by Osborne, Jon
Springing to her feet, she dashed over to him and caught her son just as he collapsed to the cement.
Dana cradled the little boy’s head close to her breast as her world spun wildly out of control, just like it had always done ever since she’d been four years old. Just like it always would for the rest of her life. Because there would be no getting over this, she knew that. Not ever.
Bradley eyes swam with absolute terror as he locked his blurry gaze onto hers. “Am I going to die, Mommy?” he breathed, coughing up bright pink sprays of blood through his trembling blue lips.
Hard as it was for her to accomplish, Dana forced herself to answer the little boy. She needed to do this, though. She knew that, too.
She choked out the words through the boulder of pain stuck in her throat. “No, my darling little baby boy,” she sobbed; blinking away the blinding tears so that she could continue to hold his rapidly fading stare. “You’re never going to die.”
And it was the truth.
In one sense, at least.
Sadly, though, Dana’s final words to the most important person she’d ever met in her entire life – the most important person she’d ever meet again until the very day she died herself – had been the truth in but one, heartbreaking sense only.
CHAPTER 159
From high overhead on the rocky ledge overlooking the gorilla enclosure, Jack Yuntz snapped shut the metal fasteners on his guitar case, securing the beautiful new AR-47 military assault rifle inside.
Slipping away into the cover of the nearby woods a moment later, he sighed contentedly as he headed for the highway three hundred yards away. The AR-47 had been just one of the many perks he’d received from the late, great Jared von Waldenberg – may the idiot’s eternal soul rest in peace forever. Or burn in hell. Jack really didn’t care.
Jack smiled to himself, remembering the almost comical scene he’d just wrought. Dana Whitestone cradling the little boy’s head in her arms, blubbering like the weak fool she’d always been. The little boy not knowing what the hell to think as his life force expired just like one of those little red flags on a parking meter. Still, even after all this, Jack wasn’t anywhere near finished yet, now was he?
Nope, not even close.
Jared von Waldenberg – stupid as the man had been – had at least made good on his promise to spring Jack from the Connelly Institute. With a little help from the inside, the entire thing had gone down as smoothly as if they’d extracted him from a kindergarten class underneath the distracted gaze of a harried substitute teacher. And when he’d checked his overseas bank account earlier that morning, Jack had seen that the money von Waldenberg had promised him had already been sitting there for more than a week.
Enough to set him up for life.
And now that he’d made good on his end of the deal, Jack could now concentrate all his noble efforts on Dana Whitestone, just as he’d always planned to do ever since the very beginning, ever since the day that she’d snapped silver handcuffs around his wrists back in the ritzy Presidential Suite of the Fontainebleau Hotel in downtown Manhattan eighteen months earlier.
First, though, he wanted to play with Dana Whitestone a little more. Tease her a bit. Challenge her. See just how good the bitch really was.
Manhood wasn’t very far away now, after all – just a few more years. And after that, the final showdown could take place.
But first, a little more fun.
Jack resisted the urge to break out into song as he finally reached the highway fifteen long minutes later.
Never before in his life had ever gotten such a charge out of playing chess.
CHAPTER 160
Bradley’s funeral three days later barely registered in Dana’s drugged-up mind. She’d become a living zombie thanks to the Xanax – enough to stun a thoroughbred horse. She hadn’t tasted her food, hadn’t heard all the well-intentioned words people had said to her during the service. Hadn’t felt anything at all.
Good thing, too. Because if Dana had felt anything, she knew she’d go clinically insane. Of course, that possibility still remained, though, didn’t it? Of course it did. Maybe when she quit taking the drugs, which she planned to do just as soon as everybody stopped watching her. And they would stop watching her, Dana knew. They always did.
After that, who knew? She supposed she’d just have to wait and find out.
Almost time to join all the others on the other side.
Bruce Blankenship’s left arm was draped around her shoulder as they made their way up to the tiny white casket. Dana looked directly at the little boy, but she didn’t actually see him. What she did see, however, was the envelope attached to the colorful flower arrangement five feet to the right of the coffin. An envelope that had been addressed to her.
In a daze, she covered the short space and plucked the envelope off the flowers. She felt nothing as she read the note inside. No grief. No anger. No pain.
Nothing.
CHECKMATE, AGENT WHITESTONE. THAT WAS A LOT OF FUN. WANT TO PLAY AGAIN?
YOURS TRULY,
JY
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading my book! I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave a review! I’d also like to take this opportunity to invite you to join me on my Facebook page here. Hope to see you there!
SHARP FORCE TRAUMA
A DANA WHITESTONE THRILLER
BY JON OSBORNE
PUBLISHED BY JON OSBORNE BOOKS
COPYRIGHT © 2013
COVER BY LAURA MICHELE
([email protected])
Join Jon Osborne on Facebook here.
OTHER BOOKS BY JON OSBORNE
KILL ME ONCE
A GAME OF CHANCE
THREE TIMES A LADY
skin: the white power murders
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
PART II
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
PART III
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
PART IV
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
PART V
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
PART VI
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
PART VII
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
PART IX
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
PART X
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
PART I
“Peek-a-boo.”
Eric Harris, to Cassie Bernall, right before the trench-coated high school senior shot the pretty, blonde-haired junior in the head while she hid beneath a library table with her terrified classmates during the infamous Columbine High School massacre on April 20th, 1999.
CHAPTER 1
Friday; 12:30 p.m.; St. Anthony Elementary School; Lorain, Ohio (40 miles west of Cleveland)
The young man wearing a long black trench coat slipped undetected into St. Anthony’s
Catholic grade school just as the second of the two lunchtime bells rang, signaling an unwanted return to classes for the two hundred or so students unlucky enough to be in attendance that day.
None of the pint-sized pupils skittering about the place took much notice of the ominous shadow of death moving among them – practically right through them – but no great surprise there. After all, despite any muckle-mouthed nonsense New Age-apologists might like to spout to the contrary, children made such fine targets precisely because they didn’t notice anything going on around them, much less everything. The plain truth of the matter was that anybody under the age of twelve not only represented lambs easily led to the slaughter, but lambs that had no idea where the hell they were going at all – and most likely wouldn’t have been able to comprehend their shared doom even if they did.
And so it was under these highly fortuitous circumstances that Jack Yuntz, decked out in shiny black combat boots complete with blood red shoelaces tied up tight enough to cut off the circulation in his ankles, climbed the cement staircase at the northeast corner of the eighty-year-old brick building and paused in the upper hallway of the two-level structure to assess the situation.
Perfect. Everyone had made it into their proper spaces on the chessboard now, including himself: the most important and powerful piece of them all. The most deadly piece of them all. Finally – after all that time spent arranging the annoying particulars – the game he loved so much could begin anew.
And maybe – just maybe – it could finally end this time, too.
Jack closed his eyes and drew a deep breath into his lungs to further steel his resolve, readying himself mentally for the next step. One way or the other, he knew that this game would ultimately culminate in death – either his own or that of Special Agent Dana Whitestone of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Anyone who got caught in the crossfire simply represented unavoidable collateral damage. Because if nothing else, sacrificing pawns for the greater good had always marked an integral component of chess, now hadn’t it? Of course it had. Always would.
And – as Maverick from Top Gun might have said given the platform and opportunity – St. Anthony’s represented an extremely target-rich environment.
Jack opened his eyes again and began walking down the hall, giving himself a quick mental pat on the back for all the hard work he’d put in to reach this point and resisting the sudden urge to break out into a wide grin despite the current raw state of his frazzled nerves. This was the fun part of his work, after all. The payoff.
He should be enjoying this.
He swallowed hard and wiped his shaking hands against the sides of his long black coat, flicked his desiccated tongue across his sandpaper lips, wishing like hell that he’d thought to bring along some water to slake his unrelenting thirst. Amateur mistake on his part; no two ways about it. He’d tried his damndest – both mentally and physically – but he hadn’t yet mastered complete control of his physiology: the manner in which the cells in his body carried out the chemical signals from his brain. Still, he was working on it, and he needed to remember that Rome hadn’t been built in a day. Neither had it fallen that quickly, for that matter. Like just about everything else involved in this highly complex and monumentally important mission, though, time was squarely on his side here. Cunning, too. Same thing went for preparation and guts.
Most importantly of all, youth was on his side here.
And who could put a price on something like that?
As things stood now, however, Jack’s mouth was bone-dry, his palms were flooded with perspiration and his furiously pumping ticker was pounding away so madly inside his badly constricted chest that he feared it might sprout tiny little fingers and claw its way through his ribcage before jumping right out of his body of its own accord and flopping around wildly on the shiny white tile at his feet in a streaky red mess.
This was it, though. Jack knew that. No turning back now. No more putting off until another day what needed to be done today. And if everything went well for him, soon enough all of the pain, suffering and loneliness he’d experienced over the past tumultuous year of his life would prove worth it. Because soon enough he’d have yet another innocent child positioned directly in his crosshairs.
Quite literally, as it would turn out.
The delicious realization was enough to send waves of ice-cold gooseflesh fluttering across the electrified surface of his sweat-slicked skin, stitching it up tighter than a cadaver’s Y-incision under the nimble fingers of an experienced coroner and causing a sudden, shameful stirring in his pants.
As far as logistics went, the necessary reconnaissance work for this opening salvo had been conducted weeks in advance – a hallmark that Jack knew sang of a professional hit. Good thing, too. Because although he eventually wanted to take complete and total credit for orchestrating this dastardly foray into the very heart of the American educational system, at the same time he didn’t want to make things too easy on the woman who’d be tracking him down. Where would the challenge be in that? No, the closer this fight proved to be the better and the more exciting for him. Besides, picking on weaker opponents only made you a bully, and Jack had never acted like a bully a single day in his entire life. Not in his book, at least. He simply ached to test himself against the best one last time. Where, exactly, lay the unforgivable mortal sin in that?
Much as he’d expected, he’d encountered zero resistance to his entrance to the school, which marked the primary reason that he’d chosen this particular private institution in the first place. Thank God for small favors. Because if this had this been a public school – funded by taxpayers’ dollars – he’d have needed to navigate locked doors in a best-case case scenario and a school resources officer and metal detector in a worst-case one. Not to mention the goddamn cameras all over the place, which had become de rigueur in school security ever since the bloody mess that had gone down at Columbine High School in Colorado more than a decade earlier when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had murdered thirteen of their fellow students in a blistering hail of angst-fueled gunfire before sampling the barrel-flavors of their own, still-smoking weapons.
A week before graduation.
Jack shook his head at the complete stupidity of it all and forced his thoughts back onto the proper track. No time for that right now. He didn’t even want to think about those two losers at this point. Not when he was this close to finally extracting his long-awaited revenge. Because, who knew? Some of their idiocy might actually rub off on him, and that was a chance he simply couldn’t afford to take. Besides, Catholic schools such as this situated on the rocky shore of Lake Erie didn’t possess the disposable income required for all those shiny bells and screeching whistles, anyway. Not on their shoestring budgets. Not with all of the dough their parent churches had tied up in paying out settlements to the victims of pedophile priests – gross old men with gin-blossom noses who couldn’t seem keep their hands to themselves around the altar boys.
The unyielding feel of the rifle tucked beneath Jack’s trench coat along his left side might’ve provided comfort to him had he been the kind of boy who required comforting, but he wasn’t. Not anymore, anyway. Not even close. Hadn’t been ever since the life-altering day more than a year earlier when he’d discovered his mother’s murdered and mutilated body tied down to the filthy floor of her condemned New York City apartment, her gruesome death having marked just another in the long line of victims of the Chessboard Killer, which – not unlike the Hillside Strangler duo of Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono out in California during the late 1970s – had actually turned out to have been two men, Sergei Michalovic and Edward O’Hara: both very dead now, thanks to Jack.
Jack inhaled quickly several times through his nostrils and resisted the overpowering temptation to cry at the soul-crushing memory. On the awful day his mother had died his heart had turned as cold and hard as the steel currently tucked away inside his long black trench coat, never to be made completely whole again. The sam
e cold, hard steel that he’d soon use to refresh the unfinished chess match going on between himself and Special Agent Whitestone – an exceedingly interesting little affair that had most recently seen him blow a foot-wide hole into the chest of the four-year-old boy she’d been stupid enough to think he’d allow her to adopt. Not to mention the beautiful move he’d executed by jamming a sharp pair of scissors deep into the exposed throat of her former partner and sometimes-lover, Jeremy Brown. Nobody had seen that one coming. Not even the venerable Miss Whitestone herself.
“Hey. Hey, you.”
Jack frowned as he was bumped rudely out of his reverie. Looking down, he saw a pretty little thing in a flower-patterned dress standing at his right side and tugging insistently at the bottom of his trench coat. Maybe six years old, judging by the look of her. Seven, max. Probably a first-grader, if not a lowly kindergartner.
Jack bit down hard into his lower lip and fought back a sudden swell of anger in his chest. Wasn’t easy. It took every last ounce of patience he possessed to keep himself from backhanding the presumptuous brat across the face just as hard as he possibly could for bothering him at this hugely crucial moment, sending her tiny, purple-framed glasses flying across the hall in the process. The lone soft spot left in his heart might have been reserved specifically for children, but he really didn’t have time for this shit right now.
Right now, he had work he needed to do.
Reining in his anger the best he could, he gave the little girl the once-over, sliding his cold gaze from the top of her head all the way down to the tips of her scuffed and untied saddle shoes. Her short blonde hair had been cut into an adorable bob that framed bright blue eyes glittering behind the colorful glasses in an angelic face carved out of pure porcelain, twin sparkling sapphires that were further illuminated by the yellow-tinted fluorescent light streaming down from the ceiling above their heads. All in all, remarkably similar in appearance to and not much younger than Molly. Not to mention the childhood version of the soon-to-be-dealt-with Dana Whitestone.
