Daddy's Little Killer

Daddy's Little Killer



by LS Sygnet


Copyright 2012 LS Sygnet

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.  No part of this
book may be used or reproduced in any manner without permission
except in the case of brief quotations.

This book is a work of fiction.  Names,
characters, places and incidents are fictional or used
fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events, locales or
persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  All rights
reserved.  No part of this publication can be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or paper print,
without written permission from LS Sygnet.

Chapter 1

My feet pounded on the packed earth, its
contrast stark to the dense foliage crowding around it.  The
sprays of wildflowers strangling their way through the underbrush
would've been pretty under other circumstances.  Today, they
were blurs of yellow, pink and lavender while I rushed by.

Rivers of sweat soaked my
shirt in a wide V that yoked front and back.  Half-moons bled
into full under my arms.  My eyes stung with the beads of
salty condensation dripping from my brow.  My heart punctuated
the thuds between footfalls with a mantra:
look upset; look upset.

Breath sucked into my lungs like the baleen
of a whale.  Through my glazed vision I could see it ahead,
the area along the path cordoned off by too familiar yellow
tape.  The crime scene had been plotted.  The body
found.  Law enforcement collected clues that would be
analyzed, dissected, assembled to bring into focus the portrait of
a killer.

Running was necessary.  A certain
response would be expected in a matter of seconds.  Lessons
learned swirled in my brain.  Could I pull it off? 

I knew what it was supposed to look like,
the horror, the shock, the grief.  How could I contain the
urge to smirk?  Would I successfully quell the drive for a
fist pump and a loud screech of victory?

David Levine saw me rushing headlong for the
crime scene border.  I wasn't close enough to hear his voice,
but I'm a very good lip-reader.  Sometimes you have to be in
my line of work.

Who the hell told her to come out
here?  Jesus!

Obviously, David is Jewish.  Yet he has
no qualms about using certain religiously oriented epithets. 
Anything in the Common Era is fair game.  He didn't want me
here for obvious reasons.  I had to show up for only
one. 

Rick Hamilton used to be my husband. 
Now, he was dead.

Oh, he was also under the microscope of a
certain organized crime investigation being conducted by the
FBI.  Hence our divorce.  Appearances are important, and
I had to maintain mine.  So here I am.

David's arm restrained me.  "Helen,
no.  You shouldn't be here.  You shouldn't see him like
this."

Sweat served two purposes.  It's
virtually impossible to tell the difference between it and tears,
particularly when the mineralized moisture stings the eyes and
burns them red and raw.  I shoved his hand away from me. 
"I have to see."

Under the yellow tape, I saw something
familiar.  Rick's face lay side-down in the dirt.  The
earth around his head was brown-black, soaked with the blood that
sprayed from the insult and oozed out with the aid of
gravity. 

I stopped, hesitated for a beat too long
(maybe it looked like shock, at least I hope it did), and tried to
crumble to his side where I planned to commit the first
unforgivable sin of crime scene processing.  Touching the
body. 

David grabbed me.  "No, Helen. 
You can't touch him."

Dozens of chary eyes pinned me.  I
clung to David in a measure of self-protection.  Surely they
didn't suspect …

"It's obvious what happened here, Helen,"
David's low voice shrouded me in an impenetrable armor, shielded me
from the skepticism of my peers.  "They were afraid he would
tell us what he knew, so they had him assassinated."

Yes.  That's exactly what it looked
like.  It was precisely what it was designed to look
like. 

Assassins are supposed to be sociopathic
monsters.  They stay off the radar easier that way. 
Forget the grid.  They're ghosts.  That's what we're
taught to believe.  Police.  Television. 
Books.  Assassins are boogiemen, not quite urban legends, but
certainly not your next door neighbors, your friends, your
coworkers.  They don't have regular lives.  They don't
have wives, and they certainly don't have children.

They have whores who know better than to get
pregnant, or at the very least, take care of the problem quickly
and efficiently.  Such cold blooded killers feel no
empathy.  Emotion is as foreign as the speech of your run of
the mill alien from another galaxy.  Large men lurk in the
darkness.  They only shave off the five o'clock shadow every
three days.  Burly men in black clothes, they drive
nondescript sedans with stolen license plates. 

If they have homes, there are no white
picket fences, no perfectly manicured lawns and definitely not a
sturdy porch swing, its perfectly stained oak slats swinging from
shiny chains fastened above by hooks skewered into the
ceiling.  They don't water the begonias potted on the same
porch.  They don't stumble out in a bathrobe to rescue the
morning paper seconds before the sprinkler system kicks on to
quench that thirsty idyllic lawn.

No, the world believes that an assassin
drifts from seedy motel to cusp of condemned tenement.  He
lives between cryptic phone calls on throw away cell phones, or
busted up phone booths on deserted corners (before the advent of
cellular technology).  His contracts are not sought. 
They sort of roll in unbidden, because his reputation is whispered
in all the right circles.  And while it is a technicality that
he works for someone, the assassin has no boss.  The hit must
be a one-time deal.  Otherwise, the risk to his anonymity is
too great.  It makes him grow roots, become corporeal, less
than legend or ghost.  He is real.

Right?

Of course that's right.  Pop culture
says so.  The mafia hires assassins to take care of their
problems.  Who better would another group of sociopaths find
than the mother of all psychos?

Wendell Eriksson was the exception to the
rule as prescribed by Hollywood and company.  He slaughtered
men, and sometimes women at the behest of anyone if the price was
right.

And he would rock me on that porch swing
every balmy summer night, telling me about life and death and
everything that happens to a person in between.  Wendell
taught me things without even underscoring a single word of his
lessons.  I learned that the very best way to become a ghost
is to hide in plain sight.  If you want to stay ten steps
ahead of the law, join their ranks. 

Most important, if you want to be the last
person to ever land on a suspect list, you must be very
careful.  It's not about having a life that is little more
than a façade.  To be successful, you have to live life like
that American dream is real.  Embrace it.  Wallow in
it.  Find sane and normal and hold on for dear life.

Oh, and always make sure that twenty people
will give you an alibi, no matter what the job calls for or where
it takes you. 

These were the lessons that allowed my
father to be the most prolific hired killer in the history of the
world.  As far as the authorities could tell at the time of
his arrest, Wendell racked up a total of two victims.  My
adult memory tallied the number a bit higher.  And those were
merely the people he killed.  What shocked the hell out of me
was Wendell's little side venture. 

He was an adoption specialist.

Apparently, death was too kind for some of
Dad's victims.

He read an article in the newspaper to me
one night on the swing.  "Hell of a thing, Sprout.  If I
were these poor bastards, I'd wish I were dead rather than live the
rest of my life wondering what happened to you."

He tousled my honey blonde hair.

I was nine or ten years old at the time, but
the family whose baby was stolen from their home in the dead of
night never left my memory completely.  I supposed in
hindsight that it was part of the reason I wasn't so terribly
surprised when additional charges were tacked onto my father's
grand jury indictment.  Of course they had suspicion and no
proof.  Dad escaped the noose on that one.

Did I say he surprised me?  No, the
real mind fuck for me came in another form.

I stood over the gaping hole in the ground
and watched my mother's coffin as it was lowered into the
earth.  Her minister uttered some illogical nonsense about
ashes and dust and a resurrection that would one day restore her
broken body before she was joined with the righteous for some
blissful eternity.

He glossed over the fact that Marie was
Wendell's partner in crime.  Reverend Denial neglected to
mention that Dad had a third side business, one in which Mom was
probably the mastermind.  It was that part time gig that
landed my father in Attica for the rest of his life.

The lessons he taught me  …

Those were not easily
shed. 
Give people what they
expect.  You must always blend in, Sprout.  Never draw
attention to yourself.  If you do, let it be for being
brilliant and upstanding, always above reproach.  Make it
impossible for the world to ever believe you could do something
that would shock them
.

Yes, Dad was a master at that.  To say
that Wendell Eriksson, being unveiled as Jersey Third Eye, the most
notorious low-risk armored truck thief in the five boroughs and
beyond shocked the neighbors was an understatement.

Even in the bad times, Dad was a raging
success.  The evidence against Mom was ignored.  Not just
discarded, it was deemed hateful lies told by the wickedest man
alive.  How dare he slander Marie Eriksson's good name?

Well-meaning advice poured in, a flood of
salt into the already deep wound where my heart had been
evacuated.  Don't lift a finger to help him, Helen.  He's
trash.  Wendell Eriksson not only deceived his friends and
neighbors, but he pulled the wool over his brothers in blue's eyes
for twenty plus years.

My dad, the formerly decorated Detective
Wendell Eriksson, would stand trial and the city would weep when
his death sentence would be commuted to life without the
possibility of parole.  They were further outraged when his
incarceration included isolation from the general population. 
Can't have the murderer getting a filed down toothbrush stabbed
into a kidney.  No, that wouldn't be justice.

Ah Wendell's lessons.

On the outside, I was the perfect
daughter.  Outrage made my voice tremble at the merest hint
that I even had a father.  My mother became the saint in my
speech that the rest of the world created.  Yes, of course
Wendell dragged her unwillingly into his life of crime.

They had the luxury of ignorance.  I
did not.

Dad said Morse Code was a lost art.  He
employed it at his arraignment hearing.  He tapped out the
name to what I later learned was an offshore bank.  Conveying
the account number to me was a little trickier, but he managed that
too.

A brilliant guy, my
father, despite his flaws.  The look in his eyes when they met
mine before he was led out of the courtroom after being denied bail
told me everything I needed to know. 
Don't get involved, Sprout.  Live your life.  Stay
in the shadows.  Make me proud.

Lessons learned.  Dad got his
wish.  I was nineteen at the time of the incident when life as
I knew it ended.  I turned 38 last week, and I haven't seen my
father since that arraignment hearing.  I didn't go to his
trial.  I didn't beg for leniency at his sentencing
hearing.  There were no baked good wrapped with loving care
and addressed to a certain inmate at Attica after New York State
put a halt on executions.  I had so successfully distanced
myself from Wendell Eriksson by then that nobody seemed to remember
that he had a daughter.  Not even the media vultures.

My father did everything right.  In the
end, it didn't matter.  My sainted mother tried to kill him,
to presumably make off with their lifetime of ill-gotten
gains.  He stepped up and carried the consequences, so I
wouldn't suffer.  He let the world canonize a woman who wanted
him dead, but ended up taking her life instead of his. 

That's my dad.  A stand up cop.  A
doting father.  A ruthless killer.  A man who made
mistakes so I would learn from them.  Thanks to his sacrifice,
I won't make the worst mistake he made.  I will never take
money in exchange for services rendered.  Thanks to Dad, I
don't need a paycheck.