TWIN KILLER MYSTERY THRILLER BOX SET (Two full-length novels)

by Osborne, Jon

  I pause and lift my eyebrows again. “Real nice tits, though.”

  The black guy rounds his eyes in surprise. For several long moments, he looks as though he’s thinking of attacking me. But when he sees the cold, dead look residing in my own freezing green eyes, he immediately thinks better of it.

  So, instead of attacking me physically, the black guy simply flips me off with both of his middle fingers before following Dinah Leach out of the crowded bar. Fake bravado, of course, but at least he has sense enough to leave it at that.

  I shake my head and curse the inconvenience of it all as I watch the black guy stalk his mark out of the crowded nightclub. No matter how much time and effort you put into these sorts of things, murder was never an easy feat to accomplish, was it?

  Not logistically, at least.

  I remind myself to stay calm. No doubt the black guy with the ridiculous teeth in his mouth has a little bit of nonconsensual sex with Dinah Leach out in the parking lot on his mind right about now, but that isn’t going to happen. Not tonight, anyway. Not on my watch.

  My mother wouldn’t have liked that one bit.

  Finally trailing the black man toward the exit and out of the club, I keep no more than fifteen feet behind him the entire way, rolling my neck on my narrow shoulders to loosen up the muscles as I go, knowing I’ll need to act fast here.

  This was it. Show time. Time to clear this unexpected obstacle from my path so that the main festivities could finally get under way. Grunt work, really.

  Nevertheless, work that needs to be done.

  The wind has already started to pick up outside, blowing various bits of garbage and other debris around the surprisingly empty parking lot. Little bits of dust kick up into my face and sting my eyes, making them water profusely. Still, I’m actually happy to welcome the first signs of my accomplice.

  From all indications, Hurricane Allison is definitely on her way.

  When we reach a blind spot around the corner of the building twenty seconds later, I pick up my pace and remove the .45 from the inside pocket of my Armani blazer before stopping less than a foot behind the black guy.

  Flicking off the safety, I glance around quickly to make sure no one’s watching me. I don’t want an audience for this, after all. Not yet, anyway.

  Seeing that the coast is clear, I lift the gun to the base of the black man’s skull and pull the trigger once, timing the action perfectly to coincide with a loud crash of thunder overhead.

  The “O.G.” immediately crumples to the ground like a bag of dropped bricks, his backward-facing Atlanta Falcons baseball cap flying off his head as he tumbles to the ground. Blood rushes out of his shattered skull and onto the blacktopped pavement before pooling at my feet. Bits of white bone and gray brain matter spray onto the sidewalk in front of us.

  Stepping over the shimmering pool, I lean down to examine the lifeless body. No need for a second shot, that much seems clear. The man’s already deader than a doornail.

  Putting away my gun, I check my pulse by placing two fingers against my throat. My heart rate hadn’t risen above a hundred the entire time I’d been killing the other man, and I’m gratified to realize this. My hands are still steady; my palms still dry. The evenness of my breath makes even me wonder what I’ve just done.

  Turning away from him, I walk quickly back around the corner of the building and catch one last glimpse of my quarry before she leaves the parking lot.

  Fifty yards away, Dinah Leach is just getting inside her silver BMW for her fifteen-minute drive home; blissfully unaware of the fact that I’d just saved her from what most likely would have been a very brutal rape. The self-absorbed moron is much too closed off in her own little world to notice anything going on around her, though. Much too consumed with her own insignificant little life to sense the danger I represent, completely confident in the knowledge that nothing can ever hurt her.

  After all, she’s famous, right?

  I purse my lips as I watch Dinah Leach drive away into the darkness; infinitely pleased that she’s decided to leave the nightclub earlier than usual. Normally, she’d have stayed out until the early-morning hours dancing her ghetto booty off, but tonight she’s obviously in a great big hurry to beat the storm home.

  I close my eyes and luxuriate in the feeling of the bracing wind on my face. For a brief moment, I almost feel sorry for Dinah Leach as the wind picks up even more and flutters my perfectly tailored blazer wildly around my trim waist. No matter how hard you tried, though, you could never really beat the storm, could you? And Hurricane Allison is almost here now. I can sense her; feel her soft breath against my cheek; the moistness of her saliva in the spitting rain.

  And that was very bad news for Dinah Leach.

  Very bad news, indeed.

  Finally heading to the perfect-replica ambulance out in the parking lot that is serving as my transportation down here in Georgia – another luxury made possible by the residual checks from Timmy’s television commercials all those years ago – I prepare myself mentally to step out onto the global stage in front of the blinding floodlights, ready to give the performance of my life.

  Climbing up into the ambulance, I switch on the flashers and hit the siren before tearing away from the nightclub in a wail of screeching tires, knowing that I’ll need to hurry if I’m to beat Dinah Leach to our shared destination and follow my mother’s instructions properly, no matter what the cost.

  Once I’m finally on the highway, I glance down at my Mickey Mouse and allow myself a small smile.

  Almost time now.

  Tick, tick, tick…

  CHAPTER 33

  Head spinning from the alcohol, Dinah Leach wheeled her silver BMW onto the highway just east of Atlanta and leaned forward in her leather-covered seat, squinting ahead into the darkness.

  The night was blacker than a funeral veil already, and it matched her foul mood perfectly. According to the weather reports, Hurricane Allison was headed directly toward them now, and Dinah knew she never should’ve been out in this kind of weather in the first place. Much less drunk. Not only was it unsafe, it was absolutely pointless.

  She gritted her teeth and flipped open her cellphone before hitting the voice-activation feature. If she needed to be miserable out here, then she’d damned well have some company for the ride.

  And she knew exactly who to call.

  “Call Derrick Coleman,” she said.

  The Motorola Droid went to work dialing the number of her agent, a smooth-talking, almost heartbreakingly handsome man whom she’d first met while they’d both been studying drama at Spellman College back in the late-1980s.

  Derrick answered his phone after five rings, his deep voice booming over the car speakers via Dinah’s BlueTooth setup.

  “Dinah, baby! What’s the good word, sweetheart? What’s new and exciting in the life of my favorite reality-television star? Tell me something good, girl.”

  Dinah rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight back an insistent smile. Derrick had been her agent for the past five years now and one of her best friends for even longer than that – going on almost twenty years now, hard as that was to believe.

  Dinah widened her smile. When they’d first met, both she and Derrick had been fresh-faced teenagers hell-bent on taking the world by storm – or at least taking the world and fashioning it to suit their needs as well as they possibly could. Sometimes it seemed to her like she’d blinked and half her life had passed her by.

  “Can it, Derrick,” she said, still grinning. “I don’t have time for any of your silver-tongued charm right now, playboy. I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

  Derrick grunted. “How big of a bone are we talking about here?”

  “Ever heard of a Tyrannosaurus Rex?”

  Her agent whistled. “Damn, that’s a pretty big bone. What’s the problem, babe?”

  Dinah let out a frustrated breath. “The problem, Derrick, is that I don’t like going out every night like this,” she said. “I don’t
care if it’s good for my career or not. It’s just not natural. I’m a housewife, for God’s sake. It even says so right there in the title of my show: ‘The Real Housewives of Atlanta’. But I’m never home long enough anymore to actually be a housewife these days. You’ve always got me running around like a chicken with its damn neck cut off, and I need a break already. I’m not twenty-two anymore, you know. I don’t need to be club-hopping like this all the time.”

  She heard Derrick scribbling notes on his end of the line, no doubt finalizing the details on yet another public appearance for her to make. “I hear ya, babe,” he finally said after several long moments of scribbling. “But you do know that we’ve got to keep you in the public eye, don’t you? That’s just the way these things work. We’re trying to stretch your fifteen minutes of fame into at least twenty here – if not even longer than that. So we’ve got to ride this train as far as it’ll take us. Out of sight, out of mind and all that.”

  Dinah smirked. They’d played this game ever since college, each trying to one-up the other with competing clichés that possessed exactly opposite meanings.

  “How about absence makes the heart grow fonder?” she asked, slipping right back into the familiar game as though they’d never stopped playing at all.

  “She who hesitates is lost,” Derrick countered.

  “Look before you leap.”

  “Strike while the iron is hot.”

  “A stitch in time saves nine.”

  Derrick Coleman paused. “Dead men don’t wear plaid?”

  Dinah burst out laughing. “Ha! I win, sucker! Again. I’d say that puts the all-time score at somewhere around a billion to one, wouldn’t you? Anyway, what’s my schedule look like this week? I haven’t seen Tyree in what seems like forever now and I need some alone time with my man.”

  “Hmmn,” Derrick said. “Let me take a look here real quick.”

  While her agent shuffled through some more papers on his end of the connection, Dinah stretched her neck to the left and thought of her husband. Between his job as the starting power forward for the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and Dinah’s own job on the reality television show, spending any quality time together seemed a virtual impossibility these days. She knew that other couples had it worse than they did and that they always needed to remember to count their blessings, but she still couldn’t help resenting their busy schedules sometimes. After all, what was the point of working so hard all the time if they couldn’t enjoy the fruits of their labor together every once in a while?

  Derrick finally stopped shuffling papers. “You’ve got a book signing at Borders on Tuesday, a speech to the rotary club in Roswell on Thursday and that cancer benefit thing at the children’s hospital on Friday.”

  He paused and cleared his throat. “Speaking of the cancer benefit, Dinah, are you sure you won’t let me alert the press to the fact that you’ll be appearing at the hospital? It would look really great to the public and up your rep with all the bleeding-heart liberals out there. Probably score you a few more fans for your Facebook page, too, while you’re at it.”

  Dinah shook her head while she pulled the BMW onto the freeway just north of Buckhead just as the skies really opened and the rain began to pound even harder against her windshield – to the point where flicking on the wipers to the most powerful setting made hardly any difference at all. “No, Derrick,” she said, raising her voice to be heard clearly above the incessant whine of the wipers. “I’m not trying to cash in on my charity work; you know that. This is personal to me.”

  Her eyes misted up with the words. Ever since her and Tyree’s only child had died of leukemia three years earlier, she’d worked tirelessly to help find a cure. Still, she never felt like she was doing enough. There was always more she could do. More money she could give. More charity events she could attend.

  Derrick shifted back into friend-mode for a moment. “We all miss, Marilyn,” he said. “I hope you know that. She was an absolute angel.”

  Dinah wiped at her misty eyes with the back of her left hand. Between the tears coming from her eyes and the waterworks coming down from the heavens, it was almost impossible to see anything on the road in front of her.

  “Yeah, she was an angel, Derrick,’ she said, sighing softly with the words. “She was an absolute angel sent to me directly from God. And I know that she’s always watching over me from up there. As a matter of fact, I can feel her watching over me right now.”

  She paused and swallowed away a huge dry lump from her throat. “Anyway, it’s raining cats and dogs out here, D, so I need to let you go. I need to concentrate on driving.”

  “How far away from home are you?”

  Dinah squinted through the windshield again. Almost as if on cue, a bright flash of lighting exploded overhead, allowing her to catch a quick glimpse of a green exit sign on the side of the highway. Maverick Road.

  “Only about five miles now,” she said. “But at the rate I’m going I’ll be lucky if it only takes me twenty more years from this point.”

  Derrick clucked his tongue. “That really sucks, girl, but better you than me, I suppose. Anyway, be careful out there, OK? I’d really hate for anything to happen to my favorite client.”

  Dinah twisted up her face. “Don’t you mean your only client?”

  Her agent laughed. “Yeah, that’s what I said the first time. Anyway, I’ll call you in the morning, OK? I’ve got some ideas I want to run by you. Some really big stuff in the works.”

  Dinah switched off the connection with Derrick and sighed again. No doubt her agent was cooking up even more crazy schemes designed to get her even more publicity – as if publicity was something she needed any more of these days. Hell, she already had more than enough publicity than she knew what to do with. Enough to choke a damned horse.

  Lost in her thoughts, her heart abruptly stopped beating dead in her chest when her tires suddenly hydroplaned on the slick pavement.

  Adrenaline shot through her veins. Perspiration flooded into her palms. Without thinking, she slammed down her foot violently against the brake pedal – the exact opposite of what all the experts told you to do in situations like this.

  The car fishtailed wildly out of control, taking a sharp left-hand turn and heading directly toward the concrete divider in the middle of the highway. Dinah squeezed shut her eyes tight and gripped the steering wheel with all her might, bracing herself for the bone-crushing impact.

  But it never came.

  She opened up her eyes again when the car finally came to a gentle stop five seconds later and gasped.

  The concrete divider was staring her dead in the face from no more than three feet away.

  Before she knew what was happening, she was laughing and crying at the same time. Against all odds, she was still alive.

  And she knew exactly who to thank for that, too.

  She breathed out a grateful sigh of relief and lifted her stare to the heavens.

  “Thank you, Marilyn,” she said in a voice choked with emotion. “You’ve always been mama’s little angel, haven’t you? I love you, baby girl.”

  Just then, five more quick flashes of lighting lit up the night sky.

  I love you, too, Mommy.

  CHAPTER 34

  Twenty minutes of racing down the rain-slicked highway later, I finally switch off the flashing lights and silence the wildly blaring siren before swinging the ambulance around the southwest side of Dinah Leach’s guesthouse.

  I kill the engine and lean forward in my seat, study the guesthouse closely through the pounding rain, my green eyes no doubt turning even greener in their sockets with envy.

  The reality star’s overflow housing is impressive in its own right. Twice the size of most normal people’s houses and a hundred times nicer. Set about thirty yards away from the main dwelling, it provides the perfect cover I’ll need to get away with the extremely bloody scene that will unfold from here.

  I roll my neck around my shoulders before checking my
Mickey Mouse watch again. With any luck at all, the two ladies I’m waiting for will arrive at just about the same time.

  I peer through the windshield some more and nod approvingly. The sky has reached its darkest point of the night now, and the howling wind seems more insistent, transforming the spitting rain from earlier into a thunderous downpour that dances a gleeful, hammering jig on the ambulance’s metal roof. From the look of things, Hurricane Allison will be here at any minute now. Fantastic. But where the hell is Dinah Leach? Impending hurricane or not, the nightclub is just seventeen short miles away. She should’ve been here already.

  As if on cue, her tricked-out BMW pulls into the long, winding driveway of her palatial pad, the vehicle’s bright headlights bobbing up and down in perfect time with the shocks and piercing the foreboding night like sharp silver knives stabbing hard through a huge black sheet.

  From the driver’s side of the ambulance, I watch her exit her car and hurry her way up to the front door before fumbling around with her key for a moment. My heartbeat ramps up in my chest as I throw open the ambulance door and the howling wind slams me squarely in the face. I cover the thirty yards between us in a flash.

  Torrential rain soaks deep into my clothing and the booming thunder masks the sound of my pounding footfalls as I approach her. All five of my senses tingle violently, as though I’ve just stuck my pre-moistened finger directly into a live electrical socket featuring an exposed-wiring problem.

  Slipping up behind the woman twenty seconds later, I stab the sleep drug deep into her neck, rendering her completely unconscious almost at once. Her body goes as limp as a rag doll in my arms as I remove the house keys from her left hand and slide the correct one into the lock, simultaneously balancing her body in one arm. Stepping inside the house a moment later, I pause and take a look around.