autopsy videos before facilitating her horrific rape.
The locals on Fort Myers Beach referred to their hometown as ‘paradise’, and Dana could understand why. No hyperbole required. As long as you could put up with the hurricanes that routinely ripped through the place like a bull in a china shop (and could ignore the flock of elderly snowbirds that flew down here each and winter before completely taking things over) it was paradise. A place where you could get lost in the crowd and maybe – just maybe – find yourself again in the process.
Dana lifted her stare to the ceiling and studied the fairly new construction. Though she’d missed the devastating effects of Hurricane Allison by half a year, you couldn’t tell by simply looking around the place. Winds of up to ninety-five miles per hour and a storm-surge five feet above normal had done no real damage to the charming pink and blue cottages dotting the sandy shore. The cleanup afterward had been little more than an afterthought, much like plowing snow off Interstate 90 back home in Cleveland following yet another lake-effect blizzard was an afterthought to the residents there. And why not? There were some things in this life that you simply needed to do. You didn’t bitch about them. You didn’t whine about them. You didn’t complain about them. You just did them. And if you didn’t, you’d find yourself snowed in until April or enjoying warm sea breezes through several windows in your home that the architect had never intended to exist.
Dana took another long swallow of her beer and swiveled in her bar stool a little more, wishing like hell that the alcohol would hurry the fuck up already and drown her painful memories like the crying infants in a bathtub she knew them to be.
Shortly after her brutal rape in the parking lot of the coroner’s office back home in Cleveland, Dana had received the devastating news that little Bradley had been adopted out to another family. The domestic court judge and the June Cleaver clone who’d taken the little boy in seemed like nice enough people to her. Real stand-up folks, as a matter of fact. Honest-to-God pillars of the community. In addition to his duties overseeing a section of the legal system dealing with traffic offences in Westlake, Bradley’s new father served as a lector at the Assemblies of God Baptist church in Rocky River. The little boy’s new mother ran the PTA. Their four-bedroom house overlooked a tranquil lake stocked with steelhead trout, looking positively idyllic to Dana every time she’d driven past.
Lost in her self-pitying thoughts, Dana was abruptly jerked out of her reverie by the sickening sound of glass crunching against bone twenty feet away.
She whipped her head around hard to the right and saw bright red blood gushing down the face of a stunned-looking biker in his early fifties, courtesy of his fellow biker and bar mate. The wounded party put a hand to his head and came away with a palm-full of blood. His bloodshot eyes widened briefly in surprise. Then a slow, ugly smile creased his weathered face. Obviously, this didn’t mark his first rodeo.
Reaching around to the back pocket of his filthy blue jeans, the man produced a switchblade knife and flipped it open before taking a menacing step toward his adversary.
Even as Dana’s newfound bartender friend was frantically scrambling over the bar to get between the drunken combatants – a short billy club in his right hand to underscore his point that he didn’t especially care for fighting in his establishment – Dana fought every instinct in her body that was screaming out for her to intercede. Instead, she simply slipped a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill beneath her half-empty beer bottle in order to keep it from blowing away in the breeze before leaving the bar and losing herself in the crowd of suntanned tourists that was strolling through Times Square, the quaint little beach town’s unsubtle homage to New York City.
No reason for Dana to get involved here. No reason for her to risk her own neck. She wasn’t law-enforcement any more. She wasn’t an FBI agent any more. Hell, she didn’t know what she was any more.
Except for broken, of course.
CHAPTER 31
Banks of the White River – Tichnor, Arkansas – 1 a.m.
‘Get some more sandbags over here on the northwest side! It’s starting to give!’
Covered in full plastic flood-gear from head to toe, Nicholas nodded to the man who was holding the