by Nick Keller
But William knew Anthony Sola Jr. would never say those things. He had made his choice. There was no going back. He had chosen not to play his role. He chose morality. And William knew it.
William snapped back to himself and looked at Anthony Sola Jr. horrified. He couldn’t ask that question. It would destroy him. And William knew, despite his own needs, and despite his father’s legacy, destroying people was immoral no matter how much he wanted to—no matter how desperately the need to kill lingered inside him. That was his role, but he could never satisfy it. Not ever! So, he flinched away knowing no one was like him. His needs were different. He was strange. Not even Anthony Sola Jr. was like him. Needing to kill and needing to murder—that wasn’t Anthony Sola Jr.
That was William Erter.
Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed A KILLER’S ROLE
be sure to pick up
ERTER & DOBBS BOOK 2:
PATTERNS OF BRUTALITY
Available Now!
About the Author
Nick started writing creatively at a young age, right about the time he figured out how to use the complete sentence. Though his many interests range from community theater, playing competitive air hockey on the worldwide circuit, and studying film, his real work happens at home, in the dark, usually in silence, hunkered over a glowing keyboard.
He lives in Fort Worth, Texas where he loves big cheeseburgers and can occasionally be seen dancing the night away at this spot or that. He is a father, son, brother and friend to an eclectic cadre of humans, all from whom he pulls a great deal of inspiration, camaraderie and love.
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Book 2 Excerpt
Enjoy this opening excerpt from the follow up thriller to Erter & Dobbs: A Killer’s Role.
ERTER & DOBBS:
PATTERNS OF BRUTALITY
Book 2 in a series
The Dead Bin
January 2012. Andi Jones had been first.
The autopsy deduced the obvious. She was bludgeoned to death. Massive cranial fractures caused hemorrhaging in the brain. The meat of her scalp turned ash-colored brain matter into shades of red. Her face was crushed with violent force. Skull shattered. Impact concussions jarred soft tissue apart. There was nothing left by which to identify her. They had to use DNA records.
Massive soft tissue damage throughout the body suggested the beating continued post mortem. It would have been a case of deadly torture otherwise. The first blow to her head either rendered her unconscious or killed her outright, delivering her from the kind of anguish only a devil could enjoy inflicting. Over a hundred bones in her body were fractured or shattered altogether. Andi Jones’s killer beat on her body with uncalculated maliciousness. The weapon was a heavy pipe of some sort, perhaps an aluminum baseball bat.
Investigators ruled it was the first of its kind. They had no profile on such a killer, so they collected whatever evidence they could. The degree of brutality suggested psychotic tendencies, even insanity. There could be no other reason as to why a man would pound and pound on a dead girl.
The only real evidence left at the scene was the killer’s semen, yet, oddly enough, there were no other trace elements to identify the killer. The semen was found in her uterus. There had been intercourse implying he was a seducer, probably the dark and mysterious type making promises he never intended to keep. That kind of seduction was easy to exercise on a young starlet like Andi Jones.
DNA screens proved problematic, though. The semen was bad. All that was left of it was a smattering of hormonal trace elements, not unlike the hormones which could be found in any Angelino. This gave rise to mysterious questions. Semen could survive ten days, maybe more, in a deceased body, if the conditions were perfect, yet Andi’s death had been recent. Something was amiss.
And there were no witnesses.
Aside from the fact he was male, there was no other lead. The entire male population of the city of Los Angeles was a suspect. Everything turned cold on the Andi Jones case. Three years later in January of 2015, her murder was filed away as unsolved.
And with that, Andi Jones’s dreams of being the next big thing in Hollywood were smashed into bloody little bits.
Visitation
Breathe out when you pull up.
Breathe in when you release.
It’s a cycle. A pattern.
Up. Breathe out.
Down. Breathe in.
Repeat.
Chin-ups. He could do eighteen of them in one set. He used to do more, a lot more. But that was back when he was a much younger man. Now it was eighteen chin-ups—not bad for a sixty-six year old.
They’d given Oscar Erter a chin up bar when he asked for one. It was anchored into the wall by six-inch mortar bolts and inspected weekly just to make sure he wasn’t loosening it. The Frederick M. Vinson Federal Penitentiary could never be too careful, and they could see where an inmate like Oscar Erter might find some flashy uses for a chin-up bar—he could bash people’s brains out like a club, bust windows out with it like a ramming device, force open maintenance hatches and doorways like a lever, you name it. Which was why the Frederick M. Vinson prison was a pier barge rested several hundred meters over the ocean on concrete pillars. In the event an inmate escaped his cell, there was no escaping the barge. Nevertheless, there were no signs of tampering. Oscar Erter was an ideal inmate.
Aside from the chin-ups he would do fifty push-ups, eighty sit-ups and an assortment of stretching and meditation exercises. It was his routine. He did this every day, torqueing his body over time into a lean machine. There was nothing more peaceful than feeling his body expel its energy into the world. It reminded him of his positive space, that all things in existence had to acknowledge him—the breeze, the rain, even the mountains—and that he was an object in the world of the real.
Yet the exercising and the fatigue also assembled his spirit into a unified, single whole, and made him aware of a deeper, less tangible reality—the underneath. This was the world they could not take away from him. Even when they strapped him to the gurney, read him his last rights, depressed the final plunger releasing the poisons which would collapse his airways, liquefy his organs, stop his heart. Even then, the underneath would remain unscathed, untouched. It would remain his. And after he evacuated from the world, he would wait there in the underneath to thank his killers when they joined him, for one day they would, just as his own victims were there now, waiting for him to die, watching for his last breath, anticipating his arrival.
Today he would forgo the full workout. He had a visitor coming—the one person on Earth who hadn’t judged him, who understood him and who might even continue his work. At least one day.
William was coming.
His son was coming.
“Yo, Oscar,” Billings, the shift officer said. “Got a visitor.”
Oscar turned around slowly and said, “Good.”
William Erter watched his father shuffle into the visitation hold. They had the old man’s hands cuffed together, then chained the cuffs onto a steel belt around his waist and secured his feet together with another chain. He wasn’t going anywhere, even if he wanted to. But in reality, he’d always been happier than a pig in shit to be in prison. Death row suited him fine. Escaping was the last thing on his mind. So, he followed Billings over to the chair and sat down.
William followed his father with his eyes.
Oscar rubbed his beard and mustache having to lift both hands. He was smiling. “Hello, Son,” he said.
“Hello, Dad.”
“How’s everything?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
William gave him a patient look. “Job’s good. Car’s running. Just like always.”
“Wonderful. And your mom?”
William sniffled and looked around. The old man was always asking about Mrs. Erter, as if she were stil
l alive. William sighed, forcing a breath, figuring maybe she was alive—at least to the old man—in some strange way. “She’s fine,” William said.
“She’s dead,” Oscar said with a grunt.
The suddenness of his dad’s words snapped him up. William said, “That’s… right.”
The old man chuckled at William’s reaction and said, “She’s watching us from the other side. She’s waiting for us.” His eyes went to the table. “Waiting for me, perhaps.”
As if offering the punch line to a joke, William said, “Well, she isn’t going anywhere.”
“Hmm…” his dad murmured. “Usually I get—you shouldn’t beat yourself up, Dad, or she drank herself to death, Dad, or it wasn’t your fault, Dad. But—this time you make light?”
William looked down. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It was the right thing to say,” his dad said, thumping the table with a fist. “It requires an understanding few have.” His father tilted his head at him, reading him. “I know there are things about me that frighten you, Son—the monster in the closet, so to speak. I know you always want to do right. I know you’re a moral person. And I hate to say it, but—I’m afraid we’re very much alike, you and me. I know the struggle you fight inside yourself.”
Not wanting to discuss his urges with the old man, William snapped half-angrily, “I was just being ironic, Dad.”
The old man settled back, still smiling a benevolent, understanding grin which tempted so dangerously to condescend. William bit his lip and held the flesh between his teeth. Here came the story, an enlightening tale from the old man. They always started out the same way: “Let me tell you a story, Son.”
Those words—the bearer of dark and delicious things. Especially when they came from his old man.
“There was this undertaker. This was in Albuquerque. He lived his whole life caring for the dead. He dressed them, cleaned them—made them look nice. It’s a real art making the dead look alive. Then one day he meets a man at a bar not far from the airport. They get drunk and talk for hours, just the undertaker and his new friend. They buy each other drinks and talk about life things. Pretty soon, they develop a trust—the kind of trust two fellas who will probably never hang out again develop, and when all their huffing and puffing about the world and politics and wives is over, this undertaker from Albuquerque goes home. He drives a four-year-old Lexus, and he’s drunk. But his new friend—oh, his new friend, yes, yes, yes—he doesn’t want the night to end. He sees such delicious and undeniable irony in caring for a dead undertaker. The idea swallows him. It makes him giggle and slobber like a dog. So, he flags a taxi and follows the undertaker. Follows him straight home. It’s a nice house. Big. There’s an incredibly cuddly-looking wife with big breasts—loose and squeezable, like you’d expect a mother of two to have—sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. Beautiful children in their own bedrooms down the hall. God, the girl was an angel.”
William knew how the story ended. He watched his dad get lost in memory, then come slewing back to the here-and-now. He blinked and cleared his throat and said, “As you can imagine, the new friend got to be the undertaker for a day, and the undertaker got to be all the people he had painted and loved over the years. He got to finally be them.” He leaned forward. “That’s irony, Son.”
William couldn’t stop the frown coming over him. “You've never told me…”
“Told you what?”
“One of your…” the word didn’t come for a long time. He said, “… exploits.”
“What do you think—to know that?”
“I never… imagined… how it was. I never saw, really… what you did.”
“And now?”
“I think I see it.”
“We’ve changed the pattern, haven’t we?”
“What do you mean?” William awaited the inevitable clarification.
“Another story. The boy tries to understand the world but always sees it through the eyes of his father, so his father comforts him—tells the boy what he wants to hear, tells him it’s not so bad from this side of righteousness. Tisk, tisk—the world disagrees. Then, satisfied, the boy leaves, goes back into that cynical world with his father’s words echoing in his ears, in his memory, in his soul—it’s not so bad on this side of righteousness—over and over. Finally, he gives in to what he knows will overtake him. His nature. Not his father’s, but his own. He makes light of death. He sees his mom in her grave, happy as she can be, detached from a horrible world. He watches his father. Even watches him kill. The boy is starting to see the world through his own eyes, now. He’s realizing they’re not so different than his father’s.”
“I’m never going to do what you did, Dad.”
“If what you mean is that you will never conduct the tithing of fate, you already have.”
“I’ve never killed anyone.” William wasn’t angry. His words were low and logical, dipped in a bowl of compassion.
Oscar Erter sat back grinning the way fathers grin when they watch their sons mature. He said, “No you haven’t, have you? But I sense the pattern is changing, Son.”
Iva
Bernie’s lovemaking had changed over the last several months. The change wasn’t subtle, either. He’d begun doing it slower, touching her shoulders and running his fingers down her arms sending goose pimples up her neck and back. He was kissier, too, putting his lips on her throat and ears. She’d even begun letting him steal a few pecks on the lips which was a strict no-no for a girl in Iva’s profession. Plus, he didn’t seem to relish doing it from behind as much, either. There was less pounding and more frontal pulsing, arms and legs tangling up in each other. Even when she went down on him, he’d often pull her back up saying you don’t have to do that, baby…
It was as if his impulses had changed. He’d gone from animal to man, and she was more than intrigued. She had to ask herself—after a thousand other men and nearly two decades of escorting—if they weren’t becoming actual lovers.
Afterwards however, the routine was still the same. Once he finished, he rolled his big body off her and reached for the smokes. He lit his, then hers. They lay quietly for several minutes just melting into the hotel sheets, everything expended, the A/C on cold.
“Hey…” he finally grumbled.
“Hmm?”
“How much would it cost me to, you know—”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Nuthin’.” He reached over and thumped his cigarette and lay there rolling it inside two fingers watching the smoke rise up. She didn’t say anything. Irritated at her silence he said quickly, “To buy you. How much?”
She paused unsure of how to feel, then said, “Depends on how long.”
“What’s the usual?”
“A weekend. But that’s…” her voice trailed off.
“What?” he said.
“A thousand. Maybe more.”
“I’m not talking about a weekend.”
“Well, how long are you—”
“Couple weeks.”
She puffed on the cigarette to hide her hesitation.
“Iva,” he said powerfully.
“Depends on the person, Bernie.”
He huffed. “The person.”
“Who’re you talking about, you? You got a thousand bucks, Bernie?”
“Yeah me. And maybe I do.”
“Uh—you want to buy me, Bernie?”
“Oh, forget it,” he grumbled and threw the sheets off him. Smashing his cigarette out, he got up and started yanking his pants on.
She propped herself up on her elbows not wanting him to be angry, not wanting him to leave. “It wouldn’t be much.”
He stopped and looked at her.
She gave him a devil’s grin and cooed, “You’d get my favorite customer discount.”
He flapped his lips and started buttoning his fly sneering, “Awe gee, thanks a lot.”
When he zipped up and went for his shirt she sat up. “You are, though, you know.”<
br />
“What?”
Holding the sheet up over her boobs she moved toward him on the mattress and whispered, “My favorite.” He watched her reach for his collars letting the sheet fall over her contours to the bed. “I don’t do this with anybody else.” She pressed her lips to his in a warm, long kiss.
When she released, he sat down in the chair across from her. “Then how much would it cost me?”
She settled back lifting the sheet up again. “A few weeks? No one’s ever gone that long, baby.”
“Okay,” he said popping another smoke into his lips. “Then how about this?” He lit up and said, blowing out, “Forever.” The smoke took on a life of its own in the current of the room’s air conditioner, as if awaiting an answer.
Her head tilted. “You proposin’ to me, Bernie?”
“No, God, just talking.” He started buttoning his shirt.
“You know the deal,” she said. “It’s not a question of price.”
“Then I don’t know the deal. What’s the deal?”
“Do I have to say it?”
“Your pimp.” He assumed.
She tried to laugh off his remark and said, “He’s not… a pimp.”
“He’s a grease ball pimp.”
“Well, he wouldn’t like it.”