A Killer's Role: Erter & Dobbs Book 1 Read online

  “It’s a technicality, man,” Bernie said. “The warrant was approved.”

  “Yeah,” Eyvers said, “a technicality Amanda Treadwell will blow a hole through this case with. Then it’s up to the jury to make a judgment call. We don’t want that, you got it?”

  Bernie crinkled his face, disgusted. Amanda Treadwell—she was a bottom dollar scum sucker. She’d sooner watch those children suffer untold misery before losing a case.

  “You got it?” Eyvers fixed his gaze on Bernie, eyes wide, insistent.

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “And I swear, Detective, if I don’t get your full cooperation—if you so much as piss standing on the wrong foot—then I’m calling it off. We’ll take our chances without your testimony.”

  “Fine,” Bernie said, half defensive.

  “Okay.” Eyvers got up and walked out followed by Captain Heller.

  Bernie looked up to see Mark Neiman standing over him looking at him. Shadows attached themselves to his face highlighting a disgruntled frown. Disdain poured out of Mark Neiman.

  In all his years, Bernie had never heard of detective partners disliking each other. He’d only ever heard of them being like brothers. Their wives knew each other. Their kids all played together. They shared Christmases and birthdays and graduations with each other. They were friends. In many ways, they were family.

  Then there was Bernie Dobbs and Mark Neiman.

  They had nothing in common. Mark was in his mid-thirties while Bernie felt fifty creeping up on him a little closer every day. Mark was a former surfer who loved the beach while Bernie avoided beach scenes altogether. Mark was a playboy with the ladies, while Bernie saw such behavior as undignified and unbecoming, feeling his own prime slip further away. Sure, both were L.A.P.D. career boys, but that meant very little. Mark came from Santa Monica. Bernie hailed from Atlantic Boulevard.

  But partners were partners, dammit. It seemed to Dobbs they should have gotten along. Maybe in another universe they would have. But in this one Mark Neiman was protocol boy, a schmoozer, an opportunistic, nimrod prick that drove a reckless, ethic-driven work mule like Bernie bat shit crazy.

  Mark Neiman finally muttered, “If you fuck this up for me, Dobbs…”

  “You’ll what?”

  Mark huffed. “Jesus, man.” He walked out leaving Bernie shaking his head and going pffft.

  5

  Trigger Finger

  “We do not have a green light. This is a negative go on ops. Stand down, all positions.” The words rang in his ears from twenty-six years away, over and over. He had been young, blood-thirsty. Those words had made him blink, refocus. Screw the orders. He trained the crosshair over the target. Four hundred and thirty feet away. It would have been a cake walk. The conditions were perfect. The shot would have been easy. The enemy was just standing there with his arms crossed looking over the compound sternly, watching his troops train on the hardpan obstacle course at the bottom of a bowl-shaped canyon. The Saudi sun was hotter than hell.

  “Repeat. The order is stand down and find egress, double time. You do not have clearance to fire.”

  In memory, that moment had been so automatic. The soldier’s C.O. called with orders to stand down. It hadn’t taken the soldier two seconds to do just that. He pulled his eye away from the scope, thumbed the rifle’s safety on and reversed his way back down the hill, headed for cover.

  But this was the dream of that moment. This was life’s big What If? It played out in his sleeping mind over and over, every night, without end begging the question, again and again…

  What if…

  He had pulled that trigger?

  What if…

  He had shot that mid-ranking Al-Qaeda leader?

  What if…

  That asshole had died right there in the sun instead of coming to power? And…

  What if…

  That Al-Qaeda leader hadn’t orchestrated an airborne attack against the World Trade Center just ten years later?

  What if?

  That was the question of the soldier’s life, but he had no answers, none that mattered. And The Eye wanted to know—The Eye of the great sniper in the sky. God. Fate. Whichever. It wanted to know…

  What if…

  You had disobeyed those orders and…

  What if…

  You had pulled that trigger, soldier.

  What if…

  You had saved all the lives of all those doomed people?

  And now, here he was, twenty-six years later overlooking a public park still asking himself the same question, feeling The Eye look at him through a scope of its own. He knew someone had to die. Desert Storm had taught him that. As long as someone died, someone else lived. It was simply the way the web worked.

  The soldier picked out his spot. It was perfect. Everything was below him. He had a bird’s eye view of the city park, always operating from above. And though everything seemed faraway, it was well within reach.

  People walked by, most of them in pairs or packs. Young mothers pushed strollers. The playground area was bloated with commotion, kids streaking after each other or playing in the big sandbox. In the distance, a group of twenty and thirty-somethings played Frisbee football in the field to the south. The soldier’s vantage was unbroken. He’d earned the right to be here. This is where he belonged. There was no stopping him now. He’d come this far. The point of no return was just in front of him. He blinked, had to pause. His hand trembled.

  No! No trembling.

  He clenched his hand into a fist. Anger flared. He closed his eyes swimming in the darkness behind the lids. Be haunted no more. Let the ghosts slip away, be free, let it go. He knew the remedy. It was in his hands. The rifle. He clutched it close to him feeling his pulse thud in his temples. It was the rhythm of his life, and it slowed, leveled. There was balance now. A full breath later, he opened his eyes again.

  Yes, better now.

  This was his home, seeing the world through a scope. He could pick out any pixel of the Earth and study it right down to the blades of grass, the granules of sand. He felt new again. He was The Eye.

  He settled the crosshair on a child swinging on a swing, kicking his feet backward and forward, the arc of the swing increasing, tiny hands gripping the chains until the knuckles turned white, baby teeth showing through a manic, child’s smile. The soldier calculated the distance with a shooter’s precision. The land distance was an easy one hundred and thirty meters, but the increased distance from his elevated position made it one fifty. The soldier could hear the boy’s laughter even from way up here, shrill and bloated with glee. Maybe it was in his head. It made his brain hurt. His thumb glided to the safety toggle and flicked it to the off position. The hair trigger teased the inside of his finger.

  There was a breeze. It just picked up. One knot. Minimal wind drift. The boy swung back and forth arching his back on the downswing, letting his hair whip around his ears. The swing was going higher now, faster. The soldier would have to lead the target. Not much. Just a hair.

  It was time for the shot.

  Breathe in nice and big. Fill the lungs. Then breathe out, slow and relaxed.

  It was the sniper’s process—everything controlled and patient and calm. Then…

  “We do not have a green light. This is a negative go on ops. Stand down, all positions.”

  The soldier flinched, blinking madly. He reassessed his target struggling against his own desperation. The boy still swung back and forth. He rubbed the trigger up and down.

  Don’t pull. Your orders are to stand down.

  No! Kill him. You’ll save lives!

  Soldier, you have your orders.

  It’s your duty, soldier. You must carry out the mission.

  Do. Not. Take. The shot.

  The soldier released, and pulled the rifle away. He sank down behind the security rail trying to catch his breath. He’d almost lost his control. It had started to tip, started slipping away, but he took it back. The point of no re
turn had whispered to him, tempted him. But no! He was still here.

  The soldier peeked up over the ledge again scanning the park. So many people. So many targets.

  There, yes! That one.

  He scoped a young woman, maybe in her mid-twenties. She could have been a student at one of the local colleges. Or maybe she was a young professional. She wore a summery tank tee over jogger’s shorts and tennis shoes. She was the sporting type. Her hair was pulled back into a rust-colored ponytail that bobbed with her motion as she kept up with a large dog on a leash. It was some sort of Retriever, golden-red and healthy as a horse.

  The woman was a pretty thing, at least on the surface. But underneath, the soldier knew what she really was. She was the enemy. He placed the crosshair over the girl’s face panning the rifle with her as she moved. She was at about the same distance as the previous target, only at a different angle. Maybe a shade under one-five-zero meters. He was good for that.

  Then the voices began sizzling in his head. Yes. No. Yes. No. Do it. Don’t do it.

  He clenched his teeth, refocused.

  Yes. No. Yes. No.

  He jerked the crosshair away angrily, still watching her move along the path. The crosshair landed perfectly on the dog. The Retriever. He watched it through the scope. Its tongue hung out. The coat shimmered and bounced as it trotted along, leading its owner. It was as happy as it could be. The soldier hesitated, thinking, following.

  The voices inside him were quiet. There was no turmoil, no past demons sneaking up from his brain stem. There was only peace. The dog was the perfect kill. It was more than a target. It was his mission. He slammed his eyes closed, bit his lip. Could he do it? He had to. That was the order. Kill. He opened his eyes, reassessed the target.

  Breathe in nice and big. Fill the lungs. Relax the shoulders. Place the finger. Breathe out, slow and relaxed. Hold it. Hold it. Hold…

  Now—Bang!

  The report went off like an atomic bomb in his ears, louder than he remembered, and he sank down below the ledge feeling his body go lax. It was orgasmic. It was like sex. Perfectly natural. Completely biological. He’d killed again. It was beautiful. It was gorgeous. As he made a lethargic, half-eyed grin, he could hear the screaming start in the distance.

  6

  William Erter

  William woke up that morning with a desperate sound, like a man being punched in the sternum. He blinked and looked around, pulling all his pieces back together. It was just a dream. But it was the same one he always had. In it, he’d always be killing someone. His methods differed from dream to dream like variations on a theme, but ultimately, it was always the same. He could never remember if his victim was male or female, just a faceless being with a powerful, androgynous scream, and they were usually held down by something beyond their power—either tied to a chair or chained to a table or strapped to a bed.

  Sometimes these motifs skewed away from real-world visions and toward something that perverted reality into a hellish impossibility. This time, his victim had been trapped prostrate in a sticky, intricately geometric pattern of high-strength gossamers, like a huge spider’s web, and William approached, navigating the web with a natural ease causing the victim to scream louder, as if glimpsing their own death grow nearer and nearer.

  And when William was close enough to reach out and touch his prey he realized his arms weren’t arms at all, but rather long, multi-jointed appendages, black and shiny with strips of overgrown cilia, chillingly similar to an arachnid’s forward limbs, and his face was home to two, enormous tubules protruding forward, each ending in needle sharp talons dripping some sort of salivary liquid that steamed and hissed with a toxin’s quality. And his eyes—they were large, lifeless bulbs with a grotesque mirror finish that warped what they saw into huge, terror-filled fisheye malefactions. And this is how he saw his victim as he moved down on top of them—they were contorted, misshapen, debased human beings screaming their final, sheer terror blasts before being eaten alive.

  Immediately after the dream, William was up splashing water on his face and catching his breath. He was always half terrified by the dream, and half hypnotized by it. It both emptied him, and satiated him.

  He brushed his teeth next and dressed in gym shorts and New Balance running shoes, then he sprinted four miles in thirty-five minutes on his treadmill. He never listened to music when he ran, but rather settled into an internalized biorhythm conducted by his own, organic makeup. He found himself at peace listening to the organs in his body, sensing the motions of his brain, feeling the thousand pieces of his framework conduct itself in perfect harmony.

  His cooldown was an additional two miles at twelve minutes each, then a one-mile walk. He had been taught the beauty of a lean body through his father’s appreciation for flesh, specifically lean muscle. Fortunately, his genes were predisposed to crafting a fatless body, so at a mere thirty years of age he stood just under six feet and tried to stay between one-eighty and one-eighty-five. He typically succeeded—a well-oiled machine with creases and lines in all the appropriate places.

  His morning showers were a steam furnace that fogged up the entire upstairs loft, after which he wrapped in a towel, made his bed, went downstairs, ate a breakfast of sugarless oatmeal, coffee, and natural juice while he air-dried. Next, his wardrobe was an exercise in organization, everything by color, then size. A pair of nicely-creased, relax-fit jeans (nothing too trendy, but sensible and aesthetic) with a solid-colored, light-weave longsleeve tee shirt that fit loose over his muscled shoulders, and a pair of double-stripe Vans, and he was ready to face that delirious morning L.A. traffic.

  But first, he stopped as he did each morning, and glanced across the family portraits hanging on the downstairs wall in his study area. They were all printed in full-color eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch portrait canvas and set in black, plastic frames, and they hung in an odd, inarticulate pattern on the wall making a busy, modern-looking collage across the bricks. There were seventeen portraits in all, each representing an entire family, all posed around coffee tables, on family couches or around the fireplace, gawking back at him—moms, dads, brothers, sisters. None of them smiled. Not one. Some of them looked to be sleeping, others stared through blank eyes, no spark, no life. He didn’t know any of those people, not personally, but there was an undeniable kinship he had for them. They were attached to him through his father in indescribable ways. And to William, that was enough of a reason to give each one a moment’s notice each morning before clicking off the light and heading out.

  The 110 from Pasadena to Los Angeles was usually a parking lot, but it was at its worst in the mornings. Commuters coming in from Alhambra to the east and Pasadena to the northeast made the push into L.A. impossible. It was like cramming a world of humans into a few square buildings. The madder everyone dashed, the slower they all went. William found it fascinating—everyone honking and cussing, flipping each other off, all of them going nowhere.

  The commute gave William time to squawk through the numerous digital bands on his UNIDEN police scanner, especially the lower police band frequencies. He tended to overhear a lot of 11-78 paramedic dispatch calls, usually after a 911 came in about a car wreck. The fatalities required a Code 3 emergency. Every once in a while, he’d hear a 10-15 prisoner in custody call after a 242 battery or a 314 indecent exposure call. The ones that tended to pique his interest the most while sitting dead still in traffic happened in the Highway Patrol codes, the 22000s and 23000s—the hit and runs or the exceeding speed limit calls. On a few occasions those calls had induced a long buzzy hale of scanner talk once the incident became an all-out police chase. It didn’t happen often, but often enough to keep him tuned in.

  During the Pasadena street shootout of a few years ago in which officers from every precinct from Compton to Santa Clarita were called in, he’d sat mystified at the scanner radio, listening all wide-eyed like a kid at the movies. The frantic nature of the situation and the collected sound of those voices—the di
spatchers, the medical staff, the officers—had consumed him in its dramatic frenzy. Impossible decisions were made by a dozen voices at every turn. It was the sound of mental control, psychological toughness, pure discipline. He almost envied them.

  The police scanner waves were an endless cornucopia of current events. What they reported were more immediate than the action news channels the city had grown up watching on channel four or eight. And there was no commercial encoding involved. Most people brain drained to the FM pop stations (You’re listening to KISX, Big Hits on the KISS…) or whatever politically-driven dribble was stumbling around on the AM dial. But for true human crime, there was nothing better than the police scanner frequencies.

  To the southwest the glistening skyline of the city loomed like a beacon. William would cut short up the I-5 heading north. Glendale Jr. College was his destination. Like all the buildings between L.A. and Hollywood Hills, the college had a very self-aware presence with stark, low-slung angles, modern cantilevered glass and chrome appendages, a sky bridge and lots of modern appeal.

  He swung his 1974 VW Bug off the main road and into the parking lot. It rattled and shimmied as he did. He flicked the police scanner off bringing up the AM dial. It was set on a news-read station and the radio personality was a woman saying something like, “… shot at Heirloom Park.”

  William hit his brakes, his attention caught staring at the radio with a look of ironic disbelief on his face. He turned up the volume.

  The lady announcer continued, “I mean, what is humanity coming to? You’re out walking your dog one morning—and it was a pretty morning too, folks—probably just breathing the crisp, clean L.A. air, right? And some numbskull—what was it, was it a rifle?”