The Ultimate Romantic Suspense Set (8 romantic suspense novels from 8 bestselling authors for 99c)

by Lee Taylor

  I pour another shot of bourbon (this time adding water), put on my vinyl Rubber Soul album and head for the trunk. Have to stay calm.

  I hate even opening the damn thing. Too much of the past comes pouring out. Like I’m supposed to get a childhood glow every time I look inside. After all these years it still makes me ill. Gives me nightmares. Makes me want to find another tree to plow into. This time, however, I can go with its pull, embrace its destruction, feel good about who I am. Who I’m meant to be.

  Carefully, I lift the heavy lid. No sound, no creak. Lisa’s oil still lubricates its hinges. Lavender fills the air, permeating my memory, allowing me to see their faces, remember our promises, promises we never kept. For the first time in years I find myself tearing up over the memories of Sharon and Lisa, my two best friends. Never heard from Sharon after she moved. Lisa and I drifted apart after that summer. Don’t know where she is now. Makes me sad to think about her. Must be Mike’s influence. Can’t let it in. Not now. Not when I’m so close.

  The top of the trunk is filled with newspaper clippings about the nurses. Those eight women, frozen forever in their white nurse’s caps. Wearing their eternal smiles. Not really people, not flesh and blood, but victims. Victims of a killer who’s not sorry he took their lives. Who thinks it’s amusing… “Just wasn’t their night.” Funny. Real funny. Such irony. He’s been allowed to age, to breathe, to feel, to decide. Richard Franklin Speck—murderer and trustee.

  The Chicago papers carried the story for weeks. Showed pictures of the townhouse where the girls were killed, the missing screen on the back window where Speck entered. Why didn’t Suzie notice it when she came in to make a phone call to the housemother, then left again to go next door while Speck was upstairs tying Nina Schmale and the others with shredded bed sheets? Was it too dark for her to see it in that alley or maybe she was too excited about life to notice a pulled-out screen.

  There are pictures of the rooms inside the townhouse, the metal bunk beds, a rag doll, a bulletin board with a note: “Dear Nina, May the Lord bless you and guide your path.” Signed, “Mother.”

  Headlines: “Yesterday, So Full of Life,” “How Girls Met Their Doom,” “Chicago’s Agonizing Riddle,” “Eight Nurses Slain in Apartment—Killer Flees,” “Knife found off 100th Street Bridge” —our bridge, the bridge that reminded us of England and convinced us that Wolf was a German sailor.

  Pictures of a neighborhood waiting, looking, watching as the bodies are brought out. One by one, carried on canvas stretchers by solemn-looking policemen. The nurses wrapped in white bed sheets, the outlines of their bodies visible under the thin cloth, cloth so sheer you think you can see their tortured faces crying out to you.

  There’s a clipping of a young girl’s face as a stretcher passes right in front of her. So close she could reach out and touch the passing body. She does. Cold. Still. The cop tells her to step aside. Where was the young girl’s mother? Why didn’t she keep her home that morning? Why did she let her see? Let her be a witness to an uncovered hand that she recognized? A hand wearing the ring that she’d envied?

  The shaking begins again, taking hold of me. Starting from the inside working its way out until my limbs go weak and I collapse on the floor. Wanting it to stop. Wanting the agony to go away. Wanting the memories to die forever. There’s only one way to stop this torture, one way for me to make some kind of restitution for my cowardly behavior. For my inability to act when I knew something was wrong. That Wolf wasn’t who we thought he was.

  That I trusted evil.

  I glance at the headline that chafes my soul: “The Mass Murder: How Could This Happen?” And I know exactly how this could happen. I didn’t warn Pauline. I didn’t warn the nurses. I didn’t tell anyone what I saw that night.

  Twisting myself up I can hear Nina Schmale’s drawn-out voice. She wants me to know, wants the world to know who she was. From my purse, I pull out the stationery Lisa gave me for my love letters. It’s always with me, wherever I go, along with the scented pen Sharon gave me for my birthday that year. I only use the pen and paper when the voices start. When I can’t stop what they want to say. When I have to write their words down somewhere. Somewhere special. Somewhere sacred:

  My name is Nina Schmale.

  Funny how something like an air conditioner can make you popular. That was me, popular. Especially when the temperature got into the nineties. You’d be amazed at how many friends I could squeeze into my tiny bedroom. We’d sit around at night or during the day, talking and laughing, not wanting to ever leave.

  I remember the hum of my air conditioner that night when Richard Speck walked me back to my room where Mary Ann and Suzanne had planned on spending the night with me. I had heard them come in. Laughing. Heard their struggle with Speck, but my two friends never entered the back bedroom where the rest of us sat on the floor, our hands and feet bound. I got scared.

  When I look back on it now, of course, I handled him all wrong. I should have seen the madness in his eyes. The Filipino nurses saw it, but we wouldn’t listen. I wouldn’t listen. After all, I had been trained in this. Dealing with psychoses was my specialty. My direction as a nurse. What did they know? Besides, they were from another country. Another culture. We were Americans. Speck was an American. He wouldn’t hurt us. Not really. He just wanted money to go to New Orleans. All we had to do was cooperate so we could go on with our lives, our plans.

  My boyfriend Peter and I were going to be married sometime after my graduation. We hadn’t set the date yet, but there was no hurry. We knew we loved each other and had loved each other ever since high school. There was plenty of time.

  I liked to take things slow and not rush through life. It drove some of my friends crazy, but after awhile they’d get used to me. I guess it was because of my beautiful mother. She was disabled and took life at a slower pace. I loved her for giving me the gift of ‘living in the moment’ and savoring each action. I suppose she was also the reason why I wanted to be a nurse. To be able to help people like her.

  I thought perhaps Speck was just someone I could help, use the nursing skills I had learned from working at the State Institution in Redding. But I was wrong. I tried to talk to him when he escorted me down the hallway to my room. I even thought that perhaps he was taking me to Suzanne and Mary Ann. I tried to reason with him, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that he had gone way past any reasoning.

  He startled me when the knife that he held up to my neck actually cut my skin a few times. I took a quick breath in and let out a painful, “Ahh.” That’s when he put the pillow over my face.

  Thirty-one

  The last time I knocked on Flukey Brown’s door, I was met with a .45 automatic. We couldn’t reach him by phone, so I volunteered to go pick him up. The director had to run a scene over again and Flukey happened to be in it. When Flukey saw who it was he put the gun down and apologized. For some reason, I hadn’t been afraid that day, but today, on this particular morning, sitting on his sofa, wearing my tight black leather skirt, and pink shirt, I feel entirely vulnerable.

  “What’s a nice chick like you want with a gun?” Flukey asks while he leans against a bright blue table.

  Flukey’s apartment, just off Maxwell Street, looks like something you’d find in an episode of Magnum P.I.—Hawaiian pastel. Neat. Clean. Not exactly what you’d expect in this neighborhood.

  “You didn’t answer me. Why you want a gun for?” Flukey asks again. “They ain’t nothin’ but trouble. I don’t like givin’ no gun to a nice white girl like you. ‘Sides, what you think? Just ‘cause I’m black I got me a gun store? Maybe I’m Guns R Us or somethin’?” He stops and chuckles. “Hey, that’s funny. Ain’t that funny?”

  “Yes,” I answer, smiling. Flukey laughs a little more and shakes his head as if he’s amazed by his own cleverness.

  “I’m a funny man. Should’a been a comic like Richard Pryor. That’s one funny son of a bitch. Got hisself a drug habit, though. Now, there’s a brother w
ho got everything—the money, the woman, the kids, livin’ out there in California and the fool can’t stop the habit. Like he’s still livin’ in the projects. You know him?”

  “No,” I answer, angry now that he’s changed the subject.

  “You know how to use a gun? I gonna give you a gun and you gonna shoot yourself in the foot then I gonna feel real bad, and I don’t like feelin’ bad over some crazy white chick from the movies. Talk to me, woman. You gotta be on the straight with me.”

  “I know how to use a gun.”

  “Good. That’s a good start. Now, what you want it for?”

  “I need protection.”

  “Protection? From the guy who gave you that lip?”

  I don’t answer.

  He yells out to the other room, “Terrell, you hear that? She needs protection. Come on in here, Terrell.”

  Terrell walks in from the kitchen. A mountain of a man, dressed in a deep purple suit. He smiles. Between the two of them, neither one seems real. They look like caricatures of themselves. Flukey stands about six-foot-three, skinny as a stick, and wears a hot-pink suit. Terrell, his bodyguard, must be six-five and has to weigh in well over 300 pounds. Neither of them can be more than twenty-five years old. When they showed up on the set all decked out, Terrell in a floor-length mink and Flukey in a hot-pink leather overcoat, both carrying custom leather pool-cue cases, wardrobe wanted to redress them because they didn’t look authentic. Shows you what Hollywood knows.

  “You want protection? My man Terrell’s here for protection. Who you want hit?” Flukey asks and sits down next to me on his pink floral sofa.

  “I don’t want anybody hit. I just want a gun to protect myself—that simple.”

  “To protect yourself. Ah-huh. And what makes you think I can get you this here gun you want…to protect yourself? What’s stoppin’ you from gettin’ it at a gun store? They got themselves some fine weapons. Terrell, what’s the name of that gun store over there in Riverdale?”

  “Chuck’s Gun Club,” Terrell answers, sitting himself down on a rattan side chair that his body completely overwhelms.

  Flukey continues, “Terrell here, can drive you over and—”

  “I want a gun now. Today. Without any strings,” I insist.

  “You gonna kill somebody today?” Flukey asks in a low voice, reaching up and touching my swollen lip. His tone deadly serious. A tone I’d never heard before.

  I move away from his touch. “Look, I can’t answer all your questions. You don’t need to know what the gun is for. I just want one, okay? I thought maybe you could help me out. If you can’t, tell me. I don’t need you to be my mother. I just need you to sell me a gun. Purely business. I’ll pay you whatever you want. If you can’t sell me one, then tell me who to go to. I don’t have time to dick around with you and your ideas about what a white girl like me should or shouldn’t do.”

  I stand to look down at Flukey still sitting on the sofa. “I covered your ass when the FBI called the set looking for you. Gave you some time. Now I need a favor. I need a gun. Can you get it or not?”

  Silence.

  Not a word from either man. I wait, staring down at Flukey, shaking from the excitement of my anger. Trying not to think about how insane this whole scene is. Second-guessing myself.

  Flukey gets up, walks over to a bedroom doorway, steps inside, makes a quick phone call to someone, comes back out wearing a hot-pink fedora and says, “You ever ride in a ‘68 Caddy? It’s like nothin’ else.”

  Thirty-two

  Terrell goes for the car while Flukey and I wait on the front stoop. My mother used to tell me stories about Maxwell Street when I was a little girl. It was the place to go if you wanted a bargain. There were more street vendors and pushcarts on Maxwell Street than any other street in Chicago. It’s where my grandmother bought our dining room table, where my friends’ parents bought their Persian rug, where a little bit of Western Europe seeped into the U.S. and stayed for more than three decades. Now the only things they’re selling are drugs and sex. Any kind of drugs and any kind of sex.

  The neighborhood looks like a rerun of Combat, that WWII TV series. Each block has one or two buildings that are partially destroyed with bare walls still standing and bricks lying in piles. Other buildings have long since been condemned but kids still run up and down the front steps to their apartments. It’s the part of Chicago that the Daleys never talk about.

  In the midst of this chaos, from around the corner, with sunshine glistening off each bumper and piece of chrome, comes a pink Cadillac that even Elvis would have drooled over. Not a stitch of rust anywhere.

  “There she is. That’s my baby. Ain’t she somethin’? Better than a sweet ass,” Flukey says. I can see the love on his face.

  “A classic,” I tell him.

  Terrell stops the car at the curb and Flukey and I walk down the cement steps. The closer I get to the car the bigger it seems to grow, about the length of a small ship. Terrell gets out and holds the door open for Flukey and once he’s seated, Terrell comes around and opens my door. I slip into the front seat next to Flukey and Terrell squeezes into the back. Once inside I feel like I’m in Flukey’s living room rather than in his car. The seats are white leather with a wide pink stripe across the back. They feel like a plush sofa that you just want to sink into and never leave. The dash is mother-of-pearl. There’s enough headroom for Flukey, his hat and a midget. All in all, a family of five could move in and be quite comfortable.

  “What you think of my lady? Is she not the finest thing you ever seen?” Flukey asks as he starts up the engine.

  “Better than sex,” I tell him and slip down into the seat, moaning.

  “Terrell, this here is my kinda woman. A woman that ‘preciates a Cadillac deserves a gun. And we gonna get you one. Right now. Yes we are,” Flukey says as he pulls away from the curb. “You my kinda woman. Yes sir. You sure is.”

  As we drive south under the Illinois Central train tracks, Flukey waves and beeps to friends along the way. I notice that the sidewalks are crowded with regular folk, including some not so regular folk. Obvious hookers stroll in groups of twos and threes. Occasionally, a car stops alongside the girls, and one of them approaches the car, taking turns, no doubt. No movie could ever capture what this place really looks like. It’s too shocking, too downtrodden. The director would want it painted, and wardrobe would have to redress everybody. America couldn’t handle what their streets really look like. How some people really live. That their children live in filth only minutes away from the golden strip of Michigan Avenue.

  After about twenty minutes and one eight-track of the Temptations’ Greatest Hits, we pull up in front of a hair salon named The Silk Touch. It’s a storefront on a four-story brick building with some of the windows boarded over. Once again, Terrell opens the car doors for us, but remains outside guarding the treasured Caddy.

  Flukey and I walk inside the shop together. Right away I can tell this is a jumpin’ place. A place where both men and woman come to get cool, look the part, be on the inside track of hair style. Every chair is occupied and every inch of waiting room is filled. Advertisements for Afro-Sheen, Jerry-Curl and Jhirmack hair products cover the walls. A red sign over the cash register reads: “If you can’t grow it, we’ll sew it.” Whitney Houston belts out one of her ballads and the whole place seems to move with the rhythm. Spike Lee couldn’t have set it up any better.

  Hidden in the back of the salon stands the only other white woman in the place. She’s braiding a young woman’s hair, while a man with a 70s Afro sits at the empty station next to her. They’re having an animated conversation, laughing and talking like they’re alone. Flukey heads right for them.

  “My man,” Flukey says as we get closer. The Afro stands up and he and Flukey give each other the High-Five. They talk to each other in jive for a few minutes and then come back to English. The Afro gives me the once over and says, “Who this here woman? She your woman? You ain’t told me about havin’ no w
oman that look like this.”

  “No, man, she’s a friend. A good friend who wants to talk business.”

  “This business friend got a name?”

  I start to say my name but Flukey breaks in, “Yeah, man. Her name’s Ruby, Ruby Brown.”

  “Ruby Brown. Let’s see now. That name sounds like I heard it before…yeah, I’m thinking that’s your mother’s name.”

  “How ‘bout that? They got the same name.”

  “Ain’t that somethin’?” He looks over at Flukey. “My name’s Ivory.” He turns back to me. “And this here’s my woman, Desire.” To which he briefly cups one of her butt cheeks in his hand. She smiles up at him and continues with her work.

  Desire is older, maybe in her mid-fifties, I’m guessing Ivory can’t be more than thirty. They make a funny-looking couple. She’s short, big boned and stout. Ivory is tall and skinny. Too skinny. They remind me of that silly Mother Goose rhyme: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. Ivory suffers from a chronic case of disco fever. He wears a tight paisley polyester shirt, and gold, wide-flared pants with matching platform shoes. Desire dresses for her part with a V-neck sweater which shows off her ample breasts and her tight, black sweatpants accentuate the more important part of her anatomy…her large, round ass.

  “I’ll be done here in a minute, hon. We can talk then,” Desire says to me. “In the meantime, you want a Coke or something? Ivory loves to make a woman happy. He’ll get you whatever you need.” She looks at Ivory and gives him a ga-ga smile. I figure their relationship must be pretty new.

  “No, thank you. I’m fine,” I tell her.

  Ivory leans over me and whispers, “If you was fine, you wouldn’t be here wantin’ to do business, now would you?”