HARD FALL: A Gripping Noir Thriller (Thomas Blume Book 1) by Phil Reade

Author:Phil Reade [Reade, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-04-30T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

It all falls down.

Amid the dirt and grime coating every surface of the room, a flicker caught my eye. Low down, half buried in a pile of leaves, something glimmered. I moved closer and reached down for the object. It finally came free in my hand, and I was surprised to find a toy car.

It was a tiny thing, less than the length of my finger and rusted from top to bottom. The paintwork, which had once been blue with some kind of flame decals, had all but vanished. Decayed by time and weather. The windows, made from a hardened plastic had remained, however. It was these that shined in the thin light.

I straightened and weighed the toy in my hand. Sure, some adults collected the items but mostly, these were for kids, boys especially. My own son had owned a handful of model cars. For one of his birthdays, I bought him a scale model of the Ford pickup truck, my own first car. Tommy had smiled and thanked me, but the pickup had soon been relegated to the lower ranks of his collection, beneath the sports cars and drag racers. It just wasn’t as cool as other cars. Its real-life counterpart suffered the same problem.

It made me smile to remember Tommy on his birthday. Was it his eighth? Ninth? The memories were hard to place, and for a moment, I hated myself for letting them fade. Instead, I focused on his smile, the ruddy color in his cheeks when he would come running into the kitchen, full of the boundless energy of children, and the strange games he would imagine with his toys. Those were the memories that would never fade. Seared into my mind by joy and by grief.

The car found a place in my pocket. It was an unusual discovery, but hardly proof of anything untoward.

I looked at the dresser again, wondering if the drawers might hold any clues, and stepped forward. The toe of my shoe made sharp contact with something on the floor. A dull thud echoed in the abandoned building as I stumbled forward.

“Son-of-a—”

I caught my balance in time to see what obstacle had appeared from out of nowhere in the nearly empty room. A raised floorboard, half an inch higher than the rest.

In the decaying apartment, a warped floorboard wasn’t exactly extraordinary—the whole damn place was falling apart—but something made me inspect it closer. Something about the angle and the markings on the wood, the straight cut marks near the end, as though it had been lifted numerous times before.

I knelt and pressed my fingertips against the rough wood, pulling it upward. It came loose easily, and I found myself staring into the small cavity below. It was dark and musty, with the wan light from outside doing nothing to illuminate the contents, but the faint outline of something colorful sat inside.

Using my phone’s flashlight function, I angled the white LED into the gap and hesitated.

A small notebook was wedged inside, with the spine facing up.

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