Title: Dirty Work – Book One of the Dirty Deeds Series

Publisher: Rogue Firebird Press

Release: March 4

Buy Links:

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Blurb:

Crime Scene Cleaner [kraɪm siːnˈkliːnə] – Cleans up crime scenes…before the cops know there is one.

People always say ‘you can’t go home again’. It turns out that doesn’t count as a guarantee…especially not during a global pandemic.

After the jobs in LA started to dry up, crime scene cleaner Grade Pulaski was forced to pack up and move home. He loves his family, but the last thing he ever wanted was to face the ghosts he’d left back in Sweeny, Kentucky.

Also, the place just sucks.

He certainly isn’t going to stay any longer than necessary. The plan is to save up enough money to move back to LA and give his business a kick-start. The problem is that, as previously mentioned, Sweeny’s a hole and the locals are anything but professional.

Now a body has gone missing, Grade’s reputation is being held hostage, and people keep asking whether his Dad really did run off with 100 grand of meth in the back of Dodge. Plus, even though you shouldn’t sleep with your employers, crime lord Clay Traynor is exactly the sort of bad idea that Grade can’t resist. Tattooed, bad news, and dangerous.

…oh, yeah. Grade’s job is to clean up the crime scene before the cops know someone’s dead. That’s why he needs to sort this out before he gets a bad review on dark net Yelp.

 

 

Thanks for letting me pop in to talk about my latest book, Dirty Work, which comes out on March 4. This is the first book in the Dirty Deeds trilogy and I had a lot of fun with it! It’s available online and I hope you like it! I had a lot of fun writing it!

 

I also hope you enjoy ‘Clean Hands’ a short story prequel to the series.

 

Clean Hands – Chapter Five

 

The bone saw had been worth the money.

It might actually be usable again. Probably not legally, not for food. Grade was still careful as it took it apart and dunked it into the tub of bleach he’d set out below the stairs. He’d not decided if he should keep it or not. Either way it was better to have it as clean as possible.

What was left of the drug dealer — John Harlow, 29 — was bagged up in black plastic bags. It was like using those compression cubes for packing, you could fit more than you thought in. That had been the easy part.

Grade stripped off his stained–frankly nightmarishly–boiler suit and pulled on a clean one. Then he grabbed the fresh bucket of bleach and lemon scented ice machine cleaner and got to work.

His mom was a cleaner–among other things, when you had two kids and no husband anymore you found jobs–and she’d always told him to do good at school or he’d end up doing the same thing. Well, he’d done excellent at school until he left and here he was.

Grade stripped out anything that could have been splattered with blood and stacked it in the back of Harrison’s jeep for disposal. Then he set out to scrub away all evidence of what had just happened.

It wasn’t going to be perfect. If some crack team of FBI forensic specialists rolled up and took the place apart they would find blood that had gotten into the thread of a screw or seeped into a crack. Thing was, who was going to spend that sort of time or money on a small-time drug dealer? As long as they didn’t have any reason not to believe it, they’d just assume he crossed the wrong person and ended up in the desert.

So sad, but luckily there was probably someone else with a pocket of uppers to take his place.

Cops didn’t care about criminals. Grade had learned that young.

By the time he finished everything was wet and smelled aggressively clean. It wouldn’t last. He’d leave the garage door open tonight–or tomorrow, at this point he supposed–and the place would be grubby and smell of rogue skunk soon enough.

He finished, stripped off again, and pulled his own clothes on with pruned up fingers. It was nearly dawn when he checked his phone, and it looked like Shannon hadn’t come back down to help.

Dory had texted him though. A picture of his nephew with spots all over his face and the alarmed question ‘Measles?!’. Grade had missed his chance though, because she’d already corrected herself with ‘Crayola’. He dragged the black plastic bags of bits down to the back of the jeep while he texted her back one-handed.

Some of them were blue.

He waited for a second, but it stayed unread. She was probably asleep.

Grade missed them. Sometimes. He still wasn’t going to go back, no matter what.

Once the bags were stacked up he went back inside to drag Harrison and Shannon back down to give him a hand with stacking them under the parcel rack.

 

“And then what?” Mark Hall–who dealt drugs on a more wholesale level than the dead man in the garage had — asked as he crouched down in front of Grade. “What did you do with my cousin after that?”

Grade swallowed the mouthful of blood and weighed his options. Neither Shannon nor Harrison had been here when he got home, so it was hard to pin blame. One of them had obviously sold him out.

He hoped it was Harrison. Even though he’d known better, Grade had kind of liked Shannon.

That meant that Grade could try and stick with his claims that he had no idea what was going on, but it probably wouldn’t help him much. Never admit anything to the cops, his Dad had always taught him that was the golden rule, make them work for it.

Criminals, however, didn’t have the same need to show their work to justify their pay check.

“What’s in for me if I tell you?” he asked.

“Impressing me,” Hall said. “It might be your last chance to look clever.”

Grade grinned briefly. It hurt his face. “I am clever,” he said. “I don’t need to prove that. If you’re going to kill me anyhow, why should I spend my last hour proving I test well?”

Hall gave him a light slap on the cheek. “You’re too smart for your own good, aren’t you?” he said. “Bet I’m not the first person to tell you that.”

He was not. Hall was batting a hundred tonight.

Before Grade could say anything else to make things worse, Hall pushed himself up out of his crouch. He tugged his trousers down and wiped blood off his hand on an old t-shirt.

It wasn’t the first time someone had wiped blood up with it.

“You want a job?” Hall asked.

Grade blinked, genuinely caught off guard. “Huh?”

“Huh,” Hall mimicked, before he glanced at one of the heavies he’d brought with him. “Look at that. Smart boy didn’t realize this was a job interview.”

Grade spat out a mouthful of blood. “Why would you hire me?” he asked. “I fucked up. You found us.”

“Yeah,” Hall agreed. “You did. But I’ll tell you how, and I get the feeling you’ll not make the same mistake twice. But you want this job, you need to impress the boss. So how did you get rid of the body?”

Grade hesitated for a second, but he didn’t see how keeping his peace would help now.

“There were three bodies scheduled to be cremated,” he said. “I just put your cousin in with them, under them. No-one ever checks, and I’m the one who drives the bodies to the crematorium.”

Hall raised his eyebrows. “Nice,” he said. A glance to the heavies for agreement got him nods and shrugs.

“So how did I fuck up?” Grade asked.

“You didn’t work alone,” Hall said. “Next time, don’t trust anyone.”

 

TA Moore is a Northern Irish writer of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and contemporary romance novels. A childhood in a rural, seaside town fostered in her a suspicious nature, a love of mystery, and a streak of black humour a mile wide. As her grandmother always said, ‘she’d laugh at a bad thing that one’, mind you, that was the pot calling the kettle black. TA Moore studied History, Irish mythology, English at University, mostly because she has always loved a good story. She has worked as a journalist, a finance manager, and in the arts sectors before she finally gave in to a lifelong desire to write.

 

Coffee, Doc Marten boots, and good friends are the essential things in life. Spiders, mayo, and heels are to be avoided.

 

Website: www.tamoorewrites.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TAMoorewrites/

Twitter: @tamoorewrites

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