A Man Beyond The Law

by Dan Ames

  He opened his eyes and saw that he wasn’t the only thing on fire.

  The whole world was being consumed with flames.

  Since he had been at the center of a vicious mob, surrounded by a ring of people three layers deep, it was they who had absorbed the impact of the blast, sent from above.

  Body parts were everywhere. The stench of gasoline, burnt flesh and chemical residue filled the air.

  At his feet were a pile of charred body parts. A head, completely severed from its body, was tucked between his ankles. The blank eyes stared up at him.

  Somewhere, someone screamed.

  He wasn’t the lone survivor, he realized.

  It galvanized him into action. A chain around his left arm was now completely loose. He pulled on it, and a metal pole snagged on the bloodied torso to his left. He pushed the body away and the pole went with it, allowing the chain to slide free from his arm.

  He staggered to his feet.

  Blood gushed from his open wounds and parts of his body sagged under the weight of loose burnt flesh.

  He knew he was alive, but barely.

  He also knew that he had been abandoned.

  And why.

  It didn’t matter. What he knew from the unit’s reconnaissance is that there was a pickup truck at the rear of the compound, with a machine gun anchored in the truck bed.

  He staggered across the minefield of body parts, passed through an empty tent and found the pickup truck. It was unlocked so he climbed inside and looked for the keys. They were on the floor.

  His hands shook as he picked them up and found the right key. He turned the ignition and the engine roared to life. All around him, smoke billowed, and the roar of dozens of fires filled the air.

  He drove away from the small village and no one saw him leave. No one tried to stop him and no one shot at him.

  They were dead, most of them.

  He had no idea where he was going.

  All he knew was that for now, he couldn’t go back.

  But eventually, he would.

  He thought of that now as he prepared to leave his cheap hotel room and go back out into the world.

  There had been a message on his burner phone from the only person in the world who actually saw him for his true self. It was an interesting message with information that required swift and accurate attention.

  He gathered his things, applied the various accessories required to camouflage his true self, and left the room.

  When the sun hit his face, he was reminded of that moment when he’d left the smoldering village in the stolen truck.

  And with the super heated sound of human suffering and the air tinged red with blood and fire, he remembered how he’d felt the first stirrings of a vengeance that would fuel him.

  It wasn’t a rebirth, he would realize.

  It was resurrection.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Pauling was back in her office and pacing. She’d gotten out from behind her desk, sat on the couch in the small sitting area and read through the files again. Then she’d gotten up and started pacing.

  Peter Maitling.

  Christopher Zenz.

  Doug Franzen.

  The three names included in the files along with Michael Tallon. Three men who’d been on the last mission before Jessica Halbert’s murder.

  Pauling knew she had learned just about everything she could from the file and from the paperwork. It was time for some intelligence gathering of her own.

  She went back to her desk, sat down at her computer and entered all three names into a separate software system she used that was a skip tracer’s dream, thanks to its highly illegal access to private databases.

  All three names came back with addresses. There were no redundancies because Pauling had included military service dates along with the search request.

  These were the three men she needed to speak to, no question.

  Linking the names and addresses to a database that utilized reverse lookup, she found phone numbers and started with Zenz and Franzen. Both calls went to voicemail and she left messages with them asking to speak about an issue that had come up involving Michael Tallon.

  She figured that dropping the name would overcome the initial skepticism they were sure to exhibit.

  Maitling, however, answered on the second ring. His voice was coarse and he sounded older than she’d imagined.

  After introducing herself, Pauling brought up Michael Tallon’s name.

  “Tallon? Hell, yeah. Good guy. What’s this about?” He spoke with a rapid-fire delivery. Like he was barking orders at her.

  She decided to hedge just a little. “Well, I’ve been asked to investigate a criminal case that took place not long after you and Tallon took part in an operation in Turkey.”

  There was a long pause and Maitling didn’t respond.

  “I’ve got some questions about the operation and how they might have impacted my case.” Having plowed ahead, Pauling was determined to force a response.

  Finally, Maitling relented.

  “Hold on while I make sure you are who you say you are.”

  Pauling listened as the sound of fingers working a keyboard resonated through the cell phone connection. He pounded the keys with a lot of force, much like the way he spoke.

  She could hear Maitling breathing and it sounded a bit ragged. She wondered how old he was as that information was not provided in her search results. There was the possibility he wasn’t in the greatest shape. Sometimes old soldiers had wounds that never healed.

  A full two minutes went past before Maitling responded.

  “Okay. I won’t talk about it over the phone, though. Where are you?”

  “I’m in New York. Manhattan.”

  She already knew where he was but didn’t let on.

  “Okay, I’m in Brooklyn and there’s a coffee shop near my home. I go there every day at three for an espresso. If you want to meet me there and talk, great. If not, good luck.”

  His delivery was forceful and deadpan. Pauling felt like if she declined, he would hang up and seconds later never remember that they had even spoken. A black-and-white kind of guy, she was sure.

  Pauling checked the clock and decided if she hurried she could make it there in time.

  “Sounds good,” Pauling said. “I could use a coffee.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  For once, Tallon was happy for the traffic. Creeping along the freeway on the outskirts of Los Angeles was perfect. There was no way he could go more than ten miles per hour, what with the miles-long traffic jam he was sitting in.

  Because of that, there was no way he could speed even if he wanted to, which he didn’t. So there was absolutely no chance of getting pulled over by cops for any other reason than the officer wanting to reach his or her quota of tickets for the month.

  So, Tallon waited patiently as the caravan of cars crept forward, eventually reaching the exit he was looking for after nearly an hour.

  He descended into south central Los Angeles, and cruised until he found exactly what he was looking for: a busy convenience store with no sign of security cameras. The neighborhood was a bad one, home to the highest murder rate in the city.

  Tallon pulled the SUV into the parking lot and gathered his backpack and duffel bag. He used an app on his phone to arrange a pickup at the taco stand he had passed a block away. He wasn’t sure if the driver would object to picking him up in the ghetto, but the request went through.

  When an alert came that his ride was less than a minute away, Tallon rolled down all of the windows in the SUV, left the keys in the ignition and walked away. He was sure it would be gone within the hour.

  He walked past the convenience store and caught his ride; a young woman in a Hyundai sedan. She was white, with purple hair and a nose ring. Tallon thought she was quite pretty, and got a kick out of the utter fearlessness she showed at being in this part of LA.

  “You’re going to the W Hotel in Westwood?” she ask
ed.

  “That’s the one,” Tallon said.

  “That’ll be quite a change in scenery,” the woman pointed out.

  “Variety is the spice of life, they say.”

  “Yeah sell, this is beyond spicy. This is extra hot.” She said it in a way that made it sound like a good thing.

  She took surface streets and eventually they wound their way up to Westwood, a little suburban enclave just north of Santa Monica and home to the UCLA campus. Tallon tipped her and checked into his room, a suite overlooking a narrow street shaded by a row of gorgeous eucalyptus trees.

  He’d thrown on a light jacket over his shirt, which he knew had bloodstains from the dead man he’d carried into the SUV. So now he went into the bathroom, removed the razor-sharp pocketknife from his pants, and took off all of his clothes. He carefully began to cut them into small, tiny pieces, tossing a handful of them at a time into the toilet, which he then flushed. He repeated the process nearly two dozen times until all of his clothes, and any DNA, were gone. He carefully washed and cleaned the pocketknife, and then took a long, scalding hot shower.

  Retrieving clean clothes from the duffel bag, he dressed and grabbed a bottle of Heineken from the minibar.

  When he felt the first few gulps of ice-cold beer hit his belly, and his muscles relax, he finally checked his phone.

  Odd.

  There were no new messages, save one.

  It was from Peter Maitling asking him why a woman named Lauren Pauling wanted to talk to him.

  Tallon’s brow furrowed and he dialed Pauling’s cell, but it went straight to voicemail.

  As he drank his beer, he thought about how strange it was that Peter Maitling would contact him. He hadn’t heard from Maitling in years. His nickname had been “Matey” even though he wasn’t Australian – just a shortening of his surname.

  Matey was a tough guy, one of the toughest Tallon had ever worked with. A westerner by birth, country strong as they say. Tallon remembered seeing Matey break the neck of a Taliban soldier with one hand.

  As he drank his beer, Tallon began to have a bad feeling. He had only worked a few missions with Maitling, but one of them had been the one in southern Turkey. It was the very same op where Tallon had met Jessica Halbert.

  Tallon shook his head.

  First the email with Jessica’s photo.

  Then an ambush at his home.

  And now a message from Maitling.

  It was all connected and it was not good at all.

  On the other hand, Lauren Pauling was involved.

  That did more than just make Tallon confident his questions would eventually be answered.

  It made him smile, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The melted cheese on the pizza reminded him of his face. As he pushed the pointed end of the slice of pepperoni into his mouth, he wondered if he should eat some of his own skin. Would it taste like cheese?

  Probably not.

  It was meat, after all. But it probably wouldn’t taste like pepperoni. It’d be more gamey.

  He laughed as he kept his eye on the coffee shop across the street. It occurred to him that he might be crazy. He used to think it all the time, especially when the nightmares took place in the day instead of just at night.

  Waking up in sweat-soaked bedsheets in the middle of the night was one thing. Sitting in a chair at half past noon with your body shaking and ghosts of the past coming at you with knives was something else entirely.

  There were days he couldn’t remember who he was or what he’d done. One time he’d swum back into consciousness only to find himself stabbing a homeless man in the belly with an ice pick. The homeless man couldn’t yell. He just kept groaning and letting out a small “oof” each time the ice pick was plunged into him.

  The man still didn’t think he was crazy, even as he realized he’d killed a homeless man for no reason. That it was reality, and not a nightmare.

  It was only when he heard the term “disorganized killer” that he found his salvation. Indeed, he’d learned law enforcement often categorized murders into “organized” and “disorganized.” They were terms, really, for premeditated crimes vs. crimes of passion, but the phrasing had really sunk in.

  He’d been a bit disorganized, he’d realized.

  Self-knowledge is so important in personal development. He’d read that in a book somewhere. It also applied to someone like him. A person who enjoyed killing and raping women, but also found pleasure in all acts of violence and homicide.

  It was at that moment he put his true purpose together.

  When he’d raped and murdered Jessica Halbert, he’d been freshly deranged and completely out of his mind. There had been some extenuating circumstances in that one, though, that made it different from all the others.

  Looking back, it was astounding to him how under control he’d been during the murder. His mind had been in a constant state of frenzy back then, but somehow he had held it together well enough to get away with the crime and elude the authorities.

  He’d really upped his game.

  It was amazing, really.

  Now he had at least a little bit of help, which he could have used back then. Like the information that some woman was going to be meeting with his old pal Peter Maitling.

  Great.

  He wondered if she was young or old. Would she be pretty? He’d just done a redhead. He secretly hoped she was a brunette or a fake blonde. He wondered what her skin was like. What her ass would taste like.

  He giggled again and stuffed the rest of his pizza into his mouth.

  Across the way, he watched as Peter Maitling stood up and extended his hand to a woman who had just arrived at the coffee shop. Maitling looked about the same, a short, powerful build with an air of no-nonsense about him. Except he didn’t move as smoothly as he used to and his hair was gray.

  The man across the street watched as Maitling waited for the woman to return with her coffee, which she did moments later.

  He studied the woman closely.

  Older than he ordinarily liked. Probably close to fifty. But she was really beautiful. A classic face and a nice body. Not a brunette, but light-haired, with maybe highlights. She held herself with confidence and had a nice trim body. A woman who clearly took good care of herself.

  He would certainly enjoy killing and raping her. Maybe he’d do something special, get really creative with her.

  What he saw before him was the epitome of what his killing strategy had become.

  One victim for revenge.

  One victim for pleasure.

  He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the woman across the street.

  He wanted to hear her scream.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Mr. Maitling?” Pauling asked. She had seen his picture on his driver’s license from the database she’d used. She knew it was him. Plus, his voice was unmistakable. Like a machine gun firing bad ammo.

  “Hey, you’re good looking,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. Your voice sounds like you might be a bar fly.”

  Maitling was a short, powerful man who’d seen better days.

  “What’s wrong with being a bar fly?” Pauling responded, resisting the temptation to comment on the quality of his voice.

  Maitling held up his hands as if to say he had no problem with it.

  After getting her own coffee and returning to the table, she took the lead. Maitling didn’t seem like the kind of guy who needed small talk, and Pauling wanted to get to the point.

  “Thanks for meeting with me,” she said. “So why weren’t you comfortable speaking over the phone, Mr. Maitling?”

  “Please. No one calls me mister. Call me Pete or Matey.”

  “Okay, Pete.”

  He smiled at her and raised an eyebrow. “How well do you know Tallon?”

  “Quite well,” she smiled back.

  Maitling nodded. “Yeah, I figured. Frickin’ Tallon always was good with the ladies. And, if you know him so we
ll, you already know the answer to that question. The kind of work Tallon and I used to do is rarely talked about in public, certainly not over unsecured lines. That’s a no-go.”

  “Used to?” Pauling asked. “Tallon’s not really retired. Are you?”

  Maitling nodded. “Sure am. Full medical disability, I won’t go into the details. Let’s just say I won’t be jumping out of helicopters or sprinting up a mountain anytime soon.”

  Pauling had figured that already. She didn’t know if it was some kind of long-term illness or the result of serious injury, but Maitling moved much slower than a man his age should. Plus, his breathing sounded labored.

  He glanced down at his phone and gave an imperceptible nod. “Tallon says you’re legit, but I already knew that.”

  Pauling had looked at her phone while she was ordering a coffee and saw that Tallon had called. She would have to call him back after this meeting was over.

  “So ask away,” Maitling said.

  “Okay. I’m looking into the killing of Jessica Halbert,” Pauling explained. “She was killed near the army base in Turkey not very long after your mission with Tallon, of which she was a part. I’ve been able to find almost nothing regarding what you were doing there and the reports are heavily censored.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Am I missing something?” he asked. “Why do you think her death had anything to do with the mission? Maybe it was some boyfriend at the base she dumped. Or a psycho at the bar who came onto her and she shot down. Happens all the time. All it takes is one crazy bastard.”

  “Anything is possible,” Pauling conceded. “But I didn’t start here. I went through all of the files and reports from the original murder inquest performed by the army’s special investigators. They couldn’t find anyone who Halbert had rejected. No ex-boyfriends. No threats. No problems at all.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “One name that did come up was Michael Tallon.”

  “Which would be expected.”