by Osborne, Jon
D’Arbinville sharpened the smile on his face into the approximation of a freshly whetted axe blade and mentally complimented the server for her obvious financial acumen. If nothing else, the girl clearly knew how to maximize her tips. Smart cookie. Pity he didn’t have time for her tonight. Because ever since he’d first entered the hopelessly dull and dreary bar an hour and a half ago, his dance card had already been filled up from top to bottom with a single, beautiful name.
Straightening in his seat again, he nodded and felt a delicious thrill of anticipation swirl around deep in the pit of his stomach. This was it. The time had finally come for him to get off the sidelines and jump feet-first into this long-overdue and highly dangerous game of cat-and-mouse. His claws had been honed to razor-sharp points, his reflexes felt quick and nimble and his belly had been grumbling for nine months now.
High time for him to enjoy some delicious mouse stew.
Gesturing to his target – who’d just finished off the last of her latest oversized cocktail and who was now reaching back into her ridiculously oversized beige purse to light up yet another smoke, he cleared his throat forcefully and said, “As a matter of fact, yes, I believe you can. If it doesn’t present too much trouble for you, I think I’d like to buy a drink for that lovely young lady seated over there at the end of your fine bar.”
CHAPTER 3
Friday; 8:42 p.m.; Lakewood, Ohio (10 miles west of Cleveland)
As the dashing (though unquestionably psychotic) Horatio D’Arbinville ordered a drink for the decidedly plain-Jane Helen Morgan over at the Oak Barrel Bar on Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland, Dana Whitestone huddled on her living-room couch beneath a tattered plaid blanket that hadn’t been washed in three weeks.
Dana closed her horribly puffy, hopelessly bloodshot and thoroughly exhausted eyes while she ran a small hand through her short blonde hair, cursing the day she’d been born into this unfeeling world that had given her everything only to snatch it away again at the hands of a string of bloodthirsty killers.
Her devoted parents, James and Sara: slain by Dana’s half-brother, Nathan Stiedowe, who’d also taken out her mentor, Crawford Bell, and her best friend, Eric Carlton, along the way. Six months after that, the man of her dreams – the ridiculously kindhearted Jeremy Brown – had followed those four doomed souls prematurely into the afterlife, murdered in cold blood by an up-and-coming serial killer who’d only recently turned sixteen years old. The same youthful offender who’d finally ripped Dana’s still-beating heart right out of her chest with his most recent stomach-turning kill.
All told, six beautiful, vivacious and completely innocent people who were all dead now simply because they’d had the distinct misfortune of getting caught up in the insatiable vortex of Dana’s wretched excuse for a life.
First-world problems, though, right?
Dana tugged at a greasy knot near her left ear. She’d given her hair a cursory combing each day in an attempt to keep the tangles away, but not much more than that. She simply lacked the energy for it anymore. And who the hell could blame her for that? After everything she’d been through in her life – after all the blood she’d seen – it was a goddamn miracle that she hadn’t been committed to the nearest insane asylum yet.
Dana closed her eyes and let out a heavy sigh that deflated her chest completely, knowing full well that if anything went wrong with the horrible thing she planned to do here tonight that fate still remained a definite possibility. Only time would tell, and time, she was definitely a-tickin’ now. Ready the white coats that restricted the free movement of your arms, for the safety of both yourself and that of those around you. Either that or ready a funeral shroud for her. When all was said and done, though, Dana knew that she wouldn’t be sitting here wearing these stained gray sweat pants or this badly wrinkled Cleveland Indians T-shirt with former shortstop Omar Vizquel’s faded last name printed across the back much longer. A tragic loss to the fashion world, she felt sure. Still, at least Omar Vizquel’s old number fit her life pretty well.
Thirteen: everybody’s least-favorite combination of digits.
Dana wrinkled up her nose at the offending smell in her nostrils. The source of the odor wasn’t hard to trace. Half-full containers of Chinese take-out littered the coffee table in front her, no doubt covered in penicillin by this point. Nothing to alert the press about there, though. Nothing newsworthy at all about the fact that un-refrigerated, perishable foods often underwent that sort of radical chemical change after a while. Unfortunately for her, however, the spoiled food didn’t mark the end of it when it came to the general lack of cleanliness surrounding her. Not even close. Bulging bags of garbage had also been stacked up high near the front door; some of them not even tied shut. A general scent somewhere between sour milk and old shoes hung in the air. All things considered, it would have been entirely safe to say that the state of her life matched the state of her apartment right now.
In other words: a complete and utter mess.
A mess Dana knew that she could never clean up, no matter how hard she scrubbed or how many different brands of cleansers she tried out.
Because like it or not, sometimes blood stained.
She sucked in a ragged breath that fluttered her lips against her teeth and forced herself to not start blubbering again. Another thing for which she simply lacked the energy anymore. Besides, the chances that enough moisture remained in her overworked tear ducts to support another extended crying jag seemed highly unlikely to her. Not at the world-class rate she’d been going for the past twenty-two days now. Again, though, no big surprise there. After all, murdered children tended to have that sort of soul-sapping affect on people.
Especially murdered children who’d almost been yours.
The television was on, but Dana hadn’t been paying much attention to the rerun of Pillow Talk starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. What was the point? There existed no hope at all of getting lost in somebody else’s world while she remained so hopelessly stuck in her own – a cruel, vicious world in which four-year-old little boys could have their chests disintegrated by a cowardly monster squeezing the trigger on a high-powered rifle from a hundred yards away.
Dana bit down hard into her trembling lower lip and blinked back the fresh surge of hot tears that sprang up into her pale-blue eyes at the excruciatingly painful memory. Jack Yuntz hadn’t stopped with the mere killing of little Bradley, though. Not by a long shot. That hadn’t been good enough for the bastard. Simply murdering the little boy hadn’t been enough to satisfy the youthful lunatic’s newly acquired taste for blood. Because after killing the little boy the unbelievably audacious prick had then had the gall to actually mock Dana at Bradley’s funeral, sending along a flower arrangement bearing a card that playfully challenged her to come for him, if she dared.
No shot of that happening, though. Not anymore. Dana knew that she was done. Had been for the past three weeks now. Let someone else take up the struggle for a little while. She’d given all she that she had and she didn’t have a single thing left to give.
Except for maybe one last thing. A token gesture, perhaps, but the only thing of value she had left to offer this world.
From her post on the living-room couch, she stared at her pair of identical-twin cats, which struck even her as odd, considering the fact that she’d always kept just one feline companion around to break up the crushing feelings of loneliness that went hand-in-hand with being a forty-year-old single woman who had no living family left to speak of.
Or to.
“What are you two looking at?” Dana slurred, tasting the potent whiskey still burning the back of her throat. Not surprisingly, she’d given up any pretense of being a sober person the day Bradley had died and she hadn’t looked back since, not even for a second. Hell, she hadn’t just fallen off the wagon; she’d leapt. And the entire time she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the adorable nickname that she’d picked out for Bradley: “Boo Radley”, in honor of the Harper Lee ch
aracter in To Kill a Mockingbird. Unless she and Bradley were somehow reunited up in heaven, though, she knew that she’d never get the chance to use that term of endearment for him now, however cutesy it might have sounded to others. Because up there in heaven he’d probably be with his real parents.
Dana sighed again, even more heavily this time. Still, who knew? Maybe pretty soon she could say the exact same thing for herself.
Chasing away the thought with a quick shake of her head – at least for now – she turned her attention back to the cats in front of her. There was no point in dwelling on the past here, she knew that, however recent or painful that past might be. It was her future that she needed to concentrate on now, however short or painful that future might prove.
She funneled her next words in the general direction of the blurry kitties stationed five feet away. “Haven’t you guys ever seen an empty shell of a human being before? Why don’t you make yourselves useful and go catch some mice or something?”
Oreo – Dana’s lone four-legged friend – yawned, clearly unimpressed. Turning on his heels, he headed for the kitchen. A moment later, the crunch of dry cat food filled the apartment. No earth-shattering occurrence there, however. Oreo had never been an especially quiet eater ever since the happy day seven years earlier that they’d first rescued each other at the local animal shelter. Then again, Oreo had never been an especially quiet anything.
A short, hard sob that started somewhere deep in Dana’s stomach burst out of her mouth before she had a chance to stop it from coming, hurting her insides so badly that for a moment it felt like a goddamn Buick had parked itself squarely on the middle of her chest. As much as she would miss Oreo, though, she knew that this was for the best. She was useless to him now. Just like she was useless to everybody else in the world now. No doubt the rambunctious little pile of fur that liked nothing better in this world than to chase rapidly unwinding balls of string across the living-room carpet would be far better off without her. Again, just like everybody else in the world would be far better off without her. And Dana felt infinitely grateful to know that her landlady – the kindly old Mrs. Carter who lived on the first floor of the seven-level complex with her husband of more than sixty years – would take exquisite care of her constantly purring black-and-white buddy once she’d finished up doing what she knew she needed to do next.
Dana reached over her left shoulder and plucked the almost-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the end table by its glass neck, grimacing while she finished off the last of the contents in four long swallows. Then she placed the bottle back on the end table next to her Bureau-issued Glock, an as-yet-unopened prescription bottle of Ambien and a wickedly sharp butcher’s knife that she’d appropriated from the sturdy wooden block on her kitchen counter.
Taking a deep breath that ballooned her lungs to capacity, she braced herself for what would come next, both mentally and spiritually. This was it. The end of the line. After a star-crossed lifetime spent seeking answers she could never seem to find no matter how hard she looked, only one question remained for her now:
Which one would it be?
PART II
“Depression is rage spread thin.” – George Santayana, Spanish-American philosopher
CHAPTER 4
Grunting hard with the intensity of his efforts, Bruce Blankenship finished off his last set of bench-presses at the 24/7 Fitness Center in North Ridgeville before waving goodbye to the pretty woman named Della seated behind the front desk, stepping out into the mostly deserted strip-mall parking lot and flipping open his cellphone to call his partner again.
He frowned when the familiar voicemail message clicked on:
“Hello, you have reached Special Agent Dana Whitestone. I’m unable to take your call at the moment but if you leave your name, number and a brief message I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you, and have a nice day.”
Blankenship deepened his frown and flipped closed his phone without leaving a message. What was the point? It marked the fourth time already that he’d tried calling his partner today and the technology let you know who’d been trying to reach you with a simple check of the caller ID.
Clearly, Dana didn’t want to be reached right now. Not by him, and probably not by anyone else, either.
Blankenship sighed and stepped off the short cub in front of the gym before making his way across the parking lot with his beat-up canvas gym bag slung over his right shoulder, luxuriating in the invigorating cool fall air that was rapidly drying the sweat on his face. The worst of the summer heat had passed now and had given way to crisper October weather. Next up on the hit-list: winter. If nothing else, he knew it would prove exceedingly interesting to see how his first one in Cleveland played out. If all the stories he’d heard proved true, no doubt it would be a long and cold one. As the long-running and hopelessly clichéd joke went here in northeast Ohio, there existed only two discernible seasons in Cleveland:
Winter and construction.
Switching off his car alarm with the keychain-control, Blankenship slid behind the wheel of his Toyota 4-Runner and cranked the engine to life before maneuvering the shiny, dark blue vehicle that he’d just washed that morning out of the parking lot, pointing it in the direction of Interstate 90 East for the short trip home while Through The Years by Kenny Rogers played on the stereo.
Blankenship pressed his lips together while he listened to the heartstring-tugging lyrics. The intensely melancholy tone of the song immediately struck something deep inside him that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He hadn’t known Dana Whitestone for years, not even close. They’d only partnered up a couple months ago on the Race Master case. Still, he’d been worried about her ever since they’d wrapped up that racially driven shitstorm. And why shouldn’t he be worried about her? She’d watched from no more than ten feet away as the child she’d been preparing to adopt had been murdered in cold blood by a juvenile lunatic hell-bent on exacting misplaced revenge, subsequently taking a leave of absence from work in order to concentrate on dealing with her overwhelming grief. If that didn’t mark a cause for concern, he didn’t know what on earth ever would.
The last, plaintive strains of Through The Years wound down just as he merged with the heavy, Friday-night traffic streaming down I-90, followed almost at once by frat boy-favorite Jimmy Buffet’s Come Monday. Fitting, since that’s when Dana had been scheduled to return to work. Blankenship only prayed that his partner had somehow been able to find a measure of peace in these last three weeks, however slight that peace might be.
Hard to imagine, though.
Leaning forward in his leather-covered driver’s seat, he turned down the volume on the radio as his thoughts went to his own children. The twins had just turned three years old the previous month and he couldn’t conceive of a life without them, much less a life in which they’d been struck down by the calculating hand of a deranged killer. That being said, he realized that was the single-most terrifying risk they all took in their chosen line of work: losing loved ones as a direct consequence of their professional actions. And nobody had ever told him or any of his colleagues that being a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation would be an easy or safe way to make a living.
Still…
Ten minutes later he glanced up at the latest in the long series of large green signs dotting the edge of the busy highway. He’d almost made it past Dana’s Clifton Avenue exit when he suddenly jerked the steering wheel hard to the right at the last possible moment, squealing his tires in a long, wailing screech of burning rubber and eliciting an angry, extended horn-blast from the elderly blue-haired lady piloting the dented brown minivan he’d just cut off. He lifted a hand sheepishly to the rearview mirror to apologize, but the charming old gal who could barely see over her own steering wheel only lifted up her frail right arm and extended her bony middle finger to him in return.
Blankenship grinned. Fair enough. He’d deserved that.
Three more minutes
and four turns later, he finally wheeled his vehicle into the parking lot of Dana’s apartment complex on Fairview Avenue in Lakewood and found an open spot before sliding in and killing the 4-Runner’s engine. He sat in his parking space beneath the building’s muted exterior lights for another five minutes while he debated his next course of action, knowing good and goddamn well that he wouldn’t have wanted anyone showing up unannounced at his home like this. Still, he’d have answered his friggin’ phone by now – if only to put his persistent caller’s fears to rest. That was what you did for those who cared about you. Lord knew that most people didn’t have enough of them around in this world.
Finally, he got out of his car, slamming shut the door behind him and locking it up with the keychain-control. Fuck it. Partners – even new ones – needed to have each other’s back. That was how the FBI worked. And whether or not the weekend had come was completely immaterial. Dealing with personal tragedies didn’t magically go away simply because Friday night had arrived.
He tried calling Dana again once he’d reached the lobby of her building, but was only met by the same voicemail message again. Flipping closed his phone; he shook his head in confusion, feeling a weird, indefinable tingle of fear ripple deep through the pit of his stomach. Dana had to know he was trying to reach her now. Why the hell would she be ignoring him like this? If nothing else, the cold shoulder marked a distinct one-eighty in her usually sunny disposition. Ever since the very beginning – ever since he’d first been reassigned from the Omaha office to take over as her new partner – she’d been unfailingly warm and accepting, taking Blankenship under her wing with all the grace and class that had marked the entirety of her illustrious career.
