Chasing the Fates: Fates' Fool, #1

By David Gearing

Chasing the Fates is the first book of the FATES' FOOL series, a story of those who must kill and deliver death to random strangers or risk losing everything they love...

In Chasing the Fates, Avery, a reckless man looking to be a better person and a better provider for his family, must now leave everything he loves behind to keep them alive. New to "the game," he finds a partner in a 65-year-old woman who has been "playing" for nearly forty years.
A rash but determined police detective, Hunter Walsh is willing to bend the law to get answers about the murderous crime spree taking over her city...
They are CHASING THE FATES...

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Gearing
• Release date: Feb 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507007877

David Gearing

David Gearing is a recent transplant from the harsh Arizona deserts to the green forests of the Pacific Northwest. He plots, he games, he pretends to be his own living room rockstar when no one is looking. His other books range from various genres from thrillers to gothic horror and beyond. You can find him at his webpage DavidGearingBooks.com or at his publisher's website AkusaiPublishing.com

Book preview

Chapter 1

It’s only because of this kid’s blaring earphones, rapid drum beats with the faint sound of someone screaming something incomprehensible, that I couldn’t hear the screeching of the bus brakes.

I’m being pushed forward into the city bus, my butt gradually sliding off of my red leather seat, the holes and frayed edges of the leather scratching into my khakis. The teenager to my left, wearing a black shirt with a skull on it—a skull composed entirely of white shadowed cats—and pink bangs on his otherwise black hair. His eyes are closed, focused on the poetry of the screamo music, no doubt. Apparently he takes the grunge attitude seriously. He smells like he hasn’t taken a shower in a few days. Funny, considering how smooth and fresh his black and pink nail polish seems to be on all of his fingers.

The brakes hit hard at first, the screeching and squealing of metal against aging brake pads. The rubber tires scrape against the black asphalt of streets, so rough that I can actually taste the burning rubber in my nose and mouth.

A woman in the back clutches onto her paper grocery bag. An orange rolls out near my foot. I pick it up, squeezing it at first as is usually my habit. My first love has always been cooking. I was quite good at it, but only because as a young boy I was overweight. It was a matter of survival. I liked to cook because I liked to eat.

I’m reminded of this as I pick up the soft orange, small for this kind of year. Clearly a bargain bin fruit.

I stand up and clasp the metal poles that extend from the front of the bus to the end. The black rubber bottom of the floor makes it so I cannot slip, a fact that I am grateful for because these black shoes of mine—as old as my three-year-old pug at home—have almost no grip left on them.

This place I’m going to, it’s a job change of sorts. A new banking experience that I have been wanting for a while.

Going from teacher to banker, I needed to be able to put my family ahead of someone else’s kids.

Being a teacher, well, it just doesn’t allow you to do that.

My hands slide along the metal pole, cold and smooth, until I find the previous owner and hand it off to her.

She smiles and I smile back.

She nods and says something I don’t quite understand in a language I don’t recognize. I imagine she’s saying thank you, but really, there’s no way to tell.

It could be buzz off, buddy, and my ignorant self wouldn’t be able tell the difference.

Still, we leave each other with a good sense of spirits. I think. I turn around and the bus begins to move again. The release of some pressure from the breaks, the squeak of more breaks and gears, and we’re off again down the road.

It’s funny how things always feel faster when you stand up. Never when you sit down.

I race to my old seat back, but something up front catches my attention.

We’re on one of those new buses, where the front of the bus is completely flat. The engine lies somewhere in the front, but underneath the driver. So with this flat, so not aerodynamically sound design, we creep up close to another car.

Except, I don’t think we’re moving anymore.

The car, it rushes backwards, getting closer.

The driver looks back at us, his arm behind the passenger side seat, looking over his shoulder. The face is small and white. Roundish, and maybe a woman’s, but no lipstick. She’s crying and mouthing something.

Oh shit is the only warning we get from the bus driver.

I’m thrown forward off my feet. My hands catch on the seats beside me and soon I’m face down, next to someone’s feet.

An orange, I presume, hits me on the sole of my foot. It rolls up past my feet and nudges me on the elbow.

What just happened? someone says behind me.

I try to pull my face up off the ground, but it sticks to something someone spilled earlier.

It smells sweet, so thank goodness it’s most likely soda.

My hands grip the rubber floor of the bus. I do a pushup to get to my knees.

That woman’s crazy, the driver says. Hold on, everyone!

From where I’m lying, it looks like someone in a gray uniform tries to pull a manual lever. The door opener.

But he pushes, then pulls, then wiggles it in frustration. His eyes go from front to back to us to the door and to the front, eying everything he can see at once.

The car in front of us, a red hatchback with California license plates, drives forward.

I hurry to my feet and check on the teenager in my seat. His face has gone white with fear, his eyes wide open, taking in everything and trying to process what happened.

Are you okay? I ask.

He nods. But from the look in his eyes, he’d probably nod at anything.

Wheels screech again, and not the bus’s.

I’m thrown off my feet again, this time bouncing my nose off the rubber ground. My nose feels flat and warm, too shocked to know that I’m in pain just yet.

I pick myself up again and rush to the front of the bus.

The car drives off, but slowly. The back of the hatchback has been damaged, hurting the back frame and wheels. And part of the hatchback’s windows looks wet, slick.

Blood.

But whose?

I’m at the front of the bus in only a few steps, my long strides thankfully not failing me here. At only five feet nine inches, I am thankful that I can run as fast as I need to. Not quite four minute mile, but not a slow poke either.

I rest my back against the first pole on the bus and kick the door open. It’s been bent outward, so the windows don’t want to move. The hinges forced to go an unnatural direction.

The door, the driver says. He points to the hinges. Kick the door.

I kick it open with my second kick and I’m outside.

The smell of burning rubber and bile taints the air.

I walk to the front of the bus, stepping off the curb of the sidewalk.

The ground is sticky with blood, and someone’s hand grips for my toes.

Chapter 2

I scream to the bus driver to call 911 and then follow the skid marks down the street. I didn’t get the license plate, and with that kind of damage, she couldn’t have gotten far.

There were people in there who were hurt, people who need answers.

Hell, someone was even killed.

I tell myself that I left because I couldn’t bother to let this person get away. A citizen’s arrest. A sense of pride and civic responsibility. That it would be irresponsible of me to not act. To just let someone walk away like this. But the real truth is, I was about to taste my own stomach acid and introduce it to the rest of the world. Not attractive, not productive.

Most of this town is set up like a grid. You can get to nearly anywhere just by taking a few streets. One of the few things these city planners actually got right. Other cities I’ve lived in must have been planned by a blind monkey. Lines and streets starting in one place and whirling around like a top, only to start again somewhere else.

Here in Tucson, that only happens some of the time. And, it seems, only in the streets that I need to find businesses on.

The smell of burning rubber and gasoline follows down a side road down a back alley, clearly designed for cars to make it to and from these houses. There’s no parking on the streets in this part of town, so small back roads were made so everyone can get to their separate covered parking and garages. The nature of living downtown, where everything is so squished together you practically have to live on top of someone to stay down here.

I turn down the side road, but pause at the entrance.

At the middle of the daytime, a hit and run with an intended homicide is just not run of the mill, everyday occurrence here. For a large town but not quite a city, Tucson has its own fair share of crimes. Rarely murder. Most of the time it’s drugs. Maybe rape.

I stop just short of walking down the dusty, unpaved road and hide next to a baby blue building. One of the few houses in this area to have actual paneling. It’s the style downtown to have more