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

let go.
    “I’ve always been quick to congeal,” said Junior proudly.
    Felix used a wing from the chicken to point at Misha. “We nuked her grandparents,” he said.
    “What’s that again?”
    “Her grandparents. World War Two. We nuked ’em.”
    “And now you’re fucking the survivors,” said Junior with a grin.
    Felix ignored him. “Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Bang! Powie! We vaporized ’em, Junior. Nothing left but shadows on a wall.”
    “Don’t blame me. I wasn’t even born.”
    “I know how old you are,” said Felix. “I know how old I am, too.” He wriggled his toes in the sand. The sand was cool and it felt good. Firm. Resisting, but yielding. He wriggled deeper. “Tell me what happened last night,” he said.
    Junior shrugged. “Nothing much. He used the van I told him about. Picked up the kid and took him to a parking lot under an apartment building. Chopped him up and left him and the van in the park.”
    “What park?”
    “Stanley Park. You know Second Beach?”
    Felix nodded. “After that, then what?”
    “Beats me.”
    “You see him actually do the killing?”
    “No, I didn’t. You told me not to get too close.”
    “Did I?”
    “Before he picked up the kid, he stopped off at a grocery store and bought something.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know. Toilet paper, maybe.”
    “You don’t think too much of Mannie, do you?”
    “No, I wouldn’t say that at all. You need somebody to fetch your newspaper in off the porch, he’d be just about perfect.”
    Felix finished his beer. He threw the empty bottle towards the water. It skittered across the sand and spun to a stop fifty feet away, end on. “Can you hit that from here?”
    “Easy,” said Junior, not even bothering to look.
    Felix took off his wide-brimmed straw hat and scratched vigorously at the liver spots high up on his forehead, where his hairline used to be. “We got one down and two to go. What I’d like is to let Mannie do the work, and then kill him.”
    “Fine with me.”
    “In the meantime, you keep an eye on him. If he starts to get in over his head, then you go right ahead and pull the plug.”
    “My pleasure,” said Junior.
    “That is,” said Felix with a mocking smile, “if you think you can handle the guy all by yourself.”
    Junior ripped his shirt in his hurry to get out the Colt. The long barrel slowed him down, but not enough to notice. He thumbed back the hammer. The blade front sight bisected the dark brown disc. He squeezed the trigger. The Magnum went off like a cannon, and a fountain of sand erupted a foot to the right of the bottle.
    “Fuck!” shouted Junior. He thumbed back the hammer for a quick second shot.
    Misha screamed and jumped up, found herself right in the line of fire.
    “Rise and shine!” said Felix cheerfully.

 
     
     
    Chapter 10
     
    The pilot kept the engine running and the power on. Willows pushed the sliding door open and dropped blindly into a maelstrom of dust and small pebbles. Above him the whirling blades spun and clattered, dicing and chopping the air. There was plenty of headroom, but Willows found himself crouching as he trotted down the road towards his Oldsmobile. He was halfway to the car when the helicopter lifted off, the rising scream of the engines and the thud of bruised air pounding down at him in waves.
    It was nice to be back on the ground. The short trip down the mountain had been claustrophobic. A puddle of river water had collected under the stretcher, and vibrations transmitted through the metal floor had made the corpse quiver endlessly, as if it was alive and shivering with fear. Willows reflected, not for the first time, how odd it was that the dead always used up so much more space than the living.
    Willows unlocked the boot. His service revolver was as he had left it, hidden under the spare tyre and wrapped in a clean white cloth. He put away his gear, shut the boot, got into the car and started the engine. The windscreen, like the rest of the