Read Online Shattered by Jay Bonansinga - Free Book Online Page A

handle carved from genuine ivory that had worn down over the decades to the color of rotten milk. She wielded it like a sword.
    Vida Grove had just turned eighty last month and still smoked, her ubiquitous Camel straights tucked into a pouch that hung from a cowhide strap around her neck. This morning she wore a traditional floral kente dress with scarlet do-rag wrapped around her ashy silver braids. Her long regal face was the color and texture of arid earth, cracked and pocked with hardship. Her brown eyes, deep set and huge in her face, scanned Clark Street with sober wariness.
    One of the reasons for Vida’s nervous sobriety—and the tapping cane—was the fact that she hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Occasionally she went through a period of insomnia not uncommon for a woman her age. White nights , she called them. But once in a while the sleeplessness coincided with a bout of visions. They would come unannounced—sometimes appearing in the very bedroom she occupied in that three-flat building—like ghosts. They would flicker at dusk or flash in the darkness of a closet, and they would invariably take Vida’s breath away.
    But these recent ones had done more than that; they had taken her back to her days as a young mother in Kenya.
    The vision that bothered her most was almost like a memory, but not exactly. It was more like a snapshot of her past twisted and distorted through the lens of a carnival mirror: the sight of her only son, Ulysses, when he was a mere toddler, wandering off into the blue darkness of the Chalbi desert on the edge of their village. Something like that had actually happened years ago, but it had been fleeting, a minor incident. Vida had managed to immediately rescue the child.
    But in this vision, unlike the actual event, the darkness of the desert coalesced into a shadow-figure, an incarnate of pure evil, who suddenly grabbed the child and vanished with him into the abyss without a sound. And Vida was helpless, mired in terror as though her feet were sunken into cement.
    And that was why Vida had called her son last night, and that was why she now waited for a cab to take her to Midway Airport for a cheap flight to Virginia. It wasn’t merely time for a visit. It was time to warn her son: these visions were more than prophecies, they were warnings.
    And that was why she kept tapping the tip of that baobab cane on that stone porch. Most of the time she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. The tapping was akin to a nervous tic or a habit, like biting one’s fingernails. But it was also possible there was more to it than mere nerves. Perhaps the tapping primed some deeper rhythm in Vida’s soul, perhaps it touched off some mystical reserve.
    Regardless of the reasons, however, she was tapping like crazy now, and she would keep tapping that cane until she knew for sure that her son and his family were safe.
    Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-CLICK!
    Â 
    â€œGimme a smile, you stupid piece of rat shit,” Big Ben Milambri uttered under his breath, boring his gaze like twin augers into Splet’s skull. The prison lounge undulated around them with milling bodies, the din of voices waxing and waning.
    Splet frowned. He was confused. “I’m sorry…you want me to what?”
    â€œSmile, you idiot.” Milambri glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at the photograph pasted inside the splayed cigarette carton like it was radioactive. “If you don’t smile in two seconds I’m gonna shove this carton down your goddamn throat, you goddamn faggot.”
    Splet managed an awkward grin.
    Milambri kept nodding at him with a weird, fake smile, his eyes as dead as buttons. “Now chuckle like we’re just sitting around the cracker-barrel sharing a dirty joke.”
    Splet let out a dry chuckle.
    Voices bounced off the painted cinderblock walls. It sounded like a monkey cage in there. The air