her breasts. Her head had been shaved. And her fingers—well, there were none. Her hands were like those of an alien, each and every finger snipped away, bleeding out.

  “Please tell me this happened after death,” I said.

  Lenny squinted. Opened and closed his mouth, taking a breath, as if he couldn’t work out whether to tell the truth—that this girl had been tortured and mutilated before her death.

  “So she was tortured,” I said.

  “Badly,” Lenny said. “Her eyes and tongue were removed. Her fingers were—”

  “I can see, Lenny. Any sign of penetration?”

  The corners of Lenny’s mouth twitched, like he was a high school teenager who’d just discovered a naughty word in a dictionary. “Yes,” he said. “Quite… quite roughly, to put it in Rayman’s terms.”

  “Layman’s,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter. So you’re DNA profiling? Checking for semen traces? Have you IDed the girl?”

  Lenny looked like he’d been pummelled with an array of bullets, question after question.

  “We… We’re looking into it. Investigating every angle. But it’s very hard to fingerprint without any fingers.”

  “So no witnesses? Nobody come forward?”

  Lenny shrugged. “We’ve got the reconstruction people working at her face. Not literally. Sorry. Bad taste. And um… and forensics are investigating her body for the obvious signs—blood, skin, hair, saliva—”

  “I know how it works,” I said. “What I’m struggling to get my head around is why you need the help of a guy who runs Groovy Smoothie when you’ve got all these wonderful staff members and all these wonderful facilities.”

  I knew damn well why, really, but I was just using any leverage I could to piss Lenny off. He kind of deserved it after dragging me in here, blackmailing me. But it was obvious why he’d come to me. The Preston Police Department was inept. It had been for years. It’d been one PR disaster after another, and since the budget cuts set in, things had got worse.

  That was the official word, anyway. Truth was, things had always been bad all over the country. Every city had its experts at catching filth, and those experts very often weren’t the people in the police department. They were those on the outside. Bounty hunters. People like me. The police outsourced, then took the credit.

  I’d caught petty criminals before. Captured burglars, rapists, hit-and-run thugs. But murder… murder wasn’t an area I was familiar with.

  “The cuts,” Lenny said. He shrugged, tapping his finger inadvertently on the girl’s cut-off breasts, oblivious to the awkwardness. “The cuts affected us. We don’t have the manpower or the budget to work a murder investigation like this, not anymore.”

  “Did you say you don’t have ‘the guts’?” I said.

  Lenny opened his mouth to correct me, but he clearly caught on to this one. Well done, shitface. You’re learning.

  “So let’s get this straight. You want to pay me one million—a whole one million pounds—to catch a criminal because you don’t have the money to do so?”

  Lenny nodded. Smiled. “That’s exactly what we want you to do, Blake.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was too dumb to realise the hypocrisy of his words or whether he was just so used to bullshitting that he’d actually started to believe them.

  I sighed. Thought about going home, lying down and watching some more “Breaking Bad.” “I… I don’t know if—”

  The interview room door slammed open. A short officer with an acne-covered pig-face stormed inside.

  “Detective Inspector Kole,” this spotty officer said. God, no wonder the department were struggling. This guy looked barely out of his teens.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy here, Kyle?” Lenny said. He deepened his voice, forced a serious face.

  It didn’t work. Not on me, anyway.

  It had the kid rattled though. “I—I’m sorry. It’s just…” He panted. Placed his hands on his knees.

  “Spit it out, boy,” Lenny said.

  Kyle lifted his head. “There’s another. An… Another girl. Another girl like the one earlier.”

  Lenny’s mouth opened. “What… Where?”

  Kyle’s jaw started to shake. His face was losing colour by the second. Come to think of it, he did smell a bit… vomity.

  “She’s… she’s outside. On—on top of the squad car,” Kyle said.

  And then he puked out his guts all over the interview room floor.

  FOUR

  Officer Kyle Whatever wasn’t lying about the murdered girl sprawled out on the squad car.

  The parking area outside Preston Police Station was cordoned off with yellow tape. A couple of officers were struggling to connect the tape, as they’d run out of it with a small area still to cover. To solve the problem, a short, chubby officer stood holding the tape, acting as the bridge between the two parts. Idiot.

  Lenny escorted me outside. I still had my cuffs on, and I wanted to ask him to remove them, but I figured I’d get a look at the girl first.

  And a look at her I got.

  She was completely naked for a start. Just like the girl in the photograph. Only unlike the girl in the photograph who’d been found on Moor Park, this girl was laid out atop a squad car.

  I held my breath as I got closer and immediately regretted clearing my airways with lozenges just earlier.

  The girl’s eyes had been plucked out, just like the other’s. Blood had run from the holes, dribbled down her cheeks like over-frothed milkshake. There was something bloody, like a sponge, stuck in her mouth. But it only took me a few moments to realise that it was the remnants of her tongue.

  “Shitting hell,” Lenny said. He’d put his sunglasses back on even though it was dark, and was covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. Lucky man. “Plenty in common with the other girl alright.”

  I got closer to this woman. Noted the sliced-off breasts, the torn vagina.

  And then I notice
d her fingers. Or rather, the lack of them. All of them snipped away, although this woman looked like she’d had even more of a struggle.

  “I think we can definitely conclude we have a serial killer on our hands,” Lenny said, his voice muffled by his sleeve.

  “D’you reckon?” I said.

  “Well, two women found in similar circumstances, fingers snipped, eyes gouged… Oh. Oh I see what you’re doing. Sarcasm. Good job. Very good. Very sensitive.”

  I looked up at a streetlamp, which illuminated this woman’s body like she was on a stage. And then I looked down, looked past the yellow tape and the panicky officers. Over by the street, specks of light rain hit the journos who had already heard the news, some way or another.

  That “some way or another” was no doubt the tip-offs from the police. Well, snitching paid good, so why not?

  “Get forensics down here then get her inside for a look,” Lenny said to a dark-haired officer. She nodded, disappeared outside the tape. Lenny looked at me and shook his head as if this was all one big inconvenience to him. “What d’you reckon, ey? Spidey senses tingling yet?”

  “They might come close to tingling if I wasn’t cuffed up.”

  Lenny nodded. Smiled and nodded. No sign of letting me out of my cuffs. Dick.

  I crouched down beside the girl, looked at her skin. Bruises lined her left side, like she’d taken a beating before she’d died. And there were little slits, too. Little indentations, piercings, in her skin.

  “This could be something,” I said.

  “Jesus, on it already? You’re something special. I tell you, why don’t you join the police? You wouldn’t even have to run a job as a smoothie salesman if you were in the police.”

  I pretended not to hear Lenny’s shit-headed suggestion and I nodded at the little slices on the side of the girl’s belly.

  “So what am I looking at?” Lenny asked.

  “Seriously, how are you a police officer? What d’you think you’re looking at?”

  Lenny squinted. Scratched at his recently shaven beard. “I… Well it looks like stab wounds to me.”