Free Shattered by Jay Bonansinga Page A

one easy thrust, sending her into paralytic shock against the side of the building like a dying moth. Then he dragged her around behind a Dumpster and removed her eyeballs, using a surgical instrument that resembled a baby spoon. The entire procedure took less than three minutes.
    From there, Henry drove out to the storage facility with the souvenirs next to him.
    The eyeballs floated in olive jars filled with saline, each jar nestled in a newspaper-lined Chinese carryout box. Henry felt anxious and jittery knowing he was about to visit his secret place, his place of dark wonders. But that was okay because he needed to think, he needed to strategize, he needed to figure out how to eliminate this dapper fed…this Agent Grove . Special Agent Ulysses Grove. He would find somebody to do it.
    Somebody.
    That much was certain.
    Â 
    That night, Grove couldn’t sleep. While his mother, wife, and child slumbered in the shadows of the little colonial, he paced his kitchen, and squeezed his rubber stress ball, and waited for Cedric Gliane to call from the Bureau lab. The DNA tests were taking longer than expected, and Grove felt like a walking fuse, his nerves sizzling, flaring, and sparking. He had tried calling Los Angeles repeatedly but each time he had gotten Gliane’s voice mail.
    Now he had a terrible feeling something was wrong. The calm around him—the ebb and flow of the air conditioner, the hum of the refrigerator—had started to mock him, taunt him, call out to him: Be careful, Old Hoss…them is Injuns out yonder in the dark .
    Of course, Grove didn’t know it yet, but his intuition was correct. There was something gathering out there in the night, far to the west.
    But it was not even remotely like anything he would have expected.

EIGHT
    The U-Store-It mini-warehouse was located out on Old Six Mile Road, north of the pine barrens along Pickman Creek. The area was a ramshackle wasteland of landfills, fallow fields, dilapidated barns, and abandoned cement foundries. As far as the eye could see, the rolling hills lay scabrous and strewn with discarded car chassis and refrigerator boxes. Shreds of truck tires littered the skeletal woods. In the wee hours, the distant horizon glittered with broken glass.
    Henry Splet drove down the access road to the east, then pulled into U-Store-It’s gravel lot. The crunch of the SUV’s tires pierced the silence.
    Headlight beams fell on an automatic gate, which was shrouded in fog, the dull gleam of concertina wire curling along the pinnacles. The rusty guard shack, now boarded and empty, flanked the left side of the gate. Henry slammed the SUV into park, left it running, and climbed out.
    Glancing over his shoulder, making sure he was alone, he strode over to the magnetic reader. He snapped his card through the slot, and a tiny green light winked. The gate began to rattle open.
    Henry pulled the SUV into the labyrinth of narrow blacktop paths that ran between the low-slung tin buildings.
    If most self-storage complexes were like honeycombs of low-rent neighborhoods, U-Store-It was like a rotting Calcutta slum compressed by a great garbage compactor. The corrugated roofs were buckled and dented and pocked with bird shit. The pavement was cracked and ulcerated and whiskered with weeds, and the endless rows of garage-style doors were all slathered with graffiti. In the dark it virtually glowed with methane and filth. Henry’s unit was in the last building.
    He parked near the access door, turned off the SUV, and got out. Then he carried his souvenirs—still packed in their white carryout boxes—through the rusted door and into the darkness of the building.
    He found the light switch, turned the timer dial to sixty minutes, then watched the fluorescent lights sputter on—most of the ancient tubes nearing the end of their lives, flickering and stuttering and sending nickelodeon shadows down the long narrow corridor of vertical accordion