Elliot Turner is a criminal investigator for the Air Force Office of Special investigations, trying to hold on to his sanity and his career as he struggles with his erratic telepathic and clairvoyant abilities, while attempting to catch a serial killer who has been preying on young men and women for over 20 years. The killer is using the Military as a means to change his killing fields every few years. This case takes Elliot from the plains of Colorado to the far east, and begins an odyssey that will introduce Elliot and the reader to a new type of organization and criminals with skills he would never have imagined.
Some like them dead
By James Davidson IIAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 James Davidson II
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4567-6308-4Chapter One
The chamber was moist and cool but not uncomfortable. The air was alive with a rhythmic current, ebbing and flowing, stronger than a draft but not quite a breeze. It was as if some gargantuan, slumbering, beast was providing a gentle breath to caress and calm the weary subterranean traveler. The walls of the chamber were wet with condensation and streaked with milky, green, limestone deposits. A mineral odor, damp and stagnant, permeated the place. The overall feeling was that of being in a cave, but it was actually a large, domed, underground room.
The room was furnished with twenty gray metal desks and matching chairs constructed with the dull efficiency expected of government furniture manufactured during the Cold War era, neither pleasing to the eye nor particularly ugly. They were just desks and chairs with no distinctive design or marking, welded together to provide only a modicum of comfort to underpaid government cave dwellers. The walls were lined with empty consoles, each with its own swivel stool, memorials to the ghosts of command post workers who had gone about the daily business of nuclear deterrence. The furniture was also covered in slick limestone droppings from the ceiling.
Outside of the chamber's unlikely location, the only thing remarkable about it was one of the desks, which was unremarkable in and of itself. What set it apart from the others was the small form resting on its back in the center, a small child, his face relaxed and serene. His cheeks were pale from the cool air. The day before that same face had been flushed from the warmth of the sun, the cheeks ruddy from the carefree exertions of a child hard at play.
As the sun retired for the day, and the air in the cavern began to mirror the temperature of the cooling concrete shroud above, the face would loose the illusion of being in comfortable repose. The blood remaining in the diminutive body, having recently lost the use of a beating heart to force it along its not so perpetual route, would settle to the bottom of the shell. As post mortem lividity set in, the pearly inner flesh of bloodless wounds would start to contrast against the boy's pale blue skin. In time, the body would begin its metamorphosis into the dust from which it had come. Before that happened, however, it would spend some time looking exactly like what it was ... the body of a small boy, mutilated and alone.
Chapter Two
Elliot had his own internal theme music, an edgy rock and roll action hero score that generally played in a continuous loop inside his head whenever he was doing something he thought was particularly cool, which was often the case. Not that he was often doing something particularly cool, but the narcissist in him liked to think everything he did was cool. His theme music, however, stopped abruptly when he looked down and realized he was covered in blood. As the crashing cadence of his heart slowed and the adrenaline faded, he turned his consciousness inward and tried to determine if any his aches and pains needed immediate medical attention. He'd heard stories about soldiers who suffered fatal wounds but still continued to fight. They didn't even realize they were hurt until the surge of adrenaline abated, and they dropped dead. He suspected dropping dead sucked; he didn't think he would allow the dropping dead thing to happen tonight.
Satisfied with his quick self-examination, and a prognosis of not dropping dead in the immediate future, he bent to take a look at the freshly dead and oozing carcass at his feet. Most of the blood on him had splashed out of it. In life, this newly rendered pile of goo had been a biker who went by the gentle moniker of "Hatchet". He suspected this wasn't a given name and, although he didn't know what Hatchet had done to earn it, he was pretty sure it was indeed earned, and had likely involved a hatchet.
In life Hatchet hadn't been much to look at. He was the poster boy for outlaw bikers: fat, hairy, filthy, and rank. Now he was bloody, fat, hairy, filthy and rank; and he was missing half his face. That part, Elliot mused, was actually an improvement.
Hatchet's bowels had loosed after Elliot pressed his government-issued 9mm to his head, pulled the trigger, and given him a bloody lobotomy. The smell of shit was in the air. Elliot's face was covered in a fine crimson mist from the blowback. Yuck! Who knew what manner of disease Hatchet had been carrying? Fucker was probably a disease playground. He hoped the biker didn't have any of the three H's (the HIV, the HERP, or the HEP), because he, himself, hadn't come out of the scuffle completely unscathed. He'd sustained a number of small cuts and abrasions, and his right eye was starting to swell shut. Hatchet didn't just look like a grizzly bear, he also hit like one. There had been more than a small amount of bodily fluids exchanged while he and Hatchet battled for survival. Hell, he would have exchanged less body fluid if he had fucked him. Killing someone up close and personal was much more intimate than sex. You could have sex with a person many times over, but you could only kill a person once.
Hatchet was starting to smell worse in death than he had in life, but not by much. The smell of death, on top of being covered in Hatchet's coagulating blood, was making him nauseous ... and thinking about Hatchet and sex in the same span brought up his gorge. He choked it down.
Note to self: Don't shoot anybody else in the face, at least not at close range. The thought made him giggle a little. He had to force himself to stop, and realized he was a hair's breath from hysteria. If he started laughing now he would loose his fucking mind.
Think, think, think.... think! He needed to clean up, but he should wait for back up. Okay kids, one real dead biker, one blood drenched special agent, no backup, this was what was known in laymen's terms as a drug deal gone real bad.
Where was his backup, anyway? He'd been about to buy five-hundred dollars worth of crystal-methamphetamine from Hatchet in the parking lot of the Crazy Bull Saloon and Pool Hall, which he had taken to calling Bull's Dingus Redneck Emporium (but only to other cops). This would have been just little starter purchase to build some mutual trust. Before he could pull out his wad of money, though, he had one of his flashes, a familiar feeling of déjà vu. Everything slowed down as he watched Hatchet, now in stark techno-colored relief, pull that big fucking knife he wore in a functional leather sheath on his right thigh and skewer him through the gut.
The premonition only took a second, and then Elliot was back, looking at Hatchet who was still standing in front of him, beaming his most disarming grin right at him. What Hatchet didn't know was that his face was simply not accustomed to smiling, and so his unpracticed muscles only managed to twist his ugly mug into a reasonable facsimile of a cheerful, deranged wolverine. Hatchet dropped all pretenses of friendliness, however, when he noticed Elliot noticing his insincerity and the resultant change in Elliot's demeanor. He reached for his companion, the aforementioned big ass knife. Elliot grabbed for Hatchet's knife hand, even as the biker formulated the best way to skewer him with the nasty, well-worn blade. Hatchet responded by hitting him across the face, and he just knew he'd be feeling that in the morning. He kicked the biker between...
