by Osborne, Jon
Angel’s vision swam wildly in and out of focus. The room melted away into a crazy swirl of jumbled colors before suddenly clearing up again.
She shook her head hard in an effort to clear away the blinding fog, but that only made things worse.
Then, the worst shock of her entire life.
The huge weight she’d just pushed off herself was grandmother’s enormous body, the old woman’s flowered housedress riding halfway up her massive thighs.
Granny Bernice had been shot once between the eyes. Her unseeing hazel eyes stared up at Angel, seeming to ask one simple question:
Why?
In an instant, Angel’s entire world collapsed. Everything around her came to a screeching halt. There existed no sound in this strange new world of hers, no smells, no sense of touch. Nothing. Just the very real sensation of her heart breaking into a million tiny pieces inside her badly constricted chest.
She started screaming then.
PART II
“The power of the White world is threatened whenever a Black man refuses to accept the White world’s definitions.” – James A. Baldwin, author.
CHAPTER 22
The Race Master slid a sharp knife through a delicate piece of filet mignon and slipped the tender meat into his mouth.
Delicious.
Wiping at his mouth with a heavy linen napkin, he put down the fine china on the floor after just one bite. Bane could finish off the rest. Hell, the dog had earned that much with his fearsome display in the woods.
Josef Sullivan was seated across the huge oaken table from him in the well-appointed dining room, a huge crystal chandelier sparkling over their heads. Imported from Austria, the chandelier had cost twenty-five thousand dollars. The solid-sterling place settings had all come from Spain bearing price tags of four thousand dollars a set. The Italian suits both men wore had been cut from whole cloth by one of the finest tailors in all of Rome.
These fine things had all cost a small fortune, of course, but the Race Master had expensive tastes and enough filthy lucre to indulge his refined tastes whenever he damn well pleased. He could thank his father for that much. The old man had been a highly valued member of the SS during World War II – one of Hitler’s personal favorites, or so the story went – and the stolen paintings he’d appropriated from the Jewish hordes had fetched the family quite a handsome sum, indeed, ensuring that none of the man’s offspring would ever have to work a single day in their lives should that so be their choosing.
The Race Master sighed, missing his father badly. A true Aryan if ever there’d been one. Raising his glass of fine French champagne to his lips, he drank a silent toast to the old man’s memory, swishing around the expensive liquid in his mouth and relishing the way the exquisite flavors danced across his tongue.
Ten feet away, Josef Sullivan raised his own glass, still not having spoken a word yet. Excellent. Perhaps the idiot had finally learned that it was far better to be seen than it was to be heard. Seemed that even the hardest taught among their number possessed the capacity to learn, which represented a comforting thought to the Race Master.
The Race Master cleared his throat and finally acknowledged Sullivan’s presence. “Well then, Josef,” he said. “What have you got for me today?”
Sullivan fidgeted with the perfect Windsor knot in the silk necktie at his throat. “Our man from Cincinnati conveyed your message to the private investigator in Cleveland, sir. He also handed the traitor over to some of our people from Pennsylvania. They should be here any moment now.”
“And the Rhodes scholar, Josef?” the Race Master asked. “What of her?”
“Trebblehorn is taking care of her as we speak, sir.”
The Race Master nodded. “Very well, Josef. Have we acquired another target yet?”
“Yes, sir. Betsy Campbell; a professional musician from Washington.”
“DC or the state?”
“The state, sir.”
“Has the seeding been confirmed?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Race Master rose from his chair just as the crunch of gravel under tires sounded out in the driveway in front of the house. Favoring his most faithful sycophant with a bright smile, he nodded again.
“Very well, Josef. You may proceed with the next execution.”
CHAPTER 23
Dana and Blankenship left Jarvis’s apartment and made their way back down the narrow stairwell to the first floor.
Mercifully, the mysterious boy and his coal-black stare stayed out of sight this time. Thank God for the little things in this life. Because Dana honestly didn’t know if she could stand looking into the boy’s soulless eyes again. Not this soon, at least. She already felt jumpy enough as it was.
When they’d reached their destination forty-five seconds later, Blankenship lifted his right hand and knocked firmly on the door to apartment 1, which sat conveniently located right next to the entrance to the street. The door opened up almost at once in response to his knocking – and Dana’s heart immediately stopped beating dead in her chest.
In her mind’s eye, the boy dressed in the Bob Marley T-shirt and colorful Rastafarian cap vaulted at her in a sudden rush of movement without ever moving his feet on the floor – like those trick Internet videos showing a deathly pale woman with glowing green eyes who vaulted at the unsuspecting watcher and gave their hearts a terrible start while their “friends” fell all over themselves laughing their asses off at the debatably funny spectacle.
In the real world, though, the boy that had passed them in the narrow stairwell twenty minutes earlier simply removed one of his earbuds and said, “Yeah? What do you guys want?”
Blankenship flipped open his FBI shield, and Dana felt infinitely grateful that her new partner took the lead. At least one of them still retained the ability to function normally. “Agent Blankenship, Agent Whitestone,” he said. “FBI. We need to talk to the landlord. Is he or she around?”
The boy tucked his earbud back beneath his knitted Rastafarian cap and looked directly at Dana. “Ma!” he yelled.
A woman’s voice sounded from a back room. “What?”
The boy shook his head and finally released Dana from his hypnotic stare. Dana shook her own head in disbelief as he did so. She couldn’t believe she’d been intimidated so goddamn easily. What the fuck was wrong with her? The kid couldn’t have been any more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Maybe it had been some trick of lighting in the dim stairwell. Maybe it had been some deeper psychological malfunction that Dana really didn’t feel like dealing with right now. Whatever it was, though, she felt like a complete jackass for her snap judgment about the boy’s voodoo leanings.
As she knew she should.
“Some cops are here to see you,” the boy shouted, even louder this time. “Say they’re FBI.”
“What?”
The boy rolled his eyes and released a disgusted breath. “Cops. FBI. Just come in here, would ya?”
A moment later, a white woman in her mid-fifties shocked Dana even further by coming to the door, wiping her soapy palms against the front of an apron. Dana fought back a physical wave of surprise in her chest as the woman shooed the boy out of the way. “Go do your homework, Marcus. Quit hanging around the house all day doing nothing.”
The boy gave the woman an irritated look well known to mothers of teenaged boys all around the world. “I don’t have any homework. It’s summertime.”
The woman pushed the boy gently in the back. “Fine, then go do something else. Get a head start on next year’s homework. Read a book. Take a walk. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. I really don’t care. Just get out of my way.”
When the boy had finally stomped off – presumably into his bedroom to listen to some more of his trance-like music while reflecting on the countless injustices foisted upon the teenaged world – the woman turned back to Dana and Blankenship and shook her head. “Sorry about that. That kid, I swear. He’s just like his father. Always trying to be something he�
�s not. For God’s sake, he was born right here in Yonkers, not Kingston. Not that you’d know it just by looking at the way he dresses, right?”
Dana shook her head. She sure as hell hadn’t known it. More guilt flooded through her system for the sin of jumping to conclusions about the boy’s lineage. Seemed that even people who weren’t out-and-out racists had their own fair share of preconceived notions floating around inside their minds when it came to dealing with those of different skin colors than their own.
She just wished like hell that she hadn’t been one of them.
Dana locked away her guilty feelings – at least for now – and introduced herself and Blankenship. She could deal with her sensitivity issues later on. Right now, though, they had a murdering white-supremacist asshole they needed to learn a little more about. And the clock on finding out just which white-supremacist group the sadistic prick might’ve been working for had already been ticking for quite some time now. Most cases that didn’t develop solid leads in the first forty-eight hours went cold, something known to even the most casual viewer of the late-night television crime dramas. Shows such as CSI and Investigative Reports with Bill Kurtis and the aptly named 48 Hours had set the bar higher for law enforcement, keeping them accountable to a more-educated populace. But Dana didn’t mind. Hell, she relished the challenge. Always had and always would. The challenge is what made her tick. “We’ve got some questions about one of your tenants, ma’am,” Dana said, happy to find that her voice emerged somewhat normally from her constricted throat despite the uneasiness she’d been feeling all day. “A Lee Maxwell Jarvis. You know him?”
The woman nodded. “Yep. Sure I do. One of the nicest people who live here, as a matter of fact. Always pays his rent on time, never causes a problem at all. No noise complaints, no loud parties; no nothing. I just wish all my tenants were even half as considerate as he is. Is he in trouble for something?”
Blankenship answered the woman. “Worse than that, ma’am. He’s dead.”
The woman pulled back her head in undisguised shock, widening her clear blue eyes into the size of fifty-cent pieces. It was the sort of look that guilty murder suspects could never pull off, no matter how desperately they tried. “Oh my God,” the woman breathed. “How absolutely dreadful. How did it happen?”
“Suicide,” Dana answered. “Jumped off the Queensboro Bridge at ten o’clock this morning.”
Jarvis’s landlord closed her eyes. For a long moment, Dana thought that she saw the woman’s lips moving silently in prayer. When the woman finally opened her eyes again, she asked, “So if Lee didn’t do anything to hurt anyone else, what’s this all about then?”
Dana ignored the question. She just didn’t think that it would be helpful to inform the woman that Jarvis had cut out an unborn fetus from a young lawyer’s stomach fewer than twenty-four hours earlier. She could read about it in the newspaper when all the gory details came trickling out, just like everybody else. No doubt the story would be splashed all over the front pages of both the New York Times and the New York Post by tomorrow morning, at the very latest. And it was already on the Internet. Much like the rest of the country – and whether they wanted to admit it or not – New Yorkers loved a good murder story. Especially when it involved a victim and suspect of different races. The bloodier the better. Dana had learned that much firsthand while she and Jeremy Brown had been investigating the Chessboard Killer murders the previous year.
Dana asked, “Did Jarvis have any regular visitors around here at the apartment complex, ma’am?”
The landlord shook her head. “No, nobody ever came to see Lee. That was another great thing about him, another thing that made him such a wonderful tenant. Poor boy grew up in an orphanage, you know. Probably made him thankful to even have a home at all.”
Blankenship cut his stare over to Dana before sliding his eyes back to the landlord. From the restless look in her new partner’s eye, Dana could tell that he didn’t think this line of questioning worth pursuing – and she didn’t blame him. Great minds and all that. The well-intentioned woman obviously didn’t have anything useful to offer them, so that made talking with her any longer a complete waste of time. And wasting time – completely or otherwise – wasn’t something they could afford right now. Like Dana had already noted – the clock was still ticking.
“Thank you very much for your time, ma’am,” Blankenship said, flipping closed his ID and tucking it back inside his blazer. “We’ll be in contact with you if we need anything else.”
The landlord nodded. “Yes, of course.”
The woman paused and let out a deep breath. “Well, I guess I’ll have to go clean out Lee’s apartment now. Seems terribly cold and insensitive considering what just happened, but I really can’t afford to let the place stay empty, you know what I mean? The economy and all.”
When the woman had closed the door and Dana and Blankenship were back out on the busy street, Dana wondered if the landlord’s generous assessment of Lee Maxwell Jarvis’s character would be affected by what she’d soon see in apartment 219 – especially considering the mixed-race heritage of her son. Nice as the woman seemed to be, Dana wouldn’t be surprised if the landlord dug out Jarvis’s dead body from the ground just so that she could kill the murdering bastard all over again. And if that turned out to be the case, Dana wouldn’t have blamed her at all. Hell, Dana felt the exact same way. Much like the traffic-court judge who’d whipped poor little Bradley with a thick belt for the sin of simply being alive, just one death seemed far too easy on some people – and Lee Maxwell Jarvis had definitely been among that heartless number.
Dana turned to Blankenship. “You don’t like to fuck around very much, do you?”
Blankenship pressed his full lips into a tight line. “Not when it comes to these white-power assholes. Do you?”
Dana shook her head. “Nope. The quicker we can nail these pricks to the nearest available cross, the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Just then, Dana’s cellphone sounded in her purse. Digging it out, she flipped it open and held up a finger to Blankenship, motioning for him to wait.
She placed the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
Thirty seconds later, she flipped closed the phone again, feeling all the blood drain from her face.
“What is it?” Blankenship demanded, searching Dana’s eyes with his own. “Another murder? Another white-power hit?”
Dana shook her head. For several long moments, she couldn’t even speak. She simply lacked the breath for it. Finally managing to move her lips again, she said, “No. That was Shelley Margolis. I’ve got a play-date with Bradley coming up in two weeks.”
Blankenship lifted his eyebrows, confused. “Who in the hell is Shelley Margolis? And who’s Bradley?”
Dana took a deep breath through her nostrils and brought her new partner up to speed about the possibility that she’d soon become a mother to the handsomest little guy she’d ever laid eyes on in her entire life. A regular GQ model, if ever there’d been one.
A smile crossed played across her lips while she filled in Blankenship on all the particulars. And why not?
Wasn’t that what all mothers got when they talked about their kids?
CHAPTER 24
Angel spent the next five hours answering questions from Cleveland PD’s Major Crimes Unit.
No, her grandmother didn’t have any connection to Razor Diggs. Yes, Granny Bernice had heard of him. No, her grandmother had never met him before. Yes, Granny Bernice knew where Angel had been headed today. No, Angel didn’t know why Razor Diggs had left her alive.
The medical examiner had left the scene an hour earlier, taking Granny Bernice’s bloodsoaked body with him. They’d be conducting an autopsy, he’d told her, though Angel thought the cause of death rather fucking obvious in this case.
Ten minutes later, she was seated in the swing on the front porch of their house, wrapped up in a heavy blanket even though the mercury had reached ninety-two degrees.
She was shaking like a leaf, unable to get warm for the life of her despite the oppressive heat wave baking the city. She recognized the weird body-chill as shock, but she also knew there wasn’t a goddamn thing she could do about it other than to let the shock run its course. Lieutenant Stosh Meyers, an old friend from the force, was seated next to her on the swing.
“I know what you’re thinking, Angel,” Stosh said softly, “but don’t go flushing your life down the toilet over a murdering piece of crap like Razor Diggs. He’s just not worth it.”
Angel had always liked Stosh Meyers. He’d always been one of the good eggs on the force. A damn fine cop, too. But right now Angel really didn’t feel like being talked down off the ledge she was on. “I’m sorry, Stosh, but he’s gonna have to pay for this,” she said, her voice wavering in her throat and threatening to shatter like a fumbled dinner plate. “That woman was my entire world and now she’s gone. Murdered by a piece of human trash.”
The Cleveland cop reached out a hand and touched her right knee. A look of genuine concern filled his soft blue eyes. “Leave that part up to us, Angel. I’m going to take care of this shit personally.”
Angel looked up at her former law-enforcement colleague from her days on the Cleveland police force and held his stare. “Better hurry Stosh, because by the time I’m done with him, there isn’t going to be anything left of Razor Diggs to take care of.”
Just then, a young uniformed officer stepped out onto the porch and cleared his throat. “Hey, LT? I think you’d better come in here and take a look at this.”
Angel rose to her feet and followed the Cleveland cops back into her living room. A sheet of paper lay across the mahogany coffee table, ten feet in front of the cabinet-style television upon which sat family portraits of Angel and Granny Bernice throughout the years: Angel’s first day of kindergarten, tears slipping down Granny Bernice’s plump cheeks as she dropped her off at the doorway to St Ann’s. Angel learning how to ride a bike, Granny Bernice’s running behind her the entire way; her arms outstretched and ready to catch Angel should she happen to fall. The two women outside Progressive Field right before they’d gone inside and watched the Indians get their butts kicked again by those despised Yankees.