Free THREE TIMES A LADY by Jon Osborne

dressed,’ he said.  ‘Just get dressed and get the fuck out of here.  I need some time to think.  This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.’
    Claire did as she was told, hastily pulling the T-shirt over her head and balling up her socks in an effort to save time.  Cramming her bare feet into her beat-up Keds, she was halfway out of the freezer when the boy suddenly sprang forward and yanked her backward by her hair, jerking forcefully enough to temporarily lift her newly re-sneakered feet off the slippery metal floor.  The roots of her hair screamed as though they were on fire .  More tears of pain and fear flooded into her eyes.
    ‘Wait just one goddamn minute, there,’ the boy said, still holding Claire backward by her hair and staring down hard into her eyes.  ‘You’re not going to tell anybody about this, are you?  You can never tell.’
    Claire looked up at the boy and shook her head the best she could in his viselike grip, too terrified to even whimper the wrong way, much less provide him with an incorrect answer.  And it was the truth.  Jaded as she was, Claire Bishop wasn’t the only one who life owed.  Apparently, there were some fates in this life worse than death.  Some fates in this life worse than living in a shitty third-floor walk-up with an uncaring mother and an alcoholic child molester who was constantly copping ‘accidental’ feels whenever your mother was away at work.
    ‘No, I’m not,’ Claire said; choking out the words around the jagged lump of fear lodged in her throat.  ‘I’ll never tell anyone, I swear it.’
    And Claire Bishop never did tell anybody – not even when she grew up and got married and had kids of her own.  At that exact moment, she didn’t know she’d live to regret that decision one day.  Regret it with her whole heart and mind and body and soul.  Because the decision Claire made in the freezer that day would wind up costing more than half a dozen innocent people their lives.
    Still – selfish as it sounded – at least she hadn’t been one of them.

CHAPTER 5
    The overwhelming blackness of Dana’s nightmare morphed first into a hazy gray, then pure white, and finally a blinding flash of vibrant colours that hurt her brain so badly it threatened to bring on a seizure. 
    Dana squinted hard against the disorienting visual onslaught, feeling more confused than she’d ever felt in her entire life.  Nothing made sense to her.  Nothing had ever made sense to her.  Nothing would ever make sense to her again.
    As she gradually established her bearings, a soul-freezing chill passed through her body, directly through her heart.  Shocked, she watched as the colours in her world transformed again into a grainy black-and-white, like an old-time newsreel where everything jumped around and flickered, as though the footage was being played on an antique film projector set to the wrong speed.
    Dana sucked in a sharp breath that sent an agonising stab of pain slicing hard through her lungs.  A man had just walked right through her.  A small silver pistol peeked out from the rear waistband of his dirty jeans.  His walk was confident, completely sure of itself, practically a swagger .
    Dana blinked rapidly and tried desperately to make sense of the mind-bending scene in front of her.  No use.  Suddenly, though, her brain collapsed on itself when she realised exactly what this was, exactly where she was.
    The home of her childhood.  3330 Eastlawn Street; West Park-section of Cleveland.  The place where her parents had been brutally murdered thirty-five years earlier.  The place where she ’d barely escaped bloody murder at the hands of the same deranged madman when she’d been just four years old – saved only by a concerned neighbour who’d heard screaming in the night.
    Dana’s breath hitched in her throat.  Her heart stopped beating dead in her chest.  A cold shiver ran down the length of her spine, as though some unseen ghost was using its