by Osborne, Jon
“Hell yeah,” he said, digging his elbow into his partner’s ribs. “Some cash and a couple of BJs sound just about right to us. What did you have in mind, honey?”
CHAPTER 37
When Dana’s world finally swam back into focus fifteen minutes later, she found herself bent forward over the driver’s-side seat of her Protégé with her jeans and underwear ripped down around her ankles.
Cold winter air froze the backs of her exposed thighs. She tried to straighten but found she couldn’t. She was pinned down hard beneath a heavy weight.
Vomit rocketed up her throat and burned the thin lining of her esophagus before flooding into her mouth and wearing away the enamel on her teeth. One of the men in blue overalls who’d been loading boxes into the back of the building when she’d been speaking on the telephone with Bill Krugman had positioned himself between her legs and was now pumping himself furiously in and out, shredding her insides and grunting hard with his efforts like a wild beast in heat.
Dana choked on the contents of her stomach. Hot tears sprang into her eyes and blurred her vision, burning her retinas and making it impossible to see anything clearly. She tried to straighten again but the man on top of her shoved her face roughly back down into the leather of the car seat.
“Just stay down, bitch,” he hissed, wrapping a thick handful of her hair in his fist to keep her in place. “Just stay down and try to enjoy yourself.”
Dana closed her eyes and tried to ignore the searing pain between her legs, still fighting with every last ounce of energy she possessed. She kicked her legs. She bowed her back. She gritted her teeth. Tears streaked down her cheeks and dropped down into the grooves of the car seat, sliding down the leather before collecting in a saltwater pool at the bottom of the backrest. She wondered if this was what her mother had felt when Nathan Stiedowe’s father had raped her over a church altar back in 1957. A feeling of complete and utter hopelessness. A feeling of complete and utter violation.
A feeling of wanting to kill the person who was doing this to you.
She took a deep breath that filled her lungs to capacity and opened her eyes. She knew that she needed to remain in the moment here, no matter how horrific the moment might be. Marshalling every last ounce of strength left in her body, she took another deep breath, ready to scream with all of her might in order to alert someone to the fact that she was being brutally raped just fifty feet away from the entrance to the coroner’s office. Suddenly, though, a different scream ripped through the night. A high-pitched yelp of terror that sounded eerily similar to that of a mortally wounded animal.
The man on top of her withdrew quickly from between her legs and whirled around to trace the source of the scream. Dana did the same. Her pale blue eyes burned in their sockets, glistening with hot tears of rage and shame.
Five feet away, the rapist’s partner writhed in agony on the snow-covered pavement, clutching his neck as rivers of bright red blood pulsed from between his trembling fingers and soaked into the pristine white snow covering the ground. A horrible gurgling noise came from deep within his slashed-open throat.
Dana widened her eyes in shock and amazement. A woman stood over the prone man, holding a long knife in her right hand. Its sharp silver edge glinted with her target’s fresh blood.
The primary rapist – the one who’d been violating Dana only moments earlier – fumbled with the belt on his overalls. “What the…” he began.
But the words died in his throat when the woman sprang forward in one quick flash of movement and shoved the knife deep into his Adam’s apple, twisting hard before pulling it out again, causing the man’s esophagus to collapse on itself. Falling to the ground next to his partner, he, too, began to choke on his own blood.
Dana stared up in confusion at the woman holding the knife in her hand. Utter disbelief filled her mind. She found it impossible to breathe, to speak…
To thank the woman.
She blinked hard, trying desperately to process the surreal scene before her. Her savior had dressed in formal attire for the occasion, her long blonde hair streaked with subtle shades of red. Dana’s hands trembled uncontrollably as she yanked up her pants and underwear around her waist.
She coughed painfully and wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her right hand. “Thank you,” she sobbed. “Thank you so much.”
The woman smiled at her and waved a delicate hand in front of her face. “Hell, don’t go thanking me just yet, honey. We girls need to stick together, don’t we? Anyway, you would have done the same thing for me, right?”
Dana narrowed her eyes, not understanding the woman’s meaning. To say the least, it was an odd thing to say considering the gravity of the moment. Flippant. Out of place. “Of course I would have,” she said. “I’m an FBI agent.”
The woman narrowed her own beautiful green eyes, which were sparkling in her face like glistening emeralds set into a face carved out of pure porcelain. “Yeah, I know that, Agent Whitestone. That’s why I’m here.”
Dana pulled back her head on her shoulders in surprise. An uneasy feeling boiled deep in the pit of her stomach. Still, her traumatized brain didn’t seem capable of processing the woman’s odd words.
Her pulse crashed in her wrists. Her knees went weak. “How do you know my name?” she said.
The woman smiled again and adjusted one of her small gold hoop earrings; as though the two of them were simply engaged in a little bit of mindless chitchat right now rather than acknowledging the horrific rape to which Dana had just been subjected. “Oh, I know a lot of things about you, Agent Whitestone,” the woman said. “Let’s see here: I know that your parents were murdered when you were four years old – a murder that you yourself had the great misfortune of witnessing. I know that you live in Lakewood with your pet cat and that you enjoy watching the same television program on Showtime every Wednesday night. Weeds, isn’t it? The one starring Mary-Louise Parker? Anyway, I also know that you probably think you’re better than me. It’s not true, of course, but in short I know plenty about you.”
The woman paused and lifted one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “Can’t say I like a single goddamn one of them, though.”
Dana reached inside her leather jacket for her Glock and curled her fingers around the corrugated-plastic grip. “What the fuck are you talking about?” she barked, following the training that told her to keep her voice even but still speaking harshly enough to display control. It was important to never show fear to your adversary. That would only reinforce their confidence and encourage them to attack. “You’d better start making goddamn sense or I’m going to arrest you right now. Tell me how you know these things about me.”
The woman dressed in black widened her beautiful smile and took a step forward, at the same time producing a syringe loaded with a clear liquid.
Dana slid out the Glock from her shoulder holster and pointed it directly at the woman’s head. “Stop right there,” she ordered, both her hands and voice perfectly steady now. “Just stop right there or I’ll put a bullet in your fucking brain.”
But the woman didn’t stop.
Dana lowered the gun and pulled the trigger once, aiming for the woman’s kneecap, just like she’d done with her half-brother in his underground bunker two years earlier. A warning shot meant to drive home the painful reminder that the predators weren’t in charge here. The good guys were.
But the gun only clicked dryly.
She stared down at the Glock in her hand dumbly. Shaking her head, she pulled the trigger again, praying that a particle of dust had somehow caused a temporary malfunction. Again, nothing happened.
The woman in black widened the smile on her pretty face even farther, showing off two rows of perfectly straight white teeth. Without warning, she then suddenly shot out a hand and grabbed Dana hard by her throat, squeezing forcefully enough to cut off her air supply. The power in the woman’s grip was unbelievable, unladylike, to say the very least, practically inhuman.
&n
bsp; Pain like a scorpion’s sting bit deep into Dana’s flesh as the woman jabbed the sharp needle deep into her throbbing carotid artery and depressed the plunger, the pinching sensation reminding Dana of the yearly influenza shots she’d received as a kid. Only then did she realize that the woman accosting her at the moment was the same woman from the one in the autopsy-room video. The woman’s hair and clothes were different now, sure, but her eyes were the same brilliant shade of green. Sadly, though, Dana didn’t have time to process this information before her eyelids abruptly grew heavy and her world faded away again.
Through the fog in her brain, she heard metallic clinks echo against the frozen pavement.
The woman’s last words – just like all of her previous words – were delivered in a voice positively dripping with contempt.
“In case you were wondering, dear, those men were working for me,” the woman said, letting the remaining bullets from Dana’s gun drop from her hand and scatter onto the hard surface of the parking lot below. “We took the liberty of emptying your gun while you were passed out the first time. Anyway, like I said before, you shouldn’t thank me just yet. I may be done with you for the time being, but I’m certainly not done with you for good. I saved you only because I want you for myself, Agent Whitestone. Sweet dreams, sweetheart. I’ll be seeing you again very soon.”
The woman paused. Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “Better look twice, though. I know that you’re supposed to be the world’s greatest cop and all, but you probably won’t recognize me the next time around.”
CHAPTER 38
Dana came to again twenty minutes later, woozy and nauseous from the effects of the powerful drug still coursing through her system.
She shook her head hard in an effort to clear away the cobwebs in her frazzled brain and pulled herself up off the ground before punching 911 into her cellphone. She paced the parking lot of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office for ten solid minutes while waiting impatiently for the cops to arrive.
Dana forced herself to not cry during the interminable six hundred seconds. Wasn’t easy. Her head was killing her and her body temperature had soared to a feverish level despite the bitterly cold wind that was whipping in hard off the lake and knifing viciously through her traumatized body. Still, the bitter cold couldn’t touch her right now. Nothing in the world could touch her right now. Not today and maybe never again.
She stomped back and forth in front of her car: twenty feet forward and twenty feet back, tracing and re-tracing the same path until she’d worn a patch three feet wide into the snow. Sweat rolled down her temples and plastered her short blonde hair to her forehead. More sweat seeped into the armpits of her shirt beneath the leather bomber jacket. Still more perspiration flooded into her palms. Her ears rang. Her skin crawled. Her stomach churned. Her Glock – useless as the goddamn thing had been tonight – rubbed the left side of her ribcage raw, until the entire left side of her body had been turned into a painful hunk of tenderized meat.
Dana ignored the pain and sweat and nausea and paced on, the gun continuing to shift back and forth inside its holster and further mutilating her side. But it was a good kind of pain. The kind of pain she needed to feel right now. It was like working a loose tooth back and forth in your mouth and actually enjoying the way it hurt, unable to keep your fingers away from it for the life of you. Unable to keep yourself from wanting the pain.
More importantly, it was the exact opposite kind of pain that she’d just experienced. The kind of pain that violated your mind every bit as much as it violated your body. Probably more so.
One thing was for certain: with every last cell in her body Dana wanted revenge. Needed revenge, as a matter of fact. With everything she’d been through in her thoroughly fucked-up life, she was sick and goddamn tired of playing by the rules. Sick and goddamn tired of being one of the good guys. Constant subjectivity was way too much to ask of anybody, much less a person in her already-weakened psychological condition. After all, there were limits to what the human spirit could endure, no matter how tough you thought you were or how many inspirational posters they tacked onto the walls of your warm, safe office buildings. Stupid, third-grade-level shit that urged you to keep on keeping on, to keep on trucking, to continue trudging through the muck of your everyday existence and to look at all of the trash surrounding you and convince yourself that it was actually flowers.
When everything was said and done, though, Dana knew that there were no atheists in the foxholes of life. No matter what anyone said to the contrary, when you’d reached the breaking point that every person in the world possessed you got down on your fucking knees and prayed to God in a trembling voice to please, please, please take away the other kind of pain. To relieve the agonizing pressure, if only for a moment. To grant you sanctuary from the hellish reality of your life.
That being said, snapping mentally wasn’t an option for Dana at this point. Not now and not ever again. The only option left to her now was the one where she made everything right again – by not playing by the rules, if necessary. Somehow, some way, she needed to restore proper order to the world. To bust the bad guys asses so hard that their grandchildren felt it. To make sure that they paid for their crimes until it hurt. To make sure that they paid for their crimes until it hurt their descendants. Hurt them all the way down to their goddamn souls. And not the good kind of pain, either. The other kind of pain. It was exactly what the killers and drug dealers and child molesters deserved.
Not to mention the motherfucking, piece-of-shit rapists.
Dana shook her head violently some more and cursed a blue streak beneath her breath while she tried desperately to organize her jumbled thoughts. Once again, it seemed, an unspeakable nightmare had invaded her life and reinforced her entire purpose for breathing. As an FBI agent, she’d been tasked with making sure that the human trash piles littering the world rotted away in prison for the rest of their natural-born lives. As a woman who’d just been raped, however, she needed something more than that. Needed to make the animals hurt like they’d made her hurt. Because no matter how much it might seem that way sometimes, the bad guys weren’t in charge here.
Or, in this case, the bad girls.
Dana clenched her fists into tight balls at her sides and resisted the urge to start throwing punches in the air, once again fighting back the insistent tears that were pooling in her eyes, feeling angry with herself for even considering tears at this point. Tears were for the weak, losers, schoolchildren. Still, how another woman could possibly take part in the soul-numbing violation that had just been so savagely foisted upon her was completely beyond her comprehension, utterly beyond her ability to understand.
With more than a quarter-million rapes reported across the world each year, Dana knew that she wasn’t alone. Still, that knowledge didn’t make her feel in the least bit better about what had just happened to her. How could it? Nobody on the Titanic had taken comfort in the knowledge that so many others were sinking down to their watery graves with them, had they? Hadn’t taken solace from the fact that they’d have plenty of company in their icy tombs for eternity, right? Not unless they’d been complete fucking assholes who’d deserved to die anyway.
Worse, the astronomical number of reported rapes didn’t even scratch the surface of the problem. One National Crime Victimization Survey showed that just thirty-nine percent of all rapes and sexual assaults in the United States were reported to law-enforcement officials each year. And less than ten percent of all male-on-male rapes were ever reported, with the victims most often believing that it was a personal matter or fearing reprisal from the assailant.
Dana stretched her neck sharply to the right, feeling like a prizefighter who was preparing to climb through the ropes and enter the ring. She knew exactly how those other victims felt. But she didn’t fear reprisal from her primary assailants at this point. They were dead, after all – killed by the woman dressed in black. What she did fear, however, was what she’d do to th
e sadistic bitch who’d killed the rapists once she finally caught up with the conniving whore.
Horrible thoughts crept into her mind. Thoughts of how she might murder another human being in cold blood and actually get away with it.
First things first, though. Before she could do anything else, Dana needed to find the woman. Luckily for her, though, as an FBI agent, that was precisely what she was best at doing. The best in the entire country, according to Newsweek’s recent cover story.
Dana clamped her teeth together so hard that her jaw began to ache. Rape had always been a crime that she’d despised almost as much as murder. And why not? It was practically the same thing, for Christ’s sake. Rapists took lives, too, even if their victims survived the brutal attacks. There were lots of different kinds of deaths, after all. The death of innocence. The death of a getting a good night’s sleep. The death of knowing that you could walk freely around your fellow man without becoming a victim. In Dana’s mind, the perpetrators of rape deserved nothing less than the death sentence. Or, at the very least, total castration. And their accomplices – cowardly jackals like the woman dressed in black – should be held every bit as accountable as the hyenas that had performed the animalistic acts of invasion in the first place.
Dana finally stopped her pacing when the squad cars and ambulances came racing up to the scene with their sirens screaming and their blue-and-red lights flashing thirty seconds later, casting eerie, dancing shadows across the parking lot. Two uniformed cops emerged quickly from the lead vehicle and ushered the looky-loos who’d come outside back inside the building. Five minutes later, yet another squad car pulled up to the scene, this one holding Gary Templeton and bringing the total number of emergency vehicles in the parking lot to more than twenty.