by Nick Keller
49
BROKEN BOND
Ruthi Taylor’s funeral had a decent showing. Mostly, people from her work showed up, all in disbelief, with an overgrown sense of slow shock on their faces. There were others, too. A few people from her apartment complex came to pay their final respects—people she had spoken to in passing or shared space with on the elevators, those who’d exchanged names with her while they helped her carry groceries up.
She had no family.
William stood distantly eyeing them. This was L.A. No one knew each other. Not at all. Showing up at weddings and funerals was more a show of courtesy than anything else. None of them had the slightest inkling she was a murderer. The L.A.P.D. kept it under wraps. No one needed to know. Nor did anyone need to know she’d been murdered. It was William’s secret. It was ruled a suicide. Open and shut. Just like the life of Ruthi Taylor.
William’s gaze went away from the murmured words of the preacher, and he scoped across the graveyard. Down the slope the procession was parked along the curb. Birds sang their chipper, little songs oblivious to the human melancholy playing out below. Everything was prettier in a graveyard. The stones were cleaner. The grass was greener. Even the sky seemed bluer.
Then there was Bernie.
William took a double take. The big man was standing across the yard by a picturesque wooden bridge which arched over a little waterway. His fedora was pulled down. Only a frown showed, but somehow William could tell he was looking at him.
William looked back at the funeral one last time and headed toward Bernie in the distance. When he reached him he said, “Thanks for coming.”
Bernie didn’t say a word, just turned, and headed over the footbridge lighting up a cigarette. William paced alongside. Bernie finally muttered, “Sorry about what happened.”
“I’m sorry too, Bernie.” Meaning Iva, of course. They didn’t say much else until they rounded the top of the bridge. William said, “So—how you doing?”
Bernie stopped and rested his elbows on the railing looking out over the water with his cig pinched between his fingers. He sighed and said, “They’re feeding me a bunch of psychobabble bullshit. Don’t be too sad, don’t be too mad.”
He took a drag, blew out and continued, “Don’t be too happy—all that shit. People buy into it too much. I don’t buy it at all.” He thought for a second. “People ain’t soft like that, Will. They ain’t supposed to be soft. Hell, I ain’t soft. I’m hard. I don’t believe in avoiding my problems, don’t believe in running. But this…”
He shook his head blowing out smoke. “This has got me ducking, man. It’s… it’s too much.” Bernie fought against a thinning voice, had to keep control. He said, “I can’t breathe with it hanging on me all the time.”
Bernie took another drag and flicked the butt out into the water. As if finalizing his point, he said, “I have to run, now. Got to put it in back of me. All of it. That means you, too.” He turned to make eye contact with William. “You want to be good, Will, I know that. But no matter how hard you try to be good you’ll always be…”
William looked down. Bernie didn’t have to finish his sentence. They both knew what he would say. They both knew he was right. William looked him in the eye, understanding. He murmured, “I know.”
“Yeah.”
William glanced out over the water nodding his head. “We were a good team.”
“Not good enough.”
William looked back. “Better than most.”
“They’re still dead.”
There was no arguing the fact, no debating. There was nothing more to say. Bernie was leaving, cutting his losses. William took a labored breath and offered his hand. “Okay, Bernie. Good luck.”
Bernie shook his hand and muttered, “You too, Will.”
William watched Bernie Dobbs walk away, heavy-hearted and slow like an injured bear. He’d probably never see him again. Sadness hit him like a fist, and for a second, William had to wonder whose funeral it truly was—Ruthi’s, his own, or Bernie’s. He turned away slowly and headed the opposite direction. Maybe it was really Iva’s.
50
AFTER
William’s inbox blinked up at him when he got home. He had a message from an unlisted source. He knew immediately who it was. It was Jacky.
He opened the file and an imbedded video player popped up. It was a series of windowed surveillance camera angles. The player was imprinted with CLIENT NUMBER 67321-1009. L.A. BARONIAL SUITES APARTMENT. Across the bottom rolled a numeric date and time indicator. It rolled smoothly, even through the edit once the loop began. Jacky was good. He’d even adjusted the time code and frame counter on the video so no investigation could detect a loop.
The player started. William watched the video knowing he wouldn’t see anything—just a series of video windows on his computer screen, security cameras displaying empty passages in a high-rise apartment complex—one empty passage after another. But it was a well-crafted lie. Time had been erased. Entire minutes had been cut out of the surveillance video like they had never existed. And inside those lost minutes a man named Bernie Dobbs had inhabited the place. He entered the building, went directly to the elevators, exited on the eighteenth floor, marched to the appropriate door and waited until the door opened and invited him in. The video would have also shown him looking grim, with an ominous frown, a man on a mission of vengeance. And now he was only a phantom, a ghost. Any video evidence he’d ever been at the L.A. Baronial Apartments had been cut out without a single trace, thanks to Jacky’s magic. Not even the most seasoned eye could catch him at work.
William turned the video player off and swiveled his chair around to stare up at his friends on the wall, each a reminder of his strangeness. Like Bernie, they were trapped in a place between being dead and somehow still present. And William Erter, son of a psycho, had to wonder how responsible he was for it all.
A woman’s voice spun him around, heart leaping into his throat. It said, “Hello, William.”
William got to his feet like a shot kicking his chair backward on its casters. He squinted at the figure in the shadows hiding from the overhead cone of light in the kitchen—just a dark shape with narrow shoulders. For an instant, he wondered if this wasn’t an apparition, maybe Ruthi’s malicious spirit come back to haunt him. The apparition stepped into the light.
Dr. Oaks.
“How’d you get in here?” William said with a razor’s edge in his throat.
“You’re a subject of the state. You know that.”
William moused the cursor on his screen over to the close button and zipped the video windows away. Looking back at her, he realized now why Oaks hadn’t been at Ruthi’s funeral, not even for moral support. She had been here at his home, waiting for him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
She moved around the wet bar, slowly, almost cautiously. “If you’ve ever been honest with me William, you need to be honest with me now.”
“Okay.”
She stopped, keeping her distance from him. “Did you kill her?”
Insulted, he whispered, “I loved her.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
William went rigid. It was a standoff. He muttered, “We all kill each other, Kendra.”
Her eyes sharpened, reading him, looking for the truth, or the delusion. She broke her stare with a grunt and looked up at the portraits. She knew what they were. William stared at her. He’d kept those portraits from her for five years, never mentioning them. But now, his little secret was out.
She said, “I’ve been a fool with you, haven’t I?”
Now it was time for the truth. William felt it under his skin. He looked at her with sharp, killer eyes and said, “Not a fool. Just… blind.”
She backed away. “You’re dangerous.”
He took a step toward her. “Everyone’s dangerous.” Ruthi’s words slipping from his own mouth.
Oaks paused and they stared at each other for seve
ral long seconds. Evading the moment, Dr. Oaks started pacing, saying with a thoughtful finger in the air, “I was thinking about your formula. It’s brilliant. It’s your sightline into the mind of a true killer.” She stopped and looked deep into him. “But it’s wrong, William. I think it’s criminal, and only a criminal mind could conjure it.”
“Go on,” he said, following her with his eyes.
“Who the victim is, how the killer chooses to kill, when and where—all this equals the killer himself. But it fails to include the one variable of a sound mind. Why.” Her words paused sinking in. “Why, William—the one thing that separates man from beast. And you don’t include it in your formula. No wisdom. No reason. No why.” She punctuated her point with, “Just murder.”
He raised his chin at her, confident, unafraid. “Determining why someone kills is insignificant to me.”
“How can that be?” she said.
“Because I already know why people kill. You’ve spent your entire life trying to discover something you’ll never understand. No matter how close you get, you’ll always be in the dark. But me—I was born knowing why. And that’s what separates people like you,” he tilted his head, shadows attaching to his face, darkening his features, “from people like me.”
Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed PATTERNS OF BRUTALITY
be sure to pick up
ERTER & DOBBS BOOK 3:
MORBID CURIOSITY
Available on Pre-Order 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 thErter, 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 3 EXCERPT
Enjoy this opening excerpt from the follow up thriller to Erter & Dobbs: Patterns of Brutality.
ERTER & DOBBS:
MORBID CURIOSITY
Book 3 in a series
GRAVE SITUATION
The scalpel.
Oh, what a thing. The perfect utility. Beautiful to the eye. Serene and pure. A single-minded object, built for one purpose. As solid and unyielding as it was delicate, almost dainty in its wickedness. The sweetest thing of all.
This one had a twinkle in its crescent blade, as thin as a star’s light, as buoyant in the hand as a feather. Perfect. Ahhh, perfect.
He brought it slowly down white-knuckling its stainless stem, pointer finger pressed over the blade for stability, and began to slice, slowly and perfectly, down, down, down, drawing it ever deeper into a block of soft, yellow cheese. The slice peeled away, as thin as paper and came to rest on its plate. Cheddar flesh. It made him smile.
With delicate, nimble fingers he took the tiny slab of cheese and placed it perfectly onto the open face of his ham sandwich. He arranged it symmetrically over the pink meat next to the other thin fillet of cheese.
“Ah.”
Closing the sandwich with a slice of bread he pressed it down dripping lettuce and tomato juice off its edges. His other hand still pinched the scalpel between finger and thumb. He leaned across the table to place it gently with his other supplies—an assortment of other scalpels of varying make, a stainless steel bone saw, hemostats and expanders, all arranged in perfect order, set in an intricate row—but he froze in mid-motion. He brought the blade closer to his eyes staring at the tiny, perfect thing.
Cheese residue.
“Mmm.”
His tongue reached out and slathered lubricous spittle across his lips as they parted to receive the cutting end of the scalpel. Closing his mouth over it he swam in the cold, steely taste of its bladed end resting on his tongue. Slowly, with hardly any motion at all, he drew it away from its fleshy home feeling the microscopic blade’s edge painlessly open a split in his tongue, then lips. The taste of cheddar mingled with a hint of iron and he swam inside the sensation again.
“Mmm.”
Smacking his jowls lightly, he inspected the blade. With great satisfaction, he’d cleansed the cheese fat off, leaving only a bright, chromatic surface glinting like a mirror under the light, the thinnest bit of spit making it sheen and glow anew. Then…
The tiny reflection he saw in its surface froze his blood cold. It was his own face. Only a mere pixel of the whole reflecting back at him, but it was enough. A reminder.
Hideous. A gruesome creature. Disgusting.
He heard himself sneer before his impulses could catch him, and he threw the scalpel to the floor, clicking it off concrete. Triggered by his sudden motion, a tiny sound issued from behind. It was muffled, all grunting and diffused. He turned around to see that she had awakened sometime in the past few minutes.
She.
His patient.
His face melted into a smile, eyes softened. He went to her bedside approaching with the care of a physician and stood over her, resting a soft, comforting palm down over her hand. The wrist restraint had squeezed her hand bloodless, and it was cool to the touch. “Welcome back, my dear. How was your rest?”
She said nothing, only stared up at him through wide eyes that glistened and sparkled. The sound of her breath issuing back and forth through her nostrils settled him. It was rhythmic, cadenced, slightly up-tempo, but deep and full. He tilted his head. Couldn’t tell if she was smiling under her gag. He could never tell. It seemed as though she wasn’t, certainly not. They never did. They never smiled.
“I’m glad you came back to me. They don’t always, you know.” His head dropped. Eyes blinked. Tears surfaced. “Eventually, they always leave me.” He snapped out of his trance, brought his head back up. “But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it must be.” He looked at her with a paternal grin, warm and endearing, and said, “That’s the way it’ll be for me, too. Very soon. But.” He stood up. “Not soon enough, I suppose.”
He strolled over to a corner of his wide, concrete room where a tripod stood on small, rolling casters. An IV bag dangled from it, bloated out with some syrupy, clear fluid. A tube and syringe lassoed from a clamp, held in place. “The first time I lost someone,” he giggled in remembrance, a deep sense of nostalgia, “it was 1989. My residency. I was so young. There was no saving him. The impossible patient. But we—and that is to say, I—had to try. They say it was a valiant effort. All I saw was a failed attempt. I promised myself it would never happen again. Oh, the improprieties of youth, eh? I had all that time, from then until now. But like all sweet things…” He looked at her blinking a tear down one cheek. For a moment he marveled at her the way a father would marvel over a daughter, proud and understanding, yet just the tiniest bit hurt, realizing she would eventually leave him, like all daughters. “So sweet,” he whispered. “The sweetest of all things.”
He moved toward her rolling the stainless steel rack with him. She followed him with those scared, bloated eyes. He stopped at her bed, staring down at her, and chanced putting his hand to her cheek. He stroked matted hair out of her eyes. “It won’t hurt,” he whispered. “I don’t like hurting people.” He shifted to her arm tying a rubber tourniquet. She squirmed, mumbled under her gag. The vein in her forearm began to swell. His eyes widened. The vein pulsed.
Yes. Life’s blood.
He took the syringe and placed it gently on her arm, its narrow needle resting on the vein. “You’ll feel just a tiny poke, okay? Nothing more.”
Her tiny voice rose… mmm, mff!
He stabbed it in, gently but quick, making her eyes roll
up in her head.
“Shh. Just relax,” he said. “This isn’t so bad. It’s the sweetest thing.” The IV bag began its drip. The process would take a long time, perhaps an hour. He had time, so he patted her gently on the shoulder and went back to his sandwich.
An hour later, just as Curly and Moe were exercising their frenzy of eye poking, face slapping and head rubbing on the little TV set, the EKG machine displayed a high-pitched squeal. Flatline. He spun around feeling his own pulse spike. She was going into cardiac arrest. She was dying. He was losing her.
He was at her side in a flash feeling for a pulse. Nothing.
“Oh, God no.”
He whipped the IV needle from her arm and kicked the tripod away. It clattered to the floor bursting the clear, plastic sack and its syrupy contents oozed the floor. Mouth-to-mouth was first. Lips created an airtight seal. He huffed and puffed, then started chest compressions. He waited on the verge of tears, clawing for a pulse, waiting for the digital graph to show a spike, just one, please, any sign of life.
In the background, he heard “Why, I aughtta…”
Nothing.
“You aughtta what?”
“Oh god, oh God, oh God.”
Shock was taking her away. The syrupy liquid had done its job well. Too well.
He crashed to a medical dresser throwing open the middle drawer. A collection of syringes rattled inside. He snagged one, looked at it desperately. Insulin, 50 Mg. He ripped it away from its plastic seal and was back at her side thumbing the inside of her arm for the vein. It was dormant, hard to locate. But he was seasoned. Found it.
“Come on, baby!”
He jabbed the syringe in and thumbed down the hammer, then started pounding on her chest. He pounded and pounded trying to infuse her vitals with activity, any activity.