Scavengers

Robert Hood

Description

Mike Crowe doesn't believe in ghosts, but it seems there's one ghost that believes in him. Can he escape the attention of a psychopath long enough to help her?
A not-exactly legal PI, Crowe is blackmailed into tracking down a serial killer known as The Scavenger. At the same time, he finds himself increasingly plagued by visions - and eventually visitations - of a young girl he failed to save from being murdered a decade before.
Are these things connected?
Crowe must scavenge through the debris of a world going to pieces around him - at first just to survive and then to find the answers to questions he'd rather hadn't been asked.

'Scavengers is smart, dark, riveting crime fiction at its best. This is Hood at the top of his game.' - Kaaron Warren, author of The Grief Hole, Into Bones Like Oil, and Tide of Stone.

Sujets

• Private Investigators
• Detective
• Mystery
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Clan Destine Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780645316834
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Clan Destine Press in 2022
Clan Destine Press PO Box 121, Bittern Victoria, 3918 Australia
Copyright © Robert Hood 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including internet search engines and retailers, electronic or mechanical, photocopying (except under the provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.>
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data: Hood, Robert Scavengers
ISBN: 978-0-6453168-2-7 (paperback) ISBN: 978-0-6453168-3-4 (eBook)
Cover Design by © Cat Sparks Original Cover Art by Cameron Sparks Design & Typesetting by Clan Destine Press Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
www.clandestinepress.net

Praise for Scavengers from a host of award-winning authors:
‘Robert Hood, master of horror, has turned to crime. In Scavengers , he deftly stitches the body horrors of Frankenstein’s creation into the fabric of a chilling murder mystery. This archetypal battle between humanity and monstrosity pits a laconic, haunted PI against a psychotic serial killer, drawing the reader into a dark web of alienation, intrigue, and sheer terror. I couldn’t put it down.’
Janeen Webb , author of Death at the Blue Elephant , The Dragon’s Child , and The Five Star Republic (with Andrew Enstice)
‘ Scavengers is a spectral thriller of (modern) Promethean dimensions. A lightning-powered Frankenstein’s monster of a novel that stitches hard-boiled noir with classic horror, the hunt for a serial killer with a revenant ghost mystery, the black magic black market with Bulli Pass. Gruesome and intelligent, with a disinterred heart of uniquely Australian grit.’
J. Ashley-Smith , author of Ariadne, I Love You and The Attic Tragedy
“Why should you read Robert Hood’s Scavengers ? Because Hood, a fantasist of the highest order and one of the best damn wordsmiths working in Australia today, has combined horror and hard-boiled crime fiction into a genre-bending, spine-chilling chimera of a novel that will keep you up all night!”
Jack Dann , author of 70 books including The Memory Cathedral , The Man Who Melted , and Shadows in the Stone .
‘Robert Hood is one of the grand masters of Australian Horror writing. Here, he infuses a gritty neo-noir crime story with disturbing, haunted, macabre elements, and to impressive effect.
Tim Napper , author of Neon Leviathan and 36 Streets .
‘ Scavengers is smart, dark, riveting crime fiction at its best. This is Hood at the top of his game.’
Kaaron Warren , author of Slights , The Grief Hole , Into Bones Like Oil , and Tide of Stone .

‘ God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.’
– Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil’s Dictionary

PART ONE
THE INSISTENCE OF MEMORY

1
‘Mike? Wake up!’
The immediacy of a memory: a birthday party, images of Lucy Waldheim – good and bad – morphed into a different time and place. Mike Crowe woke to find himself partially covered by crisp white sheets in a chic room – too bright, airy and upmarket to be his own. For a moment, he was disoriented. A radio automatically came on, in the midst of a news report about some poor bastard named de Mora who’d been found murdered in a Balmain hotel overnight. No one knew why. Crowe reached over and thumped his fist on the off-button, cursing it. Then he rubbed his fingers along the lengthy scar that had been carved down the left side of his face several decades ago by a since-deceased thug, as though to confirm his own identity. He remembered where he was. In Wollongong, the steel town cum university city on the south coast of NSW, and this apartment, in one of the city’s high-rise, beachfront hotels. But memory of Lucy rushed over his mind again and lingered, sharp with sorrow. It felt as though someone had shot him in the chest.
Lucy had been dead for just on 10 years.
He breathed heavily.
‘Bad dream?’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Sorry about the alarm. I set it for nine. I have work to do.’
The voice’s brunette owner dragged on the sheets Crowe had accidentally pulled away from her. Her name was Gail Veitch. A journalist, yes, but much more. Crowe and she had history, 20 years of it. Years of friendship and conflict, random spates of intense interaction and relative peace, commitment implied but never formalised. The thing was, Crowe had always considered himself a lone wolf, ill-suited to close connections – a legacy from his long-dead father, who had given him cause to distrust letting people get too close. But Gail challenged that and got closer than anyone else. Not that he’d admit it. He couldn’t tie her down. He wouldn’t tie himself down. Yet she was more important to him than she knew. Perhaps more than he recognised himself.
‘I don’t dream,’ he muttered, sliding out from under the sheets. He walked toward the open window and looked out over Wollongong’s main beach. It was a spectacular view, which he got to enjoy whenever Gail had work in the Gong, as she always booked the same room in the same hotel whenever her employers were paying. A handful of surfers dotted the gentle waves. The sun had risen some time ago, and, uncharacteristically for this time of year, was hanging in a calm, blue sky, with only a few ragged clouds visible further up the coast.
‘Everyone dreams.’ Gail yawned, stretched. ‘I’ve never seen you like that before. Groans and sobs. Sounded like my cat – you remember Jimmy Olsen, right? Dreaming of mice that got away.’
‘You’ve never had a cat.’ He didn’t turn around.
‘Okay. But if I did, it’d be called Jimmy Olsen and would dream of lost mice. So, what the hell were you dreaming about anyway?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Ancient history.’ Crowe walked back, lay on the bed and gently drew Gail to his side, wanting her warmth against his chilly flesh. ‘Forget it.’
He could see questions percolating in her mind, even though she didn’t voice them. Together and apart, the two of them lay in silence for a few minutes, Gail’s breasts pressing against him. He ran his fingers down the smooth curve of her back, feeling her vertebrae as though to check they were all there. As he did, his anxiety over long-lost Lucy faded, replaced by the beginnings of arousal.
‘Mike–’
‘Don’t say it.’
Knowing him well or not, Gail was at heart a journalist, an interrogator, and always had been. She was persistent in her curiosity. She’d raise the question again, mistake or not.
‘It sounded like a nightmare. I’ve often wondered what scares you.’
‘Nothing scares me.’
‘Always Mr Tough Guy, eh? You know it’ll come back and bite you on the arse if you repress that stuff.’
‘Let it try. I bite back.’
She laughed. It was brief and followed by silence. Her head turned toward the open window, but her luminous green eyes weren’t studying the sky. He could almost see her mind ticking over and wondered what she was thinking.
An irritating noise that sounded like an anaemic doorbell with aspirations to become a rapper suddenly leapt from the mobile phone on the bedside table. Crowe only answered phones when he was expecting a call. His own was turned off. Not Gail’s. He didn’t bother telling her to ignore it. She was constitutionally unable to.
‘Shit,’ she muttered. Her warmth disappeared as she pulled away and reached for the bleating instrument. ‘Might be important. I’ll have to take it.’
Crowe growled something that wasn’t quite agreement.
‘Gail Veitch,’ she said in her best journalistic manner. ‘Speak.’
She listened. Her artificial smile, pinned on as if someone could see her, withered in displeasure. She gave Crowe a side-glance. ‘Stop shouting, Charlie.’
Her face went stony. ‘I don’t know what you’re–’
An even stonier silence.
Then: ‘Charlie, really? What I do in my spare time is none of your business.’ She glanced toward Crowe, engulfing him in her conspiracy. Her black hair overlapped onto her lightly tanned, high-cheek-boned face as though to form a mask.
She really is beautiful , he thought.
‘He’s an old friend – you know that. We were talking about an article I’m working on.’
Crowe could hear the voice on the other end, no clear words, just the murk of bluster: Charlie Pukalski, pillar of the community as far as the community was concerned, dodgy bastard to those in the know, an old frenemy.
‘I’m not yours and I don’t owe you anything, Charlie.’
More bluster, louder.
‘Yeah, yeah, okay.’ Gail held out the phone to Crowe. ‘He wants to talk to you,’ she said flatly.
He didn’t reply.
She mouthed, Stay cool .
Reluctantly, Crowe took the iPhone X-something or other from her. He didn’t like mobile phones much; they made you too available. He’d given in to the inevitable a year or so back, but few people had the number. He still used a landline and an archaic message-recorder in his office. ‘Pukalski? What makes you think I’d want to talk to an arsehole like you?’
Pukalski’s tone was twisted tight around a core of anger. ‘I’d watch your tongue, mate , or you might lose it. I got a job for you.’
‘I don’t need a job.’
‘You always need a job. Least employed PI around, I reckon.’
Crowe’s PI licence had long expired, but Crowe didn’t bother to remind him. ‘I’ll rephrase it then. I don’t need a job from you .’
Pukalski laughed, with no camaraderie in the sound. ‘Ill-mannered as ever. Okay, if money’s not enough to overcome your scruples, how about I appeal to your good nature?’
‘Lost it long ago.’
‘Pretend. Be in my office within the hour or that bitch you’re screwing ends up in the morgue.’ By this stage his usual, carefully acquired Aussie accent had lapsed into the more European mode that only appeared when h