MYSTERY THRILLER DOUBLE PLAY BOX SET (Two full-length novels)

by Osborne, Jon

  More garbage lined the staircase leading up to the second floor where Razor lived: empty bottles of St. Ide’s malt liquor; blue condom wrappers; even a few stray bullet casings.

  Angel’s hand went instinctively around to the back of her skirt. The feel of her .45 tucked snugly against the small of her back made her feel better, but only marginally so.

  The stairwell smelled of urine and broken dreams. She would’ve covered her mouth and nose against the nauseating odor, but she wanted to keep both of her hands free for whatever might be coming next.

  The thought had no sooner crossed her mind before rough hands suddenly grabbed her from behind, lifting her sensible, inch-high heels two feet off the steps. Her kicking feet danced frantically in the air as someone very strong yanked her backward hard by her hair and slammed her skull violently forward again into the cracked concrete wall.

  The lights in Angel’s world flickered briefly, then blinked completely off.

  Cue all the little birdies.

  CHAPTER 16

  An hour after his invigorating walk in the beautiful New England woods with Bane, the Race Master kicked back in his comfortable leather office chair and relaxed in his fine den while the huge dog slept peacefully at his feet and the graceful sounds of Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave floated out of the antique record player over in the northeast corner of the dignified space lined with towering bookshelves positively crammed with history books. After all, those who didn’t study history were simply doomed to repeat it, now weren’t they?

  Goddamn right, they were. And this time the ending would be quite a bit different than it had been for poor Adolf Hitler. The Race Master had absolutely zero doubt in his mind about that much.

  A soft knock sounded at the door a moment later and Josef Sullivan entered the room, his face as white as a sheet.

  “What is it, Josef?” the Race Master demanded.

  “Bad news, sir,” Sullivan said in a shaking voice. “One of our operatives deviated from his instructions.”

  The Race Master pushed back his office chair angrily and rose to his feet. “Which operative, Josef?” Sensing his master’s unease, Bane lifted his huge head and growled.

  The Race Master turned around and slammed down his hand violently on the desk, knocking over the ivory ashtray in a shower of gray ashes. “Sit down, Bane!”

  Whimpering, the dog lowered its head at once and returned its body to its previous submissive position on the floor.

  The Race Master turned back to Sullivan. His voice shook with rage. “You have exactly thirty seconds to explain yourself before I slit your fucking throat, Josef.”

  Sullivan’s own voice trembled. “The one assigned to the Rhodes scholar in Cleveland, sir. Seems he took a fancy to her and has been holding her in his basement five miles outside the city, raping her every day. Said since she’s already pregnant he might as well have a bit of fun with her before he completes the job.”

  With every last ounce of energy in his toned and muscular body, the Race Master fought the overwhelming urge to lunge across the room and throttle the life out of Sullivan with his bare hands.

  He took in a deep breath through his nostrils and forced himself to calm down. His emotions were running far too hot right now, and that was a dangerous sign. Angry men made stupid decisions. Angry men failed at their missions.

  He stretched his powerful neck until a string of vertebrae popped in quick succession. Then he took another deep breath that expanded his already broad chest another six inches before adjusting the silk necktie at his throat. “Bring this man to me, Josef,” he said. “Assign someone else to finish the job on the Cleveland girl. Our best man in the state – Trebblehorn in Cincinnati. But bring this traitor to me alive, Josef. I don’t want a single hair on his head harmed. Not yet, anyway.”

  Sullivan nodded, looking very sick. “There’s something else, sir. A private investigator is looking into the Cleveland girl’s disappearance. A black woman.”

  The Race Master gritted his teeth in irritation and ran his fingers through his short blonde hair. “Then have Trebblehorn follow this woman, Josef,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “Have him follow her and report back to me every hour on the hour with updates on what she’s doing.”

  Sullivan paused. “Shouldn’t we just take her out as well, sir?”

  If he’d been holding a pistol in his hand at that precise moment, the Race Master would have splattered Josef Sullivan’s insolent brains all over the walls of his fine den. “No, Josef. But convey the message to her that her intrusion is most unwelcome. Now get the fuck out of here before I change my mind about killing you. I need some time to think.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Dana and Blankenship jumped into a Yellow Cab outside La Guardia and Blankenship gave the driver directions before the elderly Middle Eastern man pulled out into the crazy snarl of traffic plaguing New York City at rush hour.

  The cloying smell of incense filled the cab and turned Dana’s stomach as they drove, but at least it beat the hell out of the sour body-odor smell found in most New York City taxis. Seated directly behind the driver, she stared out the grime-streaked window and watched the streets pass by – the same familiar streets that she and Jeremy Brown had traveled while tracking down the Chessboard Killer during their last case together.

  Dana shuddered against the painful memory. Despite the obviously singular moniker, the Chessboard Killer had been a pair of mentally unstable billionaires masquerading as a single murderous entity while transforming the streets of the Big Apple into a gigantic, bloody chessboard just for shits and giggles, taking everyone involved in the investigation – including Dana and Jeremy themselves – completely off-guard. Jeremy had lost his life during that investigation when Jack Yuntz, the fourteen-year-old protégé of one of the whack-job billionaires, had stabbed a sharp pair of scissors deep into his neck while the final showdown had taken place inside the ritzy Presidential Suite of the Fontainebleau Hotel in downtown Manhattan.

  Dana let out a soft breath over her teeth. She still had as macabre souvenir of that day the bloodstained blouse she’d been wearing while cradling Jeremy’s head in her arms and listening to the tortured, gurgling sounds of his last breaths, not knowing then about the diamond engagement ring in his pocket. She still hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw away the shirt yet, and she doubted she ever would. That would almost feel like throwing away a piece of him. And Dana wanted to hang onto him forever.

  Good God, almighty, did she still want to hang on to him.

  When the driver pulled up to the front of the DeVine Office Building at the corner of Broadway and 83rd twenty-five minutes later, Dana and Blankenship hopped out of the cab before Dana paid the man with a fifty, telling him to keep the change.

  Dana steeled herself for what would come next as she and Blankenship stood on the sidewalk in front of the towering office building and stared up at the massive skyscraper that lifted a hundred and ninety floors into the air. No fancy forensics would be needed here today. No complicated bloodstain analysis or tricky manner-of-death determination required. Because – like just about everything else that took place in New York City – every last sickening detail of Laura Settle’s brutal murder in the northwest elevator bank of the building had been captured on camera. Finally – blissfully – something for which they could all thank Big Brother.

  Blankenship pulled open the door and held it for Dana before stepping inside after her. They made their way across the glittering main lobby and caught an elevator up to the twelfth floor, which housed the building’s security offices. Now they were seated in a pair of matching leather chairs in the chief of security’s personal office and watching in horror as Laura Settle’s unborn baby was savagely cut from her stomach with a long knife wielded by a handsome young man dressed in an expensive-looking suit.

  Vomit rushed into Dana’s mouth. Her heartbeat palpitated violently in her neck. Her palms flooded with sweat.

  Blankenship ro
se to his feet and gestured to the television set when the gruesome video had finally finished playing. “This thing have a USB port on it?” he asked.

  The chief of security – Charlie Plouff, according to the man’s nametag – nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s state-of-the-art all the way.”

  Blankenship nodded and reached into the inside pocket of his blazer, extracting a short length of insulated computer wire and hooking up his iPhone to the television set before downloading the security footage to his phone. Then he punched a series of commands into the phone’s keypad.

  “What are you doing?” Dana asked, rising unsteadily to her feet and swallowing back the acrid taste of stomach acid in her mouth. Never before in her life had she witnessed anything even half as gruesome as the gut-wrenching events she’d just watched unfold across the television screen – and she’d seen plenty of horrible things in her life. Nobody with a single brain cell in his or her skull could possibly debate that much.

  Blankenship hit several more buttons on the keypad of his phone. “I’m emailing the video to a contact of mine over in the Criminal Justice Information Services Division. You familiar with it?”

  Dana nodded. The FBI’s “data campus” in Clarksburg, West Virginia stored ninety-six million sets of fingerprints belonging to criminals and suspects scattered across the United States and around the world. Dana had sought the division’s help herself while she’d been in the process of investigating Timothy Preston; the transgendered serial killer the press had dubbed “the Censor” due to his/her habit of targeting B-list celebrities. So Dana knew that CJISD had powerful face-recognition software capable of matching up suspects’ facial features to the fingerprints on file. “You running the guy’s face?” Dana asked.

  Blankenship nodded and unhooked his phone from the television set, slipping it back into his blazer. “Yep. And I put an A-1 Priority on it for my guy, too, so hopefully we’ll be hearing something back soon.”

  Dana turned to the chief security officer of the building, Plouff. “No eyewitnesses on the night of the murder?” she asked.

  Plouff shook his head and tucked his crisp white uniform shirt tighter into his belt. “No, ma’am. We got the report just six minutes after the murder happened, too, according to the time-stamp on the video. We locked down the place tighter than a virgin on her confirmation day and helped NYPD rule out everybody in the building within a matter of hours, but no one saw a thing.”

  Plouff paused and shook his head – obviously impressed with the fine work that he and his people had put in that night. “Four thousand people we had to go through,” he said. “My crew really busted their asses on that one.”

  Dana lifted her eyebrows. She didn’t know what to say. Still, it seemed clear that Plouff was fishing for a compliment, so she obliged. “The job can be tough sometimes. Thank you for all your hard work, Mr Plouff.”

  Though that should have been the end of it, Plouff continued his unsubtle compliment-fishing expedition.

  “Yep, we really busted our butts that night,” he went on, clearly intent on engaging in a bit of war-story tale-telling with his fellow law-enforcement types. “I’ll you what: I don’t know how the hell we…”

  Just then, mercifully, Blankenship’s phone sounded from inside his blazer. Digging it out and hitting the speakerphone feature on the keypad, he said, “Jimmy, boy. Tell me something good.”

  A man cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “I’ll tell you something better than good, Bruce. I’ve already got an ID on your perp with the knife. The Nobel Peace Prize candidate who gets his jollies from cutting unborn babies out of pregnant women’s stomachs.”

  Blankenship cut his stare over to Dana. “What’s the asshole’s name?”

  “Lee Maxwell Jarvis. Small-time petty criminal in the past who experienced a ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment and subsequently became a youth pastor. One with known ties to several white-supremacist hate groups scattered across the country.”

  Blankenship frowned. “Last known address?”

  “Hell, would be my guess.”

  Blankenship frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

  Blankenship’s contact cleared his throat again. “Well, according to the information I’ve got here, the neo-Nazi prick took a swan dive off the Queensboro Bridge at ten o’clock this morning. Really made a mess of things, too, if you know what I mean. White, black, brown, purple – I guess we’re all blood red deep down on the inside where it really counts, huh?”

  Blankenship laughed without humor. “Yeah. But other than hell, what’s Jarvis’s last known address, Jim?”

  “Yonkers. But I’d say they’re pretty much the same thing, wouldn’t you?”

  CHAPTER 18

  When Angel finally emerged from unconsciousness an hour later, she cringed against the worst headache she’d ever experienced in her entire life

  The roots of her hair felt like they were on fire. Her whole body ached. Human skulls and concrete walls had never been designed to meet at sub-G forces like that, and now she was living proof of it.

  At least I’m still living proof, she thought groggily. For now, anyway.

  “You awake, bitch?”

  As her world swam gradually into focus, Angel found herself looking up into the hard green eyes of Razor Diggs. He had a red bandana tied tightly around his shiny bald head, just like Tupac Shakur used to kick it before a carload of assassins hell-bent on exacting revenge for the murder of rival rapper Biggie Smalls had caught up with the controversial musician and his oversized manager, Suge Knight, outside a Las Vegas casino on the night of September 13th, 1996 following Mike Tyson’s boxing match against former champion Bruce Seldon. Diggs was cradling an Uzi-Mac 10 hybrid in his huge hands.

  Only the finest in weaponry for Cleveland’s king of the streets, right?

  “Razor,” Angel mumbled, swallowing back the metallic taste of warm blood she tasted in her mouth. “What a pleasant surprise. What’s it been, ten years now?”

  Razor Diggs grinned down at her, his smile as sharp as his name, his teeth perfect and very white. If nothing else, killing people for a living must’ve come with one hell of a dental plan.

  When he spoke again, his voice emerged unnaturally low from his thick throat – the perfect complement to the rippling, tatted-up muscles in his bulging arms that he’d chosen to show off today in a pristine white wife-beater. Ghetto-fabulous, all the way. Dress for success and success would surely follow.

  “Angel fuckin’ Monroe,” Razor grunted, sounding like some kind of sadistic, inner-city version of Barry White while he twisted his full lips into a menacing sneer. “Of all the people in the world, I’d have thought you’d have better sense than to come nosin’ around here. Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time I saw you, bitch? Didn’t you bleed enough then?”

  As she further established her bearings, Angel saw that she was sitting in an overstuffed armchair in the living room of Razor’s tenement apartment – a ridiculously well-decorated affair considering the decidedly shitty exterior of the building. A huge flat-screen TV hung on one wall over a mantle. Drug paraphernalia littered a glass-topped coffee table five feet away. The furniture in the apartment looked new and expensive to her, but Angel highly doubted that Razor subscribed to any sort of payment plan. He just didn’t seem like a Rent-A-Center type of guy to her.

  She tested her muscles gingerly, happy to find that everything still seemed to be in good working order. She lifted her eyebrows in surprise when she realized that her hands hadn’t been tied, but that only let her know that Razor didn’t consider her much of a threat, which was a good thing. But she also noticed her .45 was gone. Couldn’t win them all.

  Angel shook her head to clear out the remaining cobwebs cluttering up her woozy mind. “Yeah, Razor,” she said. “I bled plenty the last time I saw you. No need for a repeat performance.”

  Back when she’d still been a Cleveland cop, Angel had taken part in a drug raid on this very building that had gone
horribly wrong from the start. In the end, most of the targets had gotten away, including Razor Diggs. But not before he’d hit Angel with a crushing left hook that would’ve made Muhammad Ali proud, knocking her clean out and splitting her upper lip wide open. It had taken twelve stitches to close that especially painful wound, and Angel still had the nasty scar on her upper lip as a daily reminder of just how much she hadn’t missed this man.

  Still grinning from ear to ear, Razor finally broke eye contact with her when a kid in his late-teens emerged from a back bedroom.

  Angel focused her watery vision across the room and pegged the kid’s height at about six-four. Rail-thin and smoking a cigarette, he took a long drag on his cancer stick before flicking a long line of ashes into a marble ashtray sitting on the mantle, blowing out twin jets of smoke through his wide nostrils. Angel’s vision sharpened further and she recognized the label on the boy’s cigarette even from across the room. A Newport – the same brand Granny Bernice smoked. Did black people ever smoke anything else? She wouldn’t know. She never touched the things herself. Nothing more than sharp coffin nails wrapped up in pretty little packages, she knew.

  The kid’s oversized Lebron James T-shirt looked like it had swallowed him alive. His face appeared handsome enough in a dangerous sort of way, with only a miniature black teardrop tattooed neatly beneath his right eye to mar his smooth brown skin. From her time working with Cleveland PD’s gang unit, Angel knew the tattoo meant he’d already made his bones – always a bad sign. Some killers were born and some were made, and from the look of things this kid was the worst of both worlds.

  The kid nodded to Angel. “Cunt finally woke up, eh Razor?”

  Razor tightened his face into a scowl. “Shut the fuck up, Chauncey. This here is between me and this nosy little bitch sittin’ in this chair here, so why don’t you take your monkey ass back in the bedroom and roll me up another spliff, motherfucker?”