by Osborne, Jon
When the clock neared nine p.m. an hour later, she finally rose from her seat and collected her things. That was enough for today. Besides, she had a dinner date at nine-thirty that she didn’t want to be late for.
Laura smiled to herself. She’d met Michael Timmons during a ridiculous speed-dating event that her mother had convinced her to attend. She’d felt goofy the entire she’d sat there – until Michael had settled into the chair across the table from her.
He’d had ninety seconds to state his case.
“Hi, my name is Michael,” he’d said. “I write books for a living. Personally, I don’t think I’m very good at it, but somehow I’ve managed to pull the wool over the publishing industry’s eyes. No accounting for taste, I guess.”
Laura had laughed at that, immediately feeling at ease in his presence. Something about Michael’s easygoing nature took the nervousness right out of her own chest – and any way you sliced the bread that was an extremely attractive quality in a man. “What kind of books do you write, Michael?” she’d asked.
The handsome blonde thirty-something had shifted uncomfortably in his seat and cleared his throat, and Laura had empathized with him at once. And why not? After all, if ever there’d been a pair of hot seats, these two definitely fit the bill. “Well,” he’d said, “I write murder mysteries, mostly. Excellent therapy when you live in the city, I find.”
As she’d watched his adorable dimples flicker in and out right along with his nervous smile, Laura had immediately decided – right then and there – that she’d help the charming writer work on a romance novel next. Who knew? If everything went well for them, it might even turn out to be their own personal love story. And that goal wasn’t a bad foal for which to shoot, now was it?
Nope wasn’t not a bad goal to shoot for, at all.
After penciling in his name on her scorecard, they’d exchanged phone numbers at the end of the night and the rest, as they said, had been history.
They’d been dating for four months now, and Michael had hinted at the possibility of them dating a lot longer. Like, maybe even forever. Laura only hoped that the news she’d share with him tonight wouldn’t make him change his mind about all that.
Her flesh tightened at the skin-stitching memory. The little blue cross on the plastic stick that she’d peed on had preceded a frantic trip to the doctor’s office, where an elderly gynecologist with a long, jagged scar running down his left cheek had confirmed the news that Laura was with child for a hell of a lot more than the fifteen bucks she’d spent at CVS.
Out in the lobby of the D.A.’s office, she smiled a quick goodbye at the security guard and punched the button on the elevator for the ground floor. Three minutes later, the doors opened up and she stepped inside.
Riding an elevator in a New York City skyscraper wasn’t quite like riding an elevator anywhere else in the country. Sometimes it might take as long as ten minutes to get all the way down to the street because of all the frequent stops.
Laura’s companions to start the trip were an old woman and two men in dark blue business suits.
On the forty-third floor, the old woman got off and two more suits got on. Ninety seconds later, one of the suits exited on the twenty-ninth floor, followed by two more suits on the eighteenth, leaving just Laura and a handsome young man dressed in a Pierre Cardin ensemble left in the elevator car.
The young man looked over at her and smiled as he punched the button to exit on the eighth floor. The doors slid open, but he allowed them to close again before hitting the STOP button and turning back to face her with an embarrassed look coloring in his features. “Oops, sorry about that. Almost forgot I had to kill you, nigger.”
Laura’s confused brain didn’t process the statement until it was already too late. “Excuse me?”
The man smiled sheepishly at her and withdrew a long knife from the inside pocket of his expensive suit jacket.
“Sorry, nigger, but I’m afraid I’m gonna have to cut out that disgusting baby from your stomach, too. Nothing personal. This here’s just business to me– and I just so happen to be in the business of getting America back to where it needs to be.”
CHAPTER 11
Finally – blissfully – Shelley Margolis wrapped up the seemingly never-ending interview with Dana concerning her suitability as a prospective adoptive parent for Bradley two and a half long hours after it had begun.
Margolis had promised to call her in a day or two after talking over the matter with the agency’s board of directors. God only knew what the child-care advocates would talk about after everything Dana had revealed during the interview, but she doubted that murders, rapes and shooting deaths in the line of duty constituted everyday fare for the stuffed shirts.
Then again, who knew? Maybe they did. Lord knew there were more than enough sick people in the world who didn’t think twice before hurting kids. Just ask Casey Anthony about that much.
Dana’s mind was still spinning as she drove back across town to her office in the federal building on Lakeshore Avenue in downtown Cleveland. She wasn’t scheduled to work today, but she needed something to take her mind off the meeting with Margolis, needed to lose herself in the muck of someone else’s life for a little while rather than in the muck of her own.
Sadly, though, to do that first she’d need a new case, and her docket had been wiped as clean as a whistle following the culmination of the Censor case a week earlier – a case that had seen her blow off the top of the killer’s head in a crowded baseball stadium while the horrified crowd had stampeded toward the exits screaming in terror. When the dust had finally cleared and all of the shooting had finally stopped, the bloodthirsty murderer’s severed scalp lay in a bloody pile of shredded flesh more than fifty feet away from where it had initially begun, finally coming to a gentle, rolling stop beside the foul line along the third-base side of the baseball diamond. Still, Dana knew that the lull in activity likely wouldn’t last for long. Never did in the FBI.
Nodding nodded at one of her fellow agents as she walked down a long hallway to her office on the fourteenth floor and pushing open her office door a moment later, she’d just settled down into the chair behind her desk when a knock sounded at her door.
“Agent Whitestone?”
Dana looked up to see a tall man around her own age standing in her doorway. His sandy brown hair had been cut in such a fashion to immediately let her know that he was a fellow member of Bureau. Wasn’t all that difficult to spot one of your own. “Yes?” she asked, rising to her feet.
The man smiled and crossed into her office, extending his right hand across the desk. “Hi, there,” he said. “I’m Bruce Blankenship.”
Dana smiled back tentatively as she shook his hand but didn’t say anything right away.
“I’m your new partner.”
Dana pulled back her hand in surprise. She just couldn’t help herself. Rude or not, she couldn’t have been any more shocked if Nathan Stiedowe had just breezed into her office and told her the exact same thing.
She creased her lips into a frown. “My new partner?” she asked.
Blankenship nodded. “Yep. I’m your new partner, all right. Ready to do all sorts of partner-y type things with you, too. Catch us some bad guys. Put away some killers. Maybe even drink a little coffee together if we can find the time.”
When Dana again didn’t immediately respond, he lifted his eyebrows into twin brown question marks on his forehead. “Don’t tell me that Bill Krugman didn’t tell you about this.”
Dana shook her head. “No. As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
She paused and searched her memory to make sure that she’d just told Blankenship the truth. The man known to everybody in the FBI simply by his title of “the Director” had mentioned at one point during the Censor case that he might bring in Blankenship from Nebraska as backup for Dana, but as far as she knew nothing had been made official. Then again, Krugman hadn’t exactly had time to pass along his decision to her, now had
he? Because shortly after the Director’s suggestion that he might pair up her and Blankenship, Dana had fled down to Florida following her brutal rape in the parking lot of the coroner’s office in an effort to lose herself in the crowds of suntanned tourists dotting the sandy beaches. Ultimately, Florida had actually been the place where she’d found herself again, but life was funny like that sometimes, wasn’t it?
Sure as hell was. Damn shame there was no humor in it most of the time.
Dana shook her head again and finally remembered her manners. She might have been raised in six different foster homes, but not a single one of them had been a barn. She motioned to a chair on the other side of her desk. “Please sit down, Agent Blankenship,” she said. “Can I get you something to drink?”
Blankenship shook his head and pulled back the sleeve on his navy-blue blazer, glancing down at the Timex watch strapped around his left wrist without sitting down. “No, thanks. As a matter of fact, you and I need to get going. We’ve got a plane that we need to catch in exactly thirty-eight minutes.”
Dana stared at him across her desk. “What the hell are you talking about? Where are we going?”
Blankenship pressed his lips into a tight line. “New York City. Murder of a young lawyer out there that the Director thinks might be connected to a white-supremacist hate-group. Krugman said that he wants us to go out there personally and check things out. Do you need to pick up anything before we leave?”
Blindsided, Dana swept her gaze quickly across the small space of her office and took a hasty visual inventory: a picture of her parents; a small plaque from the FBI in recognition for work on the Cleveland Slasher case; a Cleveland Indians bobblehead doll. “No,” she said, “nothing I can think of.”
“Great. Ready to go then?”
Dana looked around her office again. This time her eyes didn’t process any of the decorations on the shelves or walls. Her eyeballs were much too busy popping out of her face with shock. Finally slipping the strap of her leather briefcase over her left shoulder, she nodded. “I guess so.”
“Awesome. Then let’s get a move-on.”
Dana shook her head in utter disbelief as she and Blankenship rode the elevator down to the ground floor before crossing the parking lot and hopping inside her Protégé for the short trip over to Hopkins International Airport. The lull in activity in the FBI never lasted too long, did it?
Nope, never lasted too long, at all.
And thank God for that much.
CHAPTER 12
Amy Winehouse on the CD player, Angel eased her twelve-year-old Cabriolet out of the driveway and hit Interstate 90 for ten minutes before getting off at the West 25th Street exit and heading downtown.
In the 1990s, Cleveland had been nicknamed “The Renaissance City” due to its dramatic and highly successful urban-renewal efforts (one of the long-suffering town’s only flattering nicknames), but in the past ten years or so Cleveland had managed to slip right back into the same ugly, gloomy mess of never-ending construction and boarded-up storefronts that had marked its time in the 1970s as one of the most-depressed big cities in the country. As far as pure aesthetics went, Angel didn’t kid herself into thinking they were ahead of even Kansas City on that count anymore.
Having skipped breakfast with Granny Bernice this morning, her stomach was growling louder than the Cabriolet’s engine now, so she pulled into a Dairy Mart on the corner of St. Claire and Piedmont to grab a bran muffin and a quick cup of coffee before embarking upon the unenviable task of tracking down Razor Diggs. After all, when seeking out a murderous psychopath like him, it always proved helpful to do so on a full stomach.
What happened next shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her, because even the simplest things in her life had never really been simple, had they? Still, it managed to slam her across the forehead with the sheer blunt force of an aluminum baseball bat cracking into a cinder block.
She’d just poured herself a large, steaming cup of wake-up juice at the serve-yourself counter and was busy trying to avoid burning the shit out of her wrists while she fitted the plastic cap over the Styrofoam cup when a loud cough abruptly sounded directly behind her. Spinning around to trace the source of the noise, Angel almost dropped her coffee on the floor.
There stood Malachai Grimes, holding his own insulated cup of java and looking like a million bucks. Maybe even two million. Clean-shaven and bright-eyed, he’d slipped his lean, six-foot-two frame into an immaculately pressed, double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit today, looking for all the world like he’d just stepped out of a Starbucks ad on the glossy pages of GQ magazine.
Angel’s heart immediately leapt up into her throat and began taking vicious potshots at her carotid artery. She wasn’t at all ashamed to admit that she wasn’t happy to see Malachai like this. After all, any woman worth her vagina would tell you that there were very few things in this life more depressing than running into an ex who looked like he had the world by the tail. Truth be told, they wanted to see their former flames looking all run-down and bleary-eyed, like they hadn’t been getting much sleep lately.
Like the thought of losing their supposed soul mates actually mattered to the cheating bastards.
Several long seconds passed before Angel managed to recover from the initial shock of seeing him there. But when she finally did she didn’t bother trying to disguise the utter contempt in her voice. “Leftover remnants of that nasty flu bug, lover boy?” she asked harshly.
Malachai dropped his stare to the floor and kicked at a stray piece of paper with one of his shiny black dress shoes. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that, Angel,” he said. “I’ve been calling you all week but you never answer your goddamn phone.”
Angel stared at him, not believing her ears. Why the hell did cheating men always try to turn things around and make the woman feel guilty about it? Like it was their fault somehow?
Uh-uh. Not kosher. Wasn’t happening. Not today, anyway. Not with this chick.
The icy tone of her voice was enough to give her teeth frostbite. “First of all,” she said coldly, “I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t swear at me, Malachai. There’s absolutely no need for it. Second of all, does it really surprise you that I don’t answer your calls? Why don’t you give Beatrice Patterson a ring if you really need someone to talk to that bad? I’m sure she’d be more than happy to discuss anything you’d like.”
Malachai stepped past her and placed his coffee down onto the prep counter next to the burners, the musky scent of his cologne drifting up into her nostrils and making her feel dizzy as he passed. Woods by Abercrombie & Fitch. He knew it was her favorite, and that only made her hate the son of a bitch that much worse.
“Angel, I’m sorry…” he began.
She cut him off with a stormy look before he could continue. “I don’t want to hear it, Malachai. Sorry is just another sorry-ass word coming out of your mouth. It’s completely empty. It has absolutely no meaning at all.”
She lowered her shoulder and tried to move past him, but Malachai shuffled his feet and blocked her path. “Aren’t we even going to talk about this, Angel?”
“No, we’re not.”
“So that’s it for us then?”
Angel looked past him and out the store window to where her Cabriolet was parked. “Guess so.”
For as long as Angel could remember, the easiest way to tell if Malachai was upset about something was by simply watching his nose. Sure enough, his nostrils flared for the briefest of moments before he stepped past her again and plucked his coffee off the prep counter.
“If that’s the way it has to be, then I guess that’s just the way it has to be,” he said. “But I love you, Angel. You know that.”
“Well, maybe you should’ve thought about that before you stuck your dick in Beatrice Patterson last weekend.”
The sudden anger in his voice caught Angel completely off-guard. “I did think about it, Angel. That’s the whole fucking point. So if you ever dec
ide to come down off that high horse of yours, why don’t you give me a call sometime? If not, fuck you too.”
And with that, he stormed right past her and out the front door, leaving Angel standing there open-mouthed in the middle of a downtown convenience store wondering what the hell had just happened.
One thing was for sure: Whatever idiot first said it was better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all didn’t have the faintest goddamn clue of what they’d been talking about.
And they sure as shit had never dated Malachai Grimes.
CHAPTER 13
Breathing in deeply enough to fill his lungs to capacity, the Race Master smiled contentedly. He’d always considered the woods in New England to be among the most beautiful in the world, mostly because the land here remained pure and unsullied by the encroachment of industry. Perhaps the only locations that could match the splendor here were in Sweden and, of course, his native Germany.
The Race Master’s heart twinged in his chest at the thought of his beloved homeland. Though he’d left the Fatherland behind as a young man, he still carried it around with him wherever he went. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had precipitated the ugly influx of niggers and hordes of other undesirables, making the painful decision to leave Germany a bit easier, but only marginally so. Still, he knew that if you wanted to get anything done these days, you needed to get it done in America.
And what better place than the United States to make the point that he was currently trying to make? By not controlling its borders properly, the country known around the world as “the melting pot” had turned into a disgusting, homogenous goop where you could hardly tell the race of one brown mongrel from the next. Worse, the rest of the world had begun to follow suit – following America’s lead just as it always did, allowing itself to be led around by the nose like the mindless puppy dog it consented to being. And that needed to change. Now. And the Race Master considered himself just the man to change it. The shortsighted world could thank him later on for his efforts – if and when it ever smartened up enough to ever thank him at all.
