Rose Head E-Book

Robert Jeschonek

• Herausgeber: Pie Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In a world where everyone has a flower for a head, who can stop the serial killer called the Pruner? Enter Inspector Glisten, a hard-boiled, two-fisted, rose-headed cop who'll stop at nothing to cut down the Pruner. But when the trail leads to a seedy underworld he never imagined, Glisten gets in way over his rose-head. His rosy world blows apart in an explosion of deadly flower power, leaving Inspector Glisten to fight for his life with guns blazing against a harvest of terror that could bring everything he knows and loves crashing down around him. Don't miss this exciting hard-boiled mystery by award-winning storyteller Robert Jeschonek, a master of unique and unexpected fantasy that really packs a punch.

Leseprobe

Rose Head

A FANTASY TALE

ROBERT JESCHONEK

Contents

Also by Robert Jeschonek

Rose Head

About the Author

Special Preview: Heaven Bent

ROSE HEAD

Copyright © 2023 by Robert Jeschonek

http://bobscribe.com/

Cover Art Copyright © 2023 by Ben Baldwin

www.benbaldwin.co.uk

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved by the author.

Published by Blastoff Books

An Imprint of Pie Press

411 Chancellor Street

Johnstown, Pennsylvania 15904

www.piepresspublishing.com/

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Rose Head

The woman with a daisy for a head--her name is Gravelina Scalding--runs out the front door of her townhouse with a pair of pruning shears pointed in my direction.  The silver-shining blades are scissored open wide, ready to snip my green throat with a squeeze of the handles.

Myself, I have a red rose for a head, but not for long if I don’t make a major move right this instant.  Then, who’ll find the killer of things roselike, the man, woman, or thing the papers call the Pruner? Who’ll avenge the murders of my dear darling wife and seedlings?

The very thought of their deaths is enough to fill my red red heart and my green heart too with rage.

My partner, Chub, is nearby, but I know better than to look to him for help.  While I have the head of a rose and the body of a man, Chub has the head of a man (though it’s a fat, pasty man’s head like a pile of mashed potatoes) and the thick-stalked body of a sunflower.  He gets around on flippery roots, but he’s useless in a pinch because he just can’t run.

So it’s up to me, as usual.

Since I’m more interested in questioning Gravelina than killing her, I don’t reach for the pistols in the pockets of my lemon yellow suit jacket.  Instead, as Gravelina charges, I grab a nearby lawn chair and charge right back, jamming the aluminum frame into the blades of the shears. Gravelina keeps pushing--she’s stronger than I expected--but I hold her off.  One last shove and I knock her back off her feet, sprawling on the cobblestone walk.

The shears fall from her grip, and I kick them away.  Dropping on top of her, I pin her wrists to the walk and cough a cloud of ester vapor in her face.  This particular ester is meant to tranquilize and bring out the truth.

“We know you’re connected to the Pruner,” I say in the language of the flower-headed people, the play of scents and the rustling of petals.  “Now tell me the killer’s name.”

Gravelina thrashes violently beneath me, nearly freeing one arm.  “The weeds must be pruned if we are to touch the sun,” she says.

The blood and chlorophyll syrup in my veins freezes.  She is quoting the message that was left hanging in wisps of fragrance in the air at each of the Pruner’s twenty-one known murders.

I press the thorns in the palms of my hands more deeply into the meat of Gravelina’s wrists.  “Tell me! Who is the Pruner?”

“The question you should ask, Inspector Glisten,” she says, “is who isn’t?”

* * *

“Daisy-heads suck,” says Chub, wrapping a dark green frond around a mug of beer.  He hoists the beer from the bar and downs the contents in one swallow. Drinking is one thing he does fast.

“Gravelina won’t crack,” I say in flower-speak.  Though Chub has the head of a man, he understands my rustling/scent language, which makes my life easier.  With some difficulty, I can eke out a whispery approximation of man-talk with vibrations of my stamen, but Chub saves me the trouble.

Whatever I did to deserve him as a partner, I’m glad I did it.  Chub’s no rose-head, so he’ll never be promoted, but he’s been my loyal, reliable helper for seventeen years.  He hated me at first, but I won him over by saving his life, and we’ve been crime-busting best buddies ever since.

Not that we’ve been busting much crime since the Pruner came along.

“Maybe the aphids in the crime lab’ll dig something out when they get a taste of her,” says Chub.  “Sniff out trace information from her petals.”

I shrug, displaying my lack of confidence in this possibility.  Though aphid bugs have been known to find evidence when we let them gnaw on a suspect or a victim for a while, the technique has been as useless as everything else we’ve tried so far to track down the Pruner.

A girl with a marigold head drifts by, carrying a water mister on a tray.  I want a spritz and wave her over. “In the meantime, what do we do next?” I say.  “Gravelina was our best lead. Aromacams picked up her scent in the lobbies of two hotels where murders were committed.  We found the pollen prints of five victims on her pistils.”

“Hmm,” says Chub, thoughtfully swaying from side to side.  “She said the question we should be asking is who isn’t the killer.  Does that mean the process of elimination?”

The marigold girl lifts the blue-tinted mister bottle from the tray and directs the nozzle at my rose-head.  I lean forward as she squeezes the trigger, spraying my crimson petals with fine droplets of water.

I feel instantly refreshed and tip her generously.  As she bows and glides away, I admire the bobbing of the sepals at the base of her blossom, the sway of her buttocks under her filmy white skirt.  She reminds me of my wife, Zwilla, though my wife has a rose instead of a marigold for a head.

Had.  I mean she had a rose for a head before the Pruner killed her.

For the umpteenth time today, I feel a stab in my gut at the thought of dead Zwilla.  Though she has been gone for a month, the pain is as fresh as if she had been taken only this morning.

To dull that pain, I return my attention to talk of investigating her murder.  “One other possibility, Chub,” I say. “Could she have meant that the least likely suspect is actually the murderer?”

Chub thinks for a moment, then sighs and shakes his fleshy jowls.  “Maybe she just wanted to throw us off track,” he says.

“You might be right,” I say, reaching for a plant food spike from the jar on the bar.  “We know Gravelina has a connection to the killer. Perhaps we should take a closer look at her personal life.”

“She works for a rhododendron-head who arranges humans,” says Chub.  “Miss Carionette. Maybe we should drop by her shop.”

I kick off my right shoe, peel off the sock, and nibble the food spike with the tiny toothy maws on my toes.  “Now you’re thinking, man-head,” I say as the nutrients rush into my system. “We’ll clip this weed yet.”

I flash Chub a confident smile, but it’s all fake.  We’ve been looking for the Pruner for over a year now, and all we have to show for it is a longer list of victims.

A list that now includes my wife and children.  They bring the grand total to twenty-one.

That means that more is at stake in this case for me than personal revenge for the death of my family.  For any police inspector like me to leave twenty-one murders unsolved in one year’s time, that individual won’t be inspector for long

The word on the grapevine is that I’m just about out of a job, and I believe it.  I’ve seen better cops than me get the old heave-ho for lesser failures than this. My nineteen years of distinguished service on the force don’t mean much next to my last year of shitty underperformance

If Chub and I don’t produce a perp soon, the axe will fall hard and fast on yours truly.  What comes after that, you don’t want to know.

Let’s just say that they’re probably not saving me a spot in the garden of honor.