Noah gasped, took a deep breath, and then threw up again all over the man’s shoes.
He was going crazy, he must be. He had just seen this man’s face down on the beach, purple and blotchy but most importantly and noticeably dead. Was someone playing a cruel trick on him? He retched again, but nothing came up. Apparently he had already emptied the contents of his stomach.
Noah reached up a shaking hand, and wiped the sweat from his forehead before using the towel around his shoulders to dry his mouth.
“You’re messing with me, right?” He managed to get out. “You’re an identical twin or this is a really elaborate prank? It’s not very funny.”
The man was looking disdainfully at his shoes which were covered in vomit. “These are Italian leather,” he said mournfully. “They cost me eight thousand dollars.” He shook his head. “I guess in the grand scheme of things that’s not too important right now though, is it?”
IcyFlame wrote:[b]1. How can I make it more interesting at the points in my novel when nothing much is really going on? I have a lot of parts where there will be a lot of action and parts where the characters are doing some investigating but then it'll slow down a little and wait for the next big revelation/action sequence. Besides character building, what else can be good to put in there?
IcyFlame wrote:2. What is a good pace to have my two main characters start to fall for each other without this entire thing turning into a love story? This is very much a side plot so I don't want it to take too much attention but I also want enough for the readers to stay interested and invested in the two of them.
IcyFlame wrote:3. How do I, knowing the ending, make sure not to spoil it for my readers too soon? If I have a character that's going to turn out to be terrible, how do I put my feelings for them aside so that the reader grows suitably attached to them before more information is revealed about them?
Josh was still watching him. A slightly dumbfounded expression had clouded his dark features and his eyebrows were furrowed. His cheeks were tinged pink from the raw ocean wind. “You think someone dragged him to where you found him?”
“Yes.”
“And where are those marks now?”
Noah shrugged, in what he hoped was a nonchalant kind of way. “I guess I must have messed them up when I fell down. They were made in the sand, after all.”
Josh looked as though his head might well explode. Noah hoped it wouldn’t. He was covered in enough bodily fluid as it was without adding Josh’s brain juice to the mix.
“Come with me,” Josh said finally, through slightly gritted teeth. He strode off along the sand and Noah scrabbled to keep up with him, feet slipping along the sand.
“Wait,” Emily called, jogging after them. “The techs need to speak to Mr Taylor. He might be covered in evidence!”
“Well good job you told us to widen the perimeter,” said Anders. “We’d probably not have caught it otherwise.”
Noah resisted the urge to gloat. But that meant it was possible Toby had been right. He didn’t like to think about what that meant. There was no way for Noah’s subconscious to have known this was a murder, not least because he’d made up seeing the drag marks to pique josh’s interest. There was nothing that indicated murder to a civiilian. He hadn’t seen gunshots or stab wounds, and despite the copious reruns of CSI, he knew nothing about how to recognise cause of death. He could hope that his brain had noticed something he hadn’t, but it was looking less and less likely that Toby was a figment of his imagination.
What that meant he was, Noah wasn’t sure. But whatever he was, he had promised to leave Noah alone as long as the cops solved his murder. Noah had pointed them in the direction of some evidence, he just had to hope it was enough.
“Well?” Josh demanded. “Don’t be so vague about the whole thing. Out with it. What did you find?”
“This,” said Anders simply, and he pulled back the leaves of one of the fronds to reveal a battered fishing boat.
Josh simply stared at it. “You pulled me down here to tell me you’d found a boat? Is this the time to point out that we’re by the sea? There are loads of fishing boats down here Anders, get to the point.”
“It’s wet on the bottom,” said Anders with a smug smile that said he knew something that they didn’t. “That means it’s been out this morning. Considering it’s not even dry yet, that means we’ve either found who moved our body, or a possible witness.”
The phone beeped, and he saw that Tim had hung up. “Typical,” he muttered under his breath. He fumbled to put his phone away.
“Problem?” Josh asked, as though he hadn’t just heard the conversation, and how snide Tim had been on his end.
“He’s a substitute,” Noah offered by way of explanation.
“Why is that a problem?”
Noah glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t much feel like making small talk, but the normal morning traffic wasn’t going anywhere and he wasn’t completely sure how much further they had to drive. “Substitutes have this thing about real teachers,” he said finally. “They’re just bitter, really, because we have proper qualifications.”
“And substitute teachers don’t?”
“No,” he exclaimed. “We worked hard for those so we deserve to take sick days if we need it. We work all day every week. The day doesn’t end when the kids go home. They think we can just call in sick and they’re some kind of knights in shining armour who come in to save the day at the last minute. I work so hard, and he wants to take the glory. It’s stupid,” he finished, trailing off. He had come very close to declaring that it wasn’t fair, as though he was some kind of a child.
He shut his mouth and leaned back in his seat, turning his attention to the heavy traffic out of his window. There was something about Josh, he decided. It brought out a weird, petulant side of him that he didn’t like at all.
The medical lab turned out to be the basement of a block of offices in the centre of the city. The traffic had eased slightly as they drove, thinning as the morning rush hour ended and people made their way to work or school. Even so, the journey had taken nearly forty five minutes, at least forty of which were spent in an awkward silence.
Periodically, Noah had noticed Josh watching him whilst the car was stationary but he’d pretended not to see. When Josh had dropped him off at the lab, they’d barely exchanged a word of goodbye, merely nodding at each other before Josh turned to Emily who had been waiting.
“One piece of evidence, as promised.”
“And you kept him from compromising it.”
“Almost,” Josh grinned. “I did my best, but the man falls down a lot.”
They smiled at each other for a moment before Josh cleared his throat in the background. He had put one hand on the door handle, looking back into the room as though someone might tell him not to leave. Noah certainly wasn’t going to be the one to do that.
The man who followed behind was already wearing a pair of gloves. Logic dictated this must be Dr Bernstein. He was much smaller than Dr Parish, with strawberry blonde curls in a mass atop his moonlike face. He smiled at Noah, and despite his discomfort, Noah found himself smiling back.
“So you’re the dude covered in victim goop”
Noah’s smile slipped instantly. “I guess that’s me, yeah.”
“Dude, that’s so cool,” Dr Bernstein grinned broadly. “You’re like walking talking evidence.”
The bar gradually filled the longer Noah sat there, as Friday afternoon gave way to early evening and the string of businessmen and women trickled in. All seemed relieved to have made it to the end of the working week and they made it known with toasts and cheers and general merriment.
Noah sat in the corner and nursed his second drink, which was not going down all too well. He’d ordered beer, which was unusual for him, and halfway through the first sip he was reminded of why he never drank the stuff. But he was too awkward to go and ask for something else so there he sat, taking the occasional sip and pretending he was enjoying it whenever anyone happened to glance in his general direction.
120,141 Literary Works • 648,791 Reviews
Gender:
Points: 154066
Reviews: 1485