by Osborne, Jon
Half-expecting to see a rat – or maybe even several of them considering the dismal state of Dana’s apartment right now – he laughed nervously when he instead found himself greeted by the sight of a plump, black-and-white cat. Rats and cats: two creatures that might have been separated by only a handful of letters in the alphabet but most definitely remained worlds apart when it came to how homo sapiens reacted to their unexpected presence.
“Jesus Christ, pal,” Blankenship breathed, leaning down to stroke the top of the feline’s furry head while at the same time trying in vain to control the jack-hammering of his racing pulse in his wrists. “You scared the living shit out of me. Where’s your mom?”
Purring contentedly, the cat let out a single, loud meow in response, somehow making both noises simultaneously. Impressive feat, to say the least. It was then that Blankenship finally became aware of the sound of running water coming from the end of the short hallway leading off the living room.
A tidal wave of relief washed over him. He breathed out forcefully enough to deflate his chest a full six inches. Dana was safe. Thank God. Still, at the risk of giving her a stroke when she emerged from her shower and found him standing uninvited in the middle of her apartment on a Friday night he might as well stick around and verify that fact with his own two eyes. After all, that was what partners – even new ones – did for one another, right?
Blankenship pursed his lips. One way or the other, he supposed he was about to find out.
CHAPTER 5
Horatio D’Arbinville watched with interest as the well-endowed server at the Oak Barrel Bar on Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland delivered his drink to the lovely Helen Morgan, amused at the same time to hear the jukebox switch over to There Goes My Life by country music superstar Kenny Chesney.
D’Arbinville grinned at the sheer appropriateness of the song as he listened to the cowboy-hatted crooner work his smooth vocal magic that had always had such a dizzying effect on the ladies. Much like D’Arbinville himself, Kenny Chesney was a real panty-dropper, no two ways about it. Women just couldn’t help themselves around men like them. And if D’Arbinville hadn’t known any better, he just might have reason to believe that a force greater than himself somewhere out there in the never-ending cosmos had composed the musical score for the night. Crying shame that he’d always been an atheist, because the thought marked an exceedingly pleasant one. Still, faithful believer in any sort of unseen, divine heavenly power or not, he followed his own brand of religion. And midnight Mass had just begun for him – kick-started by the formal presentation of the intoxicating communion wine.
Fifty feet away, the waitress placed the ridiculous fruity concoction on the polished mahogany bar in front of his target and said a few words to her before turning in D’Arbinville’s direction and pointing. When Helen Morgan followed the server’s extended right index finger with a quizzical look on her heavily made-up face in order to ascertain the identity of her secret admirer, D’Arbinville lifted up his glass of Scotch in acknowledgement.
Predictably, sparks flew as their gazes locked for the first time in their lives – though certainly not for the last – and D’Arbinville reveled in the familiar reaction from a member of the opposite sex. Ever since he’d reached puberty at the tender age of fourteen, his good looks and confident nature had meant that he’d never needed to work especially hard to gain favor with women. Plainly, this time would prove no exception.
An unmistakable sheen of desire and hope flashed in Helen Morgan’s badly bloodshot hazel eyes, visible even through the alcohol-induced glaze. Straightening up in her seat, she pulled back her rounded shoulders in a hasty effort to correct her sloppy posture, at the same time placing her still-burning cigarette down into the overflowing ashtray in front of her.
D’Arbinville nodded and put on his friendliest and most unthreatening smile. When he lifted his eyebrows into twin non-verbal question marks on his forehead, Morgan returned his smile shyly and nodded back.
Forty-five minutes and two drinks later the conversation was in full swing.
“So, what do you do for a living?” D’Arbinville asked, though he knew good and goddamn well what she did for a living, had for the past several months now. Leaning over from his bar stool directly to the right of hers, he casually rested his left hand on her right knee. Body Language 101: establish a personal touch just as soon as possible at the onset of an interpersonal relationship. If successful, it engendered a feeling of intimacy in your target that paved the way for further physical contact later on. And D’Arbinville had no doubt whatsoever of just how much physical contact would be taking place later on between him and Helen Morgan. Hell, it marked the key to the entire bloody mission. The absolute lynchpin. The only question that remained now revolved around whether that physical contact would involve a great deal of pleasure or a great deal of pain.
Or, perhaps, a little of both.
Exactly how he liked it.
Fortified by a healthy dose of liquid courage and the company of the most eligible bachelor in the entire bar – if not the entire city – any trace of demureness had left Morgan now. Tongue properly lubricated, she answered him in a voice that registered two decibels too high for his liking. “I’m a pediatric nurse in the birthing wing over at Fairview General Hospital in Fairview Park,” she bellowed. “It’s about twenty miles west of here.’
D’Arbinville resisted the urge to cringe at the painful audio onslaught in his ears. The music in the bar wasn’t that loud, for Christ’s sake, and the woman’s booming voice called to mind a ship’s foghorn, in both pitch and volume. “And how do you like being a nurse?” he asked, hoping that his discomfort wasn’t too noticeable to her. Not that he supposed it made all that much difference. Not in any meaningful sense, anyway. From all early indications, he’d already managed to tuck Helen Morgan safely away into his hip pocket. The lothario of the Renaissance City already – that was him, all right. And it certainly hadn’t taken him very long to reach that particularly lofty status, either, now had it? So damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.
Morgan tilted back her head and exhaled a long line of cigarette smoke. Marlboro Menthol Lights served as her preferred carcinogen. Typical American ragweed and no tremendous surprise to D’Arbinville. After all, rare indeed was the quality of refinement to be discovered in a Yankee. “I don’t like it all,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
Morgan screwed up her cartoonishly painted face. From this distance, D’Arbinville could practically count the layers of make-up slathered there. Good thing the lights would be out on them soon, because he truly didn’t know how much longer he could stand looking at her. If nothing else, taking one for the team would no doubt prove extremely painful this time. “Hmm, let’s see here,” Morgan said.
Swiveling on her stool in order to face him more directly, she lifted up her right hand and ticked off the reasons for her discontent on her stubby fingers. “Shitty pay, shitty hours, shitty treatment – where would you like to start?”
D’Arbinville repositioned his own stool, already feeling closer to the woman in every possible sense of the word. “How about we start at the beginning?” he asked. “You must love babies to work in the birthing wing.”
Morgan’s alcohol-clouded gaze did a complete three-sixty in eye sockets featuring purplish half-moons ringing the bottoms. “Must I?”
“You don’t?”
“Hardly.”
D’Arbinville felt a cold ripple of anticipation flutter through the core of his being. So far, so good. The dossier on Morgan seemed to contain accurate information. Good thing, too. He’d certainly paid enough for it.
Setting his lips into a tight line, he cleared his throat and readied himself mentally for the next step. Now that he’d attended to all of the irritating preliminaries and had dispensed with all of the annoying buildup, the time had come to move in for the kill. Swiftly, targeting the jugular straight away. Experience had taught him very well indeed th
at it didn’t often pay to pussyfoot around on these sorts of things.
Reaching into the inside pocket of his finely tailored suit jacket, he removed his alligator-skin wallet and extracted a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill before placing it under his now-empty glass of Scotch. Then he turned back to Morgan and held her heavy-lidded stare. “Ready to go?” he asked.
Morgan leaned back her head and drained the last of her own drink in a melodious rattling of rapidly melting ice cubes. “Go where?” she slurred.
“Why, back to my hotel, of course.”
Blissfully, D’Arbinville’s target chose to eschew any pretense of acting as though she didn’t know where this night had been heading all along. She’d snagged herself quite the catch, and she seemed to be well aware of that fact, too. No way in hell she’d let him get away. Not when she found herself this close to sealing the deal.
D’Arbinville stifled a mischievous grin. Thank heavens – or the atheist’s approximation of such a ridiculous concept – for the sexual liberation of Western woman over the course of the past fifty years or so. Made things so much easier on men like him and Kenny Chesney.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Morgan said.
Pushing back her stool, she rose unsteadily to her feet and slipped her designer-knockoff purse over her left shoulder, swaying drunkenly from left to right, and then back again.
Finally regaining some semblance of her thoroughly compromised balance, she focused her watery eyes squarely on the tip of his slender nose and creased her thin and overly painted lips into an impatient frown. “Well, what the hell are you waiting for? Lead the way, lover boy. Lucky for you, I’ve got all night.”
CHAPTER 6
Standing inside Dana’s apartment while her extremely friendly cat rubbed up against his bare legs, Bruce Blankenship slipped his cellphone from the left-hand pocket of his knee-length gym shorts and checked the time again.
Ten minutes had passed now since Maggie Carter had issued her “twenty-minutes-or-I’ll-call-the-cops” ultimatum, and he didn’t at all relish the prospect of tangling with the no-nonsense landlady again. Hadn’t worked out very well for him the first time he’d done so, to put it mildly, and he had no earthly reason to believe that a second go-‘round with her would shake out any differently. Not to mention the fact that his horribly overburdened wife had undoubtedly grown frustrated with his much-longer-than-anticipated absence by now. Not that he could blame her. After all, spending even a couple of hours alone with rambunctious three-year-old twin girls that liked nothing better in this world than to turn your previously neat house into a demolition zone was enough to make anyone want to pull out their hair by the roots. Madison needed backup on the home front, pronto, which meant that he needed to get this show on the road. Literally. Sleeping on the couch tonight certainly hadn’t appeared at the top of his to-do list today when he’d woken up this morning.
Stepping over a small mountain of dirty clothes piled up next to the coffee table, Blankenship made his way carefully through the living room with his new feline companion trailing closely at his heels, past a large color portrait hanging on the wall near the flat-screen television set of what he assumed to be a childhood version of Dana flanked by her murdered parents. He felt a sharp twinge in his heart as he remembered her telling him about how James and Sara Whitestone had been brutally murdered in cold blood by Nathan Stiedowe right in front of her eyes when she’d been just four years old. The poor thing. Ever since the very beginning, Dana’s life had never been what anyone would have described as especially easy or fair. And no doubt the recent horrific murder of little Bradley had only reopened those old tremendously painful wounds.
Blankenship stopped dead in his tracks when he reached the bathroom at the end of the hall. A neatly handwritten note had been taped to the door:
Do not enter. Please call emergency services personnel.
Blankenship nearly threw up. He tried the door handle. Locked.
Frantic, he called out to his partner. “Dana? Honey? It’s Bruce Blankenship. Open up!”
No answer.
Blankenship took one quick step back and lunged forward again, putting all of his weight behind the powerful kick and landing it just below the door handle, exploding the wood around the lock with a deafening crack and a small shower of flying splinters, one of which somehow found its way into the corner of his left eye.
A thick wall of steam filled the bathroom, making it even more difficult for him to see. His left eye watered badly from the splinter lodged there and his hammering heart pounded wildly in his throat as he cut hard through the swirling gray fog. Flinging open the plastic shower curtain in a cacophony of screeching metal rings, his breath hitched in his throat. Acrid bile flooded into his mouth. He grimaced against the foul taste.
Then he grimaced against the foul sight invading his eyes.
Dana was naked on her back inside the tub. Blistering-hot water streamed down on her prone form from the showerhead attached to the wall. Her eyes were half-open, glazed over, completely unseeing. The sharp edge of a huge butcher’s knife peeked out from between her spread thighs. Pinkish water swirled around the drain near her feet.
Blankenship’s mind raced. His heart rolled across his ribcage like an Olympic-level gymnast performing a world-class floor routine. His skin crawled with what felt to be at least a billion invisible bugs. He couldn’t process his own fractured thoughts through the mind-numbing haze of confusion that was pressing down hard on his thoroughly unprepared brain like a thousand-pound weight.
Then it hit him. Hard.
Dana had cut herself. Badly.
More tears flooded into Blankenship’s eyes, stinging his retinas and further blurring his vision. Wiping at his leaking eyes with the back of his left hand, he reached inside the shower with his right hand and twisted off the hot-water handle violently, nearly tearing it free from the wall in the process. Bright red blood immediately pulsed out of Dana’s right thigh, no longer diluted by the stream of rushing shower water.
Blankenship blinked back the blinding veil of tears in his eyes, unable to believe what he was seeing right now. Dana had sliced her femoral artery lengthwise. Clearly, this had been no simple cry for help. This had been deadly serious.
She’d meant to end her own life.
Not if he could fucking help it.
His mind snapped back into gear as his training took over. Ripping his sweat-soaked T-shirt over his head, he fell to his knees and tied off the fabric just above Dana’s wound, banging his knees sharply against the tiled floor but not even feeling it. Placing two fingers against Dana’s slender throat, he checked for a pulse.
Weak, barely discernible against his fingertips.
Blankenship rose to his feet again and bent over at his waist, trying again to not throw up. Wasn’t easy. Gathering Dana’s naked body carefully into his shaking arms, he laid her down flat against the tiled bathroom floor and shooed away her cat irritably before putting his ear to her mouth.
She wasn’t breathing.
Blankenship shook his head hard in a panicked effort to clear away the residual shock still cluttering up his mind. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not like this. This wasn’t the way Dana’s life was supposed to end. She was a good person, goddamn it. Always had been. A loving person. She’d needed his help and he hadn’t been there for her. None of them had been there for her. She’d given over her entire life in service of the FBI and they hadn’t been there to take care of her when she’d needed them the most.
No time for that now.
Sliding quickly on his bruised knees up to Dana’s head, he tilted back her chin to clear her airway before sweeping her tongue with his right index finger. Moving farther down her motionless body, he began single-man CPR, finding the proper spot on her chest and performing thirty forceful compressions, followed immediately by two quick rescue breaths that left the sharp taste of sour whiskey resting on his lips.
Then he listened again for the so
unds of her breathing.
Still nothing. The silence coming from Dana’s ice-cold lips threatened to shatter his eardrums. To shatter his entire world.
Blankenship repeated the exhausting series four more times, falling into the proper rhythm as he forced himself to stay focused on the life-and-death matter at hand. Leaning down to check her breathing a fifth time, he felt the cold metal of a gun barrel press firmly into the back of his skull, just behind his right ear.
A man’s deep voice sounded in his ear a split-second later. “Lakewood Police! Put your hands over your fucking head. Now, asshole!”
CHAPTER 7
Post-coital bliss and the further smoking of cigarettes marked the orders of the night in Horatio D’Arbinville’s sumptuous suite on the twenty-second floor of The Four Seasons Hotel & Resort on Ontario Street in downtown Cleveland.
Pulling back the paisley-patterned curtains covering the oversized bay window in the living room of his splendid (though sadly temporary) quarters, D’Arbinville gazed out upon the bright Cleveland skyline while Helen Morgan freshened herself up in the gleaming, impeccably appointed bathroom, a space that just so happened to be situated directly off the equally impressive bedroom, which in turn just so happened to feature a king-sized Tempurpedic bed upon which the two of them had just now made extremely satisfying love, if he did say so himself.
D’Arbinville inhaled deeply on his latest Gitane and let out the smoke again in a satisfying rush over his perfectly straight white teeth while taking in the sparkling nighttime view. To his mind, Cleveland had gotten somewhat of a bad rap in the global media. During the nights, darkness covered the long-suffering city like a layer of professionally applied make-up on an otherwise-homely woman, ably concealing some of its less-than-stellar attributes and fooling unsuspecting onlookers into finding a level of attractiveness they hadn’t been aware of before. When the sun had gone down on the day and the harsh glare of natural light had receded from view in favor of more forgiving artificial illumination, one could more easily appreciate the architectural splendor of buildings such as the Terminal Tower, One Cleveland Center and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Glittering jewels adorning the knobby fingers of an aging metropolitan whore that had never been taken especially seriously by the rest of the world ever since the horribly polluted Cuyahoga River had actually caught fire in the scorching-hot summer of 1969.