by Osborne, Jon
Jack took in a deep, bracing breath through his nostrils and held it tight in his lungs as the first pangs of nervousness finally began to flutter through the core of his being despite the reassuring weight of the machinegun slung over his left shoulder. In an effort to forestall such an unwanted fate – if not completely avoid it altogether – he said, “Yeah, man, I’ve got a lot more cash, but not on me right now. Are you still gonna be here later on tonight, though?”
The black man nodded. As he did so, Jack could practically see the gears in the man’s brain working. The man would eat a full meal later on tonight in lieu of a quick snack right now. Smart thinking on his part. After all, you didn’t take everything from your marks all at once. Good businessmen bled them a little bit at a time. “Yeah, dude,” the black man said. “I’ll be here later on tonight. The name’s Lester, by the way. Pleased to meet you and all that shit. Anyway, I’m in Room 146. Just knock on the door and tell ‘em you’re the white boy who bought the car from me this morning. They’ll let you in. What are you gonna need, exactly?”
Jack shrugged again. “I don’t know. Do you have any nine-millimeters for sale?”
Lester laughed again. Turning his head, he spat on the ground and wiped at his mouth with the back of his left hand before turning back to Jack. “Yeah, dude. I got like three of them. Nice shit, too. Serial numbers filed off and everything. Completely untraceable.”
Jack paused, wanting to sound as authentic as he possibly could. “Got any LSD?”
Lester lifted his thick eyebrows halfway up his forehead and laughed again. The contempt in his voice was audible this time, lurking just beneath the surface of his menacing tone. “Hell, yeah, I got LSD. I got a whole fuckin’ sheet of it, my man. Woodstocks. Super-trippy shit.”
“How much do you want for everything?”
Lester paused while he turned the query over in his mind. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll make you a deal here. Three-fifty for the nine if you only want one of them and thirty bucks a hit for the acid. It’s a good deal, dude. You’re not going to beat those prices anywhere.”
Jack pursed his lips. He didn’t do drugs – never had – but even he knew that those prices were a complete and total rip-off. He didn’t mention this knowledge to Lester, though, of course. No doubt the man would have beat the living shit out of him right then and there if he had. Besides, it was never a good idea to tangle with somebody whom obviously had nothing left to lose. Somebody who’d probably never even had anything to start off with in the first place. “Sounds like a deal to me,” Jack said, wanting to get this conversation over with already so that he could finally get back to work. “So I’ll come to Room 146 at around eight-thirty tonight, OK?”
Lester tucked the wad of cash Jack had just given him into the front pocket of his filthy jeans and stretched his muscular neck, clearly pleased with himself for having gotten over so easily on the dorky white boy. “You do that, my man,” he said. “Anyway, see you then.”
When Lester had finally gone – presumably to go pimp-slap a ho or something equally chivalrous – Jack slid behind the wheel of the Sebring he’d just bought and cranked the engine into life on the first try. Adrenalin coursed hot through his veins as he put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot of the Manor Inn, never to return again. Just then, his soul’s stomach grumbled loudly, practically audible to his own ears. Pressing down gently on the accelerator with his right foot, he smiled as another iconic jingle from the famous restaurant he’d be visiting now played in his mind; slightly modified to meet his present needs, of course:
Murder: it’s what I do.
CHAPTER 30
Half an hour later, Jack pulled the recently purchased Sebring into the crowded parking lot of the McDonald’s on Rockaway Street in Strongsville, more ready than ever to finally get back down to the bloody business at hand.
In the driver’s seat of the car, he felt his chest swell with immense pride at the intensely satisfying memory of killing his father despite the melancholy that came along with the recollection of his poor mother’s horrific death at the hands of the Chessboard Killers. Though it had been just his first-ever kill, Jack had managed to pull off the grisly deed while Don Yuntz’s twenty-two-year-old girlfriend had snored off her latest hangover fewer than twenty feet away, lying on her stomach on a sheetless bed and wearing only brief white panties that framed her supple posterior beautifully, a tantalizing mound of exposed boob flesh peeking out teasingly from beneath her shapely body on her left side. Hot as she’d been, though, the stupid bitch had been completely oblivious to the events going on around her the entire time that Jack had been murdering his father in cold blood. Hadn’t even twitched, as a matter of fact, not even when Jack had ruthlessly plucked out his old man’s spongy left eyeball from the unrepentant asshole’s hopelessly thick skull with the same sharp pair of scissors that he’d later use to kill Special Agent Jeremy Brown in the Presidential Suite of the Fontainebleau Hotel in downtown Manhattan.
Jack breathed out deeply in contentment now, relishing the exquisite memory. Not a bad way to start off a career as a killer by anyone’s estimation. Still, he just hoped that his run of good luck would hold out a little bit longer. At least for the next ten minutes or so. Long enough for him to finish off the stunning thing he’d come here to do today.
Exiting the Sebring and reaching back inside for his machinegun, he slung the strap of its case over his left shoulder and left the car running in order to expedite his impending getaway. The highway was fewer than a hundred yards away and visible from where he was standing in the parking lot, and this particular restaurant had been chosen for precisely that reason. From all appearances, everything was positioned properly on the makeshift chessboard laid out in front of him now. Everything was a go. All the pawns had been lined up in a neat little row, just awaiting capture by the most important and powerful piece on the board. The most deadly piece on the board.
Once again, this was the fun part of the job.
Jack paused and stretched his aching neck in an effort to loosen up the badly knotted muscles there before he proceeded with the next step, wanting to make one hundred percent sure that he was thinking clearly here. Even tucked away into its case, the machinegun might draw unwanted attention to his person, but with any luck at all the people who saw it would only think he was carrying a guitar. Jack smirked despite the clear and present enormity of his situation. Yeah, right: a real music lover; that was him, all right. Still, even on the unlikely possibility that someone identified his cargo as the brutal weapon off mass murder it had become over at the movie theater a few days prior, by that point it would already be far too late for any no-good do-gooders out there hell-bent upon collecting the one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward that the FBI had so recently offered for Jack’s own capture to do anything about it. Far too late for them to stop him.
Rolling his stiff shoulders forward one last time to release the remaining tension coiled up in his muscles, Jack made his way quickly across the parking lot with a stiff westerly wind whipping the tails of his long black trench coat wildly around his legs. His heartbeat thumped away painfully inside his chest as he pulled open the glass door to the restaurant nearest to his vehicle and stepped inside the busy space before quickly scanning the interior with a discerning eye. From what he could see from where he was standing, at least twenty other people were inside. Some were eating at tables, laughing and enjoying each other’s company. Others were emptying their finished trays into trash receptacles. Still others were lined up at the counter, waiting patiently to deliver their breakfast orders to the six or seven paper-hatted workers stationed behind it. Judging by the brown skin everywhere he looked, all Mexicans: the most prevalent form of illegal immigrant in Ohio. Jack suppressed another smile. Again, he just couldn’t help himself. Breakfast burritos all around.
Still trying to remain as inconspicuous as he possibly could with a goddamn machinegun slung over his shoulder, Jack studied his
fellow diners closely, taking in every last detail in sight. Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any children inside the place. No ninos. None that he could see, anyway. Weird for McDonald’s, but another unexpected stroke of good fortune.
Jack pressed his thin lips tightly together as an uncharacteristic wave of regret suddenly washed over him, dragging his heart all the way down into the pit of his stomach. Even with his cold and hardened outlook on the sanctity of life these days, he still felt bad for the four kids who’d died at the movie theater. The four kids he’d killed. And why shouldn’t he feel bad? It hadn’t been his intention to hurt them, after all, even while he’d been methodically spraying the screaming crowd with gunfire and watching their heads explode like firecrackers on their shoulders. As a matter of fact, Jack had jerked the machinegun up toward the ceiling several times when he’d managed to make out a child’s terrified face in all the madness.
Jack sighed heavily, deflating his thin chest. Like it or not, he supposed that was just the way war worked sometimes. Sometimes – no matter how hard you tried to avoid it – collateral damage just couldn’t be helped. A sad fact of life, perhaps, but a simple enough one to understand nonetheless.
Jack shook away the troubling thought and took in one last deep breath that puffed out his narrow chest against his trench coat, finally ready to get back down to the business at hand now that he’d paid his small mental penance for having killed the children in the movie theater. Slipping the strap of his machinegun case off his left shoulder, he laid the case across the top of the garbage receptacle right next to the door he’d just entered before unzipping the case and extracting his weapon from inside.
All the feelings of remorse that had been weighing down his mind just a moment earlier completely gone now; he lifted the machinegun chest-high and started firing again.
A moment later, he froze in place when a shockingly cold blast of air abruptly hit him in the back of his neck, chilling his brain into utter uselessness and causing him to pause in his very important work. Acrid bile flooded into his mouth, making it taste like he’d just swallowed a very tall glass of rat poison. He couldn’t believe his rotten luck.
Despite all the shooting that had been going on, some idiot had just opened the door behind him.
CHAPTER 31
Briefing wasn’t the word to use for it, Claire thought. Not even remotely. Nothing brief about it in any way, shape, fashion or form. At least, not in this instance.
She and Bill Krugman were seated at a large rectangular conference table in a back meeting room at the downtown FBI field office on Lakeshore Avenue with several stacks of files piled up high between them. Claire and the Director were now an hour and a half into the rundown of all the gory details concerning the horrific mass shooting that had taken place at the movie theater over in Rocky River a few days prior – the same horrific mass shooting that had claimed the lives of nearly fifty innocent people so far, including four beautiful children who’d barely even begun living their lives yet.
Claire stifled an impatient sigh, feeling like she had ants in her pants right now. She wanted to get out of her seat and get to work already, not sit around rehashing stuff with Krugman that she already knew like the back of her hand. Wanted to get on a plane out to the bustling and mean streets of New York City, where agents stationed there had reported a near-miss of Yuntz the previous day outside his little sister’s school.
Claire tried her best to remain stationary but it wasn’t easy. Hell, she’d been squirming like a worm on a hook ever since the beginning of this briefing. A good twenty minutes of it had been spent going over the paintball-shooting at St Anthony’s grade school in Lorain and the subsequent cold-blooded murder of Special Agent Meghan Shaughnessy a few days later. And they’d started things off by examining the genesis of Jack Yuntz’s brief-but-all-too-chilling career as a killer, beginning with when he’d mercilessly shoved a sharp pair of scissors deep into the exposed throat of Jeremy Brown in the Presidential Suite of the Fontainebleau Hotel in downtown Manhattan the previous year, collapsing the poor man’s windpipe on itself and causing him to choke to death on his own blood.
Claire shook her head in disgust as all the particulars from that infuriating case flashed through her mind again. She gritted her teeth so forcefully that she was afraid she might chip one of her expensive porcelain veneers. From all reports, this Yuntz kid was a real piece of work.
A real piece of garbage.
Claire balled up her fists at her sides and dug her fingernails deep into her palms, relishing the pain. Thankfully, though, she was just the sort of person who knew exactly how to take care of garbage. You simply took it out. No fuss, no muss, no room for negotiation. Once you got over all the moral implications involved (some of those moral implications specious, at best), it wasn’t difficult to see that it was the only way to deal with garbage, whether it came in its human form or otherwise. At least, it wasn’t all that difficult for Claire to see. Frustrating as it might be for her, though, sometimes she felt like the rest of the world still remained blind to that simple fact. Probably the main reason why so many repeat offenders were out there on the streets raping and killing innocents with an unassailable sense of impunity right now.
Knowing that she was taking a chance with the movement, Claire snuck a quick glance down at her watch beneath the table despite Krugman’s proximity, hoping the Director wouldn’t notice. Make that running clock on the briefing an hour and thirty-five minutes now.
And counting.
“Got someplace else you need to be, Agent Wexler?”
Claire snapped her attention back up to the Director and shifted in her chair uncomfortably, immediately feeling stupid. And why shouldn’t she feel stupid? Krugman had just caught her red-handed, no two ways about it. From where he was sitting, she might as well have told him to hurry the fuck up already. “No, sir,” she said, shaking her head in a weak attempt to reassure her boss that she was still there in the room with him. She plucked an invisible piece of lint off the sleeve of her gray blazer and lifted her eyes to him again, held his stare. “Right here is the only place I need to be, sir. The only place I want to be.” A slight lie, perhaps, but one Claire felt like she needed to tell right now. After all, even if she didn’t need any of the money from her profession thanks to the safety net provided by her family’s pretzel company, the other perks of her job were pretty much irreplaceable. And she knew that annoying Krugman wasn’t the best way to continue enjoying those perks. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. Another fairly simple equation for her to figure out.
“Good,” the Director said. “So let’s get back to it.”
Claire nodded, studying Krugman’s face as he reached out to pluck yet another file off the table in front of him. She frowned at what she saw. Deep grooves were carved into Krugman’s countenance, and not just from his age, either. Exhaustion was clearly visible there, too. She wondered briefly why he didn’t just retire already and leave all the heavy lifting to the younger people like her, people who were better equipped to handle the heavy load. Would’ve been a hell of a lot easier on him at his age; that much was for sure. Still, she supposed that the Director had his reasons for continuing his career, just like she had her reasons for continuing her career. But Claire also knew for a fact that Krugman’s reasons weren’t anything like hers. Not even close. Pity, really, because they probably could’ve had a pretty good talk about it over a pair of smoking Glocks in a back alley somewhere while they stood over the lifeless bodies of the bad guys at their feet.
Claire waited as patiently as she could for the Director to proceed while Krugman flipped through his newest file for several moments, apparently in no great rush to get on with things. If nothing else, though, the Director’s good humor that had been present at the start of this briefing had run its course now. No more light-hearted jokes coming from his side of the table along the lines of “I like what you’re doing with your hair these days, Claire” or “Nice glasses,
Agent Wexler. If I’m not mistaken, however, your jacket on file down at Quantico says that you have twenty-twenty vision. What gives?” Now that Krugman had really gotten his teeth into the meat of this case, he was all business. Had been all business ever since he’d informed her that the highly anticipated task force they’d been waiting on would be ready to go by the following day at the very latest, if not even sooner than that. Not what Claire had wanted to hear, of course – having always preferred to do her special sort of work alone – but no great surprise to her, either. This was the FBI, after all. Most agents played things by the book. And Krugman definitely played things by the book.
Krugman finally cleared his throat forcefully and looked back up at her. He seemed just about to say something when he suddenly frowned and reached into the inside pocket of his blue suit jacket to extract his beeper. He studied it closely and deepened his frown. From her position across the table, Claire watched the Director’s face drain completely of blood while she felt in her jacket pocket for her own beeper before suddenly realizing that she’d left it sitting on her coffee table back home. No doubt Mischka and Milo had chewed it into unusable shreds by now. The destructive little rascals. Another expense added to their running total; maybe ten grand now. However tempting the thought might be at times, though, Craigslist wasn’t an option for her pups, no matter what she’d threatened the with earlier. She loved Mischka and Milo. And why the hell wouldn’t she love them? They were so much better than almost every human being she’d ever come across in her entire life. “What is it, sir?” Claire asked, deepening her own frown now. “Is everything OK?”