Death Is Stalking . . .

Here is the cover for my first book designed by the very talented Carl Graves who has done covers for authors such as: J.A. Konrath, Lee Goldberg, James Swain, and L.A. Banks.

Mr. Graves came up with a concept that showcases my characters facing a peril that is not only menacing, but identifiable for a wide audience.

It was also very easy to work with Mr. Graves. The entire process, start-to-finish, was done via e-mail, and after sending him a few illustrations, along with a few lines describing the protagonists, he delivered this cover in a couple of weeks.

If you’re an author in need of a professional cover, drop by his website Extended Imagery.

Flash Fiction: Guardians

THE FOLLOWING STORY IS BASED ON TRUE EVENTS.

Eric Holt didn’t need Bing Crosby crooning, a tree decorated with twinkle lights, or a calendar to tell him it was Christmas Eve.

All the twelve-year alarm control ‘lifer’ had to do was swipe his identification badge to enter the UL central station. Six operators, himself included, filled the room to capacity in order to process the rainbow colors of pending or active alarms that flashed on computer monitors, three at each workstation.

Eric nodded at his supervisor, Kara Scarlett, as he shrugged out of his jacket to hang it up on the row of hooks to the right of the door. He smiled at her attire for the shift, which took advantage of the relaxed holiday dress code. Kara wore sweatpants, Elmo slippers, and a sweatshirt with a snarling bulldog on the front under the words Bite Me.

“Hey, boss. Anything special going on?”

“No,” Kara said. “Just the usual.”

“Right.” Eric took the only empty station across from Kara and next to Colleen, a seasoned operator that had been with the team now for almost three years. The cougar was sucking on a piece of candy between phone calls and sang Christmas carols over and over again.

Eric logged into the SIMS application they used for monitoring on the right and center monitor of his station, while the left computer was reserved for the corporate network. Sliding a headset over his salt and pepper hair that looked like it’d been trimmed by a chainsaw, he carefully positioned the headphone over his left ear so it wouldn’t rub against a larger earring his mother had given to him as a present. He glanced up at the flatscreen television mounted on the wall in the center of the room. Northwest Cable News was covering highlights of the week, including a pair of bombers that’d been sentenced to death.

“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me,” Eric heard the hot blonde, Lizzy, at the station behind him comment into her headset microphone.

He paused at plugging his own headset in to swivel around and peek at the computer monitor she was typing real time comments on to glimpse the words ‘dead body’.

That sucks, he thought, then turned around to plug into his phone and log in to start taking calls. The incoming call light blinked like a heart monitor machine reading a patient with a heart attack in progress. He pushed the button to find twenty plus clients on hold for help with their alarm systems and it wasn’t even six p.m.

Eric pressed the Available button and took his first call.

“Alarm Control, this is Eric. How can I help you? OK. Fred Meyer South Salem.” His fingers typed the information on the keyboard as if he was breathing fresh air on a tropical beach. “Happy holidays to you too, Tom. Five minute break for the photo electronic fire exit to make sure its secure. Got it. No. Sorry. It’s too late to change your employee door break times for temperature checks tomorrow. Talk to you later.”

Call number two. “Your alarm won’t set. Is the front door closed? Yes. Close that. Good. Keypad still says ‘Not Ready’. OK. Put in the alarm code and press enter twice. The display reads ‘Motion’. You still have balloons hanging up? Yeah. Take those down. Put them in the bathroom or something. Why? They’re blocking the motion sensors.”

At the workstation diagonal from Eric, Max Grove finished chomping on a potato chip, then said, “Hey Eric. I bet I know where you really wanted them to put those balloons.”

Eric gave the fellow sarcastic operator a whimsical smirk.

His attention focused on the emergency cell phone hooked to the paneling of the central station’s rack which housed the receivers and servers for alarm signals. The ringtone sounded different, until he realized it was Theresa’s cell phone.

“Sorry, everyone,” the earth mother said. “Excuse me, but I’ve got to take this.” Snatching her flip phone, Theresa left the room, but not before reminding Eric that there was plenty of food the company had bought for the team in the test kitchen fridge.

“Thanks Teri,” Eric said. “If that’s your daughter in boot camp, tell her hi for us.”

“I will sweetheart. Thank you.”

The sound of Kara’s voice at being annoyed brought Eric’s attention back to the thirty pending events on the monitors.

“If you don’t have the code to set the alarm there’s nothing we can do,” she was telling a store employee. “You’ll have to call your manager. No. We can’t turn it on for you.”

One hour later the largest chain of one-stop shopping centers in Oregon and Washington were all trying to leave their stores in the space of thirty minutes. Two hundred locations calling six people in a room smaller than a corporate office restroom. Do the math if you want to.

But Eric already envisioned what the call stats would be. Ninety-eight percent of the calls would be answered in under twenty seconds, a golden standard for a central alarm station.

Colleen burst into laughter. “Merry Christmas to you too,” she giggled in a little kid’s playful voice. “You’re the last employee out. OK.” She dispositioned her operator comments in the Employee Door account for Tacoma Pacific Fred Meyer with a C: Data/Info Entered. A few minutes later when the employee entry door alarmed and reset on the screen, indicating the employee had opened and closed it to leave, Colleen cleared the alarm off with a B: Authorized Break.

“Lizzy?” Kara called out over Eric’s head to the youngest operator in the room who’d just turned twenty-three. “Tell me what happened at that Smith’s store in Downtown Utah.”

Putting her phone on work, Lizzy swiveled around in her chair. The Grinch adorned the front of her sweatshirt.

“Probable drug overdose, Kara. Grocery PIC was doing a bathroom check and found the guy slumped backwards over the toilet with a syringe dangling from his arm. Gross. I called the Loss Prevention Manager.”

“Good work,” Kara said.

A yellow signal indicating a burglary alarm began to flash at the top of the screen and Eric clicked Enter to grab it. It was a garden center rollup door at Tacoma Pacific Fred Meyer. He picked his line and dialed police dispatch.

“I’ve got a silent alarm at the Fred Meyer on Tacoma Pacific. Last employee left about twenty minutes ago. Yes, I’ll call a responder right away. Incident number? OK. Anything else you need from me? Right. Thanks.”

Eric contacted the store director and interrupted the man’s family dinner. Oh well, that’s retail. It sucks. Tough shit.

Twenty minutes of babysitting ones and zeroes later, Eric was told to pick a call from Tacoma Pacific’s store director.

“Where the hell are the police, Eric?” the director whispered.

“I dispatched them right before I called you. Why are you whispering?”

“Because I’m laying low from the two assholes dressed like Santa Claus looting my store.”

Eric called dispatch again and gave them an update. A little while later the director called back with joyful relief.

“They got ‘em, Eric. They got ‘em with the dogs.”

*     *     *

For my work family of operators, programmers, and service co-ordinator in Kroger Central Alarm Control. Merry Christmas.

Flash Fiction: Trichina

Detective Lindy Ferguson had just finished cleaning her kitchen after hosting Thanksgiving dinner, got her four-year-old daughter, Gillian, to sleep with only five pages of Alice In Wonderland (instead of the customary ten), and managed to steal maybe four hours of sleep.

When her cell phone lit up her nightstand, the ringtone of the theme from Dragnet telling her her captain was calling.

"Yeah . . . " she grumbled.

"Sorry to interrupt your beauty sleep," Captain Hicks said, "but you've got a homicide."

"I'm not on call," Lindy coughed, swallowing the expletive she almost blurted.

"Adams can't respond right now," Hicks explained. "He's getting stitched up. Got stabbed with a butcher knife answering a domestic disturbance."

The horrible news of a brother in blue injured woke Lindy up immediately.

"Is he going to be okay, Cap?"

"I think so. No major artery severed. He should be back on his feet by New Years."

Lindy grabbed a pad of Mary Engelbreit stationary and pen with a snowman bobble head.

"What's the address?" She jotted the Southeast location down in hurried shorthand. And she would have used her palm rather than a piece of her Mary Engelbreit collection, but she needed to grab a quick shower. "Felony Flats. Terrific. I'll be there in forty-five minutes."

"Lindy. Wait."

Oh God, she thought, the captain only used her first name when giving her a reprimand, or at personal functions like Gillian's first birthday party.

"What now?"

"Thanks again for dinner last night. Are you still sure you won't share your family stuffing recipe?"

Lindy didn't even bother to gratify that with a response and ended the call.

After pulling on a pair of black jeans, a purple silk blouse, her Glock in a shoulder rig, and fleece-lined leather coat, Lindy left a note for her family on the coffee table, then stepped out into the brisk forty-degree night.

While she warmed up her restored 1968 Hunter Green Ford Mustang, Lindy unlocked her iPad. She accessed a database developed by the Cyber-Crimes division that catalogued criminal activity. She entered the address off Fifty-Second and Henderson to track any recent updates.

A week ago one Geoffrey Shepard had been reported for a parole violation and when his parole officer tracked him down to confront him, Shepard assaulted her with a knife, then raped her. Several calls from the neighborhood Lindy was going into had reported sightings of Shepard. She tapped a link to the felon's rap sheet. He’d been nailed for a GTA five years ago.

Her memory clicked on the day of Shepard's apprehension. She had been one of the officers that corralled Shepard into driving his stolen Shelby GTO over a spike trap.

The evening was cold, but not moist, and once the windows were defrosted, Lindy shifted gears, and pulled out of her driveway in Clackamas. 103 FM plays Christmas music every year from Thanksgiving to New Years and Fergie began to sing a cover of “Santa Baby”. Lindy rocked out to the Black-Eyed Peas chanteuse all the time, but as far as she was concerned, Eartha Kitt would always own that song.

She double parked across the street from the location, grabbed a travel case and baseball cap from the back seat, then headed for the border of crime scene tape around the broken-down Victorian house that'd seen better days. One of the two uniformed officers that'd secured the exterior got out of the driver's side of his cruiser to offer Lindy a cup of coffee.

"No thanks, Charles," Lindy said. "Who tipped us off here?"

"Neighbor lady next door. She was supposed to have dinner with the family that rents the place, but they never answered the door when she knocked yesterday afternoon. A couple hours ago, she did some nosing around and discovered all four tires on the family car slashed, then the family cat scared the shit out of her running out through the animal door."

The officer panned the beam of his flashlight along the gravel path that lead to the stairs. Lindy spotted the paw prints of blood.

She placed the travel bag on the hood of the cruiser, then bunched her shoulder length blonde hair underneath the Oregon Ducks baseball cap. Lindy didn't want her golden locks to get mixed with any evidence she collected inside. Grabbing the case, the homicide detective approached the house, sidestepping the gory animal tracks.

"Watch my caboose, boys," she told Charles over her shoulder.

"Aye, Lieutenant," the uniform promised as Lindy snapped on a pair of gloves.

She found the door locked, but before resorting to her lock picks-a trade craft Lindy didn't have the patience for-she found a set of spare keys in a tin stowed away inside the bird house that hung above the archway of the porch.

Inside, she canvassed the dimly-lit dwelling, starting with the living room and kitchen, then the three bedrooms upstairs, and finally the basement which was a deathtrap of magazines and newspapers. She spotted a mildew-stained rag on top of one pile that was an out-of-print circular for Portland's adult entertainment industry back in the day when she was a lingerie model to help pay her way through college.

She found the bodies of the family stacked like lumber in the tub of the basement bathroom. There were no weapon marks or bruises to suggest they'd been slain by a weapon. Just feline bites and scratches where the cat had scavenged. Poison then? She examined the fingertips, slack mouths, and hollow expressions of their death masks for any tell-tale signs.

"Gross," she muttered. "What in the hell are you?" Lindy asked the tiny worm that crawled out of the adult male's eye socket, leaving a slimy trail. She snatched a petrie dish from her evidence collecting kit, along with a pair of tweezers, and delicately placed the worm inside.

She took a picture of the creepy crawly with her cell phone and sent it along with a text message to an entomologist friend at PSU that lived with insomnia. Just before her cell phone battery died, he revealed that the specimen was a trichina worm.

"You're telling me that these people died from trichinosis?" Lindy talked to herself. "Food poisoning? Then how did the corpses end up in the bathroom?"

She raced back up the stairs and into the living room. One of the pictures above the mantel of the fireplace showed the adult male with his arm around the shoulder of Geoffrey Shepard. Taking a deep breath, Lindy dropped her evidence collecting gear and unholstered her sidearm to aim it at the entrance of the kitchen.

A bowl or something rattled.

Barrel covering her twelve' a clock, Lindy proceeded to step towards the kitchen, her heartbeat racing, her lips clenched to breathe quiet and shallow.

The kitchen was a mess of moldy dishes and food containers. Fruit flies drifted around the sinks garbage disposal and a stench forced Lindy to move her gun down so she could cover her mouth. The cat's bloody paw prints were all over the linoleum floor and formica countertops.

It leapt from the top of the fridge to land at her feet, then scurried away.

"You little shit," Lindy chuckled, following her nose to the smell in a pantry lined with shelves of canned food just beyond the kitchen and a little nook and dining room table.

The butt of a cigarette smoldered in an ash tray off center.

The foul stench led to a refrigerator next to a deep freeze, neither emitting a hum that they were operational. The fridge door was ajar and Lindy pushed it open all the way with her foot.

Trichina worms spilled out onto the floor. The hundreds that didn't fall out were clinging to a ham that rested on a plate.

The door of the deep freeze flew open and Geoffrey Shepard's ratty mop of red hair whirled in Lindy's peripheral vision.

"Suspect on location!" she began to shout, but Shepard nailed her in the mouth with a fist. A mop handle smacked her hands to knock the Glock from her grasp and the weapon dropped. Agile as a tiger escaped from a cage, Shepard hurdled out of the freezer to reach for the gun, but Lindy sent it skittering across the floor with a swipe of her Nikes. The shooter swiveled underneath the fridge.

"Bitch!" Shepard yelled, giving Lindy a shove into the kitchen. Off balance and coughing from the blood in her mouth and acid reflex in her throat from the vomit she'd swallowed at touching the worms when she lost her gun, Lindy hit the floor on her ass, legs spread.

"Oh yeah," Shepard said, grinning. "I've been thinking of this moment ever since you read me my rights. I'm gonna fuck you up so bad."

As the felon lunged, Lindy hurled a fistful of trichina worms into his face, then rolled out of his path. Shepard screaming obscenities like a girl, Lindy grabbed the first kitchen utensil she could, a marble rolling pin, and brained Shepard up alongside the head with it.

After he went down hard and began to moan, Lindy gave him a swift kick to the nuts.

"That's for making me miss the Black Friday sale at Fred Meyer."

Flash Fiction: The Booby Trap

You’ve probably heard of our backwater berg by one of it’s nicknames? The City of Roses is the most popular. It’s landed Portland on some of those yuppy award lists like ‘Top Ten Most Family-Friendly Places’. Then there’s Stumptown, Bridgetown, Beertown, and PDX.

These aliases are like the miracles of plastic surgery, because if someone peers close enough, microscopic scars of crime become visible.

Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel considered building Las Vegas on Sauvie Island, only the constant rain forced the gangster to reconsider. A star witness for Robert and John Kennedy’s Rackets Committee Hearing, Big Jim Elkins, was a Portland native.

And if a criminal requires an oasis to lie low in, don’t underestimate Portland’s adult entertainment industry; more strip clubs per capita than Vegas or San Francisco.

***

Brown ponytail flopping in a damp breeze, software designer Alec Winter and his personal bodyguard, former light heavyweight boxer Antonio Mercer entered Mary’s Club, a stripper bar on downtown Broadway Boulevard.

Winter was an entrepreneur on the lam. Five years ago he hit the cover of Forbes and publicity behind his persona compared him to Bill Gates and Quentin Tarantino. Three years ago his wife arrived home early on his birthday to plan a surprise party to find his dick in an Asian immigrant. His wife was three months pregnant.

Mercer got kicked out of boxing for using steroids and gambling.

Winter and Mercer found a vacant table that was just being cleared off.

“I’m hungry,” Mercer blurted, unfolding the food menu. “What appetizer do you want to share with me?”

“Christ, Tony. You just swallowed that bacon maple bar from Voodoo Donuts practically whole, and you haven’t been training for months.”

“How about a veggie platter with hummus then?” the boxer slurred through a gold front tooth that wasn’t quite the exact size as his other teeth.

“Good choice,” chimed the Goth waitress in fuck me pumps. “What do you wanna’ drink?”

“Two pints of PBR,” Winter said. He watched the petite minx hip-walk away. “I love me the curvy proportions of P-Town girls. Plenty of meat on their bones and more ass to ride than . . . Hey! You spot a cop or something?”

“I want what he’s getting.” Entranced, the boxer’s square-shaped head nodded at the back of the dive.

Winter glanced at the lounge chairs lined along the walls.

“There are lap dances,” the software programmer explained, before his eyes bulged and mouth fell open with lust. “And then there’s dry fucking.”

The brunette in leopard-print latex lingerie straddled and slid around the thighs of a twenty-something blonde-haired punker that looked like an extra in a grunge music video. The kid traced a finger along the dancer’s thigh. He also said something that made her flip her head back in laughter.

“Dumb ass.” The boxer snorted through his crooked nose. “I bet the bouncer tosses him out.”

Sideways from the rim of his glass, Winter glanced at the hulk of a bouncer at the bar, while a shorter one carded customers at the entrance. Neither one of them must’ve noticed because they didn’t do jack shit.

“Thirty-six/twenty-three/thirty-five. . .” Mercer groaned at the stripper, tilting his head sideways to get another angle of her supple curves. “Wow.”

She braced her hands on the punker’s shoulders to snuggle in against his crotch. As she started to sway to and fro, her shoulder length curls brushing through the course spikes of the kid’s buzz cut, his hands gripped the plush arms of the lounge chair tight. When her hips began to grind harder, she unhooked the whip coiled at her waist.

Unfurling it with a flick of her wrist, she then braced the back of the punker’s head to pull his face into her breasts.

“Shit,” Winter said and spilled some beer down the front of his sweater, glad it wasn’t one of the thousand dollar suits he missed wearing in a Silicon Valley boardroom. “Not even the dancers in Bangkok touch a man that much.”

The three-song set ended. After the punk kid slipped a fifty-dollar bill into the dancer’s panties, he headed for the restroom, the back of his frayed, worn out shirt read ‘I ♥ boobies’.

When the guy came back from the john, Mercer intercepted him.

“My boss would like to buy you a drink.”

“Thanks,” the punk said. “Maybe later. I’m busy. Hey, Sandra.” He offered a pair of twenties to the Goth waitress. “That offer for a dance still good?”

With a thick smile accentuated by gold hoops in her red lips, Sandra undid her apron, grabbed the kid’s hand, and pulled him to a couch.

Shoulders slumped, Mercer retreated to the table. “Sorry, Alec. Guy’s not interested. Can’t say that I blame him.”

Winter dug into his pocket and withdrew a large roll of cash that was almost the size of a canned ham. Most of that bankroll he owed to his ex-wife for child support. He peeled off a pair of bills and tossed them at Mercer.

“Offer these to him,” he said, then flinched at the screams of an orgasm from the Goth stripper that didn’t sound fake.

The punker didn’t turn down the green. He joined Winter and Mercer at their table. The stripper had to go back to the bar and serve other patrons, but she made up for her absence by getting three others to take her place. Four rounds of PBR led to tequila shooters, phone number exchanges, and enough sexual innuendo to make Doctor Ruth blush.

While a red head escorted Winter to a couch and proceeded to show him more than her tattoos, the punker smuggled himself to the bathroom and unflipped his cell phone.

“This is Matt Grudge,” the punker said. “You know that deadbeat dad that owes two years of child support? I’ve got him wrapped up,” the private detective explained to his police contact. “No, he’s not going anywhere. The dancer I set him up with has a fetish for handcuffs.”