Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) (30 page)
Read Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) Online
Authors: Eli Yance
She winked at him, gave him a big hug and then planted a kiss on his cheek.
“Still struggling with this fame thing?” she asked.
He gave a passive shrug. “I could get used to it.” He gave her a kiss, looked up at the building in front of them. “This is the place?” he asked, a little unsure at the daunting, impressive facade of the glamorous restaurant and bar.
“I’ll admit,” she said, running her appraising eyes over it. “It’s not as impressive as that run-down hole you’ve been drinking in all day, but it’ll do.” She gave him a cheeky wink.
“Who told you?”
“The whisky on your breath.”
“I barely finished one glass.”
She hooked her arm around his, straightened up. “Don’t worry,” she said, patting him on the back. “I trust you.”
“This place looks expensive,” he said before entering.
“This is a special occasion,” she informed him. “And you can afford it now,” she turned to him, raised an eyebrow. “
Superintendent
.”
He couldn’t help but smile; he liked the way that sounded. He’d had the job for a few months but was still settling in. As strange as it sounded hearing his title from his girlfriend, it had been even stranger hearing it from his colleagues, people he had worked alongside for so long. Even Clarissa Morris, his former boss, had been forced to address him as such on a couple of occasions, and that could never be topped.
Clarissa was working the beat again, trying to climb back up the ladder, although no one wanted her at the top anymore. After the bodies of the bandits were discovered, after Cawley had publicly walked away from his boss, Clarissa had given a press conference; retaining all the anger and animosity she felt for Max Cawley and unleashing it onto a room of journalists who knew what buttons to press to send the hard-faced Superintendent over the edge.
The press conference, filmed live for nationwide coverage, became an overnight hit. It went viral. The video of an angry, abusive woman at the head of an authoritative chain was plastered all over the internet and television. The public loved it; her bosses didn’t share the same enthusiasm. They suspended and demoted her.
She no longer talked down to Cawley, she had tried a couple of times but she didn’t succeed.
Andrew Simpson had moved on as well. He achieved his own fame. He stayed away from the force but he also stayed away from the drink, sobering up just a few weeks after the ordeal. As half of the duo that finally caught the bandits, he became an overnight celebrity. As current Superintendent, Cawley kept his head below ground, kept away from the spotlight. Simpson lapped it up. For the first few months barely a day passed when he wasn’t on the television or the radio, after that he signed his own book deal. He had enough money stashed away to live it up for a few years and was in talks to become a spokesperson for the force.
The bandits became folk heroes, modern day legends. Their untimely and cruel death only served to expand their popularity, giving them an immortal and worldwide fame. Sellers and his friends became famous for killing them, but not as he hoped. Sellers spent his first few weeks suffering daily beatings from his fellow prisoners and guards, before being locked up in solitary and eventually ending up as a medicated drone on the psyche ward.
Rex, the youngster with the big mouth and big attitude, ended up as a bitch to a butch drug dealer inside a maximum security prison. On his seventeenth birthday, after downing a batch of prison hooch, he picked a fight with his cellmate. The fight didn’t last long; the guards found him dead in his cell the next morning, soaking in a pool of his own blood.
Their partner in crime was sentenced to life inside a prison which adores the notorious bandits; whose cooks regularly dilute his food with piss, spit and any other bodily fluids they can find; whose population take their showers with extra shanks.
For Cawley, life wasn’t perfect. His ex-wife was still on his tail, berating him for whatever she could get, but she was losing patience with him. She knew she wasn’t getting to him anymore, wasn’t affecting him as she once did, and that was forcing her to give up. She had never wanted his money or his possessions, she had always wanted to deprive him of his life, his soul, and when she saw just how happy he was becoming, how comfortable he was in his new life -- with his new job and his new girlfriend -- she experienced a depression of her own and had all but given up on hounding him. On more than one occasion she tried to rekindle their relationship, drunk dialling or texting him with apologies and desperation which Cawley promptly ignored.
They sat down at their table, stared at each other over a single red rose that sat solitary in a crystal vase.
“So,” she said, holding Cawley’s gaze with a radiant and cheeky smile that lit up her face and his. “What’s new?”
***
The radio fizzed with a static wail, a banshee screaming through resisting airwaves. It heightened and faded as the semblance of music and chatter was discovered and then released. It settled on a distant, buzzing station -- a sombre toned man with a hypnotic drawl was reciting the weather.
Pandora turned away, looked out towards the road, a chipped back-lane that cut a winding path through the green country.
“No decent music in there?” Dexter glanced across at her, his eyes half on the road, his thoughts back on the present.
She shook her head.
“I could sing for you if you want?” he offered with a dimpled grin.
She laughed, shook her head. “I’ll pass, thank you.”
“You’re missing out.”
“I’m not. I’ve heard you in the shower,” she sighed heavily, gave him another brief laugh as he turned a grin towards the road. “Where are we going then?”
“Like I said and like we planned: somewhere to lie low.”
“But, where?”
He shrugged, scrunched up his face. “There’s bound to be somewhere around here.”
“Another place like the bar back there? With a dozen dumb-fuck locals looking for rape, torture and reward?”
He shrugged again.
“Hm,” she frowned at him.
He turned to
her; saw the annoyance in her stare. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he expressed.
“How about, ‘I’ve arranged a flight out of here,’ or ‘I have a friend who’s going to let us stay at his place until things blow over’.”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone to hole us up with such a big reward hanging over us,” he paused, contemplated. “And I don’t have any friends.”
A smile fought annoyance on her face and eventually won. “Fair enough,” she conceded. “A drive into nowhere it is then.”
Thank you for reading.
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