by Osborne, Jon
The Director glanced back up at her with a haunted look flashing in his tired brown eyes, and Claire could practically see him age another ten years right in front of her face. “No, Agent Wexler,” he said, his deep and usually steady voice wavering slightly. “Everything’s not OK.” Krugman paused and let out a deep breath that deflated his chest completely, looking thoroughly defeated now. And old. “As a matter of fact, I can’t possibly imagine how things could be any more fucked up than they are right now.”
Claire grimaced and felt her blood begin to pump hot through her veins. Sounded exciting. “That bad, huh?” she asked.
Krugman shook his head sadly and closed his eyes. Blowing out another slow breath that fluttered his lips, he said, “No, Agent Wexler. It’s even worse than that.”
CHAPTER 32
Amped-up ticker thumping away madly inside her badly constricted chest, Claire drove ninety-five miles an hour the entire way with her magnetic siren slapped to the roof of her car, its shrill and screaming voice telling everyone in her general vicinity to get the fuck out of her way while her beloved Sentra did every bit as good a job as the fancy-schmancy Bentley would have done. Probably better.
Even after factoring in a couple of heart-stopping near-misses along the way where she’d needed to swerve wildly onto the shoulder of the highway in order to avoid bone-jarring contact with her fellow motorists – hearing the crunch of sliding gravel beneath her crazily spinning tires as she’d done so, the Sentra fishtailing out of control before she’d finally managed to right the vehicle again and make it back onto the highway – it took Claire just eighteen minutes door-to-door from the FBI field office downtown to the McDonald’s over in Strongsville, scene of Jack Yuntz’s latest mass-shooting.
Claire gritted her teeth in anger as she pulled the Sentra all the way up to the yellow police tape strung around the perimeter of the parking lot. Jamming the car into park mode, she left the keys dangling from the ignition before exiting her vehicle without bothering to shut the driver’s-side door behind her. She flashed her ID at a uniform who was standing outside the DO NOT CROSS line and checking IDs like a bouncer outside a nightclub. The man studied it briefly before obediently lifting up the tape for her to duck under.
Claire scrunched up her face as she went. She could practically feel the man’s eyes on her ass as she marched purposefully across the parking lot with a stiff westerly wind pushing back at her chest. She sighed heavily as the unsubtle stare warmed up her rear-end. Men: they were all the same, no matter what the circumstances. Horrific mass shooting or not, there was always time to sneak a quick peek at a woman’s backside, wasn’t there? Of course there was. A cheap thrill just waiting to be taken. And the sad truth of the matter was that Claire had grown quite accustomed to it by this point in her life. Was used to it by now. It had been the same old, incredibly boring story ever since she’d turned thirteen years old and her T-shirts had stopped laying flat against her chest.
Reaching the restaurant a moment later, Claire pulled open the glass door on the side entrance and stepped inside before scanning the interior quickly with a well-practiced eye. Three distinct areas of blood that she could see from the entranceway where she was standing. The first splash of blood had streaked a window on the northeast corner of the restaurant. Another had splashed up against the façade of the counter twenty feet away. The third measure of blood had splattered across the smiling face of a four-foot-tall Ronald McDonald statue that was standing guard next to a plastic-encased display of the Wreck-It Ralph toys available in this month’s Happy Meals.
Claire stretched her neck until she felt the compressed vertebrae there pop in a long string. Despite the visual rape to which she’d just been subjected, it felt great to finally get back to work again. Amazing, actually. Not as much blood as she would have expected to find in a mass-shooting incident, though. Not even close. Odd. Finding an important-looking local, she flashed her ID again before pulling the woman into a short hallway where the bathrooms were located. “How many dead?” Claire asked.
The local – a silver-haired gal in her mid-forties with two wide gold stripes on her navy-blue shirtsleeves that identified her rank as a lieutenant – pressed her wind-burned lips together. “None that I know of, ma’am.”
Claire lifted her eyebrows in surprise. More like in total shock, actually. She could hardly believe her ears. “None?” she asked incredulously. “What the hell do you mean none?” Krugman hadn’t given her an exact body count back at the field office, but she’d expected the number of casualties to be in the dozens, at the very least. After all, machineguns did a whole hell of a lot of work in a very short space of time. Efficient killing machines if efficient killing machines had ever been created.
The other woman shook her head and shrugged, holding up her delicate hands chest-high. “None, ma’am,” she repeated. “No deaths here today. Apparently the shooter was interrupted before he could get off too many shots. Thank God for the little things, huh?”
Claire narrowed her bright green eyes suspiciously and looked around the restaurant again. Didn’t make any sense. This had to have been like shooting fish in a barrel for Jack Yuntz, assuming that it had been him again – which, of course, she did. Keeping an open mind about things was all well and good – the mark of a good investigator and all that shit – but you didn’t need to be a member of Mensa to figure out the identity of the shooter. Hell, you didn’t even need to be a member of the Mickey Mouse Club, for Christ’s sake. Besides, Claire was a Mensa member – not that the silly and completely meaningless recognition had ever done her any good in her life. Her parents had forced her to take the stupid test over her loud teenaged objections when she’d been sixteen years old, and the plain truth of the matter was that it hadn’t been very difficult for her to place in the top two percent of the world’s population intelligence-wise. Hell, not even taking into consideration the unfair cultural bias so prevalent in standardized testing, a never-ending string of private tutors and Claire’s attendance at Hathaway Brown – the most prestigious all-girls elementary school in Ohio – had made good and goddamn sure that she’d succeed both on the test and in life. It had been a can’t-miss proposition for her ever since the very beginning. And it hadn’t been very tough for her to ace a test when she’d already known most of the questions beforehand. Pretty hard to fail at life, too, when your family had in excess of a hundred million dollars sitting in their bank accounts to ensure the opposite of that. As always, playing with house money meant that you never really lost at anything. Another unfair aspect of life, Claire knew, even if she’d taken advantage of it herself. “How many injured?” she asked, getting her mind back onto the right track. No time to go strolling down memory lane here. She had much more important things to do at the moment. Like catching a cold-blooded killer, for one. What she’d do after she caught him still remained to be seen at that point. At least by others.
The local held up a trio of slender fingers in response to Claire’s question. “Just three injured, ma’am,” she said. “One guy got hit in the lower leg over near the counter, a woman was hit in her right ear while she was sitting in a booth near the window on the northeast side of the restaurant and the third victim was struck in his shoulder over by the Happy Meal display. EMTs said that none of the wounds appeared to be life-threatening, though. Victims were all taken to the Cleveland Clinic.’”
Claire breathed out a grateful sigh of relief, feeling her heartbeat finally begin to slow a bit in her chest. They’d gotten lucky this time; she knew that. Incredibly lucky. Chalk one up for the good guys. Still, there’d be more shootings after this one. A lot more shootings. She knew that, too. Maniacs like Jack Yuntz never stopped until they’d been caught. And now Claire was ultimately in charge of catching him. Good. Game on, asshole. “Who interrupted the shooter?” she asked.
The female cop jerked her head over to a middle-aged Hispanic man who was sitting in one of the booths that had managed to stay blood-free d
uring the shooting fifteen feet away and talking to another local uniform. “That guy,” the woman said.
Claire thanked the woman, then made her way immediately over to the booth. She flashed her ID a third time at the local seated there, prompting the man to nod and slide out. Claire slid into his place after him and got straight down to business. Now that she’d finally made it onto the track, she wanted to sprint. Chases usually ended a whole hell of a lot faster when you did things that way. “My name’s Agent Claire Wexler,” she said to the Hispanic man on the other side of the table. “What happened here today? How did you interrupt the shooter?”
Wearing a loose-fitting tan shirt and a faded brown fisherman’s cap that had a shiny silver hook tucked snugly into the wide band, the heavily mustachioed man in front of her furrowed his thick eyebrows in confusion. “No comprende,” he said.
Claire closed her eyes in frustration and breathed out slowly through her nostrils, trying her best to control her overwhelming irritation. Wasn’t easy. Pretty hard to sprint when you could barely even walk, for fuck’s sake. For the millionth time in her life, she wished to God that she’d paid closer attention in her Spanish classes. For all her many academic achievements over the years – and there’d been plenty of plaques and certificates testifying to her supposed “genius” – learning another language hadn’t been among them. More room for personal improvement, she supposed. That being said, she still hadn’t jumped out of an airplane or scaled the sheer face of Mount Everest, either. Still, only one of those accomplishments would have helped her right now.
She shouted out the question without bothering to open her eyes again. “Who here speaks Spanish?”
A light touch on her left shoulder five seconds later prompted Claire to open her eyes again. The same local who she’d displaced a moment earlier stood next to the booth. “I do, ma’am,” he said.
Claire nodded. “Great. Could you please translate for me here?”
“Of course, ma’am. What do you want me to ask him?”
Claire shifted in her seat. “For starters, ask him how the hell he managed to interrupt the shooter.”
The local turned toward the Hispanic man and passed along Claire’s question in the foreign tongue that she could barely even follow, rolling his Rs expertly on the tip of his tongue in a way that she’d never managed to do, even just for fun. Getting his answer in another rapid-fire rolling of Rs a moment later, the uniform turned back to Claire. “He says that he was just coming in to order some breakfast, didn’t mean to interrupt the guy, it just happened that way. The shooter fled when Mr. Ramirez opened the door. Mr. Ramirez was listening to his iPod at the time, didn’t hear the shooting, otherwise he says that he wouldn’t have even come in at all.”
Claire nodded again and filed away the information mentally before providing the local with the next question for translation. “What did the shooter look like?” she asked. Though she already knew the answer to that query, Claire also knew for a fact that Bill Krugman would yank her ass off this case fast enough to make her goddamn head spin right off her shoulders if she failed do things by the book here. Like most of Claire’s other colleagues in the Bureau, the Director was a stickler for the rules, always had been ever since the very beginning, according to all reports. No great surprise there, though. The entire FBI was his baby, after all. Made sense that he would want to protect it.
More R-rolling came from the local, followed a moment later by more R-rolling from the witness who was playing the part of the happenstance hero today. The uniform nodded to the other man before turning back to Claire again. “He says that it was a tall guy. Skinny. Young. A teenager, maybe. Wearing a trench coat.”
Claire pressed her lips together and felt a hot jolt of adrenalin flood through her veins. Jack Yuntz, all right, no two ways about it. To a T. Leaning forward, she reached out across the table and touched the witness’s knobby and gnarled left hand with her fingertips. “Gracias, Mr. Ramirez,” she said.
Ramirez nodded and gave her a small smile. “De nada, seniorita.”
Claire smiled back at the man and felt an unexpected wave of warmth wash through her body. She just couldn’t help herself. Despite any lack of vanity she might have, she appreciated the witness’s classification of her person. Fluent in the language or not, even she knew that seniorita meant that she still looked pretty young to the guy. Nice to hear. After all, even she wasn’t completely immune to compliments – especially when they were coming from a guy who wasn’t desperately trying to get into her pants at the moment. Welcome change of pace, if nothing else.
Sliding out of the booth, Claire looked on for the next few minutes as several crime-scene techs processed the scene. Breathing in excitedly through her mouth, she heard a faint ringing sound echoing in her ears, knowing exactly what Jack Yuntz had been thinking when he’d selected this location for his latest despicable act of terror. When other kids her age had been reading Goosebumps to get their heebie-jeebie thrills, Claire had used her spare time to devour true-crime books. Hell, she felt like she practically knew Ann Rule personally after all the time the two of them had spent together over the years. And combined with the way that Jack Yuntz had played out a Columbine-like scene at the grade school in Lorain and the way he’d recreated the events in Aurora, Colorado at the movie theater in Rocky River, from all appearances he’d been attempting to recreate the horrific mass-shooting executed by James Oliver Huberty at a San Ysidro, California McDonald’s in 1984, a grisly massacre that had killed twenty-one people – including five children – and injured nineteen others. Thankfully, though, Yuntz hadn’t managed to duplicate that feat here today. Not even close. And Claire figured that had probably rattled the sadistic little punk. And why not? Up to this point in the game, the murdering bastard had been living a very charmed life, indeed. He’d gotten away scot-free thus far with both of his two previous shootings, and he’d narrowly escaped capture out in New York City just the previous day. But even Yuntz had to know that the wheels were coming off now. That this trip would ultimately culminate with him crashing into a concrete wall at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, smashing his worthless skull in a dozen places like a shattered eggshell in the process.
But where the hell would the arrogant little jerk strike next?
Claire stretched her neck again; mentally preparing herself for the next series of moves that would take place in this high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse.
OK, you little shit, she thought. You want to play games with me? Fine, then let’s play some fucking games. You might not know it yet, but this is something you’re going to learn the hard way very soon: you’re not dealing with Dana Whitestone an more – some namby-pamby chick who can’t handle the pressure and who needs to go running off to heaven in order to escape all the hurtful things that you do to her and others.
Not. Even. Close.
CHAPTER 33
After having gathered all of his weapons from the storage facility where he’d kept them for the past month just half an hour earlier, Jack now stood on the jagged rocks at Lakewood Park on the west side of Cleveland.
He stared out at the boiling waters of Lake Erie that were crashing into the shore at his feet and attempted to collect his fractured thoughts in much the same way he’d recently collected his guns while a cold, misting spray sprinkled lightly across his cheeks.
Jack took a deep breath through his nostrils that chilled his lungs and resisted the sudden urge to shiver against the cold wind that was whipping in hard off the lake and fluttering his trench coat wildly around his body with an audible whap-whap-whap.
He sighed heavily, producing wispy puffs of gray vapor from his mouth and nostrils with the forceful exhalation. Following the hopelessly botched shooting over at the Strongsville McDonald’s – a shooting where he’d been interrupted in his very important work by some oblivious wetback who’d been blasting brain-bending salsa music into the earbuds of his first-generation iPod and not paying any attention at all to
the historic events taking place around him – Jack had fled the scene in the Sebring before finally making it to the relative safety of a Greyhound bus station parking lot over in Parma. Sliding into an open space there, he’d jammed the car into park mode and had seethed in pure frustration, gritting his teeth hard in his mouth until they’d nearly crumbled into bits of chalk.
It had taken him several long minutes before he’d finally managed to calm down enough to figure out how he could begin cleaning up the enormous mess he’d just made. Wouldn’t be easy, that much was for sure. Still, he’d made it much too far along in his long journey to just turn back now. Much as had been the case in the dark sewer back in Queens, he at least needed to try.
Gathering himself mentally, he’d left the keys to the Sebring dangling from the ignition before going into the bus station and purchasing a ticket to New York City. Paying in cash, he’d then dug out his iPhone from his pocket and caught a wi-fi connection in the bus station before navigating the phone’s Web browser over to Google, typing into the search bar what he’d wanted to know. And then he’d waited. And then he’d waited some more. And then he’d waited even more.
With the iPhone struggling to work with the weak Internet connection at the Greyhound station, it had taken nearly a full minute before the link to a recently published Plain Dealer newspaper article had finally popped up. Jack had read through the text just as quickly as he could possibly could while the first details of his new plan had begun to form slowly in the back of his mind, tickling his brain lightly with all the enormous promise it held: