Too Cold For Snow

delicious speed, two men as a loom of motion.
    Their first few moves were perfectly executed and in any other pair’s routine would have been climactic: perfect pirouettes, explosive bursts of energy and synchronicity, but they skated with all the verve of chefs calmly arranging their ingredients. The crowd in the arena knew this; so too did the huge worldwide television audience as Henry worked up a panting sweat and started to accelerate into the pièce de résistance.
    He was travelling too fast and was mentally too far into the move to notice the pains radiating into his body or to register the heart seizure which convulsed him in mid air, so that people thought this was all part of the act. He was dead before his still upright body careened towards the judging panel.
    There’s one photograph that sums up what happened: a shot taken by an enterprising photographer who had squeezed beneath the judges table. It showed a row of limp clenched fists, like white tulips, holding onto the numbers they would have shortly held aloft, ones and noughts in repeating order, showing they would have given the ‘Hawks’ every available point, had not Henry died in mid routine, becoming the first ever martyr of the ice.
    Planer never found another partner, but enjoyed his return to the meat factory. Normality was welcome after the blur of attention which followed Henry’s death. On a good day Planer would remember their arabesques as he carved the Uruguayan beef with the file saw. And he could conjure up Henry’s smile as his teeth flashed in orbit.

Mission Creep
     
     
    Krink was the only contract killer working out of Gwynedd. Despite his stranglehold on the market – and how telling was that word when you considered his favoured modus operandi – he made a poor fist of it, with only two hits to his name these past three years and one of those was just a quick nudge for a rich old man over a cliff near Colwyn Bay. It made him glum, and as he stared at the brown sludge of coffee in the chipped mug on the café table he tried to banish the blues. It wasn’t easy. His bank account had dwindled, what with takings from the bookshop being down and people clearly cutting back on their assassination budgets.  
    This part of north Wales was a thinly populated place, with a landscape of jagged dragons’ teeth and high sheep folds and just as the population was a trifle spare so too was the criminal underworld that shadowed it, confined to a few sheep stealers and the usual drug traders from the estates in Liverpool who sped along the A55 in their pimp-my-ride BMWs, each a gleaming wonderland of chrome, tinted windows and multi-layer paint jobs. They brought C-grade skank and lower grade whizz, each cut with weed killer and flour, even brick dust sometimes, just to make the heroin look a bit more brown.
    South of the coast where the land rises in its jagged dentitions were hills where only bachelor farmers lived and here on the sea’s edge, along the Costa Geriatrica, many of the old grippers who lived here were only killing time, waiting for the Reaper to come and slice them out of their bath chairs.
    Krink lived in one of those death towns so crammed with old folk that it actually had a bath chair shop, like a throwback to the Empire days. Horace Keel and Son still managed to ply their trade in the age of the Zimmer and the Stannah stair lift, their emporium full of raffia and moth dust. Given an onshore breeze you could stand in the middle of the High Street and smell the embalming fluid.
    The café that morning was full of people in the middle of a shift change, with white hatted nightbirds who’d just finished the last batch of loaves at the nearby bakery having a quick cuppa before going to bed and shop workers fueling for the zombie-day ahead. Krink assessed each of them with a professional eye, drawn to weakness, habit and obsessive tics much as most people were attracted by beauty or style. He identified an affair in its early stages, and read the slippery body language of a shoplifter who was practicing prestidigitation on the salt and pepper shakers. Opposite him was a fat man, slobbering over a heaped bowl of breakfast linguine alla vongole. The man was a quivering, heavy-breathing icon of greed. He couldn’t get the pasta into his mouth fast enough. A slinky psychopath, adept with piano wire, could work wonders for his table manners. A rivulet of tomato sauce ran down the man’s neck, resembling a garrote