Blaze of Glory

by Weston Ochse

  "Are you kidding?"

  "Nope."

  They were interrupted by a knock. Kumi opened the door and spoke with someone in hushed tones.

  Rebecca waited, realizing for the first time that she probably did have a future. The money was a nice stake and would be a terrific help getting her back on track. After Kumi's reintroduction, Rebecca could even find a job. There had to be some lo-tech work that suited her.

  The room looked like it belonged in a cheap hotel. An orange sofa sat against one wall. A table and two chairs had been arranged by a curtained window. Although thread-bare and gauche, the furnishings were more opulent than anything she'd been allowed to use during her incarceration. Her Spartan cell had been a perfect merging of metal and cinderblock—effective, easy to keep clean, and about as comforting as stone and metal could be.

  The pièce de résistance of the room was a large velvet painting of dogs sitting around a table playing poker as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. When Kumi had prepared the reintroduction room for her, she'd found a reference to this painting in Rebecca's files and placed it here. The painting had been her brother's, something she'd given him for his birthday. He'd placed it in his den as a reminder for all things wonderful, sometimes gazing at it as he drank scotch long into the night. She'd never really understood the imagery. She'd only known that the painting had made him happy.

  Now, looking at the velvet picture of the dogs playing poker gave her strength. She remembered a saying that her brother had been fond of—If dogs can play poker then I can rule the world. Of course he never had ruled the world. Before she'd been incarcerated, the best he'd managed to do was sell used computers over the Internet and auction video tapes that he'd found at garage sales, but the sentiment was no less grand.

  Rebecca turned as she heard the door close. Kumi walked slowly back to her, her forlorn gaze losing focus midway between them. Where a smile had lit her face just moments before, a frown now darkened her features, bringing with it the harsh edges of dread. Kumi stopped in front of Rebecca. She held her hands out in front of her, empty and clutching. Her eyes tried to find the right place to gaze at Rebecca's face.

  "What's wrong, Kumi?" Rebecca asked.

  Kumi breathed twice, each exhalation a sigh. "It's your brother," she said at last.

  "David? I was hoping you'd tracked him down..." Her voice trailed off as she finally acknowledged the agonized emotions in the young woman's face. Rebecca grabbed Kumi's hands. "What's wrong? What's happened?"

  "The medics found him in his flat," she said, her voice low. "They called it a stroke."

  "A stroke?"

  "His brain filled with blood. There was nothing they could do," Kumi said evenly. "Even the donor squads were too late to save him."

  "When did it happen?" A pit yawned open in Rebecca's chest.

  "An hour ago."

  She felt sick to her stomach. "What caused it?"

  "They don't know."

  "How could he have a stroke?" Rebecca felt her mind swirling around thoughts of her brother. She remembered when he'd been five, then ten. She remembered him at her trial and the miserable look on his face. She remembered that she hadn't been allowed to speak with him since. "He's only forty. What happened to him, Kumi? Why him? Why now?"

  SPECIAL SNEAK PREVIEW

  MIRROR ME

  By Yvonne Navarro

  Prologue

  The things they did in the dark to the baby were unspeakable. The older one had been watching crime shows on television, and so he knew about things like fingerprints and bits of skin that might be found under fingernails. It was high summer in the poorer part of Cicero, Illinois, hot and green, and beneath the heavy, pre-thunderstorm clouds and the whine of insects buzzing in the humid air, everything around the yard was open—the garage, the rickety gardening shed, the side door to the house. They’d gone scavenging in secret and picked up things like a couple of sets of dirty gardening gloves, rusty trimming shears, a hand-sized hoe fork, a partially used roll of duct tape and a flashlight from the garage. Then, while the mother was in back hanging the wash on the line—trying to save electricity and keep the ancient dryer from dumping more heat into the small, shabby house— they went into the house and took the eighteen month old girl from her crib.

  And when they saw that the mother had left the five year old girl to watch over the toddler…

  Well, they took her, too.

  Nineteen Years Later

  Friday—September 29th…

  He is waiting for the woman in the hallway of her building when she gets home. It is, he thinks, as if the universe has conspired to make this, his little act of revenge, easy for him. The building where she lives is an old brick three flat and her apartment is on the second floor, but he is not concerned with that. What he does find helpful is the foyer, which is shallow but wide, with a deep, handy “blind spot’ on each side of an entry door that only has glass in the top half and bears a lock that is pathetically easy for him to slip. There are heavily frosted windows to each side of the door, but they aren’t wide enough to cause any problem—he can easily stand beyond where his shadow might show against the outside glass.

  His emotions are a mixture of cool calculation and anger…no, rage. It expands and contracts inside him like a red spider working long, prickly legs every time he hears the words she said to him on the telephone that last time—

  “Listen, you lying son of a bitch, because this is the last time I’m going to tell you this. Don’t call me, don’t talk to me, don’t even think about me. If I pick up the phone and it’s you just one more time, I’m going to call the police. They’ll take care of you once and for all.”

  —and then the red spider inside him actually bites down, filling him with venom at the memory of the final words she said before she slammed down the phone—

  “I don’t know you, and I don’t want to. You are one sick fuck.”

  No, he thinks as the door opens and she comes inside, you don’t know me at all. The door eases shut behind her and she is looking toward the mailboxes on the west side of the foyer, so she doesn’t see where he waits a few feet away, like a giant, silent version of the vicious spider inside his mind. There will be a second or two when the spider, this dark, vengeful side of himself, is visible to all in the window of the entry door, but that cannot be helped. The mailboxes have doorbells below each and he must move her to avoid the chance that she will slap her hand against one of them as he performs his task.

  Keys in hand, she is reaching for her own mailbox when he darts forward and clamps his left hand hard across her mouth. Her keys drop as he drags her backward and spins her toward the interior entry, bending low to avoid the window in the door behind him, using her body weight and momentum to slam her against the wall on the opposite side. There is a narrow wooden table there and the jarring movement bounces it away from the wall and leaves an eighteen inch space; she is too stunned to resist as he forces her to bend over the tabletop, pressing against her from behind as he shoves her head and shoulders down and into the gap, keeping her pinned against the wall. He lets go of the back of her head, quickly reaches into the deep right pocket of his black windbreaker, and brings out his weapon. The knife is a beautiful K2K Folder with a drop point and a serrated edge, slightly more than two and a half inches of deadly stainless steel blade. Revenge would be, as they say, a much sweeter thing if he had the time to enjoy it; he does not and so without wasting any more movement he reaches under her neck and draws the blade left to right across her throat.

  She thrashes and goes deeper into the space, voiceless, and he holds her there, keeping the spray of blood directed toward the left outside corner of the foyer and away from his clothes, sees it splatter against the wall like an abstract scarlet painting. Warmth covers his hand, seeping through the heavy latex glove he’s stretched up and over his wrist to protect the cuff of his windbreaker. When her struggling stops, he lets her fall, not caring about the awkward positio
n of her body or the leather purse that drops to the side of it. He backs away, pleased when he sees that he hasn’t stepped in any blood and so he won’t have to use the bottle of ammonia in his other pocket to wash away any footprints. There is an arc of ruby colored liquid climbing across the wall and ending midway on the east pane of frosted glass, so he wipes the blade of his knife with the gloved, bloodied fingers of his left hand and puts it away, then reaches up with his right and loosens the dim, bare bulb overhead.

  The foyer drops into darkness and he stands at the door for a moment, studying the sidewalk out front. It is dark and comforting, lined with thick-leafed maples that rustle in the pleasant fall evening and scatter the already weak glow of the overhead streetlights. No one is out there and he quietly pushes the door open and slips onto the porch, quickly stripping the latex gloves inside out and pocketing them before descending the stairs and strolling, unconcerned, to where he’s parked his car beneath the elevated train tracks only a block to the west

  The trauma team at Illinois Masonic Medical Center was waiting when the Chicago Fire Department ambulance, lights flashing and siren screaming, careened into the driveway and lurched to a stop beneath the protective overhang at the entrance to the emergency room. The men and women—two doctors and two trauma nurses—were experienced and capable, and no one among them had been with the group for less than a year, plus they’d gotten a heads up from the driver, so they all knew what was coming, had all the equipment ready.

  That she was alive, still, was a shock.

  “Female, early twenties, knife wound to the throat!” one of the EMTs shouted as he and his partner propelled the Gurney out of the back of the bus and into the half dozen reaching hands. There was blood everywhere, and beneath an oxygen mask the victim’s face was as white as the marble cross that hung in the chapel in another wing of Illinois Masonic. Over the past several years, Dr. Ireta Tansey had seen that cross many times, too many, and she had also seen this young woman before.

  “Ready the suture tray,” Dr. Tansey ordered. As the patient was rushed into the ER, she paused only long enough to shoot a question back to the paramedics who stood stripping off blood-soaked gloves and looking disgusted at the mess inside their vehicle. “ID?”

  The older one jerked his head toward a police car swinging over to the curb at street level. “Randall’s got it.”

  The doctor gave a crisp nod. “Tell him to bring it in, stat. This girl’s been here before and we can look up her records, save time on the blood type.”

  He turned and headed toward the cop as she slammed back through the ER doors and followed the trail of blood into chaos.

  The trauma team had put the woman in the crash room, on the right and closest to the entrance. Everyone was moving at once, juggling IVs, hooking up blood pressure and pulse sensors, hands changing off holding a wad of scarlet soaked gauze in place over the gaping, happy mouth of a wound that nearly circled her throat as tasks were switched back and forth.

  “Pulse is fifty nine, respiration is steady, and blood pressure is holding at…one-twenty over seventy?” Jeremy, one of the trauma nurses, scowled. “What the—that can’t be right!”

  Before the doctor could make her way up to the examination table, everyone in the room just… stopped. And stared.

  “Move your asses, people,” Dr. Tansey snapped as she strode forward. “Unless you want this girl to bleed to death in front of you!”

  “I don’t think so, doctor,” said Camila, the other nurse. Still, at least the others were moving again, if only to step forward and peer at the ivory-skinned girl lying quietly on the table. The other doctor, a young man named Sajag Bharat, looked back and forth from the monitors to the patient, then cautiously lifted his gloved hand from her throat. It came away filled with sopping red gauze, but there was no fresh red pulse behind the material. “She’s stopped bleeding on her own.”

  “What?” Dr. Tansey scooted in closer and leaned over the victim. The cut on her throat was fresh and deep, the edges separated enough to show muscle and the thin, creamier colored layer of adipose tissue. If it hadn’t been for the steady beep beep beep of the heart monitor, Tansey would have thought the girl was dead—at least that would have explained the abrupt halt of the blood flow.

  “Her name is Hannah Danior,” the charge nurse called from the doorway. Dr. Tansey glanced over and saw the older woman flipping rapidly through a bunch of cards obviously just handed to her by a policeman a few feet away. “Here—she’s got an IM card. I can pull up her data on the computer.” She shoved the rest of the cards back into the policeman’s hands and disappeared down the hallway.

  Dr. Tansey straightened, feeling the gazes of the rest of the team. She knew what to do next, of course, but for the first time in her career she couldn’t explain what had just happened on the examination table in front of her.

  “Maybe it wasn’t as deep as we thought,” Jeremy suggested. He sounded as unconvinced as she was, but at least it gave them all something to grasp, a lifeline in the midst of inexplicability.

  Dr. Tansey stared at the young woman, her eyes narrowing. Yeah, even without the records pulled up, she remembered this patient. It had been awhile, back in the spring perhaps, but recollections like that didn’t die easily in someone trained to hang onto the most minute of details, and when she brushed the girl’s hair away from her jaw line, the doctor’s memory was confirmed.

  “Stitch her up,” she said abruptly. She pulled off her gloves and tossed them into the waste receptacle, then pushed back the strands of streaked blond hair that had fallen across her own forehead. “Make sure she’s stable and have her transferred…into the psych wing.”

  “Welcome to another exciting Friday night.”

  As he climbed the steps of the apartment building, Detective Greg Jedrek raised one eyebrow at the nearly light-hearted sound of his partner’s voice. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad, he thought…then again, a homicide was a homicide, and what could ever be good about something like that? When Greg didn’t say anything in response, Tony Rutland regarded him impassively. The blue bubble lights atop the three squad cars parked in front cut across Tony’s face at half second intervals. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Got my taste of that Friday night spirit you’re so excited about,” Greg retorted. “It’s called DePaul traffic. Must’ve spent fifteen minutes stuck on Fullerton between Clark and Lincoln—nobody gives a damn about lights and a siren anymore.”

  Tony nodded, then stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. He jerked his head toward the porch of a small brick apartment building at the end of the short walkway behind him, where a couple of uniformed cops stood unhappily flanking the entrance. Dim light bled out of the doorway and lit two murkily textured windows on either side of the door; something dark was streaked in a semi-circle across the one on the left. “Well, wait’ll you get an eyeful of what’s up there,” he said as he ran a hand through his hair. “I bet it makes you wish you were still sitting on Fullerton and listening to the radio.”

  Greg bit back a sharp reply and shouldered past the older man, who made no move to follow. “Aren’t you coming?” Greg finally asked as he paused on the last step.

  Tony shook his head and one corner of his mouth turned up in a vaguely cruel smirk. “No, thanks. I’ve already seen enough to make me blow dinner. Your turn, farm boy. Enjoy.”

  Greg turned back toward the entrance to the building and said nothing despite his annoyance. What was the use in arguing? Some people were just how they were. Tony wasn’t that much older than him but he’d been on the job here in Chicago a lot longer, had been exposed to levels of brutality that Greg would readily admit hadn’t been found in his hometown of Grinnell, Iowa. Maybe it was the job that had made Tony the way he was, a young guy who radiated the same emotionally dead spirit that Greg had so despised in his own father. In a comparison like that, Tony came out the winner—at least he had a reason for the way he was; Boyd Jedrek had made a lifetime c
areer out of turning away from his wife and children, fine tuning the art of cold-shouldering his loved ones.

  The beat cops by the door nodded to him and stepped aside as Greg moved toward the entry door. He frowned when he saw it was open but there were no telltales smears of print dust on it.

  “Evidence techs are on the way,” one of the uniforms told him before he could ask. “I don’t know what they’ll be able to salvage, though—the lady who lives on the third floor found the victim, said she had her hand all over that knob when she opened the door. The light was out, too, but she reached up and tapped it with her newspaper and it came on. That’s when…” He shrugged.

  “Damn it,” Greg muttered under his breath. Louder, he said, “What else?”

  The older of the two took a deep breath. “Female, middle twenties. We can’t tell from the position of the body, but the amount of blood makes it look like her throat was cut. Her clothes are intact and her purse is still inside.” He jerked his head toward Tony, still standing and smoking calmly at the foot of the porch. “Rutland already snapped a couple of Polaroids, but nobody’s moved anything.”

  “The woman upstairs—she found her?”

  The policeman nodded. “The victim’s name is Eloise Addison. The neighbor was a friend of hers, so she’s pretty freaked. Couple of the guys are up there with her now. Rutland said you’d do the interview.”

  Greg nodded. Yeah, Tony would have left it to his softie partner to question the crying witness—which was fine with Greg. If there was ever a classic good cop/bad cop twosome, they sure filled it; too bad they didn’t actually get along and make it a perfect match. “I’ll get to her in a minute,” he said, and toed open the door.

  As places to off someone went, this had been a good choice—very little visible from the outside and plenty of space to work with inside. He watched where he was stepping, but the killer had made a clean exit and there were no footprints to worry about. On the floor beneath the mailboxes was a set of keys, and it didn’t take much brainpower to guess the victim had been about to open her mailbox when she’d been grabbed from behind. He could see a line of envelopes behind the slots of the box marked ADDISON. She hadn’t made it that far and had probably been grabbed and pulled to the other side so she couldn’t ring any of the bells.