Candleburn

by Jack Hayes

  “So you thought you’d drive into the middle of the Empty Quarter so we could die of heat stroke before the authorities got to us?”

  In the back of the car, Boxcat meowed inside his carrying case. Blake took a deep drag of his cigarette.

  “Got another of those?” Asp asked. “I feel like I could really use one.”

  “There’s a packet floating around in the glove compartment somewhere,” Blake replied. “But to answer your earlier question – no. We’re heading for the Al Qatain oil facility, run by a British consortium under licence from the government. It has its own air strip.”

  “How does that help us?” Asp asked, fishing a cigarette from the packet and lighting the end. “Someone still has to fly us.”

  “Those kind guys who dropped the foam on the bomb,” Blake said. “Fire fighting is their secondary business. Primarily they operate an emergency response service paid for by international insurance companies. It’s a medical flight that uses a Lear Jet. Basically, it can stop off legitimately at any airfield in the region it likes, provided the insurance paperwork is all valid. Our destination will be the British Air Force base in Cyprus.”

  Asp sucked on the end of his cigarette.

  “Good plan,” he replied. “We’ll just be two random oil workers until we’re too far away to realise who was on the flight...”

  A look of confusion crossed his face. He coughed on the intensity of the smoke in his lungs.

  “What the hell is this?” he said. “Did you change brands?”

  “What?” Blake asked.

  “This morning,” Asp stated. “You definitely started today smoking menthols. These are heavy tar. Look: the filter on this one is orange with yellow flecks...”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Blake replied, reaching the end of his cigarette.

  He leaned forward and stubbed out the butt in the brimming ashtray.

  Asp looked at the filter of the cigarette between his fingers, then at the contents of the ashtray.

  “You’ve got to be joking...” he said.

  In his hand he kept staring at the colour of the filter. It was orange, with yellow flecks.

  “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Blake shook his head.

  “You swapped them!” Asp said. “Somehow, sometime today – you swapped the cigarettes in the box for three you’d smoked!”

  Blake reached out and removed the ashtray from the car’s dashboard. It was near overflowing with spent butts and cold grey, cinders. He took the plastic holder in a single hand and, as the Audi reached the pinnacle of the dune, shook the contents out into the wind.

  Burnt ash mixed with sand and cigarette butts on the strong breeze.

  Some of the filters were white with green stripes.

  Others were orange, with yellow flecks.

  Rising high on the gusts, they were carried off across the vastness of the Empty Quarter, never to be seen by human eyes again.

  In seconds, they vanished.

  “Harry would make an excellent king,” Blake said, returning the empty ashtray to its home. “The man’s a hero. Everything else is irrelevant.”

  “You crafty, crafty bastard,” Asp chuckled.

  “And, God willing, we’ll never have to find out,” Blake said.

  A Note from Jack Hayes

  The market for books is crowded and it can be difficult for exciting new works to stand out from the crowd. Now, more than ever, word of mouth is the key marketing tool authors have to rely on to get noticed. If you enjoyed this book, please find time to review on Websites such as Amazon & Goodreads – and most importantly, please recommend it to your friends.

  If you enjoyed Candleburn, or my other books - Dead Man Rising, Overtime and Blood Red Sea - and would like to get in touch you visit my Internet page: http://www.jackhayes.co.uk or join me on Twitter: @JackHayesAuthor

  If you enjoyed reading Candleburn you might be interested in Overtime by Jack Hayes, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Overtime by Jack Hayes

  Chapter 1

  The first time I met Josh Wheeler, he was already dead. His body sat behind the wheel of a bright-red ‘73 Corvette, twisted and half-slipped beneath the seatbelt. One arm dangled through the open door onto the pavement. The other lay limp at his side.

  He was dressed like a man who was used to the nightclub scene and wanted to appear deep and mysterious: black jeans, black polo-neck sweater, black $1000 crocodile-skin shoes and a silver-tinted belt-buckle the size of a curled fist. Blood was lightly stippled around a hole in his temple, taking the appearance of a cobweb tattoo.

  To get such a shot you’d have to be close. Real close. Almost nestling the barrel against the skin. Frankly, the idea of the killer getting so intimate before pulling the trigger was strangely at odds with the look of complete surprise frozen on the corpse’s gaunt face.

  I glanced at the policeman and shrugged my shoulders.

  “I just don’t know. He called me. He said he wanted to meet at the Waffle House over there for breakfast.”

  I pointed with my thumb at the small café on the major road at the end of the alley. This was a grim little passageway between two tall buildings that stretched high enough to block all light from the brilliant cyan sky above. It was a dark and spiteful place. It stank of urine. It stank of mould. It smelt like death.

  Discarded piles of cardboard boxes, still damp from the overnight drizzle, were stacked along the walls. Over time the mounds tumbled apart and the cartons got flattened until, covering the floor like a giant carpet, they simply rotted away. The result was that every footfall squelched as you walked, making your possibilities for sneaking up on someone unnoticed seem limited at best. There was little alternative to simply walking in blasé and firing from point blank range. Wheeler must have seen or heard the killer – so why the shock on his face?

  “Do you know why he wanted to meet you?”

  The policeman reminded me why I was here. He didn’t look up. He just hurriedly scrawled down word after word into a small, bound, leather notebook with a lightly chewed plastic pen. I read his name badge: Officer Hartley.

  “The conversation wasn’t long. Wheeler wouldn’t say what it was about on the phone. He wasn’t nervous, he was too calculating for that – if anything he had a “weaselly” voice. There was something he wanted to share with me for a profit.”

  Hartley slowed his scribbling for a second. His slightly laborious monotone lifted a little, perhaps even gaining the faintest hint of enthusiasm.

  “Weaselly? You sound like you made out quite a bit about him from just a phone call.”

  “That’s part of my job. I’m a quick study of people.”

  “You, like, a psychiatrist or something?”

  “No. I work for the ‘Black Ears’.”

  He shook his head. His writing quickened again. Perhaps in his world non-psychiatrists can’t tell how someone sounds on the phone – either that or he just wasn’t a Black Ears fan.

  Far behind Officer Hartley, near the centre of the crime scene, a tall blond man dressed in a 1940s trench coat, marched back and forth among the overflowing aluminium trash cans.

  His face was pock-marked. In his teenaged years he’d probably been scarred with bad acne. He stood with his legs strong and wide, head held high, exuding the signals of authority – and yet, there was an uneasiness, the feeling of a man somewhat out of his depth. He wind-milled his arms. He pointed with hard stabbing movements. And when he spoke his words came out too fast, as if he was worried that said any slower they might be questioned.

  Occasionally, he would pause and rummage through a bin’s top few items, hold a Coke can or a broken bottle aloft and study its facets from different angles in his leather-gloved hands. I don’t know what he was doing. He must have known they were irrelevant to the case. Then again, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was an idiot. It was too early to say.

  When you see the world through my
eyes it can seem like people become caricatures. That’s a dangerous route to take. Forget the probabilities and when those people act outside your tightly defined expectations you’ll be surprised. In this line of work, surprise can lead to an early death.

  When the item failed whatever criteria the detective had in mind, he tossed it over his shoulder among the black plastic bags that lined the alley floor, invariably sending the odd rodent scarpering for cover. Then he stopped and directed different people to continue where he’d left off.

  Wrong. It was all wrong.

  The body language of important people is usually subtle because authority carries influence that makes overbearing movement unnecessary. The blond man’s gestures were too large to go with his seniority. Clearly, he was insecure. But was there more to it than that?

  All this time, at his side, a young black protégé stood following his actions with reverence. Perhaps almost awe. When the blond man spoke, the black detective nodded his head vigorously like one of those toy dogs you find in the back of people’s cars. As they marched towards me along the passageway, they might have been lifted straight from a Monty Python sketch. They walked step in step, the blond man shouting at other officers as he passed them, his “yes-man” sidekick repeating his commands almost verbatim.

  I hate “yes men”. They piss me off.

  “How well did you know him?” Hartley asked, bringing my gaze back from the crime scene.

  “Who? Oh, Josh – no, not at all. I flew into Miami three days ago from England. This is my first day doing public relations for the Black Ears. You can check my credentials with them. Josh was the second groundskeeper at the club so I didn’t even know how he looked like until I came out and saw the body on this side street. I’ve got to be honest with you, being at the scene of a murder five minutes into my job isn’t exactly how I saw things happening today.”

  “Why Tequesta – it’s not exactly New York?” “For the position. New challenge, more money. It just felt right.”

  Hartley nodded. He thought for a few seconds. Scratching the inside of his wrist, he exposed a small tattoo of a star in a circle surrounded by laurel wreaths.

  In a secluded alley such as this it was doubtful they’d have many witnesses who’d actually seen the murder. Mind you, in this area of town, there could have been a crowd around the car whooping and hollering when it happened and the moment the police arrived, as if by magic, there still wouldn’t have been any witnesses.

  “Are we done yet?” I asked.

  “No, I need to take down your details. What’re your age, height, hair and eye colours?”

  Jesus Christ. What a fuck wad.

  “You’re standing in front of me. If you can’t answer those questions for yourself how the hell do you expect to solve a murder?”

  Hartley stopped writing. He stared at me. For a second I thought he might lose his cool. Instead he snorted a slight laugh.

  “Good point. You’ve got spunk for a suit. I didn’t expect that from how you look. All the same, you’re going to have to come down the precinct and give us a full statement.” “Can I do it later? First day for a new employer and all, I don’t want to be late.”

  Officer Hartley agreed reluctantly.

  “Before you leave the scene though, I need you to take a GSR test.”

  “Gunshot residue?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You haven’t fired a firearm recently have you?”

  “No,” I said derisively. “As I said, I’m English. We don’t tend as a rule to carry them around.”

  “If you’re thinking of staying in this town, you might want to reconsider that. Are you familiar with how to use one?”

  “I’ve led an interesting and varied life.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Come with me.”

  Hartley walked me over to a member of the forensics team. As we passed closer to the car, I got a better look at the scene. Nasty. A small pool of blood had formed on the road underneath where Josh’s head leaned uneasily out the door. It looked sticky, like drying molasses. Inside, the far window was a mess; shattered and covered with bits of skull and brain.

  Wheeler’s right hand, the one by his side, was neither fully open nor fully closed. His thumb and forefinger were clenched together. Between them I could see a tiny fragment of something. From here it looked like a small corner piece of paper, relatively low grade, though any closer examination was difficult without drawing unwanted attention.

  Hartley gave a little light banter to the forensics techie as I was processed.

  “Can you hold your hands out here, please?” a man in jeans and a shirt asked. His clothes seemed sloppy for a forensic criminologist. You’d think to lower the risk of scene contamination he’d have worn a boiler suit, or at the least, some kind of uniform.

  “Sure.”

  As he padded them with chemicals and nodded at the negative result, I pointed to the tall blond man. He was now on the far side of the investigation teams telling some girl in her early twenties that she wasn’t doing her job the way he wanted. Then he gestured to the young black man and shouted: “Paul, for god’s sake, show her how to do it correctly.”

  “Who’s that? Is he in charge?”

  The forensics guy turned to take a peek.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s our very own Tequesta super sleuth, Carl Roberg.”

  “Super Sleuth?”

  “Rumour has it that he used to be really good, back when he first joined us here in Tequesta. Came up from Miami and brought the big city techniques with him. Been slacking off, though – bungled his last few cases. Probably it explains why he’s been put down here on this one.”

  “Surely a murder’s a murder?” I asked.

  “This is a relatively minor incident,” Officer Hartley cut across. “Folks get killed in this part of town all the time. It used to be that Carl Roberg got the slightly tougher cases...” he shrugged and trailed off.

  The forensics man laughed: “That’s what you say. I say since Jacquelyn he’s past it.”

  “That so? Who was Jacquelyn?”

  Before Hartley could answer, Roberg stared over in my direction and shouted out.

  “Hartley, have you taken down his statement?”

  “An initial one, sir, he’ll get down to the precinct later to fill out a full one. We’re just GSRing him now.”

  “Is he clear?”

  Hartley looked at the forensics specialist, who nodded.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then get him the hell off my crime scene.”

  Hartley raised his eyes to heaven.

  “Okay, we’re done here, you can go.”

  Hartley looked slightly put out as we walked away from the test. It could have been the dressing down from Roberg but something about his demeanour whispered a different message. I think a small part of him had genuinely expected me to be the killer. He probably hoped that the simple residue test would prove it. Perhaps he even hoped for a full, teary-eyed confession, with me begging to be put in cuffs. Naturally, the result would earn him a commendation.

  I smiled.

  “What’s so funny?” Hartley asked as he accompanied me to the edge of the crime scene.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t guilty,” I replied.

  An awkward expression crossed his face as he stared at me.

  “We’re all guilty of something.”

  He grinned churlishly and lifted the yellow police tape just high enough that I could bend below the striped ribbon. As I ducked beneath it I heard the black investigator call out: “Found something, Carl.”

  Roberg looked over at him as he held out a long dark hair and bagged it. I wanted to pause and eavesdrop more but as the officer lowered the yellow tape, I was besieged by three reporters and a camera team.

  Journalists. Mouths all flapping at once as they spewed questions jumbled together so I couldn’t hear a word they’re saying. I didn’t smile. My heart beat didn’t flutter. Journalists are pack animals. If they smell fear, they’ll r
ip you apart.

  “One at a time, please gentlemen.”

  I introduced myself. There seemed little need; they already knew exactly who I was.

  “Dave Paschal, Morning Star. Do you have a comment on the killing here?”

  I looked at him and took in how he moved. I pulled a cigarette from my pocket. Slowly, methodically, I tapped it twice on the back of my hand. The reporters looked at one another as I put it in my mouth and lit it. In Florida, smoking a cigarette is in the same category as picking your nose in public. Smoking in front of journalists with video cameras is like picking your nose publicly and then, after careful consideration of the bounty retrieved, choosing to eat it.

  Dave looked pensive as I took a long puff of the cigarette. Just as he readied himself to ask the question again, I replied.

  “Not at the present time Dave. This is a police investigation and they must be allowed to proceed free from idle speculation. The Tequesta Black Ears are fully supportive of their efforts to determine what has happened here today.”

  With that, I brushed past them and moved swiftly but calmly to my car. The reporters continued to follow, asking questions. If the Black Death ever makes a comeback it’d do well to ignore the rats and hitch a lift on this modern endemic vermin.

  “Dustin Barnegat, Vinewood Valley Times. Do you think this death is related to the murder victim’s job at the Black Ears?”

  Dustin less spoke the query, more sniffed it. When he finished, he rubbed his nose with his hand. It was a dangerous question. I finished the cigarette. Answer no and I’d be a liar. Answer yes and I’d probably be fired.

  “To be honest with you, right now I have no idea.”

  I flicked the cigarette to one side and climbed in the car. Terrific. Now, before I’ve even started there’s a press quote from me on a murder case.

  Shit.

  I’m going to end up just like my Dad.

  Chapter 2

  The Black Ear’s stadium was built among the docks. Fifty years ago the town had been a major destination for shipping traffic but these days, the bigger container vessels went elsewhere. The area was now an open wasteland of car parks and empty warehousing. Without the stadium, I couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would come to this corner of Tequesta.