Kill It With Fire by Adam Maxwell

Author:Adam Maxwell [Maxwell, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Lost Book Emporium
Published: 2018-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

nine

There had been no sound from the room beneath Violet for at least a minute. She began to gradually move back towards the open loft hatch.

“Katie?” Violet breathed.

No noise came from the room below.

“Katie?” Violet moved closer still, unable to see her friend through the hatch.

“Katie?” she said, louder this time.

There was no reply. This was not a huge surprise, given that Katie was mute, but there was something else about the silence. Something Violet didn’t like. She should have been able to hear her friend moving. Nonetheless, she couldn’t wait any longer. If her friend was in danger then she had to face the threat head on.

Head on and upside down in this case.

Violet lowered herself into the room so that her hair entered first, hanging below her inverted face. She whipped her head around, taking in the whole room from the door and bookcase she had already seen to the wall opposite, where a well-stocked drinks cabinet sat under a portrait of a man who appeared to be Napoleon. Looking past the uniform and focussing on the face Violet smirked, realising that Elias Croft had had himself painted in place of the little man. She turned her attention to Croft’s desk. The wide, mahogany monstrosity was inlaid with red leather and sat in front of a wall made entirely of glass. A huge, dark red leather chair sat behind the desk and, leaning back in it with her legs crossed, feet perched on the inlaid red leather of the desk, nudging a metal pen jutting from a holder attached to it, was Katie. And she was reading a book.

“What the hell are you doing?” Violet spat the words.

Katie ignored her, preferring to make an exaggerated motion of licking her thumb and turning the page.

Violet dumped her backpack on the desk, lowered herself down and surveyed the room from a right-side-up perspective. There was a fireplace along one wall and above it was a huge oil painting of the film star Bruno Zenker in his signature role as Gino Lombardi from the movie ‘I Am The Mob’. Lombardi was a particularly vicious Italian-American gangster, primarily because he was a bit of a short-arse.

“He’s very fond of Zenker, isn’t he?” asked Violet.

Katie didn’t respond.

“He was from Kilchester, you know? Back then he was called Wilbur Wimberley,” said Violet. “I read one of his biographies. You wouldn’t keep a name like that, would you? Wilbur Wimberley.”

Katie tapped the page of the book she was reading, but Violet carried on unperturbed as she walked around the office, getting a feel for the room. “I mean there was no shaking Kilchester’s stink from her favourite son but Zenker seemed to embrace the infatuations the idiots from this city had with him and, sort of, played with it.”

Violet looked along the spines of the books on one of the shelves, then pulled one out.

“This is the biography, if you’d like to read it?” she asked.

Katie gave a slight shake of her head and made a show of turning another page in her own book.

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