by Osborne, Jon
Paulson said, “What about the pinkie finger, though? That’s what confusing the hell out of me. Little Zachary still has all his fingers. So where did it come from?”
Krugman shook his head sadly. “Case of grave robbery out in Elyria a few nights ago,” he said, pursing his lips with the relaying of this sobering information. “It was just a bluff on your brother-in-law’s part. A very sick bluff, but a bluff nonetheless.”
Paulson grimaced. “Jesus fucking Christ.” He paused and blew out a slow breath that sagged his chest. “I want to pay for all the costs of a new funeral for that baby,” he said. “I insist on it. It’s the least the parents deserve.”
Blankenship grimaced. “No need for that,” he said, feeling a pang of grief cut hard through his heart even though he hadn’t known the baby personally. “The child died in a car crash with her parents last week. Barely a week old. The poor little thing.”
Paulson blanched. “Dear God.”
“Yeah,” Blankenship said. “I know. Dear God.”
Just then, a nurse called for Paulson. “Sir,” she said, “you can come see your baby now if you’d like. We have him stabilized enough now for contact.”
Paulson shook both Blankenship and Krugman’s hands before he left, his grip considerably stronger than it had felt just a few short hours earlier back in the man’s sumptuous drawing room. When Paulson had gone, Blankenship turned to Krugman and lifted his eyebrows on his forehead. “So, sir,” he said. ‘What’s next for us? Where do we go from here?”
Krugman stretched his neck, looking absolutely exhausted from the intense exertions of the day. And why not? The Director had killed two people today, after all. A pretty tough concept to wrap your brain around even considering how bad those particular dead people had been. “Now, Agent Blankenship,’ Krugman said, blowing out a slow breath of his own, “you get exactly what’s been coming to you.”
Blankenship tensed his shoulders and felt his stomach dropped all the way down to his toes. The insubordination coming back to bite him in the ass, just as he’d feared it would ever since he’d had the temerity to go against the Director’s very specific orders earlier in the day. Though he’d hoped it would never materialize, here it was, right here, right now and staring him right in the face, practically mocking him for his stupidity.
Blankenship swallowed hard. “Yes, sir,” he said, slumping his shoulders in defeat. “I understand completely.”
Krugman wrinkled his already wrinkled face even more, looking confused. “Hell, there’s no need for you to look so goddamn glum about it, Bruce.” He reached out a hand and clasped it firmly onto Blankenship’s left shoulder. “What I mean by that is now you finally get to join Agent Wexler on the Jack Yuntz case. That is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Blankenship’s heart skipped several beats in a row inside his chest. He was almost unable to believe his luck. In the space of about ten seconds he’d gone from being the ugly girl at the dance that nobody wanted to be seen with to the queen of the entire prom.
Gathering himself, he breathed out a grateful sigh of relief and set his lips in a tight line, readying himself mentally for the upcoming showdown with the bloodthirsty youthful lunatic who’d caused the suicide of his partner and the deaths of scores of other innocent people along the way over the course of his brief-but-all-too-deadly career as a killer.
Jack Yuntz.
Blankenship gritted his teeth in anticipation. It was payback time now, and he had plenty for which to pay Jack Yuntz back, too. Time for him to settle the score for Dana and all those other innocent people who’d died by the youthful murderer’s ruthless hand. He only prayed that he could remain professional when the time came to dish out the retribution, and not transform into some wild-eyed vigilante with no thought at all for either his family or his career. “Yes, sir,” Blankenship said, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy to stay professional when he finally met up with Jack Yuntz but also knowing that he’d need to try. “It sure as hell is what I want. Exactly what I want, as a matter of fact.”
Krugman nodded. “Good. So get the hell out of here and go rest up. Go hug your wife and kids. Give them a hug for me, too, while you’re at it. Because starting bright and early tomorrow morning, you’re back on the job. That OK with you?’
Blankenship nodded back. “More than OK with me, sir.” He paused and frowned. “Hell, sir, I feel like we should give each other a hug right now or something. Are you feeling that way too?”
Krugman closed his eyes briefly and breathed out a frustrated sigh. “Just get the fuck out of here, Blankenship,” he said, pinching his nostrils with his eyes still closed and shaking his head in exasperation. “Just get the fuck out here before I change my mind about all this and put you on traffic detail outside the field office for the next six months.”
Blankenship snapped his heels together smartly and gave the Director a stiff salute. “Yes, sir,” he said. Pivoting on his heel, he began to walk away. “Agent Blankenship now getting the fuck out of here before you change your mind about all this and put him on traffic detail outside the field office for the next six months.”
Krugman stopped Blankenship before he could get too far away. “Agent Blankenship?” he said.
Blankenship turned around to face him. “Yes, sir?”
The Director held his stare, all business now again. “Don’t ever disobey a direct order from me again, do you understand? Do it again and be prepared to hand over your ID and gun. Are we clear on that?”
Blankenship nodded and dropped his frivolous tone at once. He felt infinitely sorry that he’d been stupid enough to push his luck with his boss. He should have known better. Despite his warm and caring nature, the Director wasn’t a man to be trifled with. Not if you wanted to keep your job, at least, which Blankenship most certainly did. That mortgage payment at the end of the month was coming up fast and furious, after all, and it wasn’t going to pay itself. “Yes, sir,” Blankenship said, averting his gaze. “We’re crystal clear on that.”
What happened next caught Blankenship completely by surprise. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t have been any more shocked if the Director had just torn off all his clothes right there in the hospital to display a pink tutu hidden underneath in an unsubtle homage to the late, great, cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover.
Krugman burst out into a loud peal of laughter.
“You should have seen the look on your face just now,” Krugman said, barely managing to choke out the words around the waves laughter coming from deep within his chest. “Now come over here and give me that hug you were just talking about, you oversized son of a bitch.”
PART IX
“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?” – John Lennon
CHAPTER 46
December 15th
Jack laid low for almost two solid months after having escaped relatively unscathed from the harrowing debacle over at the Strongsville McDonald’s, until right before Christmastime.
To say the least, he felt thankful beyond words that he wouldn’t be spending the holidays in a cold jail cell somewhere while he waited for his upcoming murder trials for having butchered nearly fifty innocent people in cold blood with his trusty machinegun over the course of the past several months.
Merry Christmas, indeed.
Flipping on the television set in his rented room down in Columbus – the Ohio state capital located a three-hour drive away from Cleveland – Jack sat down on the queen-sized bed and watched the breathless news coverage of the recent school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that had captured the entire world’s attention. The previous day, a mentally unstable teen named Adam Lanza had burst into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and had proceeded to mow down twenty schoolchildren and the six courageous teachers who’d been trying to protect them. Predictably, the media were linkin
g the Sandy Hook shooting to Jack’s own crimes, causing Jack to roll his eyes in exasperation. He and Adam Lanza were nothing alike, for Christ’s sake. Jack had used a fucking paintball rifle at St Anthony’s. He wasn’t a monster, after all. What was so goddamn hard about seeing the difference in that?
A lot, apparently.
“If you ask me, we need to ban all assault weapons in this country,” a perfectly coiffed female was saying to the other members of a roundtable panel on NBC. “How many more Jack Yuntzes and Adam Lanzas do we need to suffer through before we finally smarten up?”
The portly man seated to the woman’s left took umbrage at that. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Michelle,” he snapped, hijacking the conversation with his gruff voice and even gruffer demeanor. Looking remarkably sloppy for television in a wrinkled white dress shirt that had some sort of food stain on front and sweating heavily from the bright overhead lights, he’d already loosened the ugly paisley tie strapped around his tree-trunk throat. “When are you going to smarten up? Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Do you want to ban all forks and spoons too because we’re the fattest country in the entire world?”
To her great credit, the woman named Michelle passed on taking a mighty swing at the softball the oversized man had just served up. Displaying an admirable amount of restraint considering her fellow panelist’s impressive girth and aggressive attitude, she simply said, “No, Michael, I don’t want to ban forks and spoons because we’re the fattest country in the world. I do, however, want to ban assault weapons because they’re killing innocent children.”
“What about the Second Amendment?” the man shot back, shifting hard in his seat and getting even more riled up now. His pockmarked face turned a terrifying shade of red that made Jack wonder for a moment if he might burst a blood vessel in his brain right there on the spot and keel over dead on the table. If nothing else, certainly would’ve made for compelling television. “What about our Constitutional right to bear arms?”
The woman screwed up her own pretty face, not cowed in the least little bit by the man’s overbearing nature. Jack lifted his eyebrows on his forehead, duly impressed. Looked to him as though the chick had quite a bit of moxie despite her remarkably diminutive stature. He liked her already. “If you want to cite documents, Michael,” the woman said coolly, “what about the Declaration of Independence? You know, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – with an emphasis on life? Or are you just going to twist things around to meet your own selfish purposes? The Second Amendment was written when the government didn’t have aircraft carriers, smart bombs and nuclear weapons. How do you plan on fighting a tyrannical government with the assault weapons you’re proposing we continue to allow killing children?”
Blissfully, the moderator cut in at that point. Jack nodded his head in approval. Couldn’t have happened soon enough for his taste. He’d already grown weary of this stupid exchange that wouldn’t solve a single aspect of the gun-control debate. “I’m very sorry, Michelle and Michael,” the woman in charge said, glancing up at someone off-screen and pressing a finger to the tiny transmitter tucked into her right ear, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to interrupt you there. The President is just about to address the nation.”
Jack sat up straighter on the bed and watched with interest as the roundtable discussion gave way to Barack Obama. Dressed in a dark black suit that had a tiny American flag pin tucked into the left lapel, Obama made his way slowly across the television screen to the front of a candlelight vigil for the Sandy Hook victims out in Connecticut.
Clearing his throat quietly, Obama gave a short speech praising the teachers who’d lost their lives the previous day while they’d been trying to protect the murdered students. Then he read out loud the names of each of the deceased children in a somber voice, pausing briefly between each name. “Charlotte. Daniel. Olivia. Josephine. Ana. Dylan. Madeleine. Catherine. Chase. Jesse. James. Grace. Emilie. Jack. Noah. Caroline. Jessica. Benjamin. Avielle. Allison.”
Obama paused again for a long moment then before continuing, letting the enormous gravity of the situation sink in. “God has called them all home,” he said with a slight hitch in his voice. “For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory. May God bless and keep those we’ve lost in His heavenly place. May He grace those we still have with His holy comfort. And may he bless and watch over this community, and the United States of America.”
Jack flipped off the television as polite applause sounded from the vigil-goers, angry that the media were still using his and Adam Lanza’s names together in the same sentence. Lanza was an amateur, for Christ’s sake. A coward. Someone who’d turned one of his own guns on himself at the conclusion of the bloody events that had taken place at Sandy Hook, killing himself in much the same cowardly manner that Dana Whitestone had killed herself several months earlier. In Jack’s book, that made them both amateurs and losers.
Jack, however, was a winner. Always had been and always would be. Not to mention a professional. And now it was time for him to remind the rest of the world of that indisputable fact.
Digging his iPhone out of his pocket while he continued to fight back the hot surge of annoyance in his chest brought about by what passed for journalism these days, he caught an Internet connection at the motel and navigated the Web browser over to FriendFinder, a site that matched up people with similar interests for online chats. Jack smiled despite the overwhelming irritation still burning in his veins as he checked his contacts list and saw that lawdog71 was online again. Excellent. Using his own username of bullets4justice, he tapped out a quick greeting to his computer mate, a man with whom he’d spent the last two months building a friendship:
bullets4justice: hey, man, what’s up? what’s going on tonight? can you talk right now?
The response came a moment later.
lawdog71: Yeah, I can talk. Still at work right now, but I’ve got a few minutes to spare. Anyway, what’s going on?
Jack’s skin tingled. A lot was going on, actually. Maybe only in his brain right now, but that would change soon enough if all went well for him with the conversation from here.
bullets4justice: not much. just bored. anyway, i’m coming into cleveland tonight. wanted to know if you could get together with me for a drink later on.
A full twenty seconds passed before the response came, causing Jack to worry briefly that he’d overstepped his mark. He gritted his teeth at his own unforgivable stupidity while he waited. He was an idiot, a fool. He’d jumped the gun, so to speak, and now he’d lost his chance to continue executing his bloody script – maybe even forever.
Blissfully, though, just when he’d begun to think that all had been lost and he’d never get another chance like this again, another high-pitched chime sounded on his iPhone, signaling lawdog71’s response. Jack breathed out a deep sigh of relief that deflated his chest completely at the extremely beautiful and highly welcome sound. More pleasing to his ears right now than Johnny Cash belting out an unplugged rendition of Ring of Fire.
lawdog71: I’m not sure what time I’ll be done with work tonight, but to tell you the truth, a drink sounds pretty good to me. I’ve been up to my ears in paperwork lately. Anyway, what time will you be in town?
Jack checked his watch and tried his best to control his excited breathing. Wasn’t easy. The air in the motel room might as well have been molasses right now for all the good it was doing him. Still, where lay the great surprise in that? He had the old man squarely in his sights now. It should be hard to breathe. And if nothing else, he knew that he’d need to navigate the conversation very carefully from this point forward if he wanted to avoid fucking things up beyond all repair, which he most certainly did.
Nearly seven p.m. now. If he left in the next ten minutes or so, he could probably make it into Cleveland by ten. Giving himself half an hour to prepare from there and barring any sort of unforeseen delay, the next sce
ne outlined in his exquisite and recently rewritten script could get underway before the clock had even struck eleven. Jack hadn’t been lying to his conversation partner at the beginning of this discussion, after all. He was bored. Deathly bored, as a matter of fact. Had been for the past sixty days now. Thankfully, though, he knew precisely how to take care of that.
Turning his attention back to the smartphone in his hands, he pecked out his response:
bullets4justice: i’ll be in town around ten-thirty or so. would that work for you?
Lawdog71 paused again before answering. Even longer this time. The wait was excruciating.
lawdog71: Actually, that’s a little late for my blood, partner. How long will you be in town for, though? Maybe we could do it tomorrow night, if you’re not busy then.
Jack shook his head in aggravation. Tomorrow night simply wouldn’t work for him. He wanted to get back to work now. To begin executing the rest of the script tonight. He’d waited for far too long already as it was and if he had to wait another single day, he felt sure that he’d lose his mind from the boredom. He told his conversation mate as much.
bullets4justice: can’t do it tomorrow night, man, just tonight. c’mon. what do you say? one quick drink won’t kill you.
A major lie, of course, but one Jack couldn’t resist telling.
Bill Krugman’s next response seemed to take an eternity to appear, leading Jack to believe once again that he’d fucked up his chance. When Krugman’s response finally came, though, Jack’s pulse crashed hard in his wrists: