The first thing we heard were the screams, then we saw the girl half walking, half running down the middle of the street. Eric and I had been sitting on my front porch, talking low. It was late, the air was hot, the drinks were cold. I don’t know how long we’d been on the porch before we heard the screaming, then the crying.

Eric looked at me, looked back down the street.

The screaming was coming towards us, fast. A young black woman stumbled into the pool of light at the intersection of Locust and Chalmers, half a block down from my porch. Electricity shot up my body, coming up through my feet. Her pursuer charged up from behind, a young black male, grabbed her by the shoulder, getting a grip on her shirt, punching her in the back of the head.

She was crying. Bawling.

He was punching her. Again. And Again. Yelling at her.

I didn’t think. I was up and on my feet moving. My hands were fists. He didn’t see me coming. Didn’t see us coming. Eric was pounding feet right behind me. My eyes were locked down the block.

I didn’t see anything but HIM.

I didn't feel anything but HIM.

I didn’t hear anything but the SCREAMS.

She was crying, his fist was angry, so goddamn angry, yelling at her. She had her hands up, her head ducked down, trying to hide from those fists. I watched the fist coming down again and again while he spun her around with his grip on her t-shirt. I could see the tears on her face in the street light, the pain of the blows.

I knew about pain. I knew about fists.

“HEY!”

He spun. He snarled at me.

“The hitting stops NOW!”

I was enraged. I wanted a body to hurt. I wanted a man to punish. Eric and I flanked the girl. I wanted to hit the man right there, standing in the center of the light like a ring, but it was all about the girl. It was always about the girl.

“This ain’t nunya business! This ain’t your concern!”

His fist balled up at his sides, he barked at us over and over again. Saying the same shit. The girl cried. She shuddered as I put my hand on her shoulder, guiding her away from her attacker. Eric was quiet, watching this guy. I asked the girl where she lived, was she all right, ignoring the punk. He was maybe 5’8”, maybe 5’10”. He was no threat to me, whether Eric was there or not.

I kept up on where she lived. They were coming from a party. No one from the party paid attention to this. No one from any house, with so many bright windows, had stuck their heads out to see what the screaming was all about. Cowards. All of them, they could hear the screams. The man was jumping up and down in his anger, wanting to get at the girl. She lived just a few houses up from the corner on Locust, an apartment building whose parking lot was right behind my backyard.

Her place was on the 1st floor. She didn’t speak clearly. She mumbled and pointed. The tears kept coming down her cheeks.

We walked the girl up to her front door, Eric and I on either side of her like bodyguards, the scumbag women beating piece of shit trailing behind us, yelling impotently. Her head was down, she didn’t look at us, she didn’t look up. We stood there while she fumbled with her keys. The mutt was yelling at my back, yelling at her. She got the door open and disappeared into the darkness, never looking over her shoulder. I heard the deadbolt slam home.

Now it was just us.

The little cocksucker grandstanded in the middle of the yard. He was calling me out. He saw my own lust in my eyes. I wanted to grind him into nothing but bubbling tears pouring across cold concrete. This was everything I wanted. A body to destroy. A bad man to break and make weep. It called to me.

I wanted to hurt him so goddamn bad.

I tossed my glasses off into the grass. We squared off, chest to chest. I stared down at him, the ignorant fool had both his arms out wide. Telling me to “C’mon, let’s do this, let’s go.” I ground my teeth down. I was trained to destroy humans with my bare hands. I’d spent a lot of time in Chicago fighting with groups growing up. I’d spent a lot more time learning from an ex-military Korean professor, a member of the Korean Army Demonstration Tae Kwan Do team, a man who’d taught me how to break and kill.

His throat was wide open. His eyes begged for a head butte.

Arms open wide for the pain, he was easy, but something wasn’t right. No matter how much I wanted to hurt, this wasn’t the man. This wasn’t the man I wanted. My mind was racing between impulses. Beating up someone smaller than me, even a creepy piece of shit like this one… I didn’t know if I could stop, once I started hitting him, I didn’t know if I could stop, didn’t know if I could keep from killing him.

My breathing slowed.

I didn’t want this. Not this way. I wanted to save it for the right one. This lust, wasn’t meant for anyone but HIM. I wanted to hurt HIM. All my rage, it was pure, it was right, it burned me down every night I closed my eyes and the booze hadn’t shut them hard enough. I wasn’t going to waste it on tissue paper. I didn’t believe in condoms. He wasn’t my man. He wasn’t the one that had hurt my Michelle. This girl, this lucky girl, she was safe in her apartment. Not like Michelle. It was up to this girl to call the police. It was up to her to call them and press charges. If I beat this moron to a bloody pulp, I know I'm the one going to jail. The police, they’d already warned me to watch my step.

Blowing air out of my nose slowly, I stepped back.

It was over. I turned away from his mocking eyes, walked across the lawn, scooped up my glasses. Wiping sweat from my face, I put them on, looked at Eric.

“It’s over. We’re leaving.”

He nodded his head. I knew he wanted to bust some heads. I knew how he felt about Michelle too. We left, walked back to my porch. Just like any domestic dispute I’d ever read about, the abuser went straight to the girl’s door, talking through the door, not yelling now. Trying to talk his way back in. She was safe behind her door. What happened next, that was her decision.

I couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved. I’d lost that fight before.

The excitement was over. It was all over, I was numb again.

I went back to a darker place. My place.

I never heard from the girl again.


All Contents Copyright 2009 Hart D. Fisher. All Rights Reserved.

Recently, I completed my second novel, A Killer Like Me. My agent, Scott Gould of RLR Associates in New York City, is submitting the novel to several big editors. I have my fingers crossed. Meanwhile, I'm working on a third. It pays to have a backup plan.

Here, submitted for your perusal, is the first chapter of my recently completed novel.

A KILLER LIKE ME

By Chuck Hustmyre

CHAPTER 1

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

NEW ORLEANS -- 2:30 p.m.

The woman's body lay sprawled on the grimy floor. She was naked, her arms extended, legs spread. Dried blood caked her crotch. More blood had leaked onto the floor and formed a gooey puddle under her buttocks.

Homicide detectives Sean Murphy and Juan Gaudet stood near the dead woman's feet, looking down at her.

"He hurt her before he killed her," Murphy said.

Gaudet nodded. "Looks that way." He let out a deep breath. "You think it's our guy?"

"She's got ligature marks on her neck."

"But no plastic cable tie," Gaudet said.

Murphy took a careful step toward the woman's head and leaned forward to get a better look at her neck. The ligature contained tiny ridge impressions, like those found on a cable tie. "He must have cut it off."

"But why?" Gaudet said. "He left them on the other victims."

"It's him."

"What makes you so sure?"

"I got a feeling."

"You got a feeling?" Gaudet said, an edge of sarcasm in his voice to let his partner know he wasn't buying it.

Murphy nodded. "It feels like our guy. The way he put her on display, right in the middle of the dance floor. She looks like she's been sacrificed on an altar."

"The other ones weren't posed."

"They just weren't this obvious," Murphy said, "but I bet if we go back and look at the crime scene photos, we'll see it."

"Like one of those pictures you stare at until you see the hidden image?"

Murphy ignored the question as he stepped over the victim's outstretched left arm and squatted beside her head. Staring at the dead woman's face, he said, "He's getting more into the act itself. He likes it. He's gaining confidence and developing into a more sophisticated killer."

The crime scene was inside an old club on North Rampart Street called the Destiny Lounge, a black juke joint a few blocks from Elysian Fields Avenue, in the Upper 9th Ward. The club had been closed since Katrina. For a long time after the storm, the Destiny Lounge had been a place where bums took a shit and junkies came to get high. Several months back the city finally boarded up the doors and windows.

Murphy stood and shined his flashlight at the ceiling, amazed that the mirrored disco ball still hung over the dance floor.

An overweight uniformed cop stood just inside the half-open front door. Murphy recognized him but couldn't remember his name. "Who called it in?" Murphy asked.

"Anonymous 9-1-1 call," the fat cop said.

"Some dope fiend would be my guess," Gaudet offered.

"A dope fiend with a conscience?" Murphy asked.

"I bet he fucked her first."

"The killer?"

"No," Gaudet said. "The 9-1-1 caller."

"She's kind of ripe."

"Still, piece of ass lying there like that, these junkies don't care. I bet there's more than one sperm sample in her -- one from the killer, one from the caller."

"She's a twenty-five dollar crackwhore," Murphy said, "which means we're probably going to find a whole sperm bank inside of her." He shined his flashlight around the bar. The dead woman's clothes were gone.

Outside, the late July sun beat down on the city through a cloudless sky. The heat radiating inside the sealed building was so thick Murphy felt like he could set his notepad and flashlight on top of it. Sweat ran down his face. His shirt and suit coat were stuck to his back.

Hardly any of that blinding sunlight, though, penetrated the tomb-like interior of the bar. The plywood covering the club's doors and windows hadn't keep out the victim, or the killer, or the transient who found the body, but it kept out the light. The only ambient illumination came from the halfway propped open front door.

"How'd the first officers get in?" Gaudet asked the fat uniform cop.

The patrolman pointed toward a back room. "A door in there has been pried off the hinges. It's leaning up against the frame, but it's pretty easy to move."

"Is that how you got in?" Murphy asked.

The cop nodded.

"What about the front door?"

"It was chained shut from the inside. We used a tire tool to bust open the padlock so we could get some light in here, and some fresh air."

Gaudet turned to his partner. "You're the Homicide Division's expert on dead women. How long do you think she's been here?"

Murphy painted the body with his flashlight. Then he took a big whiff of the air. "I'd say at least two days."

The front door banged open as a uniformed sergeant took a half step into the building. "Hey, Murph ... " The sergeant looked around like someone who had just walked into a dark movie theater. "Where the hell are you?"

Murphy waved his flashlight. "Right here."

"Coroner's man says it'll be at least an hour before he can get here. They're pulling a floater out of the river by the French Market. The body got hung up on a pylon."

"Male or female?"

"Female."

"A local girl?"

The sergeant shook his head. "Tourist. They already got her I-D'd. Her boyfriend reported her missing yesterday. He said they were having sex on that old pier up by the zoo. Somehow she fell in. I guess she couldn't swim."

Great, Murphy thought. Another hour standing around inside a sauna with a rotting corpse. By law, even Homicide couldn't move a body until the coroner's investigator got to the scene.

He and Gaudet went back to examining the victim.

She was black, twenty to twenty-five years old, and badly swollen. Her tongue was the color of chocolate syrup. Her eyes were open and bulging out of her face. The whites had turned dark from the burst blood vessels.

Textbook strangulation.

The ligature marks, the bruising left by whatever had been used to choke her, looked like they encircled her neck. When the coroner's investigator got there, they could roll the body and be sure, but Murphy was betting she had been strangled with a cable tie.

The woman had been skinny but the stretch marks on her belly and hips indicated she'd had at least one child. Scabs and needle marks dotted her arms and legs. Three of the fingernails on her right hand were broken.

She fit the profile of the others. Six previous murders in twelve months, all fairly young, all prostitutes, all victims the department brass called women with high-risk lifestyles. All but the first had been strangled with heavy-duty cable ties, thick plastic bands with a one-way ratcheted lock on one end that tightens but doesn't loosen. The only way to remove a cable tie once it's on is to cut it off.

"What are you thinking?" Gaudet said.

Murphy shook his head to clear it. He'd been staring down into the dead girl's blood-soaked eyes, but there wasn't anything behind them. Everything she had ever been, every dream she'd ever had, every memory -- good, bad, or ugly -- was gone. Nobody starts out in life wanting to be a junkie prostitute, but that's all this poor woman would be remembered as, assuming she was remembered at all. But even if she wasn't, she would exist forever in the files of the New Orleans Police Department as a dead hooker, murder number one hundred and something, whatever the count was up to as of this afternoon.

"Hey, partner," Gaudet said, "don't get too wrapped up in this shit. It's just another case."

Murphy looked at him. "You think they'll finally admit it?"

"Your serial killer theory?"

"I think we're past the theory part."

"Brother, you had me convinced after murder number three," Gaudet said. "But I'm not in charge. I just work here."

"I'm going to talk to the captain again. We need a task force. We need resources. If we don't catch this guy, he's going to keep going and going."

Gaudet's laugh sounded like the bark of a hyena. "Just like the bunny."

Murphy cracked a smile. "Yeah, just like the Energizer bunny."

***

Crime scene techs took pictures of the dead woman and the inside of the bar. They also measured how far the body was from fixed objects around the room, and from the back door, the most likely point of entry. They plotted the distances and directions on a diagram. Forty-eight feet separated the back door from the woman's body.

While everyone waited for the coroner's investigator to show up, Murphy managed to talk one of the techs, a woman whom he guessed weighed about 130 pounds, into letting him drag her around on the floor. Murphy paced off fifty feet of floor, on the opposite side of the club from the back door and the victim's body, then asked the tech to lie on her back. He dragged her one way, then dragged her back. After a little experimentation, he found out it was easiest to pull her by her feet.

"Not this method acting shit again," Gaudet said as he watched his partner drag the crime scene tech across the filthy dance floor.

Breathing hard, Murphy said, "It works, I'm telling you. You get inside a person's head and you can figure out how and why he does what he does."

"How do you know he dragged her? He could have carried her."

"They call it dead weight for a reason," Murphy said. "If he choked her unconscious while they were outside, he had to get her in here somehow. Lifting and carrying an unconscious or dead adult by yourself, even a female, is nearly impossible."

"You carry a lot of unconscious or dead women, do you?"

"If you don't believe me," Murphy pointed to the crime scene tech lying at his feet, "try carrying her from the back door to here."

"He ain't carrying me nowhere," the tech said. "That's enough of this bullshit."

"Maybe they walked in together," Gaudet said.

"Could be, but I don't picture our guy as a smooth talker. He's not Ted Bundy." Murphy stared at their victim for a half-minute. "I picture him as shy around women. I think he approached her on the street, tells her what he wants. They make a deal, he shows her some money. Then they go down the side of the building or come around the back to take care of business. But he grabs her and chokes her out, or maybe he slugs her with something. Either way, he brings her in here unconscious. There's no way she comes in here willingly just to have sex. This place is too nasty, even for a crackwhore."

"He would've had to know he could get inside."

"He scouted it out ahead of time. He was probably the one who took the door off the hinges." Murphy looked down at the crime scene tech still lying on the floor. "Can you check the hinges and the pins to see if there are any fresh tool marks? I want to know if they look like they've been taken apart recently."

"Can I get up now?"

Murphy ignored her. "We need more light in here. This dance floor is covered in grime. If he dragged her in here, she would have left a trail, maybe even some hair. Look for shoe impressions, too."

The crime scene tech held her hand up to Murphy. "Are you going to help me up?"

***

It was almost five o'clock when the coroner's investigator showed up. By that time Murphy was so hot he had stopped sweating. From his Boy Scout days he seemed to remember that was one of the signs of heat exhaustion, or heat stroke, heat something.

The dead prostitute -- he and Gaudet had already decided that's what she was -- had no pockets to empty, nor possessions to catalogue. Nothing but injuries to document and photograph.

The coroner's investigator examined the woman's body by flashlight. He started with her scalp and began working his way toward her toes. He stopped halfway. Murphy, who was looking over the investigator's shoulder, saw the tip of a dark object protruding from the woman's rectum. "What is that?" Murphy said.

The investigator angled his head down for a better look. "I don't know."

"Guess."

The man flicked at the object with a latex-covered fingernail. It clinked. "Sounds like glass."

"Glass?"

The investigator probed with his finger, then nodded. "It feels like a bottle." He cast a quick glance around the abandoned bar. "Probably a beer bottle."

"The whole thing?"

"That'd be my guess. The tapered neck would make insertion a little easier, but we'll have to wait until the autopsy to remove it."

"That's a new twist," Gaudet said, "sodomizing her like that." He looked at Murphy. "None of the others had anything like that done to them." He paused for several seconds. "You still think it's your guy?"

"He's not my guy. He's our guy?"

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I think it's our guy. He's just ratcheting things up a notch and getting off on causing more pain. Maybe that's why the cable tie is gone. Maybe he cut if off so he could keep her alive while he tortured her."

"He must have left something behind," Gaudet said. "He either raped her, or jacked off on her, or licked her, or maybe he just jizzed on the floor. One way or the other, though, he had to have left some DNA behind."

"Don't you think he knows about DNA?" Murphy said.

"Maybe he's not a CSI fan."

"He hasn't left any yet."

Gaudet pointed to the body. "He's never done this before, either. You said he's ratcheting things up and getting off on what he's doing."

"We'll see," Murphy said, though he didn't believe they would find anything. This killer was too smart for that.

Gaudet shuffled his feet around like he was suddenly uncomfortable.

"What's wrong?" Murphy said.

"When are you going to talk to the captain?"

Murphy glanced at his watch. "Tonight," he said. "I'm going to catch him before he leaves the office."

"He's already told you no, twice I think. You keep fucking with him, he's going to see to it you get fired ... again."

"Maybe." Murphy looked around the filthy, abandoned bar, then back down at the dead woman. "But I'll do whatever it takes to catch this sick bastard."

By Denny Griffin

Continued from: The Spilotro Era in Vegas - Part II


The Chicago Outfit’s strawman in Las Vegas, Allen Glick, hired a bodyguard. But his new employee had a sense of right and wrong, and a friend in the local police department.

In the 1970s, Bob Gatewood was a sergeant working with the police department in Newport Beach, California. He was assigned to the Organized Crime Unit. One day in 1973, he received a phone call from a friend, a Marine he’d met while undergoing SWAT training at Camp Pendleton. They’d become close and socialized together with their families.

Gatewood’s friend told him he’d retired from the Marine Corps and taken a new job as a bodyguard for Allen Glick, who had a residence in an exclusive area south of Newport Beach. The ex-Marine had come to the conclusion that his new employer had some very shady associates and was probably involved in something illegal. He felt morally obligated to do something about it, but wasn’t sure exactly what.

Due to his work in intelligence, Gatewood was familiar with Glick and his reported ties to organized crime and the Teamsters Pension Fund. During the discussion, Glick’s bodyguard revealed that his position required that he accompany Glick on trips and at social gatherings, as well as receive a copy of the guest list to every event hosted by his boss. The former Marine agreed to provide information regarding Glick’s activities and acquaintances, but only to Gatewood.

After the phone call, Sgt. Gatewood entered the information into the database of the national Organized Crime Intelligence Unit. He was soon receiving calls from agencies across the country, including the Nevada Gaming Control Board and, later, Las Vegas law enforcement.

For the next two years the informant fed information to Bob Gatewood, who in turn passed it on to Nevada authorities. During that time the bodyguard became increasingly concerned for his personal safety and that of his family. He had his home checked for bugs and wiretaps. Sergeant Gatewood advised his friend that he could terminate his cooperation whenever he felt the situation had become too dangerous, but the flow of information continued until the informant switched jobs. He has since passed away from natural causes.

Bob Gatewood was never told exactly how the information his friend provided was used, but he believes it was instrumental in facilitating the investigations into Glick’s involvement with organized crime.

Other Endeavors

In addition to loansharking, Tony Spilotro had other money-producing irons in the fire, burglary and fencing stolen property chief among them. Burglars working for Spilotro eventually earned the nickname the Hole in the Wall Gang (HITWG). This handle resulted from their method of gaining entry into commercial buildings by making a hole in the wall or roof. But the thieves didn’t limit themselves to breaking into businesses; they stole from private residences and hotel rooms with equal zeal. Jewelry and cash were prime targets.

The size of the burglary crew fluctuated depending on the nature of the job. Some small capers might require only one or two men, while a major heist could need six or seven. In the latter case, extra help was sometimes imported from Chicago or elsewhere.

The proceeds from a job were split among Spilotro and the burglars. For a big haul, Tony was obliged to send some of the profit to his Chicago bosses. He also had to pay a certain amount of overhead. Valets, maids, desk clerks, and others who provided information regarding the value and activities of potential victims were compensated for passing on the information.

One of these scams was operated out of two locations, a major Strip property and a popular restaurant, and involved valet parkers. The valets identified affluent guests and struck up conversations to obtain additional information about the guest’s plans. For locals, valets could usually find address information with the registration papers in the vehicle. In the case of visitors, the name of their hotel was extracted during seemingly idle chitchat. Then, indicating long and short-term parking areas, the valet inquired as to how long the guest would be leaving their car. If the answer reflected a lengthy stay, the valet turned over the car to a burglar who, armed with keys to the residence, could conduct a leisurely burglary, using the victim’s own vehicle to transport the booty. For out-of-towners, a friendly desk clerk at their hotel was contacted for specific room information. If the target’s plans didn’t allow the time for an immediate theft, the information was filed away for possible future use.

So, depending on the size of the score and the number of ways the loot had to be split, an individual burglar might earn enough money from a job to be able to take a few weeks off and live it up. However, if through faulty intelligence or bad luck, the break-ins weren’t profitable, the thieves might be forced to strike again quickly just to maintain a basic standard of living.

Well, maybe “forced” is too strong a word. As a retired detective familiar with Spilotro’s burglars told me: “Those guys loved to steal. It was what they did. They could be sitting in a restaurant with ten grand in their pockets and they’d go across the street to a convenience store to steal a pack of gum. They wanted the big money, sure. But stealing, in and of itself, was a necessity for them. They were addicted to it.”

As Tony’s status grew, additional sources of income materialized, too. The Ant and his gang weren’t the only street criminals in Las Vegas, other crooks, not mob-connected, wanted to share in the bounty, and there was more than enough to go around. But Tony was running his budding underworld empire like a business. Legitimate entrepreneurs are required to get business licenses and pay related fees; if they’re caught operating without the necessary permissions, they’re subject to sanctions. Enterprising criminals wanting to get, or stay, in business also had to follow a certain protocol. They needed to get Tony’s blessing and pay him a share of their profits, known in gangland parlance as a “street tax.”

And it wasn’t wise to think you could simply ignore Tony and go about your business without his finding out about it. He knew everything that went on within the Las Vegas criminal element. No one did anything — from contract killings to burglaries, robberies, fencing stolen property, or loan sharking — without his approval and without paying him a monetary tribute where appropriate. And the sanctions for violating Tony’s procedures could be much more severe than those imposed by a governmental licensing agency.

Tony Spilotro was becoming ever more powerful, and his organization was growing.

Next: The Spilotro Era – Part IV

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