by Osborne, Jon
Angel tried her best to answer, but the words wouldn’t come out. So instead, she simply stood up and went around to Whitestone’s side of the table before leaning down and giving the FBI agent a quick-but-meaningful hug.
Straightening back up and wiping at her eyes, she looked down at her new friend and said, “You’re probably the only friend in the world I’ve got right now, too, Dana.”
CHAPTER 129
Miles O’Reilly drank his hot black coffee no more than twenty feet away from the women that he and his partner would soon kill.
From across the table, he watched Seth Collins dump three containers of cream into his cup and swirl it around with a little plastic swizzle stick before finally blowing off the steam and raising it to his lips.
Fucking pussy.
In O’Reilly’s mind, the Guns and Roses song that had long ago become the soundtrack to his life started playing.
He might not be in the bush any more, but the thrill of the hunt remained just as exciting to him as it had ever been. Raising his own steaming cup to his lips, he drained the entire thing in one quick pull, letting the scalding coffee burn the back of his throat and relishing the exquisite pain.
Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got fun and games…
CHAPTER 130
Returning to her side of the table in the coffee shop, Angel asked Dana how things had gone with Randy McMichael after Angel had left the interview room.
The FBI agent frowned. “That asshole could some take charm-school lessons from old Smitty back at the jailhouse,” she said. “McMichael spent most of his time denying that he had anything to do with Sasha Diggs’s murder, but I finally broke the motherfucker down.”
“How’d you do that?”
Dana took another sip of her coffee. “Let’s just say that he was more than just a little bit concerned about losing his ability to father any more illegitimate children in the future.”
Angel winced. “We should be so lucky.”
Finishing up their coffees a moment later, they left Arabica and agreed to head over to Angel’s house on the west side of Cleveland in order to examine Sasha Diggs’s computer.
“I’ll tell you what McMichael said on the ride over,” Whitestone said, slipping the Protégé into gear and pulling out of the busy parking lot before glancing down at the silver Rolex watch strapped around her delicate left wrist. “Bruce Blankenship’s probably gotten enough sleep by now, so I’ll give him a call and ask him to meet us over at your place. If there’s anything worth seeing on that hard drive you’ve got over there, he’s definitely gonna find it. Any objections to that plan?”
Angel shook her head. “Nope, not the slightest objection, at all.”
She paused, then added, “So, c’mon. Let’s go do this shit, sister.”
CHAPTER 131
Through the large picture window of the busy coffee shop, Miles O’Reilly watched the nigger woman and the FBI agent pick their way through the parking lot before hopping inside the sleek silver Mazda Protégé and pulling away.
Smiling, he crumpled up his paper cup and took a hook shot at the garbage receptacle ten feet away.
Nothing but net.
CHAPTER 132
Angel and Whitestone were lost in easy conversation as Canadian singer Allison Crowe belted out a beautiful cover of Joni Mitchell’s River on the stereo and they streaked down I-90 ten minutes later.
“So,” Whitestone asked, “any wedding plans for you and this Malachai guy in the near future?”
Angel blushed. “I don’t think so, Dana. Malachai’s a great guy, but he’s also got a wandering eye.”
“Better than something else wandering.”
Angel bit down hard into her lower lip. She wanted to tell Whitestone about Malachai’s recent infidelity, but somehow she just couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. That would have almost seemed like cheating, too, so she just changed the subject instead.
“What about you?” she asked. “Any hot prospects in your dating world these days?”
Before Whitestone could answer her, a huge pickup truck suddenly came roaring up along their right side, its powerful engine whining like the starving howl of a mongrel dog. A Confederate flag snapped wildly from a stationary post in the back. Same truck from the restaurant earlier in the day.
“Jesus Christ!” Whitestone yelled, fumbling for the Glock in the inside pocket of her suit jacket. Angel jammed her hand inside the brown paper bag laying across her lap and cocked the hammer on the .45, but by then it was already too late.
A man wearing a black ski mask leaned out the window on the passenger side of the truck and fired a sawed-off shotgun at the Protégé. A split-second later, a horrible explosion sent the FBI agent’s vehicle skidding into the shoulder of the highway, its front tire completely blown away.
Angel held on for dear life. The shrieking sound of metal scraping against pavement filled the car. Then the Protégé went airborne before slamming back down to earth and beginning to roll. Once, twice, three times.
Sparks flew. The entire world shook. The passenger side of the car crumpled like a cheap aluminum can. A jagged piece of sharp metal pierced Angel’s side.
On the fourth roll, Angel’s seatbelt broke. For the briefest of moments, she felt completely weightless.
And then her head slammed so violently against the roof of the car that it plunged her world into a blackness so complete that not even paying the goddamn bill would have been enough to switch the lights back on.
PART V
“Send us your broken toys and we’ll fix them for you.” – Bill Riccio, leader of the Aryan Youth Front, a Birmingham, Alabama white-power hate group featured in the 1992 HBO documentary, Skinheads, USA.
CHAPTER 133
Sue Lyn Pepperton glared at her husband across the den of the couple’s fine Georgetown home. Scalding tears burned her eyes. “You’re a fucking murderer, Robert! You’re a fucking murderer and now our daughter is going to die for your goddamn crimes! She’s pregnant, you fucking asshole!”
Robert Pepperton buried his face in his hands and cried bitter tears of shame. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”
Sue Lyn fought the urge to lunge across the room and claw out his eyeballs with her sharp fingernails. “Shut up!” she screamed. “Just shut the fuck up, you simpering wimp! Your apologies aren’t going to do a goddamn thing to help Jasmine now. You’ve doomed her, Robert. You’ve doomed her to a horrible death because you’re a fucking murderer! I fucking hate you, you son of a bitch!”
Robert Pepperton rose to his feet and looked at his wife with pleading eyes filled with tears. He opened his arms and took a step in her direction. “Please, Sue Lyn, we can fix this…”
Sue Lyn held up her hands to keep him away. Her knees shook. Her stomach churned. Her world swayed. “Stay right the fuck where you are, Robert. I’m a goddamn senator, for Christ’s sake! You think I’m not going to turn you in for this? I have to.”
She watched in horror as her husband’s gaze found the decorative gun case in the corner of their den. It was unlocked.
Sue Lyn slid open a drawer in her desk and took out her loaded .32, leveling it directly at her husband’s chest while picking up the phone with her free hand. “I’m sorry, Robert, but this is just the way it has to be.”
Ten minutes later, Capitol Police led Robert Pepperton away in handcuffs. Sue Lyn’s eyes glazed over as she watched her husband of thirty-five years being placed into the back seat of a cruiser before they slammed shut the door and began filling out the paperwork.
She shook her head violently to clear it when the patrol car finally pulled off five minutes later, it blue-and-red lights flashing, with escort vehicles sandwiching the car in both the front and back.
However hard it might be for her to do, Sue Lyn needed to think only of Jasmine now. Jasmine and her unborn grandchild.
One life in exchange for two.
It was only fair.
CHAPTER 134
Angel groaned as she came awake sometime later, her head throbbing so badly that it felt as though someone had wedged a piece of burning-hot steel between her eyes.
She tried to turn her head, but found she couldn’t. She’d been strapped down to a bed with her neck immobilized in a brace. High-pitched computerized beeps filled the room. She coughed hard, gagging on the thick plastic tube jammed down her throat.
Panic set in when a series of painful spasms suddenly wracked her body, her empty stomach trying desperately to crawl up her esophagus and out her mouth. Distant voices murmured, but Angel couldn’t understand what they were saying. Something about a seizure, something else about how it was perfectly normal for a victim with a serious brain injury.
A moment later, a sharp needle entered a vein in her right arm.
“Just a flutter of the central nervous system,” a faraway voice said. “Nothing to get excited about.”
Slowly, Angel’s already-fuzzy world faded away into complete blackness once more.
CHAPTER 135
When Dana came to, she found herself standing in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom in the West Park-section of Cleveland and watching Nathan Stiedowe terrorize her mother with the long, sharp butcher’s knife balanced in his powerful-looking right hand.
Sara Whitestone widened her panicked blue eyes in horror when she caught sight of Dana standing there. Turning around, Nathan Stiedowe followed Sara’s gaze to the doorway.
And then he smiled.
“Mommy, what’s happening?” Dana asked, her small voice quiet and shy. “Who’s that man on top of you? Where’s my daddy?”
When Dana locked gazes with her half-brother for the first time in their lives, she froze in his stare. Abruptly, though, her four-year-old body grew to its full adult height right there in the doorway.
Bolting into the bedroom, Dana caught Nathan Stiedowe’s strong right wrist just as he began to whip it like a silver lightning bolt across Sara Whitestone’s slender throat.
She twisted hard, hearing the bone snap in two. The knife fell from the monster’s trembling hand. A mask of excruciating pain covered his handsome face.
“You can’t do this to me,” the monster sputtered, glaring up at her as he held onto his badly injured wrist. “This isn’t how the story goes.”
Dana retrieved the knife from the bed and jammed it deep into the monster’s stomach before wrenching the sharp steel blade violently upward.
“Tough luck, motherfucker,” she spat, watching Nathan Stiedowe’s body disintegrate into a pile of choking gray ashes right in front of her confident adult eyes. “I’m changing the goddamn story this time.”
CHAPTER 136
Back in the den of her fine Georgetown home, Sue Lyn Pepperton dialed the number she’d been given to reach Jasmine’s abductors.
She’d been instructed to tell no one about the phone number – that it was a secret – but there was no way in hell she’d let a terrorist dictate her moves. She’d been just a young girl when George Wallace had run roughshod all over the state of Alabama in the 1960s, but Sue Lyn had been old enough even then to understand that there was only one way to deal with bullies. Stand up to them. Punch them in the nose a couple times. Bloody them up a little bit and pretty soon they’d understand that you meant business. As soon as this call was completed, her next call would be to the FBI.
A man answered the phone on the fourth ring. “Have you begun negotiations for Stefan von Waldenberg’s release from prison yet, Senator?”
Sue Lyn gritted her teeth. “Before I do anything, I need to know that my daughter is still alive. Put her on the phone immediately.”
The man laughed without humor on the other end of the line. “Sorry, Senator, I can’t do that. If you’d like, though, I’ll send my Presa after her so that you can hear her screams. He seems to have developed quite the taste for human blood lately.”
Sue Lyn’s insides flipped inside out. She found it difficult to breathe out the words around the painful lump of fear lodged in her throat. “Who are you?”
The man laughed again. “Hasn’t your husband told you about his extracurricular activities in Germany during the late-1970s yet, Senator? What he and his Army buddies did? How they murdered two innocent people in cold blood in their own home?”
Sue Lyn took a deep breath. “Yes, Robert told me all about it. As a matter of fact, I turned him over to the authorities not ten minutes ago.”
“Liar,” the man hissed.
“It’s true. Turn on the national news if you don’t believe me. I’m sure it’s all over CNN by now.”
“Hold, please.”
Sue Lyn heard the man place the phone down on some sort of hard surface. A moment or two later, he picked up the phone again. “Not what I wanted at all, Senator,” he growled. “You’ve done a very bad thing here.”
Sue Lyn gasped. “What the fuck are you talking about? Robert’s going to pay for his crimes now. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
The man drew in a sharp breath, and Sue Lyn could tell that he was talking to her through clenched teeth now. “I wanted him for myself, Senator. For myself! Now I’m going to have to rearrange all of my plans because of what you’ve done, you stupid, arrogant little cunt. You’ll hear back from me within the hour. If you’re lucky, your daughter might even still be alive.”
Sue Lyn’s entire body trembled in the empty den as the line went dead.
Sweet Jesus. What had she done?
CHAPTER 137
The distant voices again, closer now but still speaking a foreign language.
“Massive brain trauma, left temporal lobe. She’ll probably be a vegetable for the rest of her life.”
From the prison of her own body, Angel screamed out silently to them that it wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true.
She tried to scream out for real but no sound emerged. She wondered if this was what all brain-injury victims experienced. Trapped inside their own minds and completely aware of everything going on around them but powerless to speak out about it. Powerless to tell everyone they were still there, that they were still alive.
I’m still here, goddamn it! I can hear you! I’m still alive!
Angel willed the sound around the thick tube jammed down her throat. “Mmgrh.”
The voices around her got excited. She heard the scurrying of feet. Then she felt a flurry of hands flutter over her prone body. Tubes were yanked out of her arms. Another needle stabbed deep into a vein.
“We’ve got brainwaves! Thirty cc’s of polyethylene glycol stat! Prep her for surgery now!”
CHAPTER 138
Dana came around the corner of her childhood home, slipping past the freshly trimmed hedges and into the backyard.
Thirty feet away, James Whitestone was barbecuing hot dogs and hamburgers on a rusty outdoor grill. Not too far away from him, Sara Whitestone sat in a collapsible nylon lawn chair, studying a legal brief that she’d brought home with her from work.
Dana smiled, feeling her heart explode with pure joy inside her badly constricted chest at the sight of her beautiful and beloved parents. “Hi, Mommy,” Dana said quietly. “Hi, Daddy.”
Sara Whitestone looked up and smiled, rising from her chair as though she’d been expecting to see Dana. James left the grill and came to stand next to his wife. “Hello, Dana,” they said in unison. “We love you, sweetheart. We’ve always loved you.”
Hot tears spilled from Dana’s eyes, blurring her vision. She took a step in their direction, but her mother held up one small hand to stop her. “Not yet, honey,” she said softly. “You’ve got to let go first, baby. Then you can be with us forever.”
Dana froze in her tracks and lifted up her eyebrows in confusion. “What do you mean I’ve got to let go first?”
James Whitestone smiled at her gently. “Just let go, pumpkin. That’s all you need to do. Just let go.”
Suddenly understanding their meaning, Dana nodded and took a deep breath through her nostrils b
efore letting out the air again in a slow exhale over her teeth.
Then she leaned back her head on her shoulders, closed her eyes and did what they’d told her to do.
She just let go.
CHAPTER 139
Sue Lyn Pepperton walked over to the sideboard in her fine Georgetown den and poured five fingers of Kettle One vodka into a cut-glass tumbler.
Her hands shook as she raised the thick glass to her lips and gulped down the clear liquid in two quick swallows.
The strong drink burned like hell as it slid down her throat before hitting her stomach like an atom bomb. For a split-second, she feared the drink might explode up her esophagus again in a disgusting rainbow of projectile-vomit, but then the vodka finally settled in her stomach.
Sue Lyn poured some more vodka. No matter what the man on the other end of the line had said, she knew what she needed to do. She was an official of the United States government, for Christ’s sake, and she’d taken a sworn oath to uphold the law.
She let out a deep breath. Her heart felt heavy in her chest, of course, but she knew the hardest choices to make in life were the choices that had never really been yours to make at all.
Settling down into the leather chair behind her massive desk, she picked up the phone and punched in the number.
A moment later, a woman answered on the other end of the line. “FBI.”
Sue Lyn cleared her throat. “This is Sue Lyn Pepperton,” she said, “junior senator from the great state of Alabama. I need a team of agents sent over to my house immediately. It’s literally a matter of life and death.”
CHAPTER 140
The thick plastic tube that slid out Angel’s throat felt like a fat snake covered in blood and guts, making her gag hard. It felt like giving birth, or at least what she imagined giving birth must feel like. Her eyes fluttered open briefly, then fell closed again. It was all too much too soon, the bright lights too piercing, stabbing her brain, too agonizing to bear.