Short Fiction: Mouse Trouble

Welcome back to another short fiction attempt here at Anansi’s Web!

Once again, check out some other writers where I’m sharing this over at Inspiration Monday if you enjoy a variety of short stories from an interesting mix of writers. Also elected this time to try out a Three Word Wednesday challenge where they provide 3 words that I then work into my story.

This one was an idea that I’d had before but never worked on and here decided to give it a shot, I hope you enjoy the end result. There is a hidden story in all this, details hinted at and clues about what it’s all REALLY about, BONUS POINTS to anyone who can guess what it is!

When you finish reading though, do let me know: what did you enjoy about this story? And what did you not (if anything)?

Cheers!

(this story is the intellectual property of Akshay Dhar, the owner of this here blog!)

———————————————————

My crotch was on fire! There are few things in life as painful as having a fresh, hot cup of coffee rain down on your family jewels, that I can now tell you from experience. A quick change almost on-the-fly and tearing through the streets with the siren wailing and the uniform is dropping me off at the crime scene where my partner waits with the recently departed. Wading through the crowds behind the barricades and the many over-eager reporters hoping to build a career on cases like this.

“No comment!” briefly becoming my mantra, I finally reach the wood-lined magic circle and am let through. A quick breath to take in the whole scene and then straight on to the main attraction.

“Took you long enough to get here, getting a little too hot and bothered today?” says Detective Inspector Mallika Udwadia, my partner, without even looking my way.

“You heard – guess I shouldn’t be surprised since our entire station’s worse than an old lady’s kitty-party.” I retort. Can’t help but smirk a little, one quickly suppressed since I’d hate to be caught smiling at a murder scene. Next thing you know I’m on Youtube and losing my job due to public outrage. I’m not even thinking about the report on all this that I’ll have to draft later today.

“What have we got so far?” I ask, focus on the matter at hand.

“Same M.O as the last three.” Mallika says, finally turning and putting her notebook away. “No obvious clues as to who did it and why, but going by the detail and efficiency of it all, definitely our guy.”

I walk over to the grisly remains of our victim, wincing a little at the smell starting to emanate from them. It was indeed exactly the same as the string of deaths that had shaken up the town these past weeks. The targets have all been tough-guys, bullies, men in power who picked on the little guys. Thomas Catus was the first two weeks ago, a dockworker known to moonlight as muscle for local loan sharks and W.E. Latrans, a national-level mafia enforcer, was the second. And now suspected mafia big-shot R.T. Berganza, a.k.a “Wolfie” had joined that list.
All gruesome and equally bizarre in their methods of execution – at first glance they looked like macabre deaths, but if you looked past the shocking nature of them all you could see that they’d all been messed up on purpose – a very malicious purpose.

I look slowly around the apartment complex around us. “Count the windows out yet?” I ask, looking at the broken ledge above me. Not hard to locate where this all began today.

“We’ve got teams spread out and looking for any witnesses who can give us something.” she said, hanging up the phone-call the DCP had been shouting through. “Nothing’s come up so far though. The apartment that ledge belongs, turns out it belongs to Wolfie here, rumoured to be a bit of a love-nest. Could be clear case of adultery-gone-wrong if that theory wasn’t rapidly unraveling before my very eyes here.” She went on, shaking her head in a mix of annoyance and confusion, “What do you have to be thinking to do something like this and pull it off with such precision?”

As she turned to greet the Crime Scene technicians, I looked over the body one last time as it lay. He was a big man, a really tough guy and I knew his reputation, no way he went down easily so whoever did this was good. Hopefully the tox-screen will bring up something, but the last two were clear – for the time of death period mostly – clean nonetheless. The decreasing likelihood that these were all unconnected was increasing the pressure on the police to find out who was behind these murders and we were feeling it right now.
The tech’s go to work and we head up to the apartment. Nice, normal place to to live – excellent place for a quiet rendezvous.

“Here it is.” she pointed it out and we went in through the wide-open door.

An officer and havaldar kept an eye on the place and now moved out to give us room. Total serenity and calm in this nice, clean, cozy little apartment that looks like it’s been put together with a lot of love. I look around, no obvious signs of any struggle in the main room or the open bedroom, or anywhere else for that matter. Then I find myself on the balcony looking down.

“So what do you think?” I ask as Mallika steps out to join me.

“I don’t know.” She replies, “But then again what can you say about a case of death by piano?”

765 words