Edge Of Midnight. Shannon McKenna
his head, liquidating assets, transferring this, converting that.
“Your slush fund should cover it. And the big boys at Helix won’t have to worry their pretty little heads, right? We’ll keep it between us. He jerked his chin at Caitlin. “Want me to load her up?”
“Yes. I’m sick of looking at her. I’ll mix up a dose of heroin and fentanyl. Inject her right before you dump her. Don’t let her asphyxiate in the trunk of your car. It looks suspicious to the forensics techs.”
“Might take her a while to finish dying,” Gordon warned. “You want to risk her ending up in the emergency room?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Osterman adjusted the knobs. “She’ll have so much cerebral damage, she won’t be able to tell them her own name.”
Gordon whistled softly. “Now that’s cold.”
The silence behind him made him suspicious as he loaded the syringe. He turned, to see Gordon peeking under Caitlin’s shirt.
“Why do you do that?” he snapped. “It’s disgusting.”
“Why does a man do anything? Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can, Chris. Because he can.”
Osterman shuddered with distaste. “You are such an animal.”
“So throw me a chunk of meat.” He moved his hand down to caress her crotch, and snatched it away with a hiss of distaste. “Yuck. She’s wet herself. I’ll back the van up to the cargo door. You got any more body bags? I don’t want her leaking in my trunk.”
“I’m almost out. It’s really hard to get those in bulk,” he said.
“Yeah, ain’t life difficult? Is that one of your annoying passive aggressive ways of asking me to get some more of them for you?”
The door swung shut on their wrangling, leaving the vidcams to record the subject’s response to X-Cog NG-4. Wrists straining, heels drumming. Face locked in the rictus of an endless, silent scream.
Chapter 5
Crash. Bam. Kitchen cupboard doors bounced shut, and swung open again. Sean watched in horrified fascination as his older brother stormed around the dim kitchen of their father’s old house.
“I don’t know why you’re so pissed with me,” he said plaintively. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” He paused for a moment. “Yet.”
Davy made a snarling noise. There was a squeak, and he was staring at a detached drawer, its handle torn half off. Rubber bands, nails and other detritus rattled onto the kitchen floor. He flung it away.
“Hah,” he muttered. “If I weren’t so pissed, that would be funny.”
The sun was long since hidden behind Endicott Bluff. They hadn’t bothered to light up the kerosene lamps yet. In fact, considering Davy’s current mood, perhaps the kerosene lamps were best left unlit.
Shadows were swallowing the room. The west window was a light show, ranging from fire-edged pink to mauve to deep, cobalt blue. A star hung in it. OK, a planet—Venus, if he recalled Dad’s astronomy lectures correctly.
But Davy wasn’t enjoying the sunset. He assaulted the cupboard, and another handle came loose. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Goddamn flimsy rotten piece of shit.” He hurled it against the opposite wall.
Crash, the handle hit a picture. Sean winced as glass shattered.
This was unnerving. Davy usually maintained near-pathological control over his emotions, with the notable exception of his passion for Margot, his new wife. On a normal day, it took the emotional equivalent of a catastrophic earthquake to make him lose his temper.
Davy rummaged through the cupboards. “I know there’s a bottle of Scotch around here. Unless you drank it and didn’t replace it.”
“Nope. I wouldn’t drink that stuff if you held a gun to my head. Would you calm the fuck down? You’re making me tense.”
“I’m making you tense?” Davy spun and kicked the swinging door. Smash, and one side dangled forlornly from its bent, twisted hinge. “I’m the one who bailed your ass out, and I am making you tense?”
“You did not technically bail me out,” Sean pointed out. “I was not technically under arrest! I didn’t—”
“Nah, just hanging out in the interrogation room for fun, chatting on the technical aspects of car bomb construction with local officers of the law. All of whom think you’re a delinquent. Many of whom, like Roarke, have personal reasons to hate your guts—”
“That’s not my fault!” Sean protested.
“You’ve been using that excuse ever since you learned to talk!”
“Well, sometimes it’s valid. And you did not bail me out,” Sean said obstinately. “No money changed hands. And you guys are my alibi for last night, so there’s no reason to get all—”
“Oh, yeah? How lucky is that? How does it look, that you’re so fucking unstable that your brothers have to follow you around to make sure you don’t hurt yourself when you go out drinking and whoring?”
“Whoa! Harsh words! Those girls were not whores! They just like to party! They were very sweet, cute, ah—sexually emancipated—”
“Aw, shut up,” Davy snarled. “Imagine the scene if we hadn’t followed you. Can you tell us where you were the morning of August the eighteenth, Mr. McCloud? Uh, well, Officer, I was having a drunken clusterfuck with some chicks that I met at the Hole, but I don’t remember their names. They had nice butt cheeks. Gave great head.”
“I do, too, remember their names!” Sean pondered for a moment. “Their first names, anyhow,” he amended.
Davy snorted like a maddened stallion and kicked the wall.
“It’s not like you guys have to follow me around all the time,” Sean argued. “I’m usually a good, solid citizen. It’s only on August—”
“The eighteenth, yeah. Think about it, if you remember how that’s done. Is it in your best interests for anybody to remember that today is the anniversary of your twin brother’s truck bursting into flames?”
Sean sat without breathing. “Maybe not,” he conceded.
Davy slammed both fists onto the countertop. The jars rattled nervously on the shelves. “Where the fuck is my whiskey?”
Sean got up with a frustrated sigh. He spotted the bottle, in plain sight on top of the propane refrigerator, and handed it to his brother.
Davy yanked out the stopper and sloshed a shot into the glass. He drained it, and fell into the chair. It creaked under his weight.
A heavy silence fell between them. Davy was a master at heavy silences. Sean was not, as a rule. He liked movement, dynamism, noise. But he felt tired enough to stare blankly into the dark today.
He chose his words carefully when he finally broke the silence.
“You’ve already ripped my head off about my past stupid stunts,” he said. “I don’t feel like getting lectured for them all over again.”
“Oh, no.” Davy poured another shot. “No, you did plenty of brand new stupid stuff. The last time you got within a hundred yards of Liv Endicott, you landed in jail. Did that fun fact flash through your head?”
“If I’d stayed away, Liv and Madden would be fine particles in the stratosphere, and there would be a crater where the Trinket Trove Gift Emporium used to be.” Sean pointed out. “Be glad that didn’t happen.”
“That’s not the fucking point,” Davy muttered.
“Then what is the point? For Christ’s sake, enlighten me.”
“The