Theresa Nash
Apr 27, 2016 | Crime, 1st pages
ONE
The sharp metallic sound of steel-capped heels on black combat boots echoed through the corridor, keeping time with all the paraphernalia tapping against the guards’ thighs—keys dangling from metal chains, walkie-talkies, and black wooden Billy clubs. The stocky female escorts, a blonde and a brunette, both with hard chiseled features, were bored and uninterested. This was routine for them; another day, another prisoner.
Musty sweaty odors, mingled with those of stale food, drifted through the air. Walking along on either side of their prisoner tightly holding her upper arms, the guards escorted Kate to what would be her new home for a few years. She stared straight ahead, her peripheral vision taking in the gray cell bars, the gray walls, the gray atmosphere, and the empty cells. All the “ladies” were at lunch. She thought the city jail drab and unwelcoming. This one was slightly worse.
D. B. Silvis
Apr 27, 2016 | Crime, 1st pages
Max Manchester, an All-Pro Miami Dolphin linebacker, was in the living room of his fashionable Key Biscayne home, watching Sunday Night Football on ESPN, when the front door burst open. Max jumped to his feet as three men entered. Two of them were huge, with multi-colored tattoos covering their burly arms. They looked like professional wrestlers. The third was a short, balding, gaudily dressed man in his mid-fifties.
“Who the hell, are you?” Max shouted.
The two large muscle-bound men rushed at him, and then the three, all big men, engaged in a vicious fight. Lamps and vases smashed onto the reddish-brown tiled floor; chairs and tables were overturned; a mirror and several works of art were destroyed. Throughout the melee the short man stood by the open doorway and watched calmly. Max, wild and violent, was holding his own against the two men. After a minute or two the short man, who was evidently in charge, seemed to realize that his goons weren’t going to be able to subdue the strong pro football player. He pulled out a gun and struck Max on the side of the head. Dazed, Max fell to his knees. Through glassy eyes, he looked up at the short man, who struck him again with the gun.
As Max Manchester regained consciousness, he felt himself gagging. Slowly he opened his eyes and spat the liquid in his mouth out; he saw that it was blood. The three intruders were looking down at him. He found he was lying on his back, spread-eagled on his king-size bed with all four limbs tied to the bedposts. He struggled to move his arms and to get up but couldn’t. Then he tried in vain to kick at one of the huge men standing at the foot of the bed.
John Benacre
Apr 22, 2016 | Crime, 1st pages
A Glimpse of Camelot
Both men were still laughing from the joke they’d just shared. Cahal Brady walked across the room, kicked-off his shoes and then followed the relaxed wave of his younger half-brother to take the seat opposite him. A drink already awaited him, glinting amber in its glass.
They were hard and determined men who knew they had immense power right across Ireland, although unbeknown to them then even greater influence was just around the corner, and they believed they were in their prime. Cahal was forty-three and Frank O’Neill was two years his junior, and both were the mortal embodiment of alpha males; yet Frank’s achievements were gilded with a subtlety and charisma that set him apart. Coincidentally they were about the same age that Michael McCann would be (although not yet born) nearly half a century later, when Frank would send him on his mission to London in 2013.
Despite the stark and monochrome austerity of 1960s Dublin, Frank’s suite in the Gresham Hotel had a smug grandeur to it; a little like Frank himself. It was seductively lit, lavishly furnished, and it smelled of leather, wood polish and cigars. Sinatra crooned quietly on the wireless and Frank reclined in one of two deep armchairs with his stockinged feet atop a small round coffee table below the window. Cahal put his feet up too and sat like an opposing bookend in the other. He had a hole in one sock. And yet, despite their life-long intimacy and the blood they had mingled – both theirs and others’ – they made sure their toes didn’t quite touch.
The big double bed was turned-down, plumped-up and ready for sleep, but it was for Frank only. Unusually that is. For once something other than a woman had brought him into the capitol and his sheets when he climbed in later would be strangely cold. As their laughter subsided he rolled a cut-crystal tumbler in his mighty hands and blew a swirl of cigar smoke into the air above his sibling. It was the early hours of Wednesday the 5th of June 1968 and a day that would soon resonate right around the world. But that would be in eight hours’ time, when they met-up again for breakfast and at something after 1 am in Los Angeles the same day.
James D Mortain
Apr 21, 2016 | Crime, 1st pages
Prologue
What made someone the ideal victim? he speculated.
Were they created that way, right from the start? Was it a case of nature or nurture? On the other hand, was it all down to luck, perhaps? Maybe they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. He chuckled. There was no such thing as the wrong time. Everyone had a time, regardless of how it may play out.
He stared down intently at the washed-out family snap as if it was the first time he had seen it. The truth was, he had studied this photo many times before and with equal fascination.
He was alone. There was no noise from the TV or radio, only the sound of his own trancelike, metronomic breathing, eyes refusing to deviate from the photo as he gazed down at Mum, Dad and himself.
To anyone else it would be a classic family photograph: two children, a boy of about six and a girl of about eight, wearing woolly hats and scarves, frolicking in the snow with their parents. For him, though, it was more. It had always meant much more.
Back, then, to the question. He smiled, and closed the two halves of the black faux-leather photo album, carefully placed it into the box and slotted it in the correct position, the right way around, between number 3 and number 5.
He snorted joss stick-scented air through his flared nostrils and cast his mind back. The first was easy – he had been left with little alternative. The second fell somewhere between curiosity and education. And what of the next? He had been counting down her final days since they first met.
She was… ideal, but she was not going to be alone. The one after her, he would leave to fate, and for the sporting hell of it.
S. R. Reynolds
Apr 21, 2016 | Crime, 1st pages, Non Fiction
Larry Lee Smith of the County of Pinellas and State of Florida, and on the 12th day of July in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred eighty-one did insert his penis into the vagina of Katherine McWilliams without the consent of Katherine McWilliams, and in the process thereof used physical force and violence likely to cause serious personal injury, to-wit did choke and strike the victim, thereby causing Katherine McWilliams to submit to said sexual battery.
The State of Florida vs. Larry Lee Smith
He’d circled nearly-empty city blocks more than once, Katherine noticed, before the guy giving her a lift home, late on that summer Sunday evening, finally brought his small truck to a stop in front of an apartment building. Taking in elements of her surroundings, Katherine would remember the white picket fence and the rectangular shape of the four-plex: two units up, two units down, stairs running up the middle.
“Come up with me,” Larry Lee urged his passenger as he reached for the door handle. “It’ll just take a minute.”
“That’s okay,” she replied agreeably. “I’ll wait here.”
“No, come with me. It’ll be quick. I want you to meet some people.”
She breathed a sigh of reluctant submission. “All right,” she surrendered, hoping it would actually speed things along. She really needed to get home.
Michael Donovan
Apr 15, 2016 | Crime, 1st pages
I was sifting paperwork one Monday morning, trying to ignore the northerly that leaked through my office window along with the racket of Westway traffic and commuter trains slowing into Paddington. My electric 2-bar was toasting my feet but making no impression elsewhere in the room, and the cold conspired with the distractions of a weekend's memories to impede concentration. I'd begun to sense a long day looming. Then my intercom kicked into life with an explosion of static that snapped me back to reality with the more immediate prospect of a cardiac.
The thing's an eighties-vintage Motorola I'd picked up on Camden Market and it came with some kind of short-circuit that blasted out static that drowned messages to the untrained ear. I used it mostly for coffee and sandwich orders. I'd had coffee and it was a little early for lunch so I figured something was up. Lucy waited a moment; repeated my name.
‘Mr Flynn. Are you available?' As if she hadn't watched me go into my office twenty minutes back with nothing more than a cup of coffee and a hazy expression. I grinned: it wasn't the pointlessness of the question, it was the way Lucy could “Mr Flynn” me so you'd never imagine the two of us had a history steamier than a Chinese laundry. The history was very old history but something still sparked. Lucy hung on to the desire to mother me even after she'd wrecked my life by ditching me. I put it down to guilt. My Herman Miller chair was tilted back at an awkward angle for business, and I had to strain my abs to get my mouth to the intercom.
‘What's up, Lucy?'
‘There's a visitor to see you.'
‘What visitor?'
‘A Miss Bannister.'
‘We have an appointment?'
‘No.'
That tallied with my memory. We usually see clients by appointment only but I sensed an excuse to defer paperwork. ‘How are we fixed?' I asked. You'd barely notice the pause as Lucy offered to check my diary. Behind the static I heard the sound of blank pages turning.
‘You're free, Mr Flynn.' That tallied too. My excuse was on. I told Lucy to show our guest in and tilted myself upright. Pushed a mess of paperwork aside. Our visitor came through and stopped just inside the door. Lucy followed her in for no reason than to see my reaction. But I can be good at not reacting. My smile barely wavered. Lucy finally got the message and backed out, closing the door. My visitor still didn't move. Maybe it was the look that had replaced my smile. I guess I needed to work on the customer-relations thing.
