Free [PS & GV #6] Death on Demand by Jim Kelly Page B

brown irises wide and watery, like a fish glimpsed in the shallows, and with the same fleeting impermanence.
    He’d parked the second-hand BMW soft-top in its usual spot. Once, a year earlier during his training, he’d let a diazepam tablet confuse him so much he’d spent forty-five minutes searching for his own car. But he walked directly to the BMW tonight, and driving at a modulated fifteen miles per hour, headed for the exit, his hyper-awareness acute, so that he watched a bunch of teenagers on a street corner opposite, sharing a cigarette, the lit butt glowing brightly on its downward trajectory to the concrete forecourt. Beyond the barrier-exit a police patrol car sat purring in a layby, so that his heartbeat picked up, and for the first time that day he felt globes of sweat prickling along his forehead. As he drove away he checked the rear-view mirror to make sure the police weren’t following.

    Lynn’s Vancouver Centre shopping complex, refurbished this year in vibrant pastel shades, had been re-designed to incorporate a small block of ‘luxury’ flats, behind a gated car-bay. Planners, caustic about the deserted shopping malls of the 1980s, wanted people like Gokak Roy – young, salaried, single – to reinvigorate the town. He was only inside the flat for ten minutes: time enough for a shower, clean jeans, T-shirt and trainers. Then he was dancing down the stairs, his ankles sending little jolts of joy through his bones.
    His uncle’s restaurant was three streets away and empty when he put his head in, so he said he’d eaten at work. Then he ran, laughing, down Eastman Street, to Ja-Ja’s – a basement bar, full of friends. He had four shots of vodka with a pint of lager and Sean, the barman, said he was on a roll, although the words seemed to float into his head as if they were falling leaves. At one point a girl, in white shorts and a ripped T-shirt, had licked his ear and he’d said something and she’d simply walked away. The disappointment, the frustration, felt like it might bloom into anger so he went to the toilet and popped two more diazepam. When he got back to the bar Sean had lined up three shots, each a kind of petroleum blue in colour, which he downed to the sound of applause.
    Back in the flat, in the small hours, he forced himself to re-engage with his daily routine, setting up a saline drip by the bedside which would rehydrate his body overnight, so that when he woke up he might feel physically as if he’d been hit by a truck, but there’d be no actual pain, no headache, no nausea. The headlong chaos of his interior life could continue, masked by its crisp, carefully nurtured, facade.

    Sitting on the bedside, naked, he’d seen the envelope on the distant mat at the end of the corridor. He must have walked straight over it a few minutes earlier.
    On the outside it said simply GOKAK in an eccentric curling script he’d come to know well. Inside, he would find a date, a time, but no indication of place, because that was always the same. Sitting on the floor, he began to cry, the envelope on his knees. He knew that if he failed to rip open the letter his life would be over, but that if he did rip it open this simple action would set in motion a lethal series of events, which would begin in earnest after he parked the BMW under a street light as he always did, and slipped into the shadows beneath the Lister Tunnel.

NINE
    T he desktop PC glowed in the suburban dark of midnight. Nothing moved in the silent cul-de-sac outside the curtainless window as DC Mark Birley stretched until his bones cracked. Pushing the heel of his right hand into an eye-socket, he massaged the muscles, seeing a kaleidoscope of colours dance across the darkness, before forcing himself to re-focus on the screen’s six mini-images.
    CAMERA A: looking west, showed the ‘tradesman’s’ entrance to Marsh House, consisting of a tarmac parking area, surrounded by hydrangeas, reaching up more than fifteen feet. A