The Sins of Lincoln (3 page)

“You know what I’m talking about.” But Mav had no response. “I’m talking about your outbursts.”

“Oh, mom...”

“No, I mean it. Mavery Healy, you listen to me.” Her mother pointed a sharp finger forward. “You have a long way to go in this recovery. There’s an anger brewing in you. Maybe you don’t see it, but I do. I’ve never seen such sudden rage. It scares me honey.” The south Texas drawl oozed out at the corners of her words. “You’ve always had a, well, a temper. But this. Honey, this is so unlike you.”

“Well, mom. They raped me. They held me down and raped me. Sometimes it makes me so angry I don’t know what I could do.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Honey, no one knows what you’ve been through other than you. But that rage, it will eat you alive. You’ve got to keep going back to the clinic and talking with the psychologist. She’s there to help. Please let her. Do it for me?”

Mav shook her head. She knew far more about her internal rage at her attackers than she let on.

And so it was. Mav Healy was independent once again. Mav was a smart girl and not one easily fooled. She’d done well in college. Well, she’d done well once she grew up a bit. She’d had one semester at Penn State before being politely asked to leave. It wasn’t her behavior at issue, it was her grades. But in all fairness, Mav knew it actually was her behavior that led to the first demise of her life. Being kicked out of a prestigious university was a bitter disappointment, but she had no one to blame but herself. The partying was good, but the frat boys were better.

Mav didn’t like to admit it, and would be horrified if her mother ever knew, but Mav had a wild streak in her, and it was different from the temper flares that sometimes occurred out of nowhere. It was the kind of thing that many young coeds go through, but for Mav, it went just past the point of normalcy. She wanted to immerse herself in collegiate life right from the start. She joined a sorority and two months later, she knew she’d made a mistake. The girls were great, but the access to social life on campus that it afforded her was too much. Mav found out one thing about herself during that time—she never knew exactly how far she’d go in a given situation. It wasn’t that she was out of control and would go on wild sexual binges. But within a week of being on campus, she knew it was time to shed the virginity. The word itself gave her a chuckle now. Mav knew that it wasn’t about shedding a word, or a state of being. Shedding her virginity was more about satisfying a writhing sexual curiosity than anything else.

During her second week of pledging the sorority, it happened. The Delta Theta frat boy never saw it coming. But once Mav laid eyes on him, she knew he was the one. She told no one, particularly none of her sorority pledge-class sisters. She followed him outside where it was dark, and once he had his back turned, she breezed by and ran her hand across the back side of his tight blue jeans. It was something she was exhilarated by. The act of feeling his firm body with no one else seeing threw her into a rush. The boy turned around and she gave him a little smile. From there, he took his cues and took them well. They walked behind a large oak tree and Mav kissed him and let her hands run where they wanted to. Even for her, the whole situation was something out of a fantasy. She didn’t even say a word to him. He kissed her back, and a few minutes later, that’s where it happened. Right behind the largest white oak in the county.

Mav didn’t bother getting on the ground with him. It was safer to stand up and have him lean his naked weight into hers. They both kept it quiet and no one at the party saw a thing. The rush, the danger, the thrill was intoxicating, and Mav was addicted.

At the end of the semester, however, Mav’s joyride ended when her grades returned less than stellar results. She’d made all D’s and one C. Her mother was in shock. But, Mav returned home and held her head high, only to apply for summer semester at Bucks County Community College, a school of around 10,000 who was more than happy to give her a second chance at a degree.

The ride from her parent’s home out to Bristol Township and onto campus wasn’t too bad, but it was just far enough that Mav could live in the dorms without fear of any surprise visits from her mother. This time, she had a better handle on what to expect, and how much work it would take to earn her way through.

Since there was no local chapter of her sorority, Mav lived out those next college years as an ‘independent,’ a person without a Greek affiliation. But that proved to be an advantageous situation for her since she had no sorority functions to attend. At Penn State, Mav had seen one disadvantage of pledging a sorority, and that was that the sorority tended to hang out with a select few fraternities on the weekends. Since there were so many guys to choose from, it wasn’t such a bad thing, but there were so many other male physiques out there, it seemed a shame to operate in such a limited fashion. At Bucks County, Mav had her choice of over 5000 guys. Some were duds, of course, but for the most part, these guys were hard partyers.

Mav herself possessed the strange combination of a sweet-girl face, a party-girl body, and a sneaking temper that brewed just under the surface. Keeping a low profile was the hard part. She didn’t want people to know how many men she’d slept with. So, she’d go to class, study at the library for a few hours, but by nightfall, her young body was looking for a challenge. The easier ones were the guys she’d catch looking at her at a party. But they rarely provided her the risk she was looking for. To combine sex with danger—now that was a recipe for blissful satisfaction, and to achieve that, she had to go after the ones other girls dreamt of as well. But that was just the beginning. Once she had their undivided attention, the fun would begin.

“What?” said one boy with stark brown hair and thick eyebrows. “You want to do it where?”

“On the roof. Come on, take me up to the roof. I want you on top of me while I’m looking at stars.”

“Are you crazy? Somebody will walk up there for sure. We go up to the roof of this frat house all the time.”

“That’s what makes it so dangerous,” giggled Mav. Mav got her way with him, as she did with most men she wanted. But as time went by, Mav’s satisfaction with sneaking into some place they weren’t supposed to be and having sex became less satisfying. By the time she graduated, she had fallen into a rut, and wanted out. More danger, more daring, more risk was what she needed. And the more the risk, the harder the orgasms. It was an addiction.

And so it came to be. Mav walked into the biker bar, Chopper Town, that night with thrill on her mind. Danger, thrill, and rough sex, that is. She had no idea that it could all go so wrong so fast. The Lincoln Killers were a rough gang, each and every one a hardened felon, and Mav was easy prey that night. Mav had no intention nor desire to be attacked. She provoked no one. She had sex-on-the-brain when she went looking for a biker to hook up with that night, but what happened was not her fault, and she knew it. The little flame of her underlying anger would later grow into a torrent that even she might not be able to control.

CHAPTER NINE

Dreams

Dreams came to Mav in fits and starts. Some were nightmares, nightmares of that night. During her waking hours, Mav was blissfully unable to remember the details of the attack. But at night, the demons came. She would see herself in the back room of that cheap bar. The smell was etched onto her memory. It was a cross between bad body odor and stale beer. Just walking through the door in the first place had been her only mistake. A woman should be able to go wherever she damn well pleases without being attacked. The rage grew inside her.

But then there were other dreams of the attack where she would see flashes of the face of the man who saved her. The concussion had removed most of her memory of the event, but his face would not budge. She knew it was a face that would forever dwell in the recesses of her mind. His jawbone and high cheekbones were both squared and solid, like something cold-forged out of molten steel, then cast into shape. His eyes; a piercing blue, and his hair, wavy and long. What stuck in her mind most was his rage. Watching him break bones and take down each biker one at a time was the most exhilarating thing. Mav sometimes dreampt the same dream, only she was the one breaking the biker gang into little pieces. The face of her rescuer in her memory from the night of the attack was as rage-filled as she’d ever seen, yet there was a stoic control in it at the same time.

And then, she had memories of the face when she was in the hospital. It was the same face. He would visit her during the night.
But how could that be?
, Mav thought.
Maybe this is all just my imagination. I’ve been watching the coverage of my attack on the six o’clock news too much
. What she remembered most about the face she’d seen at the hospital was the warmth, the caring, yet so devilishly good looking. This was not the face of a cold blooded killer like they talked about on the news. This was the face of someone deeply committed to what he believed in.

Mav stared at the computer monitor, then shook her head back and forth, trying to rock free the distractions. Her new job as a loan officer at Bailey Bank and Trust was going well and she didn’t want to blow it.

“Miss Healy?” said an older man whose bottom shirt button had broken loose under the strain of the spare tire he tried to conceal underneath.

“Huh? Oh, sorry Mr. Lorrance. Yes, how can I help you.”

“This is Mr. Jenkins. He and his wife are looking at buying their first home. Can you walk him through our 30-year flat and variable rate mortgage products please?”

“Oh yes sir. Nice to meet you Mr. Jenkins.”

Lorrance gave her a look of slight disapproval—Mav had been caught daydreaming on the job again and she knew it.

Mav talked for several minutes to the customer about the particulars of what types of loans were available. “And we also have a 15 year variable rate mortgage, it’s tied to the LIBOR, but I won’t bore you with the details of that...” Mav’s eyes drifted out across the bank floor and out the ten-foot tall glass window. Then, the expression on her face went blank.

“Miss Healy?” said the customer.

Mav’s eyes locked on a man walking past the bank on the sidewalk, and she followed him until he was just about to disappear from sight.
It’s him! Oh my God, it’s him. And I thought it was all my imagination,
she thought.

“Miss Healy? Hello.”

Mav didn’t hear any of it. The man walking on the sidewalk stopped, turned his head towards her desk and looked right at her. Mav’s mouth dropped open. Her eyes went into a blur, but when she looked again, he was gone.

“Are you okay?” said the man. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I think I did.” Mav’s heart raced and she was suddenly self conscious that she was blushing.

CHAPTER TEN

Riggs on the Hunt

“Well no, it’s not going well at all,” said Lt. Riggs.

“And why not? I said I wanted this vigilante tracked down. Are you stalling?” replied the captain.

“Stalling? Are you out of your mind? No, I’m not stalling.”

“Good. Don’t.”

“It’s just that I keep hitting brick walls. None of the witnesses at the bar that night had ever seen him before. And apparently he didn’t talk to anyone, not even the bartender.”

“Oh bullshit. He talked. Did you interview all the women in there?”

“Every one. Several of them have distinct memories of him.”

“What do they say?”

“Rough types, mostly. They said he was eye candy, but with a dark side. They wanted to get to know him better, a lot better, if you know what I mean.”

“And what about fingerprints? You know good and well he left prints all over that place.”

Riggs looked dejected. “He did.”

“And? What’s the problem? Did you run the prints?”

“Of course I ran the prints. What do you think I am, an idiot?”

“Watch it, jackass.”

“Yes, I ran the prints, but they came back a blank.”

“No hit?”

“Oh, there was a hit on them alright. But they belong to a dead guy.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that our vigilante, the hero to women everywhere, is a ghost. Not literally, of course. These are definitely his fingerprints, but the identity tied to the fingerprints belong to a William Borders, deceased. Died two years ago this December, Chicago, Illinois, in a car accident.”

“Damn. You mean to tell me he’s stolen someone’s identity? But...even if he did steal an identity, stolen identities aren’t tied to fingerprints. A stolen identity is tied to a social security number, then they get the credit cards, write a bunch of bad checks, take out a big fat loan and all that. There’s no way his fingerprints would be changed in the system.”

“Unless he’s a spook.”

“A spy? Bullshit.” The police captain was incredulous.

“Damn right. We’re talking ex-military, someone trained in assassinations. Covert ops, CIA, or something similar. Did you see how he annihilated those bikers? Both you know and I know that only a government would have access to change a person’s fingerprints in the National Computer Information System. Whoever he is, he’s highly trained. That much was obvious on the surveillance tapes. He’s someone who’s done this before, many times I’d say.”