"THE TATTOO MURDER" BY ROBERT HYMAN-ROTH CHAPTER ONE
AUTHOR RATING: Detective Genre, violence, graphic sex, not recommended for under 17 years old.
The morning sun shining through the upper pain of glass was just enough to arouse the sleeping detective without the rude sound of the cell phone going off. Cell phones in the morning were never John Potenza’s favorite alarm, especially with a half naked young lady laying beside him, just a sheet covering the pair, hiding their cool bodies in the morning air. In today’s world however they were a necessary evil, unfortunately.
“Yeh, uh um,” the detective moaned only slightly awake. “Yeh I know where it’s at. How long have I been living here?”
“What’s up baby?” The woman asked trying vainly to keep her eyes closed.
“Nothing, but I gotta go,” he replied looking at the real alarm clock on her nightstand. It said it was way too early to get up and while he didn’t want to, his job made it a must.
She knew the life of a policeman took its all hours turn on a 24/7 scale and she didn’t put up a fuss over his leaving in the morning after a late night rumble in the bundle. She instinctively got up, went to the bathroom and had hot coffee ready to pour from the pot before he had his pants buckled.
“You got time for a quick shower before you go baby?” She asked with a purr in her voice.
He grinned knowing he wasn’t going to be showering alone.
“Sure he’s dead and the body ain’t getting any warmer,” Potenza said as he sipped on the mug full of hot black coffee and smiled.
He picked her up with one hand under her knees and the other behind her back and headed off to the small bathroom with a tub shower. It was her place not his. Potenza rarely took his ladies home and his ladies didn’t seem to mind. They seemed to be more in control of the local cop with a reputation for the women. Jen was in control this morning.
Although she shared his bed the night before she knew it might be some time before they were together again. He had a case load and he HAD other ladies. She was content to be occasional. In actuality she preferred it. A nice hot shower and a steamy bit of sex in the morning were just what the doctor ordered for her and kept the cop on his toes.
It was a short drive to the ocean for the officer who had lived in Ventura, California nearly all his life. He’d gone to Lincoln Elementary School, Cabrillo Junior High and finally Ventura High School before heading off to the military. Coming back was always a foregone conclusion. His friends, the small town beach community atmosphere and the beach. Oh yes the beach and above all else the surf. For it was surfing he loved and could never get enough of. It was his relaxation away from the job, from home and from the rigors of daily life when it became mundane. The surf was what mattered.
Driving down Seaward Avenue toward the beach, he could see the red and blue lights flashing from the patrol cars as he approached. They had encircled the cul-de-sac at the end of Seaward as it became a dead end. Local restaurants and a hotel along with some beach condo’s lined both sides of the area as it opened into pristine sand and water so as to make the Sierra Club jealous. This was Ventura at its best. The patrol cars stated it was also Ventura at its worst.
The officers knew what to expect when they saw the powder blue rag top corvette coming down the street. They knew the blond hair, the sun glasses, the Hawaiian shirt and the cargo pants hid the man they knew as C.B. Potenza, Detective John Potenza to anyone else. Cocky, easy going, smart, a dead on shot and oooh so good with the ladies. They all wanted to be him but they knew his was a life few would ever know.
“Whatta we got boys?” Potenza asked with a smile which said ‘what in the hell am I doing up at this hour?’
“Sorry to get you outta bed so early detective but this guy ain’t getting any better smelling,” the officer replied. “C’mon, this way.”
The pair walked across the warming sand with the cool breeze coming off the ocean. It was clear with a light fog a few miles out. The fog would roll in a few hours later but for now the sun shone high above and it was the bluest of blue skies one could ever imagine. Aside from the bloated dead body they were approaching it was a near perfect day.
As they approached the man-made breaker, huge chunks of concrete designed to break the waves if they ever got huge, Potenza couldn’t help but think back to his youth before the breakers when this was a super surfing beach. The breakers were designed to break those waves from carrying on up to the expensive homes which lined the shore if ever there was a powerful storm.
Several other officers and the county coroner were standing just the other side of the concrete, all looking over the large body underneath the white sheet now sitting on the sand. It was larger than normal since the body had been in the ocean for several days and became bloated over time.
“Hey John, sorry to get you out here so early, but you look pretty refreshed for seven o’clock,” said detective Lt. Jim Vincent. “You look very refreshed. Did you have a good start to your morning?’
Vincent often worked with Potenza and the smile in his voice was meant to chide his partner to smile. Smile and maybe reveal a little about the steamy shower scene which he figured had to happen if Potenza arrived before eight o’clock content and with a smile on his face.
Potenza only looked back with a grin of acknowledgment which was all Vincent needed.
“Well anyway, we have a white male, late 30’s early 40’s, dead for a few days but we won’t know for how long until the coroner here does his work,” Vincent began to detail what he had so far. “Looks like blunt force trauma to the head and lower back. No wallet, no I.D. so we don’t have a name yet.”
“A lot of tattoo’s on the body,” Potenza pointed out pulling back the sheet. “Some fancy artwork too, anything else?”
The officer looked up and down the dead man’s body. Leather and black clothes showed the man was probably a biker. He might be a bit older than the first impression left to the coroner. With the body so bloated it was going to be a few days before they could pin the age down.
“Yes,” the coroner spoke out. “Very unusual here…notice the victims thumbs are missing?”
“Shit!” Potenza struck a chord as if he’d already solved the case and he didn’t like the answer. “Shit, shit, shit!”
The others in the group, the plain clothes guy, the coroner and the four patrolmen who watched the detective get unusually upset, could only stand by in amazement. He didn’t usually get this pissed off and he usually didn’t turn around and walk away from a crime scene but he did now. He walked a good 10 yards away before looking out into the sea and turning around to come back.
“John, John, you want to let us in on something?” Shouted Vincent, stopping the detective dead in his tracks. He quickly stopped as Vincent approached. In his tantrum he had not realized how far he had wandered off.
“Yeh, Stingrays!”
“Stingrays? What about them?” One of the officers asked thinking of the fish which occasionally patrolled the waters from Ventura to Santa Barbara to Santa Inez Island.
The detectives knew what Stingrays meant even if the rookie police officer didn’t and none of them liked to think about what was coming next.
Stingrays was the name of one of the most notorious biker gangs of the past 40 years. They hadn’t been any trouble in the last 20 years mainly because they got old, they got wise and they got sophisticated. They still ran drugs, guns on occasion and anything else they could make fast illegal money with. They still ran small things but mainly stayed out of the way of police and in some cases were upstanding members of the community.
They had their corporate, yes corporate headquarters in Ventura and even had a spokesman. They ran a charity motorcycle ride each year raising money. They even gathered toys for the Navy’s Toys for Children program. They pretty much had become edge of the law kind of guys.
“The thumbs being removed is a sign of a Stingray killing,” said the surfing cop. “It was a sign of humiliation back in the day.”
The patrol officers just looked stunned as to why and what it meant. Potenza went on to explain about the importance of a thumb and how it separates humans from primates, from monkeys. And how the humiliation of it all was, without a thumb it made it impossible to do mundane daily things we all must do. Specifically without a thumb it becomes very, very difficult to wipe one’s ass after having dropped a deuce to put it mildly.
The humiliation of this wasn’t lost on the Stingrays. They not only degraded their victims to animals but they somehow tied the knot between the lowered human to a pile of feces. It was something some ancient cultures would do in their killing madness and it was not lost on these bikers. As one man said they didn’t care because to care you had to be human first. Those hard core against these types of gangs never considered them human.
“It’s something I haven’t seen in oh, well let’s just say a long, long time and something I’d hope I would never see again,” Potenza said, head down, as he fidgeted with his fingernails. He didn’t bite them but he reached into his pocket for a clipper and began using the fold out metal to clean them. It was a habit he’d picked up as a kid.
For Potenza, it was something he had not seen in many years. If the Stingrays were involved it could mean a revival of gang warfare or it could mean a new wave had come into the gang and was looking for a way to break out and up. The least of which, it might just mean they were sending a message. This is what Potenza was hoping for, the least of three evils.
He needed to round up some old contacts, find out what was going on and see where he could step in. Maybe it was something he could nip in the bud.
“Let’s get out of here!” He said to Lt. Vincent. “Mr. Coroner let me know when you get an ID and more info. I have a bad feeling about this one.”
