The Count of Carolina, page 22
part #2 of A Clean Up Crew Series
Cleea grabbed Nicole’s arm and bent her down far enough to plant a loud kiss on her cheek. “By-n-by,” she echoed.
Nicole left the office without looking back and climbed into the pickup, Dan now at the wheel.
“Where to?” he asked.
“The Custers are flying out of Charleston, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right!” Dan said. “Nick and Jessica!”
“Those are the worst aliases I’ve ever heard,” J.J. said.
Dan laughed. “I thought so too. Maybe that can be your role in CUC. You can come up with false identities that don’t suck.”
Without taking her eyes off the road ahead as Dan pulled out of the Z’s parking lot, Nicole smiled. Yes, she thought, that or some other role.
21
Full Kerouac
The following day, Nicole and J.J. were driving through Kentucky, almost to the Indiana border. At the last minute, Cole had decided that she needed time to talk to her daughter, and Nick Custer had flown to Denver by himself. Dan figured she’d need to debrief J.J., and after all they’d been through over the past week, he assumed Cole would benefit from the slower pace. She’d leave the new rental car in South Bend and fly back to Colorado from there.
It was a beautiful day. They’d stopped as the previous night had snuck up on them, in a much newer-looking motel than the Z, somewhere in central Tennessee, and after the first real rest either of them had since leaving Denver, they’d hit the road early.
Now it was early afternoon. Nicole had used the previous hours of driving for small talk, mainly. This was both to help J.J. decompress from the experience she’d been through, and to give her time to think through the real reason she wanted to drive her daughter back to school.
With a nervous sigh, Cole said, “We need to talk about what happened.”
“Yeah. Fucked up, huh?”
Nicole burst out laughing. “Fucked up indeed, Jennifer June.”
“So all these years I’ve been walking around with your name and I never even knew it.”
“Your grandma’s too. She was Jennifer Lipton before she married Conrad.”
“Nice,” J.J. said.
“But there’s more that needs to be said than just ‘fucked up.’ J.J., you killed a man.”
The statement surprised the young woman a little. “You too,” she said, a little defensively.
“I’ve killed many men, J.J. But that’s not the point. When your father killed to protect me in Bucharest, it changed him. In some ways, it was for the better, but from the moment he pulled that trigger, his innocence, which he probably thought he’d parted with long ago, was finally and fully lost. Now the same is true for you.”
“It… it felt good, Mom.”
Nicole nodded. “I know. But if it were to ever happen again, it might not feel good.”
J.J. sensed where her mother was going. “Well, I don’t anticipate having to clean up Notre Dame…” she began. Nicole held her breath as she waited for her to finish. “… but I’m not going to rule out it ‘ever happening again.’”
“So you think this is something you could do… for real?”
J.J. looked out the side window at the passing countryside and didn’t respond for several minutes. Nicole waited for her to speak, anticipating that she wasn’t going to be completely comfortable with whatever answer she gave. Finally, the girl turned toward her mother and said, “I know I could. I just don’t know if I want to.”
Nicole was surprised to find that this third alternative to “yes” or “no” was the only answer with which she could be comfortable. She wasn’t ruling out further work with Cleanup Crew, but she wasn’t chomping at the bit to kill again either.
“Then I need you to know something. I’ve observed you carefully over these past days, and I’ve seen in you just about every characteristic that makes me not only able to do this, but to be the best there is at it.”
“Brag much?” J.J. laughed.
Nicole smiled and said, “It ain’t bragging if it’s true, Little Bug.”
“That’s the second time you’ve called me that.”
“Make a good alias,” Nicole joked.
“It would be a very bad alias,” J.J. said, “but still better than Nick and Jessica Custer. I mean, really!”
They laughed together for several minutes, then settled into a more comfortable period of quiet.
It was a quiet Nicole shattered about fifteen minutes later, as they passed a sign that said “Welcome to Indiana, The Crossroads of America.”
“I had sex with men for six years without ever having an orgasm.”
The instant she said it, Nicole felt a rush of mixed emotions that she hadn’t anticipated. Hell, she hadn’t anticipated saying those words. But there was one final secret that no one, not Dan, not even Darlene knew. So, saying the words brought on the leading edge of a stormfront called “relief.” It was good to say it out loud. But the first person she’d said it to was her twenty-year-old daughter. And that triggered feelings of guilt and uncertainty. Still…
“I guess that’s not that weird,” J.J. said. “You weren’t making love with those men. They were sexually abusing you. It couldn’t have felt good.”
“Pretty insightful for a girl about whom I have video testimony from a medical doctor that states she is still a virgin.”
“Barely. If your Uncle Clyde hadn’t arrived when he did, that would no longer be true.”
“But it is, and if this topic is too intense, I’ll stop.”
J.J. immediately sensed it was vital that her mother go on. “Don’t stop,” she said simply.
“I made sure, even after it really didn’t hurt anymore, to never let the sex feel good. I made it hurt. In here.” She tapped the side of her head.
“I’m with you so far,” J.J. said.
Nicole hesitated. “Eventually, I had one.”
J.J. smiled. “Does this story turn heartwarming, as you tell me that the first time you and Daddy made love, you had an orgasm?”
Nicole’s lips thinned. “Well, yes. That did happen. But it was not my first.”
That surprised J.J. a little, as she’d never heard her mother talk about relationships prior to meeting her dad. “Oh?” she asked, leaving the door open for her mom to continue.
Nicole stared straight ahead at the highway, but J.J. thought she saw her give a quick nod. As if she’d just made her mind up about something.
“No. The first time I came was when I cut off Clark Brockway’s cock.”
That was definitely not how J.J. had anticipated the story would go, but she didn’t comment, and Nicole continued.
“I had no idea what happened to me. Only that it felt better than any feeling I’d ever had. I could tell it had something to do with sex, because that’s primarily where the feeling happened, although my whole body tingled from it. It wasn’t until it happened again with the next one, and then with every one after that… it wasn’t until then that I figured it out. Killing them turned me on in a way that them grunting on top of me, or grunting while they bounced me on top of them never could.”
J.J. tied to act nonchalant, but her eyebrows had risen to full staff and the look of shock was unmistakable.
“I’ve offended you,” she said to her daughter.
“No!” J.J. said quickly. “Surprised, definitely. But not offended.” She paused, then said, “I can understand it.”
“You can?”
“Yeah, Mom. I mean, I’ve never had sex, but I’ve had plenty of orgasms. You can give them to yourself, you know.”
Cole had to smile despite the emotional minefield through which they were walking. “Of course,” was her reply. Then, remembering a parenting book she’d read years before, she added, “That’s perfectly natural, honey.”
“Thanks, Mom,” she said sarcastically. “Years of masturbation guilt has just been washed away. But the point is that you’d been tortured for six years, and now it was going to be over. Not many things could have felt better than knowing that. I can see how your mind and body might decide to reward you for what you were doing.”
She completely understands, Nicole thought, stunned and epically pleased at the revelation.
“There’s one more thing,” she said, emboldened by J.J.’s comprehension and compassion.
“Okay, I’m ready,” J.J. said, knowing she was probably lying as she said it.
“It still happens.”
“Huh?”
“I still come whenever I kill somebody. It’s happened enough times that I anticipate it now, and since your dad’s gotten involved, I’ve developed ways of not letting him know.”
J.J. let this settle in. “Okay,” she said hesitantly. “Does that mean I watched you have an orgasm yesterday? Because that part’s gross.”
Cole laughed. “No. It didn’t happen with Uncle Clyde. Maybe that’s because I didn’t actually watch him die. He was there, things got loud, then he wasn’t there and a tree fell over. Not the same.”
“I get that,” J.J. said. “I didn’t have a climax, but when I put those bullets in Dr. Lewis’s chest, it felt almost as good as if I had.”
Notre Dame is in St. Joseph County, one of the seven that make up the northern border of Indiana, so they still had several hours of driving ahead of them, but Nicole now felt the ride would be fun. There was nothing left hidden. Her daughter, she was convinced, was like her in the most fundamental, and what would seem to some, the most blood-curdling ways.
So they could laugh and sing along to the radio, and enjoy the company of a person who truly understood. For J.J., who hadn’t been completely comfortable with just how comfortable killing someone had felt, now knew that Nicole must have felt the very same thing once. And that made it okay.
Nicole could focus on the road and on the final nagging piece of the tapestry she’d been sewing together since she was sixteen. Because Conrad was still out there, licking his wounds and no doubt plotting his revenge.
It was her intention that he never got to enjoy that revenge.
Police Chief Gil Gleason sat alone at his desk, a single bulb burning in the green banker’s lamp. The light fell upon the photograph of a young woman.
Gleason had assigned a small team to track the activities of Dr. Nathan Lewis, as he had heard the rumors and rumblings, and was determined to take the bastard down, even if no one else on the force seemed to give a shit.
He’d been a proud member of the Greenville Police Department for nearly thirty years, and he was tired. Tired of the bullshit, tired of the fact that he knew his were not the only hands working the strings in the GPD. But this picture…
The photo had been taken from an intercepted email to Lewis from a community college somewhere, introducing one Britney Darrow to the good doctor. It was unremarkable other than the fact that the young girl was quite pretty.
But there was something about that face that had nagged at him. He opened the top drawer of his desk and shuffled some things around until he found what he was looking for, and he pulled it out. It too was a photograph, but was much older and certainly not of the same quality as the other. It was the only known photograph of another young girl, taken by his partner just before the discovery of the then ten butchered men at Lake Hartwell. The girl was in a car, driving from the house of man they’d been investigating for unrelated crimes, one Jacob Green, reportedly a decedent of the city’s name-sake, definitely a small time con man.
Green had been found not long after, along with nine other corpses, and the legend of the Hartwell Mangler had been born. This one picture was the only clue he’d ever gotten to the identity of killer, and as he held it side by side with Britney Darrow, he couldn’t get past the fact that the two looked frighteningly similar. Nor could he get over the fact that Nathan Lewis and Clyde Davis had been found dead in a burnt out cabin on Lake Hartwell, along with a random leg whose previous owner had not yet been identified.
With a huff, he pushed both photos away. He’d had enough. Enough of the corruption, of the Good-Ol’-Boy mentality that was so detrimental to effective police work. He was tired of having to fight just to do his job.
And so, on what was scheduled to be his final day as the chief of police before retirement, he shut out the banker’s lamp and stood up. He walked around his desk toward the door. He’d already boxed up all his personal mementos of a long career in law enforcement, so there was nothing keeping him here any longer. He opened the door.
But at the last minute, he walked back to the desk and picked up the two photos. He might be done with the Greenville PD, but considering the eerie new developments, he realized that he’d never be done with this case.
About the Author
S.J. Varengo is a married father of two adult children, living in Upstate New York. He has written a volume of short fiction (Welcome Home), in addition to the Cerah of Quadar series (A Dark Clock, Many Hidden Rooms, and A Single Candle). He has also co-written several installments of the SpyCo espionage thriller series with Craig A. Hart.
S J Varengo, The Count of Carolina
