Forgiveness Dies by J.J. Hensley

Author:J.J. Hensley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down & Out Books

Behind the bench in my darkened corner of Madison Square, I detected movement. I began to turn, but stopped myself.

Knowing I couldn’t have been followed, I said, “What do you want, Lukas?”

The response came, but it wasn’t from my nemesis of a hallucination. It wasn’t any of my hallucinations.

“That’s the thing about Savannah,” said the voice in a Southern drawl so thick and heavy, any syllable could have cracked one of the bricks under my feet. “It’s a wonderful place to hang out, but a lousy place to hide out.”

Now I did turn and take in the form that was mostly shadows and angles. It was too warm for the suede jacket he was wearing and his hands never left the pockets as he revolved around the bench to stand in front of me. The shapes and angles combined with his movements to create something familiar in my mind.

Something must have registered in my eyes, because he said, “You know me.”

My eyes dropped to the brick sidewalk and my vision blurred. The sounds of Savannah became muted and the scent of destruction faded from my nostrils. The curtain of the present was pulled up as one with no defined sense of time and space descended.

In the room I’d stood before, or one similar to it, the mental bulletin board filled with rows of photos appeared on the wall in front of me and I studied each image. I stopped at the third frame, and saw Hackney in conversation at the Duquesne Club with the unknown man whose face was not clearly visible, a dark ring around one of the man’s fingers. I traced a path along the rows of photos until I reached the ninth frame, where I found Hackney sitting behind his mansion while an unidentifiable figure wandered away from the landscaped maze. My eyes moved to the fourteenth frame, where Dennis Hackney mingled at the Phipps Conservatory and a solitary figure stood, hands in his pockets, at a cocktail table in the center of the event.

The bulletin board disappeared and my attention returned to the here and now; the real and looming. It had all been a lie. The lie was sold to Nick, who rented it to me, and I gave it away to the world free of charge. Alana Hackney had known exactly what had been in the packet of photos, but she didn’t give a damn about an African warlord in hiding. I should have known. Lukas Derela had tried to tell me when he said we needed a divorce attorney instead of a job. I hadn’t been pulled into a con job created to generate publicity for an aspiring politician. This wasn’t a political operation at all.

It was a goddamned domestic dispute.

The man spoke again. “Well, Mr. Tin Man, I know you.” He made a slight gesture with the hand in his right pocket. “We prefer to handle things in a civilized manner down here, but we do what we have to do when necessary.

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