Nathaniel T Hawkes

The Little Black Book

Tom Bell sat with his head held in his hands, elbows propped on the dull metal finish of the interview desk staring into the remainder of his coffee. It would be an understatement to say that he was not having a good day. He took a deep breath, but he could not focus his thoughts they kept crowding his mind with catastrophic scenarios of a life in jail and the grief this would cause his family. His world, which up to that point had rarely hit any high notes and felt like it was consistently off-key had now decided to take a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse. That morning he had only had to contemplate being unemployed and unable to pay his rent, now he was waiting to be interrogated for a murder and robbery of a man he hadn’t even known before the day began.