A Dead Chick And Some Dirty Tricks: Jake Rodwell Investigates, #1

By Jon Lymon

Magician Dino Camballi staggers from his apartment with five daggers sticking out of his torso. As medics battle to save him, PC Rodwell is assigned the task of guarding Camballi's hospital bed. But is the magician victim or suspect? And what is the secret he's keeping hidden? Rodwell must find out before the magician pulls the whole hospital under his spell and makes his escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Lymon
• Release date: Dec 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311507327

Jon Lymon

The truth isn't stranger than my fiction.Jon Lymon writes thrillers for adults and cute animal stories for kids, though one day he might swap that around. He lives in south London and likes cheese, and biscuits. But not cheese and biscuits.

Book preview

Also by Jon Lymon:

THE DIAMOND RUSH

LAST NIGHT AT THE STAIRWAYS

THE WRONGED

A BIG BLUFF AND SOME GREEN STUFF

A KILLING SPREE AND SOME BLOODY ZOMBIES

THE ZOMBIE COP

FLYING ANT DAY

––––––––

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to the below for reviewing the above:

John Collins, Stuart R Bennett, Sharon R Howe, Kelly, Sandra Niedermeier, Jonzie, Ashley, Candice McKinney, Erica Shafer, John Creekmore.

1

Dom Tenby pressed mute, his work papers spread over his lap and sofa like a white patchwork blanket. Something bad was happening over the corridor in apartment twenty-two.

This was the third night in a row his attempts to get some work done at home had been ruined by the couple who lived there. He wasn’t in the mood for them tonight, hadn’t been the previous two. But at least then the noise had stopped after a few minutes. Tonight, Tenby was convinced that one, if not both of them, had been seriously hurt.

Ever since he first saw them, not long after he’d moved into the apartment across the corridor with his girlfriend of the time, whose name he couldn’t bring himself to remember, he thought they made a strange pair. It was an opinion he couldn’t shake. They were both in their forties, Tenby estimated. She blonde and doll-like, probably attractive back in the day, but now layered too thickly with make-up that was slapped-on to cover-up the cruelty of years. As for him, the husband, partner, whatever his relationship to her was, his hair was blatantly twenty years younger than the rest of him, dyed an oily black and styled to cover up the brutal, shiny scalped truth that he was receding. They spent most of their weekdays at home, from what Tenby could gather, leaving together at just gone six most nights, not returning until late, usually after Tenby had called it a day.

But three nights ago, that all changed.

Tenby heard crockery smashing first. Didn’t think much of it. Everyone drops a bowl or plate now and again. But seven, eight in one night? The multiple smashes were followed by dull, inexplicable thuds. Then silence.

The second night, last night, the soundwaves of a fully fledged shouting match carried through the walls of the Byron Close apartment block, shuddering across the neat, white walled, real oak floored corridor. The shouting ended with her screaming where he could stick something (Tenby didn’t catch exactly what or where, but imagined it would be painful). He certainly heard the echo of the front door slamming, a sound that disturbed his train of thought to such an extent, he was forced to abandon his work for the night.

And then there was tonight, the crescendo. Apartment twenty-two played host to scrapes, thuds, yells, bangs and crashes, intercut with him shouting and her screaming, then her shouting and him screaming. Tenby couldn’t quite make out details, much to his annoyance, even after he’d pressed mute, lowered his breathing and leant toward the door.

As he listened, a yell sent Tenby’s heart racing. Was that her or him? He stood up, letting his work papers slide off him like slates off a roof in high wind. What was going on over there? He pictured one savagely attacking the other, inflicting merciless hits around the head with a laptop, an iron, a toaster, a trouser press (his neighbour looked like the kind of guy who’d have a trouser press).

Tenby’s remote slipped from his grasp as he contemplated the gravity of the situation – a serious assault happening across the corridor and he was sitting there, listening to it happen.

Pangs of nervousness infected a stomach that had been over-fed and under-nourished by too frequent eating of the wrong kind of food over a Christmas break that had been curtailed by a call from his boss demanding he go into the office the day after New Year’s Day.

He slipped on novelty crocodile slippers that had been a ‘surprise’ present from his parents and edged open his front door. He looked left down the corridor, hoping someone else would be peering out of their apartment or stepping out of the lift.

He was out of luck on both counts. His neighbours were either out or out for the count.

He glanced across to number twenty-two. His apartment door was definitely the nearest. Twenty-three was four, maybe five feet further down the corridor. Tenby reckoned that rendered him honour-bound to be the first to intervene. The no-show of his other neighbours suggested they agreed.

After cursing his choice of apartment and checking he had his keys, he crept toward twenty-two.

As he approached the door, the great slab of wood rattled in its frame, the sound of splintering ripping from inside the apartment.

Tenby rocked back on his heels. That noise had to be something sharp embedding itself in the other side of the door. Something like a...

Tenby battled the urge to run back inside his own apartment, double-lock the door, don his Plattan headphones and pretend he’d been asleep all evening.

His heart was racing, his conscience clouding. He had to find out what was going on before he found out about it on the local news.

Tenby clenched his fist and reached toward the door.

Before he had a chance to knock, the handle moved.

Tenby froze, unable to comprehend why he was still standing there and not running away.

As it slowly opened, a hand reached around the door. Tenby stifled a laugh when he saw blood trickling between its shuddering fingers. This had to be some kind of drunken party game. Come on you guys, the joke’s over. The hand was followed by a forearm with blood streaming up to the elbow and dripping onto the corridor floor.

Tenby would have yelled for help right there and then, had whoever the arm belonged to not tried to do exactly that, choking on a throat thick with blood and vomit.

As Tenby leaned to his left to get a better angle on the owner of the bloodied arm, the door flung open. Tenby’s neighbour stooped in the doorway, the handles of five ornate daggers protruding from his midriff. He didn’t know why, but Tenby quickly counted them all. The lion’s share of the blood that was leaking onto the floor was being generated by a gaping wound in the lower abdomen, from which Tenby assumed the victim had recently pulled a sixth blade.

As he reached out to help, Tenby was forced back by a flash of brilliant white light from within the apartment, accompanied by a soft ‘phut’, too weak to be a gunshot, more akin to a tame firework.

Tenby squinted, temporarily blinded by the dazzle.

He heard footsteps, charging toward him.

‘Who is it?’

Still blind, he stood helpless, expecting a knife or six to slice into him.

As he held his breath and waited for the inevitable, Tenby felt someone brush past him, a waft of cool, fragrant air.

‘Hello,’ he called out.

No answer.

As he blinked his eyes out of their blindness, Tenby saw his multi-wounded neighbour cowering next to him, the daggers making him look like a macabre hairbrush.

‘Somebody help!’ Tenby shouted.

2

Twelve minutes later, an ambulance sped to Turpenton General, its payload one of the most seriously injured it had ever had the pressure of transporting across town. The pair of paramedics onboard attended to stab wounds that outnumbered their hands, stemming multiple blood flows as best they could, their hands moving up and down and around the patient like steel drum players on a carnival float.

They counted six knife wounds peppering the prone torso, five still with the weapons in situ. Keeping this one alive until they reached A & E was going to be a big ask.

Outside Turpenton General, they were greeted by twenty or so placard wielding demonstrators standing under disastrously spelt messages opposing the planned closure of the emergency unit and the threatened closure of the rest of the hospital. Their number had thinned as the temperature of the day had plummeted, the remainder a hardy, red-faced, soup-full crew whose creaking and swaying tents on the green strip between A & E and the always full car park suggested they knew more about protesting than camping, and that they were all in it for the long haul.

The arrival of the ambulance sparked them into life, its presence giving them a chance to shout and jump around to warm themselves. From the venom in their tone and the expletives in their shouts, it was as if the emergency vehicle’s occupants were the very councillors who’d planned and voted for the dastardly closure. The driver zoomed past their thrusting boards and into the relative calm of A & E where Dr Rice awaited.

Rice was a tall, dark but not handsome man with a clipped accent that sounded expensive and suggested he hailed from a family blessed with a history of money. In reality, he merely had parents who were prepared to pay through the nose to give their only son the very best education.

‘Blood loss heavy, though we’ve managed to regulate,’ a breathless paramedic told Rice. ‘Heart and blood pressure holding steady.’

Rice struggled to keep up with the gurney as two overweight orderlies pushed it toward theatre at jogging pace, Rice conscious that the excess around his midriff was a little more excessive than it had been before Christmas.

The gurney slammed into double doors that bore scars which suggested they’d been on the receiving end of plenty of that sort of harsh treatment over the years.

A trio of surgeons waited with rubber gloved calm as the incoming patient was swiftly transferred onto the operating table and hooked up to a fresh IV, heart monitor, pulse oximeter, anesthesia unit and electrocautery machine.

The bloodstained sheet that covered the man’s midriff was whipped away. Gasps were suppressed, but eyebrows couldn’t stop themselves rising at the sight of the ornate silver dagger handles.

‘Before you start there’s something else you ought to know about this guy,’ one of the paramedics announced. ‘Something totally mindblowing.’

The surgeons looked up en masse, their eyes demanding answers.

3

Detective Inspectors Naughton and Shelton’s line of work often forced them to moonlight as ambulance chasers, the former’s Series 3 Jaguar XJ6 still having enough about it to keep pace with the new-fangled yellow green life-saving boxes on wheels.

Despite the Jag’s speed, the detectives arrived at Turpenton General several minutes after their quarry, Shelton having insisted Naughton keep within the speed limit.

Naughton further delayed their arrival by insisting on parking in the visitors’ car park, despite Shelton demanding he drive straight up to the entrance of A & E.

‘We’ll get towed if I leave it there,’ said Naughton. ‘Last thing we need.’

Shelton sulked in the passenger seat, his emotions in turmoil as Naughton trawled the car park for a space that he could easily reverse into.

As soon as he stopped, Shelton was out, rushing toward the hospital building as fast as his tar-stricken lungs would let him, with all the urgency of man whose wife was inside and in labour.

‘Do you know if I need to get a ticket this time of night?’ Naughton called out, one foot in, the other out of the car.

Shelton heard but ignored his partner, his lungs burning in their lack of appreciation of the exercise, the cold bite of the early January night aggravating insides ravaged by a twenty-year smoking habit he’d called a halt to a minute into the new year barely a week ago.

The blast of warmth that greeted him inside A & E made his eyes water. No wonder the health service was so strapped for cash, he thought. Turn the heating down from Caribbean degrees centigrade and they might save themselves a fortune.

He approached an overwhelmed and overworked nurse, flashed her his badge and demanded she take him straight to the recently arrived stab victim.

Begrudgingly, she led him through several double doors, past beds in corridors bordered by thin blue curtains behind which fully clothed outpatients lay on temporary beds covered with temporary blue sheets waiting to see if their ailment was fleeting or permanent.

Shelton had no wish to see the weak, the injured, the paranoid. It would only serve to remind him of his own frail state of health, so he kept looking dead ahead as he followed the nurse until she stopped outside a pair of double doors marked ‘emergency theatre’.

Shelton thanked his guide with a grumble and snarl, and peered through a reinforced square window at a group of surgeons hunched over a prone figure on the table.

‘I want to go in,’ he insisted.

The nurse shook her head.

‘Why not?’ Shelton bellowed.

A couple of the surgeons looked up and out. One of them, Dr. Rice, strode toward the door and kicked it open. ‘Quiet out here,’ he hollered.

Shelton gave him a ‘who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ look which was met with a ‘who the hell do you think you’re looking at?’ glare from Rice.

‘A man’s fighting for his life in here,’ Rice told him, repelled by the stench of alcohol and sweat Shelton transported everywhere.

Naughton, younger than his partner by a good fifteen years and evangelically anti-smoking, arrived breathless and nodded at Dr Rice. Sensing tension in the atmosphere, he immediately suspected Shelton had been rude to the nurse and aggressive toward Rice.

Can’t stand medics, Shelton thought to himself as he eyeballed the surgeon through eyes lined by his years of smoking and decades of unrequited love.

Dr Rice was distracted by the beeps of an alarm behind him which triggered frantic activity around the table.

‘We need you back here now, Trist,’ came a shout from the far side of theatre.

‘I think we’re losing him,’ said another.

Rice ran back toward the operating table, letting the door slam shut in Naughton and Shelton’s face.

‘They call it a theatre, but they don’t like an audience,’ shouted Shelton, slamming his fist against the glass.

4

I don't want you. I don't need you. Not any of you.

Jake Rodwell peered through the newsagent’s window, his breath steaming glass that was already beginning to frost in the bitter winter night air as his clammy fingers toyed with the congregation of coins in his pocket.

He took a deep breath.

This felt like his biggest test. The first of many, he suspected.  

The multi-coloured packets of temptation lined up on the shelf were more alluring than ever, their warnings easy to overlook when you knew something of the relief and joy the contents could bring. And Rodwell had known plenty of that relief and joy over the last eight years.

But now it had to end. It was time to think not of his own pleasure, but of Emily.

He shuffled nearer the shop door, his brain a hive of activity, his heart thumping. He definitely wasn’t over them. Not by a long filter. Only five days, nineteen hours and fifty six minutes into being off them, and life had already become a struggle.

As he shaped to walk away from the store, a squat guy in a green anorak nudged his shoulder as he walked in the opposite direction. The guy smelt like he’d doused himself in a bottle of vodka before leaving his house, a novel way of keeping warm, Rodwell thought.

Rodwell saw him mouth a curse under his breath, then turn away and aggressively push open the newsagent’s door.

From his profile, Rodwell could tell that as well as liking a drink, the man was a stranger to a razor.

He had at least served to take Rodwell’s mind off the cigarettes for a few valuable seconds.

Through the window he saw the shop owner checking out his latest customer, a look of concern taking over his face.

Rodwell shared that concern. There was definitely something about the guy. Something that was keeping Rodwell from returning home.

He withdrew into the shadows and watched as the guy drifted past the magazines, glancing up to feast on the top shelf flesh then quickly down to pick up a chocolate bar, examining its wrapper, not to check the saturated fat content, Rodwell presumed. Almost certainly to calm his nerves.

The guy put the bar back then looked out to where Rodwell had been standing. From the shadows, Rodwell saw him draw an unspectacular kitchen knife. He strode toward the counter, the blade flashing as it caught the ceiling strip light, the owner recoiling into the cigarette display as the knife was thrust toward his neck, a few packets toppling down from the shelves, victims of the speed and force of his retreat.

‘Empty all them fags into the bag,’ the guy shouted, thrusting an off-green rucksack into the newsagent’s face.

As he let go of the strap, the thief felt his legs slide out from under him as a sweeping kick battered his right ankle. In tandem with his legs giving way, his head slammed forward onto the counter with a force that dislodged several of his many fillings and even more cigarette packets from the nearby display. The impact sent the knife tumbling from his grasp and clattering to the floor. Shock soon gave way to anger, the frustration of being denied tobacco, coupled with the tired bravado the cheap alcohol he’d been necking since midday had given him, causing him to lash out, swinging his fists at Rodwell, initially failing to hit his target, still reeling from the blow to the head, his ankle throbbing insistently.

Eventually, he connected with a couple of shots, but Rodwell’s face had soaked up worse in his line of duty. In a flash, Rodwell had the guy’s right arm up behind his back, the thief yelling ‘stop’, knowing another degree further north would snap his ulna.

‘OK, OK,’ he slurred. 

In a flash of silver, Rodwell had him cuffed and his head flat against the counter.

‘You’re nicked.’

The shop owner looked on, in awe of the speed with which Rodwell had neutralised his assailant.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ he repeated, smiling at Rodwell.

‘Not a problem.’

‘Shall I call the police?’ 

As if on demand, flashing lights bathed the shelves of magazines and sweets and stationery in a blue filter.

‘I beat you to it,’ said Rodwell.

The owner nodded more respect and caught Rodwell glancing at the fallen packets of cigarettes.

‘You can have them. All of them. As a reward,’ he said, stooping to pick up a packet or two.

Rodwell shook his head. ‘No thanks.’

‘Please, sir. It is the least I can do for someone who saved my life.’

‘I’m just doing my job,’ said Rodwell, cringeing at the cliché. ‘I’m police.’

‘Please, it is the least I can do. Refusal often offends.’

Rodwell smiled and stepped away from the cuffed thief as PC Worthington and WPC Stark strode into the shop.

‘At it again, Rodwell, I see,’ said Worthington.

Rodwell smiled then turned back to the shop owner.

‘I'll just take one,’ he said, pointing at a packet of menthols.

‘Take more, sir, please.’

‘No, it’s fine. Honestly.’

‘If you're sure, sir?’

‘They'll do me,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

PC Worthington examined the dropped knife as WPC Stark gripped a fist of hair and yanked the thief off the counter, steering him out of the shop, the thief stealing one last snarling glance at Rodwell, his head tipped back, nose leaking blood.

‘We’ll need to take a statement,’ Worthington told the shop owner, who nodded excitedly, shivering through a combination of cold, fear and adrenaline.

Worthington turned to Rodwell.

‘Never off duty, eh?’

‘You know me,’ Rodwell replied. ‘Forever taking my work home.’

He walked toward the shop door gripping his cigarettes.

‘You really ought to come down the station,’ Worthington called after him.

‘Bannen knows the score. And anyway, I’m happy for you to take the credit on this one, Joel,’ he called out, and kept walking.

Rodwell paused by the first rubbish bin he reached and gripped the menthols in his pocket. He looked over his shoulder, back at the newsagents, still bathed in flashing blue, then walked on.

When he reached the door to his apartment block, his step faltered. He stopped and hung his head. He’d forgotten to get what he’d gone out for in the first place. It was too late to head back to the newsagents, he’d already been gone way too long.

He checked his watch, and realised he’d forgotten that too. Must have left that in his bedroom. What was happening to him? A few days