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Website of Robert T. White
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Robert Hale Publishers
ISBN-10: 0719824613
Type: Fiction
Pages: 224
Copyright: Feb. 1, 2018
ISBN-13: 9780719824616
Price: $33.26 (eBook)
A Chinese-American FBI agent whose career is stalled and whose life is beset by personal problems has the only real chance to bring a serial killer crisscrossing the country for his victims to justice.
Jade Hui is an FBI agent on the way down—until, that is, her supervising agent assigns her a triple-murder investigation. She soon must overcome bureaucratic obstacles to catch a free-roaming, amoral killer who leaves neither pattern nor motive in his wake. Her suspect is not a typical spree killer or psychotic fantasy killer. Born into wealth and privilege, gifted with great intelligence and strength, Charles Wöissell has his own reasons for traveling across America selecting victims. Wöissell intends to burn every bridge left—home, family, safety—for revenge against the one woman who has put herself in his path.
Excerpt
Perfect Killer
“I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right … that is, not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep … certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).”
--Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Part 1
CH. 1
Fayetteville, AR
“You think that’s funny?”
Coy Burchess knew his friends were in line behind him begging him to make this happen.
“No,” said the man half-obscured behind the plexiglass window of the white lunch truck. It was the same man and the same truck for the last three days in the same spot in the parking lot.
“Then why the hell are you grinning like that, shitheels?”
The man complaining about the sandwich he had just received from the concession man was performing for his friends and the girl from the taco line he was hoping to impress. She was wearing those white skinny jeans to work again and the outline of her valentine-shaped ass was firmly imprinted in his neocortex like a baby chick’s image of its mother. The beer he’d put down before their shift at the Black Goat was adding more fuel to his display. He told his friends he was going to make that “stuttering sombitch” look “smart” at break.
“You tell him, Coy,” said the man behind him.
Coy recognized Donnie Hugheart’s voice. “Hug” was his best friend. They were high-school buddies who planned to go to war together after high school. Instead, they both knocked up their girlfriends and found themselves stuck on the same graveyard shift in this taco factory.
“I don’t like your fuckin’ face or your fuckin’ sandwiches, Sandwich Man,” Coy said.
“I’m sss-sorry about that, sss-sir,”
“I’m sss-sorry about that,” Coy mocked the man’s terrible stutter, hoping the girl was behind Buddy somewhere. “You guys hear that? He gives me a roadkill sandwich and he fuckin’ says he’s sss-sorry.””
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I-I’ll rr-refund your money rr-right now, sss-sir,” said the concession man.
Coy couldn’t get a good look at the man’s face behind the plexiglass half-window to see what effect he was having on him.
“Give me my fuckin’ money, right now,” Coy demanded, “or I’ll climb through that fuckin’ window and make you suck my dick!”
“N-no nn-need for threats like that, sss-sir,” said the sandwich man. His voice remained even.
Coy imitated the man’s stutter and savored the loud yuks from the men behind him.
When the concession man’s hand extended his money to him, Coy reached for it and snatched his wrist and twisted. The man dropped to his knees. Coy yanked the sandwich man toward him so that the side of his head slammed into the plexiglass and he fell to one knee.
“Next time you give me a sandwich that tastes like rat turds,” Coy growled in his thick bar-fight voice, “I’ll break your arm off and shove it up your ass!”
Coy stuffed the three dollar bills into his pants pocket and high-fived his way down the line of shift workers. One or two wouldn’t meet him in the eye and he’d remember them.
She was there, too, must have seen it all. Coy’s chest pumped an extra inch and he walked into her, hip-bumping her as if by accident. She playfully slapped his shoulder as he passed. He hoped she felt the rock-solid bunch of muscles in his delts. The slight hangover he was developing when he and his posse left the Goat had disappeared. He felt a swelling of male tumescence begin like a door opening in his groin. The image of her ass bucking beneath him had him semi-erect by the time he made it to the men’s washroom. Once inside the stall door, he had to let Jumbo out for some air before it hurt. He improved his erection with a couple strokes and thought of his wife back home. He could save it for her. No, fuck that, Coy thought. He might as well go for it right after shift, see if that look she gave him tonight was for real.
While Coy was plotting his morning seduction of his co-worker, the last customer in line for coffee or sandwiches had just received his change from the concession man. He looked at the concession man and gave him what passed for a shy smile of regret; he said, “Don’t let that guy bother you none, man. He don’t mean nothing by it.”
“I won’t, sss-sir. Thank you.”
The man was a shift supervisor who wanted to fire Burchess for coming to work smelling of alcohol. He knew Coy and his friends drank during shift break, too, because Donnie Hugheart and Duane Crawford made no secret of their trips to go stand around Burchess’ wide-open trunk. You could hear the tabs of beer cans being popped clear to the loading dock.
The canteen truck man, whose full name was Charles Tyrone Wöissell, watched him return to the lunchroom. He could hear laughter inside where they were no doubt replaying his humiliation and giving more back-slaps to the bully.
The sandwich man wasn’t humiliated or even embarrassed. He did wince when he recalled the bully’s hand on his wrist just before he was pulled into the plexiglass. He had almost forgotten himself and was a split-second from clamping his own hand over the man’s hand where he could have easily slipped free and pinned the man’s hand before he knew what was happening. Charley Wöissell had trained with several jiu-jitsu masters in small-circle fighting back home in Providence in room converted to a gym. He disdained going for belts. He was interested in mastering holds, kicks, strikes, and throws from anyone his wealthy father could hire to teach him. He knew more about the human body’s pressure points than most doctors.
He could have broken each one of the bully’s fingers with a pop of metacarpal bone fracturing. The man’s screams would have drowned out the second, third, fourth fingers breaking. The thumb would go last, a stubbier digit, and far more painful but no less difficult to break when you had complete control, as he did and had for so many years.
Complete control. Without control, you had nothing; you were nothing. An atom floating in black empty space.
Then where would he be? Right back to zero and the three weeks of grooming the shift workers of El Torito’s Tacos & Nachos three miles outside a busy college town all wasted. Night after night of the nauseating stench of not-steamed cornmeal reeking in his nostrils would have been wasted. Watching this parade of minimum-wage zombies pass in front of his eyes—Thank you, sir; thank you, miss—then disappear back into their cement-block prison to be released until the next shift drew them back. Charley didn’t hate them. Worn-out horses in a knacker’s yard. They’d be replaced in time by other slaughter horses or sheep.
Charley was the butcher come to look them over; it was time to select one and Mister Tough Guy inside there had just won the qualifying prize hands-down.
But now he knew, he felt a weight lifted. He touched the knot on his forehead where he had banged his head. The slip to his knees was a ruse. The stutter was fake, not the Tourette’s syndrome. Mostly the clonidine patch kept the squeals and tics at bay and no one was the wiser. In his youth, the screeches and howls that erupted from his throat at his various private schools made him the butt of jokes and bullying. Finally, Tenex worked best of all the different antihyperintensives tried on him until the side effects, such as dry mouth, headaches, and fatigue, were overcome through adjustment and repeated dosages.
Charley Wöissell pulled his fold-out cot out from under the passenger seat of the Chevy truck. He had a few hours to kill until the shift ended, and he might as well get some sleep. The next phase of things was one he enjoyed: tracking his prey. He had a long-developed capacity to empty his mind during these restful interludes; it was much more than the average person’s recharging of batteries. In Wöissell’s case, it was a profound sleep, almost a blackout. Cognitive researchers say that human consciousness resides in the whole human body, not just that three pounds of meat riding around in its skull cap like a baby in embryonic fluid. Wöissell’s deceptively powerful body would wake him up in perfect synchronicity of all five senses as if he had merely shut his eyes and dozed for a few minutes.
Coy came out at 6:40 a.m. on the dot with his two wingmen flanking him. Charley sat up, folded the cot and replaced it under the seat.
Obscured in the glare of the morning sun bouncing off the windows of his truck, he watched the three men stop about ten feet from his Plexiglas serving window. Wöissell couldn’t hear everything the men said, his New England accent as baffling to Southerners as theirs to him. It was clear a couple threads of conversation were going on and sometimes intersecting. Howe words determined “reality” and meaning had intrigued Charles ever since he was a precocious boy in prep school. Most children ask why the sky is blue. Wöissell wanted to know why letters formed words that made “pictures” of the world around him. The first line of conversation had to do with a fishing trip. The other was more complex, ragged bits of phrases and sub-texts, that he gleaned were obscene innuendo. The men’s voices rose and fell like a chant. He despised them and their giggling idiocy. Neanderthals lived with more discipline.
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