Swastika by Michael Slade Read Free Book Online Page A

struggling youth, stripped from the waist down, was strapped to a table. His ankles were chained to hooks screwed into the far corners. Between his splayed legs stood a Totenkopf guard with what appeared to be long-handled bolt cutters.
    “Mutter!” beseeched the about-to-be eunuch.
    That earned him another sneer.
    “Only Red Ivans believe in a Mother land,” scoffed the general.
    *    *    *
     
    The slave who had etched the tattoos over Fritz’s and Hans’s hearts was a French prisoner of war at Dora-Mittelbau. The SS general had designed different crests for his two sons, and the POW had been forced at gunpoint to engrave them exactly as sketched. Streicher himself had held the pistol to ensure that the only witnesses to the tattooing were him, his sons, and the captured navy artist. As soon as both inkings were done to his satisfaction, the general passed the Walther to Fritz and said, “Seal our secret.”
    Bwam!
    Without hesitating, Fritz blew the Frenchman’s brains all over the wall portrait of Adolf Hitler.
    *    *    *
     
    Now, the cold moon shone down on the Nazis’ Fatherland while packs of marauding Werewolves prowled and howled in the night.
    Down in the Führerbunker , fifty-five feet underground, Fritz was itching to go out and kill for Adolf Hitler.
    But first, this honor.
    Not every man gets to meet God on this side of the grave.

Stealth Killer
     
    Vancouver
    May 24, Now
    In the newspaper business, battles are waged over the Story, a scramble for the Scoop. Scoop-scrambles ignite checkbook journalism. Checkbook journalism infects the newsroom too, because those reporters who land the huge Scoops find their paychecks fattened. Consequently, there are newsroom battles over the Byline.
    Byline is the name of the reporter credited on the front page with breaking the Story.
    And if the Story is Watergate—or something of similar importance—it takes only one to make your career.
    Woodward and Bernstein got the Byline for the Story that broke Watergate.
    Joe Schmo didn’t.
    Who’s Joe Schmo?
    Exactly.
    The Vancouver Times wasn’t in the same league as The New York Times or The Washington Post , but it had its Byline fights too. For the past few weeks, the paper had been running a series of articles on missing down-and-outers who might be unknown victims of foul play. All had been on the streets one day and were gone the next, as was common with transients who pass through this city’s skid road and along its prostitute strolls. The impetus for the series had come from Bess McQueen—a brassy, bleach-blonde queen bitch, in Cort Jantzen’s opinion. Jantzen and McQueen shared the crime beat at The Vancouver Times . For a piece of investigative journalism that widespread and time-intensive, they had tackled divergent angles and shared the Byline—until yesterday.
Disposable People
By Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen
     
    The “high track” stroll on Seymour Street is run by pimps and organized crime. The “low track” stroll on the Downtown Eastside is for women who will turn a trick for the price of their next fix. The “kiddie stroll” on Commercial Drive has runaway girls as young as twelve working the sex trade. And “boy’s town” at the end of Homer Street caters to men who want sex with teenage males.
    Are they disposable people? Those prostitutes who have been forced by poverty, sexual abuse, alienation at home, bullying at school, and drug addiction into a dead-end life of victimization on our meanest streets? And if foul play should claim their lives, do we view them as less dead? …
     
    That first story in the series had been followed by other McQueen-Jantzen joint bylines:
Does the Criminal Code Kill Hookers?
By Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen
     
    On the street, perverts can be as cruel as they want to be.
    It used to be that sex-trade workers did business in rooming houses. Back then, hookers walking the stroll knew there was a hotel they could safely use within