by MB Mooney
Shade brought her up to the porch and through the open door. His eyes adjusted to the shadows inside. The house was vacant of any furniture or decoration and smelled of must, the floors covered in thick dust.
“Was there any trouble?” Mr. Smith asked, standing in a room to the left with a large hearth on the outside wall.
“No,” Shade said. “She was alone when she came home.”
“Set her down here,” Mr. Smith said, waving to the floor just in front of the hearth. Setting the woman down, he took an opportunity to place another small bug on Mr. Smith’s suit jacket as he stood again.
He didn’t know this woman or why Mr. Smith wanted her. It had something to do with the conversation with those people in Rome, that he knew. He was being left out of the loop more and more, and he didn’t like it. He understood his curiosity to be dangerous, but ignorance could be just as deadly.
The woman’s eyes bulged further when she saw Mr. Smith standing over her.
“Hello, Assandra,” Mr. Smith said. He knelt down and pulled the gag from her mouth. She gasped and coughed.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “You will not get away with this …”
Mr. Smith grinned at her. “Perhaps I do not wish to. What I desire, however, is to know the location of the boy.”
Her eyes narrowed quickly, and her lips pursed. “What are you talking about?”
Shade was impressed with her defiance despite her fear.
“You know of whom I speak,” Mr. Smith said. “And you can simply tell me, saving yourself an incredible amount of pain, or we can do this the hard way. You know you are too weak to stop me.”
Assandra set her jaw. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said.
Mr. Smith sighed. “Very well,” he said. He rose. “Mr. Shade, please wait for me in the car.”
Shade bristled at being dismissed, but he had expected it.
“Oh, and please take this for me,” Mr. Smith said, removing his jacket and handing it to Shade. “I will not be needing it.”
He hesitated before taking the jacket. Laying the jacked over his forearm, Shade turned and walked out of the house.
“And close the door behind you,” Mr. Smith said. “Let’s not let in a draft.”
Closing the door, Shade set his jaw as he walked outside and stood near the car, leaning against the fender. He took his bug from the jacket and placed it in his pocket.
He heard the screams from within, shrieks of pain and fear from the woman. Shade’s face remained blank. Ten minutes later, Mr. Smith emerged from the house alone. The door shut with a soft sound. He descended the stairs and reached for his jacket.
“We are off to Atlanta, Mr. Shade,” he said, wearing his jacket again. “Warmer climates, eh?” Mr. Smith rounded the car to the passenger side.
“The woman?”
Mr. Smith shook his head. “She put up quite the fight. But unfortunately, she was not strong enough, and she gave me the information I desired. But she did not survive the questioning. She is now at peace, and we will leave her here.”
Shade nodded and sat in the driver’s seat. He drove them back to the airport where they would soon be on a plane to Atlanta.
-----
Richard didn’t know how long the phone rang before he finally woke up and answered it. “Hello?” he mumbled.
“Richard?” It was a low voice on the other end, noises of talking and music behind it. “Hey, sorry to wake you.”
Richard sat up in the bed. “Hey, Buddy. Is he down there, still?”
A sigh released into the phone. “Yeah, you’d better come down and get him.”
Richard rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Okay. Be there in a few. Watch him until I get there.”
“I will.”
Richard ended the call on his phone and slowly got dressed, dirty jeans and T-shirt with his heavy coat to protect him from the cold. He grabbed the keys to his car from the kitchen table on his way out of the apartment. The old Pontiac grumbled at him, and he let it warm for a few minutes after he started it, appeasing the old car.
A short time later, he pulled into the parking lot of the nearby Buddy’s, a local bar, positioning the car right outside the door in a handicapped spot. He wouldn’t be long. He stepped out of the car and made his way in.
Richard saw him immediately, sitting at the same place he always did on a stool at the bar. He was a big man, an inch or two shorter than Richard but quite a few pounds heavier. There were others there at the bar, and Richard excused himself as he made his way. Buddy tipped his head from behind the bar. “Hey, Richard.”
Nodding back in return, Richard silently approached the large man. Richard tapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Dad. Let’s go.”
Eddie Albright looked up from his beer, still slouching at the bar, and peered at his son. Richard noticed the hands, the big hands motioning towards him, hands with fingernails containing a chronic amount of dirt and grime that could never be washed away, even with the strongest of soaps, grease that came from the cars his father worked on every day, changing oil, replacing parts at a local garage, the only one that would tolerate his drinking.
“Hey, Richie. Have a beer with me.” His speech was slurred, his eyes tired of opening.
“C’mon, Dad. It’s time to go.”
“But I’m not done, yet.” Eddie swung his head around and found his target. “Buddy! Get me another round!”
Buddy shook his head at Richard’s father, grinning slightly at him. “You’ve had enough, Eddie. Why don’t you just go on home with Richard, here.”
But tonight Eddie was very drunk, more than usual, and not willing to be coaxed into something he did not want to do. Richard hadn’t seen him this bad in a long time. He pressed forward a little, able to ignore the embarrassment from years of practice, even though the bar rustled with customers, at this late hour, and country music moaned over the sound system.
Richard hated country music.
“Come on, Dad,” he said again, putting his hands on his father’s shoulders, trying to coax him into following. Eddie shrugged his son off of him.
“Go away if you're not gonna drink with me.”
The anger rose in him quickly, mad at the fact that he had to be here, that his father couldn’t seem to control himself and then wouldn’t cooperate with his son. Richard was tired, and he had to go to school in the morning. “Dad, I’m not screwing around, here. Let’s go, all right?”
Then a man on the opposite side of Eddie, sitting next to him on the bar, leaned into Richard’s view. “You know, your dad’s an asshole.” He was probably thirty years old, and his whole face was red from drinking and talking loudly.
Richard found himself reacting, not thinking. “Why don’t you shut your mouth?”
“Look, shithead, you'd better watch your mouth.” The man, almost as drunk as Eddie, stood up and began to move around his father towards Richard.
“Richard ...” a warning from Buddy.
Eddie stumbled to his feet. “Don’t talk to my son that way.”
The man looked up to Eddie, his face an accusing scowl. He put his finger in Eddie’s chest. “You’re drunk.”
Eddie’s shoulders rose and fell. “Well, it has to do something about your ugly ass wife. I can’t get that frigid bitch out of my mind after she did me last night.”
The man stewed for a split second, as if his mind had to assemble the words into an insult, and moved to hit Eddie, but his swing was low. Eddie raised a shoulder to absorb it and tried desperately to swing back, but his own attempt was very slow. A few hours ago, this man would’ve been a mass of cells on the floor, but Richard knew his father was in no condition to fight. The man dodged Eddie’s swing, and his father’s momentum placed his large body on the floor.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Richard picked up a random bottle of beer by the neck and placed it as firmly as he could squarely between the man’s eyes. The bottle shattered, beer splattering everywher
e, and Richard dropped it. The man lay sprawled out on the floor after falling backwards, grasping at his nose, bleeding from the right nostril. The bar became quiet all of a sudden, all eyes their way. “Aw, hell,” Richard heard Buddy say from behind him.
Richard turned to Buddy as he began to pick up his father. “Sorry,” he said.
“Just get him outta here,” Buddy answered.
Richard swore every time he had to go save his father from a drunken night at Buddy's that he would force Eddie Albright to get an apartment on the ground floor, but he never did. Most of the time Richard had to help him with his balance as they climbed the stairs. Tonight he literally drug his father, a six-foot-one, two-hundred and seventy-five pound man, up sixteen stairs, and yes, he did count them.
He leaned his father up against the wall as he opened the door to the apartment. Looking around for a moment, he caught a glimpse of the high school not half a mile away, maybe more. It was in plain sight here on the landing on the second floor, not quite as well from below, not at all from the parking lot or the narrow country road leading over to the apartment building.
With one of his father’s arms around Richard’s neck and one of Richard’s hands pulling hard on his father’s belt, Richard drug his father the rest of the way to his bed, laying him there face down, his mouth hanging slightly over the edge of the bed.
“Night, Dad,” Richard said, and he went to bed himself.
-----
The blue and black screen began to test her eyes, and Valerie rubbed them hesitantly, not wanting to exacerbate the signs of strain. She found Russell Person’s file and printed it out. She shook her head. He must have lied at every interview along the way to bury a rap sheet like that one. There must have been a dozen arrests, maybe more, but no convictions.
Andrea Gorman and her aliases showed up eighteen minutes later, and she tallied twice the arrests and three convictions for prostitution.
The FBI was involved how, and that concerned her. What did they know? Why was she being marginalized so quickly?
Sitting there at the computer, she ran over the sheets. Person was a petty criminal, little stuff when he was younger, the charges not more than burglary and theft. And Gorman’s, well, she obviously learned early on that you could trade your body to get anything, especially money. Nothing special on hers either, except, wait ….
One of the dates of arrest matched on both sheets. She pulled up the arrest report and found three more names.
David Farley.
Andrew Franklin.
Samuel Doss.
None of those names meant anything to her, but she started looking at those names as well. Under Samuel Doss, no arrests or convictions were found, but there was some evidence still logged from ten years ago on a specific case. A murder case. The name of the victim showed on the evidence file.
Kevin Stuart.
She went to records and had a very nice woman, although old and hard of hearing, help her to find the case file.
All five names appeared again as possible suspects. She took the file with her upstairs to her desk, reading it and mumbling to herself on the way. A certain detective’s name kept popping up throughout the file … Holy shit, she thought. Why is this the first she’s seeing Bill Young’s involvement? Why did he keep it from her? What the hell is he hiding?
In the elevator, she must have muttered to herself, for one of the coroners eyed her strangely.
“I’m sorry,” Valerie said.
“No, it’s all right,” said the coroner, a middle-aged black man with thick glasses and a high metabolism, for he seemed to be skin and bones. “I just thought I heard you say a name, but it must’ve just been running through my head.”
Valerie’s eyes flared at him. “What name?”
“David Farley,” he said, brushing it aside.
“What did you say?” She almost couldn’t speak.
“David Farley,” he spoke more clearly this time, meeting her gaze.
“Do you know him?”
“No,” he said, chuckling. “But I just got his identification off of his dental records. It took me all damn day.” He smiled. “Pardon my French.”
“No problem,” she said absently. “Are you telling me you just worked on David Farley?”
“Some guy burned to hell and back, cut up like a Christmas tree on New Year’s Day. Awful, really. Had to get dental records to identify him. He’s downstairs. The name is David Farley. Yep, that was the name. Do you know him?”
Valerie shook her head. “No. Just a name in a file.”
“Don’t know if it’s the same guy, but it’d be pretty freaky if it was.”
“Yeah,” Valerie agreed. “Freaky.” She spotted the file folder in his hand. “Are those the records?” she asked.
“Yep.”
She snatched them from him and compared the dental records with the arrest file.
A match. It was the same guy.
“Well I’ll be damned,” she said and looked at the coroner. “Pardon my French.”
-----
Because of his lack of sleep, Richard didn’t hear the girl at first, but he definitely heard his name the second time as he put the last touches on his painting after school. He had thought he was alone in the art room. Miss Dana, the Art teacher, let him hang out here after school to paint, especially on days he didn’t want to go home. And he didn’t want to go home today.
“Yes,” he answered quickly, surprised that his focus had tuned out her voice. He turned to see who had called him.
“Hi,” she said, pushing her glasses up into a more comfortable position on the bridge of her nose. Her straight, red hair caught his attention first, but her pale skin was also attractive, the slight freckles on her round cheeks. Her nice, warm smile eased him into a grin. She put out her hand. “We haven’t officially met. My name is Heather. Heather Williams.”
He switched his brush into his left hand, reaching across himself to shake her soft hand. “Hi,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“I have independent study sixth period, right after you do, but I guess that really doesn’t matter. I just wanted to meet you, you know. The great Richard Albright.” She seemed anxious and just a little giddy. On other girls it might have been annoying, but on Heather it was cute.
“Great? I’ve never thought myself as great.” He put the brush back into his right hand and touched up the corner, fixing a vague detail.
She huffed at him, putting her hands on her hips. “You win all the awards and everything. Miss Dana talks about you all the time.”
Richard nodded. “Is there some particular reason you’re making my head swell? Or do you just do this for fun?”
“No particular reason. We had just never met.”
“Well, what is it that you’ve done that I would have seen?”
She smiled, infectious and energetic. “That sculpture of the angel beside your painting out in the lobby.” She squinted at him. Her chest expanded. “I got second prize last year at state.”
“Really?” he asked, his mind still on his painting.
“You didn’t know?” Heather said.
“Well, I remember the sculpture, but I don't look at people’s names too often.” He pointed at his painting. “You ever ... paint any?”
“A little,” she said. Then her face soured. “But I’m not too good at it.”
“Why do you say that?”
Heather shrugged. “I’m just better with my hands.”
Richard fought back a chuckle. “I bet you are. You should show me some of your stuff sometime. I’d really like to see it.”
“I’d really like that, too,” Heather said.
-----
Marcus slammed the door and cursed loudly for the entire world to hear, shaking the house with his anger. He threw down his things. They had lost the game, but he didn’t play. The coach kept eyeing him accusingly as the other team ran up the score. Marcus cursed his coach for being a moron. He cursed his fellow pla
yers for being white and slow and so damned uncoordinated and clumsy. He cursed himself for getting in the fight. He cursed the school for suspending him.
And he cursed Richard Albright. He saw that loser watching him today, looking at him from across the hall as if he was some type of damn criminal. Marcus hated him. Ever since that day when that little shit got in his way, Marcus had hated him.
The more Marcus thought and cursed, the angrier he became, the more the rancor inside of him shuddered his muscles and his fists clenched. He barely heard his mother walking up behind him from the kitchen,
“What’s wrong, baby?” she asked.
Marcus spun on her. He swung his fist and hit her in the mouth. She fell back into the kitchen, gasping and clutching her mouth. “You whore!” Marcus said. “You whore! Why can’t you just shut your mouth?”
His mother was crying, and she sobbed through her words. “I- I was just asking …”
“I know what you were asking!” he screamed at her. She began to sit up, lifting herself by her hands. Marcus glared at her, his eyes full of hate and anger. He towered over her, stepping forward again. She felt so small to him, so weak. Marilyn cowered away from him, afraid. “Cry, cry, that’s all you ever do is cry. Can’t you be a mother like everyone else? Can’t you do anything without screwing it up?”
She was down on the floor, collapsed in a heap, weeping.
“I hate you,” he said to her as he went up the stairs towards his room. He closed the door behind him to be alone.
Why did she always make him do that to her?
Chapter 8
Valerie knocked on the door to Bill Young’s apartment.
There was no response.
She knocked a little louder.
Still no response.
Valerie commenced to bang on the door and ring the doorbell continuously. She called his cell earlier, left several messages, even texts, but he had not replied. After checking at the station, she decided to come and look for him here.