It gives
me great pleasure to be featuring author Rico Lamoureux and his crime/mystery
novella Riker's Calling in an excerpt today. Stay tuned for the review in
January.
Synopsis:
From school bullies to the crime-ridden streets of his hometown of Los
Angeles, Jeremy Riker has always felt the need to do something about the
injustice surrounding him. Just as he sets out on his journey as an urban
warrior, he unknowingly gives rise to an obsessive adversary, who ends up becoming
one of the most notorious serial killers the city has ever known. Dubbed by the
news media as The Spyderco Killer, the methodical psychopath roots himself deep
into Riker's life for the long haul, until his own madness propels everything
into an intense climax.
Excerpt Riker’s Calling
I WANTED TO BE LEFT
ALONE, but surrounded by others. To wander amongst a sea of people, yet not be
bothered by a single one. This hustle and bustle of the masses helped distract
my mind from drowning in the torment of the individual thought of having just
lost all that I have ever hoped for. Balancing on the razor’s edge between
grief, anger, and a numbness that can end all will, this self-medicated
delusion of trying to avoid the pain kept me from taking my steps out onto one
of the many intersecting tracks of the Los Angeles Union Station.
This central nervous
system of the West Coast has always been a place of wonder for me, countless
strangers coming from who knows where and going to places I would often
imagine. Sometimes I’d look up at the arrivals and departures, the footfalls
shuffling random conversations as the boards would reveal one locale after
another. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland. Landmarks and cityscapes pictured in
my mind’s eye. Standing in a dozen different places at once while never leaving
this train hub. How one minute a platform would be flooded with travelers, the
next, dead, as if every living soul had been wiped off the face of the
Earth.
And so there I was,
returning to this mysterious place as a source of solace after walking the
downtown streets of Los Angeles most of the night, trying to make sense of the
ludicrous, unable to understand the injustice I had been dealt. From one
platform to another, the terminal, the garden. How many hours I roamed, how
many rounds I made, I didn’t know, and didn’t care. But then she caught my
eye.
Another lost soul, she
sat out on platform six, maybe a decade to fifteen years beyond my twenty-one.
At first glance she appeared as someone who just might be having a bad day.
Perhaps she had been fired from her job, or had her heart broken by a
boyfriend. Just another face to pass, another story to remain untold. And so I
continued, on to the end of the line before stopping at its edge, looking out
to the tracks that would take all those I had just passed to places far and
away.
Perched in stillness, I
listened as their train came gliding in at my back, its doors giving off the
sound of compressed air as they opened to receive passengers, high heels and
sneakers scurrying about as if they only had a few seconds to board.
A few minutes later and
last call was announced, followed by doors being sealed and engines being
readied. The iron horse was then released from its gate, its awesome power
creating a gust of wind that surged over me as it passed. Picking up steam, the
more it roared to life the farther it got, the collage of faces departing
platform six on their way to the rest of their lives. Goodbye businessman who
was afraid of flying, grandmother taking her last interstate trip, lonely woman
who was having a sad day.
The tracks were once
again bare, as would be the platform behind me. Too quiet for my current state
of mind, and so I turned to head back, to the belly of the bustle. To my
surprise one person had remained, and as I got closer to the figure the image
of the lonely woman reappeared. Had she been too upset to board her train? Or
was she like me? Simply here to haunt those who were more alive?
Not wanting to invade
her private melancholy, I just kept walking, catching another glimpse of her
sorrow-stricken face as I did so. It seemed rounder this time, as if swollen
with hurt, tears now falling from eyes so red in their raw emotion. I had to
fight my first instinct, which was to rush over and offer my assistance,
whatever that could have been. A shoulder to cry on? A reassurance that he
wasn’t worth it? He who? The farther I got the more guilty I felt. Someone in
that much pain was suffering far greater than having an issue with work or a
relationship. And with this realization I had to stop, the single soul of a
woman in need back on platform six silently calling out to me far louder than
the foot traffic in the terminal.
With cautious steps I
approached, then just stood there, nervously searching for the right words. Her
line of sight never moved, my shoes now there for her to stare down upon. Then
again, maybe she couldn’t see them through her saturation of tears, holding her
shoulder bag close to her stomach.
“Ma’am? Are you
alright? I…”
She looked up, wiped at
her eyes to get a better look at me. She tried to speak, but in the attempt to
do so began to hyperventilate.
I bent down to comfort
her, to let her know it wasn’t that bad, but upon doing so I saw that it was, a
zip tie tightly secured around her neck. My eyes frantically followed the
lethal line of plastic around to her back, where I lifted her hair to discover
the tie was fastened to one of the metal bars of this mounted bench she sat on.
I immediately went for my Spyderco, a razor-sharp pocket knife that I would
constantly have clipped to my pants pocket, the hollow circle at the base of
the blade making it accessible in a fraction of a second with a simple flick of
the thumb.
As soon as I cut the
line the sound of shattering glass, like bottles popping, went off on both
tracks, my head snapping up just in time to catch the sight of six figures,
three on each side, jumping up out of the track well and onto our platform.
With the exception of their height and weight, they were identical in
appearance, all wearing pure white masquerade masks, all covered in black, from
their hoodies to their sneakers, as they came at us with jagged-edged beer
bottles.
Without thinking twice
I yanked the stranger I had just cut loose up off the bench. “You got to get
underneath it, now!” then positioned myself to guard her the best I could.
Three came at me at
once, lunging forward with their broken bottles right before I sank to the
ground, their shard glass stabbing nothing but air as the blade of my Spyderco
sliced through an ankle of one of them, the femoral artery of another, and then
pierced straight up into the crotch of the third.
On my way back up I
slid behind the back of the first to take control of him, his ankle wound being
the least serious and therefore making him the most likely to continue on. His
hand was still wrapped around the neck of the broken bottle, so I sliced it
loose by way of severing his index finger, holding him as a shield against the
other three as he joined his fellow thug in screaming out in pain, both muffled
by the masks they hid behind.
“I’ll fuckin’ kill
her!” threatened one of the last three, rushing over to try and pull the woman
out from under the bench, but only getting off a step or two before tumbling
over when I threw the guy I held into him.
I used this second
moment of opportunity to take another one of them, stepping forward long enough
to lance his windpipe, then turning my attention back to the most aggressive as
he tried to make his way back up to his feet. With a heel stump I took out one
of his knee caps, following it up with a thrust of my blade to one of his
lungs, the bottom portion of his white masquerade mask turning blood red as it
poured from his mouth.
One left, who was now
trying to grab hold of the woman beneath the bench so as to use as leverage,
but she was curled up like a fetus, kicking and screaming with the same level
of passion as a mama bear, and that’s when I noticed that her hands were
protecting her overly-large stomach. The woman was pregnant.
No longer needing my
Spyderco, I let it go, sending it off with the whip of my hand to bullet
through the air and embed itself into the attacker’s spine just below his neck
line. He instantly fell over like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
In less than a minute
my life had changed, and I knew it couldn’t be random. Although he was bleeding
out pretty fast, the only thug who could still talk was the one whose femoral
artery I had sliced. I ripped off his mask, revealing a black kid that couldn’t
have been that much younger than myself, teetering on the edge of losing
consciousness.
I pulled off his
hoodie, tied the sweatshirt around the wound, and demanded to know what was
going on.
“This can’t be random…
This isn’t random…
“Who sent you?”
His mouth was moving,
but no words were forming. I slapped him.
“Who sent you?!”
Willing his hand to the
side of his head, which I could tell he had to concentrate to do, his trembling
fingertips attempted to dig at his ear, but within a few seconds he passed out.
I turned his head to
the side.
It was an earpiece.
Just as I popped it out,
two incoming trains pulled up to the platform, the passengers that came pouring
out stunned at the scene before them.
I helped the stranger
whose tears had drawn me in back up to her feet, having her take a seat back on
that bench she had been zip tied to.
I then inserted the
earpiece into my ear, a whisper loud enough to be heard personally directed
towards me.
“You continue to
inspire, Riker.”
Five words and nothing
more, It could have come from any of the hundreds of people now gathered on
platform six, or, more likely, someone watching from afar.
And so I would be left
wondering, far longer than I could have ever anticipated.
Stay tuned for
Nadaness In Motion's book review of Riker's Calling in January 2017!
About
the Author:
Rico Lamoureux is a multi-genre
author who has been writing for over thirty years.
His Crime Thriller Riker’s Calling is available on Amazon,
as is his autobiography, Power of the Pen,
a no-holds-barred look into his diverse life that has led him to where he is
today. His life story, which includes nearly a hundred photos, can actually be
acquired for FREE, as the author is currently offering
the ebook at no charge to all followers of his new blog, The Flash Fiction
Ponder, where he posts short yet thought-provoking stories every Monday and
Friday. (The book is normally priced at $2.99 on Amazon.)
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