A Passion's Fight

  1

Classic rock was drumming out of the speakers as Chance climbed back behind the wheel of his black Camaro. He had just filled up the tank to continue the long trip southeast from California to Florida. He dropped his stash of junk food and soft drinks onto the empty passenger seat and rechecked the route he had planned on the U.S. road map. He was in Arizona and even as invitingly rustic as the landscape was Chance wanted to get back on the road and as quickly away from the neighboring state of California as he could.

Chance switched on the cruise control as he reached the southeast bound highway’s cruising speed. With one eye on the road he adjusted his heat and radio’s volume to create a comfortable environment in the car’s sleek interior. Next, he popped the top on a soda and took a refreshing gulp of the caffeine-infused drink and opened some munchies for the road. Not being a big fast food eater he would snack on junk food until he reached a nice steakhouse to take a break from the road and his junk food habit. Being modestly young; twenty-eight, had its advantages; like still being able to enjoy junk food and the occasional fast food’s grease-in-a-bag’s special and not sweating his trim waistline for any weight gain. Of course he knew that would end soon as the years were eaten up by his life’s journey, and middle age overtook the physical vitality of his youth.

Wow, where’d those thoughts sneak in from, he wondered, as he mentally shook loose of the discouraging thoughts. Chance consciously set his mind on more positive and immediate things; like the three week vacation from his taxing job that he was supposed to be enjoying at this very moment. He thought back on the look his boss, movie star Tammie Dapoom, gave him when he volunteered his vacation plans to her. The media always referred to her as Tammie Kaboom, giving the false impression that she was temperamental. But her picture and that name on the cover of any magazine sold outrageous numbers of copies because the public just had to know what Miss Kaboom was up to in every area of life; from style to recreation. Tammie took offense to her nickname and had sued Cosmopolitan magazine in the beginning of her career for false representation, and won. But after the first few public apologies by the magazine’s owners and C.E.O.’s she grew weary of battling the media conglomerates and has since adjusted to the nickname.

Chance chuckled to himself thinking back on the day that the newspaper journalist at one of the lawsuit press hearings nearly fainted dead away when Tammie extended an ordinary Kleenex from her designer purse to the guy so that he wouldn’t keep wiping his runny nose on his sleeve. Chance pondered the irony of life as he wove in and out of freeway traffic. He had grown up in the same neighborhood as Tammie, in southern California, and they had been friends from as far back as he could remember.

Both of their parents were always saying how much of the odd couple they made; she with her dramatic good looks and some playbook forever under her arm and he with his athletic abilities and edgy rock and roll style. No one ever doubted that Tammie would be famous some day; just as no one ever considered that Chance wouldn’t make it into some professional sport or another; probably football. But Tammie, God bless her, who was an up-and-coming movie star when Chance’s knee blew out in the last quarter of a college football game saved him from some stifling desk job when she called him in the hospital to offer him a position with her as a bodyguard. Chance mentally rewound the clock the past nine years to the day that he arrived at Tammie’s doorstep, with his bags, shortly after being officially released from physical therapy after his knee surgery. He still saw her as his best friend but could definitely see how her knock-out, dark good looks earned her the nickname Kaboom; ’cuz she was a bombshell, even by Hollywood’s’ standards.

Well, he mused, she may be a bombshell but her frantic schedule and superstar status always had him hopping to shelter her from the whackos and paparazzi. He sorely needed this vacation after almost two and a half uninterrupted years of celebrity trials and tribulations. In three short weeks Tammie needed him back to travel overseas with her to promote her newest movie, so Chance had to maximize on every moment of vacation that he had. And that’s precisely what he had told her when he crossed the room yesterday morning to close her mouth, after he had told her that he was driving to Florida, and drop a brotherly kiss on top of her head. She had tried to argue with him, quoting Florida’s soaring crime rates and attempting to bribe him with a favor she would call in to the top hotel in the area at a greatly discounted price for the full three weeks. He had stood his ground and told her that he needed to get as far away from all the theatrics as possible and he had insisted that his mind was made up when she had dangled spa treatments at the hotel in front of him. He could still see the amazement on her face when she realized, just this morning as he packed his bags in the Camaro, that he really was leaving her in the capable hands of the prize-winning-fighter-looking bodyguard they had hired out of a reputable agency.

Chance’s mind snapped back to the present as he spied a road sign advertising an Outback Steakhouse in a town off the highway, about one mile ahead. Just in time too, he realized as his stomach growled over the noise of both the heater and the radio. He merged the Camaro in with the slower moving traffic in the far right-hand lane to be prepared to coast down the ramp and into the small, southern town boasting the international steakhouse restaurant.

While Chance was enjoying his medium steak and salty French fries, F.B.I. agent Chuck Palmiere was busy supervising the dredging of the irrigation canal next to the Florida country road. He wouldn’t even be here right now if it weren’t for some tip from a hawk-eyed insomniac, strawberry farmer, Chuck thought as he watched the rear bumper of the green sedan being cranked out of the canal’s deep waters. It would be terribly coincidental, but not impossible, if this were a car involved in a terrible tragedy rather than the car described in the farmer’s tip. The farmer, Gill Creedy, called in the tip just this morning to the Florida-based F.B.I. office where Chuck worked. When he arrived at his desk a blue post-it note was stuck to his calendar on the wall, left there by another over-worked agent. In fact, all the members of this F.B.I. Florida chapter had been over-worked lately trying to locate bodies weighted down in water, buried in shallow graves or even turning up in dumpsters and piece together the puzzle of how the murders were related, Chuck contemplated as he drew a pair of latex gloves over his long, tapering fingers. Chuck had went out to Gill’s place after he found the post-it note and rang Gill to confirm that he was home. He and Gill had sat on the twin rocking chairs on his porch while Gill rehashed the events of the dark night nearly three weeks ago. Gill had apologized profusely for waiting so long to call about what he had seen that night but he had also explained that it was dark and his sleep-deprived mind often left him overly imaginative. He had admitted to Chuck that he wasn’t going to call anyone with his secret except that his conscience hadn’t given him a moment of peace until after he had called in his tip this morning.

As Chuck stared at the dead man behind the wheel of the green sedan he wondered how much desperately needed evidence had been washed away before Gill’s conscience had belatedly appeared. Gill was probably monitoring all this activity right now, Chuck considered, as he dialed the number into the forensics crime lab on his cell phone. Yeah, he barked into the phone, I need ‘The Sundae Ladies’ team down here right now to work a homicide and gave his location before disconnecting. Spot on, he assured himself aloud as he noted the same laceration marks on the victim’s neck that duplicated the marks on the necks of more than a dozen recent homicide victims that had been clumped together and coined, ‘The Sundae Ladies’. Yup, he uttered, Something bizarre is definitely going on here and burned a stream of epithets.

  2

J anice don’t let any calls through to my office for the remainder of the day and schedule as many home visits with the patients as my schedule can fit. I don’t want the patients around here until things blow over, Lina announced to her secretary and ended the phone connection. Man this was a busy time of the year for her private practice; what with the holidays being over and every one of her patients needing grief counseling to help them overcome the anxiety of holiday weight gain. Sometimes Lina questioned the difference she was making in the world with her hard-earned psychology degree. But this post-holiday rush of overwrought patients was leaps and bounds beyond last years counseling rush. Oh, the anxieties were the same as last year; except of course, the new ones she had taken on over the course of the past year. The difference was in her confidence that patients could keep their appointments with her and not end up dead.

Lina was haunted in waking and sleep by the awful things she had witnessed that swarthy night only a few weeks ago. Lina, born Lillian Riviara Jamison, had lived a privileged life. Being the only child of a first-rate heart surgeon and a top-notch anthropology professor had not been a hardship on Lina. However, her parents were very proud of her independent successes in life. She had matured at a very young age and applied her exceptional intelligence to academic studies; guaranteeing her to be class valedictorian and winner of several scholarships, covering all her university expenses; even though she graduated a year before her three best girlfriends since kindergarten, and their class. Through college she studied hard, sacrificed all social life; with the exception of her girlfriends, doubled up on classes and received her masters in psychology a year early. At that point her parents stepped in and purchased a building for her practice, set up a bank account for overhead for a year and referred several student’s parents and even a few of her father’s patients and their families to her blossoming career.

Lina knew that she had been sheltered from life’s cruelties up to this point, and she was thankful. She knew all about the children that were horribly abused by their parents and became very sick adults from her psychology studies. She reflected back on her school years and clearly saw the social isolation that her disciplined routine of studies heaved upon her. But, the occasions that she did go out with Cora, Sara and Holly; her three best girlfriends, always made her feel so alive and completely forget that she sometimes felt like she was missing out. All three of them practiced one sport or another, dated the boys from school and would reveal the most shocking aspects of normal teenage life to Lina; the most conservative member of their party. Oh, sometimes the girls would pick on her for always playing it safe but it was always in good fun and never malicious. But, Lina felt that she didn’t always play it safe because, after all, she was best friends with the three most daring girls in high school.

Living in isolation with books would typically lead a person to be very naïve. But, thanks to her outrageous friends, Lina was far from the naïve, sheltered girl she would otherwise be. All the girls had matured physically at an early age and therefore, looked much older than their actual ages. On most of their nights out together the girls would inevitably sneak into an R-rated movie to learn about real adult things, instead of watching the PG or G movie they had bought their ticket to see. By the time Lina was in college she had learned, at the cinema, all about the edgier lifestyle of crime and daring that most of her peers had learned first-hand. The seductive and sexual pleasures Lina’s girlfriends had filled in for her. All three of her girlfriends had lost their virginity in high school and had graphically detailed the entire adventure o her. Her girlfriends had even gone so far as to physically train her on how to tongue-kiss a guy before her prom night. She would never forget the awkwardness of kissing her girlfriends and the clumsiness of her tongue as it attempted to match the rhythm of theirs. Well, all that was fond memory now because her girlfriends were all married. Their times together were still, if not even more, exciting now though! As married women they would drag Lina into lingerie shops, where Lina would purchase quality bras and panties while her girlfriends bought sheer nighties and silk teddies. Now, her girlfriends threw fantasia parties, passed around sex toys and chatted about how kinky their husbands were. Lina knew that most of her social life was lived vicariously through these three women she thought of less as girlfriends and more like sisters. But not all of her social life was lived through them. It was this remaining sliver of a social life that had her in such distress right now. The fraction of her life where she ignorantly accepted a date for a night three weeks ago that landed her in the right spot at the right time to witness what could only have been a murder at the hands of her date, a notorious Mafia boss.

________________________________________________

Lina reclined in her high-backed leather chair as she envisioned the day, four weeks ago, that she met Sean. She was standing in front of the condo in her blouse, silk skirt and flats with her mussy ponytail flaming in the Florida sun. She was searching with furrowed brow and squinted eyes; hidden behind designer shades, for her misplaced silver Mustang. Actually, it wasn’t misplaced but was lost to her in the sea of silver sports cars that hadn’t been there when she parked her car a little less than two hours ago. She had just left the Harper’s fourth floor apartments after one of their bi-monthly therapy sessions. Mr. Harper was an obscenely overweight bank president who had survived a massive heart attack after learning a year ago that his forty-five year old wife was pregnant with their first baby. If you knew Mrs. Harper you would understand that an overdose of joy at the prospect of being a first-time daddy was not the cause of Mr. Harper’s heart attack. Mrs. Harper was frigid towards her husband, to put it mildly and spent the majority of her time lunching at the club or snipping at the poor operator taking her size and color selection of the new dress she was ordering. Mr. Harper had insisted that Lina accept his extravagant bonus for taking him through the birth of their first child, a half white and half Hispanic baby named Samuel Juan Harper. Lina was sure that she had prevented Mr. Harper’s second, and probably fatal, heart attack so she guiltlessly accepted the roll of money as a show of his gratitude. That was the last time she had been there; the day she had met Sean Darcangelo.

As she peeked out the blinds in her office she was relieved to see that the suspicious white van that had been parked across the street from her office for several hours today was finally gone. She reminded herself that the van could’ve been there for any number of reasons but couldn’t suppress a shudder as the idea that one of Sean’s hired goons was behind the wheel of the van re-asserted itself. She shuddered again when she thought of how recklessly she had behaved to accept the offer of a date from him, a perfect stranger. He had seemed so nice though; she offered like a band-aid to her hurt pride, as she remembered him buzzing down the window of his green Jaguar to lend a hand helping her flush out her Mustang hidden in the parking lot. After they had found her car he had admitted that he nearly caused an accident swerving unexpectedly into the condo’s parking lot after spotting her standing there alone. He had even acted shy; she wrestled with her pride, as he had told her how naturally beautiful he thought she was before he asked her to have dinner with him the following Thursday. She had accepted his offer and now she couldn’t talk to anyone that loved her enough to help for fear of endangering their lives. She was all alone and she was really afraid. Oh God Lina, she punished herself, why didn’t you listen to the warning bells in your head instead of doing something so impulsive?

  3

While Lina was closing up her Florida office for the night, Tammie Dapoom was just stepping into the shower; out in California. Wow, she marveled, could I really be falling in love with Brandon? Yeah, there was no denying that he was grade A beefcake, but to fall in love at first sight? That kind of thing only happened in the movies, didn’t it? Her new, temporary bodyguard was a pleasing mixture of brains and heart and virile masculinity. She had stood in the doorway this morning watching Chance pack his car, towered over by Brandon’s 6 ' 5 frame. At 5 ' 10 it was rare that any man towered over Tammie. She began to mentally select her wardrobe for her and Brandon’s excursion. With her excitement growing, she began to mentally rummage through her large collection of high heels that she could easily pull off next to a man of Brandon’s height, to select which ones would go best with her favorite dress. With renewed appreciation for the exotic scents of her expensive bathing products Tammie smoothed conditioner into her straight, jet-black hair. She thought of Chance with his concealed weapons permit and the guns that he carried to assist in his occupation as her bodyguard. And she shivered; despite the hot water, as she pictured Brandon with his bulging muscles and his big, bear-like hands, and decided that Brandon didn’t have the need for weapons permits and loaded guns.

She finished toweling off with a thick terry cloth towel, wrapped an identical towel around herself and hurried to her dressing table in her bedroom suite. She pondered the wisdom of employing two full-time bodyguards as she expertly applied her make-up to her heart-shaped face. She thought of the loyalty Chance had shown to her over the years, rarely taking even a day’s vacation. She was sure that she could never repay Chance’s loyalty with harm, but three weeks wouldn’t be enough time to come to know Brandon either; she worried as she guessed at the depth of his character and mystery. She watched her amethyst eyes shine with curiosity as she saw Brandon arrive for his first day of work for her, bags in hand, looking more like a movie star himself than a bodyguard. He looked so good the first thing this morning; she remembered as she dusted powder onto her pixie nose, standing at her doorstep in tailored navy blue slacks and a cream colored silk button down that he left open at the collar. She sifted through her lip glosses until she came out with the exact color to match the heightened glow in her cheeks. If the look in Brandon’s gray-blue eyes was any hint, than Tammie wasn’t