The End of Never Page 2

  “Don’t worry, Miss Peyton,” Callahan whispered in her ear as he followed her gaze to the roof. “We have the situation under control,” he told her and winked.

  From the neighboring yard to their backs, the bark of the dog grew louder as a police siren wailed in the distance.

  Trouble, Kraven thought, his back stiffening.

  Another siren joined the first. “They are heading to Collinsworth, do you think?” Callahan questioned Alexandra, as the sirens rang closer in their ears.

  Collinsworth Academy lay a few hundred yards away from the history teacher’s rented home. Between his house and the school was a cemetery, located at the southern border of the school’s property.

  “Perhaps you should go home, Alexandra,” Callahan said as the trio listened to the blaring sirens in the distance. “There is nothing for you to worry about with Kraven here as your bodyguard—although I think you know how to take care of yourself. Excuse me, won’t you?” Callahan disappeared through the wooden screen door of the back porch, a loud slam following him into the house.

  Alexandra glanced shyly at Kraven as a cell phone hummed in the pocket of her blue-and-green plaid skirt, part of the daily uniform required for Collinsworth attendance.

  “Mom,” she read aloud from the call screen. “Oh boy,” she sighed, and she let the call go to voicemail.

  When the phone stopped ringing, a photo of her bulldog, Jack, came on the screen. He is going to be so mad at me, she thought, frowning with guilt at the moping brown-and-white face cocked to the side, a giant, red Christmas bow stuck to his forehead.

  The screen door cracked again and Callahan emerged. Throwing a white undershirt at Kraven, he laid Alexandra’s school bag across her shoulder and ushered the pair toward a gate in the wooden fence that closed in the backyard.

  Parked at the curb on the street of the towering Victorian was Alexandra’s rusty Jeep, waiting for her patiently. “I made sure you have enough gas to get home,” Callahan informed her and kicked an empty plastic gas can in the driveway.

  “I don’t trust myself to drive right now. My nerves!” Alexandra said, throwing the keys to Kraven as she climbed in the passenger seat and pulled her seatbelt around her chest.

  “I’m sure you remember where I live,” she said, smiling anxiously and waving goodbye to Callahan as Kraven turned the key in the ignition.

  I am still alive, and she is reborn, Kraven thought as he revved the engine. The warped hoses and loose belts strained beneath the hood. They would be lucky to get down the street without breaking down.

  Sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat of her beat-up Jeep, Alexandra pinched her lips. They felt dry, parched from thirst.

  Her mother was calling again. What she does not know won’t hurt her, Alexandra thought, staring down at the cell phone screen.

  2

  Heat

  The fingerprint-smudged glass doors of the bustling hospital emergency room slid apart for the woman in the gray pantsuit as she stepped outside into the muggy Miami morning. Thawing out from a chilly night in the tenth-floor quarantine ward, the sleep-weary woman, Angela Peyton, wobbled on her four-inch heels as her head swam in the tropical heat.

  A wailing ambulance siren roused her senses as she leaned against a cement pillar and unbuttoned the collar of her white silk blouse. Wiping beads of sweat from the top of her lip, she stumbled backward from the curb while a mustard-yellow taxi cab sped toward her, shrieks of pain pouring from the open windows.

  In the sticky and tattered back seat, the left ankle of a six-foot-tall platinum blonde was perched up on the seat, swelled to the size of an orange. She screeched like a lost kitten. The driver lunged over the speed bumps as if the driveway was a ski-slalom course. The wounded blonde’s equally statuesque red-headed friend scrounged a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill from inside her bra.

  Lurching to a stop in front of the emergency room, the pale-skinned, bearded driver yelled at the girls as the back door of his cab flew open. They stumbled to the pavement. “You getting out now, crazy witches,” he shouted. His English had much improved over the time he lived in warm Miami, far away from the Russian tundra.

  The woman in the gray pantsuit overheard the commotion and decided any cab was a good cab in the strangling heat. As she approached the idling mustard-yellow car, the smell of stale cigarettes and French fries assaulted her nose and her empty stomach heaved.

  “Vamoose, girlies!” the heavily breathing driver shouted as he pocketed the sweaty twenty-dollar bill in his pants.

  “Pig!” the redhead hurled back at the driver as she shouldered her friend’s weight and helped her toward the emergency room doors. Passing the somberly dressed woman in the gray pantsuit, the redhead, her white mini-skirt stained with booze and ketchup from the previous evening, rolled her eyes to the sky.

  “I wouldn’t get in there if I were you,” she hissed in warning to the woman in the pantsuit. “He drives like an animal and smells like one, too.”

  “Shut up, Maxine,” the blonde advised, her seven-inch heels dangling limply from her trembling hand, which was wrapped around her friend’s neck. “It’s your fault we’re here.”

  Maxine ripped the blonde girl’s arm from around her neck and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m not the one who fell off the bar, Tonya.”

  “You dared me,” Tonya shouted back.

  Tonya threw the first punch, as the auburn-haired woman in the pantsuit sidestepped the fight sequence.

  “Wait!” she shouted at the taxi driver. “I need a ride.” Her bangs were curling in tiny, damp ringlets across her forehead.

  The Russian driver studied her lithe figure and nodded his head in approval as the woman slid through the open passenger door and into the back seat.

  “Vare to, Madame?” he asked, meeting her tired eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Coffee,” she sighed and removed her suit jacket.

  “Yah,” he said, nodding. He floored the accelerator. A breeze sailed through his open window, causing his toupee to flap like a bird’s nest over his glistening scalp. “You are a doctor?” the driver inquired, his black eyes scrutinizing her pale arms, short chestnut hair, and long neck through the rearview mirror.

  “No,” she explained. “I’m a scientist.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding his head as he glimpsed her blouse over his shoulder.

  “Any coffee shop will do,” the woman told him. She nuzzled her jacket against her chest. “Is that one just up there?” she asked, pointing past his nose to a café on the corner ahead of them.

  “Yah,” the driver agreed and eased to the curb. She rummaged through her purse for a ten-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” she said as she slipped the man the bill, her body cringing as his palm lingered atop her manicured fingers.

  She felt his eyes search her as she escaped from the stifling cab to the sidewalk in front of a tattoo parlor. Across the street, the frothy whitecaps of low, lazy waves grazed the surface of the Atlantic Ocean before they broke on the sandy shoreline. Angela Peyton closed her eyes and greedily sucked in the briny ocean air.

  At the curb, a loud honk echoed from the cab, the driver waiting impatiently for his break in traffic. “Sucka,” the Russian shouted as he cut in front of a black Porsche, his voice as harsh as his pale, pockmarked skin.

  Angela relaxed her tense shoulders as the cab’s taillights disappeared in the morning traffic. Coffee, she thought to herself as the scent of the bold, brewing lifesaver wafted toward her nose from the café entrance. The aroma lifted her to her tiptoes and pulled her past the imposing poster of a flying dragon behind the glass of the tattoo parlor’s front window.

  Inside the café, a towering cup of their thickest dark roast wobbled in her hands as she plucked the morning edition of the Miami Herald from a stack on the floor by the cash register. Students posing in flip-flops and sunglasses crowded the cramped tables with shiny laptops, the click of their fingers over the keyboards rattling her ears. Heading outsid
e, she plopped into a metal bistro chair and swallowed her liquid breakfast as sleek convertibles that would cost her at least a year’s salary raced past the sidewalk.

  The morning sun soaked her pale skin. How did I end up here? she wondered, basking in the tropical rays, knowing that a long day stuck in the quarantine ward awaited her after breakfast. As an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she felt the many years she had spent in the bowels of laboratories were now mounting on her tired shoulders. The CDC had never before placed her in charge of an investigation. She had only tagged along as an assistant before this case. As she started to panic over the responsibility, a single face washed over her thoughts: her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alexandra.

  Her Blackberry smart phone buzzed inside her leather handbag. As she plunged her hand inside the morass of notepads, napkins, and empty pens, she hoped that her daughter was calling. She realized suddenly that she had not spoken to her only child since the prior evening, when her daughter had dropped her at the Atlanta airport to travel to Miami. If anything was wrong, Alexandra would call, Angela convinced herself, guilt panging in her chest.

  A text message waited. Angela read the words breathlessly: All okay here. Love ya.

  Angela rang her daughter’s cell phone immediately: five rings, but no answer. Her daughter’s sweet voice echoed through the receiver, asking her to leave a message.

  “Hey babe,” Angela said, smiling and staring across the street at the ocean. “Got your text. You didn’t call me last night.” She paused and bit her lip. “I didn’t call you either.” Another bite, harder than the first. “You wouldn’t believe what’s going on here. Call me, if I don’t call you again first. Love you.”

  Angela hit the end button on her Blackberry and sank restlessly back against the metal café chair. An ambulance with a wailing siren and flashing red lights sped past her in the direction of the hospital.

  Restless to hear from her daughter, Angela started to dial the cell phone number again but stopped before hitting the send button. She’s seventeen, she told herself, and she can probably take care of herself.

  Shoving the phone back in her leather handbag, she glanced up at the tattoo parlor next to the café. A tall, bald man in faded jeans and a black sleeveless shirt stood at the front with a set of keys in the lock. He nodded at her as he opened the door. She shied her eyes away and read the name above the entrance: Devil’s Tongue Tattoo.

  Burying her face in the newspaper that she had laid out on the table, Angela tried to ignore the man as he emerged from the tattoo parlor and walked confidently toward her. His smile broadened across his tan, chiseled face. His deep-brown eyes twinkled at the woman who was still trying to ignore him.

  Leaning over a low, black iron railing, he handed Angela a black business card. A red eye winked at her from the front of the card as she accepted it—despite an inner voice that told her to ignore the stranger.

  “We’re open all day,” he told her, “and most of the night.” He turned back toward his store. “Beautiful women get a ten percent discount.” He winked at Angela over his broad shoulder.

  A light ocean breeze ruffled the pages of the newspaper as Angela tried to concentrate on the headlines, fighting the urge to wander into the tattoo parlor. “Miami misses strike from Hurricane Emily,” she read aloud from the bottom of the first page. “Storm heads up Atlantic seaboard toward the South Carolina coast.

  “Peyton Manor is there,” Angela mumbled to herself. In her mind’s eye, she saw an image of the grand house, nestled in a bay on a barrier island south of Charleston, South Carolina. That is where June, her ex-husband’s mother, lived. She and June did not talk much. Yet her stomach churned to think June was in the path of the storm. Surely June would call if she needed help because of the oncoming storm, she thought to herself and bit her lip again, until this time it bled.

  Sighing deeply, Angela focused her eyes on the story placed next to the weather report. “Mysterious outbreak plagues plastic housewives,” Angela read aloud and scanned down the rest of the story.

  Doctors and scientists gathering on the quarantine ward of a south Miami Beach medical center are shaking their heads at the reason for the outbreak that has brought them to Miami. The patients share a common link: recent plastic surgery. The primary symptoms of the outbreak’s victims is the occurrence of a dark, tattoo-like mark on the victims’ backs that resembles “a pair of wings,” according to a source within the walls of the medical center. Other symptoms include increasingly volatile episodes of diarrhea, a fever, and a skin rash that culminates in leather-like scales on the upper layer of skin.

  Angela finished reading the blurb and shoved the paper aside with acute disdain for the reporter’s lack of scientific expertise. This will only frighten people needlessly, she thought to herself as a name suddenly popped into her head. Jim Woodward, the father of Alexandra’s best friend Taylor, was a highly successful plastic surgeon back home in Atlanta.

  As Angela retrieved her Blackberry from her handbag, she remembered a class she had survived as a humble undergraduate at Emory University. That class had pointed her down the road she now traveled as an epidemiologist for the CDC. Her first day in the class, “Rare Diseases of the Amazon Basin,” was with Dr. Hans Frederick VonHessen. She hid in the last seat of the last row of the auditorium. By the second time in this class, she took a seat in the front row and never looked back at her previous desire to major in film with a minor in English. At one point midway through the semester, Dr. VonHessen assigned an article about a plant in the Amazon whose ingestion made people break out in a scaly rash and develop marks upon their backs that resembled tattooed wings. The plant was named the Raiz do Dragao, the dragon root, Angela recalled from the cobwebs in her mind.

  Her Blackberry rested in her palm. Searching her contact list, she found Jim Woodward. I hope it’s not too early, she thought, looking at her watch. She did not know that the doctor was usually in his office by nine every morning to escape the nagging of his young, demanding second wife.

  “Hello?” a deep voice with the distinct accent of the Texas plains answered promptly after two rings.

  “Howdy, stranger,” Angela greeted him. “I hope it’s not too early to call you.”

  “It’s never too early for Angela Peyton to call me,” he said, cutting her apology off before she could finish. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Jim, I’m in Miami,” Angela confessed.

  “No kidding,” he said. “I’m down here, too. Where are you?”

  Angela glanced across the street and again at the Devil’s Tongue. “The CDC sent me here on short notice. There’s some sort of outbreak among women who have had plastic surgery recently.”

  “You don’t say,” Jim Woodward drawled as he sipped stiff, black coffee from a Styrofoam cup in the lobby of his hotel. A blueberry Danish tempted him and he wrapped the secret treat in a napkin to enjoy later in the conference room upstairs. “I flew in early this morning. The flight had to wait until the storms passed over the airport in Atlanta last night.”

  Angela tensed, remembering that she had not received a call from her daughter. “I guess I just missed it then. My flight was at seven last night. What are you doing here, Jim? This is quite a coincidence.”

  A lock of sandy blond hair fell into the man’s face as he stepped outside the hotel lobby to the veranda surrounding the sparkling blue pool. Shoving the hair behind his ear, he whispered into the phone, “Don’t tell Krystal. I told her I had to fly down here for a foot fungus conference. But I’m really here to learn about new liposuction procedures.”

  “I won’t tell,” Angela whispered back into the phone sympathetically. She loathed Jim’s extremely high-maintenance wife.

  “Okay then,” Jim sighed. “So what’s going on with you, Angela? I haven’t seen you in a while.” He sat down on a plastic chair and picked at the blueberry Danish.

  “I need a favor,” Angela said. “The case I’m
working on down here, it involves women who have had plastic surgery. I could just send you an e-mail,” she said, blushing.

  “Nonsense,” he said, swallowing the last of the forbidden pastry. “Let’s get together for dinner tonight. Do you think you could get away for a little while?”

  “I will for you,” she said eagerly.

  “Then it’s a date,” Jim said, rising to his feet and brushing crumbs from his khaki slacks. “Call me around seven.”

  “Okay,” Angela said, twirling her auburn hair around her finger as she spoke.

  “Hey Angela,” he said before ending the call, “did you hear that our girls don’t have school today?”

  “What?” Angela stammered.

  “The storm last night in Atlanta knocked out the power on campus. Apparently those grand magnolia trees our tuition money pays to keep up around campus toppled over and knocked out power lines and windows.”

  “How do you know?” Angela asked, wincing. Alexandra still had not called her back.

  “Taylor called with an update this morning. She wanted me to know in case I checked her Facebook page and saw the pictures she plans to upload of her lounging by the pool today.”

  “What a mess,” Angela remarked and then lied, “Alexandra called me about it this morning, too.”

  “So I’ll see you tonight then, Angela? I’m looking forward to it already.”

  Angela licked her battered lips and told herself not to bite them again. “Yes,” she said and hit the end button on her cell phone. Immediately she found her daughter’s number on the phone and tried calling again. “Pick up,” she said aloud, anger and fear rising in her chest.

  Five rings later, a weak voice answered, “Hello?”

  “Sleeping in?” Angela asked angrily.

  “Hi Mom,” Alexandra said. “I guess you heard school was cancelled. That storm was pretty bad last night.”