Everyone is entitled to MY own opinion
There is blood all over the room. It’s on the walls and it has seeped into the cracks in the floor.
Good people are rarely suspicious. They cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one and let matters rest there. Then too, the normals are inclined to visualize the psychopath as one who’s a monstrous in appearance as he is in mind, which is about as far from the truth as one could well get… These monsters of real life usually looked and behaved in a more normal manner than their actually normal brothers and sisters; they presented a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presented of itself— just as the wax rosebud or plastic peach seemed more perfect to the eye; more of what the mind thought a rosebud or a peach should be, than the imperfect original from which it had been modelled.
–William March, The Bad Seed
There is blood all over the room. It’s on the walls and it has seeped into the cracks in the floor. There are smears of it on the doorknob and bloody hand prints on the lampshade, the light switch, and the walls. There is even a large pool of it congealed under an old-fashioned occasional chair, where the victim’s corpse is securely zip tied. As if by some occult magic flies have appeared for a macabre banquet, on the lampshade, on the light switch, on the walls, but mostly under the final earthly remains.
That’s the thing about a bludgeoning, the blood spatters everywhere.
Sherman Melvin Jacob was short, overweight, unkempt and more than slightly casual about personal hygiene. His nose was flattened from a beating he suffered as a youth and a complexion that looked like someone set his face on fire and then put out the flames with a golf shoe. Sherman Melvin Jacob was one other thing. He was absolutely, positively and unequivocally dead.
Someone had done a very meticulous and thorough job of making certain that Sherman Jacob’s death was horrific, up-close and personal… very, very personal.
His run down little house just a block south of Skokie’s main drag, Dempster street… had a rickety fence overgrown, carpeted with weeds. It was a small frame house that badly needed painting, the last structure on a block that had been cleared for a slum clearance district, showing a sad face to the world.
The interior was worse than the places described in the tabloids about hoarders. Filled with old newspapers, crushed Golden Arches bags containing greasy burger wrappings, dirty clothes and crumpled Styrofoam coffee cups and the mummified remains of franchise pizzas in their boxes that weren’t worth eating when fresh. Jacobs abode closely mirrored his disheveled self. It wasn’t always like this, not when his mother was alive. Back then it was clean and neat. Mama Jacob had a pride of place that was not transmitted to Sherman.
He was a “loner” for the most part spending most of his time on his computer. He was not a pleasant or likable person, but he was doggedly persistent.
His one redeeming attribute was that he was a “squirrel whisperer”. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a milder form of autism, he was a loner in high school, antisocial and awkward, (which earned him his broken and misshapen nose).
Jacob began interacting with his neighborhood’s friendly gray squirrels in 2012. Once hand tamed, he idly wondered what one would look like with a hat on its head. The resulting picture became an internet sensation. Pleased with the result, he gave a copy of the photo to his mother, who loved it.
The squirrels helped Jacob come out of his shell.
“The squirrel’s actually a good way to break the ice”, he explained when asked, “because I’ll be sitting here petting a squirrel and other people will come over and we’ll just start like feeding the squirrels together and talking about them.”
It would take a while before anybody missed Sherman Melvin Jacob, about three weeks to be exact…
“A Wake of Vultures” is available at Amazon.com Paperback $16.99 Kindle $2.99
When I published on 8/26/18, it was my intention to immediately start on Book 2.
Funny thing is I sat at the computer and stared at a blank screen with no words coming. It was as if I mentally couldn’t let go of the first story.
I was asked a question on a message board that I frequent that I believe is worth a blog post.
[quote=10-22Plinker;19077498]When is book two being published?[/quote]
First off, thank you for what I consider a compliment. I am flattered.
I gave some thought to the question and have a couple of thoughts.
“A Wake of Vultures” is a story that I lived with for over a year. There were a couple of times that I hit a wall as to where the story was going. Once was almost 8 weeks which was when I wrote “A Republic, if you can keep it” (Available as a Kindle e-book now), as a blog series. I had also outlined a number of other stories as a follow up in the series.
When I published on 8/26/18, it was my intention to immediately start on Book 2.
Funny thing is I sat at the computer and stared at a blank screen with no words coming. It was as if I mentally couldn’t let go of the first story. As of this morning, 9/29/2018, the muse is speaking to me again and I need to decide which of the remaining five stories goes into the hopper next. I have started roughing out character biographies that are currently generic enough to go into either one.
Secondly, I have found out that this book business is not like “Field of Dreams”. You can build it, but if you don’t market it, your story sits out there in the cold, lonely and ignored. So I need to figure out a better marketing plan for “A Wake of Vultures”.
So, to answer your question, hopefully, I have learned something by writing the first two books and the plan is to have book two written, polished, edited and published around 4/1/2019. Depending on which one I go with, the title will be “C. Auris” or “Chaos Warhammer”.
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(c) 2018 Uriel Press
Sherman Jacob. the owner/operator of snoopwiki.com accidentally acquires information regarding an international arms dealer doing business in his north-suburban Chicago neighborhood. Looking to make the biggest score of his life, he hatches a blackmail plot that explodes in more ways than one.
“A Wake of Vultures” – Book #1 in the series “Tales From The Deep State”.
The Kindle version of Wake of Vultures is now live on Amazon. There is a free preview option so, if you would be so kind as to click the link and leave a review I would be appreciative.
Notable figures in the United States have for decades expressed concerns about the existence of a “deep state” or state within a state, which they suspect exerts influence and control over public and foreign policy, regardless of which political party controls the country’s political power levers.
There is a system that is at work in the world, and that system existed long before this last election cycle. This is the twelfth U.S. President since Eisenhower where nothing has changed.
There is a deep state, a military industrial security state. … a multi-national and highly focused state, (or, more accurately a system). It is the system that has to be challenged. That takes work and is never as exciting as talking about some hated politician or political philosophy.
Watch Tales From The Deep State Blog, (http://patsanswersblog.wordpress.com), for previews of “Wake of Vultures” a different kind of political thriller, as well as snippets from inside real-world events ripped from the headlines and details on publication.
Here’s a little sample…
“The Police in Northern Cook County are not prejudiced and do not engage in random police brutality. They hate everyone equally and they treat everyone miserably.”
Sgt. Andy Novak had long ago become disillusioned with the idea of being a crime-busting cop. Mostly he found that his professional life consisted mostly of periods of boredom infrequently interspersed with occasions of being exposed to either irate citizens or absolute scumbags. There wasn’t too much “public service” left in his experience of police work
Pulling up to the address he saw that Tom had started stringing the crime scene tape across the front of the property and as he checked in with dispatch he saw Tom emerging from the side yard to the East of the property.
“Tom, you look like ****. Whata we got here?”
“Well Sarge, what we have is a stiff in the house that looks like he had a close encounter with a herd of stampeding elephants followed by a full body massage by every maggot in the north suburbs. It was bad enough that I tossed my cookies in the alley behind the house. I haven’t done much, just a cursory premise check. Once I found the body I tried not to contaminate the scene any further.”
“Anything on who our deceased might be or why he partied with the grim reaper here in this house?”
“Nothing much Sarge. This was called in by the Greek guy that owns the Little Inn on Golf rd. He was out for his constitutional and smelled something walking past here. I guess he knew the guy that lived here in a casual manner. The guy that he knew was kinda weird… tamed wild squirrels… petted ‘em… even put hats on ‘em. But I’m not even sure that the stiff inside is the same guy. Anyways, the Greek guy said that the guy he knew had been in his restaurant about 3 weeks ago with a female… quite the looker according to the complainant. Looked like one of those plastic real estate broads according to him.”
“O.K. Tom. Not too much more we can do here between us. Let’s just make sure the place is cordoned off with the crime scene tape while I call out the lieutenant. I’m just as happy to dump this in his lap although from what you tell me about what you observed it will be a nightmare for the NORTAF crew with our lieutenant bloodhound in charge. You make sure the tape is up and start on your incident report while I call in to get Litkowiak out here along with the NORTAF crew and someone from the ME’s office.”
Lieutenant Kevin Litkowiak looked, colleagues often said, how a detective in a movie looks. And he played the part well. His suits were tailored. He always seemed to be chomping his trademark cigar, whether at the station, on the streets, or at the bar after hours. He had a booming voice thick with a Chicago accent. He had a hearty laugh and a respectable handshake. He loved to buy others drinks and trade stories. He was the friendliest and warmest man many of his peers had ever met, and he was quick to cut himself down with abundant doses of self-deprecation. It was hard not to love Detective Lieutenant Kevin A. Litkowiak. He was a Skokie cop but he was attached to the North Regional Major Crimes Task Force – NORTAF. NORTAF was a crime investigation cooperative between the Northern Chicago suburban police departments of Lincolnwood, Skokie, Morton Grove, Niles, Glenview and a few others. They pooled their resources in order to bring major metropolitan crime investigation resources to the smaller towns and villages that would not otherwise have this type of expertise.
When there was a NORTAF homicide investigation you would usually find Litkowiak’s partner, Detective Sergeant Paul Berg, a stout man with a trim mustache, a brown comb-over, and skeptical, probing eyes. Where Litkowiak seemed to seek the spotlight, Berg was fine working in the shadows. The Robin to Litkowiak’s Batman, cops around the suburbs joked.
Litkowiak was the star of the NORTAF Homicide Squad. He had solved some of the suburbs’s most notorious homicides, plus scores more that got barely a blurb in the papers. He was tenacious and crafty. He developed close contacts on the streets. He had a knack for tracking down eyewitnesses. And he was a master at getting suspects to talk. “That crystal ball” in his stomach, he called it.
Great detectives, he once said in a television interview, had “the ability to get inside to that person’s soul whatever way you can and get the person to say what you need to hear.” What set Kevin Litkowiak apart, prosecutors and fellow cops believed, were his people skills. “He understood human nature,” says Michael Cunningham, an assistant state’s attorney who prosecuted a few of Litkowiak’s cases. “He could read people. He knew how to talk to people. He was empathetic. He didn’t talk down to them. He was not judgmental. He had a way with people.”
