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 Professor 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.