by Osborne, Jon
Helluva gig, huh?
“Would you like some water, ma’am?” Angel asked softly.
The old woman nodded and settled down into the chair, balancing her cane against one of the arms. Then she reached into the side pocket of her heavy sweater and extracted a badly rumpled Kleenex, dabbing at her eyes.
Angel felt sorry for the old woman as she walked over to the mini-fridge in the corner of her office and pulled out two ice-cold bottles of Aquafina from inside, though she still didn’t know what she should be feeling for her about. Twisting off the cap from one of the bottles of water with the gunshot sound of snapping plastic, she walked back to the old woman and handed it over. “That’ll be a dollar fifty,” she joked.
The old woman didn’t laugh. Didn’t even crack a fake smile. So much for lightening the mood here.
Angel stowed the rest of the jokes and gave the old woman a chance to take a sip of her water and gather herself before again asking how she could help.
“It’s my granddaughter, Sasha,” the old woman said finally, still dabbing at her eyes with the highly abused Kleenex. “She’s gone missing and I can’t find her nowhere.”
Angel lifted her perfectly plucked eyebrows halfway up her forehead in surprise. A missing persons case. That was certainly different for her. Not the kind of work that usually presented itself on her daily docket of chores as a licensed private investigator, anyway. Angel had lasted thirteen long years on the Cleveland police force before walking away from her pension two years earlier and hanging out her own shingle – a pretty ballsy move for someone not actually born with balls, if she did say so herself. These days, she spent the majority of her time spying on cheating spouses. Not exactly the most glamorous gig in the world, to be sure, but it usually paid the bills.
Emphasis squarely on usually.
“I’m very sorry to hear that, ma’am,” Angel said, twisting off the cap from her own bottle of Aquafina and taking a small sip. “But why come to me? Missing-persons cases are police business. Why not go to them?”
The old woman stared at her like she was a goddamn fool. Apparently, the old gal and Granny Bernice had a lot more in common than Angel had first thought. “I can’t go to the police,” the old woman said, shifting irritably in her seat and shaking her head in thinly veiled disgust, as though Angel had just asked the stupidest question possible. Maybe even the stupidest question ever.
“Why not?” Angel asked, doing her best to ignore the shaming look. Wasn’t easy.
“Cuz they won’t do nothin’ about it.”
Angel was grateful that the old woman didn’t actually tack the words “dumb ass” onto the end of the sentence. Because if that had been the case, it would’ve practically made the feisty old lass and Granny Bernice twins separated at birth. Figuratively speaking, of course. From what Angel could see, no fewer than two hundred pounds separated the two women in weight. And not even fraternal twins showed that much of a difference.
Walking back around her desk and sliding open a drawer, Angel pulled out a tattered, spiral-bound notebook before settling down into her office chair. Missing-persons cases really weren’t her thing – never had been – so she highly doubted she’d be taking the case based on what she’d heard so far. Still, it never hurt to look professional, now did it? Besides, regardless of whether or not it happened to be her “thing”, she hadn’t exactly been rolling around in clover lately. What she had been rolling around in lately, however, was plenty of bills. Gas, food, electric, car note… Granny Bernice had been absolutely right when she’d said that those things didn’t magically pay themselves.
Who knew?
“Why wouldn’t the police do anything about it?” Angel asked, swiveling back and forth in her office chair and resisting the sudden urge to swing up her feet onto the desk like some sort of hardboiled dick in a Raymond Chandler novel. Not the brightest idea in the world when you’d worn a skirt into work that day. “It’s their job to find missing people.”
The old woman’s eyes looked dry now; the flash of vulnerability Angel had witnessed earlier replaced by something else. Something harder. “They won’t do nothin’ about it ‘cuz of who I am.”
“And just who exactly are you, ma’am?” Angel asked, trying desperately to keep the underlying knife-edge of impatience out of her voice but no doubt falling miserably short.
A second “goddamn-fool” look was followed at once by the defiant thrust of a bony chin. “I’m Jelani Diggs,” the old woman said. “I’m Razor’s mama.”
For as long as she would live, Angel would never understand how she managed to avoid snapping off the tip of her pencil against the notebook as the old woman’s words filtered deep into the center of her brain and slammed hard into her cerebral cortex. Razor Diggs was the murderous gang-banger who headed up the Cleveland chapter of the Bloods street gang. He ran drugs, guns, women and just about everything else under the sun. But most of all he just ran anybody stupid enough to cross him six feet into the ground.
Angel tried her best to maintain a neutral look but her poker face must have needed some serious work, because Jelani Diggs immediately read her mind every bit as easily as a bright schoolchild might read Green Eggs and Ham.
“I ain’t got nothin’ to do with that boy no more, so you ain’t gotta worry about that,” the old woman said.
“I wasn’t worried about it,” Angel lied.
The old woman leaned back in her chair and stared at her evenly. “Oh yes you was. But that’s OK. I don’t blame you none for it.”
Angel tossed her notebook onto the desk and took another long sip of her water before steering the conversation back around to the granddaughter. “So, you want me to find Sasha, is that it?” Boy, did she ask great questions sometimes. Certainly a medal of some sort was in the offing for her.
“That’s right,” the old woman said. “I want you to find Sasha.”
“Why me?”
“Because you black,” Jelani Diggs said, shifting in her chair again and looking uncomfortable now. “Look, I know it ain’t pretty to hear, but white people don’t give a shit when black folks go missing. ‘Scuse my language, but it’s just the truth.”
Angel pressed her lips into a tight line. Having watched the Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway and Elizabeth Smart cases play out ad nauseum on the evening news over the years without a single mention of the hundreds of black people missing around the country, she found it pretty hard to disagree with the old lady’s assessment of the huge chasm that existed in the media’s coverage of such cases. Still, she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to get mixed up in all this just yet. Was pretty sure that she didn’t.
That being said, her interest was piqued now – always a dangerous sign.
“How long has Sasha been missing?” Angel heard herself asking.
Jelani Diggs balled up her tattered Kleenex and worried it some more in her liver-spotted hands. “Been gone three days now. It just ain’t like her. I raised Sasha up since she was a baby. She don’t even know Razor’s her daddy. She’s a good girl, missy. I always made sure of that. We always lived right in the eyes of Jesus.”
The old woman’s voice had that edge to it again, as though she were daring Angel to contest this statement. Angel didn’t. Instead, she simply suggested what usually turned out to be the answer in most of these missing-persons cases.
“Maybe she ran off with a boyfriend,” Angel said, pivoting at her hips in an unsuccessful effort to loosen up the twisted muscles in her badly aching lower back. Somehow – despite her best efforts to avoid the nightly fate – she’d managed to fall asleep again in front of the television set in the creaky living-room recliner, an ancient piece of furniture that obviously hadn’t been constructed from the same space-age materials they used in Tempurpedic beds. “Wouldn’t be the first time that a gal ran off with a guy, you know. Young girls have been known to do crazy things from time to time when they’re in love. Hell, I once staked out a boy’s house for an entire month after
he turned me down for prom.”
The old woman knitted her sparse eyebrows on her ashy forehead and shook her head firmly. “Well, that may be the case for you, missy, but my Sasha ain’t nothin’ like that. Ain’t nothin’ like that, at all. She gonna be a doctor. That’s all she care about.”
The old woman paused and studied Angel’s face for a reaction, pressing her own lips together now. “You don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe this. This was in the Plain Dealer two weeks ago.”
Angel reached across the desk and took the newspaper clipping Jelani Diggs was offering. A thirty-point headline was stripped across the top of the metro page.
CLEVELAND WOMAN WINS RHODES SCHOLARSHIP
Angel scanned the story quickly, gathering that Sasha Diggs had paid her own freight at Cleveland State University by working nights as a waitress at a downtown Denny’s. A near-perfect academic record had prompted the prestigious invitation to Oxford.
The photo accompanying the article showed the smiling face of a truly stunning young woman. Smooth caramel skin. Huge hazel eyes. Long, shiny black hair. A soft-but-firm body that stuck out in all the right places.
All in all, an embarrassment of riches.
Angel sighed wistfully, remembering when her body had stuck out in all the right places like that.
“Very pretty,” Angel said, handing back the article across the desk. “What else can you tell me about Sasha? Did she have any enemies you know of? Anybody who might have wanted to hurt her in any way?”
Jelani Diggs shook her head again. ‘No, no, nothing like that. Everybody loved Sasha. The only thing I can think to tell you is that she went missing the night before she was supposed to leave off for England. That struck me right odd, what with her being so hell-fired up about goin’ off to Oxford and all.”
Angel leaned back in her chair and took another long sip of her water but didn’t say anything.
A moment or two of uncomfortable silence hung in the air between them before Jelani Diggs placed her Kleenex back into the side pocket of her heavy-knit sweater and retrieved her metal cane from her side, rising unsteadily to her feet. Angel mirrored the movement on the other side of the desk, a little more steadily, for her part.
“Look,” Jelani Diggs said. “I ain’t meanin’ to sound rude here or nothin’, but I don’t got all day to wait on your answer. You gonna help me out or not?”
Angel’s initial impulse – and it was a damn solid one at that, she’d realize later on – was to stay as far away from Razor Diggs and his crazy family as she could possibly get. She’d crossed paths with Razor just once before in her life, but that time had been more than enough to let her know that she never wanted anything to do with him again. Plain and simple, the man was a certifiable psychopath. Always had been and no doubt always would be.
She was about to tell Jelani Diggs as much when Granny Bernice’s voice suddenly sounded in the back of her mind.
You’d best help this woman out, Angel. Where the heck would you be if ain’t nobody helped you out every now and then?
Angel sighed. Who the hell needed a conscience when you had Granny Bernice hanging around all the time? So, against her better judgment, she found herself taking the plunge. “I’ll take a look into it and see what I can do, but I can’t make you any promises.”
Jelani Diggs smiled, displaying an ill-fitting set of dentures that Angel guessed she’d been toting around in her mouth since somewhere around 1975.
“You a good girl, missy,” the old woman said. “I guess you musta been raised up right too.”
CHAPTER 4
An incredibly powerful man known throughout the white-power world simply by his intimidating moniker of “the Race Master” leaned back in his comfortable leather office chair and stroked his dog’s coarse black coat while the comforting sounds of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons poured forth from the antique record player over in the corner of his fine den.
Perro de Presa Canario, or Dogo Canario, had originated in the Canary Islands. Originally meant as a multipurpose farm dog, for hundreds of years the breed had mostly been used to drive cattle. But its name also translated to Canarian Dog of Prey. And that was exactly what the Race Master’s dog represented.
A fearsome dog of prey.
Unlike the leader of The Brotherhood himself, Bane’s exact ancestry remained unknown. It was believed that Perro de Bardino Majorero – a farm dog from the Canary Islands – had been crossed with a mastiff brought over from England in order to create the foundation for the modern-day Presa Canario. The breed had been mentioned in historical documents dating all the way back to the 16th century, so its bloodline had certainly been around for quite a while. Among its many sterling attributes, the Presa breed enjoyed a lofty reputation for its fierce fighting skills, a tradition the English colonists had brought over with them when they’d first settled the Canary Islands in the 1500s.
Canary Islanders had always considered these vicious battles to be “honor fights” and not the sole purpose of the animals, but the Race Master had raised Bane since puppyhood to fulfill that purpose far better than any dog that had come before. His dog was a fighter, and the very best there’d ever been.
Balanced and imposing in form, Bane displayed all of the physical tools needed to excel in the underground world of dog fighting. Heavily built but still able to move with great athleticism. Powerful muscles that rippled like those of a thoroughbred horse’s beneath inch-thick skin. A highly aggressive and fearless nature. The dog’s dominant character had required obedience training very early on, but the Race Master’s patient tutelage in the area had been well worth the time and effort invested. The massive canine still showed signs of unbridled aggression toward strangers, of course, resisting the urge to open up their throats with his sharp white teeth simply because of the Race Master’s constant presence, but the animal never showed any signs of aggression toward the Race Master himself. Somehow, Bane seemed to have known that it would have meant an instant death sentence had ever shown even the slightest hint of disobedience to his master, so that sort of thing never happened.
Good thing, for Bane, to say the least.
A soft knock at the door to the den caused the huge dog to stir at the Race Master’s feet. A menacing growl came from deep within Bane’s thick black throat. Long strings of sticky drool dripped down from his sharp white fangs. His entire body quivered with the delicious anticipation of the kill.
Frothing at the mouth and snorting excitedly through nostrils the size of quarters, Bane looked up at the Race Master, clearly seeking permission to attack.
The Race Master looked down at his beloved dog and smiled. Leaning over to stroke Bane’s enormous head, he tried his best to soothe the poor thing’s jangled nerves.
“Soon enough, Bane,” he said in his most reassuring voice. “Be patient, my friend – your time is coming soon enough.”
CHAPTER 5
Dana angled her silver Mazda Protégé onto the entrance ramp for Interstate 90 East and downshifted the vehicle to fourth gear before merging with the heavy mid-day traffic that was zipping along the busy highway.
The car’s engine purred like a contented tiger beneath the hood and slipped Dana effortlessly into the rat race. Forty-five thousand miles and the Protégé still ran like a dream, like it had just rolled off the showroom floor. She only wished that everything else in her life ran even half as smoothly.
Flipping down the visor above her head to block out the bright sunlight that was streaming in through the windshield, Dana punched the button for cruise control and glanced up into the rearview mirror at the empty back seat, suppressing a small smile as she did so. If all went well for her, there might be a child’s safety seat back there soon. Maybe even some half-chewed Cheerios crushed into the carpet to go along with the bright red Kool-Aid stains soaked deep into the light-gray fabric of the floorboards and a smattering of sticky handprints across the back windows.
Dana widened her smile at the thought and thum
bed on the radio with the steering-wheel control. It’s a Beautiful Day by U2 came blasting over the stereo speakers and she cranked the volume all the way up. Perfect driving music for a day like this. Because today would be a beautiful day. She just knew it. One of the most beautiful days of her entire life.
Or so she hoped with every last fiber of her being.
Activating her turn signal, she eased the Protégé over into the fast lane, sliding her vehicle behind a green Porsche doing at least ninety-five in an effort to avoid any potential speeding tickets on the horizon. People who drove Porsches could afford the fine, after all. Single FBI agents who hoped to adopt children in the very near future, however, needed to keep a very careful eye on their budgets.
Dana breathed in deeply through her nostrils, wondering if Bradley even liked Cheerios and Kool-Aid. Still, even though she didn’t know everything about the little boy’s tastes yet, one thing she did know was that he didn’t like broccoli. Hated the stuff, as a matter of fact. Despised the icky green stuff with every last ounce of energy in his tiny little body. He’d told her as much only a few hours before their plane had crashed into Lake Erie the previous May.
The smile abruptly ran away from Dana’s face at the thought of the tragic day six months earlier that had changed both their lives forever. Faulty landing gear had prompted an emergency water landing on Lake Erie that hadn’t quite gone as planned, plunging Continental Flight 942, nonstop LA to Cleveland, deep into the murky waters of the forbidding lake and plunging Dana deep into a prolonged coma from which she hadn’t emerged for a hundred and eighty-two days. And hard as it was for her to believe, she’d actually been one of the lucky ones on the plane. Because six people had lost their lives in the crash that day – including Bradley’s delicately pretty, twenty-eight-year-old mother, Lucy May.