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

by Osborne, Jon

  Dana winced internally at Blankenship’s mention of his self-assigned title, fearing he’d overplayed his hand. In the white-power world, the Master-at-Arms position held a lot of sway, ranking just a notch or two below the top slots of president and vice-president.

  Thankfully, though, the bartender only lifted his blonde eyebrows, duly impressed. “Nice,” he said, reaching out to shake Blankenship’s hand. He nodded down at the Heinekens. “Those two are on the house. Cory Hanson here. Pleasure to meet ya.”

  Blankenship shook the bartender’s hand firmly. “Yancy Middlebrooks,” he said. He dropped the man’s hand and turned to Dana. “This here’s my wife, Michele.”

  The bartender nodded. “Pleasure, ma’am.”

  Dana gave him a small smile. “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  The bartender turned back to Blankenship. “Ain’t no Separatists out here in California, so are you guys lookin’ to hook up with a new group? I run with the Phineas Priesthood, myself. Real good group of people. Don’t fuck around too much, just stick to the business of getting America back to where it needs to be. You should check out one of our meetings sometime. I could make all the intros, if you want.”

  Blankenship leaned back his head and took a long swallow of his beer. Dana’s blue eyes instantly turned green in their sockets with envy. She could practically feel the icy alcohol cutting into the back of her throat. “Maybe we will,” Blankenship said. “But we were sort of looking to hook up with the Brotherhood. I hear they’ve got a lot of serious shit going on these days.”

  The bartender leaned forward and put his hands on the bar. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” He glanced across the bar at the muscular skinhead who was playing pool by himself fifty feet away. “Andy over there’s been a member of the Brotherhood for five or six years now.”

  The bartender lifted up his chin and raised his voice. “Ain’t that right, Andy?”

  The pumped-up muscle-head looked up from his solitary game. “What’s that, Cory?”

  The bartender raised his voice even louder. “I was just telling these two here how you run with the Brotherhood. They say they’re interested in joining.”

  Dana’s heart skipped three beats in her chest as the poster-boy for anabolic steroids laid his pool stick across the green felt of the pool table and headed their way. Pure luck, she knew, but she’d take it. Anything that might help them finally put a stop to the gruesome murders of pregnant black women was just fine with her.

  Blankenship rose to his feet and shook the newcomer’s hand when the man had made it all the way over to them. “Yancy Middlebrooks,” Blankenship said again. “This is my wife, Michele.”

  The skinhead gave Blankenship’s hand one short, hard pump. “Andy Oliver,” he said. “So, you guys are interested in joining the Brotherhood?”

  Blankenship nodded. “That’s right.”

  The skinhead smiled dull brown teeth. “Well, you ready to get started right now?”

  Blankenship frowned. “How do you mean?”

  Andy Oliver widened his smile. “I’m on my way over to Cancel Avenue right now to go talk with some spic who owes me some money. I could use the backup if you two ain’t doin’ anything else important right now. Whaddya say?”

  Blankenship paused while he pretended to consider the offer. Finally, he shrugged. “Sure, why not?” Turning to Dana, he said, “That OK with you, honey?”

  Dana nodded. “Yep. Always willing to chip in for a good cause.”

  Andy Oliver widened his rotten grin even more before turning to Cory Hanson behind the bar. He pointed to the Heinekens. “Put those two beers on my tab, all right?”

  The bartender waved away his fellow hate-monger’s generosity. “Already taken care of, Andy.”

  “Great. See ya around then.”

  “Later days, buddy.”

  Exiting the bar thirty seconds later, Oliver led Dana and Blankenship to his light-beige Range Rover and they all hopped inside the mud-splattered vehicle. Blankenship rode shotgun, with Dana in the backseat on the driver’s side.

  Oliver glanced up into the rearview mirror and caught her eye. He winked. “Ready to go, sweetheart?”

  Dana forced a smile onto her lips. “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. Let’s go do this.”

  Oliver nodded and pulled the Range Rover out into traffic, chatting amiably with Blankenship as they drove. A few minutes later, he slowed down the vehicle and squinted his eyes toward a green street sign about twenty yards away. “That’s it,” he said, flipping on his left turn signal and changing lanes. “That’s the street we’re looking for. I need to make a left up here.”

  Dana caught Blankenship’s stare in the rearview mirror. Getting the non-verbal go-ahead, she slipped out her Glock from her pocket, leaned forward in her seat and pressed the barrel of the gun directly to the back of Oliver’s thick neck. “Make a right instead,” she said.

  Oliver froze in his seat. He clenched his teeth and glanced over at Blankenship. “What the fuck is this, man?” he snapped. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  Blankenship took out his own Glock and leveled it at Oliver’s stomach, holding it just below the dashboard of the Range Rover so as to not attract any unwanted attention. “Relax, Sparky,” he said. “Don’t go getting all jumpy on me. We just want to discuss some things with you, that’s all. Find us somewhere private where we can talk uninterrupted, OK?”

  The skinhead shook his head in barely contained anger. “Motherfucker,” he hissed. “You guys cops?”

  Dana returned her Glock it to her pocket. Blankenship had Oliver covered now, and she didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention to their actions, either. What she and Blankenship were doing at the moment was highly illegal, of course, but what the hell. When in Rome and all that…

  “Something like that,” Dana said, looking up and catching sight of a long row of abandoned warehouses in Sacramento’s struggling industrial district. “Pull the car over in front of those buildings,” she ordered.

  The skinhead looked up into the rearview mirror again and held her unblinking stare. The glare coming from his own bright blue eyes seemed hot enough to burn right through six inches of solid steel. “Fuck you, bitch.”

  Blankenship pressed his Glock harder into Oliver’s stomach. “Just do as the nice lady says, Andy.”

  Grudgingly, Oliver finally did as he’d been instructed.

  Two minutes later, Dana and Blankenship extracted him from the driver’s seat of the Range Rover and hustled him inside the warehouse. Dragging the skinhead over to the far southwest corner, they snapped Blankenship’s handcuffs into place around the man’s wide wrists and made him hug a hot-water pipe that was running up from the filthy concrete floor beneath their feet.

  “Fuckin’ nigger lovers,” Oliver snarled, staring at them with undisguised hatred flashing in soulless blue eyes. “You two race-traitors should have a baby together. At least the fucking thing would be white when it came out. But then you two shitheads would probably just turn it into another nigger-lover after that anyway, huh?”

  Dana twisted her face in disgust. It was clear to her that Andy Oliver believed each and every foul word that emerged from his rotten mouth. “Are both your parents white?” she asked.

  Oliver snorted. “Of course they’re fuckin’ white.”

  Dana lifted her eyebrows. “There you go. And just look at what a piece of shit you turned out to be.”

  Oliver turned his head and spat on the ground “Suck my fucking cock, whore.”

  Dana resisted the urge to smack the potty-mouthed skinhead across his filthy lips with the heavy butt of her gun. What would be the point? He already needed more dental work than a hundred dentists could ever cover. “Shut up, Oliver,” she said. “Just shut the fuck up and listen to me for a minute. Who’s in charge of the Brotherhood? Who’s the head guy every one else reports to?”

  Oliver spat on the ground again. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time, bitch. So
let me say it again: suck my fucking cock, whore.”

  Blankenship took a menacing step forward. “Watch it, buddy. That’s my wife you’re talking to there.”

  Before either Dana or Blankenship knew what was happening, the skinhead sucked in a hard lungful of air through his nostrils and let fly with a disgusting glob of phlegm that smacked Blankenship directly in his face before dripping down his chin. Suddenly possessed of a mind of its own, Dana’s right hand – the one holding the Glock – shot forward in a blur of silver movement. The heavy butt of her gun cracked into the skinhead’s left temple, knocking the jerk out cold and slumping him down unconscious to the floor. A thin trickle of blood leaked out from the fresh gash, slipping down his left cheek.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Blankenship gagged, pulling off his tank top and balling it up before wiping frantically at the skinhead’s spit. “I think I’m going to throw up my own fucking stomach.”

  Just then, Dana’s cellphone rang in her pocket. She dug it out and looked down at the caller ID. Bill Krugman.

  She looked back at her partner and resisted the urge to throw up herself. “It’s the Director,” she said. “You OK?”

  “I’ll live,” Blankenship said, waving an irritated hand in her direction. “Just take the fucking call.”

  Dana nodded and flipped open the phone before placing it to her ear. “Yes, sir?”

  Krugman cut straight to the chase. “Two more murders of pregnant black women with their unborn babies cut from their stomachs with knives. First of the murders happened down in Houston – a professional basketball player by the name of Kimberly Anderson.”

  Dana’s knees buckled. Her world swayed. She took a deep breath to regain her equilibrium. “What about the other murder?” she breathed. “Where did that one happen?”

  Krugman blew out a short breath. “Right in your own backyard, Dana. Got a suspect in custody already, a Randy McMichael. He’s a former professional baseball player who once played for the Cleveland Indians. Anyway, I’ve already assigned a pair of agents down in Houston to cover the Kimberly Anderson angle, and you and Blankenship can leave the Trimble investigation with Kingfisher and Quartz. I just finished briefing them on what they need to do. In any event, I need you guys on the next plane back to Ohio. Understood?”

  Dana nodded. “Yes, sir. We’re on our way now.”

  Flipping off the phone, she turned back to Blankenship. By this time, he’d finished wiping the skinhead’s spit from his face and had removed the handcuffs from around Oliver’s wrists.

  He turned the skinhead over onto his side to make sure the asshole didn’t choke to death on his own vomit should he get nauseas during his unscheduled trip to La-La Land. Then he looked back up at Dana. “We’re on our way where?” he asked. “Where are we going now?”

  Dana held her partner’s stare and let out a slow breath that fluttered her lips. “We’re going home, Bruce,” she said.

  “We’re going back to Cleveland.”

  PART IV

  “There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.” – Mark Twain

  CHAPTER 79

  Angel was back inside her office downtown the next day, sitting on the window ledge again.

  She glanced down at her right hand and flexed her fingers, wincing against the pain. Half moon-shaped indentations caused by the skinhead’s shattered teeth still remained visible from where she’d punched the asshole hard in the face.

  Angel rotated her wrist clockwise, then counterclockwise as she tried to work out some of the stiffness. Didn’t work. Still, it was the good kind of pain, the kind of pain that let you know you’d accomplished something truly worthwhile. Angel felt sorry for the people out there who’d never know the overwhelming joy brought about by cracking someone you despised square in the mouth with all your might. She imagined that baseball players experienced much the same thrilling sensation when they’d really laid into a pitch grooved right down the middle of the plate, making solid contact with the ball on the sweet spot of the bat barrel and knowing for a fact that the tightly-wound horsehide would travel a long, long way.

  Angel kicked off her heels and rubbed at her aching feet as she leaned her forehead against the reinforced glass of her office window and surveyed the scene four stories below on Prospect Avenue. The foot traffic down there seemed light today, sporadic, the gray skies overhead threatening a hard rain. The electricity hanging in the air was an invention of the storm-front moving in now, not the result of a happy crowd anticipating an exciting night of baseball. The Indians had left on a road trip following their latest humiliating loss to the Yankees anyway, and they wouldn’t be back in town again for an entire week. Tonight it was a five-ten p.m. match-up against the Royals out in Kansas City. The weather there, they said, was sunny and bright. Not a cloud in the sky.

  A moment later, a woman and a man, both wearing dark suits, the female with a dark skirt, entered the room. “Are you Angel Monroe?” the woman asked.

  Angel identified the woman’s outfit as Gucci even from across the room. Whoever she was, the chick had style, and plenty of it, too. In addition to that, she also looked like a carbon copy of Reese Witherspoon, only smaller and with shorter hair. For his part, the man could have stood in for Mark Harmon on the set of NCIS – all neatly trimmed brown hair and smoldering brown eyes.

  Angel lifted herself off of her perch on the window ledge and adjusted her own skirt, feeling more exhausted than she had in years. She really wasn’t up for taking on any more cases today, but neither had she begun the rolling in the proverbial clover yet, so she needed to keep all her options open here. After all, she did like to eat every now and then. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, forcing some professionalism into her weary voice. “I’m Angel Monroe. How may I help you?”

  The woman flipped open an ID, and Angel widened her hazel eyes in surprise. The letters on top of her ID read: FBI.

  “My name is Special Agent Dana Whitestone,” the woman said, then turned and motioned with a nod of her head to the man standing next to her. “This is Special Agent Bruce Blankenship. We’ve been assigned to investigate the murder of Sasha Diggs and we were told that you may have some notes on the case.”

  Angel’s mouth went dry at the mention of Sasha’s name. Confusion set in, followed almost at once by the painful thumping of her heartbeat inside her suddenly constricted chest.

  The feds were looking into Sasha’s murder now? On what grounds?

  Then it hit her. Hard. Only one possible explanation.

  “Are there others?” Angel asked weakly. “Other dead girls besides Sasha Diggs?”

  The blonde woman smiled gently. “I’m sorry, Miss Monroe, but I’m not at liberty to discuss the particulars of the case.” She paused and looked over at her partner, who nodded his head. “It’ll all be clear in the morning when the papers come out, Miss Monroe. Much as we prefer he not, a local reporter is breaking the news on this one. Until then, though, I’m afraid I’m not authorized to discuss the details.”

  Angel nodded, understanding the woman’s reasoning. Red tape had everybody’s hands tied these days. You needed to follow every procedure, every protocol and every policy at all times. You could never break rank or it would cost you your fucking job. It had marked one of the main reasons why she’d left the Cleveland police force in the first place.

  “The notes, Miss Monroe?”

  Angel’s cheeks flushed hot. “Of course. Sorry about that, Special Agent Whitestone.”

  Angel went over to her desk and pulled out the case file on Sasha Diggs. Sadly, there wasn’t much to it. Just a thin file with the eight-by-ten photograph from Elite Escorts of Cleveland and the perverted bio attached. Also, the single ledger sheet of Sasha’s appointments and a piece of loose notebook paper upon which Angel had scrawled down a few of her thoughts on the case.

  As she handed the file over to Dana Whitestone, she wished like hell that she’d made a copy, cursing herself that she h
adn’t.

  Whitestone smiled and took the file before the two women shook hands. And then something very strange happened. The woman held onto Angel’s hand a moment longer than was usual for a simple business handshake.

  Whitestone looked over at her partner, who nodded again. “I understand you’d like to be kept in the loop on this one, Miss Monroe. I’m very sorry for the loss of your grandmother. It’s a terrible thing to lose someone you love. From all reports, she was a wonderful woman. Anyway, I can’t promise you any investigative details, but I’ll do my very best to keep you apprised of events as they unfold.”

  Angel smiled back tentatively, suddenly understanding that they were sharing a moment here, silently acknowledging the bond that they shared as women in their line of work.

  “I’d really appreciate that, Special Agent Whitestone.”

  “Call me Dana.”

  Angel nodded. “I’d appreciate that very much, Dana.”

  And with that, just as quickly as they’d appeared, the FBI agents were gone again.

  CHAPTER 80

  The Race Master donned a pair of heavy rubber gloves and unscrewed the cap from a large bottle of ferric chloride before pouring a small measure into a clean white cloth and rubbing the slightly hissing liquid deep into Bane’s thick black fur.

  Like the champion he’d always been since birth, Bane didn’t even flinch as the ferric chloride soaked into his skin. “Good boy,” the Race Master said, patting the dog’s massive chest reassuringly. “That’s a very good boy, indeed.”

  Though certainly harsh, ferric chloride had long been a favorite tool of professional boxers looking to gain an edge. Rubbing the chemical into their gloves just prior to a bout ensured that their opponents would experience a stinging, blinding sensation whenever a punch was landed near the eyes. No less an icon than former heavyweight champion Sonny Liston had reportedly used this tactic to gain just such an advantage during his 1964 world-title match against a young Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay. Not that it had done Liston any good, ultimately. Employing a dizzying array of his trademark fancy footwork and crisp punching, a half-blinded Clay had left Liston sitting exhausted on his stool at the end of Round Six, unable to answer the bell for Round Seven, a stunning turn of events that had prompted Clay’s joyful dance of crisscrossing steps that would soon become known the world over as the “Ali Shuffle”.