LOVELADY
By
Marcus Wynne
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Marcus Wynne
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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PROLOGUE
My name is Frank Lovelady, and I am a psychotic killer.
I don’t think I ever meant for my life to turn out this way, but I have taught myself to live with it. I killed my first man when I was sixteen years old. It was a long time ago, back in the seventies, in a small California Bay Area town called Los Gatos. I was part of the free wheeling teen-age drug culture that thrived in Los Gatos, back in those innocent days before guns and rip offs were common, when dealers would hand out acid tabs and joints as party favors.
But there was a dark side, even then. There were predators that stalked the party world, and one of them was named Les Jones. He was an ex-con who’d done time for manslaughter, though his sport and preoccupation was rape. He stalked like a demon through our parties, and in our fear we were powerless before him. He reveled in his reputation, and the sheer intimidating force of that caused young girls to submit to him without a fight. But he liked it when they fought. He tape recorded those rapes and played them for the amusement of his followers at parties.
I was at a party once when Les Jones played his recordings. Most of us were sickened, but afraid to say anything. We murmured about the need to do something, but the police weren’t an option –the girls themselves wouldn’t go to the police after Les Jones threatened them with death -- and no one had the nerve to consider anything else.
But I thought differently about things, even then. Killing him seemed logical. I felt called to kill this man; I felt as though I had been chosen to be an instrument of fate. Maybe that’s rationalization. But I knew that this killing needed to be done.
Late one night, I stood in the shadows behind his apartment building and watched him come in, surrounded by the boys who strutted in his shadow. I waited till I saw the lights go out in his apartment and saw his friends leave. Then I went to the sliding glass door at the back of his apartment, where I’d taped the lock open, and I went in.
The front room was littered with beer cans and pizza containers. The buzz of the television covered the faint sounds I made as I picked my way cautiously through the debris. I paused outside his bedroom, the door barely ajar, and listened. I heard his breathing, an occasional snore. I stood and listened for what seemed to be a long time. My heart pounded loud in my ears. My hands sweated and trembled. Then a sudden calmness came over me.
I eased the door open.
In the bed, lying on his back, one arm thrown over his head, the other across his chest, dressed only in boxers, lay Les Jones. He was a big man, powerfully built: six feet four inches tall, and a rock hard 240 pounds of prison honed body. He’d been listening to his tapes. A portable tape recorder lay on the bed. He’d masturbated into a wash cloth crumpled on the sheet beside him; the bleachy smell of fresh semen was still ripe in the air.
I stood over him, a stolen revolver clenched in my fist, the barrel only inches from his face. He stirred, slightly, then opened his eyes. He was still asleep, really, and I saw his eyes change as his mind woke to the fact that there was a gun in his face. He opened his mouth as though to speak, and the muscles of his belly rippled as he prepared to move.
I pulled the trigger six times as fast as I could.
His head split like a melon struck with a hammer. His eyes were destroyed, his nose shattered, and fragments of teeth flew from his mouth.
He was dead.
I picked up his tape player and the shoe box in which he kept his rape tapes, and then I went out the way I’d come in, through the back and across the lawn of the complex. Lights came on in other apartments as people woke to the shots. But I was too fast, and I knew the back streets and by ways of Los Gatos too well. I was long gone before the police arrived.
I went down along Los Gatos Creek to an isolated place right on the banks of the water. I made a small fire with leaves and twigs. Transients and homeless often did that down here, and the police mostly left them alone. I took the recordings he’d made of the women he’d victimized, and tore apart the plastic cassettes till I had handful after handful of recording tape. It all went in the tiny blaze, and I watched with a great and quiet satisfaction as the tape twisted and blackened in the pure flames of my fire. Screams, pleas, cries of pain…they all melted away.
I felt right. My hands didn’t shake at all.
I went home, crawled through the window into the converted garage where I lived beside my parent’s house. And the next day, at the high school, all everyone could talk about was how Les Jones got whacked.
I never said a word.
And I never told anyone about it.
Years later, when I was in the Army, I was interviewed by a psychologist before my assignment to Special Forces.
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me, anything we haven’t gone over?” he said.
“No.”
“How do you feel about killing?”
“That’s a strange question. I’m a soldier, it’s my job. It’s what I do when it needs to be done.”
It was a private matter to me, killing Les Jones, different from the killing I did in Special Forces as a special operations soldier, different from the killings I would do later, after the Army, when I was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. I would keep Les Jones to myself, unlike the others I sometimes shared credit with my team mates, even though I might be the one actually doing the killing.
The Special Activities Staff is the elite of the elite within the CIA. Only the very best who get through the rigorous screening are even considered. They run a selection course very similar to the one Delta runs. But I passed this one, where I’d failed the Delta selection course. Only in later years did it dawn on me that my psychological profile and vulnerabilities might have gotten me bounced off the Delta course. But it seems that the CIA was looking for something different.
I was assigned to the Ground Branch when I finished the Basic Operator Course, and I spent the next few years in intensive training: shooting, tradecraft, driving, explosives, undercover skills, surveillance, reconnaissance, all of the black arts of shadow warfare. And there was carefully graduated exposure in foreign venues – short trips alone and as part of a team, walking through the moves that we’d soon be doing for real.
Then I went about my main job, which was killing people.
Carefully selected targets, all of them, with massive surveillance to determine their exact routines and whereabouts so they could be taken out with minimal exposure to the operator. But no matter how much you prepare up front, the plan rarely works out as neatly as it does in the team room. Humans are the most dangerous prey of all, because they think, and they can change the way they do business. With all the options available to us, I came to prefer the simple hunter-killer method: insert into the general area with a clear work up on the target, track him (or her) and take them quickly on the street or in their home or place of work, then fade away and leave them like the victims of random street crime.
That technique works well in the dark world of the shadow wars, where battles are fought on the urban playing ground all over the world, in actions involving only a few men.
Or sometimes just one.
After some years with SAS, I
was selected for an even more secretive operation: The Cells. We were small Special Operating Groups, assembled only when there was a mission of high enough risk and value to make it worth sending the very best. For the right kind of person, it was the perfect assignment: we worked when we worked, and when we weren’t working, we were off, free to pursue interests in our homes scattered across the country.
I settled in a quiet neighborhood in southwestern Minneapolis, a section of the city called Linden Hills. There were coffee shops, a bookstore, restaurants, a cooperative market, a butcher shop, small retail stores, all the amenities of neighborhood living, all within walking distance of my home. Linden Hills bordered Lake Harriet, one of the chain of lakes that ran through Minneapolis. Despite the harsh winters I loved it there, loved the life I had between assignments. I lived my cover as a travel writer for trade journals, even wrote a few articles and placed them in a variety of magazines, so that I always had clippings to show if asked.
And no one questioned it when I left for long periods of time on “assignment.”
The psychosis crept up on me, as it does with some psychotics. It takes years, a slow accretion of symptomatic behavior, a personality quirk gone awry, before the full blown psychosis emerges. The gene for mental instability is like the gene for hair color; at first you may have a full head of dark hair, but at a certain time, your hairline recedes, your color fades to grey.
Psychosis is like that.
Your world may be bright and full of color, but something changes; the world transforms to shades of grey, where every shadow has a hidden meaning in a language only you can understand. The genetic predisposition is to see the world suspiciously, to question motive, to see behind the shadows…that same predisposition is what made me so good at my job.
Nothing was hidden from me. I could always find who I was looking for.
Years of that stress, the stress I told myself I thrived on, contributed to my breakdown.
I remember only a few highlights of the breakdown: standing naked on my bed, a locked and loaded M-4 carbine in my hands, shouting at the walls, at the people I thought were spying on me; listening to the voices coach me, telling me to beware of the men stalking me like I had stalked so many others; eating a piece of pie in a restaurant and thinking I could hear the thoughts of everyone around me.
Then the Agency psychiatrists and some of my team mates came and took me away. I spent two months in a private hospital in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where medication and round the clock supervision worked their magic.
Then I sat in the psychiatrist’s office and was told that for the rest of my life I’d be taking anti-psychotics. 5 milligrams of Zyprexa, every night before bedtime.
And with that, I was once again…normal.
You could never tell by looking at me or by talking with me that I’m psychotic. It’s like being an alcoholic – the signs are there if they’re drinking, but if they’re not, they’re fine. One day at a time.
I could have taken a medical retirement. But what would I do? I loved the quiet intervals between jobs, the writing, the reading, the coffee shops, the discussions with the small circle of people I cultivated for cover. But the quiet wasn’t enough. I needed my work to feel complete. I needed to be of use. And the Agency, well, it surprised me, but then again it didn’t. We are a secret fraternity and we take care of our own. I was still of use, and I wanted to play, and they still needed me.
So they put me in a Super Cell. We were specialists, only called when we were needed. I was a specialist within the specialists, so I was called less often, but often enough. I saw an Agency psychiatrist once a month when I was between jobs, just to monitor me and to make sure my medication was sticking. 5 milligrams is a small dose, really – some raging psychotics take up to 30 milligrams a day.
I was fine.
Really.
CHAPTER ONE
i.
Gigi’s is a jazz bar in downtown Minneapolis, nestled in an old brick building in the shadow of the Target Center sports arena. The music is good, old jazz and blues, and the performers who come in are top shelf. Gigi is the owner, a drop dead gorgeous woman in her forties who sometimes sings with her piano player. It’s worth listening when she does.
I’ve been coming here for a long time.
Part of living your cover is establishing a circle of people who think they know you, who will vouch for you, say that you are who you are. Who they think you are. Bars are good places for that: casual acquaintances and easy relationships fueled by alcohol, which dulls the memory, and makes fabulation easy. I don’t drink much, but sometimes I like to be around people who do. I wanted a bar that was small enough for me to be remembered, but busy enough where I would be remembered as part of a crowd.
Gigi’s fit the bill. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed my regular Friday night at the bar. It was a ritual I looked forward to each week. Today had been a late summer day, the sun lingering long in the sky, but with a hint in the air of fall, when the leaves turned and bathed the city in a gold-red light. I was comfortable at the bar on my favorite stool next to the waitress station. The piano player, Max, a bone-thin twenty year old, white as a corpse with lank black hair, who played like a soulful man in his sixties, took a break, and I tapped gently on the bar top to get the attention of the bartender. Louise looked up and smiled, and set another Bushmills rocks in front of me.
Gigi came out of her office at the far end of the bar, saw me sitting alone, and slid onto the red leather upholstered stool beside me.
“Hi, handsome,” she said. “New in town?”
“Very new, pretty lady,” I said. “I heard this was the spot for women and scintillating conversation.”
“Scintillating? That sounds sexy.”
I laughed. “It is.”
She raised her hand and called to the bartender. “Lou? Honey? Bring me a pack of cigarettes, please.”
Lou brought her a pack of Camel Lights. Gigi tapped the pack, opened it and took out a cigarette, then looked at me. I plucked a matchbox from the jar on the bar, lit a match and cupped it in my hand. She leaned into the flame to light her cigarette, the close light illuminating the fine array of lines around her eyes, beneath her make up, her full lips gripping the filter. She touched my hand to steady the flame, held it just a beat too long, then pulled back and drew on her cigarette.
“So stranger,” she said. “What brings you to my little place?”
“Music and a woman.”
“Ah. That’s a good combination.”
“I think so.”
“And what do you do, stranger?”
“I’m a soldier.”
She laughed, a girlish peal. “Frank, I could never picture you as a soldier. A poet, a novelist, yes. You’re too gentle to be a soldier.”
“Maybe I’m just a soldier tonight.”
“Alone on leave in a strange city?”
“That would work.”
“Weren’t you a soldier last week?”
“No, I think I was a sailor.”
“Ah, that’s right,” she said. She studied me, her green eyes large over a pronounced nose with a Gallic bump in it, a heritage from her French forebears. “So you’re a soldier, a soldier with an artistic past, maybe. So tell me why you became a soldier, Frank.” She touched my cheek, ran a red finger nail down the back of my hand, took my drink and sipped from it. “I think of you as an artist.”
“I became a soldier because I can’t juggle,” I said.
I was rewarded with her laughter, a rich chuckle that originated deep in a flat belly that had never known children.
“What does that have to do with being a soldier?” she said.
“Do you know the story of the juggler and the goddess?”
“No, baby.” She signaled to Lou to freshen my drink, turned towards me with her trim long legs crossed elegantly at the knee, barely creasing the black leather skirt she wore beneath a brilliant red silk blouse. “Tell me.”
&nb
sp; “A long time ago, in India, there was a poor juggler. He loved a goddess, the goddess Kali-Durga. She was the Goddess of Death, but he felt a connection with her, a connection he’d felt all his life, and so he goes to her temple and stands in line to offer his respects. There’s all kinds of rich people there – wealthy merchants offering the finest silks and perfumes to the statue of the goddess, leaving only the best food and drink at her feet. And the priests, they stand by and nod in approval as they see everyone offering up the very best they have. So this poor juggler comes before her. And he takes out his juggle balls and his little cheap clubs and he begins to juggle. He juggles and he juggles till the sweat pours down his face. The priests and the rich merchants are outraged by his performance. They go to kick him out, and then, suddenly, the statue of the goddess comes alive, and steps down from the pedestal, and she wipes the sweat from his brow with her robe.”
“I don’t get it, honey.”
“He offered up what he did best, Gigi.”
“You’re more than what you do, Frank.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m the best at what I do.”
She smiled and patted my hand. “You’re the best at telling stories, Frank. I wish you would write some of those down.”
“Not much market for short stories from a middling travel writer.”
Gigi stood, and I was struck by how tall she seemed. Her dancer’s training had stretched her posture, though she was actually only five four or so.
“Maybe you’re better than you think, Frank.”
“So is there any chance for a lonely soldier to hook up with a pretty chanteuse?”
“Keep trying, honey. Maybe one of these nights I’ll weaken.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
The phone behind the bar rang and Lou answered it. “Gigi’s.”
She listened for a moment, then held the phone out to me. “Frank? It’s for you.”
I was surprised. Few people knew my routine well enough to find me at Gigi’s on a Friday night. I took the phone.
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