Retribution

By Ian Conner

Dealing death wholesale is a cold and lonely task. What could lower a man to kill without compassion. Alex Conway felt the senseless loss of his family due to bureaucratic bungling fit the bill. After the loss of his wife and daughter, alone and desperate, he hatches the plot to get his revenge by taking the lives of legislators that took his family from him.
Alex is discovered by a willing accomplice, Tara Snow, a mother who lost her daughter in much the same way. As the two carry out their mission we're introduced to the seamy underbelly of political workings and cover-ups.
Conner weaves a compelling story and carries the day with believable characters, scenes, and action. He drives home the old saying that when you seek revenge-dig two graves…three …four many more???

 

Alex Conway is in the same tradition as the Punisher's Frank Castle. Conway is a classic anti-hero who seeks vengeance for the perceived wrongs against him and his family. Pursued by female characters from the press and a specialized unit from the FBI, Conway uses recently gained and unlimited resources to enact his plans.

This l thriller is a roller coaster ride. From beginning to end, it will leave the reader wondering, who is the true villain in this novel? Is it the grief-stricken and vengeance-seeking protagonist? Or is the true source of evil the crushing and corrupt government machine that drove him over the edge?

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Raptor Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224432639

Ian Conner

Ian Conner is retired and spent most of his adult life as a Marine and Army Infantry Sergeant. A hundred percent disabled veteran after multiple head and other injuries, he is part of a growing number of vets classified as "neuro-diverse", an MST survivor and have several issues such regarding comprehension, concentration, and vision issues that he has OVERCOME to write several novels. After witnessing a lifetime of destruction, the thought of creating something tangible and lasting holds great appeal. He finds writing a cathartic way to redefine himself both in his eyes and in the eyes of others. Writing for fun, Ian has completed seven novels with an eighth near done with two more ideas in the scribble/chapter phase. He has written across four genres Fantasy, Thriller, Science Fiction and Horror. Now living near San Diego California with his wife Bonnie, a cellist, and their dog, Isabella. Conner spends his days fostering kittens, gardening, and creating worlds on the page.

Book preview

IAN CONNER

If you enjoy my books

Write a Review

on your favorite platform

and recommend them

to your friends. 

© 2024 by Ian Conner  Black Raptor Books

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Formatting by Micah Marquez

ISBN: 979-8-9897676-2-5 

FOR MY WIFE BONNIE

WHO WISHES WE HAD PUBLIC SERVANTS IN WASHINGTON INSTEAD OF POLITICIANS.

Blank

Other books by Ian Conner

Cardinals

DARK MAIDEN

Griffin’s Perch

Cooper’s Ridge

The Long Game

Solaris

––––––––

If you enjoy my books

Write a Review

On your Favorite Platform

And recommend them

to your friends. 

Blank 

A special thank you to

Micah

Who always offered encouragement and mean names.

Blank

Retribution

IAN CONNER

Blank

CHAPTER 1

The senate minority leader’s past did not take a great deal of digging into to find the nugget the investigator was looking for. The greed in American politics made the mining for damaging information all too easy. Emma Cohen was driven by the democratic platform, a black-and-white thinker. She was increasingly regarded as old guard and perhaps ready to retire. Her antics on the hill were part of the culture that led to the government shutdown.

The investigator had no idea about who hired him or their motives. He sat in the same chair for the past two months, staring at his laptop and sifting through the minority leader’s dirty laundry.

It was the senator’s finances that glowed nuclear to the investigator. He got his hands on those computer records ironically by going out in public. Sometimes he popped into the Davenport Coffee Lounge, a plant-filled non-profit student café on the American University campus six blocks from his house, to do his digging. All the local hipsters and AU students used it as their workspace/hangout. He wasn’t enough of a regular to draw attention when he showed up that afternoon. He took his usual table beneath the giant world map in a snug, sun-filled corner of the café. Hunched over his laptop and itching for a smoke, he found files to fiddle with while watching out for the young woman he was waiting for. He didn’t wait long.

The goth girl who sat down was a total cliché, head-to-toe in black with spidery purple hair, smudgy kohled eyes and a diamante nose piercing. Her arms, thoroughly tattooed, were a blue-green wilderness of wild things, her one-eyed black cat Pirate, a tiger symbolizing ferocity and sensuality, a lotus blossom that apparently meant beauty grows in the darkest places.

She slumped in the chair across of him and pushed a piece of paper across the table. Had to move hell and earth.

I bet.

Their conversation was always clipped and cryptic before the investigator produced an envelope and handed it over. 

Right, two days. Meet here again, she said and then left. He soon followed to have that desperately need cigarette.

The investigator was not overly concerned he was being stiffed. Goth Girl, whose name was Stacey, a sassy Baltimore girl educated on the streets, was resourceful and had worked for him before. Even if that wasn’t the case, he didn’t care. The money wasn’t his.

Two days later, they repeated the exercise at the café. This time she shoved an envelope across to him and quickly left, $10,000 richer and having committed various felonies to get the information the investigator needed.

He paid for his coffee and rushed out to return to his desk. Once he got back to his apartment, he opened the banking records for Emma Cohen. There were several things that caught his attention, chief among them was a series of transactions from 20 years ago, 12 payments totaling 200 grand. An annual payment from various accounts since 1998 for $20,000 a year. All payments were made to a New York lawyer. Among his client list was a family, whose ten-year-old daughter was turned into a vegetable by a drunken driver. The files from Goth Girl were a treasure trove. The investigator dug into the lawyer’s payments and found one for $30,000 to a Noah Birdwell. He was a retired police chief for the town of Onata. Birdwell headed the investigation into the drunk driver that caused the accident that injured the young McDougal girl. He read the reports from the newspapers at the time.

"A white Mercedes was seen leaving the scene according to witnesses," he read aloud, smirking.

He flipped through a sheaf of papers with DMV records. Surprise, he mumbled to himself, Cohen owned a white Mercedes at the time. Which she conveniently sold the day after the McDougal hit-and-run.

Birdwell, the retired chief of police, died of cancer two years ago. The investigator paid Birdwell’s daughter a visit to discuss the case and hit pay dirt. 

***

Behind the Federal-era redbrick townhouse on a neat, leafy Georgetown street, the detective walked up to the small ivy-draped carriage house tucked away, off the street, in a cobbled courtyard.

A slender woman in her late-forties with a silvery blunt-cut bob opened the door. She was waifishly chic in dark-gray jeans and a cream cashmere sweater, with a cheery bright-eyed white terrier at her feet.

Hi, Miss Sloan? Thank you for calling and seeing me today. He peered curiously above her head at the giant silver Buddha figurine in the foyer beyond before reaching to shake her hand.

She stared at him, sphinx-like and steely. Come in, she said, wandering off inside.

He followed her into her dazzling, light-filled all-white living room. She motioned for him to sit on the long white couch with cloven bronze feet, then disappeared. He glanced around the stylishly spare double-height-ceilinged room, which had a galleried sleeping loft and an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He noticed all her furniture had beastly cast-bronze cloven or camel-toe feet. Weird, he thought. Most of the surfaces were covered with stacks of outsize art books, white orchids in bloom, silvered-framed photos of herself, her dog and her jet-setting friends and other shiny artifacts of a life well lived. She seemed to live alone with her dog, and he speculated she was either a writer or worked in the art world.

When she returned, she held a box under her arm.

The investigator began to assure her. I’m not here to disparage your father Miss—

She held up her hand, stopping him. Don’t worry, honestly. You must be the only one in town that feels that way. My father was a piece of work. I’ve been through it. Everything you need about the McDougle girl is in that box.

Perky and quite frank, she had the manner of someone who didn’t like to waste time. Flopping down on the furry-white beast of a sofa that seemed to have swallowed her little white Highland terrier, she lit a cigarette and watched the investigator. Dad’s dead and no one is missing him. Disclosing that stuff won’t change how people feel about him much. It might change how they feel about Emma Cohen though.

She took a long pull on her cigarette and pointed to the box on the glass camel-toed coffee table between them. He popped off the lid and stared, drop-jawed, at its contents. The entire investigation file that had mysteriously vanished from the Onata Police Department was inside. It had been at the house all this time. It contained notebooks from the officers, written reports, and other evidence in the original box. 

She gazed at him, and he gazed back, stunned.

Whaddya think? she asked and laughed. Think it’ll matter that the-soon-to-be senate majority leader almost killed a little girl and covered it up?

Think so, yeah... quite a bombshell.

The sphinx-like Miss Sloane revealed that a New York mass-circulation newspaper reporter searched out the file in 2010 when researching a story about the McDougal girl’s death. The story was submitted to the editor for publishing but never actually run. The reporter Anna Kogan was fired but also received a $10,000 payment from Rod Taylor. He was a New York lawyer, the same lawyer who made the payments to both Noah Birdwell and the McDougal family. The same lawyer who still had a relationship with Senator Emma Cohen.

Once back at his office, the investigator transferred the verbal interviews on his iPhone and all the documents onto USB thumb drives. Copies of the cancelled checks, missing police files, the senator’s bank statements, the lawyer’s bank statements, medical statements listing the McDougal girl’s treatment and care until her death. It was a paper trail any prosecutor would’ve done cartwheels for. He prepared five copies of everything and placed them in boxes. The list was sure to get attention of, well, everyone. The New York attorney-general, CNN, Washington Post and Fox News. He sent the original files to the client who hired him to ferret out the information about the senator.

Satisfied, he turned away from his desk and rang the client. Yes sir, he said down the phone, "It’s Chappaquiddick only much less murky. The girl died of her injuries and there was a cover up. Manslaughter would most certainly have been the minimum charge with bribery to boot.

Can you send it over? the man asked.

Yes sir, they’re ready to go out this afternoon. The FedEx drop is across town. No prints. It’s not my first rodeo. No trace back to me or you. Your copies will be couriered to the address you gave me. Yes sir, I appreciate the confidence and the generous budget you gave me.

Switching off the burner phone, he put it and anything else related to the case into the package bound for the client. He called a bike messenger he frequently used to pick the boxes.

He sealed up the boxes, still wearing the blue nitrile gloves. Then he took everything down to meet the messenger on the street. It was 3pm and the messenger was in-bound any minute.

He took out his own iPhone and called him. Rowdy? he asked.

It was the messenger. He laughed. He could hear Rowdy Allen huffing and puffing.

I’m a block away. 

The investigator smiled, by the time he turned around Rowdy Allen skidded to a screeching stop in front of him. His face glowing, his legs burning, he caught his breath and looked at the boxes the investigator handed him.

Chloe Sachs! I love her, Rowdy said, stuffing the boxes into his pack, And she knows me.

Good. Make sure you hand it directly to her. Make her sign for it herself. No one else. Understand, Rowdy?

Got it. Hot Stuff?

You can watch the news two hours after you deliver it to see. We have the same deal as always. I wasn’t here, he said, handing him three crisp hundred-dollar bills. Got it?

Sure thing, I know nothing, Rowdy said, shoving the last package in his bag and sped off down the block.

When he arrived at the MSNBC building, a 70s-style monolith of glass-and-beige concrete on Nebraska Avenue, he asked for Chloe Sachs. Hot and flushed, he brushed his thick sandy-brown hair carefully away from his forehead and flashed a bright white smile at the lobby receptionist, who was calling her. Can you make sure she knows that Rowdy Allen is the courier delivering.

Twenty minutes passed, but Chloe Sachs did in fact come down herself. Her long, blonde hair was uncombed and she seemed distracted, as if he’d caught her in the middle of something, and likely did. What he loved about her was how self-possessed and laid-back she always appeared.

Rowdy, still pedaling? Sachs asked with a friendly smile and led him to a quiet corner of the lobby. Whatcha got?

He said it was hot when he called for the pickup.

He? she asked pointedly.

Sounds like a man. I never see the guy. Rowdy handed Chloe a yellow sticky note with his phone number on it. I’ll bet you dinner, he added, unusually confident. If it’s not dynamite, I’ll buy. If it is, you do and it’s an actual date.

She looked at the sticky note dubiously, then smiled and held out her hand. Deal. It’s a bet.

Okay great, I’m gonna wait right here. Open it!

Rolling her eyes teasingly, Sachs took the box and pulled the tear strip. She flipped open the booklet with a timeline on first page. The first thing that screamed off the page was the name of Senator Emma Cohen. Thumbing through the pages, she glanced up at him, wide-eyed. "Holy shit, Rowdy. This is serious...

Thought it would be.

You win. Dinner at Pineapple & Pearls in Capitol Hill?

Wow, fancy.

Next week, though.

Fair enough, he said with a rakish smile. I’ll hold you to it.

Yeah, deffo. I’ll buzz you next week.

I can’t wait to see you reporting this afternoon. He laughed and left the building. 

Sachs got into the elevator, pressing the file against her chest, a smile crept across her face, her eyes gleamed. The contents of the package were indeed dynamite. Hit by that jolt of adrenaline that comes with a big story, she knew the file was worth much more than a date with Rowdy. He was a fun guy, always game for a laugh.

She had a million phone calls to make to confirm the assertions in the folder by airtime.

Back in her office, Sachs put a fact-checker to work verifying a few things to make the information was credible. An hour later everything was airtight when Sachs walked toward the studio. She briefed her producer before the show. She dialed her cell to give her the news about the verification. It’s all checks out.

The news director gave her a thumbs up. Run with it then.

Sachs smiled and took her seat getting ready for air.

The Washington Post was nowhere near ready to announce anything for the morning edition’s headlines. It was much too early in the day. The private investigator knew Sachs’s reputation and fully expected if the Post would not be ready, she would. He watched the screen of his television with anticipation. The 4pm hour, where Sachs’s show was slotted, came on.

CHAPTER 2

The tsunami of sick people swamped the small emergency clinic in West Hollywood. In recent weeks the severe flu season was stretching hospitals in the city to breaking point. Alex Conway held his daughter Kitty, who was fast asleep in his arms, worried and exhausted. They had been waiting to be seen by a doctor for hours. Watching the rush of people streaming in to an already-packed waiting room, he thought it was a bad omen.

Mr. Conway? the nurse called him to the front counter.

He stood up carrying his nine-year-old daughter and went to see the nurse. Kitty moaned at being disturbed. She had a high fever. High enough he was frightened by it.

It’s alright sweetie, we’re finally seeing the doctor, he whispered to her, gently stroking her forehead.

One might suspect nurse Kelly was a tall woman when she sat behind the reception desk at the front of the office. In truth, she stood at a mere five-feet-two. Standing, her face was barely visible above the computer screen. Conway searched a moment before zeroing in on her. 

Over here, Mr Conway, Kelly said, waving.

His eyes watered from the fumes of the mixture of bleach and disinfectant a janitor was pushing across the tiled floor with a mop. He carefully weaved around the janitor toward the nurse. Kitty’s legs dangled as he walked to the counter and he cradled her head.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Kelly began, but your insurance won’t cover the visit. The government shutdown has stopped any CHIP insurance from working. 

Conway’s shoulders sagged. Kitty, who had been still and silent, moaned again in response. But she’s a very sick child.

I know and I’m so sorry. This was worst part of her job. She always felt awful having to turn away desperate people, especially when kids were involved.

Dr Mark’s Urgent Care Clinic was profit-driven, like the entire American healthcare system. Hospitals were legally obliged to treat people in need of emergency care regardless of their ability to pay. At the same time, understaffed, overloaded hospitals were run as profit-making businesses and tended to make decisions on how they treated patients based on their insurance status. Those without insurance or cash were systematically turned away.

I’m out of work so I don’t have cash or other insurance, he said, distressed. The government program CHIP is all I have to pay for the visit.

CHIP no longer works since the government was technically closed and not paying their bills.

So what do I do? Conway asked her, nearly in tears. Look at her... she’s burning up.

Maybe you should take her to ER.

We just came from the ER. The nurse there said they’re overwhelmed, running out of drugs and beds. They couldn’t treat her.

Conway had one hand out pleading with Kelly the other held Kitty.

His daughter stirred on his shoulder. Daaaaddy, my head hurts, she murmured in breathy rasps, clutching her forehead.

It’s alright, sweetheart, he said quietly, doing his best to comfort her. A wave of panic passed over Conway when he realized Kitty wouldn’t be seen. He took a deep breath to stifle the dread and tried to reason with the nurse, We have to be able to be seen somewhere... just look at her.

I’m so sorry, Mr Conway but there’s nothing I can do, Kelly said evenly as possible.

Conway looked at the nurse with pleading, misty eyes. "Please, it’s urgent... I can’t take her back home in this state... she’s desperately ill. Can you just have her seen now and I’ll sort out the finances later. I’ll put my house up as a guarantee. Please, I’m begging you."

Kelly, seeing the despair on his face, looked away guiltily. I’m really sorry, sir. Believe me, I would help if I could.

It had been a quest to try to get someone to treat his daughter. Alex Conway took Kitty, whose full name was Kathleen, home and put her to bed. She was listless and feverish, burning to the touch.

He went to the bathroom medicine cabinet to get some flu meds. The world isn’t fair but that shouldn’t apply to children, he thought, tears welling up in his eyes, as he filled a glass with orange juice. He made a cold compress with a bag of frozen peas and a facecloth and returned to Kitty’s bedroom.

Here honey, take this, he said, giving her the juice and a Tylenol to help break the fever. Beneath the glow of fairy lights above her bed, her face was shiny and flushed with fever. He swept away the wisps of tawny hair off her forehead and placed the cold compress against her face and chest to cool her down. She was hot and hurting, and closed her eyes with a grimace. He lay down beside her and held her until she fell back to sleep.

He watched her sleeping and listened to her breathing. Her little heart-shaped face was swallowed by a mass of wild curls to match her spirit. She was named after Kathleen Cleaver, the beautiful Black Panther with the afro and ice-blue eyes. Cleaver had gone from being a shy, bookish girl from Alabama to become a female revolutionary, fugitive and Panther spokesperson, and currently taught at Yale, the most badass Ivy-league professor of all time. Kitty had her fighting spirit and always stuck up for the weaker, bullied kids at her school.

As he sat on the edge of Kitty’s bed, watching her, he thought back to her first day of school, walking her through the gates. He could still vividly picture her in her little denim skirt and red sweater, her tawny leonine curls flowing behind her, how happy she was to be starting first-grade and seeing her friends. Even so, it was a huge emotional wrench letting go of that tiny, squidgy hand and leaving her. He spent the rest of that day at work thinking about what she would be doing at that precise moment. Being a single parent who worked long hours, his neighbor Sharon Walker, whose daughter Edie was Kitty’s best friend since pre-school, would pick up the girls after school and she usually had dinner at the Walkers.

Wandering into the kitchen, Conway slumped into the chair, staring numbly out the window. He felt impotent and couldn’t believe it was happening again. His depression covered him like a cold, wet blanket in a rainstorm.

Money. Always is at the center of it all. What’s right never enters into the equation.

The powerlessness he felt was the same feeling that coursed through him when his wife Carly, Kitty’s mother, died during the last government shutdown.  While Congress argued along party lines about the Affordable Care Act without actually getting anything done, his wife shriveled, one day closer to death. Her cancer was a pre-existing condition and her employer’s insurance refused to cover the new treatment that could’ve saved her. The drugs they needed to try and cure her were experimental and extortionately expensive. ‘Experimental’ was like a get-out-of-jail-free card for insurance companies. He fought with the hospital as Carly’s cancer spread, but her fate was sealed. She was killed by a lack of money. Congress wouldn’t act, Conway didn’t have the money and insurance wouldn’t approve it or pay.

Alex and Carly were college sweethearts. The first time he saw her walking around campus in his sophomore year at UCLA, looking like a lioness, with a tawny mane of curls framing her heart-shaped face, caramel skin and big brown eyes, he shouted out, Hey beautiful! like an idiot. She was his girl crush for the next two years and he’d watch her breezing by with the cool guys. Alex had lots of great girlfriends, bright, funny, caring, but Carly was always on his mind. During their last year, they ran into each other at a Halloween Party. She was catwoman and he was a dressed as a New Romantic rocker. He smiled at her and she smiled back. When he found out she lived in the same co-ed dorm, he taped a note to her door, asking her out, and left a bunch of white roses and freesias. He would later discover that musky white flowers were her favorites.

Weeks later, Carly saw him flicking through the White Album in a West Hollywood bookstore. She’d been obsessed with Joan Didion since high school. That night, he found the book outside his dorm room with her phone number. When he walked over to her room to thank her, Carly invited him in. She was wearing her wild tangle of pre-Raphaelite hair tied back, no make-up and Joy perfume, smelling of jasmine and freesias. Brought up in the Deep South, she was mixed-race, born to a white mother and black father. But when she was growing up, the world saw her as black. Carly was warm and gracious, and he fell in love almost immediately.

Five years after graduation, they got married on the beach in Venice, California in 2001, when Alex was 28 and Carly 27. They remained in Los Angeles after Carly landed her dream job as a music teacher at a private girl’s school. He worked as a software engineer for a tech start-up. He eventually ended up being recruited as a computer engineer by the Los Angeles Police Department that had long been in the forefront of using data to help fight crime.

For years, every summer the Conways fostered litters of kittens and puppies, season after season, to save them from being euthanized in Los Angeles’s high-risk kill shelters. Carly was an only child raised by her mother in New Orleans. She never knew her 22-year-old black father, who died in Vietnam in the fall of 1974, when Carly was six months old. Her young, hardworking mother, a primary-school teacher, had to take on several part-time jobs including waitressing during the summers. Juggling multiple things with little time, she signed Carly up for everything, dancing, karate lessons, drama and music. And the music stuck hard and fast. Once school was out, she would be sent off to live with her maternal grandparents every summer on their horse farm in Rayne, Louisiana, where they ran boarding stables and offered horseback-riding adventures, riding, and horse-care lessons, along with taking in unwanted horses. Carly constantly brought home injured baby possums and raccoons, and orphaned barn kittens, and her grandparents taught her to care for them.

Alex Conway’s childhood was a crash course in understanding different people. His parents were an adventurous couple of journalists, who had been working in Kampala, Uganda until Idi Amin came to power, and they were forced to flee to back to their Nairobi hub, where Alex and his brother Ben where born. Things were conventional for a few years. They went to the international school in Nairobi until, aged nine, his parents announced they all were going on vacation. Off they set in a converted bus to North Africa before relocating to Cairo so they could shuffle back and forth covering the war in Beirut. They eventually sent the boys to boarding school in London.

In the summer of 1985, when Alex was 12 and Ben 14, the Conways moved the family back to their hometown, Shaker Heights, Ohio, a pristine, progressive inner-city suburb of stately houses and shady oaks, with its own vintage streetcars. The Conways reinvented themselves and opened up an indie bookstore-café in the lively, hippyish Coventry Road in neighboring Cleveland Heights. His family lived in a modest clapboard duplex, a faux-middle-class life, on the fringes closer to Cleveland. Alex went to Shaker Heights High School, feeling like an outsider among the preppy rich kids who lived in mansions, took holidays to the Caribbean and ended up going Harvard or Princeton. Neither he or Ben, who spent most of their childhoods in Africa and Europe, envied the Identi-kit lives of their rich friends. Ben, heartbroken about leaving London, hated the States and began plotting his escape to leave when turned 18. He left home to study in London, ending up marrying an English girl, and made a life abroad. Alex, a dreamer much like their parents, took a gap year and headed out West, lured by the light, the space and the freedom. His favorite writers made him want to move to LA, where he stayed. The longest he’d ever lived anywhere. He loved the gold light, the ocean, the desert, the devil winds and, when he met Carly, he felt like he had everything. 

Then, in September 2008,