The Donzerly Light
The Donzerly Light
A Psychological Thriller
Ryne Douglas Pearson
Published By Schmuck & Underwood
© 2010 Ryne Douglas Pearson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the author, except for brief passages used for review purposes.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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http://www.rynedouglaspearson.com
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Author’s Note
Prepare yourself for a journey into the past. Fifteen to twenty years. To a time when cell phones were the oddity and pagers weren’t quite extinct. When phone booths dotted the urban landscape and allowed any Jane or Joe with some spare change to reach out and touch someone. Did I plan this as an homage to a decade dear to my heart?
Not so much. This novel was written in the mid nineties and was ‘out of my genre’. Translation—my publisher at the time didn’t want it. I ended up publishing another novel that was ‘in my genre’ a couple years later before I started screenwriting, but I’ve always liked this story. A lot. Supernatural mystery and suspense has always been what I love to read, and to write. Now, with the advent of e-books, I can bring
The Donzerly Light
to you. Sure, I could have updated it and thrown in all the current technology, and reference persons and events and cultural phenomena so that it
felt
like I wrote it yesterday. But I didn’t, and, you know what—I like that it inhabits a past that isn’t quite gone from our memory.
Oh. One last thing—I’ve got more of these books squirreled away on the hard drive, so, keep your e-readers handy, because the genre shackles are off.
Ryne Douglas Pearson, September 2010
Table Of Contents
Mutton Or Wool
First Interrogation
August 14...11:20 p.m.
His hands had been cuffed and his eyes taped over for several hours when he heard footsteps approach the small space in which he was being held. A closet, he was certain, having tested its limits while stretching his good right leg, probing walls and a door from where he lay half curled in a corner. His left leg, casted from just below the knee to just above the toes, was throbbing against its plaster confines, sending dull bolts of pain up to his hip in a sickening, precise rhythm mated to the beating of his heart. It was pain verging on agony, but that Jay Grady could handle. He’d endured far, far worse a hundred times over.
The footsteps—two sets, Jay thought—stopped just outside. A latch clicked, the door opened. Four hands lifted him from the cold floor and half carried, half dragged him out and away from the closet. Beyond the heavy tape that masked his eyes, Jay could sense brightness. The cold glow of artificial light. Not the warm touch of a rising sun—a warmth he wanted to know again. But he wondered. He wondered if he ever would.
The men—they had to be male, Jay figured from the force of their grip on his upper arms—said nothing as they moved him down what must have been a corridor, the pain in his left leg making him wince as his cast slid along a long, hard floor. They made one turn to the left and stopped soon after that. Another door opened and Jay was taken into a space with much more depth than the closet, and a brightness more cold, more intense than that in the unseen halls he had just traveled.
A room. He was in a room.
The strong hands put him in a straight-back chair and slid the seat, with Jay in it, up to something that touched him about the stomach. An edge. A table edge. He was sitting at a table.
He had been
made
to sit at a table.
The hands that had gripped him withdrew, and he heard footsteps move away, back into the hall. The door closed.
Only then did Jay hear the breathing.
He ‘looked’ around, turning his head this way and that, facing all directions except directly behind. The breathing seemed to be coming from straight ahead, from a few feet distant, if that. Across the table. Someone was directly across the table from him.
The sound of paper came next. Loose pages being turned over from a stack just across the table. Fifteen seconds or so elapsed between each hushed scrape. Whoever was breathing was also reading.
“Who...” Jay swallowed, still able to taste the blood from the open welt on the soft flesh inside his lip, still feeling the grit of the earth clinging to his cheek where it had been forced hard to the ground, a knee pressed against the back of his neck. That was some hours ago. The past. Jay ran his tongue over the open wound inside his mouth and made himself focus on the present. The dark, uncertain moment that was now. “Who’s there?”
“Quiet, please,” a man said calmly, but firmly. Not an old voice, not a young voice.
“Just please tell me who—”
“If you cannot be quiet, I will have you gagged.”
Jay swallowed the remainder of his plea and ‘stared’ toward the voice.
“Do I make myself clear?”
Spent physically, mentally, emotionally, his ability, his
desire
to protest gone, Jay acquiesced with a feeble nod. His head bowed. The throb in his left leg raced with the beat of his heart.
“When I want to hear from you, I’ll speak to you,” the man said, and that was that. The only sound for more than an hour was his breath and the slow rustle of pages turning.
August 15...12:36 a.m.
Jay was beginning to doze, a dream of Mari rising like a heat shimmer in his subconscious, when several sharp raps on the table cut short the coming of her pleasant, hazy visage, and snapped him back to the darkness of his waking world.
“What?” Jay asked, his head swinging left, then right, then the gentle hush of breathing drew his attention that way. “What is it?”
“Murder, Mr. Grady,” a voice said. It was the man. The man who’d demanded his silence earlier.
“Murder?” Jay parroted, momentarily disoriented. But very soon his thoughts centered and he remembered what near-sleep had masked for so brief a time. “You mean—”
“Murder is a serious matter, Mr. Grady.”
“Listen, you have to—”
“The intentional killing of another human being,” the man interrupted, as if his were the only words of consequence. It seemed a natural part of his manner. “Do you know what the punishment for murder is in Missouri?”
Jay sniffed the air. It was stale. Old building stale. “Am I still in Missouri?”
“You are.”
“I wasn’t sure. I was in a trunk for an hour, two hours. I don’t know. All I know is the road was lousy.”
“Your confinement was necessary.”
Jay brought his cuffed hands up from his lap and touched the tape over his eyes. “Is this still necessary?”
A contemplative quiet hung in the air for a moment, then the man said, “Lean over this way.”
Jay did, rising slightly out of the chair on his good leg. He felt the rasp of calloused fingers at his temple, then a quick sting across his face as the tape was ripped away. His eyes were instantly dazzled by a bright pulse of light that lasted, and he fell back the short distance to the chair. He blinked rapidly, his face cast slightly down from the overhead lights that seemed grotesquely brilliant. But with each flutter of his lids his eyes adjusted to the very ordinary radiance thrown from the twin fluorescent fixtures mounted on the ceiling, and soon Jay was able to tolerate the light. Squinting somewhat, he looked to the man who had been only a voice until then.
“Better?”
Jay nodded and considered the man opposite him. Whoever he was, time had gone easy on him. He was maybe fifty, but there was just a light dusting of gray on the brown hair about his temples, and fine, spiny fissures in the tanned skin at the corners of his blue eyes—the second bluest eyes Jay had ever seen. Blue eyes that bore at him, a thousand things brooding behind the stare.
And then there were his hands. Resting before the man as fists atop a thick manila file folder, each was a meaty cudgel at the end of massive, chiseled forearms, which themselves sprouted from biceps that ballooned the cuffs of the T-shirt he wore. Taken whole, his hands and arms seemed to step toward shoulders as wide and solid as an anvil.
Jay gazed at those hands, recalling the roughness of the fingers on his temple. Reliving for an instant the calloused touch. These were hands that knew contact, that knew work of some kind. Hands that could strike. Fingers that might crush.
Jay wondered if he was going to die.
“What about these?” Jay asked, glancing at the black steel cuffs that bound his wrists together.
The man shook his head. “You’re a cold-blooded murderer, Mr. Grady. Your victim was unarmed. I watched you do it.”
Jay let his hands settle to his lap. “Who are you?”
“You can call me Mr. Wright.”
The reply puzzled Jay briefly, his brow furrowing, but soon he found sense in it and the skin above his tired brown eyes smoothed. “’Mister’”, is it? Not ‘officer’ or ‘agent’?”
“You weren’t expecting a Miranda warning, were you?” Mr. Wright grinned at his prisoner, and from somewhere below the table he retrieved a small notebook and put it near the thick file. A pen was clipped to its brown cover. “I don’t know your experience, Mr. Grady, but no lawman I know has the power to blindfold someone and throw them in the trunk of a car.”