Sharp Knives & Loud Guns

By Tom Leins

Sharp Knives & Loud Guns is the brand-new collection of Paignton Noir Case Files from cult crime writer Tom Leins, featuring the novelettes Slug Bait, Smut Loop and Sweating Blood.

Traumatised and brutalised after a grisly encounter with a warped sex killer, Slug Bait finds cut-price private investigator Joe Rey licking his wounds at a decrepit caravan park on the cliff path high above Paignton. Violence has a way of finding Rey, however, and an altercation involving local amusement arcade tycoon Raymond Coody sees him dragged back into town—where his name is now on all of the wrong people’s lips. Rey’s reckless disregard for his own safety quickly wins Coody’s trust, but his new associate harbours some dark secrets, and things are about to get very bloody, very quickly.

Joe Rey has been hired by so many queasy middle-aged men in his time, an assignment from Frank ‘The Wank’ Farris barely registers. In Smut Loop Rey is forced to get reacquainted with Cherry, a middle-aged sex worker who has more unsavoury connections than he does. When she proposes an elaborate blackmail scheme, Rey is suckered in, but the job quickly spirals out of control—and they are forced to perform an unhinged job for an extremely powerful man. Rey is out of luck, and out of his depth. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

After a series of violent misadventures, Joe Rey has blood on his hands and murder on his mind. Now working as a security guard at Paignton Cliffs Caravan Park, Rey finds himself dogged by unhinged cop Carver, who is desperate to know where the bodies are buried. When a sinister figure from Rey’s past re-emerges, determined to force him to participate in a sick new game, Rey is forced to confront his past—if he still wants to have a future. As the temperature rises, so does the body-count, and Rey finds himself Sweating Blood. Will he see it through to the bitter end, or has his luck finally run out?

Praise for SHARP KNIVES & LOUD GUNS:

“Imagine Jim Thompson and Edward Lee had a baby and that baby did a bunch of steroids and meth. That’s what Tom Leins’ powerful pulp is like. Nobody, and I mean nobody, writes like Leins. He is the master of his own genre.” —Andy Rausch, author of American Trash and Bloody Sheets

“For hammer-to-face smashing, nothing could be better than Sharp Knives and Loud Guns. Viciously brutal and wickedly funny, to my mind this is the best Tom Leins book yet.” —Rob Pierce, author of the Uncle Dust trilogy

• Language: English
• Publisher: All Due Respect Books
• Release date: Dec 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005106751

Book preview

SLUG BAIT

Prologue: Murderers I Have Known

August Bank Holiday, Paignton, UK

The sky above the Dirty Lemon is the colour of diseased lungs. Fat clouds swirl above the pub, and the bronchial sky erupts as I push through the double doors—bullets of rain thudding into the wheelchair ramp behind me.

Remy Cornish is sat adjacent to the cigarette machine, perched awkwardly on his mid-range mobility scooter. He chose the meeting place—the only pub in Paignton with a wheelchair ramp—but it was no hardship on my part. I was coming here anyway.

I order a pint of Kronenbourg from Spacey Tracey and sit down opposite Remy. A thick, pissy stench hangs in the air above him, and even the pub’s omnipresent cigarette fug can’t mask it. Presumably showering has been a problem since Franco Moretti took his fucking kneecaps.

Remy makes half-hearted speech marks in the air with his sausage-like fingers as he tells me that his niece—Claudette—is missing. Wants me to find her. He passes me a photograph. It’s a typical small-town glamour shot: badly lit and barely legal. She’s a toothy brunette with small, uneven breasts. She doesn’t so much have blowjob lips as gob-job gums. I feel my cock twitch, take Remy’s money and finish my pint. In that order.

I don’t find Remy’s niece—the Harbour Master does. Wedged in the cubicle in Paignton Harbour toilets, her body contorted at an unnatural angle. By this point, the Herald Express has nicknamed him ‘The Khazi Killer’, because he carefully positions each one of his victims in a public toilet across Torbay. Claudette is the fourth victim. She even looks pretty in the autopsy photo. No tattoos. No piercings. No life in her dead eyes.

I try to give Remy his money back, but he decides to renegotiate our contract instead. Find the motherfucker responsible and deliver him to his portakabin up at Paignton Yards. His bloodshot eyes are so red-raw that they looked like flesh wounds. I nod and slip the money back into my jacket pocket. An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

I kick down the usual doors, ask the usual questions and snap the usual fingers, but nothing shakes loose. Eventually, the lead lands in my lap—like a cracked-out lap dancer. I meet David Cummings in Foxy Booze. He’s trying to pay for a porno mag with a cheque. I’m trying to buy a dented can of scrumpy with a fake pound coin. He’s wearing a denim jacket with a sheepskin collar, and has the word ‘Mum’ tattooed across his throat. It looks new. And infected.

He chuckles when he sees me. I heard you died.

You look disappointed.

He laughs even louder.

Outside, he smokes two high-tar cigarettes in quick succession as he spills the beans. Said he was in the cop shop being processed for affray—he had been caught on CCTV beating a man with the metal bar from a dumbbell—when he heard the story.

While he was in the holding tank a guy named Lucius Streete was cut loose due to a lack of evidence. The desk sergeants—Benson and Hedges—had been drinking brandy, and blabbed to Cummings that the skinny prick re-lacing his shoes in the police station lobby was almost certainly the Khazi fucking Killer. I finish my scrumpy and make my way to the bus stop. It’s time for a Foxhole safari.

Later—much later—I found out that Lucius Streete grew up in care. Like me. Unlike me, he was abandoned in Lucius Street public toilets, Torquay, at just three hours old. He never met his emaciated fourteen-year-old mother: she died in the East Plymouth Lunatic Asylum, five days after abandoning her baby on the pissy toilet floor. Inevitably, an enquiry was launched, but it was determined that the girl had died by her own hand, despite the erratic behaviour of a bloody, palpably disturbed fellow resident named Smiley.

As a teenager in the 1980s, Streete was suspected of picking up middle-aged men in public toilets across Torbay and garotting them. Corbyn Head. Preston Shelter. Victoria Square. Goodrington North. Goodrington fucking South. Psychologists suggested that the killer had suffered trauma in a public convenience during his youth. They didn’t know the fucking half of it. The Herald Express headlines called the murderer the ‘Boghouse Bastard’—until the killings abruptly stopped. Lucius, it turns out, was detained in the Royal Western Counties Hospital for two decades, suffering from a string of psychiatric problems. He was sectioned after getting arrested for masturbating into the hand-dryer in Union Street toilets.

I didn’t know any of this the first time I set eyes on Lucius Streete.

The first time I set eyes on Lucius Streete, he’s in a Foxhole fuck-hole, wearing a nylon stalking mask and a pair of greasy jeans. There’s a snail-trail of fresh semen down his right leg. At best, he looks like Tailgunner centrefold material on a particularly bad month. At worst, he looks like the kind of guy who advertises his services at the back of the magazine—and ends up handcuffing you to a radiator and stealing your wallet. Hell, what do I know? I only buy it for the fucking articles.

My claw hammer craters the nylon when he opens the door, and I bundle him into the dingy hallway, away from the prying eyes of the other sheltered accommodation shit-bags. The sagging floorboards feel as soft as shit beneath my boots. I kick him down the dank passage and he moans like a fat hooker, curling into a foetal ball on the exposed wood.

When I rip off the nylon mask, I see that he has grey hair shaved to stubble and a few pubic-looking beard hairs along his crooked jaw. He’s skinny like a stray dog, and it’s hard to believe he’s responsible for those strangled, mangled bodies.

He glares at me through his left eye—his crumpled right eye socket already matted with black blood.

He grins nastily. You’re so full of doubt I can fucking smell it.

I shrug. The only thing I can smell is the wet stink of shit and blood.

I sniff the air again. Is there another girl in the house?

He shrugs.

If you move, I will kill you, you know that, don’t you?

He shrugs again. I’m not afraid. Death is something that happens to other people.

I trudge out of the room, checking the rest of the house as quickly as possible.

Inside the third room is a teenage girl. She’s been handcuffed to the rusty iron headboard. A mouldy ordnance survey map is laid out on the bed next to her—fat marker pen circles denoting local toilets. One of which, I’m sure, is intended to be her final resting place.

She screams silently when she sees me, eyes pleading. Her left eye socket has been broken and a single bloody tear slides down her badly bruised cheek.

I place my blood-soaked hammer on the floor and hold my hands up, trying to make myself look as unthreatening as possible.

I rip the parcel tape off her mouth, and remove the stained tights wedged inside her mouth.

Wh-wh-who are you?

Don’t worry. I’m one of the fucking good guys.

I turn sharply and stomp back towards the lounge.

Streete has replaced the nylon mask, but removed his filthy jeans. He’s slumped against the wall, trying to masturbate with bloody fingers.

I weigh the gore-streaked hammer in my left fist, swapping hands because it feels dangerously blood-slick.

Part of me hopes that I don’t kill him, but that’s only because Remy will want his fucking money back.

Streete looks up at me curiously, but doesn’t bother to stop playing with himself.

I close my eyes and raise the hammer above my head.

I don’t see the switchblade until it’s wedged between my ribs, turning my sweaty t-shirt the colour of Poundland lipstick.

Streete laughs, but through the mangled bone and fabric it sounds like someone wanking into a verruca sock.

Me? I don’t have too much to fucking laugh about.

Chapter 1: Dead Souls

Three Months Later

I was looking for a quiet place to die, and someone suggested the Paignton Cliffs Caravan Park. Sure, it’s quiet, but I’m not dead yet.

Streete stomped me so hard that he left a boot print on my cheekbone, but he left me alive. The girl wasn’t so lucky. He slit her throat, dragged her through the house and dumped her dead body on top of me. While I was unconscious, I probably swallowed some of her fucking blood. Her nipples had been cut off, and when I regained consciousness, I vomited all over the crime scene.

Those wet-brained bastards Benson and Hedges could probably organise a pretty good piss-up at a brewery, but I doubt they could organise a fucking DNA test at a crime lab—even if some poor girl’s murder depended on it. Even so, I wanted to keep a low profile. Out of sight, out of mind, out of fucking trouble.

When I walk into Geoff’s office, he’s drinking cheap scotch, watching a discoloured TV with the sound turned down. I barely know the man, but I know his cousin, Slattery, and that evidently counts for something, as Geoff lets me stay in one of the caravans on the outskirts of the site, in exchange for me helping him carry out winter repairs. Despite my familiarity with hammers, screwdrivers and Stanley knives, I’m no one’s idea of a fucking handyman. Out-of-season seaside towns—other people’s last resorts. Mine included.

I tug at my collar and gasp for breath—his radiator is broken again and the room reeks with heat. Neither of us knows how to fix it, so Geoff will have to stew in his own juices until Monday, when he can hire an actual plumber. The armpits of his salmon-pink shirt are damp with perspiration, and his dirt-coloured hair is plastered to his forehead. He grins at me and it looks like there are too many teeth for his mouth.

I collapse onto his shabby black leatherette couch. The last time I was here it was peppered with cigarette burns, but it looks like Geoff has covered them over with electrical tape. He should have asked me to do it—taping up gashed sofas is about my level.

What are you watching? CCTV?

He nods.

The camera has been set up to focus on the entrance to the shower block.

I tell you, Joe: Polish pussy—the best thing to happen to Paignton since the arrival of the fucking railway.

I grunt. Geoff’s queasy small talk never ceases to amaze me.

The woman wrapped in a towel is called Maja. She’s heavily pregnant. Her husband Mariusz would slit Geoff’s throat in a heartbeat if he knew the old fucker was ogling her.

So, how do you fancy earning a few more quid?

I shrug. No thanks, mate. Not again.

Last week Geoff paid me forty-five pounds to dig graves for all of the dogs that were put down after the Polish dog fight. Mariusz hosts the battles on the last Friday of the month in a muddy square between four rust-ruined caravans. The crowd stand on the roofs, shouting, drinking five-hundred-millilitre cans of Zubr and betting on the outcomes of the matches. At the end of the last bout the spectators’ excited footfall rumbled across the caravan park like thunder.

Afterwards, I had to climb into the kill-pit with a bin-bag to gather up the empty beer cans, before throwing the dead dogs over the caravans, and hauling them across the winter mud in an old wheelbarrow. The graveyard is in the far corner of the site—next to my fucking caravan.

I walked down to the Co-Op afterwards, and spent all of the money on own-brand booze, but I haven’t drunk any of it yet. In the evenings I prefer to work out on the greasy linoleum floor of my caravan—press-ups, stomach-crunches, squats—prison cell-style exercises. I work out until my muscles burn and my mind feels numb.

Fancy some chop?

I turn away from the rain-lashed window. Huh?

Coke, Joe.

I shake my head. Since I started living here, I