Harmin slipped back into wakefulness.

It was light outside, brilliant sunshine streaming in through the holes in the ragged curtains, brightly illuminating the dust particles that drifted weightlessly in the random eddies and imperceptible air currents. He could feel the shafts of light, warm on his exposed skin, the sheets kicked off in the throws of last night’s passion.

Harmin cracked open an eyelid and examined his bleary surroundings.

Stale, dry, warm air; deep shadows, caused by the hard light that was forcing its way in; there was a feeling of age, of the start of decay. The room was well used, well worn, its fittings and furnishings bearing the scratch marks and dents of excessive use; the smooth patches of wear and tear caused by nothing more complex than time.

It was a cheap motel room.

Harmin didn’t know which one. He couldn’t remember. After a while they had all begun to seem the same, although after longer still he had begun to recognise the strange quirks of those he awoke in most often, but this one was totally unfamiliar to him.

He rolled over onto his back and stretched out an arm to his right. There was no-one there. He continued rolling and then sniffed the pillow. The heavy, cloying, tar smell of a million cigarettes and thousands of cheap laundry visits filled his nostrils. But there was another scent too. The stench of cheap perfume. A heavy, rose scent. The smell of a hooker.

Of course, she might not have been a hooker – she could have been a stripper, or maybe he was doing a huge disservice to the woman that had shared his bed last night, maybe he’d gotten lucky and managed to pull a normal woman. Not that he’d ever encountered a normal woman in the kinds of dives he frequented, but it was always a possibility. Stranger things had happened.

Harmin rolled back and reached across to the bedside cabinet. His hand brushed against something hard and he heard a scraping noise, then the soft thunk as a bottle of booze fell onto the threadbare carpet. He listened for the overly familiar sound of liquid glugging out, but it did not come. The bottle had been empty. More’s the pity, he thought and continued idly feeling around on the surface, not bothering to look round.

Eventually he found what he was looking for and extracted one of the long, thin tubes from its cardboard prison; freeing it, allowing it to see the light of day, before placing the yellow butt in his mouth and flicking his Zippo lighter open. He smelt the sharp wisp of its petroleum based contents and then flicked the flint, a feint whump and a burst of heat telling him it had lit the first time.

His trusty Zippo. It had never failed to light the first time. And if it ever did, he had promised himself that he would stop smoking. He had told himself it would be a sign – that when God wanted him to stop smoking he would take away the capacity for him to smoke. If and when that day came, he would know it was time to stop.

But it never came. The lighter always worked perfectly, and he was glad of it. Harmin lit the cigarette and drew deeply upon it, pulling the noxious fumes into his mouth, tasting their stench, revelling in them, like the addict he was. The feint crackle as the chemically treated tobacco burnt, producing its lethal drug, filled the silent room. It was like music to his ears.

Harmin inhaled, pulling in the deadly contaminated air, sucking it deep into his lungs, the hot tar collecting, coating them in a livid black oil, cancerous and damaging. The nicotine rushed into his system, sating his physical and psychological needs. Harmin held the breath, revelling in this most lethal of legal past-times.

He exhaled in a great gust, the smoke billowing out, cascading across the room, occasionally illuminated by the thin shafts of bright light. To Harmin it looked like the plumes of some great city on fire; or like the smoke of an exploding volcano that, having reached its maximum extent had come crashing down in a hot, burning, pyroclastic flow, sweeping all before it in a burning hail-storm of ash and heat and debris.

Harmin allowed himself a brief smile and then sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

On the bedside cabinet were the keys to the motel room, his wallet and his gun. He examined the wallet first. It was empty. So much for the possible virtues of last night’s company – she had cleaned him out. But it did not matter. He could afford it. He could afford many such misadventures, for, despite appearances to the contrary, despite the way he dressed, the way he lived, where he lived, the people he associated with, Harmin was wealthy. Wealthier than that sort of cheap tart could even dream of, probably.

If only they stayed around, stuck with him, maybe he’d have been willing to share some of it with them. Instead, they all seemed content to empty his wallet of the easy two hundred dollars he kept there; to take the first temptation and run. They could not see past the big green dollar signs. Harmin figured she’d probably already met with her dealer and stuck it all in her veins, or up her nose; hell, she was probably lying on some mortuary slab right now, just another OD in this neighbour of victims and fools.

Harmin smiled again, but there was no amusement here. It was a smile of resignation, of acceptance. Things did not change – they never would, how could they? There would always be victims.

His gun was still there. Of course he never kept it loaded, so it was not dangerous as such, but it would have been worth a pretty penny in the right pawn shop, where some lowlife could get his hands on it and use it for ill. At least that was something. At least she’d had the decency not to put something so lethal in the hands of someone with the stupidity to actually want to use it.

In reality it was academic, of course. The gun had a special fail safe device that he had designed himself. Unless you inserted a small piece of metal that he kept on him at all times, the gun was effectively useless, it’s firing pin disconnected, unable to be used.

But thank Heaven for small mercies, he thought. It was a pain in the arse machining them, and he should remember to be more careful. It was one thing to tempt them with an easy buck, it was quite another to wave a gun under their noses.

Harmin sucked the last dregs from the cigarette and stubbed it out on the dirty wood of the bedside cabinet. He went to get a shower.