Prologue

I was dead.

My body just hadn’t realized it yet.

I tried to climb to my feet, but the muscles in my arm had given up long ago and I collapsed to the rain-soaked dirt. The comfortable numbness of defeat welcoming me.

“Get down.”

As I lay there, thunder rumbling and icy droplets stinging my face, I stared at the twisted form of death above me, and I knew the painful truth. This was it. All of my searching, all of my fighting, for nothing. I’d have laughed if I could have remembered how.

Then the voices came again, calling for me to surrender my struggle against the inevitable, dragging me from consciousness.

“Give it up,” they echoed.

I glanced at the bitter rain clouds as colored stars wheeled overhead and time slowed to a crawl. The monster lifted his arm to finish it, and I watched him swing the weapon at my head, beckoning me beyond.

“Blume?!”

Then it all went black.

Hard Fall

A Thomas Blume Novella

P.T Reade

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ONE

Two Weeks Earlier…

They called it autumn here.

I stared at the cheap hotel for a moment, trying to ignore the weight of the hip flask in my jacket. It was only 1.30 in the afternoon, certainly too early to start. Not that the time would have stopped me, but I needed to be at least a little sharp for what was to come. The best idea I came up with to curb the craving was to check out my notes for the latest lame-ass job I’d scraped together from the poor sap only a shade more desperate than me.

I studied the building for a while, trying to understand the allure of dropping down money to stay in a room where the filth of humanity had stayed before me. Parked on the far end of the lot, my car faced the hotel office and the majority of rooms. They were all connected together by a walkway that had been painted a melancholy shade of hospital green. The tone of the place and the drizzle of rain just gave the Newham Inn an air of sadness.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror. The steel blue eyes and hard features of my father looked back. The dark hair now streaked with gray was pure Mom. The rest of the unfortunate state belonged to me.

Thomas Blume: respected New York Police Detective, decorated hero, widower, loser.

With a sigh, I sat forward and waited. The rain teased the roof, just hard enough to make that hypnotic beat on the top of the car — a noise that made me realize how badly I wanted a nap. I didn’t know why I was tired, maybe it was the booze. I certainly didn’t feel like I had done much over the last week.

I remembered reading once that people with jobs behind cubicles, the cogs in the corporate machine staring at computers all day, could become more fatigued than those in manual labor. Something about the screen that did it to them. If that were the case, I figured sitting in a rain-streaked London parking lot, eyeballing a shady-looking joint like this could do the same to a guy. Was it in New Scientist? The memory refused to materialize, and I decided that either way, I didn’t care. I had a job to do and needed to stay at least slightly alert.

Then I felt the smoke curling inside me again. The need for a drink twisting my insides, beckoning sweet numbness and with it the familiar pangs of anger, like hot coals in the pit of my stomach. My old man had died with a dependency on booze, and I had spent my whole life trying not to become him. Here I was making his mistakes all over again. The move to London had done this to me. Drinking was the only way I knew how to cope with the hand I’d been dealt.

The memory of that night haunted me, constantly dragging my mind back to a life, a happiness that was no longer mine. What happened to them had hollowed me out, eaten me away like a slow creeping cancer, until all I had was this grimy excuse for a life. Death seemed to follow me ever since.

Now here I was on the other side of the world, in a city I was rapidly growing to hate. Picking up crappy jobs like this just to get by.

When the silver car pulled up, I was almost relieved. The tormenting thoughts vanished in a brief wash of adrenaline. I was nothing if not dedicated. I had once had a very promising career with the NYPD and the sense of honor, dignity, and perseverance was still ingrained in me. Somewhere. Even for a joke of a job like this, I had a sense of duty.

Yes, I hated these little nickel and dime ‘favors’, but work was work…and I had always done every job I’d ever had with as much professionalism and dedication as I could, which right then wasn’t much.

I watched the car park on the other side of the lot. A portly man got out and walked directly to the office. When he walked inside, I looked to the car again and could make out the shape of another person in the passenger seat. I was pretty sure I knew who this was, and I realized then and there that this could very well be the easiest job I’d ever had. Thirty minutes on the job, and I was about to get to get paid in record time.

Moments later, the man came back out. He looked to his car and gave a little nod. With that, a curvy woman stepped out of the passenger seat. She held a gaudy-looking umbrella upward to the sprinkling drizzle. As it fanned open, it blocked my only clear shot of her face.

“Damn,” I muttered.

I watched the couple head down the little breezeway that connected the rooms. They stopped at the second-to-last entrance, and the man unlocked the door, letting the woman in first. She closed her umbrella, but I was still unable to see her face. The man entered and closed the door behind him.

I took a small bag from the passenger seat and sat it in my lap. Grabbed my digital camera and powered it up. Cameras had always made sense to me. In fact, photography was one of the few remnants from my old life that I clung to. The simplicity of frame and shoot was somehow comforting.

I also took out a stick of gum. Pushed it into my mouth and started slowly chewing in an effort to bury the need for a drink.

I tried to think of the last time I had taken a woman into a cheap hotel room. It had been during college — easily twenty years ago. Unless things had changed in the realm of social conventions, I was pretty sure there was nothing new to getting laid in a place like this. I doubted they would spend time talking about the weather or pointing out the decorating expertise of the people that had thrown this shabby dive together. I figured that in the minute and a half they had been in the room, they were probably already halfway to oblivion.

I stepped out of the car and took my time walking across the parking lot. I held my Canon Eos close under my leather jacket so it wouldn’t get wet, and I felt the rain, a steady October drizzle, lightly cooling my head. There was something almost pleasant about it. I made a note in my head, trying to put a few items in the POSITIVES column for London. So far, the NEGATIVE column was winning by a long shot.

I made my way to the breezeway and looked around. There was no one else traipsing around the parking lot or the corridor and really, who would? It was1:30 in the afternoon on a wet Wednesday.  This realization hit me hard and made me feel a wave of depression, so familiar since the events six months ago.

I moved along, passing the tiny windows and the doors. I briefly thought of all of the fragments of lives that had taken place behind those doors and windows. Passion, lust, anger, and a healthy dose of deception; something about it was almost poetic. I let the thought fade out. I did not want to be going down that path, and I was nowhere near a poet.