Becoming Quinn

by Brett Battles

  He took a second to recall the room, then recited the details to Durrie.

  “That it?” Durrie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Not bad, Johnny,” Durrie said.

  He had started calling Jake Johnny from nearly day one.

  “You’re going to have to create a new identity,” Durrie had explained at the time. “I don’t care what it is, but I don’t want to get used to calling you by your real name, so you’re Johnny for now.”

  In the time since then, Durrie had been pushing him to come up with a new name, something they could use to create a legend around. The veteran cleaner kept reminding him that he couldn’t go out on any actual fieldwork until he did.

  But Jake had been stuck. Whatever name he chose he would have to live with for a long time, so he wanted it to be right. The problem was he couldn’t come up with anything he liked.

  Until today.

  A month earlier, Durrie had given him a small metal lockbox.

  “I shouldn’t have this at all,” Durrie had said. “Not even sure I know why I still do. I guess because, well, because I knew you would want it.”

  “What is it?” Jake asked.

  “It was your friend’s,” Durrie said. “Berit’s.”

  Jake had been unable to bring himself to look in the box that day, or all the days after until that very morning. At first, it had felt like he was doing something he shouldn’t, but by the time he finished he no longer felt that.

  Durrie went back into the staged room, added and changed a few things, then had Jake run through the exercise again. Finally, they cleaned up the room like they would for a real job. When everything was to Durrie’s satisfaction, he nodded and said, “Let’s go, Johnny.”

  “It’s not Johnny,” Jake corrected, deciding it was time. “It’s Jonathan.”

  Durrie arched an eyebrow. “Oh, really? Is there a last name, Jonathan? Or is that it?”

  “There is,” Jake said.

  “I’m all ears.”

  Jake ignored the sarcastic tone in his mentor’s voice. Instead he thought about Berit, and the box, and her parents’ will that had been inside.

  To our daughter, Berit Quinn Davies, we leave…

  Jonathan Quinn opened his mouth, and for the first time, he spoke his new name aloud.

  • • • • • •

  Acknowledgements

  Some quick thank yous to Team Quinn members old and new. Bill Cameron and Robert Browne for support and troubleshooting, glad you guys are always there for me. Thanks to Jim and Jody Hardwick for their continued incredible support, and to my longtime friend Noretta Barker for her law enforcement insights, and years of rolled eyes back in high school. Thank you to Pat Chavez for answering all my stupid question, and to Jonathan Hayes for my medicinal needs (not what you’re thinking.) And finally to Elyse Dinh-McCrillis for her eagle eye and all around help to keep me from looking like I don’t know what I’m doing. Any mistakes in this manuscript are mine, not hers. And to all of you for your continued support and enjoyment of my work, thank you so much!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brett Battles lives and writes full time in Los Angeles. He is the author of seven novels, including THE DECEIVED, winner of the Barry Award for Best Thriller 2009. More info available at www.brettbattles.com

  Continue on to read the exciting bonus first chapter excerpt from WATCH ME DIE by Lee Goldberg.

  Bonus Material

  WATCH ME DIE by Lee Goldberg

  Chapter One

  I don’t know if you’ve ever read John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books before. McGee is sort of a private eye who lives in Florida on a houseboat he won in a poker game. While solving mysteries, he helps a lot of ladies in distress. The way he helps them is by fucking their brains out and letting them cook his meals, do his laundry, and scrub the deck of his boat for a few weeks. These women, McGee calls them “wounded birds,” are always very grateful that he does this for them.

  To me, that’s a perfect world.

  I wanted his life.

  This is the story of what I did to get it.

  My name is Harvey Mapes. I’m twenty-nine years old, six feet tall, and I’m in fair shape. I suppose I’d be better-looking if I exercised and stopped eating fast-food three times a day, but I won’t, so I won’t.

  I’m a security guard. My job is to sit in a little, Mediterranean-style stucco shack from midnight until eight a.m. six days a week, outside the fountains and gates of Bel Vista Estates, a private community of million-dollar-plus homes in the Spanish Hills area of Camarillo, California.

  The homes at Bel Vista Estates are built on a hillside above the farms of Pleasant Valley, the Ventura Freeway, and a really great outlet mall, about a quarter of the way between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I say that so you can appreciate the kind of drive to work I have to make each night from my one-bedroom apartment in Northridge.

  There are worse jobs.

  Most of the time, I just sit there looking at my black and white monitor, which is split into quarters and shows me three different views of the gate and a wide angle of an intersection up the hill inside the community. I’m supposed to watch the intersection to see if people run the stop sign, and if they do, I’m supposed to write them a “courtesy ticket” when they come through the gate.

  I’d like to meet the asshole who came up with that.

  It’s no courtesy to give one, and the folks who live here certainly don’t think it’s a courtesy to take one. Most of the time, they don’t even stop to get it from me; they just laugh or flip me off or ignore me altogether.

  And why shouldn’t they? It’s not like I’m going to chase them down to the freeway or put a lien on their homes.

  Enforcement really isn’t my job anyway. I’m there to give the illusion of security. I don’t have a gun, a badge, or even a working stapler. If there’s any real trouble, which there never is, I’m supposed to call my supervisor and he’ll send a car out.

  The guys in the car, guys so inept and violent the police department wouldn’t hire them, are the “armed response team” the company advertises. If I were a resident, I’d feel safer taking my chances with the robber, rapist, or ax murderer.

  I’m just the guy in the shack. The one who either waves you through and opens the gate, or stops you to see if you’ve got a pass. If you do, or if I get the homeowner on the phone and he says you’re okay, then I jot your name and license number in my ledger, open the gate, and return to my reading.

  I do a lot of reading, which is the one big perk of the job and, truthfully, the reason I took it in the first place, back when I was going to community college. Mostly I read paperback mysteries now, cheap stuff I get at used bookstores, and it’s probably why I was so susceptible to his offer when it came.

  I guess on some level I wanted to be like the tough, self-assured, no-problem-getting-laid guys I read about. I conveniently forgot that in a typical book, those guys usually sustain at least one concussion, get shot at several times, and see a lot of people die.

  It was after midnight, but still early enough that I hadn’t settled into a book yet, when Cyril Parkus drove up in his white Jaguar XJ8, the one with a forest of wood and a herd’s worth of leather inside, and instead of going through the resident lane to wait for me to open the gate, he drove right up to my window.

  We’re supposed to stand up when they do that, almost at attention, like we’re soldiers or something, so I did. The people who live at Bel Vista Estates are quick to report you for the slightest infraction, especially one that might imply you aren’t acknowledging their greatness, wealth, and power.

  Even just sitting in that car, Parkus exuded the kind of laid-back, relaxed charm that says to me: look how easy-going I am, it’s because I’m rich and damn happy about it. He was in his mid-thirties, the kind of tanned, well-built, tennis-playing guy who subscribes to Esquire because he sees himself in every advertisement and it makes him feel good.

  In other wor
ds, he was the complete opposite of me.

  I’d see him leave for work every morning around six thirty or seven a.m., and it wasn’t unusual for me to see him coming home so late. But he rarely stopped to talk to me, unless it was to leave a pass or get a package from me that his wife hadn’t picked up during the previous shift. I’d only seen his wife, Lauren Parkus, once or twice, and when I did, it was late and she was in the passenger seat of his car, her face hidden in the shadows as he sped by.

  “Good evening, Mr. Parkus,” I said, adopting the cheerful, respectful, and totally false tone of voice I used with all the residents.

  “How are you, Harvey?”

  I caught him glancing at my nameplate as he spoke. Each guard slides his nameplate into a slot on the door at the start of his shift for exactly this reason. You can’t expect the residents to remember, or care about, the name of the guy in the shack.

  “Fine, sir,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”

  He smiled warmly at me, a smile as false as my cheerful respect and admiration.

  “Could I ask you a couple of questions about your work, Harvey?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  I figured there must be a complaint coming, and this was just his wind-up. In the back of my mind, I tried to guess what I could have done to piss him or his wife off, but I knew there wasn’t anything.

  “What are your hours?” Parkus asked.

  I told him. He nodded.

  “And then what do you do?” he asked.

  That question had nothing to do with work, and I was tempted to tell him it was none of his fucking business, but I wanted to keep my job, and it wasn’t like there was anything in my life worth keeping private. Besides, I was curious where all this was going and how I was going to get screwed in the end. At that moment, I had no way of knowing just how bad it would be or how many people would get killed along the way.

  “I usually grab something to eat at Denny’s, since they serve a decent dinner any time and have good prices, and then I go home.”

  “You go right to sleep?”

  “No, sir, I like to sit by the pool if it’s sunny, swim a couple of laps, maybe go to a movie or something. Then I go to bed around three in the afternoon, wake up around nine or ten, have some breakfast, and come back here for another day of work.”

  “So, you only work this one job and don’t go to school or anything.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  Parkus nodded, satisfied. Apparently, I told him what he wanted to hear. I confirmed that I was a complete loser and that yes, his life was a lot better than mine.

  “Could I meet you at Denny’s in the morning and buy you dinner?” he asked. “I’d like to talk over a business proposition with you.”

  “Sure,” I said, too stunned to say anything more.

  He drove up to the gate and waited for me to open it. I hit the button, the gate rolled open, and I watched him drive up the hill, wondering what he could possibly want from me.

  I kept watching him on the monitor. I couldn’t do that with most residents, but Parkus happened to live on one of the corners of the intersection that I’m supposed to watch for those “courtesy tickets,” so technically, I wasn’t spying, I was just doing my job.

  Cyril Parkus lived in a huge, Spanish-style house that had two detached garages out front and a couple of stone lions on either side of the driveway, each with one stone paw resting on a stone ball. I’ve never understood the point of those lion statues, or why rich people think it’s classy to have them. I’ve thought about buying one and sticking it in front of my apartment door, just to see how my life changes, but I don’t know what they’re called or where you find them and I probably couldn’t afford one anyway.

  Once he went inside his house, the excitement was over and I was in for a long, restless night, waiting for daybreak, unaware that with the sunrise, my life would change completely.

  Find WATCH ME DIE at the Kindle Store Here.

  BECOMING QUINN

  Copyright © 2011 by Brett Battles

  Cover art copyright © 2011 by Rob Gregory Browne

  All rights reserved.

  BECOMING QUINN is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information about the author, please visit www.brettbattles.com.

  For more information about the artist, please visit www.robertgregorybrowne.com.

  WATCH ME DIE

  Copyright © 2011 by Lee Goldberg

  All rights reserved.

  WATCH ME DIE is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information about the author, please visit http://www.leegoldberg.com.

  Table of Contents

  Book Description

  Other Word by Brett Battles

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Bonus Material: 1st Chapter of Lee Goldberg’s WATCH ME DIE

  Copyright