Final Revenge

By Ken Kaye

A superstar singer and a jilted journalist-- imprisoned together at 30,000 feet

It was supposed to be the best day of his life. Jeff Bruce, a small-time newspaper editor, had planned to take to his girlfriend to dinner and surprise her with an engagement ring during dessert. Instead, he finds her with another man, sending him on a dark, drunken drive into Florida's Everglades. There, at a remote airport, he happens to witness a young woman being forced onto a jumbo jet by apparent terrorists. She turns out to be Marcy Blue, world-renown pop star. Suddenly, Bruce is captured as well and taken along on a violent flight. He first must devise a way to save both Marcy and himself. Then he sets out to discover why Marcy has become the target of a shocking obsession - and a final revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 18, 2008
• ISBN: 9781467840521

Ken Kaye

Ken Kaye's fiction, available from online booksellers, includes the collection of short stories "Birds of Evanston" and five novels: "Eve" (Adam's memoir, a novella), "The Net", "Eye of the Storm", "Survivors", and "Be the Best".Kaye lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he has worked as a college professor, a family therapist, and a consultant to family-owned businesses. (His nonfiction books are in the field of psychology.) Thirty-five years after his Ph.D., he earned an MFA in creative fiction from Bennington College.email: [e-mail] (and please remember to leave a review of my book at your favorite online retailer)

Book preview

1

The giant arena was pulsating. More than 20,000 rabid young admirers hooted and howled, jacked up on pounding music. Some rhythmically waved their arms above their heads while others danced wildly in the aisles. One kid actually climbed on stage, yanked down his pants and exposed his arousal—until abruptly overcome and ushered out by security.

For Marcy Blue, pop superstar, it was just another night on the road.

Wearing a skin-tight, black leather outfit, she moaned more than sang as she strutted back and forth in shiny red stiletto heels. Occasionally, she would fall in step with her backdrop dancers while powerful electric fans blew back her streaming brown hair. Or, she would seduce her audience with gyrating hips and tantalizing glares.

By all accounts, it was one of her splashiest performances.

Yet Marcy was exhausted. For the past two months, she had been on a whirlwind thirty-city tour to promote her latest CD. That entailed a day-to-day grind of nonstop travel, rehearsals and press conferences. It also involved a great deal of hard partying after her shows, when she was known to snort cocaine and down tequila to excess.

At least this gig in Miami would be the last stop. She was anxious to return to her sprawling estate in Malibu and hang out by the pool for a month. No recording studios, Oprah appearances or promotional photo shoots.

When the show finally ended, after two obligatory encores and a flood of adulation, she charged to her dressing room, ignoring all the hands and voices that reached out to her. She wiped the makeup and sparkles off her face and changed into blue jeans, a white sleeveless blouse and black high-heeled boots. Pulling her cell phone out of her shoulder bag, she called her road manager.

Get me the hell out of here, she growled. I want to be in the air like an hour ago.

The manager, a swarthy young man dressed in dark designer clothing, was waiting outside the arena by the limos that would cart her and her entourage away. He was used to such demands.

You got it, Marcy, he said patiently. The plane is waiting at MIA.

"Good. And keep the goddamn television people away. I am absolutely not in the mood to do a stand-up for Extra or Access Hollywood," she snarled.

He wanted to say, Yes, your highness, but Marcy Blue didn’t pay him a salary of three-hundred grand to be snide. She paid him to be efficient.

No one will bother you, he said matter-of-factly.

That was easy to say, of course. Everywhere Marcy Blue went literally hundreds of reporters, paparazzi and screaming fans hounded her, and it took a tremendous amount of security to protect her. But for this venue the road manager had made sure the public was blocked from the arena’s rear entrance and he had called in extra bodyguards. All he had to do was transport her to the airport safely. There, she would quickly board her Airbus A319, an airliner that had been converted into a luxurious private jet, and his job would be done, at least until she arrived in L.A. Then he would have to worry about a whole new set of logistics.

Ten minutes later, Marcy came out of a tunnel surrounded by no less than fifteen security guards, all muscular men wearing Staff T-shirts and stern faces. She was escorted to the front limo, while spectators hung over arena railings, straining to spot her from a distance.

There she is! There she is! one young girl shouted, catching a glimpse of her idol.

That was when the commotion began. Just before Marcy reached her stretched Lincoln, gunshots rang into the air. Two men brandishing semi-automatic pistols and dressed like limo drivers raced up to Marcy’s vehicle. One waved his firearm at the unarmed security guards, which stopped them dead in their tracks. The other slammed the butt of his gun into the head of Marcy’s driver, who was about to hold the door open for her.

Despite the layers of protection, the marauders shoved a helpless Marcy Blue inside the limo. While one man jumped in back with her, the other slid behind the wheel and hit the gas. The Lincoln peeled away with Marcy’s face visible in the rear window, a portrait of consternation and horror.

The road manager, too stunned to react at first, started yelling to his security people, Follow them! Go! Go! Go!

He frantically pulled out his cell phone and called 911. It wasn’t long before an army of police swarmed the vicinity, searching for Marcy Blue’s limo. Only a short while later, the vehicle was found abandoned and empty, three blocks from the arena—and the road manager knew his whole world had just blown up.

The unthinkable had happened.

Marcy Blue, one of America’s best known entertainers, had been kidnapped.

2

Kase? You home?

Jeff Bruce stood at the doorway to his kitchen, with his hand on the doorknob, sensing something wasn’t right. Outside, horns honked on nearby Interstate 95, rooftop air-conditioners strained against the broiling early June heat, and a passenger jet thundered upwards through the late afternoon haze.

However, the inside of his apartment was cool and much too quiet. Normally, he could hear her salsa rhythms blaring on the stereo or a novella chattering in Spanish on the television. Sometimes she would even sing at the top of her lungs while working around the house. Kasey Martin wasn’t a particularly subdued person. She was a veteran Fort Lauderdale police officer and helicopter pilot, assigned to the department’s aviation unit. She was a martial arts expert, skilled in hand-to-hand combat. She was a marksman with a Glock 9mm. And she was a hot-blooded Latina, who had been born in the Dominican Republic and reveled in her Hispanic heritage.

Bruce loved the way she had made theirs a cozy home. In the three months since moving in with him, she had replaced his Salvation Army furniture with modern bedroom and living room sets. She had tacked up paintings of pleasant Caribbean landscapes on his barren white walls. And she had converted the second bedroom into an office with his and hers computers.

Paying for all this hadn’t been easy, considering his rather meager pay as an assistant editor at the East Lauderdale Tattler, a small daily newspaper that mainly covered Fort Lauderdale’s elite society. Her police officer salary wasn’t exactly extravagant either, but they managed to find the money because they were building a life together.

Which was precisely why he had come home early on this afternoon; he intended to take her out to a nice dinner, get down on one knee during dessert and surprise the hell out of her with a ring. He had fallen madly in love with this tall exotic woman with almond-shaped eyes and milk chocolate skin, and it was time to make things legal.

Now, gently closing the door, he sensed someone other than Kasey in the apartment. He padded quietly across the living room and saw their bedroom door was closed. Maybe she was resting. But she rarely napped during the day. When she did, she always kept the door open and the television on. Edging closer, he heard distinct sounds of motion. Fearing she was on the other side of the door with her police service revolver drawn, ready to fire at an intruder, he almost called out her name.

Then the sounds became clearer, shooting prickles up his spine. He cautiously put his ear to the door and realized that what he heard were bedsprings rhythmically creaking. Grabbing the knob, heart pounding, he whipped open the bedroom door.

She was on top—her sinewy legs flexing as she lifted up and down, as though riding a slow-moving mechanical bull. Her long, straight jet-black hair cascaded down the front of her shoulders, dangling in her lover’s face. Eyes heavy and half shut, Kasey slowly turned to look at Bruce. The large muscular man under her also glanced over nonchalantly.

Bruce’s eyes narrowed and his throat constricted. Despite his disbelief and confusion, he was convinced she had heard him call out her name when he first walked in—yet didn’t care that he would find them.

It was in that incredibly surreal moment that Bruce noticed their two uniforms were neatly folded atop her dresser, accompanied by their holstered guns. That told him Kasey and the man, obviously another officer, had met here many times before. First-time lovers would have tossed their garments haphazardly on the floor.

Strangely, he also noticed they were making love with a framed photo on the bedside table as a backdrop. It showed Bruce and Kasey in bathing suits after a romp in the ocean, hugging on the beach; a shot they had asked a passerby to take only a month earlier. She later told him she would always cherish that picture. Now, that appeared to be an outright lie, along with everything else about their lives together.

As Bruce gawked, she seemed to smile in a sad way. She raised a hand and wiggled her fingers at him as she sometimes did when she said good-bye to him in the morning. She returned to her inamorato, leaned down and kissed him passionately, licking and biting. The bed springs never stopped creaking and the lust was never interrupted.

Too shell-shocked to move or act, Bruce continued to watch for several seconds, like a rubber-necking motorist fascinated by the mangled bodies in a car wreck. Deep down, he wanted to scream in anger and indignation.

Instead, he eventually backed out of the room.

Numbly, he left the apartment door wide open, trotted along the catwalk and took the stairwell down to the parking lot. Jumping into his pickup truck, Bruce noticed the blue and white Fort Lauderdale police cruiser next to Kasey’s red Jeep Wrangler. He darkly wondered what the police chief would say if he found out that two of his officers were screwing on city time.

Bruce fired up his truck and threw it into reverse, the tires squealing against the hot asphalt. Before he shifted into drive, he stopped to look up at his apartment—the place he and Kasey had called home. He let his forehead fall on the steering wheel and shut his eyes tight. It sure as hell didn’t feel like home anymore.

For no particular reason, he drove south on the interstate, unaware of the bumper-to-bumper traffic around him. He was trying desperately to figure out what had gone wrong, and where he had gone wrong.

Somewhere near Broward Boulevard, in the middle of a traffic jam, it occurred to him he wasn’t tough enough for her. That would explain why the entire time they had been together she had tried to change him into a stronger, and more forceful person.

She had demanded he get rid of his pansy Volkswagen Beetle in favor of something with muscle. So here he was driving a high-powered Nissan Titan, black in color to give it, and him, an even tougher appearance.

She had urged him to grow out his salt and pepper hair until it reached his shoulders, sport a goatee and leave stubble on the rest of his face, because it will make you look rough and sexy. He did this even though, as a middle-aged man in his early forties, it felt pretentious if not awkward.

She had convinced him to stop buying clothes at Wal-Mart and instead wear designer jeans and collarless shirts purchased from over-priced men’s fashion stores. Although this, too, made him uncomfortable, she at least allowed him to continue wearing a sports jacket, a habit stemming from his days attending a private, all-boys prep high school.

And she had goaded him into regular workouts, jogging, weight lifting and stretching. Although good for his health, it wasn’t easy, considering his normal exercise routine amounted to an occasional morning walk.

You may be forty-two, but we’re going to make you look thirty-two, she had said. I want a man who has confidence in himself, and not some wuss.

In short, she wanted a real bad-ass for a boyfriend.

At his core, Jeff Bruce was rather easygoing and sensitive, and while he tried to fulfill her every wish, no amount of hair, muscle, or trendy clothing would change him. He guessed that when she realized this, she had strayed. The more he thought about it, the more he came to believe she probably never really loved him in the first place.

The way she had wiggled her fingers goodbye seemed too malicious.

He resisted an urge to jam the accelerator to the floor and ram the car ahead of him. Instead, he waited for traffic to start moving again and continued driving to nowhere. As the hot afternoon sun eased toward the horizon, he capriciously took a connector ramp onto Interstate 595 westbound. Rush-hour traffic was thick here as well. Fifteen miles inland, where the highway sliced into the vast Everglades, he was able to break into the clear and speed up.

Normally, he might have enjoyed the open horizon, but he was wallowing in a dark pit. He couldn’t see anything except her hind end moving up and down. He could have gone for one of their guns while they were entwined. He could have blown them both away.

Is that tough enough for you, Kase?

Struggling to cope with his anger, he caught himself going well over ninety and slammed on the brakes to slow to the speed limit. A work van tailing too close behind had to swerve to avoid rear-ending him. Its driver angrily gave Bruce the finger as he passed by. Bruce ignored him.

Rather than continue onto Alligator Alley, the toll road leading to Florida’s West Coast, he arbitrarily took U.S. 27 southbound. He had no idea where it would lead and didn’t care. After following this highway for several miles, he turned onto a smaller road that aimed into a remote area dominated by scrubby pines, open fields and canals.

However, Bruce didn’t notice any of this. He was glancing at the empty seat to his right, where Kasey had so often sat during their travels together, swaying in time to music on the radio or holding his hand. He fought off heaviness in his chest.

As the sun began to set, he spotted a convenience mart with an adjacent liquor store—a place where hunters and campers made a last stop before delving into the Everglades. He pulled in and parked next to the only other car there, a rusted-out ’73 Plymouth.

Inside the liquor store, a young man sat behind the counter watching a NASCAR race on a small television. Wearing an oil-stained red cap, he sipped on a can of Budweiser and took frequent drags on a Camel. When he saw Bruce, he nodded and continued watching over-powered cars go around in circles.

It didn’t take Bruce long to find the Dewar’s.

With the cigarette dangling from his lips, the clerk rang up the purchase and put the bottle of scotch in a brown paper bag.

As the clerk handed over the change, he caught a glimpse of Bruce’s bloodshot eyes and asked, Everything okay, man?

Perfect, Bruce said, snatching the bag.

Back in his truck, Bruce drove to the first intersection and turned west into dwindling twilight. Once up to speed on this two-lane highway, he pulled the bottle out of the bag, twisted off the cap and took a deep pull. The alcohol bit into his gut and he grimaced. The second wallop went down easier.

The night settled in hard as he passed businesses that were far and few between, mostly tourist traps that offered souvenirs and airboat rides. Occasionally, vehicles came from the other direction. A sign told him Naples was seventy-five miles away, but the only place he was heading was into murky emptiness.

He took steady gulps of scotch with a slightly quivering hand. Mile after mile, he watched white dashed lines in the glare of his headlights. Soon, the darkness became profound, and he began to feel woozy, unsure if he was driving down a road or through an endless tunnel. Without realizing it, he had consumed more than half of the bottle, and the Nissan began swerving back and forth.

Then all the spirits hit hard.

He became violently dizzy. His vision went blurry and his stomach turned upside down. Drunk off my ass, he thought with a mixture of panic and mirth. He managed to pull to the side of the road in time to open the door and heave the contents of his stomach.

As he sat back up, wiping bile from his mouth with the back of his jacket sleeve, he noticed a narrow road to the right, cutting into the underbrush. This, he thought, would be the perfect place to disappear. He made a sloppy turn off the highway and followed the small paved road. It wound this way and that into increasingly thick swamp vegetation. Yet Bruce forged on, unconcerned as to where it might lead.

Impulsively, he began to sing an old Beatles tune, Can’t Buy Me Love, and got through a couple of stanzas before he jammed on the brakes, jumped out, doubled over and retched again. The open whisky bottle fell on the floor in front of the driver’s seat, and the remainder of its contents spilled out.

When he raised his head, now drenched in sweat, he saw the Nissan’s front tires had fallen over the lip of a canal bank and were half submerged. He realized he had come this close to driving the pickup all the way into the water, burbling down and dying anonymously, never to be found.

So the hell what, he thought with a giggle.

Standing up, he staggered in circles, trying to figure out where he was. Yet he was too smashed to know even what county he was in. As the world spun and he wobbled, one of his shoes splashed into the water, prompting him to outright laugh. He tilted his head back, gazed up at the sky, opened his arms, and howled like a lonely panther. He was surprised at how well he did this.

Then it all came flashing back—her riding him and leaning forward to kiss him while her hair fell all over him. The anguish washed in like a tidal wave.

Why, Kasey? he screamed. Why, dammit?

Filled with despair, and his emotions fueled by high-grade alcohol, he fell to his knees and sobbed, long and hard. Eventually, as the tears turned to sniffles, he stood up and reached into a side jacket pocket. He had hoped to grab his hanky to wipe his nose.

Instead, his fingers wrapped around the small velvet box.

He pulled it out and opened it up. Even under the scant light of the stars, the diamond sparkled, three karats and five-thousand dollars’ worth. He looked up at the sky, scanned the heavens, and hated himself for what he was about to do.

But he knew it had to be done.

Winding up like a baseball pitcher, he reared back and threw the box containing the engagement ring as far as he could. A few seconds later, he heard a soft distant splash. At first, he felt liberated, boldly thinking that he could move on with his life. Soon the stabbing pain of knowing he had lost her forever hit, and he fell to his knees on the canal bank near his truck, and cried again

In time, he pulled himself up and got back inside the Nissan. Reclining in the driver’s seat, he felt something under his right foot. He sat up to see the empty whisky bottle on the floor. He kicked it out of the way, closed his eyes, and passed out.

3

Billowing storms spawned in the Gulf of Mexico marched southeast across the open marshlands overnight. In deep and troubled sleep, Bruce never heard the heavy rains pelting his windshield. Yet, as the squalls subsided at dawn, a strange distant thunder jolted him awake.

Oddly, the thunder grew sharply in intensity.

Head throbbing, Bruce wondered what was going on. He crawled out of his truck and searched a sky as mushy as mashed potatoes, as the rains had left behind a foggy mist. Although he couldn’t see anything, the thunder, now constant, continued to build. Soon it reached deafening levels, and he was forced to put his hands over his ears.

Suddenly, bright lights were aimed right at him. A huge beast with wings and jet engines popped out of the overcast sky and screamed over him. Its ferocious winds blew back his hair, buffeted his clothing, and forced him to crouch down. Whipping around to follow it, he was astonished to see a runway right there. Somehow, it had eluded him in his drunken stupor the night before.

The plane, a Boeing 747, all white, save for a silver