Break in

I am not someone that is known to follow and uphold the law to the letter. I often find that it is restricting in so many ways, but I do appreciate that it is there for a reason. It separates the bad guys from the good guys and gives everyone the opportunity to choose which side of it they wish to be on; or if they want to jump between the two like I do.

When it comes to those who uphold and enforce the law, there should be no choice between good and bad and definitely no jumping back and forth between the two. Those in law enforcement should be impeachable bastions of honesty, justice and would sooner die than break the law that they serve. This is why I despise individuals like Gary Rogers, Richard Ellis and Ross Turndune as they have thrown aside all decency and loyalty when accepting money from criminal organisations whilst they are serving members of the police force.

Yes, another reason I find them so unbearable is the number of times they have tried to get Fred and Harry, but mostly Fred, fired.

Equally I find myself feeling the opposite of this vile repulsion when it does come to Fred and Harry, mostly because they have chosen life in the police and they do uphold the law without compromise - at least that's what I thought.

I spent an entire week coming home to my office and apartment to find things were not quite right. Yes the place was still decked out in the ridiculous decor that Fred and Harry had chosen when they had forced themselves upon me as house guests, but that wasn't what made it feel strange.

It felt as though someone had been there and had been moving things around as though they were looking for something. Items were not missing, but several things were not where I had left them as I had gone out earlier in the day.

I decided that the only way to find out if someone was coming into my place or if I was just becoming wildly paranoid, was to set up a surveillance point in the abandoned building across the street. The first thing I did was retrieve my sniper rifle from the super secret weapons stash and the second thing I did was break into the abandoned building.

I spent three nights not sleeping and watching my apartment through the sight of the sniper rifle without seeing anyone and I honestly began to think that I was possibly as crazy as most people assume I must be. But on the fourth night I was rewarded with someone breaking in.

Oh all the people I had thought it might be, Fred was the last person I would have named, though in hindsight, with the number of times I have broken into his place, I should have expected it. Never-the-less he stood there, as clear as day and began to carefully search my apartment. I would say I was speechless, but I was too angry with him to be speechless.

I picked up my phone and called Fred, I watched him look at his phone and answer, I then screamed at him down the phone for at least ten minutes before taking a breath and when all he did was laugh in response, I fired a warning shot through my window.

I should really start to think before shooting, especially when I am firing at Fred in my apartment...

I didn't hit him, but the bullet may have gone straight into my bathroom and shattered the toilet bowl. Now my apartment is flooded and I am having to stay at Fred's whilst the damage is being fixed - and when I say being fixed, waiting for me to have the money or leverage to blackmail someone into fixing it for me.

The worst part is, I still don't know what Fred was looking for or whether he was just breaking in and moving things to drive me up the wall.

Looking for the perfect Christmas present for Raven Siren fans? Look no further!  The Nicolette Mace books are now available in digital and paperback from Barnes and Noble. For more information about the Nicolette Mace universe please visit the wiki.

Cushions

Soft home furnishings have never been something that I have considered to be high on my priorities list. There are many theories that have been posited as to why this it - my mother was killed when I was just a girl, I never had a soft feminine influence in my life, my father was a private investigator, I never had nice things that I wanted to keep nice, that I am psychotic, I was never handed a Dunelm or John Lewis catalogue to leaf through...

Personally I don't think me being psychotic has anything to do with my lack of interest in interior design.

However my lack of caring about this turned out to not be a lack of caring, but liking my place just as it was. After the invasion of Harry and Fred and the subsequent the death threats and the throwing of several items they may have bought for my place out of the windows, I was left with a very odd situation.

There were stacks of paint charts, furnishing catalogues and wallpaper samples that had been left behind, taking up vital space in my office. There was new furniture that didn't creak and threaten to give way the moment it was used. The smell of rising damp seemed to have been replaced by a floral smell that emanated from a pile of colourful dried petals and scraps of fruit that had been purposefully made into the state - not just left in the corner of the room and forgotten about.

In short my wonderful, comfortable, grotty, damaged and dingy apartment had been turned into somewhere that approached being habitable.

What was the strangest thing of all was that there seemed to be things that looked an awful lot like overstuffed pillows now sitting on the sofa. Fred had called them cushions and I had called them a waste of time, well until I threw them at him and then I discovered they were really quite useful.

The very disturbing part about all of this is I actually quite like what they have done with the place, it is nice to not smell rotting mice corpses when I open the door to my home. It is really comfortable to snuggle up on the sofa surrounded by the overstuffed cushions. It's reassuring that not all furniture threatens to break when a feather is laid on top of it.

I'd never tell either Harry or Fred any of this. They don't need to know I am grateful for their interference in the design and decoration of my home, but I may just start carrying one or two cushions around - never know when I'll need to hit one or both of them round the head.

Looking for the perfect Christmas present for Raven Siren fans? Look no further!  The Nicolette Mace books are now available in digital and paperback from Barnes and Noble.

Home Sweet Home

My place may not be much to look at, but it is home. It has been set on fire more times than I can count, had explosives planted beneath the floorboards, had burst pipes, hosted any gunfights and even been redecorated by an RPG. And yet it is still standing...sort of.

It's the one place that is mine in this whole world, the one place I can come back to and shut out everything on the outside and not have to deal with it. Yes, that is by close a very thin connecting door, and yes, the moment I open it again the world is sat in my office with guns pointed at me - but the differentiation is very important.

Everyone goes on about how you need to take time to rest, to have a space to relax in, well this is mine.

No matter how many times it gets invaded by annoyingly inquisitive police officers, and overly sexually active police officers. No matter how many times I have walked in to find Mexican drug dealers playing Russian roulette with delegates from the UN. No matter how many times it has been burnt to the ground, blown up or used as a shooting gallery - it is still my home and my quiet place.

Here there is nothing that does not belong, the mould on the window frames, the unwashed dishes, the small rodents that scurry about their daily business, the four automatic weapons strapped to the underside of my mattress - all of it belongs in this delicately balanced place of my harmony.

At least it was all these things before Fred got termites and then Harry got woodworm - I'm not entirely convinced there is a difference between the two - but apparently neither of them can stay in a hotel because they might be transporting the insects about so instead they have both decided to stay here.

Isn't it just wonderful how they both decide that it's okay to bring invertebrates into my home that will devour my belongings and not into a hotel where they pay to use the facilities so they can afford to replace things that get destroyed.

So now I have no place of tranquillity, no refuge from the outside world because my home sweet home has been taken over by two men that have been hunting the rodents, cleaning the dishes, destroying the mould and making my home into somewhere that most people would want to live in and not avoid. I walked in the other day to find them both looking at wallpaper samples and paint charts, a new three piece suite sat in my living room with a new laminate floor, standing lamp and 56 inch flat screen up on something Fred referred to as the 'feature wall'.

It always concerns me when men seem to know more about interior decorating than women do, normally when it comes to me that's okay, but when the words 'feature wall' are mentioned in conjunction with my home, there is something very wrong.

If the two of them don't stop soon, they'll find out very quickly why it is exactly that I keep four automatic weapons under my bed...or I would if my bed was still there...

Author Note: If you enjoy the blog entries of Nicolette Mace: The Raven Siren then check out the new Siren Wiki. Books of the adventures of Siren are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, Sony, Kobo, Diesel and many more.

Blog posting hiatus

Due to family bereavement, C.S. Woolley will resume posting the Nicolette Mace blog on Monday 28th October.

Damsel in Distress

Fred and Harry decided that since I hadn't seen anything remotely Disney in my life, that I had missed out on an integral piece of my childhood. As a result they both felt the need to tie me to a chair and force me to watch Hercules with them.

Now I am not opposed to the good-natured fun for children and adults alike that the films promote. What I am opposed to is being subjected to Harry and Fred singing - seriously that is something nobody wants to be subjected to and also something I wouldn't subject Kevin Metis or Derek Long to.

The interesting thing about the film, besides discovering that Fred and Harry can't hit a single note, is the character of Meg. Meg I really liked. Yes she is a 'bad guy' that redeems herself and becomes 'good' and yes she does go to pieces over the sweet and noble Hercules, but this aside she makes an excellent point about being a damsel in distress.

"I'm a damsel, I'm in distress. I can handle it." 

I tried to point out to Fred how many times I had been in similar circumstances and told him the same thing. The jackass had the temerity to laugh at me as did Harry. I discovered as to why, when Hercules completely ignores Meg and tries to save her anyway.

Harry made certain parallels between what Fred and he do every time I get in over my head.

I have decided I dislike Disney. I would also point out that I am never in over my head, I just find myself in progressively higher water that never quite comes up over my head.

It made me wonder though how lots of different situations would have turned out if it wasn't for Harry and Fred complicating them. What I'd never tell them, and what they will never say to me, is that had they not interfered the first time I met them I would be dead. Just like Louise and my father.

Every situation since then I couldn't say the same was true, and there were all the times when I had to go and rescue them from the hands of certain death.

Does raise the question though of what the hero rules say about a dominus in distress...


Author Note: If you enjoy the blog entries of Nicolette Mace: The Raven Siren then check out the new Siren Wiki, the kickstarter project. Books of the adventures of Siren are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, Sony, Kobo, Diesel and many more.

Hunting the Priest Killer - Day 9

Trying to find a co-operative gang peon is like trying to find a vegetarian in a steak house. Harry and I spent nearly seven hours trying to find out what had happened to Fred when he passed into gang territory without finding a single canary to sing for us.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that after seven hours both Harry and I were tired and a tiny bit grumpy…and when I say a tiny bit grumpy, I mean I may have shot out the tyres of a car because it drove through a puddle and splashed me.

We had attracted far too much attention without gaining any information. I would say that things were getting dangerous, but then again we were going after a gang leader with brute force – was never going to be a day playing in a strawberry patch.

What made it more dangerous was the rain. When it rains, it pours and people don’t take to the streets – not unless those people are looking for someone or something. So Harry and I needed to get out of the rain and whilst we waited for it to pass we could think of a way to find out where Fred was.

There were several abandoned properties of both home and warehouse; we decided home was less likely to be occupied by illegal business.

We were wrong.

Harry and I forced the backdoor of the first empty house we saw and walked straight into an interrogation. Fred was tied to a chair in the middle of the kitchen looking as if Mike Tyson, Frank Bruno and Mohammad Ali had all taken it in turns to practise on him.

On the plus side we had managed to find Fred by blind luck. On the downside we were now face-to-face with gang members that actually had more of an ideal of who we were and what they were doing with the guns they were aiming at our foreheads…at close range.

Bluffing seemed like the only way that any of us would make it out of the room alive, but neither Harry nor I had ever been any good at bluffing. So we surrendered, threw down our guns and got knocked out for it.

The next thing I remember is seeing Sykes’ ugly face peering at mine. A piece of advice – even if someone is tied to a chair and has been unconscious for an undisclosed length of time, don’t put your face too close to their’s or you are liable to find yourself suffering from a Glaswegian kiss.

Sykes learnt that the hard way.

Lots of threats and swearing followed, but ultimately the bleeding where I broke his nose stopped and he calmed down long enough to admit that it had been him that had killed Patrick.

I’m not sure how I thought I’d feel when he admitted to that, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I had hoped. I think I would have felt vindicated, right, and then be able to shoot him between the eyes. This clearly didn’t happen. If anything I felt angrier than any of the times that Harry and Fred have been kidnapped or hurt.

I don’t really remember what happened next, but Harry swears from where he was sitting I did a complete Bruce Banner.

But then again, Harry is prone to exaggerate.

Tequila

There is something wonderful about tequila.

It is not a drink for everyone, but it does help separate the men from the boys in drinking contests.

I find it very helpful in getting rid of days that I would sooner not remember.

The last time I had tequila I started the evening at Joe's Place and I really don't remember anything until I woke up the next morning on Fred's sofa. At the time I decided that it was a good idea to retrace my steps and find out exactly what had happened.

Fred was not in his place and his bed didn't even look slept in, which made me wonder why on earth I was asleep on the sofa. However the best place to start looking for answers was going back to where I had started drinking.

Joe was less than happy to see me, it has to be said, in fact he leveled his shotgun at me and even threatened me! I was pretty certain that whatever I had done, Joe wasn't going to pull the trigger...after all he knows he can't shoot straight and just how annoyed I get by people firing lead towards my fashionable coordinated leather ensemble.

I did explain this to him though, just in case he had forgotten all of that. The explosion from the end of the shotgun that went wide and bit into the floor of the bar told me that I even if I knew what he should have done, he wasn't really in a good enough mood to remember that or be reasonable.

So I may have been forced to use violence to coerce information out of him. Well the threat of violence was more than enough to loosen his tongue. Apparently I had gone through three bottles of tequila, shot four people and Joe had called for Fred. When Fred had arrived I had told Joe that I was going to kill him for it...which explains his reaction to me turning up.

It turns out that I tried to punch Fred in the face when he told me he was taking me home, missed and went careening out of the bar door. Joe said he didn't know what happened after that, other than Fred chasing after me and what sounded like some colliding with a metal dumpster.

I went out to check for any evidence outside - like a blood trail, or perhaps Fred lying face down on the floor sleeping off a concussion. Sadly there was nothing. This was the moment that Harry graced the scene. He pulled up in his ridiculously flashy DBS Volante (I really don't know how he affords some of us stuff on his police salary), got out of his car, and threw his long coat over his shoulder - striding over trying to look cool. It's very hard not to laugh at people who are trying far too hard, so I didn't try to hold back. Admittedly rolling around on the floor unable to breathe due to laughing too much might have been going too far, but hell I didn't care.

Harry didn't say a word, but picked me up (I was still laughing), threw me over his shoulder, carried me to his overcompensation mobile and threw me in the passenger seat. He didn't say a word the whole drive and stopped his car outside his building. Fred was sat on the steps whiter than a sheet and shaking.

Turns out Fred had just stepped out to go get breakfast and came back to find me missing, having left behind one of my guns, my shotgun, my coat and my trilby, Fred had assumed I'd been kidnapped - especially as I might have left his apartment door open.

Harry had been woken up by Fred banging on his door and panicking. So Harry had gone out to find me and bring me back - unharmed.

In all fairness to him - Harry did exactly what he told Fred he'd do. Fred on the other hand may have chased me down the street shouting at me and throwing my belongings after me...was a good job the gun wasn't loaded.

Author Note: If you enjoy the blog entries of Nicolette Mace: The Raven Siren then check out the new Siren Wiki, the kickstarter project. Books of the adventures of Siren are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, Sony, Kobo, Diesel and many more.