During World War Two a United States paratrooper sees that evil infected the soul of an entire nation and millions die in Hitler’s extermination camps. Years later, as a police officer, he discovers that evil first begins to grow in a single human heart.
A Day and a Night is a tribute to those who stand against the darkness and the monsters who lurk there so others do not have to.
Excerpt
Jailing the miserable excuse for human being that was in my back seat seemed so completely inadequate. He had tortured his own infant son, beaten his wife nearly to death, and he seemed to be completely without remorse.
Just like those Nazis animals in Germany; the ones who ran the camps.
The husband was actually trying to defend his actions. “What goes on in my house is my business,” he said from the back seat. “I have the right to discipline my family any way I want. You have no right to take my kid.”
I pulled the car over and stopped.
Discipline, I thought. He called torturing a baby discipline!
The memory of Kaufering came back to me with brutal clarity. The need to kill came back to meI tried to calm myself; breathing . I still wanted kill the animal in the back seat. I wanted . The vermin in the back of my car was evil; as evil as the Nazi vermin that had run Kaufering. Hundreds of thousands of people had died to remove the Nazi cancer from the planet. I could kill the evil in my back seat and I would probably just do some time in prison. It would be simple; put my gun to his head and squeeze the trigger. Just like Ginsberg had done to that wounded Nazi.
Child welfare could probably make sure that he didn’t hurt his son again but past experience told me that his wife would probably go back to him when she’d recovered. I’d seen it happen before: beaten wives so mentally broken that they returned again and again to an abusive man because they had been made to believe that no one else would want them. I’d also seen too many cases where the courts took wife beating cases too lightly because judges didn’t consider it a ‘real’ crime. Unless the wife decided to press charges and not back down, the wife beaters got away with it. Child and wife abuse were crimes that the system just didn’t want to acknowledge. I’d heard that some people were trying to change the system, but those changes were probably years away. The only charge that might stick to my current prisoner was assault on a police officer, and that would probably be pled down to a lesser charge. The filth in my back seat would soon be free to hurt more women and children. Unless I stopped him.
Will it always be like this? Will it always have to be people like me doing society’s dirty work; to do its killing?
Legally, killing the animal in my back seat would be wrong. But if I could stop him from hurting anyone else and didn’t do it then wouldn’t be even more wrong? Yet, my time in the Army and now as a deputy sheriff put me in contact with these types every day. The monsters were everywhere and I couldn’t kill them all.. She was always taking care of the brat.
He was still talking about his rights; about how his wife had deserved being beaten because she had not showed him respect. After that, I was too enraged to even comprehend what he was saying as he tried to explain torturing his baby. I remember the baby screaming in pain as I picked it little thing up. I recalled the bruised face of his wife; so deformed that it was barely recognizable as human. I saw in my mind the festering, infected burns on the baby’s filth covered back. All of these memories made my prisoner's pathetic justifications seem like a distant, unintelligible rambling. Those recent images combined with memories of Kaufering. I remembered lining up that machine gun crew in my sights and gunning those men down. I remembered the frightening yet sweet sense of emotional release I had felt on knowing those Nazi’s were dead; that I had killed them. I needed to feel that release again.
“You can’t do this to me,” the prisoner squawked. “It ain’t right to tell a man he can’t discipline his wife and brat.”
The man was still talking; trying to excuse what he had done. I got out of the car, jerked open the rear door, and dragged him out of his seat. Even as I threw him to the ground he spat out threats that I barely heard. I knelt on top of him; my knee on his chest and the muzzle of my revolver pressed into his lip just under his nose. We locked eyes on each other. I saw his expression change as he realized what I was about to do. He stopped talking. After a few seconds, he started begging for his life.
“Jesus, man,” he begged. “I’m just tryin’ to make a living and have a little fun. The broad I married whined all the time about not having enough for the baby. It was always the baby. The kid was crying all the time. I just wanted some peace and quiet. I had to do something.” Tears dribbled out of his eyes, enraging me further. “Don’t kill me, man. Please don’t kill me.”
He was asking me for mercy that he hadn’t shown his wife and son. His pleading only made want to kill him more. My finger tightened on the trigger; a few more ounces of pressure and I would feel the release that I craved. For a few seconds I was in my own private world with the gutless sub-human as he begged for his life. I could see nothing but his fear-glazed eyes; I heard nothing but his sobs. I wanted to kill him and remove his evil from the world.
Fifth Book of the Southern Swallow Series. Nan Ya and his crew take a final adventure into a mythical Chinese universe and become entangled in court intrigue.
Fourth Book in the Southern Swallow Series finds the Academician Li K'ai-men in exile on Hai-nan Island. China has a new invasion threat. A showdown between ingenuity and technology explodes as the Sung Dynasty tries to preserve itself.
A novel about a family during World War II, set on the homefront in Springield, Mass., and in the South Pacific. The book focuses on four characters and how their lives were affected and changed during the war years.
