THREE TIMES A LADY (4 page)

Dana winced a little at that, but was pretty sure she was able to stop the emotion from reaching her face.  Still, life
saver
hadn’t been a very accurate description of her lately.  Quite the opposite, unfortunately.  Just ask poor Jeremy about that much.  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Dana repeated.

The woman nodded and leaned down to kiss her son on the top of his head.  Cupping his chin in her palm, she lifted his tiny face to hers and held his gaze.  ‘You be a good boy for this nice lady while I’m gone, OK, Bradley?  Mama will be right back and you know what happens if you misbehave.’ 

Bradley grinned mischievously at his mother.  ‘You’ll throw me out the window over the Grand Canyon, right?’

The woman nodded again.  ‘That’s absolutely right, buddy boy.  And that’s a heck of a long drop, so be good.’ 

Bradley giggled as his mother scooted out of their row and into the aisle before heading for the restrooms in the rear of the plane.  When she was out of sight, the little boy reestablished eye contact with Dana.  ‘You’re really pretty, you know that?  Almost as pretty as my mama.  I like your yellow hair a lot.  You sort of look like Goldilocks, only way shorter.  And you’ve got eyes just like mine.’

Dana sucked in a sharp breath at the unexpected pang of regret that stabbed her deep in the gut at the boy’s words.  From the look of things, though, she hadn’t done a very good job of locking away her desire to have children of her
own
one day.  No big surprise there, however.  But at nearly forty years old now that particular window seemed pretty much nailed shut for good.  ‘And you’re a very handsome little guy,’ Dana answered, clenching her stomach muscles tightly together in a futile effort to strangle the sad feelings in her belly.  ‘Come to think of it, you’re just about the handsomest little guy I’ve ever seen in my whole life.  A regular
GQ
model if ever there’s been one.’

Bradley chewed playfully on his lower lip and cranked up the cuteness factor at that.  Apparently, he wasn’t interested in playing fair here.  ‘That’s what my mama always tells me.’

‘Well, your mama’s absolutely right.  You’re the handsomest little guy in the whole wide world.’

Bradley widened his smile ear-to-ear, showing off world-class dimples in both cheeks.  If he could be any more adorable, Dana couldn’t possibly imagine how.  ‘Well, we can get married someday if you want,’ the little boy said.  ‘When I get bigger than I am right now.’

Dana lifted up her eyebrows on her forehead in surprise.  If she were to be perfectly honest about the whole thing, she’d have to admit that it was the first reasonable marriage proposal she’d ever received in her life.  Jeremy hadn’t quite had the chance to pop the question before he’d died… 

Dana chased away the gut-punch thought with a quick shake of her head, cursing her brain’s remarkable ability to undermine her mental stability at the worst possible time.  Everything that had happened with Jeremy was still just too fresh for her to handle right now, too painful; too hard to sort out.  Probably would be for a very long time to come – if not for ever.  ‘Hmmn,’ Dana said, clamping her stomach muscles together again and managing to keep her overwhelming grief at bay, at least for now.  ‘We can get married someday, huh?’

Bradley nodded.  ‘Yep.  And after we get married we can live in a castle on the beach and ride horses and pick flowers all day long and go swimming whenever we want to.’

Though she’d never been very big on physical contact with her fellow human beings – especially not with one she’d just
met
– Dana surprised herself by reaching out a hand and touching the boy’s smooth cheek.  He didn’t pull away.  ‘OK, handsome.  You’re on.  Consider it a date.’

From there, the conversation drifted amiably from Bradley telling Dana the difference between fledglings and
real
vampires (fledglings hadn’t yet tasted human blood) to the main reason he didn’t especially care for broccoli.  ‘Cuz it tastes gross,’ was his concise explanation.  ‘Sometimes I feed it to our dog underneath the table when mama’s not looking, though.  Don’t tell her, OK?’

Dana shook her head.  ‘Absolutely not.  Your secret is safe with me.’

Bradley held Dana’s gaze.  From the look in his eye, she could tell that he was deadly serious about this.  ‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

Dana nodded.  ‘And stick a needle in my eye.’

The little boy nodded back, apparently satisfied by Dana’s eye-sticking promise.  After all, only a complete lunatic would ever agree to such a horrible thing if they weren’t one hundred per cent reliable.  ‘Good,’ he said.  ‘And since we’ve got a secret now that makes us best friends forever, right?’

Dana reached out and touched the boy’s smooth cheek again.  This time the physical contact didn’t seem so difficult for her to initiate.  Didn’t seem so difficult, at all.  ‘You bet it does, handsome.’

From there, the five minutes alone with Bradley seemed to pass in the blink of an eye for Dana.  As he continued talking about everything under the sun (including his slow-but-steady progress on learning how to tie his own shoes), she wondered how long an entire lifetime with him would take.  Probably two eye-blinks; max.  If that long.  The little boy was in the middle of describing to her what he wanted for his next birthday (a DVD of
Aladdin
, an oversized beanbag and a new puppy dog would do for starters – just so long as the new dog also enjoyed the taste of broccoli) when his mother finally returned from her hasty trip to the bathroom.  ‘Thank you so, so much,’ the woman said, smiling in relief and wiping away an imaginary layer of sweat from her brow as she slid back into her row.  ‘A million times
thank you
.  I can’t tell you how much I needed that.  He talk your ear off while I was gone?’

Dana smiled – a
real
smile this time.  She felt happy to find that she still retained the ability.  She’d begun having her doubts lately.  ‘Yep,’ Dana said, ‘but in a good way.  That’s quite the little conversationalist you’ve got there.’

The woman shook her head in bemusement and reached down to tousle her son’s hair again.  Obviously, hair-tousling marked one of her favourite ways of showing affection to her son, and despite Dana’s very best efforts to cut off the ugly emotion at the pass, she couldn’t help feeling a stab of jealousy.  She wondered briefly if her blue eyes had turned green in their sockets yet.  If that had been the case, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.  ‘And such a hopeless flirt, too,’ the other woman said, still smiling down at her boy as only a mother could smile down at her son.  ‘Always has been and always will be.  Oh well, at least he always picks the pretty ones.  Say what you will about him, but the boy’s got great taste in women.’ 

Dana widened her smile as Bradley and his mother settled back down into their seats before falling into a lengthy discussion about what the Tooth Fairy did with all the teeth she took and why in the heck she needed so many of them in the first place.  Ten minutes of this passed before the flight attendants took their positions at various sections of the plane and ran everyone through the standard preflight instructions.  Exaggerated arm movements pantomimed the placing of oxygen masks over faces while a prerecorded message droned on in the background imploring everyone onboard to secure their own masks before attempting to assist their fellow passengers.  Ten minutes after
that
, the plane finally streaked down the runway and lifted off, shooting sharp little thrills of excitement through Dana’s stomach and eliciting a delighted whoop of glee from little Bradley in the seat in front of her. 

Dana sighed and looked out her window again, watching Los Angeles disappear behind them in a swirling fog of gray-and-white jet exhaust.  Like it or not – and she still wasn’t quite sure which one it was for her yet – it was time to get back home to Cleveland, back to her old life in Ohio after six solid months of traipsing around the country chasing deranged serial killers. 

Dana sighed again, even more deeply this time.  At least, what was still
left
of her old life.  Because not counting Oreo – her beloved black-and-white cat who she’d left under the care of her kindly old landlords at a price and security level she never would’ve been able to find at a kennel – there wasn’t much left of her old life back in Cleveland to speak of.

Wasn’t much left to speak of, at all. 

Chicago – 22 August 1977 – 2:31 p.m.

Nicholas was fourteen years old the first time he brought someone to the butcher’s shop without his mother’s permission.  Thankfully, he’d managed to survive this long without angering her to the point that made her want to erase each and every last trace of
him
too.  Quite the opposite, actually.  Turned out his mother had
other
plans for him.  Plans she’d been feeding him piecemeal over the years until he was old enough to fully understand. 

Plans that
excited
him.

Still, that didn’t mean that what Nicholas was doing here at the moment marked a
safe
proposition.  Far from it, as a matter of fact.  Three weeks earlier, he’d stolen a key to the butcher’s shop from her lingerie drawer when she hadn’t been home before making his own copy without her knowledge or consent.  He knew she’d kill him if she ever found out, of course, but it was a chance he was willing to take.  A chance he felt he
needed
to take.  He was getting older now, for Christ’s sake.  Becoming a man.  Even had a thin line of downy, first-growth hair on his upper lip to show for it.

So if Nicholas was becoming a man (wispy facial hair and all that in actuality you needed to look at upside down in the light to even
see
) he figured that he might as well start acting like one.  And there was no time like the present, right?  Besides, there was still one more step he needed to take, one more rite of passage he needed to navigate. 

The rite of passage that would finally make him a
real
man.

Still, burgeoning man or not, Nicholas’s heartbeat had slammed painfully against his bony ribcage the entire time he’d stood waiting in line for the key machine at the Walgreen’s drugstore, half-expecting to see his mother come storming into the place at any given moment to drag his sorry ass out of there by his ear.  Thankfully, though, his mother had never come, and Nicholas had given her sufficient time since then to confront him if she had any suspicions about what he was up to. 

When it finally became clear to him that his mother didn’t have the slightest idea of what he had planned – or at least wasn’t going to
say
anything to him about it – Nicholas supposed he was safe enough.  At least as safe as anyone could be around a woman like her.  Besides, it was
time
, wasn’t it?  Goddamn right, it was time.  Nicholas felt ready for this.  Had felt ready for this for a very long while now.  Ever since the day he’d watched his little brother brutally murdered in cold blood right in front of his shocked and disbelieving eyes. 

Nicholas chased away the unpleasant memory with a quick shake of his head as he glided his ten-speed into the parking lot a strip-mall three and a half miles away from his house, shuddering violently despite the oppressive heat of the day.  If his mother only had any idea that Timmy’s
murder
had been captured on videotape, as well, one that hadn’t been destroyed … 

He shuddered again, even harder this time.  The proposition was just too frightening to even think about.

Sweat poured in rivers down his back and plastered his too-thick polo shirt against his skin like a freshly applied Band Aid as Nicholas rode his bicycle through the strip-mall.  Wiping away a thick sheen of perspiration from his forehead with the back of his right hand, he flung away the excess moisture to the ground with a quick flick of his right wrist, cursing the oppressive summer weather.  To put it mildly, the summer of 1977 was an extremely
hot
one in Chicago, hot enough to kill all the old people around the city who either couldn’t afford air conditioning in their high-rise apartment buildings or just didn’t know how to go about asking for it in the right way.  The heat that permeated The Windy City that summer between the hours of two and four p.m. was the kind of heat that made people very angry with one another for no particular reason at all.  The kind of heat that made them want to
hurt
each other. 
Badly.
  Years later, Nicholas would learn that it was the same blazing summer the ‘Son of Sam’ had chosen to terrorise New York City eight hundred miles to the east, selecting so many long-haired brunette victims that young women sporting dark tresses all around the Big Apple had eventually begun dying their hair blonde and demanding severe pageboys from their stylists in a terrified – and futile – attempt to avoid David Berkowitz’s unwanted advances.  Despite all the elaborate precautions that had been taken, however, the Son of Sam would shoot and kill six people with his .44-calibre hand-cannon and wound seven more before his reign of terror finally came to an abrupt end when he’d received a parking ticket on the night of one of his many horrific crimes.

Nicholas shook his head in disgust at the pure
amateurish
nature of the pudgy-faced killer’s mistake as he passed by a bakery emanating smells delicious enough to make his stomach grumble, reminding him that he hadn’t yet eaten that day.  Honest to Christ, though, a fucking
parking ticket
?  How moronic could one person be?  And the fact that David Berkowitz would later blame his violent attacks on orders from a neighbour’s barking dog would one day make Nicholas laugh.  Some people blamed barking dogs for the adults they grew up to become.  Not Nicholas, though.  Not even close. 
He
’d blame his mother.  And why in the hell
shouldn’t
he?  It was a much more natural way of processing the events of your life when you looked at things with an honest eye.  And wasn’t that what it was all about when everything had been said and done?  Looking at things honestly?