Free Bubblegum Smoothie by Ryan Casey

plenty of time.
    I moved towards the pavement between the steaming hot engines of cars and I realised the traffic didn’t stop at the typically offending lights.
    There was a gridlock. A complete gridlock, right in the middle of the crossroads. Cars honked at each other. The lights were green now, but nobody was moving at any real speed. A boiling hot day and everyone was stuck in a jam. What wonders that would have on the collective mood of miserable old Preston.
    I ran into the middle of the crossroads, through the gridlocked traffic, which barely moved. The Black Bull got closer. To look at it, the gridlock went on to there. Traffic was… well, it was moving much easier beyond that. Maybe something had gone down. An accident, something like that.
    I crossed over onto the pavement. Kept on jogging and remembered why the hell I’d given up jogging in the first place, as a nagging stitch gnawed at my ribs.
    Breathe deeply. Taste the Lockets. Let them guide you…
    The beer garden of the Black Bull was close. It was surprisingly empty for a sunny day like today. Emptier than it had been earlier. Which was strange, because more people would be finishing work now. More people would be…
    And then I saw him.
    I saw him in the middle of the pelican crossing. He was surrounded by a small crowd of people.
    I slowed down. Felt a twinge in my gut, although I couldn’t place it.
    Gus was lying in the road. The people around him, they were laughing. Jesus. He’d not passed out, had he? Had too much to drink? That would be just typical. Just perfect for his reputation.
    It was as I got closer that I realised that the crowd around him weren’t laughing at all.
    The cars causing the gridlock were outside the Bull. In fact, Gus was the one causing the gridlock. Everyone in those cars were staring through their windows.
    Staring with horror on their faces as they looked at the man on the ground.
    And the people surrounding Gus. They weren’t laughing. They were crying.
    I gulped as I got closer. Gulped a nasty regurgitated Locket, which wasn’t quite as tasty coupled with what was in front of me.
    I looked down at Gus’s body. Looked down at the blood pooling out from underneath his mass of weight.
    “He’s—he’s dead,” a pale-faced man with greasy, curly locks said. “He’s… his pulse. He’s dead.”
    As “Move On Up” blasted from the sound system of a nearby car, I stared at the pile of shiny coins spilling out of Gus’s static hand, out onto the road.

THIRTEEN
    He speeds down the road and he can’t stop smiling and laughing.
    His car bounces with the booming sound of “Move On Up.” He plays it over and over again, louder every time, each listen just getting more and more joyous.
    But the joy is for what he is about to do. How he is going to finish off the third victim. How much fun he’s going to have with her.
    He looks at the pocketknife, wrapped in clear plastic, on his passenger seat. He didn’t want to kill the fatso, not really. Now don’t mistake this for sentimentality—he had no problems killing anyone. And he always knew he was going to kill fatso at some point. But he’d been an easy ticket. An easy part of his jigsaw puzzle—easy to bribe. And he’d helped get him his knife, helped with the girl on top of the squad car. He’d been a great help.
    “Rest in peace, fatso,” he says, and lifts an imaginary glass into the air.
    But as he turns onto his street, something niggles away at him. Dissatisfaction.
    And that dissatisfaction comes in the form of the greying, checkered-shirt-wearing snoop and his disgusting he-she it friend.
    Just the thought of him makes his heart speed up. Makes his palms clammy. Because he wasn’t a part of the plan. If he hadn’t been snooping around, maybe fatso wouldn’t have had to die just yet. He is a problem. A problem that needs to be dealt with in the same way as all problems.
    Carefully but ruthlessly.
    He pulls up into his driveway and hits a button to