by Unknown
The light from the sun shone into his apartment like a wave of fire. It didn’t awaken him. Shane was dead to the world and so was I.
I wanted to let him sleep in. He’d earned it.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get to. His iPhone started ringing. It repeated over and over. Shane was dead asleep. His resting body jerked up like he had just risen from a grave. He would have pulled off his toe tag had he actually been wearing one.
“What?” he said.
“Shane?” the bewildered voice asked. It was female.
“Yes?” Shane answered.
“Townsend Dry is missing. And you are supposed to be in court with him right now, in New York!”
The female voice was now very recognizable to Shane. It was his Brazilian, femme fatale assistant, Ally Embers.
“Missing?” Shane asked. He still reeled from such a deep sleep. The news almost did surprise him until he remembered that he already knew that Townsend was missing.
No. He’s dead, Shane thought.
“Yes. The FBI is looking for him now. And Agent Cutter has called looking for you,” she said.
“I’m in D.C. But don’t tell anyone that,” Shane said.
“They’ve tracked him here. If they find out that both of you are here, it will look bad.”
“He’s here? How do they know that?”
“His anklet led them to the river,” she said.
Shane’s sleepiness was abruptly interrupted by Ally’s report. It vanished like an escaping convict. Shane was now fully alert.
“They’re dragging the river now. They think that he removed the anklet and threw it in.”
“I had a long night last night. I’m hung over,” Shane lied.
He paused a beat.
Then he said, “Look, I will make it back to New York before anyone notices. Stay on top of this case for me and let me know if anything develops.”
Then he hung up before she could reply.
Shane checked his phone. He had dozens of missed calls: Tina, Ally, Range, and even Sun Good. There were far too many voicemails to listen to. Most of them were from Sun Good, so Shane decided to call her back first.
He dialed her number and a grimacing wave washed over me like someone had cracked open Shane’s skull and flooded it with regrets. I didn’t look forward to a scolding from Sun Good.
He listened as the number dialed. He heard clicking and ringing sounds. Then the line stopped ringing and a familiar, sultry, but slightly pissed-off voice answered.
Sun Good said, “Shane! Where the hell are you?”
Her voice actually sent shivers down his spine.
“I’m in D.C.,” Shane replied, composing himself even though she couldn’t see him. He couldn’t lie to her. He couldn’t say that he was in New York still. She may have already heard from Cutter that Shane wasn’t in his apartment there. Or she might have heard from his office that he hadn’t shown up today.
The last thing that he wanted was to be caught in a lie by her. She was a good cop. Under the circumstances, if she suspected him she’d be forced to arrest him. And she’d do it to.
If Cutter knew that Shane was incarcerated and unarmed and in restraints, he could be very dangerous. He and his monster could be very dangerous for both of us, extremely dangerous. So telling her the truth now was better than trying to recover from a lie later.
“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in New York!” Sun said.
“Calm down,” Shane said.
“I am really on edge right now. So please answer the question!” she replied.
“I heard that Townsend went missing. I heard that he might be here and I drove all night,” Shane said.
“You HEARD that he was missing? Where did you hear that?”
“I have sources in the bureau.”
“Who?” she asked.
“I’m not telling you any more than that,” Shane said.
“Okay. So tell me this. You just said that you drove all night. The bureau didn’t even know that he was missing all night. They didn’t know until his anklet came to life this morning, so how did you know before they did?”
Damn it! I thought.
“I misspoke. I’m still exhausted from the long drive here. I meant that I found out about it early this morning.”
“Early, huh? Like when?”
“I don’t know. It’s a five-hour drive. It’s about 9:30 a.m. You do the math! Are we done with this interrogation?”
“That sounds suspicious,” Sun replied. Her voice was clawing into me with her allegations.
There was a long pause. It wasn’t suspiciously long. It wasn’t a definite giveaway that Shane didn’t have a straight answer. But it was noticeable. Then suddenly he replied and even surprised me with his cunning.
He said, “I left because I thought that he might try to escape.”
“You suspected that he would try to escape? Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you call Agent Cutter?”
Another pause occurred.
“I’m going to tell you the same thing that I already told that FBI agent. I don’t work for you!
“Townsend Dry is my client. I work for him. I’m not going to call the cops on him when he hasn’t committed any crimes. If he ran I would’ve convinced him to return, but I wasn’t sure that he would. I only suspected. I came here as a precaution.
“Honestly, Townsend is not the first client that I’ve had to talk out of running. He’s simply the only one that you guys have caught doing it,” Shane answered.
Having an ex-girlfriend as a homicide cop was tough for any serial killer. Sun was particularly hard because she was tough, as tough as they come. One thing that I had to admire about her was that she was made of steel.
At the end of the pause, just when Shane was sure that Sun Good was going to speak, he heard her sigh over the phone.
Then she said, “Are you at home now?”
“Why?” he asked.
“I’m headed to a department meeting. I’ll be out in an hour, maybe two. Then I’m coming to your apartment to pick you up. Be waiting out front at eleven-thirty. Okay?”
“I really have a lot to do today,” Shane answered.
“Please, be outside in two hours. If I get there earlier, I’ll text you. Get a nap in before then. You do sound tired,” she said. Then she was gone. The phone went dead.
Shane sighed and let out our mutual relief. Because if Sun Good did put the pieces of what had really happened together, even Shane wasn’t going to stop me from silencing her forever.
She would meet the monster living behind the eyes of the man she had loved.
|||||
Shane had two hours until Sun Good would show up at his front door. She’d made it sound important. So he would stay.
Shane decided to follow Sun’s advice and get a nap. He lay down on the sofa, still fully clothed except for his shoes. They were tossed on the opposite side of the living room.
Shane closed his eyes and drifted off in seconds. A quick nap wouldn’t hurt anything. So he drifted off to sleep.
|||||
A dark figure––it had to be Cutter––hovered over a computer screen. He watched intently at a video that projected across the screen. The shadows around him kept his face covered. The darkness that had showed me these events sometimes also pixelated them in such a way that some images were distorted and some were clear.
Cutter watched the screen light up.
I focused on the video. It was surveillance of an apartment that I recognized. It was a night that I remembered.
The images on the screen were of me. I watched as he did. I saw Shane’s body, but it was transformed. His face was covered in a blood-red scarf. I watched as my gloved hands turned the doorknob to the Woodsman’s front door. I watched as I snuck in and searched for the crazed killer that was supposed to be my kill.
Cutter watched the very same thing. In the last moments that I’d been in Townsend’s apartment, I’d looked dire
ctly at the camera. Although, I didn’t see it, it saw me. It recorded me staring up at it.
The dark figure paused the laptop and froze my covered face. Even though most of my face was wrapped in the scarf and most of my features were hidden, Cutter recognized my eyes. He recognized the black orbs that stared out of Shane’s face. He recognized the evil behind them. He recognized the shark-like eyes, soulless and black like the heart of a black hole.
A grin crept across the figure’s face, a distorted face. Even though I couldn’t make out his features. I knew that evil grin was there.
Kirk Cutter knew that he looked at Shane. Without a doubt he knew that lurking through the Woodsman’s home, right in front of him, was Shane’s body and the monster that drove him.
Suddenly, time spun ahead, like a DVD skip. Now Cutter sat behind a desktop, not a laptop. He was in an office. He must have moved to the offices in New York City.
The shadows danced across his face.
The villain’s hands raced across the keyboard. He filled out an FBI form, some kind of intranet program, something that I was either not familiar with or couldn’t make out because of the distorted pixelation.
I did recognize two words that he typed into the computer:
Shane Lasher
He searched for Shane’s records. The blackness in his eyes beamed into the images of records and texts that projected onto the screen. He smirked as if he had the power to learn things about me that no one else with Internet access could do.
He searched through college records, public case files, and property and tax records. It wasn’t until he hit a brick wall that the smirk on his face turned into frustration.
His inquiry into Shane’s records was denied.
Shane’s records before the age of eighteen were sealed by the courts. The name on the request was one that the FBI agent didn’t recognize at first. Then he remembered it.
It was Terrance Graves.
Then the FBI agent picked up a landline phone. He dialed an internal number and waited as the phone buzzed another department.
A voice answered, “Yes?”
“Get me Doug Lawson,” the caller said.
A moment passed and then there were a couple of ringing sounds, followed by a click as someone picked up the transferred line.
“This is Agent Lawson,” a voice on the other line said.
“Lawson, I need some sealed files unlocked,” the caller said.
Agent Lawson recognized the commanding voice. He looked down at the caller ID on his phone. It read:
Agent Cutter’s Office
There was a pause. Static hissed through the phone as the caller waited for a response.
Lawson cleared his throat.
Then he said, “This is Lawson.”
“Agent Lawson,” the dark voice said. “I need you to unseal some court records for me. And I need it done unofficially.”
“I can’t do that,” Lawson said. I could hear the shiver in his voice, the terror. He was afraid of this caller.
“Lawson, don’t make me ask again.”
A moment of silence passed between them like a gust of wind brushing over a silent desert.
Then Lawson said, “I’ll get it done.”
He hung up the phone.
7
Death Warrant
“One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero.”
––Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London
|||||
I slithered inside Shane’s cranium and brushed my scales against his brain. My tail coiled around the brainstem. His cerebral neurons ignited under the pressure and he snapped back into the stream of thought that I preferred: death.
With a violent surge, Shane shot up on the couch. He was slightly dazed. His reaction was as if he had dreamed of falling and suddenly had jerked out of his sleep because he’d smashed to the ground.
It was time to venture outside into the street and wait for Sun Good.
Shane rose and stretched his body straight up into the air. His fingertips reached toward the ceiling. His vertebrae elongated and returned to their natural position.
He needed a shower, so he started to make his way to the bathroom. Before Shane could even get halfway there, his iPhone beeped. He sighed and yawned. Next he slugged his tired body to the phone. He lifted it to his eyes and glanced at it.
The message read:
Come Outside!
Sun Good is here, Shane thought. Low energy levels barely fueled Shane’s body as he sluggishly picked up his shoes and put them back on.
Shane grabbed his Bulova watch. Next he grabbed his keys from the table near the door and headed outside.
He stopped in the hallway to lock the door and slide his coat on over his wrinkled shirt and tie. Shane looked and felt exhausted. We’d spent the whole night cleaning up body parts, hiding Townsend’s corpse, and driving. Now we had to go downstairs and meet with Detective Sun Good.
Shane rushed down the corridor and rode the elevator to the lobby. He got off and brushed past other tenants as they headed into the city.
As he stepped into the unwelcoming light of day, he saw a Crown Vic parked at the curb. The windows were tinted and the doors still closed.
Exhaust puffed from the tailpipe. The car must have been waiting at the curb for at least several minutes.
Shane heard the engine humming beneath the metal hood and the reinforced rammer on the front of the car.
He stared at the car for a moment. He waited for Sun Good to pop her head out and order him to get in. Instead the passenger door swung open.
Nothing happened. No one came out. There were no instructions from the driver.
The interior of the car appeared to Shane like the entrance to hell. The sunlight that glared through the darkened windows illuminated the inside of the front cabin in an eerie red color. The seats were dark brown. They appeared redder in the light.
Shane walked closer and lowered himself into the car. It felt like he descended into hell, all nine levels by the time he hit the seat.
Shane plopped into the seat. The door slammed as the car sped off.
That was when Shane realized that Sun Good was not driving the car.
At the exact moment that the car left the curb, he saw her pull onto the street in front of Shane’s apartment building. She was in an unmarked white Ford Mustang.
Shane looked slowly over at the driver. His heart revved up and hammered in his chest.
He gazed over in shock into the face of a grinning FBI agent.
“Thanks for getting in,” Kirk Cutter said.
Before Shane could speak, Cutter continued, “Let’s go for a ride.”
The car sped off.
|||||
Moments after we drove away in Cutter’s car, Detective Sun Good pulled up to Shane’s apartment. She jumped out of her car in a hurry. She walked into the lobby and had the doorman buzz Shane’s apartment.
Sun Good waited and waited. There was no answer.
|||||
The car ride was tense. I liked to be in control of a situation. I liked to have the upper hand. In this case, Kirk Cutter had fooled us. Shane sat quietly as Cutter drove the car to a destination that remained unknown.
They drove for ten long minutes in complete silence. The car stopped at a traffic light. Shane watched from the front window as a group of pedestrians, including a class of high school kids, crossed the intersection in front of the black, unmarked FBI car. His heart began racing in Shane’s chest cavity.
Shane watched the students as each one of them passed, but he kept his peripherals locked onto Agent Cutter.
Shane saw that Agent Cutter had his eyes forward.
As the light changed, Cutter gunned the accelerator and the car sped off, almost taking one of the pedestrians with them as he shuffled to make it across the intersection.
After driving through the city for forty minutes and weaving through moderate traffic, Agent Cutter pulled the FBI car into a parking garage. He
drove up one level and pulled the car tight against the low-rising guardrail. Cutter killed the engine and said nothing. He just stared out the front window.
Shane turned his eyes and looked out over a massive scene of FBI agents, local cops, and Coast Guard divers in full gear. Half a dozen boats patrolled up and down the Potomac River.