All Through the Night (Liar's Web) (2 page)

But who was she really? Who did she belong to? Whose eyes did she have? Did she resemble her mama or her daddy? Why did these doubts continue to plague her? She had to rid herself of these crazy questions, ones that kept her up half the night, creating dark circles under her eyes and leaving her with lingering feelings of self-doubt.

What difference did it make? She'd been raised with all the love and care in the world by Earl and Shirley Dawkins, two kindhearted souls who'd taken her into their home and adopted her at the age of five. They had raised her, along with their biological son Lenny, in a modest, religious home filled with love and affection.

Her adopted parents had always told her she was “the child of their dreams if not their bodies”. And that would've been enough for her had it not been for the periodic flashes of memory that came to her at various periods in her life. Although the flashes were indistinct, fleeting images, they stirred up painful feelings of great happiness and unbearable loss. And there were the horrific nightmares. Dark, turbulent dreams of fire and ash that left her shaking and sobbing.

The insistent peal of her cell phone gained her attention, and she quickly glanced at the caller ID, letting out a loud groan as she instantly recognized her brother's phone number on the display.

“
Leave me alone, Lenny,” she pleaded as she willed herself not to pick up the call. Ignoring her brother's phone calls was an exercise in futility. She knew him well enough to know he would keep calling her phone until she answered.

Angrily, she picked up the phone. “Yeah, Lenny. Talk to me. I'm real busy this afternoon, so I don't have time to play around.”

“
Well, excuse me, Miss Realtor of the Year, Miss Liberty Creek, Miss Thing. Pardon me for actually thinking that my only sibling would actually have five minutes to spare for her baby brother. Hmmph! Seems somebody forgot what Mama always taught us about family coming first.”

 
“
You're not my baby brother. You're three years older than I am.”

Lenny laughed nervously on the other end of the line. “But I don't look a day over twenty-six, right? You know what they say…you're only as old as you feel.”

Darcel rolled her eyes, wishing she had never taken his call in the first place. Lenny usually called her to borrow money or fill her in on some trifling personal matter, such as his latest girlfriend drama. She was sick of the sordid details of his love life and hearing him piss and moan about the one that got away. She was tired of being his personal ATM machine and twenty-four seven sounding board. It was time for her brother to grow up and get a life.

“
I'm about to pull into my driveway. I'm in need of a serious bubble bath and a glass of Merlot. Can I holler at you tomorrow? It's been one hell of a day.”

I know you're not going to desert me in my hour of need,” he responded in a whiny voice.

“
If you're calling me again for money, I'm all tapped out. Like I told you last time, I am not your ATM machine or your personal bank. If you insist on gambling away your money, you need to make sure it's your hard-earned money you're throwing away. I work way too hard to throw good money after bad.”

Darcel could hear the sound of sniffles over the phone. “Baby sister, it's serious this time. Real serious. I'm in the hole real deep this time.” A long pause ensued over the line. She heard him clear his throat. “Problem is…if I don't get the money into certain people's hands tonight, you may be singing at my funeral.”

She laid her head on the steering wheel and began to massage her pounding temples with her free hand. It never failed. Her brother's phone calls always gave her a migraine. Time after time, she swore she wasn't going to let her brother pull her back into his sordid situations. Yet time after time, she found herself being dragged back into Lenny's messes.

“
Sister? Are you listening, baby sister? They've made threats to kill me…to chop me up into small, unrecognizable pieces. They want their money tonight. Darcel? Darcel?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn't manage to get the words out. At the moment, she was paralyzed by a feeling of intense, pulsing fear, and her hands began to shake violently in response. These scumbags weren't playing around. They were threatening violence, perhaps even death. She couldn't lose her brother!

Beside her parents, Lenny was her closest living relative. For a brief time, she was swept up in a dark current of sadness and overwhelming pain. The feeling wasn't unfamiliar. Goosebumps tingled on her arms, and she willed herself to remember where and when she'd experienced these powerful emotions. She felt as if she could almost remember the smell of burning leaves on an icy-cold night. And then it was gone, along with her tidbit of memory.

“
Are you still there?” Lenny asked in a teary voice.

“
I'm here, Lenny. I'll always be here for you. You're my brother,” she responded, her tone full of emotion. “I love you.”

She heard a loud sigh of relief on the other end of the phone. “So, you'll do it then? You'll meet Ronnie at the Sugar Shack with the two thousand dollars?”

“
The Sugar Shack? That place is practically condemned. You know damn well Hangman's Wharf is a dangerous place even in broad daylight.”

“
You'll be fine. You won't even have to get out of your ride. I'll let Ronnie know you'll hand off the payment to him from the driver's side window. Is 1:00 a.m. okay?”

“
One in the morning? Lenny! That's crazy. I have to be at the office at seven.” A profound silence ensued on the other end of the line. Her mind started whirling with all the possible things Ronnie and his sketchy associates could do to her brother. After a few moments of silence, she found herself saying, “I guess that's okay, given the circumstances. Maybe I can ask one of my male friends to come along with me for protection.”

“
It's safer if you go by yourself and make the payment.” He quickly added, “We don't want to rile them up by bringing along a posse.”

Safer for whom? She had to be all kinds of crazy to show up at Hangman's Wharf at one o'clock in the morning to pay off Ronnie Devlin, a lowlife criminal who had an arrest record as long as her arm. Not that she hadn't done worse. Over the years her brother had asked her to save him from the fire more times than she could count. The worst incident had involved bail money, an emergency trip to Tijuana, and an under-aged stripper. She was no longer surprised at her brother's lapses in judgment, just profoundly disappointed. It was stressful enough trying to hide the situation from her parents, not to mention the endless worrying over his reckless lifestyle.

As she stepped out of her red Lexus onto her pebbled driveway, Darcel couldn't resist admiring her unique home. She'd purchased the yellow Victorian with the sea-blue shutters three years ago, shortly after opening her own real estate agency Dawkins Properties.

At the time it had been a wreck of a place, having been written off as a hopeless case by its owner Willie Barnswell, who was eager to sell the place and be rid of it. Over the span of two years, she'd lovingly restored it to its former glory, painting the exterior and interior, gutting the kitchen, the master bath, and bedroom, and refurbishing it from top to bottom with plush furniture, jazzy artwork, one-of-a-kind antiques, and gleaming mirrors. It was her pride and joy, a testament to her determination and dedication to hearth and home. Like most realtors, she was nitpicky down to the very last detail about her living space.

As soon as she unlocked and pushed open her front door, the smell of vanilla greeted her like an old friend. The feminine side of her loved sensory stimulants—soaps, perfumes, candles, and incense. As a realtor she knew the importance of a good smelling home. There was an old trick in the real estate business involving the scent of baked apples and chocolate chip cookies hovering in the air as a potential buyer walked through the property.

These smells evoked images of warmth and contentment, thereby making the potential buyer feel an immediate connection with that particular home. Darcel had utilized that old trick more times than she could count. And more times than not, it worked like magic. As realtor of the year for the third year running, she could testify to the fact that in her line of business, one had to use every gimmick at their disposal to move the houses.

She wearily pushed the button on her answering machine, mentally noting a realtor's work was never truly done. There were always clients looking to make contact with her it seemed, no matter what time of the day or night. She chuckled out loud as she recalled the time an anxious buyer had woken her up in the middle of the night to make an offer on a house. She couldn't help but smile as she listened to a drunken message from her ex-boyfriend Chazz, who happened to be in town and was wondering if they could “hook up”.

“
Not in a million years,” she said in a snide voice as she recalled all the drama Chazz had put her through during their year-long relationship. There were also a half dozen messages from Lenny, who'd apparently been trying to reach her all day prior to his contacting her via cell phone. There was a heartwarming message from Mama requesting her presence at Sunday dinner and a separate message from Daddy asking her to check up on Lenny, whom he was deeply concerned about.

After checking her messages, Darcel glanced at her watch, letting out a loud groan as she realized she had approximately three hours to unwind and take a catnap. She treated herself to a warm bubble bath and then dressed in her most comfortable sweats and T-shirt, settling into a deep sleep on her queen-sized mahogany sleigh bed. All too soon her alarm went off, and by force of habit, she hit the snooze button. Ten minutes later she was out the door with a wad of cash from her emergency fund neatly tucked in her front pocket.

Although she had no intention of getting out of her car once she arrived at the Sugar Shack, she intended to deliver a scathing message to Ronnie when she hand-delivered the cash. She'd practiced her speech in her head at least half a dozen times. She was going to tell Ronnie Devlin if he ever so much as looked in Lenny's direction, she was prepared to alert the authorities to the fact he was running an illegal enterprise. And if that didn't scare him straight, she was gonna threaten to kick his ass. She'd done it a few times back in grade school, and she wasn't afraid to throw down with him if he even looked at her brother sideways from here on out.

“
No one messes with my family, Ronnie,” she murmured as she drove the deserted back roads toward the center of town. Ronnie Devlin. She'd known him since she was in kindergarten, and he'd always been trouble, in an out of reform school and wayward youth problems since he was ten. In high school, her senior class had voted him “most likely to do hard time”. In her opinion, it was only a matter of time before their prophesy was fulfilled.

The Sugar Shack was a deserted two-story building most people in town wanted to see condemned and demolished. When she was a teenager, the Sugar Shack was a popular hangout for the over twenty-one crowd, who'd congregate at the club to listen to music and learn the latest dance steps. A firestorm had erupted when a sixteen-year-old girl was raped at the club after being dragged in one of the back rooms.

The Sugar Shack had never recovered from all the bad publicity and the torrent of negative public opinion. Located on Hangman's Wharf, the Sugar Shack was now a local hangout for thugs, criminal-minded individuals, and wannabe gangsters looking for nothing but trouble. More nights than not, they found the action they were looking for, judging by the number of times she'd read in the Liberty Creek Gazette about violence breaking out at the Sugar Shack.

A perfect full moon hung in the pewter sky. It was a beautiful night. Too beautiful to be spending a single second of her leisure time waiting for a deadbeat outside the Sugar Shack. At the moment the place looked deserted. And dangerous. The hairs on the back of her neck began to stand up as she began to nervously look around the darkened parking lot. She reached for the lock button on her car, pressing it down firmly until she heard the clicking of all four doors.

She wasn't taking any chances, particularly in this neighborhood. Impatiently, she drummed her nails on the steering wheel. It was already ten past one. She had no intention of sitting around all night waiting for a no-good bum like Ronnie. Where in the hell was he anyway? No doubt he was shaking down another customer or hanging out at a strip club.

There were two other cars parked in the far corner of the lot, so it was possible he was inside the building. Matter of fact, the yellow Hummer with the gaudy rims looked familiar. She could've sworn she'd seen Ronnie riding around in it a few months ago.
Figures he'd buy the flashiest car on the lot, way flashier than my red Lexus.

She had a good idea he was hanging out inside the Sugar Shack, but there was no way she was getting out the car to find out where he'd gotten to. Mama hadn't raised any fools…or had she? She was stuck down here at Hangman's Wharf at an ungodly hour doing a fool's errand while Lenny was getting his beauty rest. That fact alone had to make her some kind of fool.

She found herself getting drowsy, and her eyelids began to close against her will.
I'll just rest my eyes for a minute
,
 
she thought, as she drifted off to sleep.
Just a few minutes of rest and then I'll be all ready to deal with Ronnie and put an end to all this madness.