Dead Sharks

Prologue

Jeff Simmons wasn’t always a bad guy. When he was ten years old, he played little league, fished with his dad, had good grades, did his chores and dreamed of playing in the World Series. Then, within a two-year time frame, he got mean, downright vicious even. At age twelve, he made his first trip to juvenile hall and never really looked back. In some ways he could be considered a victim. The two years between his tenth and twelfth birthdays took all of his innocence.

The catalyst was the separation of his parents. When he was 10, his dad, Frank, was his best friend. They would play catch, go fishing, and do woodworking projects together in the garage. He idolized his father and wanted to be just like him. Mom, on the other hand, was a piece of work. She was essentially the polar opposite of his dad. Dad was quiet, humble, and had a good work ethic. He made a modest living as an Army Sergeant and was good with his hands. He had first met Jeff’s mom early in his career. Jeff’s dad had enlisted out of high school out of a strong sense of patriotism and ended up with an MOS as a helicopter maintenance technician. He trained at Fort Rucker, Alabama where he met his eventual bride, Wendy Owens. Wendy was pure bitch. Oh, she was pretty and had a bit of southern charm, but she wanted out of Alabama something fierce and was not scrupulous as to how she achieved this goal. She latched onto Jeff’s dad for a steady paycheck and a ticket out of town. By the time they had hooked up, Frank already had orders to report to Fort Hood, Texas after he completed his training. From Wendy’s perspective, Frank was gullible and he was a ticket to Texas. Love had nothing to do with it in the slightest, except maybe for Frank. Once Wendy accidentally on purpose got pregnant with Jeff, Frank naturally did the right thing and they got married by a chaplain at Fort Rucker. Jeff was born a few months later once the family got to Fort Hood.

Frank did the best he could for his family and he loved Jeff a lot. Wendy, on the other hand, did her best to look out for Wendy. She cheated on Frank so often that it was damn near ridiculous. Wendy liked two things in life, men and nice things. At Fort Hood, she ended up with a lot of both. She was the base slut to be sure and everyone knew it. Everyone, that is, except Frank. Frank was just too simple and too naïve. Everyone liked Frank and he was just so damn nice that no one could bear to tell him that his wife was the biggest whore in a fifty-mile radius. Most of his friends had actually slept with his wife. They felt bad about it, of course, but … well … y’know, Wendy was hot and she was a sure thing, hard to resist for your average soldier. From Jeff’s perspective, life was pretty good while on base. He had lots of friends and mom always arranged for him to have sleepovers at his buddies’ houses and camping trips and such. He had no idea as to the real reason she always got him out of the house when Frank was in the field, he just enjoyed the camping and sleepovers. When dad was around, he and Jeff would spend hours fishing and had great times. Wendy, of course, would use this time as well to entertain. All things considered, it was generally pretty peaceful in the Simmons household up until one fateful night.

Wendy had one regular guy, a real lowlife that somehow captivated her. He was one of those guys that treats women like dirt and yet somehow they always fall for him hard. Ron Chandler was the epitome of the bad boy loser. He was in a local biker gang and pretty much had his hand in a number of shady dealings in the area. Wendy couldn’t get enough of him. It was just bad luck really that it all went wrong. Wendy had planned a wild night at the house with Ron while Frank had staff NCO duty at the maintenance company HQ for the night. Jeff, naturally, had been sent off for a sleepover at a friend’s house. Unfortunately, Jeff’s friend had apparently picked up a stomach virus and started throwing up during dinner. The sleepover was cancelled and Jeff was sent home. He arrived back at his house about two minutes before Ron got there. Wendy went into a panic when Jeff showed up and tried to call Ron to explain the situation. After about two minutes of feverish calling with no answer, Ron knocked on the door. Wendy tried to get him to go but Ron, as usual, was both drunk and horny and in no mood to be turned away. An argument ensued as Ron pushed his way into the house. Ron had two things that he hated. He hated kids and he hated to be told no. Now, he was faced with both with Wendy yelling at him and ten year old Jeff watching the scene with confusion. Ron’s reaction was both immediate and violent. He backhanded Wendy just to get her to shut up. The blow sent her spinning to the floor. Jeff had never seen a scene like this one before and without thinking, he charged Ron with a growl, swinging his fists wildly. Naturally, Ron decked him. His downward right cross caught Jeff in the corner of the eye knocking him down and opening a vicious cut with his ring. Jeff saw spots and flashes as he crawled away under the coffee table.

Now, Wendy didn’t have a great deal of maternal instinct, but this scenario activated what little she did possess. It ended up being a mistake. She got up and lunged forward to claw at Ron’s face. Ron’s earlier anger at being turned down was truly insignificant compared to the rage that surfaced when Wendy tried to attack him. The beating that she received was severe. Ron finally left when he got tired of hitting her. When she came to her senses, Wendy did the only thing that she could think of, she called Frank. It was difficult to speak clearly, as Wendy felt like some of her teeth may have been loosened, but slowly she began to tell Frank what happened. It ended up being a confession. The words just kept spilling out and Wendy found herself telling Frank everything, all of her sins for the last ten years. Frank listened with a strange mix of concern, anger, disbelief, and horror. Finally, in a flat monotone, he simply said, I’m on my way. Jeff was no longer in the room. In sheer terror, he had crawled from the living room into his bedroom and was hiding in his closet.

When Wendy hung up the phone, she figured she had about ten minutes before Frank could make his way home. She needed to find a way out of this situation. Nine minutes after Wendy called Frank, she picked up the phone again and dialed the police.

Provost Marshal, Corporal Skinner speaking, please state your business.

This is Wendy Simmons, my husband just attacked me and my son.

Sergeant Frank Simmons?

That’s right, I need help right away, he’s crazy!

Where are you now ma’am? Are you someplace safe?

I’m locked in the bathroom, but I am so scared, please hurry!

Units are enroute ma’am … hold tight.

Wendy hung up without another word. The lies had come so easily. They always did. Standing up straight, she slowly walked to the bathroom, locked the door and began to cry. Frank arrived less than a minute later and looked around the disheveled living room. The furniture was in disarray and there was blood on the carpet. He heard the sound of sobbing from the bathroom and he tried the door. It was locked, so he knocked softly.

Wendy? he called.

There was no answer from inside, so he knocked harder and called her name louder. Unfortunately for him, by the time the military police arrived, he was pounding on the door and yelling, GOD DAMN IT WENDY! OPEN THE DOOR!

There are a number of police, military or otherwise, that simply live for the chance to legally beat someone down. A few of those types arrived at the Simmons house and proceeded to take Frank down … hard. By the time Frank was subdued, the fact that he had no marks on his knuckles when the police first arrived was significantly obscured by the carpet burns and abrasions on his hands as a result of the arrest. Thus, by the time Frank was led from his house, his hands looked like he had been punching something or someone as the case may be.

The case ended up being pretty open and shut. Wendy’s call to the police and subsequent testimony, Frank pounding on the bathroom door when the police arrived, the marks on his hands, and the motive of newly discovering the infidelity of his wife all combined to convict him easily. Jeff’s story to the police of a mystery man that beat up him and his mom was dismissed as the refusal of a loving son to believe his father could actually commit the crime. The social workers testified that Jeff was transferring the actions he witnessed by his father onto an imaginary mystery man. Jeff’s statements regrettably ended up hurting his father’s case. The investigating officer did not include a single bit of exculpatory information in his report. He was, incidentally, also sleeping with Wendy on a semi-regular basis. Jeff never saw his father again.

The next couple years were a nightmare for Jeff. Frank had been the only real stability that Wendy had and after he was gone, all of her restraints completely fell away. In a strange twist of fate, even though his father was in a military prison, Jeff was still a military dependent and able to live in base housing. Naturally, his mother lived there as well since she had sole custody of him. Wendy, being who she was, still needed companionship and unbelievably, Ron Chandler moved in as a pseudo-stepfather. Wendy never got another beating from him, as she never again told him no on anything. Even though Wendy could charm and manipulate nearly everyone else in the world, Ron was her weakness. From the free housing at Fort Hood, Ron was able to run a nice little drug business. A surprising number of soldiers and locals in the area liked their weed and their meth. Wendy slept with the right people and Ron’s drug business never got investigated. In fact, the only person in the household that ever got in trouble with the law was Jeff.

Ron had a lot of rage and violence in him and since he no longer hit Wendy, his new target was Jeff. Usually, Jeff would get pummeled in a spot that wouldn’t leave a mark, but was sure to leave a memory. Jeff formed a lot of memories in that time period. There was no way that Jeff could defend against Ron and after the last fiasco, he was afraid to tell anyone for fear that it would backfire. All the same, the abuse had an impact on Jeff. He became a bully and a troublemaker. He was kicked off of the little league team at age eleven after attacking a pitcher that had struck him out. The kid was stunned when Jeff charged the mound and wailed on him with an aluminum bat. What surprised the kid the most was that he and Jeff had once been best friends. By the next year, Jeff was spending more time in juvenile hall that out of it.

Chapter 1

A little over ten years later, a twenty-three year old Jeff found himself wearing a dark blue suit as he sat in a Los Angeles courtroom. At first glance, he almost looked respectable until you noticed that the suit fit so badly that it was clearly borrowed. Also, his right hand was handcuffed to the chair he was in, which was in turn bolted to the floor. A closer examination would reveal the dark beige body makeup covering the swastika tattooed on the left side of his neck. Jeff would never have thought to do that, but his attorney was pretty sharp. His attorney didn’t want the jury to think that Jeff was a gang member or white supremacist. Despite the swastika, Jeff wasn’t actually a white supremacist. During his first stint in Los Angeles County Jail at age 18, he learned quickly that you needed allies. He wasn’t black, Asian, or Hispanic and really the only strong group left was the Aryan Brotherhood. Jeff was a fringer with the brotherhood. He wasn’t really active, but he could be called upon as an extra body if needed and he got the implied protection of the group. He blamed his first attorney for that jail sentence. His attorney at the time, Mike Hand, was known for plea bargains. He pled Jeff’s felony evasion down to a misdemeanor joyriding for a county lid. A county lid was one year in the Los Angeles County Jail rather than the prison sentence that the felony could have carried. Jeff did seven months actual time on the sentence and always felt that a better, more expensive attorney could have gotten him a better deal. This time around, the stakes were much higher and he had hired a top attorney. The charge was murder in the second degree and Jeff was facing LWOP or life without parole.

His attorney was Thomas The Devil Devlin. Tom Devlin was an extremely slick customer and he was expensive, very expensive. Jeff had sold a lot of meth to pay his legal fees and he had borrowed from the brotherhood as well. Tom Devlin hadn’t even raised an eyebrow when a heavily tattooed skinhead dropped by his office with a cash retainer in a duffle bag on Jeff’s behalf. Tom was used to that sort of thing and it made cheating on his taxes that much easier. Tom had been exemplary in this trial, worth every penny of the exorbitant fee. Jeff sat patiently to Tom’s right as the jury came into the courtroom to take their seats. Throughout the whole trial, Tom had positioned himself to slightly block the jury’s view of his client so that they never got a good look at Jeff, his disguised swastika and crappy suit. Whenever Tom had stood to question a witness or deliver an argument, his pure showmanship and charisma made him the focus of attention. Perfect white teeth, rich baritone, and immaculately tailored Armani suits were the capstone of the Devlin look and feel. Honestly, the jury never really looked that hard at Jeff. The whole trial had been the Tom Devlin Show.

Looking down from the bench, the Honorable Judge James Bartholomew Winters watched the jury file into the box. His eyes moved and he appraised the players in the courtroom before him. Tom Devlin had stood as the bailiff led the jury into the courtroom. He had known Tom for many years and he hated him. Too slick, too unscrupulous, and just too damn good really. Jim Winters had been a prosecutor back in the day and had lost a number of cases