by Bobby Nash
As promised, the food was spectacular. Grilled salmon on a bed of whole grain rice with butter and a small side of mashed potatoes in mushroom gravy and garlic roasted thin green beans. Delicious.
The woman’s name was Mary. Or was it Marie? He honestly couldn’t remember exactly and, truthfully, it didn’t matter. He had learned that she was a recent graduate of Georgia Tech and was working for an engineering firm in Atlanta. Once the drinks started coming, most of the conversation became a blur. He remembered that she said something about being single, had no children, and was a big fan of his books.
He’d hit the pussy trifecta. He knew all he needed to know about her. Anything beyond that was simply extraneous trivia.
They talked for a while about his books. She had a lot of questions about the stories and he answered them as best he could. A few times, she had to remind him of minute details that he had forgotten from the earlier books. Whenever he would misremember a detail, he pointed out that he had not read the books since they were being written and that sometimes the stories ran together for him.
It wasn’t a lie. He had gone over the manuscript for each book so many times that he was so sick and tired of Archer Chase and his exploits that he could vomit. If it weren’t for the opportunities the books presented and the nice royalty checks he received twice a year, he would have had one of the villains put a bullet in the character’s brain after the second book.
But that might just halt the gravy train and neither he nor his publisher was quite ready for that yet so Archer Chase lived to fight another day.
There was only one hitch in the evening. He could have sworn he saw the man from the bookstore, his old friend who had given him his business card sitting at the restaurant’s bar. After several drinks, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was the same guy, but if it was, he hoped the man hadn’t seen him, but he knew he couldn’t be that lucky. The man kept staring at him throughout his meal.
When his companion excused herself to go to the bathroom, Kilgallon decided that enough was enough. He had been as polite as decorum allowed, but that was it. Acquaintance or not, it was time to send the man on his way. He headed over to the bar to give the guy a piece of his mind. No matter that they had known one another way back when, but following him bordered on the ridiculous. He didn’t owe this guy anything.
He got to the bar and was surprised to find that the guy was gone. Assuming he had scared him off, Kilgallon ordered another drink and returned to his table and waited for the girl, what was her name again? to return from powdering her nose.
After the meal, he invited Mary, or whatever her name was, back to his hotel. He really wasn’t surprised when she said yes. He paid for dinner and had the limo take them back to the hotel where his publisher had put him up. Four stars all the way.
Alone in the glass elevator at the Atlanta Marriott, they began tearing off one another’s clothes, not worrying who saw them. By the time they reached his door on the fourteenth floor they were almost naked. A trail of clothing led from the door toward the center of the room.
They didn’t even make it to the bed.
Trying to pull off his pants over his shoe, he lost his balance and instead of fighting gravity, eased himself down to the floor.
Giggling, she joined him, hiking up her leather skirt and straddling him. He was surprised to see that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
They made mad passionate love on the floor of his hotel room. At least he hoped they did. That’s how it felt, but he also understood that he’d had a lot to drink. Luckily, he enjoyed drunk, messy sex too.
An hour later he moved to the bed when the girl - what the hell is her name? - removed her knee-high boots, which was all she had been wearing while they rutted around like energetic teenagers, and went to take a shower. One of the few things he had asked of her was to keep the sexy leather boots on during their lovemaking. He found them exciting and she was all too happy to comply with his request.
She had invited him to join her in the shower, but he told her he would need a minute to catch his breath first. The downside to having sex with women almost half his age was stamina.
They had it.
He didn’t. At least not so much as he once did.
And things had gotten going so fast that he had not had time to take his little blue friend before they got started.
He lay there until his heart rate returned to normal, which happened sooner than he had anticipated. He smiled and felt himself growing more excited. He rolled out of bed and decided that maybe he would take her up on her shower offer after all.
He stepped into the bathroom and felt the steam on his sweat-covered skin.
“Hey, babe,” he said playfully. “You still want me to join you in there?”
No answer.
“I could wash those--” he smiled. “--hard to reach areas.”
Still nothing.
He opened the door.
“Hello? You okay in there?”
She stood there, staring at him from the shower. Her skin was pink from the heat of the water turned on at its highest temperature. Her wet hair stuck to her face as rivulets of water ran down her body, winding around her luscious curves.
If it weren’t for her eyes, he would have found the moment intoxicating. Her eyes were downcast, almost closed to slits. Gone were the twinkling brilliant blue orbs that he had stared into earlier in the day.
“Are you okay?” he asked, genuinely concerned.
She said nothing, which worried him. She had been quite the talker during dinner.
“Hold on,” he said, heading back toward the room. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
“No.”
“What?”
She had spoken so softly that he barely heard her.
“No. No ambulance.”
“Are you okay? Did you take something? Pills? X? What?”
One corner of her lip tried to curl into a smile, but failed. It was disturbing.
John had enough. The last thing he needed was a headline in the morning papers about a young woman O.D.ing in his hotel room. He hadn’t seen her take anything, but she had been in the bathroom for awhile so who knew what she might have had tucked away in her purse. He was usually very good at reading people. She had not seemed the type. He generally tried to avoid drug users because he had never dealt with one that didn’t end with some kind of drama that he really didn’t need in his life.
He had to get her out of there and fast.
“Wait,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Kilgallon turned just in time to see the hotel room’s iron arcing toward him.
Instinctively he ducked, but wasn’t fast enough. The iron connected with the side of his head with tremendous force, knocking him off balance and sending the world around him into a dizzying tailspin.
He fell back against the sink, his feet slipping on the wet tile and sending him all the way to the floor, lodged between the sink and the toilet. He winced as his ribs struck the hard porcelain of the toilet. He was wedged in pretty good and had trouble finding balance to pull himself up.
The woman who had been so gentle and loving just minutes earlier stepped out of the shower, water cascading off her naked body like a waterfall. She lifted the iron again and brought it down on him before he could scream.
Then she hit him again.
And again.
She only stopped when there came a knock at the door. Blood dripping from the iron clutched tightly in her white-knuckled hand, she looked at the door as if she wasn’t sure what to do next. On the second knock, she walked over to the door with the iron still in her hand, a small trail of blood marking her path on the hotel carpet. She took a second to peer through the peephole and then, without a word or modesty, opened the door.
John Kilgallon tried to get to his feet, but he was dizzy and bleeding. Plus, the fall had wrenched his back. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to stand even if she hadn’t attacked him.
>
Blood poured down his face from a cut on his forehead, pooling around his eyes, getting into his mouth, and dripping onto his chest. He tried to staunch the blood flow with one of the washcloths stacked on the sink, but with little success. From his vantage point on the bathroom floor, he could see the door from the hallway open, light from the hallway pushing into the room.
He was not surprised when the man from the book signing and the restaurant, his old friend, stepped into the room.
“Hello, John,” the Controller said.
Of course, Kilgallon knew him by another name.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Kilgallon wheezed, spitting blood with each syllable.
The Controller stepped into the bathroom and knelt in front of the author, keeping an arm’s length between them. He was arrogant, but not stupid.
“I thought you and I should have a little chat,” he said.
“A chat?” Kilgallon barked a pained laugh. “Are you kidding me? You’re fuckin’ insane! Get out of here! Now, before I call security!”
The controller looked around the bathroom. There wasn’t a phone in sight.
“And just how are you going to do that, John?”
“I… uh…”
“Still a master of the obvious, I see. A shame. I would have hoped you might have learned how to string a few words together in the correct order. After all, you are supposed to be a writer, are you not?”
“Fuck you!”
“I’m guessing Michael Connelly doesn’t have much to worry about in the way of competition, huh? You’re supposed to be a man of words, John. Where’s your vaunted vocabulary now? Can’t you come up with something better than ‘fuck you’? Man, you are pathetic.”
The author stared daggers at the man, his body shaking in a combination of rage and pain, but John Kilgallon said nothing.
The Controller shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh well.”
He stood.
“I just wanted to stop by in person, what with our being old friends and all, to say goodbye. Unlike the others, I actually felt a bond with you. I’m not sure why, though. Maybe you were just charming enough to win me over. Or maybe the idea of rubbing your nose in it was just too tempting. Who knows?”
“What are you talking about, you maniac?”
“That was always your problem, John. You never thought anything through long term. You were in it for the instant gratification.” He turned to look at the naked woman standing nearby and cocked an eyebrow. “I guess some things never change, eh?”
The Controller smiled, but there was no amusement in it.
“You know, I was tempted to take care of you personally, a reward for my persistence, but I thought you might appreciate a demonstration before the end. I figured I owed you at least that much.”
“Demonstration?” Kilgallon asked, confused.
“I’ve done it, John. Finally, after all this time I succeeded where we had failed so many times in the past.”
“You…” the blood drained from the former CIA agent’s face as he finally put the pieces together. “You made it… work?”
The Controller smiled and nodded.
“No.”
“You bet your ass,” the Controller whispered.
“Blood Shot,” John Kilgallon gasped.
“Blood Shot works, John,” The Controller said as he stepped out of the bathroom.
The woman with the iron stood as still as a statue. She did not move, did not blink, or even flinch when the man ran a gloved finger across her exposed breast. Kilgallon could not believe his eyes.
“How?” It was the only question he could think to ask.
“And you said it couldn’t be done.”
“Impossible. I… But it… it di… didn’t work.”
“And yet,” he pointed toward the woman standing beside him, water pooling around her bare feet on the cold tile. She was still holding the iron, but her eyes remained as lifeless as they had in the shower. There was nobody left at home in there.
“Doesn’t this seem even a little familiar to you?” the Controller asked. When the author shook his head, he let out a derisive snort. “No? Really, John, I must admit I’m disappointed. You wrote a scene just like this in Requiem for Blood, remember? The villain used his mind-altering device to make a high class call girl kill Archer Chase’s best friend after they had sex in his hotel room. I thought it was one of the more believable scenarios in all of your novels. And I know some of those plots were based on actual events, as they say in the commercials. Not that you could use that tag without someone stepping on you, huh?”
John Kilgallon stared blankly at the man he thought he knew, but obviously did not. The man had always been arrogant, but to have made it work… His eyes went wide with fear as the realization that he truly had not known the man as well as he thought set in. Until that moment he had expected to find a way out of this mess, but suddenly he doubted he would ever see another sunrise. Of course, he pondered a macabre thought. My books are about to sell like hotcakes now.
“I thought you would appreciate the symmetry,” the Controller said. “But I guess not. Too bad.”
“You’re insane.”
“No,” the Controller said softly. “I’m a visionary. I just wanted to let you know that it was me that did it. Me! I could have done this from a thousand miles away, but I just couldn’t deny myself the satisfaction of seeing you die with my own eyes, asshole.”
“Bullshit,” Kilgallon said, spitting blood. He tried to get to his feet so he could show the little prick he wasn’t afraid of him, but unfortunately, his muscles refused to cooperate.
“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m going to miss you, John.”
“No,” the writer begged. He knew his time was up. “Please.”
“It’s a shame, you know.”
“What is?”
“I really did enjoy your novels. Then again, you always were good for spinning fiction from fact.”
“You bastard,” he barked.
“Good bye, John.”
The Controller pulled a gun from his jacket pocket and with his gloved hand screwed on a silencer as the wounded author watched, unable to lift himself off the floor, helpless to save his own life. Once the silencer was attached, he handed the gun to the woman without looking at her. She accepted it without a word.
“Take care of Mr. Kilgallon, please.”
“Of course,” she whispered in a soft robotic monotone.
Her nose began to bleed.
“And when you’re finished, please take the gun and splatter your brains across that wall,” the Controller said, pointing to the wall across from the bed. “We want to make a big statement here.”
“As you wish.”
The woman whose name Kilgallon still could not recall stood over him and pointed the gun directly at his head. Her hand was rock steady. There wasn’t even a hint of nervousness.
The author tried to plead for his life, but it was no use. He knew there was no way he was going to get out of this one. Only fictional heroes like Archer Chase caught those last second lucky breaks that would ultimately save his life and thwart the villain.
And though it pained him to admit it, John Kilgallon was no Archer Chase.
She pulled the trigger.
John Kilgallon didn’t have time to scream before his brain exploded.
Watching from beside the door, the Controller let out a small, derisive snort.
“Good seeing you again, John,” he said as he stepped out into the hallway.
As he closed the door behind him, the Controller heard the faint whisper of the silencer one more time as Mary Lynn Seger ended her own life.
The Controller couldn’t help but smile.
“I love my job,” he said as he headed toward the elevator.
Twenty-seven
Washington DC
Sunday
The situation went from bad to worse rather quickly.
&nb
sp; Samantha Patterson and her ex-husband, Ted Brown, were like oil and water. No matter what one said, the other either made a comment, gesture, or remark that irked the other, which dovetailed into yet another argument between them.
The detectives tried to keep them quiet, but Catherine Jackson knew they were fighting a losing battle. The incessant fighting was an annoyance and it was getting them nowhere fast. She needed to separate them so that Ted Brown would continue to cooperate.
Finally, she asked Agent Patterson to step outside.
Reluctantly, Sam agreed and left the conference room.
As a precaution, Detective Walker went out with her after a silent head nod from his partner. Once they were alone with Ted Brown, the interview went far more smoothly. They went through everything again and Jacks believed his story. There was nothing about the situation that made her think he was being anything but honest and straightforward.
She also knew that his heart was broken. The way he spoke about Sarah, Jacks knew he had fallen in love. He was having a hard enough time reconciling everything going on as it was, but adding his ex-wife on top of that did not help matters in the least. Patterson had told her that she still cared for her ex, but somehow little things that shouldn’t have been a big deal managed to spark a confrontation.
Family could push buttons the way no one else could.
Jacks understood this all too well and remembered that she still had to have a heart to heart with her family very soon before Charisma ran away for good. She hated the fact that the momentum of the case had distracted her from the family squabble that demanded her attention. Peace between Mavis and Charisma needed to be restored quickly.
After going through Ted Brown’s statement again, Jacks decided to take a short break to allow her witness time to collect himself. He was visibly shaken by what had happened to his girlfriend. Having his ex-wife within his line of sight wasn’t helping matter either. Jacks stepped out into the hallway to talk with her partner and Agent Patterson, who were leaning against a small table and the wall, respectively.
