The Darkest Half (In the Company of Killers #8)

  THE

  DARKEST

  HALF

  IN THE COMPANY OF KILLERS #8

  —

  J.A. REDMERSKI

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, historical events, businesses, companies, products, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, persons living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 Jessica Ann Redmerski

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole, or in part, and in any form.

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without prior written permission is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  ---

  This book contains adult themes that may not be suitable for persons under eighteen.

  ---

  Cover & interior design by Lonely Raven Studios | J.A. Redmerski

  Cover photo by Nomad_Soul | Shutterstock

  ---

  J.A. Redmerski | THE DARKEST HALF

  Fiction – New Adult Crime & Suspense

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  1

  Niklas

  Francesca Moretti. I knew that killing her on that mission in Italy would come back to bite me in the ass one day. I just never expected it so soon. Or like this. And I really didn’t expect that Jackie would get mixed up in it. But then nothing ever happens like we expect, either.

  Hell, I don’t know what’s gotten into me. First, I have a thing for Izzy. Almost killed her once, then I catch feelings for her that I never wanted. Then I start fucking Nora Kessler, and even though I feel like I want to scrub my eyes out every time I look at her, I end up fucking her again. Nora’s like getting so shitfaced drunk you puke your guts up all night and swear to the porcelain god you’ll never drink again, only to sober up and buy a fifth of whiskey the very next weekend. Though I haven’t been that drunk since my early twenties, nothing brings back memories of violent vomiting and toilet-kissing like Nora Kessler.

  Now, I’m panicking about Jackie.

  Women. That’s my problem. I love them, though they are great at getting under my skin. I can’t live with or without them, that whole cliché. But it’s true. Maybe I have mommy issues. I should see a psychiatrist. Only problem there is that I’d never talk to a man about my shit, and if I got a woman, I’d probably fuck her, too.

  Jackie.

  I need to focus. She’s innocent, and she’s in trouble because of me. And it’s because of her that I’m…conflicted about her being in trouble.

  Shake it off, Nik. Shake it the fuck off.

  I race past cars on the freeway for twenty minutes before seeing my exit out ahead shining green under my car's headlights. Another fifteen minutes down a dark, winding road, I arrive at the address Mr. Moretti instructed me to meet him.

  Hmm. A psychiatric hospital. Coincidence? Or a big fucking slap in the face?

  I park on the side of the road instead of out in the open because I have plenty of time left before the forty-eight hours Mr. Moretti gave me are up. I want to see what I can see first.

  I took a plane from Boston to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the rest has been driving a rental. I realized on the way that the forty-eight hours seemed generous because it wasn’t for my benefit. It was enough time for Mr. Moretti to drive to this place—more than enough, actually—as taking a plane with a kidnapped woman would be too risky. But why Pennsylvania? Why not pick somewhere closer to where he took her? And why forty-eight hours? It’s less than a five-hour drive from Boston. I guess I’ll find out soon. Maybe I got here before they did; that would certainly be to my advantage. It’s even to my advantage getting here much earlier than expected; the element of surprise and all.

  There are lights on, glowing in the plexiglass windows, so either the electric company has forgotten the old three-story building, or it’s not abandoned. The unkempt grounds and the vines growing along the rock wall make it look abandoned, but people committed to mental wards aren’t considered human by most of the population, so it’s easy to overlook the upkeep. Like the ghettos, white trash trailer parks, and where the homeless sleep. Nobody cares about them, so why the hell would they put money into where the Forgotten are forced to live? Personally, I feel more comfortable around the Forgotten. Granted, I’ve got more money than I know what to do with, but that’s just it—I don’t know what the fuck to do with it. I give the shit away, and twice as much magically appears in my bank account the next day.

  I imagine ninety-five percent of the population would love to have my “problem”. Maybe I’ll give it to them. No, maybe I’ll give it to Jackie when I get her out of this. If I get her out of this. She can take my millions and save as many girls as she wants, and I can find a nice little island somewhere and get away from all this. Maybe I’ll go live among an aboriginal tribe somewhere, adopt their primitive culture, lose my boots and my leather jacket and my cigarettes; let my hair grow out, and my junk hang out; maybe I’ll get a wife or two or three. Nah. I’d kill myself before I subjected myself to the nagging and drama of more than one woman.

  And besides, I like my boots, leather jacket, and cigarettes. And, I admit, I’m a one-woman kind of guy when it’s of the wife or serious girlfriend variety, which is why I’ve never had a wife or serious girlfriend.

  After checking my gun’s clip, I slip into the shadows and make my way around to the back of the building. There’s a small parking lot with weeds sprouted through potholes and chunks of asphalt scattered about. Only two cars are parked close to the building; a white transport van is parked underneath a portable metal garage; a blue dumpster sits next to it, overflowing with black garbage bags. Shadows move past one window on the lowest floor and two windows on the highest floor. And I smell food cooking. The heavy kind bubbling in giant pots, enough to feed thirty or more people. OK, so it’s not abandoned. It’s a fully functional, open-for-business psychiatric hospital, and what the fuck am I doing here? Why would they bring Jackie to a place like this?

  Confused, I move forward, keeping to the shadows along the base of the building, gun in hand, finger near the trigger. As I approach the windowless back door, it opens.

  I stand frozen; gun pointed at a man in a white T-shirt tucked into a pair of khakis; a garbage bag dangles from his hand. He looks like an orderly.

  “You must be Niklas Fleischer,” the man says.

  Despite the gun pointed at him, he casually walks to the dumpster and tosses the bag atop the pile. What the hell is going on here? I could shoot him, but I need answers first. And he must know that, or else he wouldn’t be so calm about the whole thing.

  Wait…Mr. Augustin was the name I used when I went to Italy to find a kidnapped girl named Olivia Bram, when I was supposed to apprehend Francesca Moretti and bring her back to the United States for Olivia Bram’s father to deal with in his own way. It was the name I used when I didn’t bring b
ack Olivia Bram—because she didn’t want to come back—and when I didn’t apprehend Francesca Moretti but killed her instead to get back at Victor.

  Even though it’s probably just that Mr. Moretti has discovered my real name, I got this odd feeling in my gut all of a sudden about why this guy used it.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” the man adds.

  “Where is Mr. Moretti?” The pad of my finger brushes against the trigger.

  The man puts up his hands in a semi-surrendering fashion. “Mind if I grab a smoke from my pocket?”

  I glance at his pocket. No gun. Just the small rectangular shape of a pack of cigarettes.

  “Sure. Go ahead.” With my free hand, and without taking my eyes off the man, I reach into my jacket pocket and get a cigarette for myself.

  “Mr. Moretti will be here soon,” he says, and takes a long drag, holds it deep in his lungs. “You should come inside and get comfortable. Wait for him.”

  “Where’s Jackie?”

  The man smiles, close-lipped. He inhales another drag and takes his precious time before answering.

  “She’s inside,” he says, smoke streaming from his mouth, “waiting for you.”

  OK, I’m no idiot. I know that everything about this is wrong and suspicious. But worse is that I already know, not so deep underneath the surface, that I’m in a load of shit. The man is too composed. That smile on his face too confident. In the back of my mind, it’s why I haven’t moved backward or forward; why I haven’t pressed the trigger and put a bullet in this guy’s head already—because I know, without having to see or hear them, that there are more where he came from.

  I’m surrounded.

  I’m fucked.

  So much for the element of surprise. The surprise is on me. Mr. Moretti is clever; I’ll give him that. He knew I’d get here long before the forty-eight hours he gave me were up, and he would be waiting. But I’m not dead. And neither is Jackie—I know this because they’d have killed me by now—so what does Mr. Moretti want? He definitely wants something from me.

  “All right.”

  I follow the orderly into the building; an offensive layer of bleach lingers on the air; the walls and ceiling are white-gray, the floor sterile white tile that makes the squeaking of rubber-soled shoes loud and annoying. I follow him down a long stretch of brightly lit hallway with doors on either side. Rooms. Unlit. Large, square-shaped plexiglass windows. But they’re all empty.

  We round the corner at the end of the hall and step into a room with many tables. There are two doors: the one we entered and another obscured by shadow on the other side, which is closed and probably locked.

  With that thought, I hear the door behind me close and then lock; the lights in the ceiling hum to life above me as someone flips a switch on the other side of the room beside a darkened door. It’s another orderly; he remains standing there, guarding that exit; hands folded down in front of him. The only other potential way out of this room is through that elongated plexiglass window; it’s as tall as I am from the waist up and stretches about twenty feet along the wall, revealing the hallway outside.

  “Have a seat,” the orderly says, pointing to a chair.

  “I’ll stand.”

  He shrugs with that “suit yourself” look.

  He hasn’t told me to get rid of my gun, and I find that both strange and my only relief.

  I hear heels tapping, and then fluorescent light floods the hallway outside the plexiglass. The tapping gets louder as the woman approaches—I’m sure it’s a woman and not a man wearing dress shoes because I know the sound of a woman’s walk—and the distinct sound of a woman’s walk in a pair of stilettos. Another Moretti sister, maybe?

  A tall woman walks past the window; yellow-blond hair is pinned up at the base of her neck. She’s wearing a black silk blouse with long flowing sleeves and a tight gray pencil skirt that hugs voluptuous curves and stops above her knees. The orderly standing guard at the door closes it behind her.

  “Hello, Niklas,” the woman says.

  Niklas?

  “Hello.”

  “You’re probably wondering who I am.” She moves toward me on those stilettos, pulls out a chair at the table and sits down, crosses her legs, props her right elbow on the table, and dangles her hand from it.

  “No,” I tell her, “I don’t really care who you are; I’m here for Mr. Moretti and for Jackie.”

  The woman smiles, close-lipped; she licks the dryness from her lips and casually presses her back against the chair.

  “Why don’t you have a seat,” she says, glancing at the empty chair next to her.

  “Just like I told that guy, I’d rather stand.”

  “I’d rather you sit,” she says, and although her tone never changed, I still felt the faintest hint of threat in her words.

  I point my gun right at her face, finger on the trigger; the two orderlies move toward us, but they stop when she puts up her hand. Her gaze never moves from mine, and in it, I see nothing but bursting confidence and complete and utter fearlessness. She knows I’m not gonna shoot her—at least not right now, while she has all the cards and I’m standing here trying to pretend I have anything. I don’t have shit, and she knows it.

  I lower my gun and sit heavily on the chair with a defeated sigh; my legs splayed out into the floor. I rest my gun on my lap but keep it in my hand, ready to fire.

  “Where is Mr. Moretti?”

  “He’s not here,” she says.

  “Yeah, so, when’s he gonna be here?”

  “Oh. Well, Mr. Moretti,” the woman says, “won’t be coming, I’m afraid. He never was coming. I’ve never met him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  One side of her perfect mouth lifts into a subtle grin; she casually crosses the other leg, and I notice a tiny hummingbird tattoo on her ankle. She takes her precious time to answer, which makes me want to put a bullet between her eyes. I grit my teeth instead.

  “You were brought here under false pretenses, Niklas Fleischer. But it had to be that way, or you wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

  I lean forward and look her in the eyes.

  “Why wouldn’t I have come otherwise?”

  “Now you’re interested in knowing who I am, aren’t you?” she says.

  “Yeah. Who the hell are you?” I inhale a deep breath, trying my damnedest to keep from exploding. “And why wouldn’t I have come otherwise?”

  She leans forward too, as if to match me, to one-up me, still as confident and fearless as she was the moment she walked into the room. Who the hell is this woman?! She reminds me of Nora—the only difference is that Nora doesn’t intimidate me.

  “My name is Lysandra,” she says. “And I’m the operative our brother, Victor Faust, was supposed to be in The Order.” She leans forward even farther and stops just inches from my face, daring me, testing me, hoping I make a mistake so she can demonstrate how much higher on the scale she is than I am. “And you wouldn’t have come otherwise because the only person alive in this world you would never betray or risk is the one person in this world that we want.”

  “You brought me here for Victor,” I say, and I’m the first one to pull away and lean back against the chair again. “You’re working for Vonnegut, and you kidnapped Jackie. You knew I wouldn’t come for her if it meant using me to capture my brother.” Our brother, seeing as how she is, apparently, our sister.

  “Precisely.” She leans against the chair again and crosses her arms. “Letting you believe it was Mr. Moretti who kidnapped your whore, gave you plenty of time to ponder every scenario. You knew what to expect; you were given forty-eight hours to think about what you’d say, what you’d do, who in Mr. Moretti’s family you might use against him. You knew going into this that the Moretti family is powerful, but they’re not operatives. Mr. Moretti himself, although he’s a killer, is just a mafia bully. Any situation involving him you knew you’d be able to get yourself out of.” She cocks her head to one side. “But you never wo
uld have shown up if you knew The Order had taken her because you would have known right away why she was taken, and you would have known you couldn’t get yourself out of this under any circumstances. You would have had to accept that your whore, your woman, your friend—whatever you want to call her—was going to die, and there was nothing you could do to prevent it. So, showing up to rescue her would have been pointless. And we wouldn’t have you. Sitting here. Right now. Am I right, Niklas, or have I severely misjudged you?”

  I swallow. And I hate this bitch already.

  I look at my hands; the gun is still there, but it’s as useful in this place as an umbrella in a flood.

  I set it on the table.

  “Yes. You’re right,” I admit. “But there is one thing you did severely misjudge, Lysandra.” I smirk at her, then prop my left foot atop my right knee and cross my arms. “No matter how you managed to get me here, there’s nothing you can do or say that’ll turn me on my brother. I can’t give you what you want because I don’t know where he is. But even if I did—”

  “Oh yes, Niklas,” she says, “I’m aware of that. I knew going into this that you’d never give him up and that you’d never cooperate with us in helping find him.”

  “Then what are we doing here?” I ask. “You may as well kill me and get it over with.” I laugh mordantly under my breath. “Or do you plan to torture me? That’s what people like you usually do to those who won’t talk.” I motion my hands in front of me and scoff. “If you know me as well as you think you do, then you already know I won’t talk.” I lean toward her, darkness in my gaze. “Even if you skinned me alive. So, again, tell me, What. The fuck. Are we doing here?”

  Lysandra glances at the orderly guarding the door; he nods and steps out into the hallway but not in view of the elongated window. A few moments later, the door opens, and another orderly walks in with Jackie. Her hands are bound behind her back; there’s a cloth wrapped around her mouth, tied behind her head; her hair is disheveled and bloodied, and mascara is streaked and smeared across her face. She’s still wearing the same clothes she was wearing when I picked her up at the airport.