Black In White

by J. C. Andrijeski

  “You put me on the payroll without asking me?”

  Thinking briefly, he nodded. “No. Well... yes. Temporarily. Until we can negotiate something formal... like I said.” He quirked an eyebrow of his own. “Would you like to hear numbers?”

  “No,” I said, sure somehow they would be obscene. “Why?”

  “I just told you why––”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He gave me another flat look, holding his palms out without answering.

  Clearly he thought his reasons were obvious.

  Or irrelevant, maybe.

  Exhaling in irritation, I said, “There’s no possible way you got me a concealed carry permit in San Francisco in under two hours, simply because I’m on your staff as a contracted forensic psychologist.” The disbelief remained overt in my voice. “Trust me, I know.”

  “I didn’t do it through San Francisco. Or California at all.”

  I stared at him. “Meaning?”

  He smirked, handing me a gun, handle first. “Stop stalling, doc. If the clothes fit, hand them over and put your street clothes back on... or I’m going to get distracted again.”

  “You’re really not going to tell me?” I said, shedding the holster and the shirt all over again and pulling back on my dress blouse. I glanced up to make sure he wasn’t watching me, in spite of myself. “About the gun?”

  He sighed as if bored. “You now have a special weapons permit, doc, through the DOJ. It allows for concealed carry when you are working under the auspices of Black Securities and Investigations.” Giving my disbelieving look another faint smile, he glanced down, watching me button my top. Briefly, his eyes showed a flicker of heat.

  “What about wait periods?” I said, maybe to distract him. “Background checks?”

  “Waived the wait period,” he said, glancing up. “And the written test. Oh... and the range test. They told me to try and get you to do all of those things, of course. We can talk about the details when we work on that thing where you join my staff permanently.”

  Ignoring that part, I shook my head.

  “That’s not possible,” I told him flatly. “Not even for you.”

  He gave me another smile. Those gold eyes didn’t waver.

  “Who are you?” I said, unwilling to drop it. “Why would they do that for you?”

  “They like me.”

  I couldn’t help it... I let out an involuntary bark of a laugh.

  Even so, like I’d been doing all day, in the end I let it go.

  I handed back the holster too, watching him stuff it along with a gun in a canvas bag along with the clothes and boots he’d already picked out for me. I watched everything disappear when he zipped up the bag... but not before I noted that the gun he’d chosen for me was the new version of the 1911 MC Operator and a gun Nick would have drooled over.

  When Black shoved a good half-dozen magazines into another bag, I simply watched.

  He tossed two bullet-proof vests into that bag, as well.

  Really, I told myself, he was right––a concealed carry permit wouldn’t matter an iota, given what he intended me to do with the gun later that night. Even Black hadn’t tried to convince me he had permission to break into the Legion after hours.

  Still, some part of me found it ironic that he could hand out off-the-books gun permits like he was some kind of mafioso drug lord in a third world country, but he still had to commit petty crimes to hunt his so-called “rogue-dimensional-traveler.”

  The way his staff treated him didn’t lessen my curiosity.

  They all but genuflected when he walked by, and I noted not a single one of them joked with him or acted like they knew him personally at all.

  They also asked absolutely no questions about who I was... or what we were doing, or even where we were going in the helicopter. In fact, I don’t think I saw a single one of them ask Black anything that wasn’t strictly relevant to what he needed in that precise moment. I definitely got a military vibe from many of them, too. A few tattoos I glimpsed on bare arms around the edges of form-fitting black T-shirts supported that impression.

  Black didn’t introduce me to any of them, or tell any of them my name.

  The helicopter itself, which looked like some kind of modified military model rather than a rich guy’s recreational toy, was a gunmetal gray with Black’s eagle symbol on the doors.

  He took the proffered headset handed to him by one of his staff and climbed into the cockpit as the man climbed out, presumably after conducting the initial pre-flight check. Black immediately started his own check once the guy vacated the cockpit, pausing only to motion me to take the seat across from him.

  Watching another in his staff toss the three black bags into the cargo area of the helicopter, I approached cautiously, holding my hair and ducking down as I walked to where a very buffed-looking Asian woman wearing all black held the passenger door open for me.

  Once I’d strapped in and clamped on my own headset, we were off.

  The flight was short, but exhilarating, I admit.

  What felt like bare minutes later, we landed on a helipad at the VA Hospital just south of Land’s End Park, not far from the Sutro Baths and of course the Legion of Honor museum itself, which was in the northwestern corner of the adjacent Lincoln Park.

  Black apparently either knew someone or made arrangements at the hospital itself, because one of his black-clad employees met us on the roof when we landed. I watched that same employee hand Black what looked like a computerized car key before jerking open the back door of the helicopter and tossing our three bags of equipment out onto the helipad.

  Then, exchanging places with Black in the cockpit seat, the man put on the pilot’s headset.

  Black hadn’t powered all the way down when we landed, and now I watched, half-incredulous, as the employee powered it back up again.

  I stood there, holding my hair to keep it from whipping my face as I watched him take off. The aircraft rose in a nearly straight line, then its nose tilted down right before it headed back in the direction of downtown San Francisco. It was nearly out of sight before we’d even made it off the rooftop and inside the hospital’s main building.

  Despite our quick drop off and dust off, I was pretty sure it wasn’t “normal” to use a government hospital helipad as your personal parking space... no matter how rich you were.

  Even so, Black must have been training me already, because I didn’t ask.

  We carried the bags down to the parking lot and found the vehicle Black’s employee left us by clicking the electronic car key a few times until something beeped. After we dumped the three bags into the trunk, we were on foot. We were also more or less in street clothes, although I wore a long coat Black had given me, and he still wore all black.

  We walked to the Legion of Honor through the military base where the VA hospital lived, using back roads in Fort Miley to cut over to a footpath which brought us to the back end of the Legion and into Lincoln Park.

  Once we entered the museum, Black got quiet, and unnervingly focused.

  Mostly, I felt like I was watching him... and following him, without having much idea of what he was looking for precisely.

  We did two quick circuits of the exhibit halls without stopping much at all.

  Black had his large-screened phone out for most of that, and seemed to be looking at that as much as at any part of the physical layout. Any time a guard watched him for too long, Black started taking pictures, I noticed, but I couldn’t tell if that was just a cover.

  We lingered the longest in the courtyard.

  Black also made a few circuits of the round exhibit room directly under the courtyard, the one below the glass pyramid that lived right by the main entrance to the building. Dominating that circle of light created by the pyramid was a bronze sculpture I didn’t recognize.

  I found myself looking at that sculpture far longer than anything else we saw.

  It stood on a pedestal of blood-red marble
, and depicted an angel on a winged horse, both with wings outspread. The angel held a scepter with a blood red jewel in the apex, but the jewel wasn’t what caused me to stare.

  It was the headpiece to the scepter itself, which had been carved into the three-pronged spiral shape that I recognized from the dead bodies of the wedding killer’s victims.

  “Black,” I said, motioning him over.

  He sauntered over to me, barely looking up from his phone.

  “Black,” I said, more insistently.

  When he gave me a vaguely annoyed look, I pointed at the scepter.

  He had to have seen it, but he barely gave it a glance before frowning at me, and then turning on his heel and walking away. I stared after him in disbelief, wondering if he didn’t know about the spiral patterns carved into the victims found so far.

  I know, he told me silently.

  He didn’t stop walking.

  I watched him leave the round exhibit room for the next chamber and then I looked back at the statue myself, studying the three-pronged spiral. Like before, in the morgue with Nick, something about that symbol looked familiar to me, but I had no idea where I’d seen it before. I was sure I’d never encountered this particular sculpture before today.

  I knew art a little, and I didn’t recognize the name of the artist, either.

  The expression on the angel’s face appeared hard to me, almost cold. The horse’s nostrils flared and it pawed out with one foot, its wings curled and spread more in a war posture than one of flight, especially given the articulation of the angel’s streaming robes and upraised arm and outstretched wings. In the hand not holding the scepter, the angel carried a sword.

  I’d never seen an image of an angel quite like that one before, not even in the more apocalyptic interpretations of the bible.

  The spiral symbol looked a lot more pagan than Christian.

  When I asked Black about the piece again, after he walked back through the exhibit hall to collect me, he only shrugged, his eyes back on his phone after a bare glance. I noticed he took a picture of the scepter before we left, however, as well as at least one of what appeared to be a brand carved into the rear of the horse in the same pattern.

  “What does it mean?” I persisted. “That symbol?”

  He didn’t answer.

  The look he gave me told me he’d heard me, though. I more got the impression he didn’t want to discuss it. Not here.

  I stared at the symbol for a few seconds more, maybe just to burn it into my memory. I found myself thinking it might be a distortion of something Celtic, kind of like how the Nazi swastika was a flipped version of a Vedic symbol that could be found all over Europe and Asia for thousands of years. I stared at the spirals long enough to memorize every particular, including the direction of each whorl.

  Long enough that Black felt the need to click his fingers at me when he wanted us to leave the downstairs exhibits.

  The second time we walked through, he seemed to be looking at the art more, but I got the sense he was comparing the location of every piece to whatever he stared at on his phone’s screen... versus looking at the art itself, per se.

  I also found myself wondering if he was looking at things like cameras and blind spots, although I never caught him doing it overtly.

  When we went out to the courtyard a second time, I sat by the ionic columns, drinking a bottled water I’d gotten from the downstairs café and watching as Black made a few circuits around Rodin’s Thinker, which stood near the exit overlooking a pool-like fountain. The fountain itself punctuated the center of a circular driveway where tour buses and taxis dropped off passengers, just on the other side of the French-styled pavilion.

  I had no idea what he was doing.

  While sitting there, however, I found myself thinking that it was an odd coincidence that the inspiration for this museum had come in part from the architecture of the Palace of Fine Arts, where the last murder had taken place. The wife of a wealthy sugar baron had taken a fancy to those French replicas during the World’s Fair and asked her husband to build a museum of the same style, which he had done.

  I’d forgotten all that, with everything else that happened today.

  I was still sitting there, thinking, when Black walked up to me, still gripping his phone in one hand.

  “We can go,” he informed me.

  “You know where he’ll stage it?” I said.

  “I have an idea,” he said cryptically. When I didn’t stand up immediately, he just stood there, looming over me and exuding impatience. “I’m hungry,” he announced.

  Nodding, I pulled myself to my feet, smoothing down the dark coat I wore.

  Luckily, in San Francisco, wearing all black didn’t make you in the least bit conspicuous. Not in the fall, anyway. Not any time of year, really. Especially not when it looked like rain.

  Thinking about that, I glanced up at the sky.

  But Black was already walking away from me, his graceful steps purposeful. I watched him disappear through the French-styled archway that led to the stone steps down to the driveway in front of the museum and then to 34th Avenue.

  With only the faintest of sighs that time, I followed him.

  Seven

  SPARRING

  IT OCCURRED TO me that I’d turned my phone off.

  I’d done it before I left my office.

  I guess I had been avoiding having to lie to Nick––overtly, at least. Despite what I told myself earlier, I knew he might call, especially if he was on stakeout in front of Quentin Black’s office building and residence.

  Especially if he knew I’d been inside. Or that Black had left.

  Nick also might do something underhanded, like have Angel call me, which he wasn’t above doing. He’d be even more likely to do that since he’d chewed me a new one that morning and might be nervous about how I’d react to him.

  I only remembered my phone being off when I slid into a leather booth overlooking the ocean and a glass of red wine was set in front of me.

  We were in the upper floor dining room of the Cliff House restaurant, a city landmark and where Black had chosen for us to eat. He claimed the location worked well, being within walking distance of the Legion without being too obviously close. I wasn’t exactly sure what that last part meant, but I didn’t argue. The Cliff House worked for me since it tended to entertain more tourists than locals given the view and the inflated prices, as well as the long lines from it being a quasi-famous historical site. Not having to fear running into someone I knew appealed to me a lot right then. The last thing I needed was to be seen out dining with Quentin Black, especially with Ian out of town.

  Thinking about Ian, I wondered if I should turn the phone back on.

  The thought didn’t appeal to me truthfully. I remembered Nick’s not-so-subtle threat that he might call Ian himself. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know if Nick would really do that to me.

  “What are you thinking about?” a voice asked softly.

  I looked up, startled, to find Black watching me from across the table.

  A faint look of frustration lived in his eyes.

  I glanced around us, more in reflex than anything. No one sat particularly close. No one appeared to be looking in our direction either, despite our borderline gothic clothes and Black’s strange eyes. Black directed the waitress to lead us to a window table in the corner of the room, which now gradually darkened with the sun setting over the ocean to my right.

  It struck me as strange suddenly that Black had given me the corner seat. I would have thought Black to be someone who would want to face the room.

  “Mirrors,” he said.

  I looked back at him.

  Then I turned around to look behind me, and realized that a whole collection of mirrors lived on each angle of the corner where I sat, between the long bay window and the window to my left. The booth really should have held a good four or five people, and not only the two of us. Glancing away from those gold beveled and angel-deco
rated frames, I looked back at Black, watching as he studied the reflections briefly over my head.

  Then he looked back at me, smiling faintly.

  “Very discreet,” I told him.

  “Most people forget about mirrors,” he said, leaning back.

  “With the added bonus that most won’t look at your face in them,” I said, thinking aloud. “Or your eyes.” I studied his face, folding my fingers on the table in front of me. “You could wear contacts, you know.”

  “I do sometimes.”

  “Your face still would stand out.”

  He looked away from the ocean to meet my gaze.

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, more or less truthfully.

  Black’s gold eyes reflected light from the setting sun. He went back to looking at the sunset... or perhaps he only pretended to look as he studied the room in the reflection of the glass. Either way, the sunset light altered the tint of his irises, making them more of a red-gold than the lighter color I remembered from the interrogation room or his apartment.

  “So?” He turned, studying my face equally closely. “What were you thinking about? Just then? Or do you not wish to tell me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Then, shaking my head as I realized I was lying, I pulled out my phone, staring at the dead face of it. “My fiancé, actually. I turned off my phone, and...” I let my words trail, wondering suddenly why I was telling him this. When I glanced up, I saw Black frown, an eyebrow quirked, like he wondered the same thing.

  Feeling a glimmer of some other emotion there, I brushed it away, shaking my head again as if to push that from my mind as well.

  “I was trying to decide if I should turn it on,” I confessed. “The phone.”

  “You do not wish to talk to him?”

  “Here?” I smiled wryly, looking up. “Not particularly.”

  “You don’t want to lie to him,” Black observed.

  “No,” I said, sighing more genuinely. “I really don’t.”

  “You are trying to decide whether to lie? Or the size of the lie?”