Hero's Curse Read online

  Hero’s Curse

  by

  Jack J. Lee

  Copyright 2011

  Version III

  Primary Editors:

  Tracy Klette

  George C. Hopkins

  Secondary Editors:

  Andrew Chase

  Jynna Gillispie

  Paul Gross

  Dedication

  I don’t know how it is with other authors but for me, it takes a village to write a book. If I hadn’t had the help of my editors, family, and friends, there is no way I would have been able to write one book much less three.

  I’d like to thank Tracy. Your relentless pursuit of perfection drove me nuts but because of you, I’ve become a better author.

  George, you are indeed a gentleman, scholar, bon vivant, and raconteur extraordinaire. I give you a genuine Marvel ‘No-Prize!’ One of these days when I find the cash, I’ll send you an autographed dollar bill. It’s the least I can do for all your help. I owe you so much.

  Andrew, without your obsessive compulsion to discuss unessential details, life wouldn’t be nearly as fun. Your suggestion that I reveal a character’s emotions by describing how he acts instead of just writing, ‘he feels this and that’ was a stroke of genius.

  Without Jynna and Paul, this book would have more errors and would look much less professional. I’d like to thank all my fans who volunteered to be beta readers.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my wife. Rose, without your support and superhuman ability to tolerate my quirks and flaws, I wouldn’t have the time or energy to be an author.

  Jack J. Lee

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction:

  Chapter 1: The Beginning

  Chapter 2: The Beating

  Chapter 3: Dinner

  Chapter 4: Home Sweet Home

  Chapter 5: Of Men and Angels

  Chapter 6: Pig Latin

  Chapter 7: Gearing Up

  Chapter 8: Redcaps

  Chapter 9: Who Do You Trust

  Chapter 10: True Love and Jehovah

  Chapter 11: Peacocking

  Chapter 12: The Kiss

  Chapter 13: The Sisters

  Chapter 14: The More the Merrier

  Chapter 15: Run Away

  Chapter 16: Road Trip

  Chapter 17: Sabotage

  Chapter 18: The Principles of Magic

  Chapter 19: Bait

  Chapter 20: Soulmates

  Chapter 21: Calm before the Storm

  Chapter 22: The Deal

  Chapter 23: Single Combat

  Chapter 24: Samson

  Chapter 25: Going Home

  Chapter 26: The Proposal

  Chapter 27: Drew

  Chapter 28: Oathbreaker

  Chapter 29: Waiting for the Word

  Chapter 30: Revenge

  Chapter 31: Aftermath

  Year of the Dead Sample (Jack J. Lee’s First Novel)

  End Notes:

  Introduction:

  I’ve got no choice but to warn you. Read further, the truth will be revealed and it will enslave you. You don’t want to know how the Universe works. I know I didn’t.

  I don’t care who you are or what you believe—Christian, Muslim, Hindi, Wiccan, Atheist, anything and everything. You’re all wrong.

  The following is a story of my life after I got drafted by God to fight the minions of darkness. Jehovah of the Holy Bible exists and holy warriors are needed to defend us.

  If you’re wise, you’ll set this book down now and walk away. Keep your illusions; they won’t hurt you. Learn too much, open the door that is better left closed, and you’ll be fighting by my side.

  Victor Paladin

  Servant of the Lord

  Chapter 1: The Beginning

  Nothing that comes from a human mind is ever random. Spend enough time doing anything and you’ll develop a pattern. There isn’t an exact word for this; the FBI uses the term ‘profile’ and gamblers call it a ‘tell’. These words aren’t quite right but they’re close enough. It’s almost impossible for a person to figure out his own profile or all his tells. If you want to be unpredictable, you have to cheat. I use a computer program.

  I wrote a program that evaluates every ATM in the continental United States. It looks for two ATMs in strip malls more than ten minutes drive from a police station and each other. The tellers have to be in upper middle class cities with independent police forces. There are over four hundred thousand automated tellers in the United States and at least twenty thousand locations that meet my criteria. My program then randomly picks when and where I’ll go next. I’ve been breaking into ATMs for over ten years, long enough for the FBI to have a profile of me.

  Entering a life of crime is easy; getting away with it is hard. A glamorous, exciting life of crime almost always leads to jail. Having been in jail and places that were worse, for the most part I was content with mundane, predictable, and calm. No one gets hurt during my heists, and I take less than one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, which is chump change for banks.

  The FBI has over fourteen thousand special agents and, if they request, local law enforcement will help out. If every single FBI agent and local cop hung out at the right ATMs for a couple months, they’d catch me. I’m not worth that kind of effort.

  For years, I haven’t stayed in one place for longer than a few months at a time. I live out of my vehicle and furnished apartments with month-to-month leases. Everything I own fits easily in my truck, a late model Ford F150 with a cap on the back.

  I was in a coffee house in Cincinnati, Ohio killing time, surfing the internet when my laptop gave me a date, time, and locations of two ATMs in Cottonwood Heights, Utah—a suburb of Salt Lake City.

  The next day, I left for Salt Lake City. My first stop when I arrived was at the local airport’s long term parking lot. I took a shuttle to the rental car strip and rented a full size SUV using a disposable, false ID and credit card. I drove the rental back to my truck and transferred my workbox, two pieces of luggage, and a police scanner.

  People don’t notice, but there are surveillance cameras everywhere. I planned on spending the next day checking out the city, surrounding countryside, and ATM locations. Since chances of being caught on tape while scouting were almost one hundred percent, it would have been a fool’s move to use my own vehicle.

  I pull my heists during the wee hours of the morning. It’s unusual for police forces in upper middle class towns with low crime rates to have a patrol out then, but listening to the local police for a couple of nights to confirm shift changes and patrol patterns is always a good idea.

  The first night I was in Salt Lake City, I found a secluded place and switched out the license plates on my rental. You can get used license plates from most junkyards without a problem. Registration stickers are designed to fall apart if you peel them off a license plate. I look for a vehicle with an owner who’s too lazy to peel the out-of-date stickers off before applying his current one. As long as there are at least three stickers on top of each other and you take them off all together with single edge razor blade, they’re easy to steal.

  On the second day, I drove around the outskirts of the city to check out potential escape routes and then through all of the streets surrounding the ATMs. It took about twelve minutes to drive from the police station to the first ATM and over eleven to get from the first automatic teller to the second. I tried to locate all the surveillance cameras and planned my route and parking positions accordingly. The SUV couldn’t easily be traced back to me but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t try to avoid being caught on tape.

  While scouting, I wear minor disguises like hats to cover my hair and shade my face. On sunny days, when it won’t cause notice, I wear s
unglasses.

  That night at the exact time suggested by my program, 3:12 a.m. (all my heists occur between 2:30 and 4:30 a.m.), I pulled into the strip mall and parked so my vehicle was out of view of the ATM camera. My welding goggles look like large, ugly sunglasses. Before I got out, I made sure the goggles were on top of my baseball cap.

  I have a custom built workbox. Some of my tools are fragile and can easily be knocked out of adjustment by accidental bumps; it is important to keep them protected in a padded container. There is a downside of living out of a truck; it doesn’t take much to break into one. Since I need to keep some things secure, my box has more armor and a better lock than most safes. The box is designed so it can be locked through the bed into the frame of my truck. It also has protruding metal eyes so when it’s in a rental vehicle, I can use a bicycle lock to securely attach the box to a rear seat. The armor makes the box heavy, so it’s attached to an expandable frame on rollers similar to an ambulance stretcher

  I rolled my workbox to the side of the ATM out of view of the camera. I set my watch alarm to give me a warning at three minutes. I took one more look to check no one was around and I was off.

  It took nine seconds to put on gloves and welding goggles—forty-four seconds to pull out and ready my oxyacetylene torch. ATM’s don’t have much armor. If someone tries to move or break into one, dye is sprayed on the cash to make it unusable. With my first cut, I disabled the dye mechanism. Every so often, the manufacturers change the position of the dye release, which kind of sucks. On the upside, I learn where to cut next time. The following three cuts allowed me to open the machine, and just a few extra seconds later, to disable the camera.

  I was packing the cash into my workbox when my watch beeped. ‘Perfect.’ I was on schedule. I used high strength foam tape to attach a metal sign, ‘Machine Down for Maintenance’ over the cuts I made with my torch. No one, not me, the banks, the police, or the manufacturers wanted it to become common knowledge how easy it is to break into an ATM. Exactly five minutes and twelve seconds after I started my timer, I drove away from the mall. One more stop and I was good.

  When I got to the next strip mall, there was a customer at the ATM. Even late at night, this occasionally happens. The smart, safe thing to do would have been to drive away and call it a night. I considered the downsides of continuing with the heist. For the first time tonight my heart rate picked up. A smile crept on my face. It’s hard to always follow the rules even when they’re your own rules. What the hell. I was only taking a small risk.

  I parked in a spot I knew was out of view of the camera and got out, just another customer waiting to use the teller. I’m so average looking I’m hard to remember. I have brown hair, brown eyes, average size nose, ears, height, and build. My scars aren’t easily visible and I don’t have any distinguishing features. An eye witness drawing, or a recollection from a person who didn’t have a good reason to pay attention to me would be worthless.

  The guy at the ATM was also nondescript, about six feet tall with a medium frame. He was clean-shaven and dressed in a button-down shirt and jeans. He turned to me in a friendly fashion. He had a foreign accent I couldn’t place. “Pleasant tonight, would you not agree?”

  What? I wanted to discourage a conversation; my voice was curt. “Yeah.”

  He didn’t get the hint. “You are from this place?”

  Since the guy really wanted to talk and it would have been counterproductive to be rude, I answered, “No, just passing through.”

  The guy lunged for me.

  He looked like an ordinary enough guy, but no one normal is all that friendly this late at night. Even in safe towns like Cottonwood Heights, you sometimes run across people who have no respect for the law; I had a Taser hidden in my hand. I saw the shock in his eyes when I shot him in the face. His body froze. Since he was already throwing himself forward, he landed face first on the sidewalk. The expression on his face was hilarious. Even though this job had just turned to shit, I didn’t regret getting out of my SUV.

  I’ve tased a couple muggers before; they never had much fight left afterwards. It was too risky now to break into the ATM. This guy was definitely going to remember me. I wasn’t too worried, I doubted he would call the cops, but there was no point in taking unnecessary risks. Once he recovered enough to pay attention to what I was doing, I was going to fake a call to the cops on my cell. He’d probably take off running as fast as he could.

  Thirty seconds later, after the electric pulse cycled off and he got control of his muscles; he tried to grab me from the ground. Since I had been expecting him to just lay there for a while, he almost got me. I had to give the guy credit; he was tougher than the average hood.

  The Taser C2 only has one distance cartridge, but can be used as a contact weapon multiple times. Mine also had a tube of pepper spray attached with a cord. I tapped his forearm with the Taser and at the same time sprayed him in the face.

  He froze for a split second. What the fuck! The son of a bitch was growing fangs! He screamed in agony and then heaved himself off the ground at me. He rammed his shoulder into the pit of my stomach, hard enough to take me off my feet and knock the wind out of me.

  Thousands of hours of martial arts training paid off. I instinctively angled my body to ensure that the padded part of my ass hit the ground first, and then rolled on my back. I thrust up with my legs and threw his body over mine. We both ended up on our backs, our heads about a foot apart.

  I ignored my inability to breathe and scrambled up making sure to grab the Taser. Mr. Fangs and I got to our feet at the same time. Someone had hit the freak several times with an ugly stick when I wasn’t looking. He had bat-like ears, inch-long fangs, clawed fingers, and it looked like he was turning green. When my diaphragm finally stopped spasming, I took a deep, gasping breath.

  He seemed upset. He snarled, “Mortal, your death will be long and hard.”

  Did he say mortal? Was I being punked? The situation was so weird that for a second I almost lost focus. This had to be a scene from a B-grade horror movie, but there was no way to put on high quality makeup this quickly. I could see the huge pores on his face. His fricking tongue was forked and he smelled like rotting meat marinated in weeks old sweat. A production company wouldn’t lather on fake stank. As hard as it was to believe, this son of a bitch was real. I was going to have to kill him. Fuck, I hated getting rid of bodies.

  I never carry a ‘lethal’ weapon on a job. There’s an important difference between robbery and armed robbery. I pulled out a thin screwdriver from my back pocket. Fangs was fast but he had problems seeing. His eyes were swollen and tearing. His roundhouse swing at my chest missed. I tapped him again with the Taser. In the split second he was frozen, I used my other hand to slam the screwdriver into his temple. It penetrated to the hilt. Instead of collapsing like I expected, he stood there blinking.

  This was insane, surreal. I grabbed the screwdriver again and wiggled it, turning whatever the hell it was’ brain into mash. It finally dropped.

  Holy shit! It still wasn’t dead; I couldn’t believe it. What the hell was it? Could it be a vampire? Did I believe in vampires? Whatever it was, I couldn’t afford to let it stay alive. There was no way I was going to let it have a second chance at me.

  I looked up. There was no one around. My watch said just two minutes had passed since I got out of my car. I had been in view of the ATM camera the whole time. The machine was an older model, the kind that still used actual videotape. I wanted that tape.

  By now, every cop on duty in Cottonwood Heights was most likely at the first ATM. It had taken me 11 minutes to drive here. I had time. I got my workbox. I put on my goggles but didn’t bother with the gloves. I used my torch to cut the thing’s head off. The stink of burning flesh was awful, but at least there wasn’t any blood. After decapitation, it finally stopped breathing. It almost took too long to get the video tape. I didn’t have much time but since I was already in, I couldn’t resist; I emptied out the cash
too. I could hear sirens in the distance when I pulled out of the mall with Mr. Fangs’ body in the back.

  Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons are wilderness areas that lead straight into Cottonwood Heights. I had scouted both canyons earlier. I drove up Big Cottonwood Canyon. About ten miles in, I pulled off at a trail head. By flashlight, I dragged Fang’s body a couple hundred feet up the trail until I found a boulder the right size and in the proper position. I took another trip to grab my tools.

  Having to hide a body is never a good thing. In the past, it has always been caused by an unnecessary fuckup. In this case, I didn’t see how I had a choice or how I had made a mistake. The boulder was close to four feet wide and maybe eighteen inches thick. It was a grunt levering the boulder up enough to fit two car jacks underneath, but once accomplished it was fairly simple to lift the boulder high enough to excavate a hole with hand tools. I put all the dirt I dug out onto a tarp.

  If you take the time to crush all the bones into small bits, a human size body doesn’t take much space. You’d be amazed at how small the chest becomes when all the ribs are broken and the lungs deflated. I took a three pound sledge and did the job right. Hit a bone off angle and skin and soft tissues surrounding it will tear. If that happens, every hammer blow within twelve inches of your mistake will cause blood to squirt from the torn flesh, making an unpleasant job disgusting and a complete pain in the ass to clean up after.

  Imagine placing celery between two steaks and pounding the top steak with a mallet; I heard a wet, muffled, crackling sound each time I brought my sledge down on Fang’s body. Smashing bones this way also tenderizes the meat and makes the soft tissues easier to squish and fold.

  I stuffed the body in a hole two feet deep and wide—the arms and legs in first, with the chest and abdomen on top. I then made multiple long slits into Fang’s belly and chest so when the body started to decay, gasses wouldn’t build up inside. A little bit of blood seeped from the wounds but without a beating heart or the hydrostatic pressure of a three pound sledge, the oozing blood didn’t make a mess. I wasn’t worried about inflating gasses being able to move the boulder, but if a decaying swollen chest or abdomen pops, the stink is hard to ignore. He smelled bad enough already; it didn’t need to get worse.