The Death Panel: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness Read online

  Praise for The Death Panel

  …if you're looking for something a little different to read in your horror fiction, a book with stories that are edgy and cool as all hell, then pick up The Death Panel, and then be prepared to be blown away by some of the best genre short story fiction written in the last few years. Yes, this book is that good.

  —Horror World

  There is not one bad story contained between the pages of The Death Panel: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. I eagerly read the noir-tinged and hard-boiled stories of crime, violence and horror and eagerly await Comet Press' next release, because they and editor Cheryl Mullenax are really making a name for themselves in the horror community!

  —Fatally Yours

  With sharp writing and a crisp design to match, the anthology makes a strong case for 2009's best. It's only Comet Press' third release, but already, the small-press label has distinguished itself as a reliable name brand. Pick it up, if you've got the balls.

  —Bookgasm

  THE DEATH PANEL

  A COMET PRESS BOOK

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The stories in this anthology are works of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to an actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  The Death Panel copyright © Comet Press, 2009

  “Lipstick Swastika” copyright © Randy Chandler, 2009

  “Blood Sacrifices & The Catatonic Kid” copyright © Tom Piccirilli, 2009

  “What Makes an Angel Cry” copyright © Kelly M. Hudson, 2009

  “The Neighbor” copyright © Brandon Ford, 2009

  “The Name Game” copyright © Scott Nicholson, 2009

  “Fly by Night” copyright © Tim Curran, 2009

  “Detail” copyright © Fred Venturini, 2008

  “Parental Guidance” copyright © Simon Wood, 2009

  “Rindelstein’s Monsters” copyright © David Tallerman, 2009

  “The Hooker in the Backseat” copyright © Erik Williams, 2009

  “The Mouth” copyright © John Everson, 2000

  “Nine Cops Killed For A Goldfish Cracker” copyright © David James Keaton, 2009

  “Board The House Up” copyright © Zach Sherwood, 2009

  “The Mouth” was originally published in Delirium Magazine, January 2000

  FIRST COMET PRESS TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION, NOVEMBER 2009, ISBN: 978-0-9820979-9-1

  FIRST COMET PRESS EBOOK EDITION, JANUARY 2010

  Visit us on the web at www.cometpress.us

  Contents

  * * *

  LIPSTICK SWASTIKA by Randy Chandler

  BLOOD SACRIFICES & THE CATATONIC KID by Tom Piccirilli

  WHAT MAKES AN ANGEL CRY by Kelly M. Hudson

  THE NEIGHBOR by Brandon Ford

  THE NAME GAME by Scott Nicholson

  FLY BY NIGHT by Tim Curran

  DETAIL by Fred Venturini

  PARENTAL GUIDANCE by Simon Wood

  RINDELSTEIN’S MONSTERS by David Tallerman

  THE HOOKER IN THE BACKSEAT by Erik Williams

  THE MOUTH by John Everson

  NINE COPS KILLED FOR A GOLDFISH CRACKER by David James Keaton

  BOARD THE HOUSE UP by Zach Sherwood

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COMET PRESS TITLES

  Lipstick Swastika

  Randy Chandler

  * * *

  Miami, 1950

  Twilight Towers. 4D.

  Trench stood in the corridor and eyeballed the lipstick swastika on the door. He reached for a grenade that wasn’t there, his madcap impulse to open the door and blow up a lost nest of Nazis. Instead, he knocked on the door and then waited with hands jammed in the pockets of his pleated trousers.

  The bolt clacked back and the door opened inward to reveal a buxom blonde in her early thirties, Veronica Lake hairdo and striking blue eyes. A white silk dressing gown that would’ve looked slinky on someone with a slenderer figure.

  “Hotel security,” Trench said. Then he aimed a finger at the red swastika and said, “You know anything about that?”

  The woman looked at the lipsticked graffito and frowned. She muttered a curse in German, then turned her flashing eyes on him. “I want that removed. Immediately!”

  He gave her a little nod. “Any idea who did it?”

  “No. The world is infested with fools and malcontents.”

  “True enough,” he said, noting the deep frown lines bracketing her mouth. “You are German, right?”

  “Naturally. But that doesn’t make me a war criminal.”

  “War criminal,” he echoed. “That’s a funny thing to say.”

  “Funny?” Her lips curled and thinned. “Funny?”

  “Yeah. Nobody said anything about a war criminal. Except you.”

  She seemed to compose herself, crossed her arms over her chest and said, “You are the hotel detective, yes? The dick, as you say?” She pronounced it deek.

  Trench nodded.

  “Then do your job,” she said, her accent thickening with emotion. “Find the person who did this and see that it is not to happen again.”

  She stepped back and slammed the door. It sounded like a gunshot.

  * * * *

  Trench sat alone at a table in The Twilight Tavern, nursing an iced glass of ginger ale and thinking about halfway marks. He figured his life was half over, barring fatal disease or a violent end, and here he was in the middle of a century that had already seen two world wars and was ticking toward the next one, what with the Commies in China and Russia raising Red hell and things in Korea just about ready to boil over. At the moment he was halfway through his shift as house dick for Twilight Towers, which he sometimes thought of as the Halfway Hotel because it was about that far from being one of Miami’s finest.

  The Twilight Tavern was next door to the hotel, and Trench was also responsible for the safety and security of its patrons, most of them being guests of the hotel. He figured a house dick was half a step up from a run-of-the-mill bouncer—not that it mattered. Again with the halfway marks.

  He sipped his drink and watched platinum-haired Lola’s long fingers stroke the ivories as she coaxed dreamy tinkles from the Steinway. He couldn’t look too long at her, not when she was dolled up in that tight sequined evening dress with the low-scooped neckline. A sight like that hit him where he didn’t want to be hit, not since he’d come upon that stinking Sicilian field littered with dead German and Italian soldiers so bloated with rot that they sported ghoulish erections. Until he could scrub that obscene picture from his memory, he would be no good to a woman in an intimate way. That sex-and-death combo played hell with romance, zombie cocks standing at eternal attention while his was alive and as limp as a soft-boiled noodle.

  He let his peepers drift off lovely Lola. They slid along the bar, pausing a moment to watch a cigarette bobbing on the lips of a chunky bald man talking to a slender woman too young to be his wife, then on they slid, finally coming to rest on the German woman from 4D. She was seated at a table with a handsome young man with slicked-back black hair and a scimitar-shaped scar along
the left side of his jaw.

  Since finding the swastika lipsticked on her door last night, he’d been keeping closer tabs on the fourth floor in hopes of catching the artist if she—or he—came back for another crack at a vandalistic masterpiece. He’d also checked the guestbook and learned that the German lady had registered as Greta Goff from Peoria, Illinois. You didn’t grow an accent that thick in Peoria.

  Trench lit a smoke and cocked an ear and tried to catch a snatch of conversation from Greta Goff and her dapper beau, but thanks to Lola’s piano playing all he could hear was the occasional bust of the fraulein’s honking laughter. From this distance she looked good but Trench had seen her up close, without the paint, and he knew her good looks were in harsh decline. A few minutes later the man got up and headed for the men’s room. Trench decided to follow him, flash his house-dick buzzer and brace him for the skinny on his date, but then out of nowhere a small woman in a dark raincoat and black beret was bearing down on Greta Goff, approaching her from behind, and Trench froze, knowing something about her was all wrong. Maybe it was the odd look on her ferret-like face or the way she had her right hand buried in the pocket of the raincoat.

  Trench was up and moving, crossing the floor in long strides and reaching out to grab the petite woman’s hand as it came out of the pocket with a small-caliber gun. “No,” he said softly as he wrapped his other arm around the woman’s waspish waist and firmly guided her away from her obvious target. Greta Goff lit a cigarette, oblivious to what was happening behind her.

  The small woman’s body was stiff with tension but she didn’t resist as Trench led her to his table. He took the pistol out of her hand and dropped it in his coat pocket. He planted her in a chair and sat opposite her. She looked at him with wide eyes, as if she’d just come out of a dream and wasn’t sure where she was or how she’d got there.

  “I’m the hotel detective,” he said. “You wanna tell me what that was all about?”

  She shot a glance at Greta Goff and said, “The Beautiful Butcher of Auschwitz.”

  Her accent was European but Trench couldn’t precisely place it. She appeared to be in her middle thirties, may have been pretty at one time, but now worry lines marred her face and her eyes were a bit sunken from having seen too much of the world’s horrors.

  “You were there?” he asked.

  She nodded. Her shoulders slumped and random raindrops ran down them. “She murdered my sister. And many others.”

  “You’re sure she’s the one?”

  “I am sure. Her hair is longer and she has put on the pounds but I am sure. She beat me near to death with a riding crop.” She looked at the woman in question. “There is no doubt. That is Gerda von Falk. Murderess!”

  “Keep it down.”

  She nodded and dropped her eyes. “She and Irma Grese were in charge of the female prisoners. They liked to cut off the breasts of the prettier ones. They were Doctor Mengele’s whores. Irma Grese was hanged as a war criminal but Gerda von Falk slipped out of Poland. And now, as you see, she is here for the good life. I saw her on the street two days ago and followed her to the hotel.”

  “And you’re going to throw your life away as her executioner?”

  “I have no life.” She clutched at her small bosom. “No soul. I am like the golem.”

  Trench waved the waitress over and ordered a double shot of whiskey. He noticed a small man in a dark suit sitting alone at the bar, shooting furtive glances their way.

  “Why not call the FBI and let them take her?” he asked.

  “Why would they believe me? I am a Polish Jew. I am not yet a citizen here. I have no proof.”

  “So you were going to shoot her and wait to be arrested?”

  “No. I would kill her, then flee.”

  “That guy over there at the bar with you?”

  “My cousin. I live with his family.”

  “He was your get-away guy.”

  She nodded.

  “Why did you draw that swastika on her door? Didn’t you think it would scare her off before you could do her in?”

  “I wanted her to know she is not free, I wanted she should taste the fear.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I wanted her to run so I would not have to shoot her.”

  Trench nodded in the direction of the blond German. “She’s not exactly shaking in her boots.”

  The waitress delivered the double-shot. Trench set it in front of the would-be assassin and said, “Drink that. A toast to your freedom.”

  “You are not going to arrest me?”

  “I should turn you over to the police,” he said, “but I won’t if you promise you’ll forget about killing her. Let me take care of her.”

  She made a sour face and downed the double-shot. “What will you do?”

  “I’ve got a couple of ideas.” He pulled an ink pen from his pocket and slid a cocktail napkin in front of her. “Write down a phone number where I can call you. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

  She wrote down a number and her first name: Anna.

  Trench said, “I’ll give back your gun when it’s over.”

  * * * *

  Trench walked back to the hotel and called his friend Morgan at the Miami Herald. Morgan was a fact checker and sometimes pulled duty on the paper’s night desk. He’d lost an arm at Anzio and worked extra hard to prove he was as productive as any man with two arms.

  “I may have a scoop for you,” Trench said when Morgan answered.

  “What? Did Hemingway get caught stealing hotel towels again?”

  “See what you can dig up on the Beautiful Butcher of Auschwitz. Gerda von Falk. If you can find a picture of her, I’ll buy you a steak dinner.”

  “That Beautiful Butcher moniker rings a bell. No, no, that’s not right, she was the Beautiful Beast and they hanged that Kraut cooze.”

  “No, that was the other one. They were like a tag team. The one I want got away. And I think she’s a guest here at the Twilight, under another name.”

  “Holy mackerel, Kingfish! I’ll get right on it.”

  “Good. I don’t want this chick to fly the coop before I know for sure.”

  “What’ll you do if it’s her?”

  “Wring her fucking neck.”

  Ten minutes later Trench was in room 4D, searching the German woman’s belongings. He’d told the kid on the front desk to call the room if the woman showed her face in the lobby. He went through the two suitcases after picking the locks with his penknife and a paperclip. The first one contained nothing but clothing and makeup, but with the second suitcase he hit paydirt: three passports with the same woman’s photo but with different names, and a loaded Luger. The passports were damned good forgeries with three different names—none of them Gerda von Falk. Wrapped in black panties was a pristine Luftwaffe dagger, and the feel of silk and steel sent a thrilling current through his crotch.

  He put the items back where he’d found them and shut the suitcase. As he was about to leave the room, something under the bed caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a black-leather riding crop and smacked it against his open palm, wondering if it was a souvenir of her Nazi past, a prop for sadistic sex games, or both. He put it back and left the room.

  When he returned to the lobby, the night clerk handed him a phone message from Morgan. Trench returned the call. Morgan said he had found one photograph of Gerda von Falk. “It’s not a very good shot,” Morgan explained. “It’s a partial profile and the lighting is bad, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  “Meet me at the Rod & Reel Grille at eight and I’ll treat you to a steak and eggs. And don’t forget that photo.”

  * * * *

  “Don’t spill coffee on it,” Morgan said, “I have to return it to the morgue.”

  Looking up from the page of newsprint with the photo on it, Trench said, “The morgue?”

  “The storage room where we keep all the back issues. Reason I found it so quick’s because I remembered the story, the-ones-that-got-away angle.”


  Trench looked a few seconds more at the photo of the blonde in a Nazi uniform and then said, “I’m pretty sure that’s her. I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but I’d sure as hell bet hers.”

  Morgan grinned and said, “Not for nothing do they call you the Twilight Detective.”

  * * * *

  Trench was in the office behind the front desk waiting for the FBI agent to come back on the horn when the desk clerk stuck his head in and said, “The lady in 4D just phoned down and said she’s checking out a day early. Today. Right now.”

  Trench motioned the clerk over and handed him the phone. “When he comes back, tell him to get here right away if he wants to nail this Nazi cooze.”

  Trench took the elevator to the fourth floor and knocked on 4D’s door.

  The blonde opened the door and gave him a big-eyed stare. She was wearing the same silky gown, but this time her bags were packed, ready to go.

  Trench said, “The FBI wants to talk to you, Miss von Falk. Have a seat and we’ll wait for them.”

  Her face showed nothing. Then she smiled and pulled the straps off her shoulders and let the top of the gown fall to her waist, exposing her voluminous breasts. Trench looked at them and froze, feeling as if he were looking down the barrels of a couple of howitzers.

  Too late, he realized his mistake. But before he could tear his eyes off her tits, she shot a beefy fist into his face and rocked him with a hard right to his left eye. Then she grabbed his shoulders and kneed his nuts. He went to his knees, nauseated. With a move that would’ve made a female wrestler proud, she seized him in a headlock and wrangled him into the room, shutting the door with her hip.

  He grabbed one of her muscular legs and yanked it upward as he straightened his spine and threw himself backward. They both hit the floor but the woman rebounded quickly, springing to her feet and spinning to kick his face with the ball of her bare foot. Then she grabbed a suitcase and swung it with both hands, the heavy blow ringing his skull like one of hell’s lost bells.