by Osborne, Jon
D’Arbinville stretched his aching neck and did his best to work out the slight kink there that had come courtesy of one of the more adventurous positions they’d tried on for size in the bedroom. No matter, though. He could deal with a little physical discomfort here. It was others who needed to worry about the forthcoming physical pain he intended to distribute. And Cleveland’s superficial problems certainly didn’t represent anything for him to be concerned about, either. Geographical beauty didn’t play any role whatsoever in what he had planned here. Not to mention the fact that there existed plenty of money for the taking in even the most depressing corners of the world. Detroit. Bombay. Beirut. You simply needed to know where to look for it.
Blissfully for him, he knew precisely where to look for it: Zachary Paulson’s perversely bulging pockets. So, all things considered, he expected that Cleveland would no doubt prove a cakewalk when compared to those other three cities. Because once everything had been said and done and the last piece of the puzzle had fallen into its proper slot in order to create a beautiful portrait of financial health that would keep him supplied with Scotch and Gitanes for the rest of his life, he didn’t at all mind taking candy from an ugly baby. Tasted every bit as sweet.
Maybe even just a little bit sweeter.
Speaking of ugly babies…
D’Arbinville turned away from his unexpectedly pleasing view when he heard Helen Morgan pad into the living room behind him. Barefoot with her hair still wet from the shower, she’d slipped herself into one of the two comfortable cotton robes that had been hanging by a pair of sturdy brass hooks in the bathroom – not that he’d have put up all that much of a protest if she hadn’t taken the trouble to cover herself. Surprisingly enough, her body had turned out to be quite nice, with full, reasonably pert breasts and a somewhat flat tummy testifying to the fact that she’d never before given birth.
And that mouth of hers.
A welcome bonus of her spinster status he certainly hadn’t been expecting.
D’Arbinville grinned. Hell, just might need to give his mark one more going-over before the night had run its course. And why not? Never before had he settled for just one roll in the hay when time hadn’t presented a pressing obstacle.
“And how are you, my dear?” D’Arbinville asked, widening the smile on his face and reveling in the renewed sense of desire flowing through his veins at the intoxicating vision of Helen Morgan’s entirely adequate form. “Feeling satisfied?”
Helen Morgan smiled back and pulled her robe tighter around her body, hugging herself with her own arms. The glow on her face was unmistakable, visible even from across the room. Cheeks lit the soft red of a cherub’s. Eyes shining as happily as those of a newborn baby’s. Nostrils flared with the delicious novelty of her recent – not to mention clearly appreciated – romantic conquest.
D’Arbinville did his best to stay composed despite the hot jolt of adrenalin coursing through his system and blurring the edges of his vision. Wasn’t easy. It took every last bit of self-control he possessed to keep himself from cracking his knuckles loudly in satisfaction right there in front of the woman’s hopelessly average face. From all appearances, however, it looked to him as though he hadn’t lost his exquisite touch with the fairer sex. Another bonus – this one he had been expecting, of course. After all, he’d always been considered an animal between the sheets by anyone who’d ever had the distinct pleasure of enjoying his intimate company, now hadn’t he?
Of course he had. Then again, he’d also been considered an animal for other, far less noble reasons, too.
Helen Morgan flipped back her damp hair coquettishly in response to his question, ever the flirtatious schoolgirl now that she’d taken care of the intense sexual frustration she’d no doubt been carrying around with her for the past several years now. “Yes, I’d say that’s about right. No complaints over here. And what about you? Any interest in going for round two?”
D’Arbinville laughed heartily. He just couldn’t help himself. Combined with the impressive amount of liquor they’d already consumed and his undivided attention for the past hour, clearly a long-overdue romp had transformed his target into an entirely new person. A confident person.
Exactly what he’d planned all along. And why not? He’d need Helen Morgan to feel completely sure enough of herself if he were to have any hope at all of her pulling off what he was about to ask her to do next.
Striding over to the large beige sofa stationed in the middle of the luxurious space, D’Arbinville sat down and patted the soft cushion beside him. “Let’s just have a little talk first before we get into it again,” he said. “Right now, I have a very important question I need to ask you.”
Helen Morgan creased her thin and slightly wind-burned lips into a worried frown. Crossing the room in six quick steps, she took a seat next to him on the couch. The light and clean scent of her recently applied shampoo tickled D’Arbinville’s nostrils and made him feel uncharacteristically lightheaded. The seductive warmth floating off her freshly scrubbed skin caressed his heavily whiskered cheek like the back of a loving hand. “What do you need to ask me?”
D’Arbinville took a deep breath through his nostrils and leaned forward to stub out his cigarette in the clean glass tray that was sitting on the coffee table in front of them. Then he straightened back up and crossed his left leg over his right. Holding her gaze with his own, he injected a somber tone into his deep, slightly accented voice. “Helen, have you ever thought of having a baby of your own?”
Morgan lifted her eyebrows uncertainly, then laughed without humor. Clearly, she didn’t have the faintest clue on Earth of what to say to that. Still, no world-shattering revelation there. D’Arbinville had sprung his unorthodox question on her this abruptly to achieve precisely that desired affect. “A baby?” she started, incredulously. “I don’t know. Why the hell would you be asking me something like that? I’m way too old to be thinking about having a child and we just met, for Christ’s sake. Not to mention the fact that I’m almost-”
D’Arbinville cut her off by placing his right hand on her left knee and giving it a gentle squeeze, just as he’d done back at the Oak Barrel Bar a few hours earlier. Morgan’s words died unfulfilled in her throat. Her thighs spread involuntarily. Almost imperceptible, but definitely there.
D’Arbinville resisted the urge to grin again. Still, why shouldn’t he grin? It certainly hadn’t taken him very long to learn how to play this particular instrument, now had it? Looked to him as though all those many formative years spent practicing with the most nubile girls in all of France had served their purpose quite ably, allowing him to retain his renowned touch with the opposite sex. Good thing, too. Because without that infinitely useful skill he knew that he had no other suitable base of attack from which to operate. No other suitable base from which to attack. Sex not only sold, it bought things, too.
Including – judging by the intense look of concentration coloring in her face at the moment as she chewed away thoughtfully on her weather-ravaged lower lip – the willing ear of Helen Morgan.
“Your age doesn’t matter one little bit,” D’Arbinville said, dismissing her concerns with a quick wave of his left hand while running his right one up her thigh. “All you need is love, my dear. The Beatles had it exactly right. So tell me, Helen, do you love me?”
Morgan placed her hand on top of his and stroked his skin softly, making small, sensual circles with the tips of her stubby fingers. “I don’t know,” she said, almost plaintively. “This is all happening so fast.”
She leaned back into the sofa and put her hands to her head. “Jesus Christ, I’m so fucking drunk right now. Everything is spinning. Can’t we talk about this later?”
D’Arbinville took his hand off her knee and grabbed her firmly by her shoulders. Roughly angling her body toward his, he locked his stare onto hers like a heat-seeking missile. “No, we can’t talk about it later,” he said sternly. “We were damned lucky to have found each other, Helen
, and I need to know if I can depend on you.”
Morgan narrowed her bloodshot hazel eyes and pulled back her head six inches on her manly shoulders, clearly taken aback by his brusque tone. “Depend on me for what?”
D’Arbinville took another deep breath that expanded his well-toned chest against the plain white T-shirt he was wearing now, still holding her tightly by her shoulders and feeling not unlike the lead male character in some sort of racy Harlequin bodice-ripper one might purchase at the grocery store in order to pass the time on a lazy summer’s day. The only things that seemed to be missing at the moment were a wide-open field, a stiff breeze blowing through their flowing locks of golden hair and a recently broken wild stallion to serve as their transportation. “Depend on you to take care of our baby, Helen,” he said, speaking more fervently now. “Do you want to have a baby with me or not? I’m no spring chicken, either, you know. I need to know the answer now. Tonight. It’s either now or never. So what do you say?”
Helen Morgan’s face drained completely of blood. Clearly, she couldn’t believe her good fortune, mitigated in no small measure by the shocking nature of D’Arbinville’s words. And who in their right mind could honestly blame her? All things considered, though, a man of D’Arbinville’s caliber certainly hadn’t come around very often in her life – if ever. So terrifying as the dizzying prospect might seem at the moment, she needed to decide if she’d take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that had just presented itself.
Her timid reply was barely audible even from less than a foot away.
“Yes, Nicholas,” she breathed. “I want to have a baby with you.”
CHAPTER 8
Bruce Blankenship lifted his hands over his head, then froze in place like a living statue.
“I’m FBI,” he said, not daring to twitch even the most minor of his spring-loaded muscles. The last thing in the world he needed right now was to have his brains splattered all over Dana’s bathroom wall by some itchy trigger-fingered cowboy looking to make a name for himself down at the precinct. He had enough troubles already as things stood. And then some. His partner was dying right in front of his eyes, for Christ’s sake. No time to play cops and robbers. “My ID is in my left pants pocket,” he said. “Take it out and see for yourself.’
Blankenship felt a rough hand invade his pocket while the gun remained pressed hard to the back of his skull. An eternity seemed to pass before the barrel-pressure finally disappeared and the previously stern voice in his ear sounded from behind again. “I’m very sorry, sir. I didn’t know.”
Blankenship leapt to his feet and spun around angrily to find himself staring at an ashen-faced Lakewood cop. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, judging by the look of him. Barely more than a rookie. “Give me that thing,” Blankenship spat, gritting his teeth and jerking the uniform’s service revolver from the man’s right hand. “Get EMTs here now. Self-inflicted knife wound to the right femoral artery. Patient still has a pulse but she’s not breathing. CPR efforts haven’t proved successful so far.”
The Lakewood cop did as he was instructed. His panicked voice shook badly as he leaned over to relay the information Blankenship had just told him into the CB radio strapped to his left shoulder.
When the man had finished passing along all the details regarding Dana’s condition, he looked back up at Blankenship with a haunted look flashing in his bulging green eyes. His voice wavered some more. “What do you want me to do now, sir?”
Blankenship placed the local cop’s gun on the edge of the porcelain bathroom sink. “Do you know two-man CPR?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
CHAPTER 9
Eight interminable minutes later, Blankenship and the Lakewood cop finally gave way to the EMTs that burst into Dana’s apartment like a small, well-trained army taking over on the battlefield.
He watched with increasing dread while the efficient team of medical personnel loaded Dana’s limp body onto a gurney and wheeled her quickly down the carpeted hallway to the elevator.
Blankenship checked the time on his cellphone as he brought up the rear. By his unofficial count, Dana hadn’t been breathing for at least fifteen minutes now. Among myriad other things, irreversible brain damage marked a definite possibility.
If not a whole hell of a lot worse than that.
He shuddered hard as he took the fire-escape stairs three at a time all the way down to the ground floor, nearly breaking his neck in the process before racing wildly through the lobby and making it outside.
Reaching his vehicle a moment later, he threw open the 4-Runner’s driver’s-side door in a flash and jammed the proper key into the ignition before cranking the engine to life. Checking his rearview mirror to make sure that nobody was behind him, he backed up quickly and shoved the vehicle into drive before mashing down his foot on the accelerator and pulling out of the parking lot in an ear-bending screech of tires, following the wailing ambulance as closely as he could without getting into an accident all the way to Fairview General Hospital, which was blissfully located just three short miles away.
Blankenship jammed the 4-Runner into park mode outside the emergency-room entrance and extracted a clean blue T-shirt from his gym bag. Pulling it hastily over his head, he hustled inside the building without bothering to remove the keys from the ignition, roughly shouldering aside a teenaged kid who was standing on the sidewalk as he went, wanting desperately to be with Dana during her time of need.
Wanting desperately to make up for not having been there for her when she’d needed him the most.
He paced the lobby for more than an hour before a doctor finally came out and spoke to him in a solemn voice. Thirty seconds later, his cellphone rang in his pocket. Bill Krugman again, who’d been checking in on Dana’s condition every ten minutes for the past hour now.
“What’s the status of Agent Whitestone?” the Director barked. “How’s Dana doing?”
Blankenship fought back a gut-wrenching sob; afraid he might throw up his own stomach all over the freshly polished hospital floor at his feet. “Agent Whitestone is brain dead, sir,” he stammered.
The awful words cracked painfully in his horribly constricted throat. He fought valiantly to regain control of his trembling voice but it didn’t work one little bit. How the fuck could it?
Finally, he managed to speak again. Not surprisingly, the horrifying words weren’t any less excruciating to choke out the second time around.
“They just pronounced Dana brain dead.”
PART III
“Mem’ries,
Light the corners of my mind.
Misty water-colored memories,
Of the way we were.”
Barbra Streisand, performing The Way We Were – written by Alan and Marie Bergman (lyrics) and Marvin Hamlisch (music) – in the 1973 movie of the same name.
CHAPTER 10
Dana clearly heard what the overly pessimistic doctors had to say about her condition. Pretty hard not to with the way they’d boomed out the especially dreary diagnosis just a few short feet away. Still, she hadn’t gone brain dead, no matter what they’d declared so prematurely. Not yet, anyway. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. Hell, her brain hadn’t felt this good in years, if ever. And as a direct result she now found herself right back in her most favorite place in the entire world: the West Park section of Cleveland on July 4th, 1976 – the same fateful night that her parents had been brutally murdered in cold blood by Nathan Stiedowe directly in front of her shocked and horrified four-year-old eyes.
Dana let out a soft sigh of contentment in her mind. It went without saying that – apart from losing her parents on this horribly bloody night – she’d missed this place right down to the core of her innermost being for the entirety of the blood-soaked life she’d led ever since.
Dana sighed again mentally. If nothing else, it was certainly nice to be back here again – back at the loving home of her childhood – however brief h
er stay might be.
Steeling herself mentally, she dug down deep and drew upon what little remained of her rapidly dwindling life-force for strength. Relaxing her traumatized brain the best she could considering the circumstances, she willed her overloaded synapses to continue firing, at least for a little while longer. If she were to find out whether she’d stay here on Earth with Bruce Blankenship and Bill Krugman or leave to go join her parents on the other side, she’d need to lose herself completely in this terrifying night and see how things played out this time around.
Heck, who knew? Maybe the awful series of events that had taken place way back in 1976 would play out differently for her and her parents this time.
Only one way to find out.
***
Dusk darkened the summer sky as James Whitestone barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers on a rusty outdoor grill. He flipped a burger expertly with a quick flick of his right wrist before using the spatula to motion to the sandbox where Dana was playing quietly. He spelled out the word to his wife so that their only child wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Although she was a precocious and highly intelligent little girl, Dana had yet to completely master the tricky art of spelling.