Cold Hard Truths 1: Vices
Loose Id Titles by Nash Summers
Cold Hard Truths 1:
VICES
Nash Summers
www.loose-id.com
Cold Hard Truths 1: Vices
Copyright © August 2014 by Nash Summers
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eISBN 9781623004675
Editor: S. N. Graves
Cover Artist: Ginny Glass
Published in the United States of America
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This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Dedication
For Lenore, who taught me about unconditional love.
For TeaHam, who showers me with limitless support.
For unicorns, who shine so damn bright.
Prologue
He used to visit me during the darkest parts of the night. A rough kiss behind my ear, a warm hand on my thigh. His lips and hands and skin would touch my own, always tentatively at first. He’d barely say anything, because he never once needed to. Sometimes I’d lie awake for hours, hoping he’d come to me, fantasizing about him returning to me during the night. Sometimes he did.
He’d rouse me by licking the spot between my shoulder blades and slowly parting my thighs. Slick, cool fingers would run up the skin between my balls and cheeks, pulling me apart and pressing into me. I’d hiss at the cold, invasive sensation, but he’d soothe me by curling his fingers and whispering in my ear.
“Stay asleep,” he’d tell me, “or this won’t be a dream.”
So I’d lie there, lingering in that space between sleep and consciousness, and let him touch me in all the ways he wanted. And when he’d press into me, and I heard him exhale that barely there groan, I’d forget all about the dying world around us.
He made me less cold those nights, warming me somewhere hidden in my chest. The way he touched me brought me alive when all else was numb and void. It was almost like a joke, really, because even when he made me come to life, I knew he was empty inside.
The last time he came to me it was different. I didn’t know then, but I know now, and somewhere buried within me, I wish I didn’t. Thinking about that night tortures my sanity, never letting me know if his entire existence had been real or something my lonely, young mind created to pass the stark nights.
I’d never before questioned what he wanted from me, because I knew all along. Not once had I played a false idol, trying to display some kind of ignorance about my sexual desires and needs. But that last night was different. He’d pinned me under his weight on my bed. He was smaller than me, but the magnitude of him was overbearing. His hand was on the back of my neck, pressing me into the mattress as he fucked me. This wasn’t unusual, but something in the way he held me down was different, if only by a fraction. I came first, him following close behind.
He ran his fingertips through my hair. A blatant sign of some sort of affection neither of us knew anything about; an acknowledgment, at least, that he knew I was a person, not just his toy. The tentative smile I gave him over my shoulder triggered him to pull back his hand as if burned.
He left me that night without uttering a word. I didn’t see him again or feel his touch on my skin, at least not while I was awake.
Chapter One
That crushing sound, the sound of bones breaking, is something you almost never get used to. Bones aren’t supposed to crackle and crunch like that, but the results of that crackling and crunching make my job so much less messy. Still, the sound wasn’t appealing, and no matter who you were, you knew the sound of a bone snapping.
A lifeless body fell to the ground, crumbling in on itself in an unnatural way. Pale, dead eyes stared up at nothing, right past me toward the ceiling. One thing movie directors always seemed to get wrong—not everyone closes their eyes before they die. Or maybe directors wanted to spare our fragile selves from the horror of a dead body staring back at us. Movies had a tendency to make people appear so peaceful and beautiful when they died, but I knew that wasn’t the reality. The reality was a dead thing’s drying eyes gazing, but not seeing, there, but not really. It would decay and rot and smell, shriveling up, mimicking some old piece of fruit. A shell of a body, disposed of and left to crumble, left alone as though it had never once had a soul at all.
Rob Denille was his name, or at least the fake name he’d given himself. Not that I cared either way. His Person Number was 565-7794-2, and since that number had popped up on my tablet, all he’d been to me was dead.
Everyone had a Person Number—well, everyone but me. The state enforces them at the time of birth to keep track of people easier. Numbers are so much more convenient than names, after all, and whatever the state thought was most convenient for itself was law.
I rummaged through his pockets, finding his flimsy wallet with his fake ID neatly tucked inside, a cheap watch, probably stolen, and a small bag with a few tabs of Corx. I snorted. Corx was definitely not the cheapest of the hallucinogenic drugs, and I wondered how this deadbeat had found the money for some fairly premium tabs. I tucked the wallet, watch, and Corx into my pocket; ZeZe would probably want the wallet and maybe the watch. I didn’t plan on telling her about the drugs. If I was lucky, she wouldn’t ask.
His body was wearing the clothing of a beggar, a man who dressed as poor as he was. A ratty old T-shirt with a thin Talcon jacket over top. Talcon manufactured trendy, bulletproof apparel. That was their niche, their market demographic: losers who wanted to outwardly appear nice in protective clothing. Talcon’s advertising campaign slogan for the year was “Cool You, Safe You” and I only knew that because it had been televised all over every electronic billboard, tablet, and personal or public screen that a person would come into contact with. He must’ve been expecting someone to show up and collect on whatever debt he owed, or else he wouldn’t have bothered with the Talcon. Good thing Talcon couldn’t make spine-snapping-proof gear; that’d definitely make my life more difficult.
I didn’t know what 565-7794-2 had done. I knew mostly everything about him though, from his first and second divorces, including his ex-wives’ names and current residences, his drug abuse problems and lust for alcohol, his habit of leaving the bathroom door open when he was taking a piss even if there were women in the room, to all his bank account information, the entire eighteen dollars to his name. I knew his eye color, what shampoo he used, which smells he didn’t like, which restaurants were his favorite, where he lived, where he worked, which side of the bed he preferred to sleep on. I knew absolutely everything about him except the reason why I had killed him.
I’d often thought how pathetic my life was, knowing more about these losers than I knew about myself.
His rented apartment was dingy, dirty, and generally unclean. The walls had once been painted yellow, but were now more like a rotten egg around the corners and the trim, smudged with dirt and smoke stains. Claw marks and pet hair were all over the carpet and furniture, lining the entire place in a fine layer of dust and disease. The place reeked. Like he’d given up on feeding his cat and changing its litter box six months ago. All the furniture was defeated, worn, and ancient—relics he’d so eagerly rescued from the street corner or someone’s garbage bin. The apartment was already small, but all that junk furniture made it impossibly cramped. Hell, my six-foot-five frame barely fit through the tiny door, but that was just how things were built in this part of the city: tiny, crowded, disposable, and cheap. Kind of like the people who lived here.
The small speaker in my ear beeped, so I pressed the button on its side to answer the call.
“
Fin
?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Yes. The leftovers?” I answered, still surveying the empty room and the lifeless body on the carpet. There had to be a cat here somewhere, but I couldn’t see one. I nudged an old housecoat with the toe of my boot to see if the animal was beneath it. As cold-blooded as I told myself I was, the thought of a cat starving to death after I’d killed its only source of food left me with an uneasy feeling in my gut.
“Bed. Make it look like he died in his sleep.”
“No one who knows what a neck’s supposed to look like is going to believe he died in his sleep.”
“Then right his neck as best you can. I’ve paid cops and paramedics to look the other way.”
“Don’t you always?”
“I’m nothing if not crafty. Did you find anything on him?”
I paused for a moment before answering her. “Just a watch and his wallet.”
“That’s all?” She was chastising me like I was a child. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Sometimes I thought ZeZe might’ve known me better than I knew myself. She could always tell when I was hiding something; she was good like that. Her intuition was probably what made her so good at her job.
“I said that was all.”
“If you’re ripping me off, Jones—” she started.
“I’m not,” I snapped back. But I was. We’d agreed that anything found while working a job was her property, especially if it had any value to it. But I could feel the weight of those tabs of Corx in my pocket, and fuck, were they ever heavy. My mind flew just thinking about fingering their smooth casings, then pulling one out and letting it dissolve on my tongue.
I tried to lie to myself, to rationalize how I could get high standing in a dead man’s apartment while talking to my boss through an earpiece. But I couldn’t. I was too hazy when I was high, my reaction time was too slow, and those two pills in my pocket would take me to the clouds. I had to wait; I had to be patient and finish the job at hand, and then I’d be free.
“Meeting?” I asked.
“Usual coffee shop. Forty minutes,” she finished, ringing off.
I sighed and ran my hand over my face, my gaze directed at the corpse on the floor. Well, he wasn’t going to move himself. I squatted down, hauled his body over my left shoulder, and stood up. He was quite a bit heavier than I’d thought, so I stumbled a step or two when getting up. I carried his body along with him to his bedroom, and then flopped it down unceremoniously with his head on the singular pillow and his full length on the mattress. I mentally prepared myself before twisting his neck toward the front. It shifted in a dislocated and unnatural way, but I had to make it seem as realistic as possible for the sake of our dear officers and paramedics. The bones of his neck shifted under my hands, not piercing the skin, luckily.