The Thomas Blume Series

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Two Weeks Earlier…

They call it autumn here.

I stared through the rain-slicked glass at the exterior of the cheap hotel, trying to ignore the enticing weight of the hip flask in my jacket. At only 1:30 in the afternoon, it was certainly too early to start drinking. 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.

Parked on the far end of the lot, my car faced the hotel office and the majority of the rooms. A walkway—painted a melancholy shade of hospital green—connected them all. The tone of the place and the drizzle gave the Newham Inn a heavy air of sadness.

I studied the building for a while, trying to understand the allure for its customers. Dropping down money to stay in a room where the dregs of humanity had stayed before me didn’t seem the least bit appealing.

A flicker of reflection in the rearview mirror caught my eye. The steel blue eyes and hard features of my father stared back. The dark hair now streaked with gray was pure Mom. The rest of the unfortunate state was down 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—a noise that made me realize how badly I needed some shuteye. I didn’t know why fatigue gripped me, maybe it was the booze. I certainly hadn’t done much in the way of exercise over the previous week.

I once read 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 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 the Newham Inn could do the same to a guy.

Maybe I’d read it in USA Today or New Scientist, during a stakeout on another place like this. Who knew?

The memory refused to materialize, and either way, it didn’t matter. I had a job to do and needed to stay alert.

Then the smoke curled inside me again, the need for a drink twisted my insides, beckoning that sweet comforting fog of numbness, but the haze was quickly burned away by the familiar pangs of anger.

My old man had died with a dependency on booze, and I had spent my whole life trying to avoid ending up the same way. Last thing in the world I wanted was to end up like my dad, and here I was making the same mistakes he did. The move to London had done it. Drinking was the only way I knew how to cope with the pain plaguing me.

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

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

When the silver Mercedes pulled up, momentary relief flooded in. The tormenting thoughts vanished in a brief wash of adrenaline. I was nothing if not dedicated. Once, I’d had a promising career with the NYPD, and the sense of honor, dignity, and perseverance still lived within me. Somewhere. Even for a joke of a job like this one, I had that 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 muster.

The silver car parked on the other side of the lot, and the portly driver climbed out, heading directly for the hotel office. Mid-forties, with thinning brown hair and a goatee, he wore an expensive but bland suit. When he stepped inside, I looked to the Mercedes again and could make out the shape of another person in the passenger seat. I knew who it was. This could very well be the easiest assignment I’d ever had. Half a day on the job, and I was about to get paid in record time.

Moments later, the driver stepped out of the office and signaled to his companion. The Merc’s passenger door opened, and a curvy woman stepped out. She held up a gaudy umbrella. As it fanned open, it hid her face.

“Damn,” I muttered.

The couple headed down the short breezeway connecting 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 shook the rain from his jacket and paused at the entrance, glancing around furtively. For a second, worry set in that he’d noticed my surveillance, but luckily, my targets were more interested in the inside of the room. Apparently satisfied, Mr. Goatee smiled in anticipation before following the woman inside, slamming the door behind him.

Grabbing my digital camera from the small bag on the passenger seat, I powered it up. Cameras had always made sense to me. In fact, photography was one of the few remnants of my old life 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 chewing slowly in an effort to bury my need for a drink.

The last time I’d taken a woman into a cheap hotel room had been during college—easily twenty years ago. Unless things had changed in the realm of social conventions, there was nothing new to getting laid in a place like this. I doubted they would spend much time talking about the weather or pointing out the lack of decorating expertise in 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 would already be halfway to doing the horizontal Mamba.

With the Canon Eos under my leather jacket, protected from the rain, I climbed from the car and took my time strolling across the parking lot. The steady October drizzle lightly cooled my head. There was something almost pleasant about it. I made a mental note, trying to put a few items in the positive column for London. So far, the negative column was winning by a long shot.

At the breezeway, I stopped and looked around. No one else appeared around the parking lot or the corridor and really, who would, at 1:30 in the afternoon on a wet Wednesday? The realization hit me hard and made me feel a wave of depression, so familiar since the events six months earlier.

Moving on, I passed the tiny windows and the doors and briefly thought of all of the fragments of lives that had taken place inside those soulless rooms. Passion, lust, anger, and a healthy dose of deception; something about it was almost poetic, in an Edgar Allan Poe sort of way. I let the thought fade out. I did not want to carry on down that path, and poetry leaves me cold.

The penultimate window. I stopped, checked the camera, and looked through the glass. The shades were drawn, but there was enough of a break between the flimsy curtains to see the faintest stirrings of what was going on inside. It appeared that I had been correct. It had taken less than five minutes for them to strip and get down to business.

Seeing an eyeful of the portly man’s bare ass thrusting up and down didn’t exactly do it for me though. In fact, my breakfast almost made a re-appearance against the glass. It didn’t help when one of the woman’s hands reached around and cupped a buttock. I grimaced, chewing my gum harder.

I’m not getting paid enough for this.

After checking the breezeway again, I pressed the camera up to the window and waited for a shot. Once the couple got into a rhythm, I snapped some pictures but needed a clear image of the woman’s face. A few times it almost came into frame, as their bodies shifted, particularly when she was on all fours on the edge of the bed.

The cop in me also caught a line of cocaine on the chipped table in the corner. The deadbeat in me didn’t give a crap.

The camera’s view screen told me that, while I managed to get three perfect shots of the woman’s breasts, her face was either blemished by the window’s glare or partially covered by an elbow, her hair, or the sheets that her head had been pushed into.

Sighing, I pocketed the camera. Really, I had been sure it would come to this. No surprise, just… a sense of defeat.

Resigned, I walked over to the door and steadied myself for a moment. As I stood there, I could hear the woman moaning in ecstasy on the other side. She either really enjoyed it or was going above and beyond to make the man think she really enjoyed it.

A healthy dose of deception.

A hard kick opened the door as effectively as any key. It flew open easily enough, the chain flying halfway across the room and the frame cracking almost all the way down to the floor. I wondered whether the hourly rate for the room would cover the damage.

The man and the woman both yelled at the commotion. Comically, though, it had not startled them enough to disengage themselves from one another. I grinned at them and then took out my camera.

Before the woman had a chance to hide her nakedness or the man could say a single word, I brought the camera up.

“Say, ‘seedy motel room,’” I said.

It took two clicks for them to understand what was going on. The woman pushed the man off of her and scrambled to the edge of the bed. All of her modesty was forgotten as she looked at me with pleading eyes, half-dazed with the cocktail of hormones and drugs running through her body.

“No,” she said. “Please.”

The pictures on the view screen told me I had more than enough to fulfill my contract.

“Thanks. As you were,” I said, and placed the ‘please make up room’ card on the door handle.

I turned my back on the two and headed towards the parking lot. The man yelled after me, but I doubted he would pursue. Overweight, he looked like a soft middle manager with an easy office job, not exactly the confrontational type. Besides, he was buck naked. Not many folks would be eager to run across a rain-slicked parking lot with no clothes on.

I had already cranked the engine to life by the time the woman reached the broken door, wrapped in a sheet. She screamed for me to stop, but I paid her little attention. She was pretty—about 150 lbs., long blonde hair, and breasts too perfect to be real. I wondered what had driven her to this. Beyond that, I pitied the man she was with and more so, the man I would be meeting in about an hour.

As I pulled out of the lot, I looked back and saw her staring at me, crying in the rain. The man stood behind her like some i***t, naked sentinel.

Hearts were going to be broken over this, but that wasn’t my problem. I was already thinking about how I would spend the money coming to me. I’d have it within two hours and in three, I’d be at the Black Swan pub down the street.

The hotel parking lot left my rearview. All that remained was the dreary East London suburb… and the pain. I needed a drink, but one man needed the photographs more.