by Osborne, Jon
The code was simple enough to understand if you knew what you were looking for. Using the relative point values for chess pieces – one for pawns, three for knights and bishops, five for rooks and nine for queens – all you needed to do was match up the numbers to their corresponding place in the alphabet. Therefore, “A” was worth one – or a pawn – and “Z” was worth twenty-six, or “QUEEN-ROOK2-BISHOP2-PAWN”. So, in plain English, their first exchange had read:
“Want to play a game?”
“Yes!”
From there, the arrangements had been made in relatively short order. According to the deal they’d struck, the Race Master would spring Jack Yuntz from the Connelly Institute and set him up financially for life on one condition: the boy would need to ensure that Dana Whitestone paid in blood for her maddening interference should the Race Master’s ambitious mission to spring his brother from his cold German prison cell happen to fail.
Looking down at Jack Yuntz’s final sequence of relative values – which had once again made the exceedingly dull workers at the Connelly Institute who examined such things think that the two new pen pals were simply engaged in a complicated game of long-distance chess through the mail – the Race Master sighed again. Because they were playing a game here, weren’t they? Of course they were. Still, he and Jack Yuntz weren’t playing chess at the moment. Not even close. What they were playing was something much more interesting than that.
Nothing less than a game of life and death.
Reading through the boy’s last response, the Race Master stretched his powerful neck and smiled again.
CHAPTER 75
Jessica Kingfisher used a small screwdriver to extract the tiny pinhole camera from the wall and held the camera in front of her eyes for a closer look. In all seriousness, she said, “It’s an SVAT PI1000 Covert MPEG4 Recording System with a built-in color pinhole surveillance camera inside the motion sensor, WiFi-equipped. Images are probably shuttled through Trimble’s Internet connection right here in her own house. Ain’t life just a bitch?”
Dana rolled her eyes. For all intents and purposes, she might as well have been listening to a female version of Bruce Blankenship. “In English, please, Agent Kingfisher,” she said.
Kingfisher shook her head. “Right, sorry about that, Agent Whitestone. Basically, it’s a very expensive little piece of equipment that contains all the bells and whistles a murdering Peeping Tom could ever want.”
Dana asked, “Any way to find out who put it there?”
Kingfisher pursed her lips. “Maybe, but there’s a lot of red tape we’ll need to go through first with the wireless provider, and even then I wouldn’t say that it’s a sure bet we’ll find whoever’s paying the bills for the account.” Kingfisher turned to Bethany Quartz. “Anything else interesting in the surveillance footage, Bet?”
Quartz leaned back in her chair and shook her head. “Nope. Not a damn thing, I’m afraid. Trail ends with the hooded guy’s message.”
Kingfisher and Quartz then devolved into yet another round of maddening techno-speak from there while Dana dug out her cellphone from her purse and connected to the Internet before Googling what she needed to know. Most of what the circuit-heads were talking about right now was pure gibberish to her, anyway. Time to get back on her own turf where she felt a little more comfortable.
To Kingfisher and Quartz, she said, “Could you two ladies hold down the fort here for a bit while Blankenship and I go out exploring?”
Quartz waved a hand in the air. “Of course. Go. We must be driving you mad with all this technical mumbo-jumbo.”
Blankenship asked, “Where we going?”
Dana looked over her partner from head to toe, mentally gauging his size. “C’mon,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
Five minutes later, they were back in the rented Sentra, Dana behind the wheel again. Following the pleasant, British-accented female voice coming from the GPS unit sitting on the dashboard, Dana pulled the car into the parking lot of a Goodwill thrift shop fifteen minutes later.
Blankenship gave her a puzzled look as she slid the car into an empty space. “We passed two thrift shops on the way over here, Dana. What’s so special about this one?”
Dana switched off the ignition and tucked the keys into her purse. “You’ll see,” she said. “Anyway, what size shoe do you wear?”
Blankenship twisted up his face. “Eleven. Why?”
Dana opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out of the Sentra before leaning her head back in. “Wait right here. I’ll be out in ten minutes.”
Leaving her confused partner sitting in the car, she then made her way across the parking lot and pulled open the front door to the thrift shop before stepping inside and looking around. The musty scent of old clothing filled her nostrils and made her want to sneeze as she headed for the back of the store. Fifteen minutes later, she exited the thrift shop again, looking much different than she had when she’d walked in.
Blankenship stepped out of the Sentra and onto the blacktopped pavement as she approached, his eyes widening as he took in her altered appearance. “Nice get-up, Dana,” he said, examining her new clothing and shaking his head. “You going to the prom or something?”
Dana smiled and glanced down at the “white-power” uniform she’d just purchased: Tattered white wife-beater. Baggy camouflage pants. Red suspenders. Shiny black army boots complete with bright red shoelaces.
She looked up at Blankenship and tossed him a heavy paper bag filled with similar attire. “Yep,” she said, “I’m going to the prom, all right, and you’re my date. So hurry up and get dressed.”
Blankenship asked, “So, where exactly will this exceedingly formal event be taking place?”
Dana pointed across the street to a skinhead bar located on the southwest corner. “Right over there,” she said. “So hurry up already. I don’t want to be late for this.”
CHAPTER 76
Angel exited the house that she’d shared with Granny Bernice since she’d been a baby, hopping inside her twelve-year-old Cabriolet with more than a hundred thousand miles on the odometer and cranking the engine into life with a quick twist of her right wrist. Putting the car in reverse, she backed the vehicle carefully out of the driveway and pointed its headlights in the direction of downtown.
Angel stretched her neck as she drove, knowing she needed to prepare for this. Knowing she needed to get loose.
After all, she’d be hunting tonight.
She clicked on the radio as she hit the entrance ramp for I-90 East ten minutes later. Eminem’s Lose Yourself came blasting over the stereo speakers as she merged with the late-night traffic zipping down the busy highway, but she frowned and hit the scan button. The station switched over to Public Enemy’s seminal rallying call, Fight the Power! There. That was better. More in keeping with the overall theme of the night.
Angel breathed in deeply through her nostrils and steeled herself for what would come next. Her prey tonight would come in the form of the not-so-elusive, inbred, alcoholic, backwoods, racist redneck.
Failing that, any garden-variety skinhead snake would do.
She glanced down at the clock on the dashboard that was glowing bright green numbers in wavering shafts of artificial light. 12:12 p.m. The drunks at the downtown bars should be good and oiled-up by now. Exactly how Angel wanted them to be.
Circling the block around the Flats area of downtown – Cleveland’s faded entertainment district – she passed Howl at the Moon, Shooters on the Water and the Shark Club, among the dozens of other watering holes dotting the busy strip. Small pockets of revelers trickled in and out of the nightclubs, the women dressed in their finest “hoochie-mama” get-ups in an effort to draw attention to the most interesting parts about themselves. Fishnet stockings. Low-cut, tight-fitting spandex shirts. Black-leather miniskirts. Thigh-high hooker boots with zippers running along the sides.
The usual douchebags were in attendance, too, trying their best to pick up the young
ladies while outfitted in two-sizes-too-small pastel-colored polo shirts with the collars popped and multi-pocketed cargo shorts in varying shades of beige and green. Fashionably messy Justin Bieber hair had been sculpted out of what looked to be gallons of “product”. Or, as an alternative, the young men simply sported plain white T-shirts with necklaces of dubious precious metal-content worn on the outside and chomped on mangled toothpicks that hung casually from the corners of mouths bent into know-it-all sneers.
Angel narrowed her gaze and slowed down the Cabriolet as she eased past Blizzard, the oh-so-cleverly-named white-power club in the Flats. Blizzard: a weather phenomenon marked by blindingly white snow. Get it? Don’t you just hate niggers?
A clearly drunken skinhead stumbled out of the bar as she passed, dressed in his nigger-hating best: A German National Soccer Team jersey. Shiny black army boots featuring blood red shoelaces. Wristbands on each wrist with ‘88’ written by hand in permanent black marker.
Angel took in the rest of the man’s appearance and felt all the little hairs on the back of her neck rise in anger as one. Silver jewelry pierced every pierce-able part of the skinhead’s pale-white face, including his labrum – the small section of skin just below his bottom lip. The man’s head had been shaved completely bald, probably with a straight razor and right before he’d left the house that night to go party it up with his fellow hate-mongers.
Angel watched the drunk stumble toward the parking lot just outside the bar, pulling out a set of silver keys from his pants pocket as he did so. She frowned angrily. Maybe the inconsiderate asshole hadn’t seen all of those public-service announcements explaining how drunk driving was a bad thing. Then again, maybe he didn’t care who he hurt or killed with his reckless behavior.
Maybe Angel should remind him of these things.
She pulled over the Cabriolet to the far side of the road and waited for the idiot to carom out of the parking lot in a huge shower of orange sparks before following him back to I-90, keeping a safe distance behind him while he drifted back and forth between lanes before mercifully taking the exit for Rocky River ten harrowing minutes later.
Angel seethed as she continued to follow the jerk all the way across town to the Crown Arms apartment complex on Lorain Road. It was times like this that she understood exactly how the general public felt when they said there never seemed to be a cop around when you really needed one. Not the easiest thing in the world to admit when you’d once been a cop, yourself.
Sliding the Cabriolet into an open space about ten spaces over from the skinhead, she exited her car and walked quickly up to the driver’s-side door of his Toyota 4-Runner while the man struggled to extract his keys from the ignition.
She lifted a hand and rapped on his window. The skinhead looked up, clearly confused, and narrowed his alcohol-glazed stare. Activating the power window, he snapped, “Yeah? What do you want, nigger?”
Angel took a deep breath through her nostrils. Then she pulled back her right arm and punched the unsuspecting drunk straight in the face just as hard as she possibly could, her balled-up fist knocking out his two front teeth in a misty spray of bright red blood and slumping the moron over unconscious in the driver’s seat of his car.
And why not? It was clearly the guy’s bedtime, anyway.
CHAPTER 77
The Race Master took a pencil and pad of paper from his briefcase and translated Jack Yuntz’s latest message again, this time just for fun.
Although he’d told the boy to make sure that Dana Whitestone paid in blood should the Race Master fail in his mission to spring his older brother from his cold German prison cell, the enterprising young man had had ideas of his own. Then again, where was the big surprise in that? After all, wasn’t it that way with all geniuses?
Once deciphered, the message read:
I’ll make Dana Whitestone pay, anyway. It’ll be my distinct pleasure. I told that bitch a long time ago that I wasn’t finished with her yet. Just set me loose and watch me attack.
The Race Master tucked away the message into his briefcase and glanced down at Bane, who was twitching wildly at his feet, obviously off in a faraway, blood-soaked dreamland where he was no doubt savaging a hapless opponent. Soon – much like Jack Yuntz – the Race Master would set Bane loose and watch the Presa attack, as well. First things first, though. They needed to prepare.
After all, as Muhammad Ali had once so profoundly said, you needed to run the road long before you danced under the lights.
CHAPTER 78
Looking equally as ridiculous as Dana – perhaps more so – Blankenship emerged from the thrift shop ten minutes later, ringing the small silver bell hanging above his head as he left.
Dana cringed as her clearly ashamed partner paused and held open the door for an elderly black lady who was struggling into the store with the help of a four-legged, rubber-stoppered walker. Somehow hanging his head in embarrassment and nodding to the woman at the same time, Blankenship gave a curt, polite, “Ma’am.”
The old woman let Blankenship continue holding the door for her until she’d made it all the way inside. Then she turned around and took in the shocking white-power outfit covering his body from head-to-toe: clean white tank top tucked into full-length camo pants; a black, AC/DC baseball cap on his head; shiny black army boots featuring crisscrossed, blood red shoelaces on his feet.
The woman twisted her lips into a disgusted sneer. “Go fuck yourself, honky.”
Dana winced as Blankenship let the door close behind the woman before he crossed the blacktopped parking lot. “Ouch,” she said. “That hurt me even watching.”
Blankenship came to a stop beside her. “Yeah, well let me tell you: it wasn’t any picnic participating, either. Off to a smashing start already, aren’t I?”
Dana nodded, then turned and motioned with a jerk of her head to the skinhead bar across the street. “Yeah, but c’mon. I’m sure we’ll receive a much warmer welcome over there.”
Blankenship lifted his eyebrows. “Couldn’t be any colder, I suppose.” He paused and nodded down to the silver Rolex strapped around Dana’s left wrist – her mother’s old watch. “Might want to take that thing off before we go in, though. Fancy jewelry like that doesn’t exactly fit in with the rest of your overall presentation.”
Dana shook her head at her own carelessness and unsnapped the watch before tucking it into her pants pocket. Inattention to detail like that marked exactly the sort of thing that could get them killed. These white-power jerks didn’t play around. Laura Settle and Marjorie Trimble – not to mention their unborn babies – had been proof positive of that much. “Thanks,” she said. “I owe you one.”
Blankenship smiled. “Well, at least one, right? Anyway, let’s get this show on the road already. I’m parched.”
After waiting for a loud pickup truck to pass, they crossed the busy street and Blankenship held open the door for her before following her inside Bar Deutschland.
The sounds of the Sex Pistols blared from the jukebox sitting next to the single pool table over by the bathrooms, illuminated by a Grolsch beer light. Johnny Rotten screeched out his healthy lungs against the injustices foisted upon the younger generation in his trademark wail while a heavily muscled skinhead dressed in remarkably similar fashion to Dana and Blankenship slid back a chalked stick across his bridged fingers and broke a fresh rack in a loud explosion of scattering pool balls.
Blankenship led the way over to the scarred mahogany bar before plopping down onto a red nylon-covered stool, acting as a buffer between Dana and the four skinheads doing shots a little farther down the bar. The bartender – a man in his mid-fifties who obviously did all his own shopping at Skinheads ‘R Us – gave them the once-over while wiping up a puddle of spilled beer from the bar. He slapped the damp white cloth over his right shoulder a moment later. “What’ll you have?”
Dana scanned the fully stocked, see-through refrigerator behind the man. All German beers inside. “I’ll take a Heineken,” she sa
id. “No glass.”
The bartender nodded and slid his bloodshot stare over to Blankenship. “And you?”
“Make it two Heinekens.”
The bartender nodded again and turned around to extract the beers. Popping off the caps against a bottle-opener hidden beneath the lip of the bar, he slid them over. “You guys new in town?” he asked, scratching at his heavily whiskered chin. “Ain’t seen you around here before.”
Dana wrapped her hands around her ice-cold beer and swallowed hard, suddenly feeling very thirsty. She knew better than to raise the bottle to her lips, though. If she did that, she might as well just go ahead and reserve a room for herself at the Betty Ford Clinic over in Rancho Mirage right now. She hadn’t had a drink in nearly a year now, and she wanted to keep it that way. Still, that didn’t mean that the temptation had gone away. Far from it, actually.
She took her hands off her sweating beer bottle in order to remove the temptation and looked up at the bartender. No use in teasing herself with the prospect of a drink any more than she absolutely needed to. “Yep,” she said. “We’re new here. Just moved here from Cleveland.”
The bartender twisted his lips. “I was in Cleveland once. A real fucking shithole, from what I remember.”
“Yeah, that’s why we moved here,” Blankenship said, sitting up straighter on his barstool and flexing his hands around his own beer bottle hard enough to make the impressive muscles in his upper arms dance. “Not much of a scene there, anyway.”
The bartender eyed him suspiciously, but with a little more respect this time. It was clear who represented the alpha male in this scenario, though – and it certainly wasn’t the bartender. “Who’d you run with in Cleveland?” the bartender asked.
Blankenship didn’t flinch at the thinly veiled challenge. “The Separatists,’ he said, holding the other man’s stare. “You’re looking at their former Master-at-Arms sitting here right now.”