“Hi Allison.”
“Where you headed?”
“Oh, just out, to dinner.”
“I didn’t know you were staying here with mom.”
“Yeah, my landlord was a real asshole, so your mom was a saint and let me move in.”
Allison smiled, “Did you say dinner? Is it a date?”
“No,” Brenda answered too quickly.
“Well why don’t we head out together? I haven’t seen you in such a long time.”
“Allison?” a woman’s voice called from near the house.
“Hi mom!” Allison smiled and waved.
“What are you doing out this way?” Her mother walked slowly over towards them. She held a carefree smile, the even more oblivious than her daughter. Talbaine watched her move, with a bit of grace, but without any real regard for the world.
“I thought I’d visit. Turns out Brenda was just going out to dinner and I kind of invited myself out. I haven’t spent any time with her lately.” Brenda smiled at them both, but glanced around as if expecting to be tackled at any moment.
“Well then, off the two of you go!” Allison’s mother made shooing motions towards Allison’s car. Talbaine clicked the back seat forward and rolled into the trunk, tucking himself into a tight ball. He pulled the seat back to rights just in time, but didn’t allow it to lock into place. “If you have time, head back here and we can talk a bit.”
Allison opened the car door. “Okay mom. So where were you planning on eating?” She nearly faltered when she didn’t see Jonathon in the back seat, but shook her head a little. He said he knew what he was doing, and she trusted him. It gave her a shiver to think that her life was in his hands.
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Brenda replied in a small voice. Allison started up the car and backed out of the driveway, then exited the estate grounds altogether. She watched, distracted, while Jonathon slowly lowered the back seat down and crept out of the trunk. She hit the radio.
“Well I know a couple of places out by my apartment, if you don’t mind the drive. But I think we should stick closer to home. How about Italian?”
“I have a better idea,” Jonathon whispered in Brenda’s ear. The woman jumped in her seat, but his arm was already around her shoulders, pinning her to the seat. “We’re going to order Chinese and take it back to the hotel room.”
***
Jonathon watched for a tail the entire way. He had a hand clamped around Brenda’s mouth the entire time, and didn’t remove it to wipe her terrified tears away. When they arrived, he searched for the telltale signs of a surveillance operation. Finally satisfied, he leaned close in against Brenda’s ear again.
“I’m going to take the pressure off. If you scream, I won’t hesitate to kill you. If you run, same deal. I’ll take you down in broad daylight, then murder every single witness in cold blood. Nod your head if you understand.”
Brenda’s head nodded. He took his hand away and wiped it on his pants.
“Good, this will only be as difficult as you make it. Remember that. If you cooperate, smooth sailing and you get to walk away from this. Don’t cooperate and your children will have to visit you in the hospital and feed you through a straw.”
Allison came back with a hotel room key.
“Everything peachy in here?” she asked.
“I’m satisfied that we can make it inside,” Jonathon replied.
***
Allison let herself out once she’d let them in. She returned with Jonathon’s duffel bag of supplies, and handed it to him. Brenda complied with everything, watching in silence as Jonathon smoothed out the blue tarp, put the chair on top, then led her over to it. Her body was a limp noodle as he tied her to the chair.
“Brenda, my name is Jonathon and I’m not a patient man,” he said, slipping on a pair of latex gloves. “So I’m going to let Allison administer the punishments. She’ll probably go easy on you, but if I think you’re holding out too long, I’ll take over. Nod your head if you understand.”
Brenda nodded. Jonathon handed Allison a pair of latex gloves, which she slipped on and balled into fists.
“I believe Allison would like to express some of her frustration over the whole ordeal, before we begin.” Allison didn’t wait, but punched Brenda hard in the face, first a left, then a right. She punched her cousin in the stomach, then once more in the face.
“That felt really good.”
“It does. It always does when you get to punish the bad guys. First question: who are you involved with aside from Joren Kirkenwald?”
Brenda only cried harder. After a minute of hitching sobs, she said, “He’ll kill me, you don’t understand.”
Jonathon cocked an eyebrow at Allison, who grabbed Brenda’s hair and smashed her knee forward into her cousin’s nose. The chair rocked back, nearly spilling Brenda onto the floor. Blood gushed out of her nose, and bruises were already red marks on her face from the punches.
“You can’t possibly think I haven’t heard that before, Brenda. Tell us.”
“His name is Morgan.”
“Good. What does Morgan do for a living?”
“I think he’s a Shadow Runner. I don’t know. He told me if I ever double crossed him I’d regret it for the rest of my life.”
“They always say that. But then a better Shadow Runner comes along and kills them. Simple as that. So I’ll skip my next, most obvious question-“ But Allison cut him off.
“Why, you bitch? Why? My mother is giving you money, letting you live at my house!” She punched Brenda again, but hit her on the ear in her fury. The next punch connected just to the side of the eye.
Jonathon put a hand on her shoulder, as if to say she can’t talk while you’re hitting her.
“Brenda, where do you meet Morgan?” Jonathon asked.
“We always meet at an Irish Pub called O’Donnell’s.”
“I’ll take your car when it’s time,” he said. She nodded.
“I want to come too,” she said
“It’ll be dangerous.”
She’d say she knows, but she really doesn’t. Jonathon watched her eyes light up at the mention of danger. It was encouraging and sad at the same time. He turned to Brenda, away from the inescapable future.
“Where is all the evidence?”
“We have some copies in my room, in my closet. I put them inside a folder and into a dress that I never wear that’s covered with a plastic sleeve.”
“Morgan has the rest. Where?” he asked.
“He has a cybernetic recording system in his brain, a hard drive.” Jonathon’s shoulders sagged. Only one way to destroy the evidence: impromptu surgery. He didn’t want something like that to happen in front of Allison.
“What does he look like?” he asked Brenda. She told him.
***
A tall, rail thin man walked into the pub and surveyed the place. It wasn’t obvious that he was armed to the teeth, but Jonathon could pick out the slight shifting and bulging underneath his brown trench coat. There were other things about him, too, which stood out just enough to be noticeable to trained eyes, like the pale, waxy evenness of his skin tone. He also wore big combat boots and large, baggy pants, which made Jonathon wonder about complete cybernetic replacement of the legs. The place was dark and smoky, perfect for hiding what a man like Morgan wouldn’t want to show off to innocent bystanders.
Morgan chose a place that overlooked most of the pub and put his back to the wall. Jonathon let him sit there for five good minutes before he strolled up to the booth and sat down. The younger man twitched and watched him with the eyes of a cornered animal.
“I’m a friend of Brenda’s,” Talbaine said.
“I know who you are,” the Runner of shadows shot back at him. “You’re Goddard’s help. You blink the wrong way and I’ll erase you from balls to chest.”
Talbaine gave him a lopsided smile and leaned in a little. “I’ve got three men with guns on you right now, so just shut up and liste
n. I am perfectly willing to get what you’ve got in your head the hard way, but I think I like the way you work. So I’ll offer you choice: erase your hard drive of the evidence you’ve got and live, or make me take it.”
Morgan blinked and looked rapidly around the room. “You don’t-“
Talbaine used the opportunity given him: he whipped his hand out and struck him in the temple, then followed it with a backhand. The last punch came from the left, and left Morgan unconscious, slumped into the corner of the booth.
The waitress appeared and looked a question at Talbaine. He smiled back and dropped the two rolls of quarters from his fists, then fished out a hundred dollar bill and dropped it on the table.
“This fella is drunk, I’ll help him get outside.”
She smiled at him and picked up the bill. “Sure thing mister.”
Allison met him at the car, where he pulled four guns and six knives off Morgan’s body. He hoisted the unconscious body into the backseat and climbed in on top of him. He took a deep breath and wrapped his hands around Morgan’s neck.
After about a minute and a half the Runner’s eyes shot open and he tried to gasp for air, but Talbaine brought his head down on Morgan’s nose and broke it. Morgan clawed at Talbaine’s crushing grip, his face purpling, until finally he slackened. Reddening eyes rolled back into his head.
Allison stood stock still until Morgan’s body stopped thrashing.
“Let’s go back to the hotel room.”
***
They found Brenda still tied into an overturned chair. He brought up one of Morgan’s silenced pistols and shot her in the chest three times.
“Why’d you shoot her?” Allison asked, not looking at him. She hugged herself around the seatbelt, with her knees tight to her chest.
“I wanted it to be quick. Go in and check to see if your evidence is where it should be. If it’s not, tear apart the room. I’m going to take care of the bodies.”
“But she didn’t have to die. She has a child.”
“Your mother-in-law will do a fine job with the girl, better than Brenda would have. If you don’t find anything in the room, we’ll search the house tomorrow, along with her kid’s room. And tell your mother that Brenda met a man at the bar, and told you she’d get a cab home.”
Allison had nothing to say to that, so she got out of the car without looking at him and walked into the house like a robot.
***
Talbaine pulled the teeth out of the bodies, and extracted the hard drive with little effort. He burned the bodies in a heap of brush about three hundred yards into someone’s private property, then buried them. The teeth he buried by the side of the road about twenty miles away. By the time he returned the car to the hotel it was nearly three in the morning.
He woke three hours later and returned Allison’s car to her apartment, and walked to a nearby park to sleep. It was done, even though it would take another week or two before Allison would pronounce her verdict of not guilty on him.
A few days later he stopped telling lies and stepped off the bench. Claudette kept coming, he needed her, and Allison showed up some nights and stayed in his bed for hours. It hurt him to love her, but he did it anyway, passionately and often. She always protested at the necessity for her to go, she wanted to stay in his arms, belong there. It wasn’t possible though. His faked smiles always disappeared after she closed the door.
It didn’t take long to get through the rest of the farce, for Allison to say the magic words and rap the gavel to finalize everything.
“In looking at the evidence presented to me, I cannot in good conscience find you guilty. This court is adjourned.”
***
She walked into his arms that night, ignoring the troubled expression on his face. Claudette had been over just an hour after court adjourned, and his body throbbed painfully. These days, it always hurt.
Her eyes glittered, and he couldn’t lie to her.
“I love you,” she whispered, and bent to kiss him.
“I know,” he said, and accepted the kiss.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him, peering into his eyes.
“Do you have that recording we made? The agreement?” She nodded. “We should destroy it.”
“Okay.”
***
They drove to a secluded cabin with it, and a few changes of clothes, and burned it in a bonfire. That night he drove off in her car, and didn’t stop until twelve hours later. He accessed a computer, gassed up, and drove another twelve hours to a hospital in New Hampshire.
William Jennings lay on a hospital bed, perforated by tubes.
“Mr. Jennings,” he said. The old man’s eyes slowly eased open.
“Who- Jonathon? Is that Jonathon Talbaine?”
“Yeah,” he smiled and shut his eyes.
“Where have you been? It’s been twenty years, hasn’t it?”
“Yes. You said-“ he stopped. “You said not to come back until I could feel sorry for wasting somebody’s life. I never forgot that. So I’m back.”
He didn’t think about Allison’s body, or the look in her eyes that had gone from love to wonderment to realization. He didn’t think about her cousin Brenda’s bloody corpse, or that of the Runner Morgan. Instead, he took the hand of William Jennings and shed some of the only tears of his life.
Also by Brent Meske
Novels and Compilations
Seven and the Eggs of Cadbury (a sugar-coated tale)
From the Desk of Col. Garrett Ross
Breaking Benjamin (find it in ebook, coming soon!)
Super Nobody (coming soon)
Other Shorts
Exo
Superhero Stories Written in Ink
Patriots
About the Author
Brent Meske lives near Seoul, Korea with his wife and son. He’s published elsewhere, though not for money. He writes and reads constantly, and often teaches English. He does all his own book covers as well.
Note
Thanks for reading. You’re the reason I write.
If you liked this story, just hang on…there are ten more interconnected tales to go with it. One you can find reprinted in From the Desk of Col. Garrett Ross. The others are coming soon, to be wrapped up in a final compilation: Breaking Benjamin. No longer will I be forced to endure miniscule royalty checks in British Pounds that I can’t cash.
If you already have a receipt for Breaking Benjamin, please keep it and send it to
[email protected]. I’ll send you a free copy of From the Desk of Col. Garrett Ross. Be sure to remove any credit card info so I don’t have to resist the urge to steal your identity and bankrupt you. Cheers!
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