Robert Parker - Snow Storm

He motioned to the barman again and the younger man made for the vodka bottle, stopping as Victor interrupted him, asking instead for the bill to be charged to his suite. He left a sizeable tip on the bar and made his way to the foyer. He had yet to see this town and there was no time like the present.

He looked round and caught a movement in his peripheral vision. He remembered his escorts. Dumb and Dumber were his assigned security detail it seemed. He wondered if whoever had assigned them had done this for his benefit or their’s. In any case they were not experts in the ways of stealth. He’d spotted them in the mirrors behind the optics when they’d shuffled into the bar drooling some ten feet behind him. Presumably they’d been told to keep a low profile. He exited via the front door and cut sharply left as soon as he hit the outside air. It was dizzying and he felt unsteady as he ducked behind a sandstone pillar.

His crack security team emerged behind him as predicted. They stood on the steps of the hotel looking left and right in a state of abject confusion as Victor laughed for the first time in a long time. When they started arguing, which seemed a one sided affair whereby the smaller one aired various grievances against the bigger one, Victor had trouble following the conversation with the speed of their accents. He grew bored of it and finally relenting, stepped forward from behind his pillar.

“Gentlemen,” he boomed, rousing them from their now detailed discussion on “the fuck ups of today.”

“Eh, oh,” the small one started. “Sorry boss, I mean sir. We didn’t, I mean we’re not supposed to ehm.” He was a study in awkwardness.

“I guessed this,” he replied.

The small one looked at him like a salmon he’d just caught and stunned. The larger one simply regarded the pavement.

“Clearly surveillance is not your strong point.”

“No boss,” the big one said, eyeing him briefly before casting his gaze back to the floor.

“Well then, you must tell me where your skills truly lie.”

They looked at him through a haze of collective confusion and he pictured the cogs inside their heads, or perhaps gambling machine wheels; that was more like it. The wheels spun as the pair hoped to hit the correct combination and come up with the correct response.

“I propose this. As we are no doubt destined to spend the evening together, how about you show me the sights of this city of yours?” Victor eventually said.

“Aye, I mean yeah, sure,” the small one agreed, still stunned and perhaps a little suspicious.

“I ask, of course, that you don’t inform anyone else of this. Obviously my dear friend Oleg has passed away and I would prefer not to be disturbed by anyone finding out where I am.”

“No problem.”

“Excellent.”

They stood, nodding in the way only people who don’t know the answer to something could, as though waiting for a cue. “Where to first then boss?” the small one finally asked.

Victor shrugged. “You tell me.”

Burke was thinking of heading home. It didn’t do, he knew. Higher up heads would doubtless shake in unison at this; murderer or murderers on the loose and the D.I. heading home at what could quite sensibly be called tea time. But higher up heads were often shaken where he was concerned. That was just the way he worked. Sometimes you had to step back from the problem and focus on something else for long enough that the solution might appear in the passing. They said that about magic eye pictures too though, and he’d never been any good at them.

He rubbed his eyes, only to feel them sting more violently. He wasn’t designed for the indoor life. The controlled environment put everything out of whack. In this case the heating system, desperately trying to fend off the effects of the encroaching “big freeze” was overdoing it a bit and causing his head to sweat, which in turn seemed to be melting the moulding clay in his hair causing it to run down his forehead and into his eyes, creating just the right amount of sting and irritation. In summer the air con would dry out his eyes causing the tear film to disappear and make every movement of the eyelids painful. Still, simple linear cause and effect was a thing to behold.

If only the rest of the world was as easy. If only this case, or these cases or indeed whatever the hell it was, could be so easy. And yet it was in a sense, all just one big mathematical equation, cause and effect flowing in many different directions all at once. That was what he loved, hated and got lost in. Like all equations it balanced, made sense. You just had to stand far enough back to get a swatch at the bigger picture.

He stared at the I2 diagrams on the big screen in the meeting room. He remembered the days you had to do this with a board, some pins and a ball of wool. You couldn’t zoom in and out of that or stick it on a slide and email it.

Even chance was an illusion. Burke was a fatalist. They were always going to do what they were always going to do because of background, circumstance, genetics, diet, whatever, and he was always going to lock them up if he could because he needed to solve the puzzle, just as he had to do things in fours when no one was looking. It was pathological. He couldn’t help it any more than he could help deciding to help it because that electrical signal would always take that particular path that offered least resistance though people liked to allow themselves the illusion of free will.

He couldn’t moralise about it. It was just what it was, best treat it as a game, but one he played to win.

He felt his stomach churn and realised he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, electing instead to stave off hunger with caffeine and nicotine, the super model diet. Rachel had recently read an article about people being predisposed to types of addiction due to a lack of dopamine, or was it due to a lack of dopamine receptors in the brain? He forgot. Whatever. He was a third generation addict. It might go back even further but no one was around to say. The previous two generations had expired, though not through their addictions. He was a first generation teetotaller. That was surely something.

He had survived on stimulants for a few years, maintained the svelte physique of an anorexic snake due to being a lazy instant past guzzling single man until the point of meeting Rachel. He probably didn’t realise it but he’d been hungry all along. She filled a void he hadn’t known was there, emotionally but also nutritionally, to the tune of two stone. And now he couldn’t stop. Was it better to die of a heart attack due to fat or stimulants? Either way you got there in the end.

He hedged his bets, ordering a Dominos pizza while inhaling the toxins from his fake fag, just as the mobile buzzed its way along his desktop. Dr Brown’s number was on display as it plummeted over the edge before hitting the floor and separating into its constituent parts.

Brown had decided to stick around for a while, perhaps due to some misplaced sense of duty or perhaps the constant jibes about Mrs Brown had a grain of truth to them.

Burke felt a sense of deja vu on arrival at the morgue, despite the fact it was a lot darker and colder than it had been on his previous visit. He’d cancelled his takeaway, his nose twitching at the prospect of a sliver of new information.

Doc Brown looked haggard, slightly doddery compared to his normal self. It could have been the time of day. He seemed smaller somehow as though he’d wilted as the sun went down or someone had let the air out of his tyres. What was left of his hair stood on end reminding Burke of The Prodigy’s Keith Flint.

He had one and a half specimens under covers on adjoining slabs. Vlad the Inhaler’s head could clearly be seen under one cover and the other it transpired was home to body number two.