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  Stagger Bay

  Pearce Hansen

  Markus, Stagger Bay’s protagonist, is a man who overcame a horrendous childhood and criminal youth to go straight and raise a family. His violent past makes him an easy fall guy to frame for a gruesome mass murder and he’s sentenced to life without parole, losing his family in the process.

  Exonerated and freed on DNA evidence after seven years, Markus is shortly thrust into a bloody do-or-die fracas during an elementary school hostage situation, becoming an overnight hero. Everyone wants in on the media feeding frenzy; to his dismay, paparazzi and news crews hound him wherever he goes. Unfortunately they’re not the only ones stalking him.

  Can Markus find the path back into his estranged son’s heart? What’s Markus supposed to do, when he discovers fifteen minutes of fame is the worst thing that could ever happen to him? What can he do, now that his town is hunting ground to serial killers and rogue cops working together – and the shadowy force behind them is turning its cold, deadly eye straight at him?

  Stagger Bay is a battle of wills, where every moral choice seems only to increase the body count. It’s in the tradition of Paul Cain’s Fast One, Ted Lewis' Get Carter or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. Stagger Bay should appeal to readers looking for a fast paced, hyper-violent thriller.

  Pearce Hansen

  Stagger Bay

  © 2012 Pearce Hansen

  This book is dedicated with respect to Mr. Dante Bonaduce

  Chapter 1

  The morning I went to hell I was passed out drunk.

  One moment I was lost in the sodden oblivion last night’s twelve-packs had bought, the next a whole passel of cops was rat-packing all over me in my bed, slamming me onto my face to shackle my wrists behind me before I could fight back.

  The feel of cold steel snapping shut around my wrists made me relax, despite them ratcheting down tight enough to cut off the blood flow completely and hurt. I’d worn such bracelets more than a few times when I was a kid and the familiarity cut right through my alcoholic haze, made me stop any resistance.

  I was wrenched to my feet and propelled out the master bedroom and down the hall, all of the cops shouting: at me, at one another, at the world. As I was staggered toward the front door (or what was left of it, for now it was no more than a shattered pile of wood dangling to the side off the bottom hinge) my son Sam stood mute by the TV holding one of his injection-molded plastic action figures.

  Sam’s eyes were bright blue and wide, looking as fake as those painted on the toy dangling limp from his hand. His thumb was rammed up to the root in his mouth even though he was ten and no longer a baby at all. The TV was tuned to one of the cartoons he liked, the volume turned high so the show’s atonal music and manic sound effects blared loud and cutesy-bouncy.

  Our eyes met as I was bum-rushed along by the cops. My eyes were bleary; I was dull-witted as a steer headed for the slaughter chute. Sam’s eyes were blank dull stones reflecting the shock unseating his little-boy world.

  As they stumbled me out the front door my wife Angela stood in the kitchen with her knuckle in her mouth, biting down on it hard enough to draw blood. Her thick black hair wasn’t brushed and combed into the long shining raven’s wing I so loved to run my hands through; it was tangled and bedraggled, and spilling over her face.

  Angela was short and petite. Now she looked shrunken as an abandoned doll, surrounded by all the appliances and furniture we’d bought to shield us from our former lives, from before we’d escaped up here to Stagger Bay. Some kind of message burned from her eyes past her bedraggled locks, but I was too drunk to decipher it as I somehow tripped off the porch and onto my face on the front walkway.

  One of the cops accidentally ground his knee into my back for a while, and then they hoisted me into the air by wrenching me up by my hands cuffed behind my back before letting my toes touch ground, almost dislocating my shoulders in the process.

  It was Cop City out in front of my house. It looked like the entire Stagger Bay Police Department had shown up to make the arrest. There were so many rollers that just the squawk off their radios would’ve activated my radar back in the day, even inside the house and asleep.

  But I was years from the Life, doing my best pretending to be a stone cold Citizen now, and my street instincts were stunted and atrophied. And of course, I was still so drunk from last night’s carouse with my big brother Karl, my brain might as well have been cottage cheese.

  All our neighbors were out on their front lawns to gawk at my plight, cookie cutter dolls in a cloned diorama of row houses extending as far as the eye could see down the street. They looked like masquerading demons at about that point; I’ll assume I was imbuing them with about as much humanity in my mentations as they were presently according me.

  As I sat in the back of the squad car my bleary gaze lit on my new Ram pickup truck in the driveway, the over-sized black beast I was working double shifts on the loading docks to pay off. I looked at the trim and ship-shape little bungalow Angela and I had somehow scraped up the down payment for, the first and only house either of us had ever owned. Angela watched me from the kitchen window, her face a pale blur as the roller surged away from the curb.

  I squirmed my butt around on that hard plastic bench of a seat. It was a suck-ass kind of a homecoming to be sitting in the back of a squad car again after so many years.

  “What’s your PC?” I asked the cop chauffeuring me to the Slams, my voice still slurred from the drinkage. He stared straight ahead, giving me nothing more than the close-cropped back of his head to relate to.

  “Shut your cake hole, baby killer,” he said. That’s when I had a sneaking suspicion I was royally fucked.

  Chapter 2

  Maybe you grow up in the gutter with no one to lend you a hand. But that’s okay; nobody owes you nothing no how.

  Maybe you meet your one true love, have a son, and leave the Life forever to become a Citizen. You pay your bills, obey the law, and think maybe you’ve paid your dues, earned your way into the consensus. You fool yourself into believing you’ve got something coming to you; you think the past is past, no more than a bad dream long gone.

  You have a mortgage; you feel like you and your family are finally part of something, embedded within a community. You get to thinking you’re safe, that the people and the things you love are well protected.

  But sometimes that’s all shown up as a load of crap. Sometimes reality slices through all your illusions and bites you right on your flabby pale ass.

  Stagger Bay, my erstwhile home, was a smallish city or a largish town depending on who you asked, up on the Redwood Coast of Northern California. It was county seat for an extremely isolated mountain region a day’s drive from San Francisco, with only three highways in and out, landslides and wild-fires cutting us off from the rest of the world several times a year. Hell, we couldn’t even keep a railroad or a fiber optics line open; the closest we came to the outside world was satellite-fed TV, Internet, and syndicated talk radio – otherwise, we might as well have been on another planet from the rest of America.

  For Angela and me, coming to Stagger Bay from Oakland had felt like jumping through a time warp back into the 1950s, or through a television screen into an episode of Leave It to Beaver.

  It was a town originally built around the twin industries of logging and fishing, tiny as a toy model compared to the sprawling urbanization of the Bay Area. Stagger Bay was barbecues and truck parades, oyster festivals and free concerts, beautiful beaches and coastline, farmer’s markets and redwoods tall enough to tickle the sky.

  Moving to Stagger Bay felt like winning, like coming home to a safe harbor the likes of us had never known. For Angela, my darling professional paranoid, Stagger Bay’s isolation was one
of the clinchers.

  She’d laugh and say that even if civilization collapsed outside our little community, even if some super-flu ravaged the world, our town would come through it smelling like roses and completely untouched. But I could tell she never really believed in its safety; I knew she was terrified of what she most needed to trust here.

  As for me? I’d never really even pretended to rely on it but that was no matter. I figured Sam was less likely to get chopped in a drive-by up here; less likely to have a crack pipe jump into his hand.

  ‘Our Town,’ Angela always called it. Stagger Bay was intimate and neighborly even if tightly clannish and old fashioned. We’d settled down and done our best to fade into the background, nodding and grinning foolishly at all those who lived about us.

  But now my neighbors were howling for my blood.

  It seems a family, the Beardsleys, had been found butchered in their own home, right down to their baby girl and the family pets – and Stagger Bay’s finest had me pegged for it.

  They treated me like a monster from the git go; like I was something other than human, a demon from the outer void none of them cared to contemplate at length.

  Gratuitous cavity searches while a coed peanut gallery of COs make snide remarks and directorial suggestions? No big deal.

  But I’ll tell you this much as well: I fell down a whole bunch of times at the station during all the interrogations, and I was equally clumsy every time the cops had any sort of one-on-one time with me.

  Still, that was okay too. Sometimes pain is the only proof you have that you’re still alive and close to copasetic. Besides, the cops must have figured they had a real wackadoo on their hands; I could understand them being a bit perturbed.

  At my arraignment the prosecutor made a big deal about how I’d spent my tender years in the California Youth Authority. I’ll be the first to admit I was atrociously violent back then. Between my juvenile rap sheet and coming up in the CYA’s gladiator schools for a goodly portion of my most testosterone-drenched years, my record seemed to have laid a taint on me in the eyes of society and the Man.

  The prosecutor even pointed out that my dad had been executed for Murder One his own self, one of the last to experience the joys of the gas chamber. My dickless excuse for a lawyer roused himself for the first and only time in the trial over that comment, objecting to it as immaterial and having it stricken from the records. I guess my genealogy wasn’t seen as necessary to complete my damnation.

  I wanted to speak my piece throughout but was never given the chance. My Public Pretender felt it wouldn’t help my case any, putting me on the stand and exposing me to cross.

  The entire proceedings had an efficiency I found impressive, despite me being the main course as it were. It moved right along like a greased chute sliding me into the toilet to be flushed away neatly and swept from polite sight.

  Throughout the trial they made a lot out of my supposed emotional numbness; my ‘flattening of affect’ and stoic lack of response to the whole sordid affair. Of course I wasn’t numb. But whenever the rage and pain threatened to overflow, I pushed it down into that black hole in my heart I’d used to dispose of unwelcome emotions as a kid on the streets of Oakland.

  I was damned if I was going to give these fuckers any little show, even to save my life. East Bay Pride, right?

  When they showed the crime scene photos, however; when I saw just what had been done to those poor people, and especially what was done to the baby… I had to look away, engulfed in a spasm of empathy for what their last moments must have been like.

  “See,” the prosecutor said, stabbing his plump finger at me as I averted my gaze from the photos, my face screwed up in an effort at self control. “See. He can’t even look at what he did.”

  When the semen they found inside Mrs. Beardsley and the baby matched my blood type, that was one nail in my coffin. But when they introduced my old Buck knife into evidence, with my fingerprints on it as well as all the victims’ blood, my heart sank deep and final.

  It didn’t matter the knife had gone missing from my garage the week before; I knew that was all she wrote. Someone had laid a rock-solid frame on me.

  When I went up for sentencing, sitting in the back of a cruiser with my hands shackled behind my back and leg irons hobbling my feet, wearing orange coveralls and a stud-heavy Mark-3/A bulletproof vest, I looked out at the passing streets of my adopted home town, I figured for the last time. The Stagger Bay skyline didn’t appear welcoming anymore.

  Those Mayberry-style homes seemed to hint goblin smiles at my predicament. The American Dream they represented had proven unattainable to the likes of me and mine, more than apparently.

  Outside the courthouse a big crowd awaited. I recognized a lot of the faces – men and women we’d had nodding acquaintance with over the years; guys I’d shot pool or played holdem against, or shared a beer with at my favorite watering hole the Sugar Shack. But my neighbors looked alien to me now; I was no longer one of them. I cringed away from dwelling on what all this must be doing to Sam and Angela.

  A phalanx of cops surrounded me and bulled us through the crowd to the courthouse entrance as fast as I could shuffle along. The leg irons cramped my stride down to a hobble, rather than the enthusiastic River Dance I so desperately wanted to entertain the onlookers with.

  One of the bystanders I recognized was Bill, my barber. I’d lost track of how many times I’d gotten my hair cut in his shop, looking at all the boar’s heads and antler racks mounted on his dark, nicotine-stained wood-panel walls.

  His place was filled with old detective and girlie magazines, and I’d pet Bill’s shedding mangy old bird dog while waiting to get my ears lowered, listening to Bill talk about hunting and fishing; feeling like I was part of something traditional, even considering taking him up on his invitations to join him sometime. Since I’d never pointed a gun at anything with more than two legs before in my life, Bill’s style of survivalism would have definitely been a new experience for me.

  As I made hopeful eye contact with Bill on my way into the courthouse, my one-time barber hawked up a loogie and sent it my way like a gift; the fluid dripped down my cheek as I looked away from him to face my front all exclusive-like. I tried hard not to hear the words the people shrieked, but enough more spittle and other substances got past the surrounding cops that I was quite the sight and smell by the time we got inside.

  The bailiff watched me close as he let me go through the motions of cleaning up a bit in the bathroom. Like I was going to drown myself by sticking my head down the toilet bowl.

  And then we were in the courtroom.

  I was first on the docket – apparently a man convicted of home invasion, multiple murder, torture, and sex crimes against children and dumb animals deserved special attention, especially in a backwater town like Stagger Bay.

  The judge looked down from on high, posing for the local reporters haunting the peanut gallery I figured. She cut quite a theatrical presence; I was in awe of her authority all right.

  “Do you have anything to say before sentence is passed?” she asked.

  I jangled my shackles. “Would it help if I said I’m innocent? The real killer is still out there, Your Honor. I don’t know why I was chosen for this, but Stagger Bay will be just as dangerous after you put me away.”

  She was silent for a moment, perhaps even weighing my words. “A jury of your peers has convicted you of rape and murder, with multiple special circumstances. The prosecutor has asked for the death penalty.”

  Mister Prosecutor stood there somberly as if he wasn’t gloating inside, as if he didn’t smell the kind of blood in the water here that would feed him to satiety if he ever made a run for DA.

  “The evidence, though convincing, is still somewhat circumstantial,” the judge said, her tone making it sound like she’d just swallowed a stanky old bug. “Therefore, I am not imposing the death sentence.” She paused once more, as if waiting for me to thank her.

 
I raised my gaze to find her staring right back at me in loathing. “I believe you did do it, and that there isn’t a circle in hell low enough for the likes of you. Therefore, I am sentencing you to life without the possibility of parole. I hope you come to beg God’s forgiveness – but I’m unsure if I would even wish him to grant it.”

  Then, with a haughty swish of robes, she was gone. I was flanked tight by a couple of deputies, but I managed to turn my head and look at the spectators as the packed courtroom gave out with a guttural growl of satisfaction.

  Neither Angela nor Sam was there; I hadn’t seen nor heard from either of them since my arrest. The only love I got was seeing my big brother Karl sitting as close behind me as he could manage on those painful-to-the-ass hardwood benches, just as he’d sat through every day of my short trial.

  Right then he looked pretty grim. But he pasted a smile on his face and raised his fist in solidarity, silently urging me to take it like a man.

  My shackles prevented me from returning the salute as my entourage of cops reprised our shuffling course through the gauntlet of spittle, insults, and threats.

  I was on my way to natural life in the Slams.

  Chapter 3

  Angela didn’t call or write – but Karl explained that, during his one and only visit to me while I awaited transfer to the penitentiary.

  I was proud of Karl for mustering the nerve to see me in the hell hole they called the County SHU: Stagger Bay’s Secure Housing Unit. I knew that to visit me he had to run a gauntlet of searches and scanners and warrants checks, wending ever deeper into the constipated bowels of the beast with the only payoff at the end getting to stand in front of my handsome mug with a smeared scratched sheet of unbreakable plexiglas between us, both of us clutching our phones as cold substitute for a brotherly embrace.