Cucumber Coolie by Ryan Casey Page B

finally looked at me.
    “And you must be Blake?” he said.
    I held out a hand for him.
    He turned away and pointed to the back room. “If you’d like to follow me.”
    I stood there with my hand propped out.
    Okay, maybe Jared was a douche after all.
    Martha and I followed Jared into the back room of the jewellers. We took a left and went through another door, which Jared had just unlocked. It was dark, and it smelled damp.
    “There’s a light around here somewhere… ah!”
    The light flickered on.
    I was stunned by what I saw.
    “Of course, it goes without saying that the moment you leave this place, you’ll unsee everything you’ve seen. That okay with you, Blake?”
    I nodded and mumbled, but no way was I forgetting this place.
    There were guns of all kinds lining the back wall. Machine guns, shotguns, handguns, all just stacked up in the back of this quiet little jewellers in the middle of a sleepy village.
    But it was the wall to my left that made my heart pick up.
    Gadgets. Gadgets of all shapes and sizes. Lasers. Top of the range laptops. Jesus—was that a bloody Google Glass? I was in absolute heaven.
    “Like the stuff?” Jared asked.
    “Don’t mind him,” Martha said. “He’s the biggest gadget nerd you’ll ever meet.”
    I salivated at the thought of all the toys I could spend my Fun Funds on. Holy hell, why had I not been told about this place in the past?
    “Is that…” I pointed to the slick black phone sitting on top of a MacBook Pro Retina.
    “An iPhone 7? Yep,” Jared said. “One of the first prototype models in from China.”
    I examined the beautiful 5.5 inch screen, the curved back… “But they—but they aren’t even—”
    “Available yet? Nope. But it helps to have contacts. Anyway, about your guy.”
    I had to pinch my own side to remind myself that I was here to save Danielle’s life, not get horny over an iPhone 7.
    Jared propped some thick-rimmed glasses on his face and scanned through a file. “Yeah, I remember him. 29 th July. Came in here with the passwords and bought the VaiTox, the SawDoor, and a load of other lock picking things.”
    “What was he like?” I asked.
    Jared tapped his perfectly white tooth with the end of his Parker pen. God, I could marry this bloke for all his gadgets. “Hmm. Well I remember him for a reason. He was in his fifties, I’d say. Balding. Quite… quite professional-looking, actually. You know, suited and booted. He looked like a typical rich-man coming in to buy his wife a new diamond necklace, something like that. So it surprised me when he gave me the passwords for this room.”
    “Do you have CCTV footage of him?”
    Jared nodded. “Sure. Got it right here for you.”
    He pushed a DVD into an unreleased Mac Pro and we waited for it to load up.
    I squinted at the screen.
    “Here he is. 2 p.m, he wanders in the shop. You can get a real good look at him here.” He zoomed in with his Touchpad.
    The guy was just as Jared had described him. Balding, in his fifties or sixties. Wearing a decent-looking suit, although it was a bit baggy for his skinny body.
    But his hands. His shaking hands and his wide eyes. They were the main things.
    “He looks like he’s shitting himself,” Martha said.
    “Right,” Jared said. “I noticed that too. Which is usually fine, especially when we have new back room clients. But I dunno. He always stuck in my mind for just how nervous he was.”
    I watched him mutter something to Jared. Watched, as the pair of them disappeared through the back door.
    One moment he was there, the next, he was gone.
    “Can we get this to the police?” Martha asked.
    Jared shrugged. “As long as it doesn’t trace back to me, you can do what you want with it.”
    Martha nodded. “Nice one. Right, Blake?”
    I stared at the screen. “What was in his pocket?”
    Jared squinted. “His pocket?”
    “Rewind a second. There was something in his pocket.”
    Jared whistled as he fiddled with the Mac Pro, then rewound a