Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Nassise, Joseph

  The thought came to me that this might actually be a better turn of events than I had hoped for. Fuentes wouldn’t want the police nosing about in Grady’s business because that might bring to light the thief’s connection to Fuentes and the activities he’d been performing on Fuentes’s behalf. I suspected that Rivera and I were headed back to the crime scene to do some cleaning up of our own before the authorities were brought in, if they were even brought in at all. It was more likely that Grady would be taken care of in the same manner that Perkins had: a quick disappearance and an unmarked grave somewhere remote that would quickly be forgotten. I assumed my presence there was due to my previous work with the homicide team out of Boston; Fuentes wanted to tap my knowledge of crime-scene investigative techniques to make sure that Rivera didn’t overlook anything the police might find significant.

  The magister’s next words confirmed my guess.

  “You’ve had some experience with this kind of thing, so feel free to speak up where you think it necessary, but follow Rivera’s lead. I’ve given him my instructions and expect them to be carried out.”

  “I understand.”

  I don’t know exactly what Fuentes had been looking for on my face this whole time, but apparently my answers had satisfied him. He grunted once, softly, as if to himself, and then nodded. “Good. You’re doing well, Hunt. I’m pleased with how you’re fitting in here.”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t give a rat’s ass how well I was fitting in and that I would doing everything I could to screw him royally as soon as I had the chance, but I simply nodded, once, and then rose from my seat to follow Rivera out the door.

  29

  That’s how I ended up riding in the passenger seat of Denise’s Charger as Rivera retraced almost the exact same route the cabbie had taken to bring me back just a hour or so again, but in reverse. For the longest time he didn’t say anything and then, almost casually, he said, “Why was your hair wet?”

  It was such an innocuous question that I was taken aback at first and had no idea what he was talking about.

  “My hair?”

  “Yes, when I came to the door, your hair was wet. And yet it took you several minutes to open the door, as if I’d woken you up from sleep.”

  I looked over at him, knowing not to do so would be more suspicious. It didn’t matter that I was blind and couldn’t see him; when someone accuses you of something, even if they don’t come right out and say it, you turn and look at that person.

  “What, exactly, are you implying, Rivera?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” he said. “I’m asking you a question. Why was your hair wet?”

  I laughed in his face. “My hair was wet because I’d just gotten out of the shower.” Anticipating his next question, I continued. “When I can’t sleep, a hot shower usually calms my brain down enough to let me get some rest.”

  It was a simple enough explanation and one that he couldn’t disprove, not unless he’d seen me coming or going from the bungalow, which I didn’t think he had. My first instinct had been to tell him that I’d showered as a result of another long and satisfying bout with Ilyana. I was confident that she’d back me up, but I didn’t know what she’d been doing all evening; for all I knew, she could have been with Rivera when he’d discovered Grady’s body and I’d have gone from the frying pan into the fire in the space of a heartbeat.

  He didn’t say anything to that and so we rode in silence for the rest of the way to Grady’s apartment building. He parked the car and got out, then started walking away across the lot toward the entrance to the building. Refusing to be drawn into his game, I stood beside the car, listening to the ticking of the engine as it cooled and the activity on the street nearby. After about thirty seconds I could see him walking back over to me.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Hunt,” he said, his voice low and deadly.

  I put on my most innocent expression, smiled, and said, “Fuck you, asshole.” I put just the right amount of irritation and annoyance into it; that shit should have won me an Academy Award. But I wasn’t close to being done. “I’m blind, remember? Or did that little fact slip beneath your radar? You can’t just walk off and expect me to catch up if I have no idea where you’ve gone. If you want my help you’re going to have to find some common courtesy in that sorry excuse for a brain and help me.”

  He didn’t know it, but I could see him perfectly fine, and I had a few gleeful moments as I watched the war of emotions spill across his face. He was furious at being spoken to that way but trapped by the fact that he needed me in order to accomplish whatever it was that Fuentes wanted me to do inside Grady’s apartment. His fists clenched, his face grew red, and his eyes bore into me like twin spikes of black lightning. All the while I stood there, playing innocent and looking off into the distance the way I normally did when talking to someone I couldn’t see.

  After what felt like minutes but was probably no more than twenty seconds, he said begrudgingly, “This way,” and then waited for me to unfold my cane and follow along beside him.

  Once inside, Rivera led me over to the elevator, then held the door so I could get inside without trouble.

  Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks. Who knew?

  We were on our way to the twenty-fourth floor and the apartment I’d left Grady’s corpse in two hours before when a question occurred to me.

  “Why did Grady have an apartment?”

  Rivera didn’t say anything.

  That didn’t stop me, however. “The rest of us—Perkins, myself, Ilyana, hell, even you—have living quarters of one kind or another on Fuentes’s property. And yet here we have Grady, a thief no less, living out from under the boss’s, and by extension, your own, thumb. What’s up with that?”

  I really hadn’t expected him to say anything; after all, what incentive did he have, aside from assuaging my curiosity, and he really didn’t give two shits about that, I knew.

  But Rivera surprised me. “He was assigned a bungalow just like the rest of you.”

  Interesting.

  “So this isn’t his apartment?”

  Rivera shook his head. “No, it’s his apartment all right.”

  “How do you know?”

  The elevator came to a stop and we got off on the twenty-fourth floor, turning left toward Grady’s apartment. At the end of the hall was the stairwell that I’d gone down earlier.

  “We know. That’s all.”

  From his tone I decided not to push. There were a hundred different ways of confirming the information, from something as simple as a search of public property records to something more esoteric like a scrying or other mystical ritual.

  Rivera stopped in front of the door to Grady’s apartment, took a key out of his pocket, and turned to face me.

  “You might want to brace yourself if the smell of blood bothers you.”

  If you only knew …

  Rivera unlocked the door and stepped inside. “This way,” he said.

  I followed, pulling the door closed and then locking it behind me. As I turned around, I saw that Rivera had stopped in the middle of the living room and was looking out at the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows, his back to me.

  In that instant I was overwhelmed with an almost murderous rage that swept over me like a forest fire. In my mind’s eye I imagined wrapping my hands around his throat and squeezing the life from him, of being close enough to watch his eyes bulging out of their sockets, feel his legs kicking and jerking as he fought for air …

  I turned away, breaking the line of sight between us, and it was like drawing the curtain at the end of a play; the thoughts disappeared and the thing in my head settled back down into silence for the time being. I breathed a sigh of relief. Taking on Rivera bare-handed was not my idea of a fair fight. It seemed I had dodged a bullet for the time being, but I had no doubt that presence would rear its head again before all this was through.

  Rivera led me to the bedroom in the back of the apartment,
where I was once again treated to the sight of my handiwork. I tried not to flinch and pretended to listen as he explained what was in the room with us.

  “So why am I here?” I asked, when he was finished.

  Rivera’s gaze was locked on the writing on the wall as he said, “I want to know if Grady’s ghost is still hanging about here somewhere. If it is, I want you to talk with it, find out what happened and who did this.”

  Ghosts didn’t talk, at least not in the way that Rivera was suggesting, but I knew what he was asking just the same. It was a testament to how focused I’d been on covering my tracks when I came to on the kitchen floor earlier that I hadn’t even thought to look for Grady’s lingering presence.

  “Got it.”

  I had no idea what would happen if I tried to access my ghostsight with this thing in my head, but now was as good a time as any to find out, I thought. I closed my eyes, flipped the switch in the back of my head, and opened them again to a new reality.

  The physical world faded into the background, growing fainter and less substantial. At the same time cracks and black pockets of decay spread across what remained, like a time-lapse presentation of the effects of entropy on a living world.

  I glanced at Rivera.

  With my ghostsight, I see the world’s true face. Nothing can hide from me; nothing can defeat the purity of my gaze. I can see through magick and glamours to reveal the real creature underneath as easily as I can see the state of a person’s soul.

  Rivera’s soul was as black as pitch and twice as dark. He was surrounded by the same dark aura of power that I’d witnessed the first time I’d looked at him this way and so I didn’t linger there, knowing that delving into the depths of Rivera’s secrets was not on my current agenda. Instead, I let my gaze move about the room.

  Grady came into view almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting for me. He stood in the corner, his ghostly form outlined in a silvery, luminescent glow that made him pop out against the background decay, and pointed a finger in my direction.

  I tensed, waiting for an attack, but he did nothing more than glare at me with an angry expression.

  Sorry, Grady, I thought in his direction and then turned slowly as if examining the rest of the room.

  “Well?” Rivera asked.

  I paused. I knew very little about Rivera and had no sense at all of the extent of his powers. He could be staring at Grady right now, fully aware of his presence and just waiting for me to say the wrong thing. Hell, for all I knew he might have been able to detect my earlier presence in the apartment and had set all of this up as an elaborate scheme to get me to betray myself through my own actions. Sure, it was far-fetched, but when dealing with the Gifted I’d come to learn that far-fetched most certainly didn’t mean impossible.

  Did I dare lie?

  Yes, I decided finally. Rivera was a come-straight-at-you, in-your-face kind of guy. Fuentes might try to trip you up with your own words and actions, but Rivera didn’t have the subtlety for it, I thought.

  I covered my indecision by glancing around the room again, and this time I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. There was a sheen of luminescence in the shape of a rectangle on the interior wall of the room, opposite the bed. It reminded me of seeing a light peeking out from beneath a closed door, but on all four sides instead of just one.

  Grady, it seemed, had even more secrets to hide than we knew.

  30

  Rivera was growing impatient at my lack of response, so I figured I’d better say something before he totally lost it.

  “No sign of Grady’s ghost,” I told him and watched him visibly relax at my words. Apparently he was just as sick and tired of facing off against angry ghosts as I was. “No ghost, but I did find something interesting.”

  “I’m listening.”

  I walked over to the wall and rapped right in the center of the luminescent rectangle.

  “I think there’s a safe behind this wall.”

  A look of eagerness crossed his face and he hurried over to stand next to me. He put his palms flat against the wall at roughly the same place where my hand had been and then closed his eyes. As I watched, black, ropy wisps of smoke rose from the back of each hand, twisted and twined about each other, and then stabbed downward at the wall in front of us with the blink of an eye. A few seconds passed and then Rivera stepped back, pulling his hands away from the wall, and opened his eyes.

  “I think you’re right. We need a sledgehammer,” he said.

  The two of us hunted around for one, but the best we could come up with was a meat tenderizer from the kitchen. I was ready to begin pounding away when Rivera walked out of the apartment, only to return a few minutes later carrying a fire extinguisher he’d taken from somewhere out in the hall.

  I eyed it dubiously and then said, “Can’t you just blast the wall to expose the safe?”

  He shook his head. “Not without possibly damaging the safe, and I don’t want to do that until I know exactly what I’m dealing with here. I don’t know about you, but I’m very curious what Grady considered important enough to hide away behind a wall.”

  I hated to admit it, but I agreed with him completely. I wanted to know just as badly as he did.

  Rivera raised the extinguisher and brought it smashing down on the wall about six inches to the right of where he’d placed his hands earlier. The double layer of Sheetrock crumpled and split, leaving a battered dent in the wall. Rivera did it several more times, creating a rectangle of crushed Sheetrock. When he put the extinguisher down and began tearing at the Sheetrock with his bare hands, I stepped in to help him. In just a few minutes we had the object Grady had hidden behind the wall exposed to view.

  It was a safe.

  One of the old-fashioned kind made of solid cast iron, with a fat combination dial and brass handle jutting out from the center of its face. Two-by-fours had been cut and fitted together to form a framework that supported the safe at a height of about five feet off the ground.

  Rivera stepped forward and reached for the handle.

  “Wait!” I cried.

  When Rivera stopped and looked in my direction, I asked, “What if Grady booby-trapped the safe?”

  He shrugged. “If he did, we won’t live long enough to know it,” he said. He paused, considering, and then said, “Why don’t you go wait for me in the living room?”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine where I am. What if Grady’s ghost suddenly turns up and attacks while I’m in the other room?”

  He glanced around, then back at me. “Is that likely?”

  “I don’t know. Does he have reason to?”

  I knew Rivera would see that as an accusation that he’d been the one to kill Grady and I threw it out there intentionally, wanting to see what kind of reaction in provoked. He wasn’t as easily set off as I’d hoped, though. He just scowled at me and said, “Fine. Stay here. Turn off your Sight though; I’ll let you know if you need to see what’s in here.”

  “Kinda hard to for me to see if Grady’s ghost is waiting to pounce without my Sight, but if that’s what you want…”

  “Yes. That’s what I want.”

  “Okay.” I paused. “Done.”

  “Good, now wait over by the door.”

  “Right.” I did what I was told, but kept my head up and pointed in his direction, as if listening closely to what was going on. In reality, dropping my ghostsight had simply brought my rider’s sight back over my own.

  I watched everything Rivera did.

  He waited until I was across the room and then pulled the handle of the safe.

  I cringed, fully expecting the worst. I had visions of an explosive charge going off, blowing both the safe and the two of us into smithereens, Rivera’s fatalism be damned, but nothing happened.

  The handle was locked and simply made a clicking noise when he pulled it down.

  Even I would have recognized that sound. “Now what?”

  He didn’t respond. Instead, he kept one han
d on the handle and put the other over the dial beside it. There was a flash of red green light accompanied by the scorched-metal smell of ozone. When he took his hand away, the dial was revealed to be bent and blackened as if it had just been through a massive fire.

  “What have you been hiding, Grady?” Rivera asked himself and then pulled the handle outward.

  The door to the safe swung open on well-oiled hinges.

  Five minutes later he had the contents of the safe spread out on the table in the living room. It included sixteen stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, a passport with a picture of Grady in it that had been issued in the name Daniel Stevens, and a thick set of paper files banded together with a short bungee cord.

  As Rivera counted the money, all three hundred and twenty thousand dollars of it, I sat across from him and waited as patiently as I could, resisting the urge to take a look for myself by pulling off that bungee cord and leafing through the files. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be able to see anything. Within moments I was ready to scream with impatience.

  The money didn’t matter; I was certain of it. The mystery was in the files.

  Convinced I was blind, Rivera saw no need to hide the contents of the files away from me as he began to leaf through them. By keeping my head in one position, I was able to observe a fair amount of the files he was looking through. I wasn’t the greatest at reading upside down, but I made do and it didn’t take all that much effort to understand just what was in front of us.

  Grady, it seemed, had been working undercover for someone else.

  The files contained notes and observations on many of Fuentes’s senior lieutenants, including both Rivera and Ilyana, detailing what they had been doing, who they had been meeting with, and what they were expected to accomplish for any task assigned to them over the last six months. The information appeared to have been meticulously collected and had been cross-referenced with the names of those who supplied it as well as those who had corroborated it. If a piece of information couldn’t be corroborated, Grady had made note of that and marked the data as questionable.