Making Up Lost Time Read online

  Published 2018 by Ravenstar Press

  Monroe, WA

  This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Making Up Lost Time. Copyright © 2018 Mark Fassett. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact Mark Fassett: [email protected]

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  Contents

  Making Up Lost Time

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About

  Other Titles

  Acknowledgements

  David R. Michael, Kendra Harrington, Rebecca M. Senese, and Blaze Ward helped make this book what it is. It would be worse without them.

  Chapter 1

  HEAVY FOG BLANKETED Lake View Cemetery as Nice stood at the front of the crowd, watching her father’s coffin as it descended into the dark hole beneath it. The man on the winch turned the handle so slowly, Nice thought it might take hours before her father hit bottom.

  But the speed was deceptive. It wasn’t hours, just minutes, before her father’s coffin could no longer be seen above the grassy edge of the grave.

  She found herself leaning forward just a bit, hoping to catch sight of it again, but it was gone. The only evidence it had not yet hit bottom were the still taut cables.

  A minute later, they grew loose, and Nice knew her father had finally come to rest.

  The man who never rested, finally stilled by a bullet, of all things.

  In the damp of the fog, Nice couldn’t tell if her eyes were dry. She hoped they were. She couldn’t let anyone know just how difficult it was for her to watch her father’s burial, how much he had meant to her. She couldn’t afford to reveal to the world that she was anything more than the Mayor’s liaison with the world’s fastest man, Red Lightning. She certainly couldn’t let them know she was Red Lightning’s daughter. Red Lightning, himself, hadn’t known.

  Nice looked up from the grave and glanced around the long faces of the few men and women standing in the fog behind her.

  There was the Mayor, half-way through his third term, his bald head wearing a black fedora, a bead of water hanging from the tip of his long sharp nose. His suit was black, too—not his typical blue. The Mayor had made a good speech just before they lowered Red into the ground about how the police would work harder to fill the void left in the wake of Red Lightning’s death, but Nice knew it was all show. Privately, the Mayor had confided to her that he worried how they would get by without his help. Red had been the last Gifted working with the city to fight crime. Now, the Mayor could only think about the anarchy they would face once the world found out how vulnerable they were.

  Red’s girlfriend was there, too. Her black skirt was too short for the weather, not even reaching her knees, and her coat and top were form-fitting at best. Too much so. Her breasts threatened to escape at every fake sobbing heave. She had a thick black veil that hung from her hat, and she held a kerchief with one hand to her face like a grieving widow.

  There were a couple other men dressed in dark suits whom Nice did not know at all. She assumed they were close associates of Red, though they could have been federal agents or other state officials. While she had acted as his liaison, they had talked about things the Mayor wanted done, or things Red wanted from the Mayor, but other than his girlfriend, he kept his private life mostly hidden.

  Beyond those two men, a half-dozen police officers, the priest, and the grave-digger were in attendance.

  No one else had been invited. The Mayor wanted to keep Red’s death a secret as long as possible.

  Of course, that would only work as long as the man who killed him kept his mouth shut.

  Chapter 2

  “I DON’T KNOW what to do with you, now,” the Mayor said to her once they closed the doors of the limo. He stared out the window as he spoke. His sharp nose was now dry.

  “I’m sorry?” Nice said as if she hadn’t heard him. She’d heard him. She just didn’t want to answer his question for him. He never seemed to like solutions being handed to him, and preferred to listen to them only if he actually asked for them. She’d learned that much in her three years working for the man.

  The Mayor focused his gaze on her.

  “I said I don’t know what to do with you, now. With Red gone, and everything about to go to hell, I don’t have any real use for you. But I can’t do anything until the news breaks one way or another that he’s dead.

  “Oh, God,” he said, turning back to stare out the window again, “that will be a nightmare of a day.”

  The car lurched beneath them as Ben, the Mayor’s driver, put it in motion on the road back to City Hall.

  “Mayor,” Nice said, “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  The Mayor turned to face her.

  “Call me Charlie,” he said to her. “Don’t call me Mayor any more. Soon, you won’t be working for me, and your Mom, bless her soul, would blister my hide if she thought I made you keep up that pretension any longer than necessary.”

  Nice couldn’t laugh, not yet. Maybe not ever, though she knew the Mayor spoke the truth. No. Charlie. She’d have to think of him as Uncle Charlie again.

  But not yet.

  “Mom would…”

  The Mayor interrupted her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought her up.”

  He must have noticed something shift in her demeanor. She’d have to work on that. She couldn’t let her emotions get the best of her.

  “It’s all right. But I think that Mom would understand waiting until after you actually let me go before I refer to you as anything other than Mayor.”

  “Right,” he said. “You always were a stickler for the rules, just like your mother. What’s your idea?”

  Nice took a deep breath.

  “I think you should let me look for another Gifted to take Red’s place.”

  The Mayor slowly shook his head.

  “We’ve had a call out for Gifted ever since Smokescreen disappeared. We haven’t even had one response. What makes you think you can find one? And if you can find one, what makes you think you can convince him to work with us? No one wants to be a hero, anymore, Nice.”

  Nice couldn’t help releasing a sigh. The Mayor was right, as far as he knew. But he didn’t know everything.

  He didn’t know she had connections, as tenuous as they might be, because of her father. Of course, he didn’t know Red was her father.

  He could never know.

  “Red told me about a place,” she said. “I don’t know if he’d been drinking, or what, but he mentioned a place where the Gifted hang out. I could go ask around.”

  It wasn’t a complete lie. Red hadn’t told her, though. Her mother had, only minutes before she died from the cancer that ate her brain. It was where, twenty-three years ago, her mother had met her father, and they’d spent an evening together.

>   “No,” the Mayor said. “I forbid it. I told your mother I’d take care of you, and I’m not going to send you in to one of those places.”

  That was a surprise.

  “You know about the place I’m talking about?”

  “I know of them. We stay away from them. They don’t want us there.”

  Nice leaned forward. “But…”

  “No, Nice. Those places are neutral ground for the Gifted. They aren’t neutral for us. If you step one foot into one of those places, I will have to fire you.”

  Nice sat up. “Fire me? I’m going to lose my job anyway, if we don’t find a replacement for Red.”

  “I never said you’d lose your job. I just said I didn’t know what I was going to do with you. Is that what this is about?”

  It wasn’t exactly what it was about, but she nodded, anyway. Better to let him think it was.

  The Mayor smiled, relief evident in his eyes.

  “Well, don’t worry. Like I said, I told your mother I’d take care of you, and I will, so long as you stay away from those Gifted safe-houses.”

  “All right, Uncle,” she said. “I won’t go looking for Red’s replacement in those places.”

  The Mayor rolled his eyes.

  “Well, I guess I can’t stop you from looking elsewhere. Just don’t say anything about Red being dead. We need to keep this quiet as long as possible.”

  The car rolled to a stop.

  “I promise,” she said.

  She had never planned to go looking for Red’s replacement at The Curio, anyway. Looking for his killer? That was another story.

  Chapter 3

  THE MAYOR LET Nice have the rest of the day off after the funeral, a gesture, he said, because she had worked so closely with Red. Nice suspected it was more likely what he’d said in the car. He didn’t know what to do with her.

  And, she thought, eventually the press would notice. Red took the bullet that killed him four days ago. It wouldn’t be long before someone in the press would realize he hadn’t been seen since then, and they would start to ask questions.

  If she wasn’t there to answer questions, they couldn’t get answers.

  Which was fine by her, and likewise, she figured, by the Mayor. If they asked him what was up, he could plausibly say he did not know.

  Although, they’d agreed on their first answer to the question.

  Red was on vacation, so please don’t print anything until after he returns.

  That might get them a week, depending on how long it was until the first reporter asked about him.

  And she could use the time.

  The first thing she had done was go home and change out of the dress she had worn to the funeral. She put on black jeans and a deep blue fitted shirt with short sleeves. She donned a leather jacket and stuffed a knitted face-mask into the pocket. She’d look like a burglar, but she didn’t care that much. Better a burglar than the alternative.

  On second thought, where she was going, she might not need the mask. If she got caught at Red’s place, she could claim she was keeping an eye on it while he was on vacation.

  She took her keys, her wallet, and her phone from her purse, shoved the keys into her jeans pocket, and shoved the wallet and phone into the inner pocket on the jacket.

  Then she reached into a drawer and pulled out the Beretta 9mm her mother had given her on her 18th birthday, only a month before she died.

  “You’re going to be on your own,” her mother had said. “You’ll need this, especially…”

  Her mom had trailed off, never clarifying what came after ‘especially’. She’d done that often during the last months of her life, her thoughts eaten by the cancer and the drugs they’d hoped would combat it. At the time, her mom still hadn’t told her about her father—that wouldn’t happen until the day she died.

  Nice almost put the gun back in the drawer. In the early months after her mother’s death, Nice had taken lessons on how to use it, and she’d restarted the martial arts classes her mother had insisted she take when she was young. She could defend herself without the gun.

  But she shoved the gun in her pocket, anyway.

  The man that could outrun bullets had taken a bullet in his head.

  And she didn’t have any of his advantages.

  With that decision made, she left her apartment, descended twenty-two floors in an elevator that she fortunately didn’t have to share with anyone, and stepped out the front door of her building to find that, while the fog had lifted, a steady drizzle had replaced it.

  And she hadn’t brought her umbrella.

  She thought momentarily about going back to get her umbrella, but turned and stepped out into the February afternoon weather, instead. It was what it was, and the umbrella would only burden her. She’d just have to suffer a depressed hair day. It could hardly make the day worse.

  A half-block and a damp head later, she huddled under the roof of the bus stop waiting area, hoping that nobody from the press was watching. She certainly didn’t want that kind of picture showing up in the paper.

  But the bus came before any cameras emerged.

  She climbed on, deposited her money, and found an empty seat near the back of the half-full bus.

  And then she waited while the bus drove her closer to her first real look at her father’s life.

  Chapter 4

  RED’S PLACE WAS a small, almost quaint house in West Seattle, overlooking Alkai beach. Its view of the beach, as well as Puget Sound, were amazing, and Nice couldn’t help thinking of what it would have been like to live there growing up.

  Especially while she was a teenager.

  Summer days on the beach would have been heaven.

  Hard to imagine, though, in the middle of February with the drizzle still coming down and the water blanketed with gray.

  The house had a dark, metal roof and beige plank siding with white trim. Large bay windows on the water side of the house would have been amazing to sit in and watch the boat traffic on the Sound, if Red had ever given her the chance. A second story extended upward on one end of the house. Nice assumed that’s where Red’s bedroom was, but she’d never been in the house before.

  She’d never been past the front door.

  Which was where she stood and contemplated what she was about to do while catching her breath after trudging up from the bottom of the hill from where the bus dropped her.

  Breaking and entering the house of her dead father.

  No one would see her enter the house. There were hedges and a fence all around, blocking the view of the door from the street.

  Still, she hesitated.

  She knew the police hadn’t been there. They didn’t know where he lived. No one did. No one had, ever.

  Except her mom.

  Her mom hadn’t told her where he lived, though. Nice had found the address in one of her mom’s diaries while going through her things after she died. Nice had checked it out online, found that it was owned by someone named Reginald Smith. She’d used her position in the Mayor’s office to look up Reginald Smith, and she’d found nothing.

  And the one previous time she’d worked up the courage to go to his doorstep and introduce herself, she’d knocked. She’d stood there, nervously waiting, rubbing her toes against each other in worry, for five minutes. No one came to the door. He wasn’t at home, or he wasn’t going to answer the door.

  She vowed she’d try again, later, but later never came.

  Until now, when it was too late.

  When he was dead.

  Still, she knocked on the door.

  “Just in case,” she said to herself under her breath.

  She waited for a few long moments. The moments got longer as they passed.

  She knocked again and put her ear to the door.

  She couldn’t hear a thing.

  She tried the knob, and it was locked.

  She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. No one was home.

  Of course
no one was home. Red was dead, and he was a bachelor.

  But now, she had another problem. She hadn’t thought about how she was going to get in the house. Some part of her had assumed that the door would be open, that someone, Red’s assailant, had been to the house and searched through it, leaving the door unlocked.

  But that didn’t seem to be the case.

  She wandered down the front side of the house, stepping around the bushes that graced the foundation, and tried each of the windows. They were all locked, and she thought they looked to be fitted with alarm triggers. She could try to break the glass. But if she did, she risked setting off an alarm, and she certainly didn’t want police coming here to check it out. If the wrong officer showed up, news of Red’s death might get out, and the Mayor had convinced her that in no circumstances was that good for the city.

  She looked up at the second story where she thought his bedroom might be. Some of the windows seemed unreachable, and it was possible Red left those unlocked, but she was no Gifted. She couldn’t jump that high.

  She walked around the side of the house. More windows, all locked. The hillside sloped down toward the rear of the house, exposing more and more of the foundation as it went.

  And then she was behind the house, her view of the water blocked by a tall fence that also blocked her view of the neighbors below. A rock bed against the fence, probably a drainage field, was filled with skull sized stones.

  Beneath a porch from the upper floor that she imagined had an amazing view of Puget Sound, she found a full size sliding glass door that had to lead into a basement.

  Vertical blinds blocked her view of the inside, but the cracks between them showed that the room was dark.

  She examined the door, looking for alarm triggers.

  She didn’t see any.

  It didn’t mean they weren’t hidden from view, but usually, they made them visible as a deterrent.