by Nick Keller
A Killer’s Role
Erter & Dobbs Book 1
Nick Keller
First published 2017
By NKBooks
DFW, TX, U.S.A.
All Rights Reserved
© Copyright 2017
www.NickKellerBooks.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author or authors, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition being imposed on the publisher or subsequent purchaser.
Created by NKBooks
Edited by www.FadingStreet.com
Cover Design By: Cormar Covers
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Books in the Erter & Dobbs Thriller Series
Note to reader
1. City of Angels
2. Oscar & Son
3. Bernie Dobbs
4. L.A. Central
5. Trigger Finger
6. William Erter
7. Killer Class
8. A Strange Logic
9. Investigable
10. Owner
11. On The Stand
12. Reamed
13. Shooters & Shit
14. Victim
15. Grace, Donna’tella
16. Rivals
17. William, On The Take
18. Odd Man Out
19. Jacky Lee Hobar
20. Reaching Out #1
21. Mark Neiman, On The Take
22. Bernie Dobbs, On The Take
23. New Recruit
24. Victim
25. Politics
26. The Rock And The Hard Spot
27. Jacky, On The Take
28. Mark, On The Take
29. Finding Their Man
30. Reaching Out #2
31. Mark And The Hard Spot
32. Erter & Dobbs
33. The Lovely Iva
34. Beginnings
35. Erter & Dobbs, On The Take
36. Threat
37. Mark, On The Take
38. William Erter
39. Hunters
40. A. Soldier
41. Ceros
42. The All-Seeing
43. Final Justice
44. All The Parts
45. That Which Meets The Eye
About the Author
Book 2 Excerpt
The Dead Bin
Visitation
Iva
Acknowledgments
_____________
If not for the members of The American Inklings, I would not have journeyed down the road to authoring, but rather sat and thought about it. Adam. Thank you. Gary. Thank you. Scot. Thank you. You are this writer’s—scratch that, author’s— dream team. I don’t believe in luck, but fortune is a different story.
Books in the Erter & Dobbs Thriller Series
A KILLER’S ROLE —Pre-Order Now!
PATTERNS OF BRUTALITY—Pre-Order Now!
MORBID CURIOSITY—Pre-Order Now!
GAMES OF LEVERAGE—Coming Soon
MODUS OPERANDI—Coming Soon
COMPOUNDING INTEREST—A novella
from the case files of Bernie Dobbs.
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Note to reader
As a pet lover myself
I can assure the reader, despite
the momentary violence toward
animals within these pages,
no pets were harmed
in the writing of this book.
1
City of Angels
Maybe it was L.A., or maybe he just didn’t belong here. The people were all fucked up. They had been all his life. In fact, William could remember thinking about how true this was even back when he was a kid. It probably had something to do with his dad always saying things like, “These L.A. people are all fucked up, son.” Nevertheless, William had always believed it. Of course, in the end, no one was more fucked up than his own dad.
What William came to learn was that there were three different types of L.A. people. First, the Echelon. It was all about trend-setting with them, hunting for the next big thing, constantly defining, and redefining the world’s material issues, homogenizing the human race down to a magazine cover, spending hours making their hair look spikey and uncombed, driving around and crashing in their sleek, silver, V-12 Euro-mobiles, giving each other that stoic, emotionally detached, celeb look. There were no real smiles among the Echelon, no genuine emotion. The whole world was one big photo op. Heh, what would Mitchum think?
William always knew if he’d ever followed in his father’s footsteps, it would be the Echelon he’d hunt. What satisfying victims they’d be. But no—he refused. He wouldn’t do that, no matter the temptation.
Next were the Lifers, poor schmucks. He’d leave them alone simply out of a guilty conscience. They were always one step behind everyone else, clueless but hopeful. It was in the way they talked, the way they walked, even the way they chewed their food. The Lifers were the majority, though. They hailed from the nine-hundred-square-foot, sixty-year-old, wood-frame houses of Los Nietos to the black tops of Compton, and back to the moderately quaint and picturesque, mud job stucco bungalows of Inglewood. In any other city, the Lifers would’ve been the proud, hardworking backbone, the spine of the whole operation. But not in L.A. Here they were something like the spleen, performing a role that was unnecessary, that the whole system could have operated without. Yeah, dicing up a Lifer would have been plain silly.
Last, and least, came the L.A. Squatters. William would drive up and down Skid Row and Main Street, or Bower Street and East Seventy-seventh, and he would watch those souls set up their squatter’s rights along the thoroughfare, all of them strutting around with that mind-fried herky-jerky way they did, flinging their arms and beep bopping along like they all had music playing in their ears. It was all just jelly-brain rhapsodies and tinnitus. There were graveyards of them in L.A., shadow people wasting away, hardly speaking Human, hardly eating food, hardly doing anything but existing under their homemade tents and bedrolls, asking the Echelon for change—just eighty cents in a billion-dollar city. They had no names. Wannabes. Has-beens. Over-runs. Woulda-shouldas. Their hair was spiky, too—like all those pretty Echelon people. And that’s how delicate the balance was. That was the difference between a Squatter and the Echelon. A hair product commercial. It always made William grimace.
The Squatters weren’t targets. They would be too easy. Plus no one would care. What’s a floater here, or a decomposer there when they had no names? Besides, they tended to drop dead all on their own. Sad story. Sort of.
Aside from his ticklish little fancies, which he swore an oath to himself never to entertain, William always wondered where he fit in himself. The state of California tried to slide him in somewhere between single-urbanite-average-Joe-Caucasian and eccentric-reclusive-borderline-sanitarium-candidate, but it wasn’t working. No title seemed to fit him. Not William Erter.
Dr. Oaks, his psychologist, tried to understand where he fit in too, but she didn’t
have the first clue. Not even after four-and-a-half years of weekly visitation. It was like shoving the one-hundred-and-first puzzle piece into a hundred piece puzzle. Round pegs and square holes. He just didn’t fit.
But William’s situation had nothing to do with L.A. If he’d lived in Tupelo, Mississippi or Vernon, Texas, he’d still want to kill people, he’d still have that same deep-seeded drive to be heinous. And he’d still refuse to do it. No way—it just wasn’t right. Like it or not. No killing. Not ever.
He was sure that all these little impulses he felt—the ones he never mentioned, not even to Dr. Oaks—had something to do with his fucked-up dad and that FBI manhunt back when he was seventeen. No, it had everything to do with that.
2
Oscar & Son
It was a long hallway—long, like horror-movie long. The tiled floors were white. The concrete walls were white. Overhead lights buzzed. William’s feet clicked on the floor in unison with the two prison guards walking behind him. Everything echoed. This is where his nerves always started fingering his guts. It happened every time he came here.
They stopped at a gray, steel door and one of the guards wordlessly swiped his badge through the lock pad. There was a click and a hum, a heavy thud. The door swung open with an iron grate that made William wince, and he entered the visitation bay.
It was another white place. White walls. White everything. Except for the man sitting at the table in his orange death-row jumpsuit. It was razor-stark in this place, almost blinding. His hands were cuffed and chained to the table, feet chained to the floor. His salt-and-pepper beard was finely manicured. He grinned up at William with deep, dark eyes. They were peaceful.
William took a moment. One guard said, “You know the drill. Take your seat. No contact. Twenty minutes.” They both left, slamming the door.
William cleared his throat and approached, taking a seat across the table. At first, they didn’t say anything. The old man didn’t look like the killing machine the world had come to know him as. To William, this man wasn’t the devil. This man was just dad.
Finally, “Hello, William.”
“Hey, dad.”
“Stupid question…”
“Things are fine. Bills are paid. Job’s good. Car’s running. Same as always.”
The old man smirked devilishly from one side of his mouth. “Lady friends?”
William looked away. His gaze went up to the windows ten feet over the floor. They all had bars. Lady friends just weren’t in his cards.
“Get a lady friend. It’ll keep you balanced.”
William tried to grin, couldn’t. It was an interesting choice of word—balanced. He had to wonder what that meant. The old man smiled and raised his hands. The chains rattled. “I know, I know. No lectures.” He tilted his head. “Your mom just had a birthday.”
“Dad, c’mon.”
“Did you go see her?”
William took a big breath then muttered, “Yes I did. I go every year.”
“Did you give her my love?”
“Of course.”
“Good. You keep her in your heart, son. She belongs in your heart.”
William leaned back in his chair, tried to look comfortable. “Dad, she’s been gone a long time. You shouldn’t beat yourself up over it.”
“I’ve accepted all things. Alcohol took her. I accept that. Doesn’t mean I didn’t love her then. Doesn’t mean I don’t love her now.”
William looked hard into him, digging for truth. “Did you love her, dad? I mean… really love her?”
The old man grinned large. “She showed me a world I’d never seen. She was the reason I killed.”
“And how’d your visit go this time?” Dr. Kendra Oaks asked.
“Same as always,” William said. “Just a bunch of small talk.” He sat on her sofa—a big cloth version of a standard living room couch, but too soft—staring out the office window.
“How are your visits, usually?” Kendra asked, sitting behind her cheap, black, compress board desk. Everything about her office suggested it was state-appointed—cheap desk and cheap furniture. But Kendra wasn’t cheap. She did what she did because somewhere inside, she actually loved it. She wasn’t bought. She was priceless. That’s why she didn’t mind the cheap office and the low pay. William had sensed that about her from day one.
“Me and dad—we don’t really have much to talk about. He’s in there, and I’m out here. There’s not a whole lot in common.”
“Do you wish it was different?”
“Mmm,” William said, looking to the floor, thinking. “It doesn’t matter what I wish. Things are the way they are. I just accept it.”
“Does it hurt you to see him?”
William thought. “I keep it separate,” he said.
“You compartmentalize.”
He didn’t like that word—compartmentalize. It reflected his dad, stuck in a cell, bound and chained, always kept separate.
Compartmentalized.
It made him cringe. “Yes, I guess you could say that I keep my relationship with my dad… compartmentalized.”
“And why do you think that is?” she asked.
“Because I don’t exactly want it touching the other areas of my life.” He pointed a finger at her. “It was your guidance that taught me that, Doctor.”
“Dad.” William tapped a finger on the table struggling with his next words. “Did you think what you were doing was the right thing?”
The old man clicked his tongue against his cheek deciding whether or not to answer William’s question. It was a hard question, a gutsy question. The old man respected that. “That’s tricky. Who determines what that is?”
William’s eyes went up to meet his. “Obviously, you.” The old man grinned at him. William asked, “So, was it the right thing?”
“I was torn at first.”
“So, when did you know?”
The old man inhaled, thinking. “It was my third time. No, it was Baltimore, so it was my fourth—yeah, the fourth. But I remember it was the first time I didn’t feel burdened by what I was doing. I didn’t feel torn—was it the right thing to do, was it good, was I wrong for doing it—none of that mattered to me anymore. Taking life was, hmm—uncomplicated after that.”
William listened in wonderment. “You didn’t feel anything?”
“Oh, well, sure. They were whole families, son. Entire families. Only an insane man would feel nothing. No—I felt something. I just didn’t feel torn. Not after Baltimore.”
“Why not?”
“Mmm.” The old man leaned forward rattling his chains on the surface of the table. “Because I was accepting my role. That’s important.”
William nodded interested, waiting for more.
His dad grinned. “When you accept your role, you know what you’re supposed to do. You’re not limited by society’s code of right and wrong. Morality no longer outweighs your actions, you see?”
William’s face changed. His lips crooked over skeptical. “That is precisely why they call it morality.”
His dad’s grin deepened, almost saddened. “Morality is a funny concept. It’s what stops our hand from doing what it wants. It stops our hearts from expressing our natural tendencies. For some people, morality gets in the way of our mission. Some people call morality fear.”
William settled back in his chair with his hands on the table just listening, weighing. His father settled back too, realigning his words. “What I mean is—it’s a choice, son, a decision. We have to ask ourselves, what’ll it be?” He held up one hand until its chain pulled taut. “The role we were supposed to perform?” He held up the other hand. “Or morality?”
They locked eyes for a few seconds before the old man continued, “Let me ask you—are you happy teaching? Does that fulfill you? Does it make you feel like the man you were supposed to become? I mean, is that truly your role?” He huffed. “Most men spend their lives raising children they’ll never know, pushing buttons and pulling levers
on machines they’ll never understand, sucking the teats on a system that’ll never fully nourish them—and why? Because they turned away from their natural role. They chose the moral path, you see?”
Conversationally, the old man continued, “Now, I’m not here to preach one over the other, in fact that’s a waste of time. It’s for each man to pick his own path, not me. I’ve made my decision. I’ve shown myself to the world. They’ve all seen me. I didn’t hide. I made my role very clear. Everyone knows it.” He scooted forward deepening his lock on William. “But what about you, son—what’s your role? What would fulfill you so that on the day you die, you can say, the world knows me. The world knows who I am. I hid nothing.”
William blinked leaning away, horrified. He pondered his father’s question. What was his role? Killer. Teacher. Man. Monster. He looked back at his father who returned a deep and sympathetic look. “You don’t have to say anything, son. I already know the answer.”