Locked & Loaded: A Collection of Short Stories

By Lee Ellis

Peer into the cold underworld of killers, cut throats and the criminally insane. Locked & Loaded brings you five stories of the dark lives lived gilded beneath suburbia and the American dream. Here there are no saints or heroes but only the corrupt and deranged; those whove lived each day from behind the barrel of a smoking gun. Follow a lustful assassin, a young hustler, a desperate murderer, a crazed outlaw and a victimized lover in their tales of mischief, manipulation, chaos and passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465369215

Lee Ellis

Lee Ellis earned his PhD from Florida State University in 1982. For most of his teaching career, he was professor of sociology at Minot State University in North Dakota. After retiring from MSU in 2008, Dr. Ellis accepted a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he conducted research. Now semi-retired, he continues conducting research and authoring articles and books including Handbook of Crime Correlates and Handbook of Social Status Correlates.

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Copyright © 2011 by Lee Ellis.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4653-6920-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-6921-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

The Mole

Quicksand

How Cotton Mouth Crossing Burnt To The Ground

The Made Man, The Stranger, and a Silhouette

From Genesis

Hamlet the Hell Raiser

For Allie’s 15th Birthday.

August 6, 2010

Happy birthday sis!

You can have whatever you want,

reach out and take it.

Special Thanks To:

Keith Jones

Brooke Rooney

Justine Poon

Alain Singaye

Kelly White

&

The limitless support of my beloved family & friends.

Author’s Biography

Lee Ellis was born and raised in East Tennessee where he studied literature and filmmaking. He now lives in Los Angeles, California, pursuing his passion as a novelist and his hobby as a film maker.

The Mole

A Tale of Lust

The bar was slow when I got here. It’s still slow. Most hotel bars are though, I guess. It’s a nice place. Real fancy. Wooden wrap around bar with a nice clear coat finish. Full upright back and cushioned stools. Great scotch to fight the cold of a Paris winter. A talented, yet subtle jazz band playing back in the corner. Low lighting. A good view of both exits.

There are six of us here. Two men sitting at a table together. They’re the only ones talking. Laughing and carrying on loudly in French like the couple of drunks they are. Highly unlikely that one of them is Jack. Then there’s the bartender, a polite old man with little to say. There’s me sitting against the wall in the very last stool. There’s a broad sitting a couple seats down from me. And then the last guy’s sitting at the opposing corner of the bar. If Jack’s here, then that guy’s the most likely candidate. But still, Jack wouldn’t have his entire back exposed like that. And there are a couple hundred other guests in their rooms, so Jack may very well be one of them, enjoying the privacy of his mini bar. Considering he hasn’t already checked out.

Men like us though, we tend to stay in public places. We try to blend in, mimicking the rest of society attempting to appear normal. Not so much in public view though, but more with the public in our view. Especially hotel bars. You can monitor who’s coming in and out. But maybe part of it is the loneliness.

This broad though, she’s eyeing me. She waits to catch my glance, then grins and turns away. She’s nervous. Shy. Probably hasn’t had a man in only God knows when. She’s the clerical type. Simple black and white suit dress that stretches down past her knees. Dark pantyhose and short heels. Red hair crudely twisted up in a bun. Thick-rimmed glasses over her face. Could be pretty. Could be beautiful. But she’s not trying and besides, I’m here for one reason and one reason only: kill Jack.

I get a call from Central three days ago. Haven’t heard from headquarters in a month, but, to my surprise and utter disbelief, they tell me they’ve confirmed the mole. Knowing surely that’s impossible, I question their reasoning, so they show me the video footage from a dying contractor. Lying on the floor of some run down motel, puddled in his own blood and drooling red ooze from his mouth, the guy mutters the last piece of the puzzle:

Room 5602, he struggles to say in short gargled breaths. Fighting against the hawk of a German accent. Pall… Palace duh… Palace de Paris… suite 5602. His face solid white, his eyes just barely peeked open, he whispers, Jack… with barely enough air to finish the name.

Don’t they have all of our identities on file? Can they not just call in this Jack guy or set him in a trap with fraud orders? But Central says they don’t have any Jack under their employment. We’re restricted from knowing the names of other contractors or even seeing their faces so I wouldn’t know. But they say Jack must be an alias. Four of us are dead, three are out of contact and therefore unconfirmed, so that leaves me and Jack. Me and the guy Central Solutions believes to be the mole. So, with a comical sense of relief, I’m the only one left to do the job. They say the money will be in my account when it’s done. They say if I succeed then all this bullshit will be over. They say, Good hunting, Trevor.

But I know Jack couldn’t have killed all seven of the others. Though, if he really did kill this last guy then there are some questions to be answered. Before I kill him, Jack and I need to talk.

This woman is looking at me again. I catch her a second time and she looks back down at her drink giggling. Ah, what the hell, it’s going to be a long night and if Jack’s the last guy then this whole mess will be over soon. I might as well enjoy myself.

Excusez moi, mademoiselle, I call to her and she gives me a look of confusion and disbelief. Parlez-vous Anglais? I add with a grin, entertained by her surprise.

She looks over her shoulder and then back to me. Moi?

I chuckle. Oui! Alors parlez-vous Anglais?

Oh, oui, Shyly, she glances away and clears her throat. "I mean, yes. It’s my first language.

I smile with the pleasantness of her accent. You’re British?

Yes. And you’re American?

Yeah but please, don’t hold it against me.

Fortunately, she chuckles at my poor attempt to crack a joke. No, I’m very fond of the states. The accent is my favorite.

And what’s your name?

My friends call me Lynn.

Pretty name, I say. Blushing, she smiles and hides her mouth behind her hand. My friends call me Trevor. A thought flashes through my mind: If I had friends.

Well, hello Trevor.

You here alone?

Yes. Just in town for business.

Me too, I tell her. So why don’t you come join me and I’ll buy you a drink.

She ducks her head and chuckles, letting out a snort. Then embarrassed, she looks back up to me with big puppy eyes. I laugh at her and she giggles back. Finally, she picks up her little purse and heads over towards me. I have the bartender bring over another of whatever she’s drinking and she takes a seat beside me.

So what kind of business are you in? I ask.

The human resources kind. What about you?

Umm… I’m a contractor.

What kind of contractor?

Well… I try to lie as little as possible. I work for a private company that contract out to large organizations and sometimes governments. And we uh… basically we just handle problems that they don’t want to deal with themselves.

Ooooh, sounds fancy.

Well fancy’s not really the word for it. It’s really a lot like human resources, I guess.

She smiles and, once again, covers her face.

You shouldn’t do that.

She’s worried that she’s done something wrong. Do what?

I reach out, and, taking her gently by the wrist, I move her hand from her face. Cover your smile.

She looks into my eyes as I’m grazing my hand off of hers. Then she picks up her drink and takes the last of it down in one gulp. I’ll have another, and she slams the glass down on the bar.

Drink after drink we go on for hours and I completely forget why I’ve come here in the first place. Late into the night, Jack slips my mind and for the first time in years I feel like a normal being. I feel peace again. Even for just this one evening, I lose track of all the lives I’ve taken. I’ve awakened this amazing little chatterbox and she reminds me again of the joy in life. I forget that a year ago nine of us were sent out to find a mole. Nine professionally trained assassins. Guns for hire. Nine strangers linked only by the company we work for, Central Solutions, and the tattoo that claims us all. And it was everyone for themselves. A manhunt to the death.

Someone on the inside had been selling classified secrets about our customers. Not just to one enemy, but to anyone and everyone that had the money. The highest bidder now had access to American secrets, or any other country or organization we had business with. Oil corporations, pharmaceutical companies, airlines, banks, huge industries now had all their dirty little secrets up for sale at a one-stop shop. Even drug cartels and crime families had business with us. Central Solutions, created to seem like a legitimate company, handled the blood business for anyone willing to pay. But now that customer-killer confidentiality was broken, it didn’t just look bad for the company’s image, but it was a death wish. So after word got around, it made us everyone’s new top enemy.

When Central couldn’t find the mole themselves, they decided to send all of their employees out, nine of the best killers, and declared no one would be accepted back until the mole was dead. We had almost no useable information and none of us had ever even met any of the others, which made the task near impossible. But there was only one rule: do anything and everything to get the job done. Trust no one. Kill the mole.

So the game itself was very clear to everyone involved. The first one to catch the mole got paid. And for the mole, it was kill everyone else before getting caught. And that’s exactly what he did. He hunted them down one by one and slaughtered six of them. But someone else killed this last guy, number seven, and now that’s what I can’t figure out. That’s what I have to find from Jack before I kill him.