Gates of hell, p.1
Gates of Hell, page 1
GATES OF HELL
A ROGUE THRILLER
BLAKE BANNER
DAVID ARCHER
Copyright © 2024 by Right House
All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this ebook are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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CONTENTS
Don't Miss Anything
Opening Quote
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
The Wait is Over
Last Chance!
What’d You Think?
Also By David Archer
Also By Blake Banner
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
DON'T MISS ANYTHING
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What the sage poets taught by th’ heavenly Muse,
Storied of old in high immortal verse
Of dire chimeras and enchanted isles,
And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to hell,
Comus, John Milton
ONE
I opened my eyes. First I saw the ocean at the end of South 4th Place: blue and still. Then I saw the windshield, right up close, and the steering wheel and the dash. Then I saw the dry blood on my hands. That was when I realized I didn’t know who I was.
I opened the door of the truck and stumbled out. I saw it was a white Dodge RAM 1500 and walked unsteadily to the sidewalk, leaning on the hood. In front of me was a building, the side of a house, painted an ugly blue-gray. Looking at that blue-gray wall, I felt a sense of panic, wild, thrashing adrenaline burning in my gut. I turned and walked to the corner of the street. The entrance to the ugly, blue house was on Ocean Boulevard. You went up five steps situated on a small patch of lawn and there was the white front door. I stared at it and saw that it was open, just an inch.
I can’t say it was a decision I made. It was more like something inside of me, something I wasn’t conscious of, that was driving me forward. I moved down the short path across the patch of lawn, climbed the five steps, and pushed open the door.
The morning light behind me moved across the dark entrance hall, framing my shadow. There was a beige carpet on the floor that led down a hall on the left, where there were two doors. On the right, a staircase rose to the upper floor. There were four bloody footprints on the carpet, and on the steps I noticed bloodstains, drips, and partial prints.
I stepped inside and eased the front door closed with my heel, and when I heard it click, I moved to the first door on my left. I pulled a blood-stained handkerchief from my jeans pocket, turned the handle, and let the door swing open. It was a living room that ran the length of the house, from the front window to the glass doors that led out to the back yard. The floor was tiled and strewn with a couple of rugs. There was an old sofa beside the door with a long coffee table and a huge TV opposite. The TV was still on. At the far end, in front of the glass doors, there was a dining table with four chairs.
On the sofa there was a guy with his belly split open from side to side. His upper body was lying across the cushions, but his lower body and legs were hanging at a grotesque angle down toward the floor. The sofa was saturated from end to end with his blood. Protruding from the left side of his chest was a wakizashi, the shorter version of the Japanese katana. At the foot of the sofa, there was also a large pool of partly congealed blood.
I took a few steps around the coffee table, toward the TV, so that I could see more clearly into the dining area. A couple of the chairs had been knocked to the floor, and the table was slightly displaced. It had that look like there had been a struggle. Lying across the rug between the overturned chairs was another man. His head had been split in half down to his collarbone. It made each side of his head and each eye gaze bizarrely in a different direction. The blood from the wound had sprayed up to the ceiling and onto the walls before he died. Beside him there was an axe, the kind you might use to go camping in the mountains.
The numbness I felt inside had become almost like a pain in itself. I backed away, out into the hall, but instead of leaving the house and getting away from that place, I climbed the stairs, going deeper into the nightmare. There were three bedrooms up there and a bathroom. I found the third body in the first bedroom. He was lying in the bed, undressed, and had a full katana driven through his solar plexus. I knew what that meant. If it had been driven through his heart, he would have died almost instantly. Driven through his solar plexus, it would split his diaphragm and make it impossible to breathe. He would not only have suffered severe agony, but death would have been through suffocation.
Somehow I knew where the next body would be. It was in the bathroom, in the bathtub. He had obviously been showering, though the shower had been turned off. The shower curtain had been pulled down. The pole was across the floor. The curtain was wrapped around him and had been tied tightly around his throat, and both his arms had been broken to stop him removing it.
A voice in my head, a voice that was calm and rational, said, “This was rage. Whoever killed these men hated them with a real passion.”
That was when I turned and ran down the stairs three at a time. I stepped out into the California sun, slammed the door behind me, and walked back to the truck. There I stood leaning against the tailgate and saw that it had Nevada plates. I looked again at the blood on my hands. Was I from Vegas, Sin City? I tried to penetrate the blackness in my mind and found only more blackness.
I climbed behind the wheel and searched the cab for some clue to who I was. There was none. I fired up the truck, spun the wheel into a U-turn, and eased out onto East Ocean Boulevard headed west. I crossed the river and at San Pedro and turned north on I-110. It was only then, as I moved from Wilmington into Carson, that I realized I knew where I was going. Though that wasn’t quite right. Because if you had asked me, I would not have been able to tell you. It was almost like the truck, or my hands and feet, knew where we were going, and I was going to find out.
After about ten minutes or a little more, at Figueroa, I came off onto Martin Luther King West. I followed that east, going slowly, trying to remember, trying to see if I would remember, aware that in some dark part of my mind I knew this route. I followed it right to the end, to Hooper Avenue, where I turned left and then right and then left. There I came to a halt at the corner of Compton and East 32nd.
It was the kind of desolation you only get in Los Angeles: wide open sunny spaces where there is no soul because every living thing has been concreted over, even the people. On my left was the Emanuel Church of God in Christ. Ahead of me, the road continued straight and broad and dusty through empty industrial lots, and on my right was East 32nd Street, where the giant primary school was just another soulless industrial lot in which the raw material of humanity was shaped, conditioned, and packaged to generate revenue for the state.
On the corner there was a house. It had two floors and was painted a dirty beige under a brown gabled roof. The ground floor was faced in mock stone, and an exterior wooden staircase led to the top floor. I parked outside the house, killed the engine, and swung down. I felt in my jeans pockets and found a cell that I knew was a burner and a set of keys on a ring. I stared at them a moment, then stared up at the door at the top of the steps. I felt rather than knew that this was my house, and they were my keys.
I pushed through the gate in the rusting iron fence, passed the overflowing trashcans, and climbed the wooden steps. At the top, I stopped and looked around. Nobody was looking back. The street was empty. The whole damned neighborhood seemed to be empty.
I put the key in the lock and turned it, and the door swung open easily. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. I was in an all-in-one living room, kitchen, and dining room. There was a sofa and a TV over by the window overlooking Compton Avenue. Directly opposite the door was the kitchen with the breakfast bar, and just below that was the small dining table with a couple of chairs. There were no books. There were no vases of flowers or photographs, and that punched a hole in my gut. I had to fight back the tears.
On my right was a short passage with a bathroom on the left and a single bedroom straight ahead. I moved down and through the bedroom door. Dusty light was leaning through a window in the right hand wall. The bed was made. The room was neat and clean. There was a built-in wardrobe and beside it a chest of drawers. At the foot of the bed, against the wall, allowing a narrow passage, was a small desk.
The chest of drawers revealed only jeans, shirts, underwear, and socks. The closet had a couple of jackets, one black leather and one linen, a good suit, boots and shoes, and a large box containing two revolvers and a semi-automatic, each in its own holster. Beneath them was a suppressor. I knew what the guns were before I examined them. The revolvers were classic Smith and Wessons. The smaller one was a .357 chambered for a magnum cartridge. The larger, a full foot in length, was the 29 with a 6.5” barrel, chambered for the .44 magnum.
The thought passed through my mind as I took the weapons from the box that revolvers were useful weapons. They were simple, reliable, and accurate. They required a minimum of maintenance, and they didn’t leave shells behind. It was true they had almost a third of the magazine capacity of some semis, but—and I found myself smiling at the thought—all you had to do was not miss, and six rounds would usually do the job.
The semi-automatic was the BUL SAS II Ultralight 4.25". Twenty-seven ounces and eighteen 9 mm rounds in the magazine. I liked the super-light trigger and the efficient speed of the weapon. It was one of the most underrated guns on the market. There were a couple of boxes of rounds too. I closed the box and slid it back into the wardrobe and eased myself into a sitting position on the floor with my legs crossed.
I knew all this about guns. I had blood on my hands. Had I killed those men? The balance of probabilities said I had, but they had been rage killings, killings of hatred. When I had looked at their faces—all but one—I had felt nothing but nausea. I had not felt hatred or triumph.
I turned where I sat and looked around the room. It told me nothing, but under the bed, I saw two sports bags. I moved over, reached under, and pulled them out. They were dense and heavy. When I unzipped them, I saw why. They were stuffed full of used bills. There must have been several hundred thousand bucks in cash in each one.
I said, “Sweet Jesus” and heard my own voice for the first time. It was a shock and made my skin run cold.
I stood and moved to the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror. The room seemed to rock. I stared at myself, and it was like staring at a stranger. I didn’t know who I was, but I knew I killed people—and I knew I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen cash under my bed.
Who the hell was I?
TWO
I made coffee and sat for a while thinking. Eventually I pulled out my cell and searched for private eyes in Los Angeles. I took my time over it. I didn’t want some big agency that was hidebound by rules, but neither did I want some ex bent cop who was going to take my money, cut all the corners, and give me shit in return. Eventually I settled on The Dave Marshall Agency, a one-man show on Washington Boulevard. The guy’s CV said he’d worked for the Feds for ten years, and his reviews all seemed to say the right things. So I called. The woman who answered sounded like she was smiling, wanted to mean it but didn’t. I told her, “I need to see Mr. Marshall urgently.”
She was still smiling when she said, “I can give you an appointment foooor…”
I cut her short. “It has to be today, this afternoon. I’m willing to pay over the odds in cash. Like I said, it’s urgent.”
“Oh, I see.” The smile had faded. “Please hold.” The line went quiet for a couple of minutes, and she came back. “Mr. Marshall can see you at one p.m., but he can only see you for half an hour. We usually require at least—”
“I’ll be there at one.”
I hung up, took five grand in cash, slipped the BUL in my waistband behind my back, and stepped out into the street.
Before I climbed in the truck, I took a walk around the block. I was curious to see where I lived, but I was also half-hoping somebody would greet me with a “Hey, John!” or “Joe, how ya’ doin’?” but nothing like that happened. The streets were practically empty, and the few people there were kept their eyes on the ground.
The neighborhood was a strange mix, part industrial units and part small residential pockets made up of houses dating back before the '30s. Most of them were boarded or dilapidated and uninhabited. I counted three hair salons you wouldn’t want to go into unarmed, two bars—The Suspiritos de Sinaloa and the Coca Cabaña—which looked even more dangerous than the hair salons, and one liquor store. There were no grocery stores or shopping malls or any place you’d want to take your family. If you had one.
I got back to my truck after forty-five minutes and headed west on I-10 toward Marina del Rey. At Inglewood Boulevard, I turned south toward Washington Boulevard and parked outside a clothing store across the road from the Marshall detective agency. I sat and studied it for a while. If you saw the website, you’d expect it to be on the top floor of a steel and glass tower in the Financial District, but it was a two-story house with a Spanish tiled roof and oxblood walls. Downstairs was a laundry on one side and an insurance broker on the other. The Dave Marshall Agency took up the whole top floor, and the way you got there was up an outdoor stairway from the parking lot.
I got out, crossed at the lights, and climbed the stairs to the agency.
The woman behind the reception desk was attractive, in her late thirties or early forties. She had a face that said she was intelligent. It also said she knew who I was and had made up her mind she didn’t like me.
I told her, “I have an appointment to see Mr. Marshall at one.”
She raised her eyebrows higher than seemed natural, pinched her mouth, and said, “Name?”
“I didn’t leave a name.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “You must be the gentleman who hung up before I could ask.”
“It’s one o’clock.”
She gave me the once-over and picked up an old-fashioned telephone from her desk.
“Mr. Marshall, your one o’clock is here. Shall I send him in?” She listened to an answer I couldn’t hear, then hung up and pointed to a door across the waiting room. “He’ll see you now. Through there.”
The office was bigger than it looked, but it was crowded with overflowing bookcases, filing cabinets, and files stacked on all available surfaces. It had one window that overlooked Washington Boulevard, and his laden desk was beside that window. Halfway down the room, there were a couple of well-used armchairs, a sofa, and a coffee table.
He stood as I came in, chewing and wiping his mouth. He was lean. He looked healthy. He held out his hand, and we shook. We sat as he swallowed, and he said, “Mr. one o’clock,” and laughed. “Betty couldn’t get your name.”
I nodded. “That’s the problem. I don’t know my name. I don’t know who I am.”
He pushed his food to one side and sat blinking at me.
“You don’t know who you are? You’ll need to explain that to me.”
“I woke up this morning with no idea who I was. There is nothing in my house or in my car that can give me a clue, except my license plates. I don’t know what I am doing in LA, where I am originally from, or anything else relevant to my identity. I need you to find out.”
He narrowed his eyes, like he was calibrating me. “That sounds like a job better suited to a doctor than a private investigator.”
“I’m not crazy. I just need the facts about who I am.”
He spread his hands and gazed at the wall behind me, shaking his head, not in the negative but like a man putting together a random list in his head.
“Um, driver’s license, credit cards, debit cards, rental contract, insurance card, car registration, tax returns, gas bill, electricity…”
He trailed off. I said, “I already told you. All I have is my license plate.” I took a pen from my pocket, pulled over a jotting pad, made a note of the plate number, and pushed it across his desk. “Your website says you’re ex FBI. Can you trace the plates or not?”
His eyes had narrowed still further, and he was watching me closely. When I was done, he nodded. “Yeah, I can trace your plates. Where were you when you woke up?” Before I could answer, he said, “You want a coffee? Something else?”
