by Osborne, Jon
Almost as if to underscore his master’s chilling message, Bane lifted up his enormous head and bared his sharp white fangs at the nervous young blonde man as he turned and exited the room.
When Mellon had gone, Jared von Waldenberg lit up a fresh cigar and blew out a huge cloud of smoke. All of the pieces were falling into place more quickly now. Not only would his brother soon be freed from his cold prison cell in Germany, he’d also finally have a chance even up the score for their dead parents with that murdering bastard Robert Pepperton.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Two lives for two lives.
It was only fair.
CHAPTER 122
From the look of things, jail hadn’t been treating Randy McMichael especially well.
McMichael’s handsome face looked drawn and haggard, his healthy sun-kissed glow replaced by a sallow, jailhouse pallor now. His usually perfect blonde hair looked as though it hadn’t been washed in a week and his light blue eyes were ringed with red.
His huge wrists were encircled by a pair of silver handcuffs secured to a heavy chain that ran across his waist. Outfitted in an ugly orange jumpsuit, he huddled across the table from Angel and Whitestone in Interview Room Seven of the Cuyahoga County Jail.
Whitestone spoke first. “Randy, Randy, Randy,” she said, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You were a bad boy, weren’t you? Got all mixed up in something you couldn’t handle, didn’t you?”
McMichael looked up at Whitestone, seemingly too weary to protest. Angel almost felt sorry for him as she watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down in his throat, but then she remembered the horrific sight of Sasha Diggs’s brutally murdered body, remembered how Sasha’s unborn child had been cut from her stomach with a long knife and how McMichael had shoved an eight-inch-long souvenir baseball bat into the poor girl’s traumatized vagina.
Suddenly, she didn’t feel quite so sorry for him anymore.
“Why’d you do it, Randy?” Whitestone asked. “Just tell me the truth and I’ll make all the bad things go away for you.”
McMichael screwed up his handsome face into a mask of sheer incredulity. “Do what, lady? Kill her? I didn’t fucking do it, for Christ’s sake. I’ve already told you people that a million goddamn times.”
Angel stared at him. Although it wasn’t exactly textbook procedure, Whitestone had pulled a few strings to allow for her presence here in the interview room, effectively conscripting her into the role of a de facto deputy of sorts. “Keep singing that song and it’s the last one you’ll ever hear before taking a ride on ‘Old Sparky’,” she said, slipping into her pre-arranged role in the “goodcop/badcop” routine. “It’s all over for you now, so you might as well just come clean with us while you’ve still got the chance.”
Randy McMichael glared at her across the table, and Angel noticed something in his pretty blue eyes that she hadn’t seen while they’d been sitting together in his home.
Hatred. Pure, undiluted hatred.
“Miss Monroe, right?” he asked coldly. “Are you the one telling them that I had something to do with Candy’s murder?”
He paused and shook his head in disgust. “It was you, wasn’t it, you worthless nigger?”
Springing to her feet in a flash, Whitestone slammed her hand down on the table hard enough to make McMichael flinch. Time to double up on the “badcop” part of the equation, Angel supposed. “Shut the fuck up, asshole!” Whitestone hissed. “You don’t get to ask the questions here. You gave up that right when you decided that it was perfectly OK to slice your unborn baby out of your twenty-two-year-old lover’s pregnant stomach.”
She paused and held his stare. “And if I ever hear you talking like that to my friend again, I’ll split open your goddamn skull with the butt of my gun so fucking fast that you won’t know what hit you. But not before I use a nice, dull pair of scissors to snip out that vile, disgusting little tongue of yours. And that’s a fucking promise, dickhead.”
McMichael tried holding Whitestone’s blazing gaze, but pretty soon found that he simply couldn’t. Nobody could’ve held Whitestone’s eyes right now. They looked hot enough to burn right through six inches of solid steel.
Angel lifted her eyebrows, impressed.
God, she loved this woman.
CHAPTER 123
Miles O’Reilly looked down at the caller ID on his cellphone in disgust.
“Who the hell was that?” Seth Collins asked when the phone had finally stopped ringing.
“Headquarters,” O’Reilly answered as he wheeled the huge pickup truck into a busy parking lot across the street from the Cuyahoga County Jail.
“Why didn’t you answer it?”
O’Reilly twisted up his face. “Because I’ve got plans of my own for this little nigger bitch, that’s why.”
Collins leaned forward in his seat and turned down the country music station that blaring from the stereo speakers. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Miles.”
O’Reilly waved away his partner’s concern. “Why the fuck not, Seth? You afraid of that big bad wolf Jared von Waldenberg? The man’s a putz, for Christ’s sake. Lost in a goddamn time warp where he thinks it’s still 1944. All this fucking Nazi shit. Give me a fucking break. If you’re going to kill a nigger, then kill a fucking nigger, but do it on your own goddamn terms. Don’t copy some little Austrian faggot who didn’t even have the balls to face up to the Allies when push came to shove.”
Collins sighed. O’Reilly was obviously going off the deep end now, but it had never been a very good idea to disagree with the man. Besides, Collins really didn’t give a shit who died, just so long as he got his money out of the deal. “So, what’s the plan then?”
O’Reilly stared at him. “What the fuck do you mean, ‘what’s the plan’? We’re going to kill this little nigger bitch and we’re going to kill the federal pig she’s with, too. That’s the fucking plan. Any questions?”
Seth Collins leaned forward in his seat again and turned the radio back up. The sounds of Patsy Cline’s Crazy floated softly over the speakers.
“Nope, Miles. No questions, at all.”
CHAPTER 124
Angel left the interview room five minutes into the intense grilling of Randy McMichael, knowing that her presence, her mere blackness, represented a deterrent to the former baseball star spilling his guts.
Angel frowned. McMichael had called her “nigger” right to her face, but for some reason or another it hadn’t hurt half as much as reading the racial slurs in the book had.
She shook her head in confusion as she walked down the long hallway of the Cuyahoga County Jail, the same long hallway she’d traveled so many times in the past while she’d still been a member of the Cleveland police force. Though her progress had been slow up to this point, Angel was finally starting to understand that “nigger” was just another word – an extremely ugly and hateful word, of course – but one that possessed no real power unless she gave it that power. It might have been a hard lesson to learn, but it was also one she thought worth learning for black people everywhere.
Sitting down in a plastic chair in the lobby of the jail, she began to think about how blacks and whites related to each other in America. The only thing she could come up with was that they all sucked at it. Really fucking hard.
The white-power hate groups were ignorant, of course; so ignorant that they almost weren’t worth thinking about. But they were also dangerous, so you had to think about them. And Angel was starting to understand just how dangerous they could be.
On the black side of the ledger, militant groups like The Black Panthers weren’t much better. Lumping all white people together was just as stupid as lumping all black people together. Each race had good and bad examples to offer; didn’t anyone understand that? It was the message Martin Luther King Jr. had been trying to convey when he’d asked people to judge him not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. The content of your character could
be good, or it could be completely fucking rotten. Still, it had absolutely nothing at all to do with the color of your skin.
To Angel’s mind, though, the media tended to play up the rotten examples of black people more often than it did with the whites. Every time you turned on the nightly news there was another black face screaming out about the injustice of having their relative held accountable for robbing someone, or beating them, or even murdering them. It made all black people look bad.
Then there were the current crop of civil rights leaders, most notably Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Angel admired the spirit of their efforts, of course, but she cringed each and every time they jumped up screaming bloody murder whenever a black person had committed some heinous crime. The Jena Six. Lloyd Williams in Tucson. Sherilee Foster out in San Diego. What kind of sense did that make? Was that judging a person by the content of their character, or by the color of their skin?
She thought the answer to that one rather fucking obvious.
And just how exactly did Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton make all their money, anyway? How could they afford to jet all over the country – all over the world, for that matter – defending these black criminals?
Speaking fees, that was how. Big, fat, fucking corporate speaking fees. Sometimes Angel thought that Jackson and Sharpton were nothing more than hypocrites prostituting the cause for their own selfish ends. And why not? She’d always found it extremely hard to listen to these multimillionaires telling black folks just how deeply they felt their pain. Hell, whatever pain Jackson and Sharpton might have once felt was so far in the past now that it wasn’t even funny.
Pathetic substitutes for Martin Luther King Jr. and W.E.B. Dubois, to say the least.
Angel wasn’t especially fond of people like the Clintons either; white politicians who she thought exploited black people for votes. She’d thought the Clintons had shown their true colors – for lack of a better term – while Hillary had been duking it out with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2008.
And what about Dennis Kucinich? Angel loved the guy, of course – an entertaining little firebrand and from Northeast Ohio, to boot – but the Ohio congressman’s passionate diatribes against racial injustice rang hollow to her ears. What did he know about being black? About the struggle? Absolutely nothing, that was what. And if a black politician had ever dared to rage against the machine with even half of Kucinich’s fervor, racists all over the country would have immediately jumped up and accused him or her of “chimping out”.
Angel shook her head disgustedly, ashamed with the state of race relations in the United States. What in the hell was wrong with her country? Land of the free, home of the brave, her ass. More like land of the weak, home of the sniveling, ignorant coward.
When Whitestone still hadn’t come out of the interview room twenty minutes later, Angel headed down the hall again and bought a soda from the snack room while thinking about gangbangers like Razor Diggs. Nothing more than human pieces of garbage, she knew, but somehow it had become uber cool in the black culture to glamorize their “gangsta” lifestyles.
There wasn’t shit glamorous about their disgusting, at all!
Rap music played a big part in it, of course. No matter what any of the rappers said about how they weren’t to blame, Angel knew that they had a tremendous influence on black youths. And listening to idiots like the Ying Yang Twins trying to defend themselves on national television with their tired old protests of how it was the parents’ responsibility to raise their own children enraged her. At best, their protests were disingenuous. At worst, it was prostituting black peoples’ collective misery just as shamelessly as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton did.
After all, it took a village to raise a child, now didn’t it?
Goddamn right, it did.
Just ask Hillary Clinton about that much.
You might have to buy her book before you got an answer, though.
CHAPTER 125
Miles O’Reilly lit up a smoke and offered one to Seth Collins. “Coffin nail?”
Collins didn’t laugh. “Are you sure about this, Miles?” Collins asked, shifting in his seat to face his partner. “Jared von Waldenberg’s a pretty ruthless bastard. “What’s the internal body count within the Brotherhood up to now? Ten? Twelve?”
O’Reilly waved a hand in front of his face. “Quit being such a fucking pussy, Seth. I know what I’m doing.”
Collins leaned back in his seat and let the opening chords of A Country Boy Can Survive by Hank Williams Jr. wash over him, not wanting to continue the brief conversation any further. What was the point? He supposed he’d find out soon enough if the song he was listening to at the moment had any truth to it.
He turned in his seat to face O’Reilly again. “Give me one of those goddamn cigarettes.”
CHAPTER 126
Another hour passed before Dana Whitestone finally emerged from the interview room and found Angel sitting in the jailhouse lobby. “Hey there, good-lookin’,” she said. “Miss me?”
Angel looked up at the FBI agent and smiled. “You know it, girl.”
Whitestone smiled back. “Good. I missed you too. Anyway, how’d you pass your time while I was back there playing Dirty Harriet with Randy McMichael?”
Angel sighed. “Just trying to solve America’s racial problems in my head, that’s all.”
“How’d that work out for you?”
“Does Randy McMichael back there still think I’m a worthless piece of nigger shit?”
Whitestone lowered her eyes. “Yes.”
“Not too well, then.”
Whitestone frowned. “We’re not all like that, Angel. You do know that, right?”
Angel sighed again. “Yeah, Dana, I do. At least I’m trying my best to understand it.”
Three minutes later, they stopped off at the front desk before leaving the jail.
“You got my package back there, Smitty?” Whitestone asked the man stationed behind the desk.
Chubby and in his late-fifties, a desk sergeant with deep-set brown eyes and a pockmarked face featuring a huge bulbous nose courtesy of one too many belts of gin said, “I’ve got a package back here for both you gorgeous ladies, if you wanna come on back and check it out.”
Angel and Whitestone looked at each other, then burst out laughing. It was starting to become a habit with them, and Angel couldn’t deny that it felt good.
“Maybe later, Smitty,” Whitestone said. “For now, I’ll just take what I called you about earlier.”
The desk sergeant slid a brown paper bag across the desk and made Whitestone sign for it before finally releasing the mysterious package.
“Thanks, big guy,” Whitestone said, handing back the pen to the man and motioning with her head for Angel to follow her.
The sergeant grinned happily as they left. “Big guy is right. Hell, you two beautiful ladies don’t even know the half of it.”
CHAPTER 127
Miles O’Reilly sat up straighter in his seat as the nigger woman and the FBI agent exited the downtown jailhouse. He watched them make their way to the federal cunt’s silver Mazda Protégé in the parking lot before slipping the huge pickup truck into gear and following at a safe distance behind as the women pulled out of the lot.
“Looks like it’s show time, Seth old boy,” O’Reilly said. “You ready for this shit or what?”
Collins blew out a huge lungful of smoke and stared straight ahead, his pale blue eyes steely and unblinking. Cocking the double-barreled shotgun laying across his lap, he racked two high-gauge bullets into the chambers.
“Yep. Let’s go get this shit over with already.”
CHAPTER 128
“Charming fellow,” Angel said, ten minutes after she and Whitestone had exited the Cuyahoga County Jail. “Smitty back there a friend of yours? I don’t think I remember him from my days on the force. Is he new?”
They were having coffee at Arabica, a local chain that was in the process of being bought out b
y Starbucks. Then again, what coffee shop in the continental United States wasn’t in the process of being bought out by Starbucks these days? The Wal-Mart of the coffee world.
“No idea,” Whitestone said, taking a small sip of her coffee and sliding the brown paper bag she’d signed for back at the jail across the table. “Anyway, here ya go, Angel. Little present for you inside.”
Angel frowned and took the bag before opening it up and looking inside.
Her .45 – the one that Razor Diggs had appropriated from her right before he’d smacked her in the temple with the heavy butt of a smoking machine gun.
Her mouth dropped wide open. Looking back up at Whitestone, she asked, “Isn’t this… evidence? Is this even legal?”
Whitestone waved a delicate hand in front of her face. “Yes, of course it’s evidence. But it’s evidence in the same way that a snowflake is part of a blizzard. No worries, Angel. There’s still plenty left over to nail Razor Diggs to a fucking cross.”
The FBI agent paused and held Angel’s gaze. “And as far as it being legal, I really don’t give a shit about that right now. I don’t want you running around out there without protection. We could have been killed today, you know.”
Hot tears welled up in the corners of Angel’s hazel eyes as she asked herself why the hell this woman seemed to care about her so goddamn much. What had she done to deserve it?
Whitestone answered the unasked question in her misty eyes. “Because you and me have to stick together, Angel. That’s why. It’s a dirty fucking world out there.”
Angel cleared the lump of emotion from her throat and amended the woman’s statement. “You mean it’s a dirty fucking man’s world.”
