The Unlucky Read online

  The Unlucky

  by

  Jonas Saul

  Chapter 1

  Everything’s cyclical. It all comes back around. From the earth’s rotation, to the migration of birds, to the lives we live and the habits we form during those lives. It always comes back around. Everything does. Some call it karma, but that’s a dish best served cold and lacking of taste. Some call it fate when people imbued with misguided intentions hurt others and cause destruction in their path. When consequences and accountability must be paid in full, they explain how it was bound to happen that way because you can’t escape fate. It seems whether it’s pessimism or optimism, it’s cyclical.

  Sarah Roberts simplified it by accepting things the way they were, forgetting the rest—who needs to carry baggage—and moving on. Do the best you can, have the right intentions, and the inevitability is that everything will work out. If it didn’t, then you can smile on your way out of this world, knowing you did your damnedest, your conscience clean. Lady Luck is a fickle bitch. Sometimes she’s mingling with others. Hope is all you have when there’s nothing else. Removing hope opens a void that only fear can fill. The kind of fear that creeps toward madness. The kind of fear that Sarah might encounter with what she had to do in the next hour.

  A strong wind, heated by the summer sun, wailed between the concrete buildings and brushed the hair off Sarah’s shoulders, as she stared up at the massive CN Tower, downtown Toronto, contemplating fate.

  Her eyes glazed over as the wind attempted to dry them. She blinked, collected herself, and stepped forward.

  She had been here before. A long time ago. With Drake Bellamy, a man she had saved from a sniper in the Rogers Centre during a baseball game. It was summer now and a ball game was about to get under way. The roof of the huge dome was already open, the sun high, wet spots forming under her arms from the heat.

  Or is that my nerves?

  Heights were never really an issue for her. It was the fall from those heights that posed a problem. And her dead sister, Vivian, had sent her here to talk to a potential jumper.

  She glanced at the ram-air parachute in her hand that cost her nearly fifteen-hundred bucks and shook her head, wondering for the hundredth time why Vivian would want to offer a parachute to someone who was suicidal. But her sister was insistent. There was no other way.

  If Sarah learned anything over the past few years, it was to trust Vivian implicitly. Otherwise people died. That included Sarah, and she didn’t want to die today. Her original goal of coming to Toronto was to visit Aaron, her boyfriend. They needed to talk. Deal with whatever was bothering him and see if they could take their relationship to the next step or nowhere at all.

  But Vivian had said this side venture wouldn’t take long. One quick chat with a potential jumper on the Edgewalk of the CN Tower and then Sarah could see Aaron soon after.

  Sarah put the parachute on like a backpack and started for the ticket booth. She had an hour before the jumper would make a break for the open air, but Sarah wanted to be in place and ready. The extra time allowed her to scout the security, examine the cameras and see how hard it would be to get onto the Edgewalk with a parachute. It was early enough that she could finish this task and still make dinner with Aaron, provided he was available. This was a surprise visit. They hadn’t talked since she’d dealt with her abuser, Cole Lincoln, back in Los Angeles. Aaron had a right to move on if that’s what he wanted. He just had to do it the right way. The honorable way. He had to explain his intentions to her face, forthright and honest.

  With the amount of people meandering about, it was a safe assumption that the CN Tower admittance line would be a long one, but when she got close to the ticket booth, she saw it was relatively short.

  She assumed the crowds she walked through to get to the ticket booth were for the baseball game happening next door.

  After purchasing the required ticket up the exterior elevator of the tower—and refusing to pay the almost two hundred dollar Edgewalk fee—Sarah got in line to pass through security.

  You better be right about this, Vivian.

  Sarah’s gun was a custom Walther PPK—one of only four hundred made—with a gold eagle on the slide. She had no need of something so special, but it was all she could lay her hands on with such short notice. Its small size made it easy to conceal and its light weight allowed her to smuggle it into the CN Tower. Vivian had instructed her to seal it in a small lead box and wrap that box in aluminum foil.

  People lined up at the machine that puffed air in search of bomb material or residue. When it was her turn, she stepped in, waited the allotted time, and stepped out. No buzzer sounded.

  One down, one to go. A clock on the wall said she had forty minutes until the jumper would take a deadly plunge to the concrete below.

  She shuffled forward again. The metal detector would be a challenge. There were two security guards, one on either side, motioning people through. She edged closer, ready to explain the inevitable beeping.

  On the other side of the detector, the elevator’s door yawned open, expelling people from the top, waiting to take the next batch up.

  Getting through this without raising an alert meant the life or death of the jumper. According to Vivian, it was imperative to make it through.

  The first guard, a blond man who had to be in his early twenties, waved for her to enter the detector. The female guard on the other side stepped into the middle of Sarah’s path with a wand in her hand. She didn’t look easily pleased. It seemed something had upset her recently as she gave off an angry aura, her eyes darting left and right like a mouse peeping out of a hole in search of a crazy cat. The guard’s bottom lip furrowed in and she bit down on it.

  Habit? Or nerves?

  The detector beeped. Sarah stepped out the other side. The female guard motioned for her to raise her arms as Vivian whispered inside Sarah’s head.

  The guard’s name tag read Janet. She bent down and waved the wand along Sarah’s left leg, pivoted and started on her right leg.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah whispered.

  The guard stopped the wand before it made it to Sarah’s waist and stood to her full height.

  “Did you say something?” Janet asked.

  “I said I’m sorry.” Sarah leaned closer. “Mike was a prick.” She said it just as Vivian instructed. “You deserve better.”

  Janet blinked and reared back in surprise. She bit down on her lower lip again before asking, “You know Mike?”

  “Everything okay?” the blond guard asked from the other side of the detector.

  Janet tilted to her right, nodded and said, “Everything’s fine. Just give us a second.”

  “I’ve heard of Mike,” Sarah added. “And what he did to you.”

  Janet gave a subtle shake of her head as she struggled to follow.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sarah said. “It’s still shitty to do what he did and then text you about it.”

  Janet’s eyes filled with tears at the mention of the text. Water collected on her lower lids, bulged, then spilled over and down her cheeks.

  “I only got the text an hour ago,” Janet said. “How could you already know …”

  “Word travels fast. Hey, I just wanted to say I was sorry to hear what happened. Sister to sister.”

  The wand completely forgotten, Janet set it aside, produced a Kleenex from her uniform pocket, wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Look,” Sarah said. “I’m meeting friends topside for a bite to eat in the restaurant. We cool?”

  “You okay?” the other guard asked again. “Getting a bit of a line back here.”

  “We’re good,” Janet said, a nasal sound to her voice as it filled with emotion drawn by the tears.

  Sarah started for the
elevator, not believing her luck. She had a metal clip for a wallet and a metal belt buckle to deflect from the gun’s box and aluminum foil shoved into the bottom of the backpack parachute. Worst case, she would draw the weapon, get upstairs and lock the floor down, thereby stopping the jumper. But doing this quietly would be better for Sarah and less embarrassing for the jumper.

  “Hey!” Janet called after her.

  Sarah turned around just short of the elevator.

  “Thanks. Just a heads up. Don’t order the butternut squash bisque or the cauliflower soup. Bit nasty. The rest of the menu is cool, but not those two.”

  The elevator door opened. Sarah nodded and mouthed the word thanks as people filed out.

  Three people who had gone ahead of her through the metal detector stepped onto the elevator. Sarah followed. The doors closed and Sarah exhaled a sigh of relief as the lift headed up.

  Before seeing Aaron, Vivian had said this jaunt wouldn’t take long and it was easy. Come prepared and everything will work out. She would even get her through security because causing a scene and forcing her way through would have created questions that needed answering and delays she wasn’t interested in taking.

  But how did you know talking about some guy named Mike would set her off and let me walk right through? Their security seems a little lax here.

  On the ascent up the exterior side of the tower, Vivian explained that Janet was going to quit her job by Friday. Mike was her supervisor. They’d had an affair. Mike was supposed to leave his wife. He hadn’t. An hour before Sarah walked through the metal detector, Janet had heard that she was the fourth employee to have an affair with Mike within the past six months. He was a serial cheater, and Janet had been mistakenly convinced they would get married one day. She didn’t care about her job and when Sarah offered kindness, Janet passed her through without another thought, like an employee stealing from the till of a store because they feel a sense of entitlement. Letting Sarah through without doing a thorough job was Janet’s version of rebelling. Janet had silently wished Sarah came today with devious intent as the elevator door closed. Maybe it would teach Mike to be a better person.

  Near the top of the tower, Sarah stared out the window at the hot concrete surface of Toronto—the elevated highways, the busy people running around the base of the skyscrapers and the lake off to her left. From this height, the Rogers Centre almost appeared attached to the CN Tower. Its roof was indeed open. Inside, men in blue uniforms scurried around the baseball diamond as the crowd of thousands cheered, a din barely audible over the elevator noise. Before the elevator entered an enclosure and the outside disappeared, she thought of Drake, dead now for quite some time, and how she had connected with him instantly.

  Could there have been anything serious with Drake? She thought not. Aaron had her heart. She belonged to him. All she had to do was let him know so he could stop fucking around and get with the program.

  The doors opened behind her. She turned and followed the people out, taking in her surroundings. She knew the jumper was female, early twenties. All Vivian told her was to be at the entrance to the Edgewalk by 2:17 p.m. She would have to convince whoever was at the door to let her out to talk to the jumper. It was the only way. She was to bring the Walther PPK as well, but so far Sarah had no idea why a gun would be needed to stop a suicide.

  She headed for the nearest restroom, pushed past two teenage girls with too much makeup, and found an empty stall near the back wall. Once inside, she pulled out the metal box and unwrapped the Walther PPK. After sliding it in the back of her jeans, she balled the tin foil up and tossed it in the trash dispenser. She placed the small metal box back inside the pocket of the ram-air parachute pack.

  After that, Sarah headed back out, using a paper towel on the door handle, and walked around the tower in search of the Edgewalk entrance. Two p.m. She was ready for whatever was going to happen with time to spare.

  Families had come to make a day of it. Children huddled close to their parents as they all stared down at the city far below. A couple of kids acted up, the unruly result of lazy parenting. A family of four with British accents passed by, each clutching an ice cream, chocolate for the small boy.

  Thoughts of children passed through Sarah’s mind. What would it be like to have children? It wasn’t the first time she had thought of kids. But raising them in this world, the one she had gotten to know over the past few years, scared her. She had seen enough death, degradation and pain to last more than a lifetime. Crime statistics, rogue cops, illegal shootings, terrorist bombings, wars—all this information was out there for anyone who wanted to find it. The daily news covered everything, and yet women still had babies, day after day, in the thousands, all over the planet.

  Sarah moved on, circling the tower, knowing in the midst of all the carnage she had seen and will see, she too would have a baby one day. She not only hoped Aaron was there to see that day, she hoped he would be the father.

  Two security guards trudged by, busy watching the tourists, until one nudged the other and leaned in to whisper something in his ear. Sarah caught what their eyes had found. An attractive woman in a red blouse and short skirt leaned over the railing by the window to catch a better look down. Her skirt had risen up, exposing most of her long legs. The guards had slowed to wait and see if the skirt would continue upwards.

  The name Mike echoed through Sarah’s mind, subtle and smooth like smoke passing over velvet.

  She changed course and approached the woman who hadn’t noticed the men gawking.

  “You’re offering front row seats to those guys,” Sarah whispered.

  The woman didn’t move at first. Then she lowered her upper body more, exposing the hem of her lace panties.

  Sarah frowned. What the hell?

  “Maybe I want the attention,” the woman said, her voice deep and masculine.

  Transvestite?

  Before the woman turned and gazed upon Sarah, it all came together. It was a man standing beside her, dressed as a woman. He wore lipstick, mascara, a blonde wig and an expression of sheer joy at the drawing of men’s eyes.

  “To each their own.” Sarah backed away, a hmmph escaping her lips.

  The Edgewalk entrance came up on her right. She went to the observation window and watched the people outside on the edge. They were dressed in red suits and tied to a rope that tethered them to a bar-like structure above their heads. Their arms were thrust out as if they were wings while they all leaned out over the edge.

  You’d never catch me doing that.

  When buying the ram-air parachute, she had looked up B.A.S.E. jumping and discovered that anything less than about 2,000 feet needed a static line, a line that pulled the chute out at the instant the jumper took air. The CN Tower was just over 1,800 feet high. She hoped whoever she gave the chute to could survive with the two-hundred foot deficit.

  Five minutes to spare.

  The Edgewalkers were heading back to the door, their session coming to an end. Sarah pivoted slowly on her heels and took in the crowd. The two guards had finished gawking at the ladyboy and stood near the door as the walkers came back into safety and were unhooked from their tether.

  The crowd had thinned but no one stood out. No single female who appeared desperate. No one crying. Nothing that made anyone look suicidal. But what did suicidal look like anyway?

  CCTV cameras were everywhere, filming everything. They had recorded Sarah in several places. They would have clear images of her face. The Toronto police had worked with Sarah several times in the past. It wouldn’t take more than an hour for everyone to know who she was if they needed an identity.

  Once she talked the jumper back off the edge, or made her take the backpack parachute, she would be revered, so there’d be no need of cameras and identity searches. Otherwise she would’ve worn a disguise.

  One more look at Mike, the dog that he was, made her want to hurt him. For a moment when Sarah had talked to Janet downstairs, she had felt her pain. Aaron
had left Sarah in California. It was the first time a man in her life had walked away. Drake was her first love interest, but he’d never walked away. He was murdered. Aaron was her man. Walking away like that hurt. She would’ve denied those feelings years ago, but now it mattered. Closure mattered. And people like Janet mattered. Mike needed to know that.

  Sarah slipped by two men standing near the window and moved closer to the entrance of the Edgewalk.

  2:15 p.m.

  After one more slow, careful look around for a suicidal jumper, Sarah slipped the ram-air parachute off her back and held it in her left hand, keeping her right available for the Walther PPK if she needed it.

  2:16 p.m.

  She saw her. Brunette. Olive skinned. Prominent nose, intense eyes. Gorgeous girl. Long flowing hair. Possible Italian heritage. The suicidal look was in her eyes—the intensity, the fear didn’t fit for a tour of the CN Tower. Her brown shirt opened in a V, exposing the white of her bra and the purple of a bruise near her neckline. She wore yoga pants that left nothing to the imagination. Without having to glance over to confirm it, Sarah knew Mike would be checking this girl out and that was the last thing she needed.