Weird Cries From The Soul Read online

  WEIRD CRIES FROM THE SOUL

  MAYNARD SIMS

  The Maynard Sims Library

  Volume 5

  Copyright Maynard Sims Limited 2014

  www.maynard-sims.com

  [email protected]

  07801 472554

  The first 15 stories were originally included in either Selling Dark Miracles or The Secret Geography Of Nightmare, both books from Prime Books in 2002

  The remaining stories have remained uncollected.

  First ebook and paperback publication Enigmatic Press 2014

  3 Cutlers Close, Bishops Stortford, Herts, CM23 4FW England

  www.enigmaticpress.com

  [email protected]

  This is a work entirely of fiction and all the names, characters, events and places portrayed are either fictitious or are represented entirely fictitiously.

  Typesetting and design by L H Maynard & M P N Sims

  Cover design by

  IAIN MAYNARD: MAD: Maynard Art and Design

  CONTENTS

  1: KILLING ANONYMITY

  2: BAD MOON

  3: MAMA

  4: THE RAG-DOLL WHO SYMPATHISED

  5: WITH

  6: WARM AS SNOW

  7: THE OTHER SIDE OF SLEEP

  8: GATEWAY

  9: OPPOSITES

  10: WIRED

  11: THE ROUTE

  12: BLOOD POSITIVE

  13: ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT

  14: THE COLONY

  15: A WHINING

  16: SILVER SISTERS

  17: WARP

  18: MARCUS

  19: THE SITE OF THE FIRST REDOUBT

  20: SLIGHTLY ALL THE TIME

  21: BETWEEN THE DEAD MEN

  22: AND THE BLIND

  23: ONION

  24: FRACTURED SOULS

  25: DEMONLEE DEVILISH

  26: DRIVING IN MY CAR

  27: COAT

  28: SKINNY LATTE

  KILLING ANONYMITY

  Anonymity.

  Blank windowless walls of old tenement buildings either side of Culpepper Alley crowded out most of the light during the day, and now, well after nine on a late October evening, this desolate strip of the city was smeared with greasy shadows.

  In the dark alley lay a shattered corpse, discarded, a bundle of blood soaked clothes. All around people whose business was murder moved like weary whispers, cautious and purposeful. Eddie Kimball noticed his partner look at his watch for the third time in five minutes. Kimball knew why. Boyle was going to be late home and Susan wasn't going to be pleased. Boyle was thirty-one, weighed 172 pounds and stood five feet eleven and three quarters in his socks. His light brown hair was speckled with the rain but his slim, hard muscled body was relaxed, confident, even in the presence of death. His dark brown eyes could be warm, full of fire hot enough to make anyone looking into them like what they saw; or they could be as cold as the bitter wind of winter, and anyone seeing the ice staring out at them looked quickly away, and knew the strength and power in the eyes, and in the man behind them.

  Robert Boyle turned up the collar of his sports jacket against the sleeting rain but still he shivered. As he'd driven past Kent Harbour entrance earlier there was a reddish tint to the sky, which hinted that the sun might shine tomorrow. If he didn't keep his date with Susan it might as well shine without him. The rain had fallen for three days without drawing breath, sometimes hard driving rain, sometimes light drizzle, why should tomorrow be any different? Meanwhile Susan was waiting for him and he was late.

  Kimball hated the rain. The fact that he was getting wet made him resent the corpse whose presence in the alley was keeping Kimball from his dinner. The dead man didn't give a damn about the rain. Two shotgun blasts had decided he wouldn't give a damn about anything anymore. Kimball wouldn't know the identity of the dead man until the forensic people had made their investigations, but he wouldn't have shaken hands even if they'd been introduced. It wasn't because the man was the cause of Kimball getting wet. It was just that once you've met violent death in all its messy guises the novelty wears thin. Had he known the man’s identity straight away he might still not have shaken hands. His job was made difficult enough without people making killing their chosen profession.

  Smoke hung in the stale air of the intimate James Bar, as solid as promises. Smoke from cigarettes, smoke from a couple of cigars, smoke from the cracked old briar pipe the landlord, Petersen, kept alight from opening time to last orders.

  It was eight o’clock on a Saturday night and the usual mixed crowd was in. By the jukebox boys and girls barely above the legal drinking age limit fed in money and argued about selections. Every half hour or so Petersen shouted at them to keep the noise down and they bought more drinks to keep him quiet.

  Tables near the door carried the strained silences of long dead couples sitting together from habit. Sharing a few hours away from home in mutual desolation, any frivolous thoughts drowning before they were uttered. They spoke to order drinks, some food, but mostly they listened, like spies in a world of memory. Listened and nodded at the conversations of others, and to the cascade of music. Listened and nodded and generally disapproved of the life around them because it reminded them of what they had lost.

  The men sitting or leaning at the bar were older, practised in the art of purposeful drinking. Consuming whiskey and bourbon, some dark rum for the eldest, and some bottles of strong pale liquor. They were construction workers and drivers, a bank vice-president who had retired early under suspicion of fraud, the owner of the bookies around the corner. And a man who made his living from killing people.

  Boyle and his girlfriend Susan had tickets for the ten ‘o’clock concert at the Arena tonight and Boyle wasn't going to make it. After wrapping up the technicalities of the murder scene he'd have missed most of the show. Susan may have become used to anti-social hours during the six years she'd dated Boyle but she'd be furious this time. She was only going to the concert to please Boyle in the first place, and over the past few months a tension had developed between the two that had not been there before. Susan was becoming impatient with Boyle and Kimball was worried that the strain would prove too much for the relationship. It had reached the stage where a stronger commitment was needed and Boyle seemed reluctant to commit himself.

  "How much longer do you think they'll be?" Boyle asked the question as much to himself as he did to Kimball.

  "Why don't you call her?" Kimball suggested, and looked at his partner. He could see the tension in his face.

  Boyle shook his head casually. "It's no problem. She'll hold on for me." The attempt at a relaxed dismissal didn't work.

  "Call her."

  Boyle sighed, Kimball was right. There was only one thing for it. He'd have to telephone Susan at her apartment and break it to her. Perhaps if he suggested she still went she might take it better. She could phone one of her friends, maybe Annie or Rebecca were free, they'd appreciate a free ticket.

  "Eddie," Boyle called across to Kimball. "I'm just going to find a phone."

  Eddie Kimball nodded and tried to shelter his large frame under an overhanging fire escape while he waited for the Medical Examiner, the photographic unit, the lab technicians and the ambulance. Kimball was six five, two hundred and twenty pounds, with blue eyes and sandy hair. Usually he dressed in blue or grey out of a compulsive tidiness. His shirtfronts always gave the impression of barely containing his chest, buttons straining against the thread, material pulled tight over muscle. His hands dwarfed almost anything they held, but unless you were guilty of a crime those hands would treat you as gently as butterfly wings. He had just turned forty and was still coming to terms with it.

  Little more than an hour earlie
r Culpepper Alley was just a convenient place close to the last bar the dead man had visited. The man didn't wonder why a narrow dirty alley warranted a name. He hadn't even known the place existed until the beer and wine needed a release. Now Culpepper Alley was his grave.

  As he had stood with one arm propped against a grime-covered wall he could smell the baked-in stench of stale food from the nearby fast food stalls. The stench mingled with the accumulated odours of the winos and dropouts who used the alley as occasional home for the night, and the soot, exhaust and gas smell that permeated through this, one of the deadbeat parts of the city.

  As an experience to savour the amalgamation of smells didn't rank as one of the pleasures of the world, but the man would have embraced them with the lust of the young if he'd known they were to be his last.

  The man hadn't wondered why the alley had its name and now he didn't care. What was left of him was slumped over an upturned rubbish sack, a rag doll posture of final humiliation. No dignity of death, no gentle shuffling from any mortal coil, no famous last words; just pain, violence and bad smells in a depressing alley for a last moment of life.

  Anyone stumbling across the body might have thought it was another rubbish sack spilled open. The German shepherd crossbreed that found it thought it was food; while the dog's owner threw up the lasagne his wife had lovingly cooked for him. Culpepper Alley hardly noticed the addition to its various odours. The dead man didn't notice at all. Eventually the dog's owner called the police.

  Frank Davenport would tell you he was retired, living off investment income. He would elaborate about his share portfolio and the shrewd deals his broker arranged to keep one step ahead of inflation. The source of the money that was now legally invested would not be mentioned. No mention of the lives he had taken to be able to afford his house in the best area of the city. The fact that there was no mortgage on the house would be dropped into the conversation as often as he felt appropriate. That was quite often because he was fond of boasting.

  He loved the infamy of his reputation, the frisson that he saw in people when they met him, when they realised, just by looking in his eyes who, what, he was.

  He liked to be the big fish in the little pond. That was why he frequented the back street bars of the city, where he had grown up, and where no expense had been spared to give an artificial atmosphere of times gone by, instead of the country clubs or the golf clubs nearer to his home. To a man like Frank Davenport, home, where he felt comfortable, was the pinched rundown area of yesterdays triumphs, the flashier scratched surface of inner city. He was alive in narrow streets of tenements cramped together in terraced tension, where a cough was heard three doors away; in alleys where twenty-four hour businesses flourished amidst the grime and shadows. In the bars, gloriously seedy in their un-modernised forgetfulness, that played host to mixtures of young and old, men and women, victors and victims.

  "Petersen," Frank Davenport shouted above the noise of the jukebox.

  Petersen put down his pipe in the cracked glass ashtray and patiently moved along the bar. "What'll it be Frank?" Davenport was enough of a regular to be well known, and he was a big spender.

  With an expansive wave of his arm Davenport indicated the knot of cold-eyed men around him. "A round, and whatever you're drinking, have one yourself."

  Petersen made his face show gratitude, "I'll take a Jameson's with you. Thanks, Frank." It paid to keep on the good side of Davenport. They all knew men who hadn't.

  As the drinks were served the men thanked Davenport silently by lifting their glasses towards him or by grunting their appreciation. The truth was he wasn't very popular. He was too brash for the local taste and always had been. He was too much the boy from the wrong side of the tracks made good who couldn't stop himself flaunting his success in their faces. They saw the rain cloud grey hair styled and blow-dried. They saw the ostentatious gold bracelet and the neck chain. They saw the manicured fingers and smelled the pungent cologne, saw the clothes that weren't paid for weekly from a catalogue, and they remembered the cowardly teenager who would hit the smaller boys and run away; the bully who drifted into the protection rackets and then into the fringes of the local criminal gangs. No one spoke openly about what he had become. He was unpopular because they feared him as well. A lot of them knew men it was rumoured he had killed.

  The gangs he worked for, on contract, had dominated the area for more than twenty years, keeping the peace through intimidation and violence. They still loomed large in every day life, their influence as inevitable as Christmas and as fraught with danger.

  Michael Macklin, the Medical Examiner, arrived with the lab technicians and Kimball nodded a welcome in the direction of the deceased. The men were professionals. They got to work.

  Boyle arrived back on the crime scene and tried to put the telephone conversation with Susan out of his mind.

  "It's me. I'm going to be late."

  "How late?"

  "I can't say. Something's come up. Telephone one of your friends; give Annie a call, see if she can go with you. I don't want the ticket to go to waste"

  "I don't want to go with Annie, Robert. I want to go with you."

  "I don't know when I'm going to get there."

  "Then I'll wait for you; outside the Arena. It'll save time if you meet me here."

  "I'd rather you phoned Annie."

  "I'd rather you went to hell!"

  She slammed the phone down.

  He stared at the receiver for a long moment then set it back in the cradle. He thought of phoning her back but knew it would only end in an argument. He couldn't spare the time or the mental energy. It was getting to be like that between him and Susan.

  Michael Macklin was crouched over the body. He was a short tubby man with spectacles that magnified his eyes to the size of golf balls. He always reminded Boyle of a good-natured bullfrog.

  "What's the verdict, Mike?" Boyle asked.

  "Oh, he's dead all right," Macklin, said, not looking up from his examination of the body.

  Kimball snorted, "Are you sure now? You don't want to go out on a limb too soon." He walked across to stand next to Boyle. He'd seen his partner's face when Boyle had come back from telephoning Susan. Obviously Susan hadn't taken too kindly to being stood up. Boyle would handle it, of that Kimball was sure. Boyle always handled everything. That was one of the things that made him such a good detective. Boyle was always calm, good under pressure. A partner you could rely on. Outside of work it was a trait that could be irritating, a trait that could come over as unfeeling.

  "How long ago, Mike?" Boyle said, trying to keep his tone friendlier than Kimball's. Trying to keep his mind on the job in hand.

  "The body's still warm, no more than an hour or so."

  "Anything else?" Kimball still sounded hostile. He couldn't help himself. He wasn't annoyed with Macklin, he respected the man. He didn't really know why he was suddenly angry, but he suspected it had something to do with his partner, with Boyle, his friend.

  "Oh, he's been shot all right," Macklin said deadpan. He was used to dealing with the detectives and their city manners.

  Boyle glanced down at the corpse again. One shotgun blast had hit the stomach, ripping it open and spraying blood and guts on the wall behind the pile of rubbish sacks. The second shot had taken away most of the face and head. The ripped remains lay in a widening pool of red mud that was gradually seeping through the five hundred dollar raincoat, staining the Lacoste tennis shirt and the beige chinos a rusty brown.

  "The Mobile Crime Unit's here," Kimball called out. The MCU would photograph the body and the surrounding area from every conceivable angle. Other technicians would take measurements, fingerprints, and samples of everything they found near to the body including samples of earth, fibres, and liquids. As Kimball and Boyle were the two detectives who were first called to the scene they would handle the investigation but without the evidence and reports of the technical staff the investigation would go nowhere.

 
Boyle crouched down next to Macklin, the back of his jacket opening to let the rain pour down his neck, soaking his shirt. Macklin seemed oblivious to it, letting it bead off his bald head and run in rivers down his face.

  "Doesn't the weather bother you, Mike?"

  Macklin glanced round at him and twisted his face into what passed as a grin. “Weather?"

  Boyle smiled. "What else are you going to give me about the deceased apart from the obvious?"

  "Well, whoever did it wanted to make sure of the job."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning one shot would have been enough. Either shot was a killer. The second shot was superfluous."

  "Superfluous," Kimball murmured, his mood still sour. "The second shot was probably just for fun."

  Macklin shrugged.

  "Any I.D.?" Boyle asked quietly. Neither he nor Kimball had been able to touch the body yet. Neither to search for any identification, nor to look for any distinguishing marks or anything else that would get their investigation started. They had to wait until the formalities of the technicians had been completed. Until Macklin pronounced him dead they couldn't even take it as fact that murder had been committed.

  "Nothing. No driver's licence, no credit cards. Empty." Macklin shook his head.

  "And no way to check on dental records unless you want to start searching the alley for teeth fragments," Kimball lamented. He looked up and down the dingy alley. The lab technicians were combing every inch of the pothole-raddled floor for anything that might help identify the killer, and who they had killed. They collected everything, including teeth from the shattered mouth of the corpse. Kimball and Boyle wouldn't be able to begin looking for killer until they knew who had been killed.