by Pete Bowen
QB1
by
Pete Bowen
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY:
Pete Bowen on Smashwords
QB1
Copyright © 2010 by Pete Bowen
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Prologue
He kicked the accelerator to the floor on the ZR1 Corvette as the 638 horsepower, 6.2 liter engine pinned him back in his seat. The brute power of the beast was worth the price of admission. He’d been handed the car only six weeks ago. It was supposed to be an SUV, but he’d negotiated with GM to upgrade to this baby with some advertising appearances. He’d even done a TV show when they handed over the car and gave him some driving pointers at Sears Point with a professional driver. The car had been sitting in a parking lot for the last month and was dirty. Tired from a day of driving, he took his foot off the gas and dropped down from 110 to 75. He didn’t need a ticket tonight. Driving on 280 into San Francisco, he found a local sports talk show and it didn’t take long for the discussion to get to him.
Host: Welcome Fast Eddie to Sports Talk
Caller: Joe, rumor has it that Tony Reilly is on his way to the Bay Area to sign a contract and Isackson is on his way to Miami.
Host: The team never comments on negotiations but I gotta believe that the decision is imminent. This contract negotiation has been long and difficult for the team and Reilly has said he’ll sit out the season rather than accept a one year offer as the franchise player. Let’s face it Reilly has the juice to get what he wants here. He’ll never sit on the bench again behind anyone.
Caller: This all should have been handled months ago. This was Oscar Tierney playing games. The man is a menace.
Host: I know Eddie. Tierney has not played this well. He’s alienated the best quarterback in football, fans and the team looks bad here.
Reilly took his exit and worked his way to his house with little traffic this time of night. He hoped she was still there. Maybe slip into bed beside her. Not wake her up. Have “the talk” tomorrow. Maybe not even have the talk. Yea, right.
He looked at the dashboard clock, 1:04 AM. He drove the car into the driveway. The house was dark, the street deserted. Hit the garage door opener and pulled the Vette in. Gathered up his stuff from the passenger seat and opened the car door. Put his foot on the ground to climb out.
He never saw who put two in the back of his head.
Chapter 1 – Two Months Earlier
You never get a good call at 4 AM. “It’s the friends you can call up at four a.m. that matter,” Marlene Dietrich said. I’m looking for no new friends at this point. 4 AM calls are always bad news. “Hey Tommy, you just won the lottery”. No one calls you at four to tell you something good. I get more than my share of 4 AM calls. I consider myself an expert on 4 AM calls. I’d been sleeping, maybe a half an hour, when I got it this time.
“Mr. Mullins, it’s Torley.” Torley worked for me as an IT expert and sometimes investigative work even though he’s not licensed when we’re short handed, which we are all the time.
“Torley.” That’s all I could manage.
“My wife is having the baby, Mr. Mullins. I have to get to the hospital. I can’t stay on this guy. What do you want me to do? Take the van?”
I’m drawing a blank trying to figure out what he was talking about. I said, “The van?” The brandy I had thrown down wasn’t helping.
Torley went back to square one. “I’m on surveillance, watching this dickhead, Hinton. We’ve been on him for the last 3 days. Jose Penna is in Sacramento. We got no one to cover. I got a personal emergency here, Mr. Mullins. No one else around to take over. You want me to leave or can you cover?”
Brain begins to engage. Hinton was a suspect in a murder investigation. The agency was working for the guy who was sitting in jail for it. Our client was a shitbag dealer who had been paying us at double time to try and nail this guy Hinton, who the dealer said had to have done it. “I guess I’ll have to come out and sit on him.” Tough blowing off something when you’re supposed to be the boss. It’s my detective agency. I own it with my Aunt, Velma Schwarz. She’s not really my Aunt she’s my Godmother. She’s 74 and looking to retire so it’s mostly been me running the show lately.
“You want I should call Roger, Mr. Mullins?” Torley asked.
“Why?”
“He knows the equipment,” Torley said.
“Oh.” The surveillance equipment in the van was complicated and not my strong suit. I closed my eyes and said nothing.
After a minute, Torley pleaded, “I gotta go, Mr. Mullins. What do you want me to do?”
I threw the covers off of me, stood up and said, “Fuck me! Call Roger, tell him to meet me on the curb in 5 minutes. You’re parked in that alley on Army near Mission?”
“Yes,” Torley said.
“If you can wait 30 minutes, you can have my car. Leave the keys by the back tire, if you have to go.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mullins.”
“Is Hinton there?”
“Yea, he’s here. He’s a crazy man, ranting and raving. He’s a maniac.”
I hung up and got dressed. We should stay on this asshole. I didn’t know if he was a killer, but he was a fucked up idiot and could have done it. If I’m taking the client’s money, I’m at least going to give it a shot. I could have had Torley just drive off, but we said we’d watch him.
I dressed and walked out the front door of my house across the street from Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The fog was in. Visibility was ridiculous, maybe 10 feet. I’m used to it, living on the beach, but this was the real deal.
I started up my work car, an old Taurus that I left on the street, and pulled forward to the house next door. Roger came out of the house with his backpack and got in.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Mullins,” Roger cried in his adenoidal whiny voice.
“Just shut the fuck up. Don’t talk to me,” I said.
“I didn’t know that it was the lab, Mr. Mullins!”
“You knew you little shit. You fucked up and it could have cost everyone, everything. Your parents, Velma, me, the business, they could have taken everything and locked us all up. I’ve told you a fucking hundred times don’t put us in jeopardy. You don’t fucking listen,” I screamed at him. He had it coming.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Mullins.” Tears streaming down his face.
“Shut the fuck up. Don’t speak to me.” I drove slowly down the street. Roger crying. He cries a lot. 12 years old, 170 IQ, short for his age, red curly hair. Looks like an elf. He’d always lived next door to me. I love the kid but he’s a tremendous pain in the ass.
The street lights could barely be seen through the fog. I took a right on Judah, drove up to 19th and stopped at the donut shop. Walked in and saw Ed Tonelli sitting in front of a cup of coffee leaning on his elbow. It wasn’t surprising seeing him there. This is where we hang. He did look beat. “Tonelli, I want you to give serious consideration to going on the wagon.” I ordered donuts and drinks for Roger and me, to-go.
Tonelli looked over and said, “What’s Roger doing sitting by the door?”
“Because he’s a dumb fuck,” I said.
“What’d he do this time?”
“He hacked into the personnel data base of the Lawrence Livermore Lab,” I said. “The FBI showed up last night and was in the process of perp walking P
rofessor Bob out in chains when I got there. As soon as they showed up, Roger called me. I went over and spent three hours convincing them that Dad, the USF Dean of the Psychology Department, didn’t do it. They didn’t believe it was Roger. There are firewalls for the firewalls at that place. Fucknut Roger, got into the personnel database looking a guy who owed his ex-wife alimony.”
“So, what happened?” Tonelli asked.
“I convinced them that it was Roger. I told them I’d show them how he did it if they dropped it. Getting that Okayed took hours. He went in the network through a back door service modem that they had forgotten to disconnect. We agreed not to disclose anything in return for no charges. Non-Disclosure Agreements under penalty of death, shit.” I winked at Tonelli, “so don’t tell anyone. It’s a damn good thing we know Bob Forbes. Special Fucking Agent Herbert Nelson was in charge and would have had Roger’s Dad on the water board within the hour. Jesus Christ, what a dick that guy is.”
We both knew Nelson well; Bob Forbes was his boss. Tonelli is the diplomatic one between us. When I worked for SFPD, I had given up trying to deal with Nelson and would defer to Tonelli when we had to interface with the FBI.
“So, Roger is at the top of the old shit list this morning, huh?” said Tonelli with a tired chuckle.
“Oh yea, he’ll be right up there for the next couple of years after last night. Why are you here, Tonelli? Jennifer finally wise-up to your pussy hunting? Butcher at it again last night?” Jennifer was his wife.
Tonelli looked down at his coffee and whispered, “yea, another one.”
I raised my eyebrows, the Butcher again? This time it had only been a few days since the last one.
Give the Mayor the credit for the name. Viciously carving women up in a sexual frenzy, the Butcher was a problem, Tonelli’s problem. After the forth victim’s hacked up, dismembered body was found in an alley in the Mission, the national news got involved. It had been a Bay Area story till then. The Mayor, never missing an opportunity to get his mug on camera, made a speech talking about police effort against this “Butcher”. It stuck. That was 3 months and 5 bodies ago. Nine women in seven months, a lifetime ago for me. It had started right after I left the SFPD.
“What do you got?" It was our usual question to each other when we wanted to be filled in.
“Prostitute, mutilated, near a dumpster by the Beach House. Same kind of work. Almost a flaying of the skin. Sexual organs hacked. All doubled bagged with a hand sticking out the top. You couldn’t miss it. He’s showing off his work. The body is at the coroners now. I don’t expect much. We’ve found some green carpet fibers on some of the bodies and DNA that is consistent with the same guy. It’s him, alright.”
“What a sick fuck," I said. I looked down at my watch. “I gotta run. Torley is having a baby. Say hello to Jen for me. Keep me in the loop. Roundball, you and me Sunday morning.” I grabbed the coffee and donuts and threw down money on the counter. Roger and I walked out. I thought I was going to be sitting in a van for the next 12 hours, bored to tears.
I was wrong.
Chapter 2
Torley Shin, our electronics guy, was standing on a corner a block from where we had our surveillance van parked. A non-descript extended Chevy van with Peoples Plumbers painted on the side. Torley stepped off the curb and flagged us down. The neighborhood was deserted at 4:55 AM. The fog was beginning to lighten with the dawn.
“Thanks for coming, Mr. Mullins, I appreciate it,” he said.
“No problemo, my man, what’s going on with this idiot?”
“Have you been reading the reports, Mr. Mullins?”
“Torley, I’ve been buried in Sacramento all week. I haven’t had a chance to do much of anything else,” I said.
“I’ve read them,” said Roger.
“The douchebag is fucking insane,” said Torley. “He’s selling meth and steroids. He’s using both and smoking crack. He’s usually up all night raging about how he’s going to kill everyone. Screaming at the top of his lungs at the walls, about The Man. He’s a fucking maniac.”
“Has he said anything about Rasheed Walters?” I asked. Walters was our client.
“His name came up in a rant yesterday. Something like, “you see what happens when you fuck with me, Rasheed? That was along with “all you fucking niggers are going to fucking pay”. He’s crazy racist.”
“You got cameras in, Torley?” I asked.
“Yea, I put two in on Tuesday. Paul Darwin and I have been watching him since then, 12 on 12 off. I don’t think Paul was watching too hard. He didn’t say anything about him. He must have taken a nap during his shift because this guy is a trip, Mr. Mullins. This is like, must see reality TV, 24/7 with this guy," said Torley.
“I winced, I don’t pay Darwin to sleep for 12 hours or spend his shift surfing porn. "Are there tapes there from his shifts?” I asked.
“Yea, it’s all digital on the same hard drive. I haven’t looked at Darwin’s shift. Don’t get me in trouble with Darwin, Mr. Mullins. Maybe the guy was asleep during his shifts and nothing happened. I haven’t looked, but this guy doesn’t sleep much.”
“His report was very short,” said Roger.
“We’ll review the tape. How’s the wife, Torley? I thought she was having a baby?”
“She is! Her water broke an hour ago. She’s having contractions but they are slow. Her mother is with her. We’re cool,” he said.
“Perfect, I appreciate you hanging around. We’ll take it from here. You go have a baby,” I said.
“Call me if you got any questions,” Torley said.
We exchanged keys and Roger and I walked to the end of the block and slipped into the van. The area was deserted. It was in an industrial area and strange spot for an apartment. This guy liked his privacy.
Roger fired up the equipment and the grainy video of Charles “Chucky” Hinton’s apartment filled the screen in front of us. He was sitting in a lounge chair with a beer in his hand and his head thrown back.
“Looks asleep to me, Roge,” I said.
“He does to me too, Mr. Mullins.”
I looked around the inside of the van and saw a pillow and blanket in the corner. Probably where Darwin had spent his shift. I got off my seat and went over and lay down.
“Keep an eye on things, Roger.”
I was asleep on the floor of the van inside of 30 seconds.
Chapter 3
“Mr. Mullins, wake up.”
Roger was in my face. I didn’t know where I was.
“What’s going on?” I said. When I’m tired like that, it takes me awhile to get orientated.
“The guy is driving somewhere. We should follow him.”
I sat up and saw that it was light outside the darkened window of the van. Looked at my watch and saw it was 9:15. I ran my hand over my face and moved to the front seat of the van with Roger following me into the passenger seat. “Where is he?” I said.
Roger said, “Follow him on the GPS screen. There is a tracer on his truck.”
Sweet, I thought. Cops don’t get to put tracers on suspect vehicles. I could see an older pickup truck pulling out of a building down the street. “That’s him, huh?”
“That’s him,” said Roger. His eyes were wide with excitement. “I think he’s going to give someone some drugs. He just got a call and said he’d be over in 20 minutes. Then, he said $600.” He pointed at the screen. “You can stay back of him by a half a mile and then just follow the dot on the screen. Just like the GPS in the other car.”
“Cool,” I said. I know about this stuff I just hadn’t used it before. Roger had spent a lot of time with Torley when we first set the van up. We hadn’t had it that long but they showed it to me. Tracking Hinton’s vehicle required a device like a miniature cell phone to be hidden somewhere on it. Torley must have set it up. I watched the dot on the screen move down the street. When he drove around the corner, I pulled out. He took Mission Ave and pulled up to an apartment house on Adair. I pulled into
a parking space a block away and got my first long distance look at Chucky Hinton. “What was he doing while I was sleeping Roger?”
“Nothing, Mr. Mullins. He was sleeping like you. I was watching the video from the last three days.”
“Anything interesting?” Hinton came out of the apartment house, got in his truck and started moving again. I let him drive off and then we pulled out. There was no reason to keep visual contact. This guy was paranoid anyway.
“He brought a woman in,” he said.
“So, did you watch them fucking, you little perv?” I leered over at him, stifling a laugh.
“No, they didn’t do that.”
“Don’t make me pull this out of you, what happened?”
“They started drinking and then he hit her. Then, he threatened her with a knife.
I looked over at Roger, as I drove. I was keeping the distance between us and the dot on the map as Hinton drove further into the city. Roger was staring straight ahead.
“He was very violent, Mr. Mullins.” I realized Roger had been unusually quiet up until now. I’d been half asleep and didn’t notice. The kid was upset. Of course, there is a fine line of emotions from Roger. He’s bawling half the time.
“He hit her?”
“Punched her really hard in the stomach. Then he slapped her across the face. She was lying on the floor crying and she got sick.”
“When was this?”
“Two days ago at 2:30 AM.”
“Was this written up?”
“It was on Darwin’s shift. There wasn’t anything about this in his report.”
“So, he smacks her around, has a knife and threatens her?”
“He said, you nasty fucking cunt. You puked on my carpet. I’ll fucking take you apart. I’ll make you wish you were dead.” He grabbed a towel and told her to clean up after herself. While she was doing that, he pulled her head back and put the blade of a knife against her throat. He said, get downstairs you fucking whore. He picked her up and they left through the door.”
