Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery) by Laurence Gough Read Free Book Online Page A

pornographic magazine splashed light back at her. The stiff, clawed fingers of a blood-streaked hand seemed to scuttle sideways as the shadow of the hand moved beneath the moving beam of light. She saw the slashed bed, tufts of foam rubber mattress. A smooth white face. Lacquered eyes. A mouth that hung wide open and might still have been screaming. A shirt of red and black, with more holes in it than a cribbage board.
    In shock, Parker started to count the wounds.
    A black car sped past, tape-deck blaring, tyres whining on the asphalt. The sudden intrusion startled Parker, got her thinking again. She switched off the flashlight and yanked her Smith & Wesson out of her purse.
    Backing out of the van, taking care not to touch anything, she called out, “Okay Eddy, let’s go.”
    “What?” said Orwell. His voice was smudged. He was sobering rapidly, but he was still a long way from legal. Parker grabbed him by the arm and led him away from the scene of the crime, towards the bright lights of the restaurant. Parker was with the city of Vancouver’s serious crimes squad. Solving homicides was part of her job. As she hustled a confused Eddy Orwell back across the lawn, she was thinking that probably the first person she should phone was her partner, Jack Willows.
    Then she remembered that Willows had gone fishing, and that he wasn’t due back in the city for another two days…

 
     
     
    Chapter 7
     
    Mannie adjusted the temperature of the water until it was so hot it hurt. He stepped under the spray and slid shut the pebbled glass door. Water drummed on his skull and poured down his face, into his eyes. His shoulders reddened. He tasted salt — a legacy of his recent ocean voyage.
    There was a narrow green belt between the beach and the parking lot where he had dumped the van. Once he had reached this cover, Mannie stripped down to his bathing suit. He rolled his sticky bundle of cheap clothes into a ball and flung the ball high into the fork of a tree. Then he strolled down to the sea wall, across the sand, and into the ocean.
    When he was about fifty feet out, he paused to tread water and orient himself. The sky was crowded with stars. Tinker Bell had been putting in overtime. Whispered conversations and soft laughter floated across the waves. Mannie smelled beach smoke, and hot dogs. He started swimming again, taking a course that would bring him to shore about two hundred yards away from the point where he had entered the water.
    It took him a quarter of an hour to walk the mile of winding seawall to English Bay. The sight of a man in a bathing suit was not unusual; no one paid any attention to him.
    His towel, cords, leather sandals and Lacoste polo shirt lay exactly as he had left them, in a tidy pile at the end of a log. His wallet and car keys were also as he’d left them, buried under six inches of sand. He picked everything up, went into the big concrete changing room and dressed. His bathing suit was still damp. He squeezed a few drops of water out of the material, rolled the suit up in the towel, and went back outside.
    Hum of soft rubber wheels on asphalt. Blur of music. Mannie looked up as a black girl wearing a red and white diagonal striped bathing suit shot by on roller-skates. A portable radio was strapped to her narrow waist. Her hair was twisted into two stiff braids that stuck out over her head like antennae. She looked like a mobile barber’s pole. Mannie watched her undulate into the darkness. Murder always made him horny, why was that? He started up the concrete steps to street level, the slap of his sandals seeming to applaud his every step.
    The water was cooling. Mannie stooped to adjust the mix of hot and cold. He massaged a pale green worm of shampoo into his scalp, rinsed, shampooed, and rinsed again. Turning to face the spray, he used a nail-brush to get rid of the black crescents of dried blood beneath his fingernails.
    When he was satisfied that he’d washed the last of the evidence