On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 145, of 240 so far.

Early Breakfast

There was no-one else on the road and nobody walking either. The analogue clock on the dashboard of the old grey Mercedes Benz read eighteen minutes past four, and out of a fifty-fifty chance, it was the wrong damned four.

It was not yet dawn, and Morris was grumpy as hell. He’d been dragged from sleep fifteen minutes ago by the call, and here he was, blasting along the expressway beside the big river, huge cranes rusted and silent above him as they cast their dinosaur shadows. He had both of the front windows down just to help him waken up, and he was freezing his sack off. Coffee was a distant ambition.

“Luck of the fucking draw,” he muttered to himself, patting his coat pocket to ensure he had his ID wallet with his badge.

Of course he’d get called out on the morning after a six-day investigation which had ended barely nine hours earlier. He’d gone home and went to bed almost straight away, but Morris had learned over the years that there was tiredness you got from a day’s work, and there was another, deeper, kind of tiredness you got from a series of them put together. You couldn’t banish the deeper kind with just one good night of sleep. It didn’t work that way.

At least he didn’t have to drive too much farther. His junior partner, Blane, had given him the address on the phone but also texted it to him as soon as the call ended. It was standard procedure, especially when waking someone. The brain’s ability to remember things had a sort of warm-up period after regaining consciousness.

He reached the place in less than ten minutes, and pulled into the parking area of one of the many interchangeable lodge-type hotels for travellers who prioritised being near an airport over being near anything interesting or fun or attractive to look at. This chain’s livery was wine red, and its sign prominently advertised that it had a restaurant called just The Grill.

“Jesus,” Morris said, shaking his head at the damned blandness of the place.

He could see Blane’s car parked near the entrance to the hotel’s reception area, immediately behind a silent and empty patrol car. More vehicles would be here very soon, and Morris briefly wondered if he’d beat the paramedics who were summoned to these things as a matter of routine, or whether they’d already been and gone.

He got out, pulling his coat tighter around himself. It was a miserably cold morning, and he already knew that the hotel’s reception would smell like disinfectant and over-vacuumed carpets. He grimaced, locked his car, and trudged towards the entrance.

Morris showed his identification to the frightened-looking girl behind the counter, but he could have shown her a bus ticket instead and she would still have waved him through. He momentarily wondered at the wisdom of employing a five-foot-nothing little slip of a girl as the night shift desk clerk, but that wasn’t really his problem at the moment.

He took the stairs in deference to the earliness of the hour, but he needn’t have. The lifts all opened into foyers that were hermetically sealed from the corridors that led to the actual rooms. Going from one to the other required a keycard, which the girl had given him, and going through two heavy doors that sucked at the air when he hauled them open. The corridors beyond were as quiet as a mouse in a morgue, and Morris lightened his footsteps to avoid wakening anyone.

He found a uniformed officer standing at the end of the first portion of the third-floor corridor on the east side, and nodded to the young man as he approached.

“Detective Blane is inside, sir,” the officer said, keeping his voice low. Morris just nodded once again, then went into the room. Blane was near the door, and turned to look at him with an apology on his face.

“Morning, chief,” he said, and Morris sighed deeply.

“Aye, it is,” he replied after a moment. “And I generally like to sleep through this part of it.”

Blane nodded, then gestured towards a door on one side of the small bedroom. Morris could see that it led to a brightly-lit, tiled space, no doubt the bathroom. It was always the bathroom where people committed suicide in hotels. They died of natural causes in their beds, and they killed themselves in bathrooms. In a way, it was considerate, at least to the cleaning staff.

He went in, wrinkling his nose, and he wasn’t surprised to see that it was a bathroom in name only; the facilities consisted of a toilet, a small sink, and a shower cubicle that was incongruously big enough for three men.

There’ll be three in it soon enough, Morris thought.

The paramedics always came in pairs, as did the transporters from the coroner’s office. For now, though, there was only the hotel room’s former occupant, sprawled in the corner of the cubicle, skin still wet because he no longer had any body heat to help with evaporation. The shower had been turned off, but the fake marble tiles the corpse lay on were still stained with some of the blood he’d let out of himself.

Morris frowned. The way the guy was positioned, it was easy to see that the wounds were on both of his wrists, but also on his left inner thigh. That was unusual. It would have helped things along a great deal, but almost nobody did it that way.

“Who found him?” Morris asked, and Blane answered without looking away from the body.

“Kid working for the hotel,” he said. “This guy had asked for a wake-up call, and when he didn’t answer after a few tries, they sent the porter up. Door was closed over but not actually shut. Kid said he smelled something weird that freaked him out, so he went in.”

“A decision that’ll be with him for the rest of his life,” Morris said, matter-of-factly, and Blane nodded.

There was a knock from the corridor, and Blane walked out of the bathroom and pulled the room’s main door open. The uniformed officer stationed there was looking apologetic, and there was a young woman in a hotel uniform with a catering trolley.

“Sorry, sir,” the uniform said, as Morris came out to join them. “But this just arrived. Struck me as a bit odd.”

The girl with the trolley was clearly putting the pieces together quickly enough, and her face was pale. Her eyes darted back and forth between the portion of the room’s interior she could see from where she was, and Morris himself.

“He ordered an early breakfast,” she said, as if this fact meant that the guest in question would just walk out and take the trolley from her.

“It’s alright, love,” Blane said, raising his hand in a gesture of reassurance. “You can head back down and carry on with your work now.”

She looked at him doubtfully, and then at Morris again, before releasing her grip on the trolley. Then she looked down at it, and the next question she would ask was obvious enough, even if you weren’t a detective. Morris reached past Blane and took hold of the trolley’s handle.

“You can leave that here,” he said. “Be a shame to let it go to waste.”

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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