Thin Men, Paper Suits

by Tin Larrick

  His mind was focused by the yellow-jacketed traffic cops congregated by the main bays. He felt a moment’s unease. Single-vehicle crash, no one else hurt. The police investigation wouldn’t be that thorough, surely? There certainly shouldn’t have been any public pressure to see justice done, or whatever other targets the police had to work to these days.

  He strode up to the cop with stripes and spoke in a mildly challenging tone.

  “Can I help you, sergeant?”

  The cop looked momentarily flustered, then regained his composure.

  “We here with the RTC casualty. Mr Nixon is the surgeon in charge of her care.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Williams said with irritation. “But do you all really need to hang around here?”

  “With respect, sir…”

  “Sarge…” called a cop from the main bay. “He’s out of theatre. They’ve taken him back to Clifford Ward.”

  The sergeant turned to address the young constable.

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Touch and go, sir.”

  Thank you, thought Williams. When the sergeant turned back, Williams had gone.

  *

  Williams resisted the urge to laugh as he hurried along the corridor, looking for Clifford Ward. Challenging the police was not strictly part of the plan, but he remained convinced that a display of bravado was the path least likely to arouse suspicion. And it had worked so well that he considered adding it to the repertoire on a more permanent basis.

  He then remembered that it was entirely possible the cop could have seen him at the scene of the crash. This troubled him momentarily, but then he dismissed it as unfounded – it didn’t matter how good they were, there was no way any cop, in the midst of car crash chaos, would be able to make that connection.

  He rounded a corner, and sweat prickled up his back as he saw two large security officers charging down the corridor towards him. Clearly his faux-doctor act had been discovered.

  His reaction time did not permit him to reach the gun in his jacket, and so he wound up a haymaker, intending to floor at least one as they reached him.

  However, in that split-second, he caught their eyes and realised they were not looking at him. Hedging his bets, he hesitated, and his vigilance was rewarded when they ran straight past him.

  Relief flooded over him in waves, and the adrenaline surge made his knees buckle. He leaned against the window for a moment, and took a few moments to admire the collection of bonsai trees in a square patch of garden outside the corridor windows, then pressed on.

  Clifford Ward was on the next floor up. Williams ducked into an empty, dimly-lit service stairwell and found himself at the end of another corridor, with four wards branching off on either side, each with a name board above the door like a road sign. At the far end of the corridor, fifty yards away, was another stairwell and a bank of lifts.

  Clifford was twenty yards or so up on the right. The doors were open and he strode in, just a doctor on his rounds, and made for the board of patients’ names.

  He realised as he got there that he only knew the target as Switch, and that whatever ID the man may have had on him at the scene of the crash was unlikely to be real – if, indeed, he had any on him at all.

  Fortunately, the hesitation that gripped him – and which would have surely given him away – was mitigated by the small clamour of staff around a side room.

  The board outside the room read ‘J.DOE,’ and Williams – not for the first time – cursed his brain for not being quite as sharp as this work demanded.

  He edged towards the room and peered in.

  “Everything alright, Sister?” he asked a lady in a dark blue uniform.

  “It most certainly is not,” she said. “This patient’s gone, doctor.”

  *

  Despite his body being seemingly unable to cope with much in the way of feelings that didn’t involve either extreme pain or total numbness, Switch was nevertheless aware of a sudden icy wind swirling under the thin sheets on his hospital bed. He wasn’t quite sure what design imperative would necessitate a patient bed transport elevator having a stop on the roof, but that seemed to be a moot point.

  The nurse leaned over him again. It was dark on the roof, but the edges of her hair were lit by an arc light from, Switch presumed, a car park or something. His vision was still fuzzy, but it was compounded by tiny flakes of snow settling on his lashes, where they melted and fell in his eyes. He could hear traffic in the distance, and the wind whistling through some unseen trees.

  “Mr Switch, I’m afraid you’re going to die. In about two minutes I am going to roll this bed off the roof. It’s only three storeys, but in your current condition I would assess your chances of survival as slim-to-nonexistent.”

  Switch opened his mouth, but a guttural groan was all that came out.

  “What’s that? Oh, you’re wondering why I didn’t just smother you with a pillow in your room? Well now, where would the fun be in that? You must realise, Ian, that the documents you collected are useless; that, in fact, the prize you were so desperately after does not actually exist. The purpose of this operation was to flush out some rather irritating thorns in my side – of which you are one. They haven’t all taken the bait, unfortunately, but your mysterious fate plastered over the ten o’clock news will give them pause, I’m sure.”

  Who are you? Switch said in his brain.

  *

  The door onto the roof from the service stairwell clattered open, and what little light it offered was immediately blocked by the square bulk of Buchanan Williams.

  Switch’s bed creaked slightly as the nurse stood up. Williams stepped forwards, a gun in his hand and confusion on his face. He raised the barrel towards the bed, but his expression suggested he wanted some answers before he used it.

  “What’s going on?” was all he could think of to say.

  “Buchanan,” the nurse said, “put the weapon down.”

  Williams, on reflex, did indeed start to lower the weapon as instructed. The snowflakes started to thicken, and he raised it again as it occurred to him that a nurse he’d never seen before knew his name. His real name, no less.

  “Who are you?” Williams said. “What are you doing?”

  “Unfortunately, Buchanan, I am clearing up your mess. If you want something done, and all that.”

  Williams’s mouth and eyes widened in perfect counterpoint.

  “Retallick?” Williams said in horror.

  The nurse smiled and pulled a small black box that looked like a television remote control from her pocket. She held it to her mouth like a karaoke singer with a microphone.

  “The… very… same,” she said, the black box turning her voice into a metallic, gender-neutral rasp like a Dalek.

  Williams’s mouth opened even wider. The nurse replaced the voice-changer in her pocket, and produced a .22 calibre pistol instead, which she levelled at him.

  “In terms of trimming the fat,” she said as she shot him in the head, “this operation has been moderately successful.”

  Williams sank to his knees, the confusion on his face freezing into a death mask as his brain expired.

  To his credit, he managed to squeeze off a shot before collapsing completely. On reflex, the nurse went rigid in anticipation of the impact, and gripped the head rail of the bed.

  The round missed her, however, and thudded into the ribcage of the long-suffering Ian Switch. What dregs of life remained in his ruined body were sucked instantly out of the wound.

  As Williams sagged onto the cold gravel, the yellow stairwell light from the doorway he had been blocking beamed out across the roof top. It perfectly silhouetted the rather more streamlined figure of Michelle Fire as she stepped out onto the roof. She levelled her own signature weapon out in front of her, scanning left and right before centering on the immediate threat – in this case, a pretty nurse with a .22.

  Fire kept it trained on her as she dropped to one knee and dug two fingers in
to Williams’s fleshy neck. The big lug was dead.

  She stood up again and moved towards the nurse, the weapon straight as an arrow.

  “He’s dead,” Fire said, stopping within a few feet and indicating Williams’s enormous body with a flick of her head.

  “He should be. I shot him,” the nurse said.

  “And Switch?” Fire said, pointing with the barrel towards the still body in the hospital bed.

  “Gone.”

  Fire took another step forwards, the snow absorbing the sound of her footsteps. She concentrated the weapon on the nurse, and zeroed in on her forehead.

  “Where do you want it?” Fire said. “Head, heart or mouth?”

  “Mouth works for me,” said the nurse.

  “I’m going to enjoy this,” Fire said. “Close your eyes.”

  The nurse did as she was told. Fire touched the barrel to the nurse’s lips – and then lowered the weapon. In its place, she pushed her own lips against the nurse’s, who responded with similar enthusiasm.

  “Are you ready?” Fire said when they eventually separated.

  “I certainly am,” the nurse said, holding up two Eurotunnel tickets.

  “Did you dismantle your office?”

  “All taken care of. Don’t worry.”

  “Come on, then. It’s cold.”

  They linked arms and walked across the roof to the stairwell, where they descended to the car park level. The nurse pulled a set of keys out of the pocket in the front of her uniform. She spun them around a long finger.

  Despite the late hour, the car park was full, and with the dim lighting and snow settling on each vehicle, one might expect to have difficulty locating the correct car.

  But the car that awaited them was a bright pink Mini belonging to Magine Taylor, and so, as the nurse pressed a button on the fob that caused the hazards to blink twice, finding it was no problem at all.

  ****

  Hell’s Teeth by Tin Larrick

  Contrary to the usual run of things, the house was the third one they looked at – out of a total of eight. It was a close contender with the stone thing in East Dean, but in the end two things sold Charlotte on the small white bungalow in Ratton.

  The first was the enormous cherry blossom tree. It was right in the middle of the tiny front lawn, and its scarred black body reached bare fingers up and over the roof. It totally obscured the house and was actually a bit of an eyesore. However, in the spring, it would shower waterfalls of pink petals onto the succession of irregular flagstones that formed a diagonal path from the drive to the front door, and Charlotte loved the idea of walking across a bed of springy pinkness when she arrived home.

  The second thing was the towering wall of opaque green that loomed in front of her as she drove up Parkway towards the house. The incline would be a killer on foot, but turning off the hum-drum of the main road and ascending past pleasant houses towards the heights of the Downs felt positively celestial. They were coated in thick fronds of vegetation that filled the vision and lent a wild, almost subtropical aspect to the drive home. When the wind was up the Downs would audibly exhale over the town. It would, of course, be all too easy to become mired in rut and routine to the extent that one could drive up the hill and not even notice the canvas of green so vibrant it looked blue.

  Charlotte vowed to never let this happen.

  Life was a game to play, she mused as she unwrapped china from the packing boxes, an elusive sprite to seize. Failing to see the fleeting moments of beauty that were right in front of you simply because the grey of mundanity had blinded you was, well, it was sinful.

  Moving had – in furtherance of these romantic notions – been a delight. Not with the wide-eyed wonder of acquiring one’s first house – even Charlotte was longer in the tooth than that – but Sean had taken a whole week off to help Charlotte with the move. This had been an unexpected pleasure, such was his unflappable dedication to his work, and the move had been, well, fun. They larked and played and fooled around, and Charlotte seemed to be permanently flushed with exertion and happiness. Under the scraping branches of the watchful cherry blossom, the unspoken tenets of what might be created here were writ large in her gleaming eyes.

  *

  Eventually, the bulk of the unpacking was done, and Sean returned to work with mock-reluctance. Even this was still tinged with rose-tinted happiness, however – Charlotte even stood at the front door to wave at him as he reversed out of the blossom-strewn driveway and cruised down Parkway. When had she ever done that?

  They had broken the back of it, however – it seemed that blissful energy had brought with it ruthless efficiency. All the essentials had been unpacked and properly stored, and those boxes that were left had been piled neatly to create clear walkways throughout the house. Empties had been mercilessly flattened and put out to pasture. The house was livable, and all in all, it was a job well done.

  Charlotte’s favourite room was the lounge (although she preferred to call it ‘the drawing room’). There was a wood burner in the corner, and Charlotte loved the smell of smoke from a thousand fires ingrained in the exposed wood beams. After the house had been tidied, she would sit down on the huge, ancient sofa with a pack of cards. She liked this particular deck; each card featured a fleur-de-lis on the rear. She would deal them on the thrift-store coffee table, and look out at the back garden while she played solitaire in a kind of mechanical trance to exercise her mind.

  That would be her next project, although the thick dark forest at the bottom of the garden that tapered sharply away down the hill caused just a grain of unease in the centre of her mind. Maybe Sean could tackle it as a weekend project.

  As the sun rolled over the yardarm, Charlotte poured a glass of wine and discarded the cards in favour of the newspaper. She knew that committing Sean to the requisite amount of hours and skills required for sprucing up the garden was just the wrong side of optimistic, but to get out of doing it herself, she would need to be more gainfully occupied.

  This would mean a job. Charlotte had no qualms about this. She had never been so domestically pious as to think there was any reason she could not maintain a house, even if children did eventually trot along.

  It was slim pickings, though. The best opportunity for something undemanding, part-time and convenient would be some sort of menial job at the hospital, which was within walking distance and probably quite pleasant in the spring. If she did choose to drive, then…

  Something caught her eye.

  Something out in the garden.

  Charlotte put down her glass and hauled herself off the sofa – no mean feat, given the extent to which it sagged. She walked to the window and looked out.

  Immediately outside the rear window was a rough stone patio, with four heavy flagstone steps leading down to the garden proper. The lawn – such as it was; the grass was almost waist-height – was about the length of a cricket pitch and twice as wide. The beds that surrounded it were heaving with nettles, bindweed and ground elder. In the corner was the skeleton of a rusted greenhouse; most of the glass had been smashed, and that which remained was caked with green moss.

  And then, beyond the greenhouse, that opaque nothingness of green forest that was so thick it looked black. How could such a bright and powerful sun fail to penetrate it in the middle of the day?

  She squinted, but saw nothing out there in the wet green. The windows needed a clean; that was probably why. Using her as-yet-undepleted reserves of practical determination to ignore the unease rising in her gullet, she hurried to the kitchen and returned with newspapers, warm water and a sponge.

  She walked out onto the patio without a sweater or coat; the sun, although deceptively bright, was providing little warmth today, and the shiver passed through her unexpectedly.

  She faced the windows and rubbed at the windows vigorously. They obviously hadn’t been cleaned in some time, and she managed to exert herself fairly quickly.

  She spun around suddenly. Her ankle nudged the plast
ic bowl as she did so, and grimy dregs of soapy water splashed onto the patio, darkening the flagstones. Some soaked into her tights, chilling her skin instantly.

  It was ridiculous, but the discomfort at turning her back on the forest was worse than facing it. The unease spread down her back, but she still could see nothing in the black hole that led into the forest.

  Charlotte…

  The wind whispered through the shaking trees, and Charlotte ran into the house. She convinced herself that this was because, even in irrational retreat, she was practical. It was simply a case of knowing when to cut your losses.

  She wrapped her arms around her torso as she ran, and the slight distortion to her coordination that this caused meant her shin heavily struck the coffee table as she passed through the drawing room. The half-mast bottle of Jacob’s Creek shuddered and then fell, and the pack of cards fluttered to the floor.

  *

  With its deep colours and dark wood, the house was cosy after daylight fell. There were gaslight wall lamps dotted throughout the house, and the wood burner glowed warmly in the corner of the drawing room. With the heavy drapes pulled tight across the window, anything lurking out there in the darkness was banished to the imagination.

  Charlotte had forgotten about her thirty seconds of paranoia by the time Sean arrived home. They ate a simple dinner and Charlotte poured them a glass of wine each. After Sean had loaded the dishwasher – a little housewarming treat to themselves, one that Charlotte felt repaid its initial cost a million times over – he took his wine and newspaper through to the drawing room.

  Charlotte hesitated in the doorway. Sean sat on the enormous sagging sofa, and patted the seat next to him.

  “Care to join me in the drawing room?” he said, his tone gently playful.

  “It’s just a lounge,” she said, and sat down; not on the sofa, but on the armchair next to it.

  Sean frowned.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. He was apparently satisfied with this, and turned his attention to the paper.