In The Company of Wolves_Follow The Raven

by James Michael Larranaga

  “I’ll check her schedule and get back to you. I’d better say my good-byes to Rebecca’s family.”

  A task reminder popped up on Quin’s phone: Take medication.

  Christopher walked off, slipping again on the wet grass, dodging deer scat as Quin reached into his jacket pocket and found his antipsychotic Prolixin pills, folded into a napkin. He set one on the tip of his tongue before swallowing it. He lived with a mild form of schizophrenia but didn’t suffer from it, as many people assumed. He endured the acute phases when he felt paranoid and saw things others couldn’t see, or heard voices others couldn’t possibly hear, but he lived comfortably in the quieter periods, or what was known as the ‘maintenance phase,’ when he felt almost no symptoms at all. He took a deep, calming breath, looked up at the trees, and noted that his raven friend was gone.

  Agent Sean Kruse was an elder statesman by FBI standards, at least that’s how Quin viewed the man. He was pushing sixty, with gray hair combed straight back, and he was wearing a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and a loosely knotted paisley tie. His deep, comforting voice could talk anybody off a ledge or coax a nervous patient out of a hospital room, and Kruse used his calm demeanor to teach his FBI recruits.

  Quin loathed the debriefing sessions followed by group practice in paranormal training. Kruse taught them Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), a paranormal form of spying and data recovery. The team trained at the Minnesota State Security Hospital, built in 1911 as an asylum for the “dangerous and insane” that now housed the state’s most violent criminals. None of the recruits had shown extreme violence toward others, but Kruse preferred to work with them here, away from the scrutiny of FBI headquarters.

  Quin had joined an existing team in January: five women and three men. Kruse had pruned the team down to four agents in training and never said what happened to the other paranormals. They were “released” was all he would say when Quin asked. Were they fired or had they quit? Nobody talked about it. The team that remained was made up of:

  Dillan Mercer, age nineteen, who lived with Asperger syndrome and was strong in pattern recognition, whether it was numbers or abstract objects. Dillan was a skater-boy hacker who got busted scaling PayPal’s firewalls and had agreed to help the bureau in exchange for his freedom, which meant he could still live at home with his mom and their elderly cat, Tesla. Quin had eaten dinner at Dillan’s house a couple of times and been served a macaroni and cheese doused with A-1 sauce by Dillan’s mom. It was pretty good.

  Rachel Crump, age twenty-one, who also had Asperger syndrome and the ability to recognize patterns, but her social skills were minimal. She’d been busted for card counting at Mystic Lake Casino and then again at Treasure Island until she checked herself into the psych ward and cut a deal with Kruse. She had bleached-blond hair with streaks of blue highlights. While Dillan liked her, Quin thought she was odd.

  Susan Johnson, age twenty-seven, with autism and the ability to draw and sketch objects. She was chronically depressed, and Quin had no idea how she had made Kruse’s dream team.

  And there was Quin, age twenty-five, a bounty hunter living with schizophrenia, who had cut his own deal with Kruse after nearly killing Ben Moretti in the fight to apprehend him.

  Kruse himself had no ability for remote viewing, or RV. He had admitted this to Quin, but after devoting five years of training to the CIA, he could teach it to people who possessed the raw talent. He embodied the dictum “Those who can’t do, teach.”

  Quin took a seat with the other recruits at a table with notepads and pens while Kruse stood at the front of the dark conference room, holding a wireless remote for a ceiling-mounted projector. He flipped to the next identifier projected on the wall: 9467K. The number was randomly assigned to a specific object or location downtown, and none of the recruits knew what the object was or its location. Kruse would have to cross-reference the number to the file on his laptop to confirm after the trainee finished his or her viewing.

  The game was to guess or “see” the object without knowing in advance what it was or where it could be found. “Just see with your mind’s eye,” Kruse had taught them.

  Rachel Crump was the first to give it a go. She stared at the symbols projected on the wall, her eyes fixed as if she were looking right through it. Quin watched closely as Kruse guided her through a series of questions to help her focus on the target.

  “Give me a stage-one description,” Kruse said, “such as color or shape.”

  “Rose or red, yes red, red, definitely red,” Rachel said.

  “What else?” Kruse asked.

  Rachel turned her eyes from the wall to her notepad and sketched a sweeping arc with her pencil. “Round or oblong.”

  The other trainees sketched too, following along, but Quin knew Kruse didn’t want them to. They were breaking his rules. “Only Rachel is in the hot seat. You’re influencing her. Pencils down, please.”

  Dillan and Susan set their hands on the table. Quin’s arms were already folded and he leaned back, watching Rachel.

  “Draw the object,” Kruse said to her.

  She continued sketching a sweeping arc into a circle as she looked up at the wall and back down to her pad before sketching again. “I see trees and buildings,” she said, shading the drawing.

  Kruse gave her another five minutes of quiet as she drew the images her mind could see. The other trainees remained quiet and Quin yawned.

  “Now go to stage three,” Kruse said as if he were asking her to increase the magnification of a microscope. “What smells or tastes come to mind?”

  “Water…like pond water,” Rachel said.

  “How does she know what pond water tastes like?” Dillan whispered to Quin.

  “I can smell it,” Rachel said, turning to him. “Screw you, Dillan!”

  “Dillan, you’re not to interrupt or break a viewer’s concentration,” Kruse said.

  Quin sensed the irritation in his voice. How many times did he have to remind Dillan of that?

  “I’m in a park,” Rachel said.

  “Draw what you see,” Kruse encouraged her. “Draw quickly before it fades. Write keywords.”

  The room was silent but for the vibrating fan inside the projector above. Rachel turned her attention away from the wall as if she had already captured the image in her mind and she continued drawing. Kruse walked to the table, standing over her. She wrote and said the keywords: “red, white, water.” He had to cross-reference her hand-drawn sketch with the image 9467K.jpg on his laptop. Then he held up her drawing for the others to see.

  “Recognize this?” Kruse asked the group.

  “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” Dillan said. “I had it before she did. I wrote ‘cherry and spoon’ before you told us pencils down.” He pointed at his notepad.

  “Anybody else come up with an image?” Kruse looked at Susan and Quin.

  “I wrote ‘truck’,” Susan said.

  “How about you, Quin?”

  “I got nothing. My mind was totally blank.” Which was the truth. He really wasn’t seeing what the others could see.

  Kruse walked back to his laptop, clicked onto file 9467k.jpg, and the image projected onto the wall: Spoonbridge and Cherry.

  “There is no spoon, nothing is real,” Dillan joked.

  “Shut up,” Rachel said.

  “Haven’t you seen the movie The Matrix?” Dillan asked. “When Neo realizes nothing is real?”

  “You’re right, Dillan,” Kruse said. “Even though the spoon sculpture is 5,800 pounds and the cherry 1,200 pounds, they’re made up of nothing more than atoms. They exist in our 3-D world as flashes of light that our eyes see. What we’re doing here is finding these objects but also seeing through them, because on a quantum level, they don’t really exist.”

  It was obvious, even to Quin, the newest member of the group, that Dillan was the fastest viewer of the four and Rachel was right behind him. Susan was slow and rarely confident in what she was viewing. Quin, w
hile not successful in a controlled environment like the dark conference room, had proven successful when remote viewing in the real world, on location while undercover at Safe Haven LLC. Quin was able to track the men over great distances, in the dark on a frozen lake. That was why Kruse had so much hope for his remote ability.

  “Let’s take a fifteen-minute break,” Kruse said, allowing the trainees to stand and walk to the door. “Quin, can I see you?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Were you distracted by something?”

  “You know how I feel about all this,” Quin said, pointing at the projected image on the wall. “Still seems like bullshit to me.”

  “But you watched Rachel and Dillan identify the location. Are you still saying they’re liars?”

  “Maybe they cheated.”

  “How could they cheat, Quin?”

  “What if Dillan hacked his way into your laptop and shared the file names with Rachel?”

  Kruse considered the idea for a fleeting moment. “Not possible.”

  “Okay, let’s assume she really could remote view. Then why would she use her mind to see a sculpture thirty miles away? Why not use her psychic powers to look into your computer hard drive?”

  “Again, not likely, but it would still be impressive. We’re always looking for ways to gain access to computer data.”

  “If this is real, and that’s a big if,” Quin said, “then I don’t see how identifying landmarks is all that helpful. You need feet on the street and agents who can apprehend criminals. When I’m bounty hunting, I’m not just spying on people, I’m catching them.”

  “You’re not still doing bounty work, are you?” Kruse asked, folding his arms.

  Quin shrugged. “Here and there.”

  “The bureau pays you a good salary to be in this elite pilot program,” he reminded him.

  “Elite program tucked away in a hospital? Besides, I can do what I want on weekends.”

  “We need you to focus your efforts here. Dillan and Rachel are good at sighting locations and stationary objects, but as you’re suggesting, crooks and terrorists are mobile. Remote viewers sense the world as a grid, like a chessboard with all its pieces, but they cannot predict how those pieces will move or change course. But you can, Quin. You could be on location and anticipate and react to the infinitesimal moves that our human targets might make.”

  “You’d make me an agent in the field?”

  “Well, officially, all the paranormal investigators are informants, not agents.”

  “And all the other agents think this department is a joke. That’s why you train us here at the hospital,” Quin said. “The bureau agents won’t work with your psychics.”

  “Once we prove to the bureau how effective this is, you’ll all get the respect you deserve.”

  “We’ll get the respect or you’ll get it?”

  Kruse ignored the question and gave him a pat on the back. “Hang in there.”

  “Why?” Quin sighed. “The salary is good but I can make money bounty hunting. And I can choose my own hours.”

  “You’re different from them.” Kruse motioned to the other paranormals down the hallway.

  “I haven’t felt it lately.”

  “Be more specific, Quin.”

  “My mind is…numb.”

  “When you’re bounty hunting on the weekends, do you see or feel anything?”

  “I saw a raven yesterday,” he said, remembering the funeral. “And then she was gone.”

  “The numbness might be a temporary side effect of the medication—cognitive dulling. Hang in there, Quin. It’ll come back to you.”

  “God, I hate Mondays,” Sal Foster groaned, staring into an old computer monitor plastered with sticky notes and cigarette ash. “Arnie at A-Plus Bail Bonds is kicking my ass.”

  Quin listened to this rant from him every Monday. Sal would sit in his downtown office encased in bulletproof glass, whining about how slow business was and how the bail game had too much competition. Arnie Cook, a former business partner of Sal’s, had started his own bail business and ran Internet ads all weekend long. That was today’s topic, how the Internet and Arnie Cook were kicking Sal’s skinny ass.

  Quin glanced around the shabby reception area at the wood paneling and framed pictures of all the accused Sal had set free. The photos were faded yellow newspaper clippings and mug shots. A real Wall of Shame. But it was the FBI Most Wanted posters the bulletins from the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program that always held his attention. Payouts for international terrorists ranged from $5 million to $25 million. That kind of work would be far more lucrative than chasing Sal’s bail jumpers.

  Quin thumbed through the calendar on his phone:

  Take medication—done.

  Meet Sal for payment—doing.

  “How can Arnie fund so many bonds and also run online ads?” Sal mumbled to himself.

  “I dunno, maybe he has a deep line of credit.” Quin knew most bail companies had credit lines with banks. Sal did it his own way, using his own cash, which always left him angry and nervous. It was also why he relied so heavily on bounty hunters like Quin.

  “You’re back already?” Sal said, lighting a cigarette and squinting at him.

  “You can’t smoke indoors,” Quin reminded him. “Against the law.”

  “Fuck the law,” he said with a rattling laugh. “People smoke in your casinos.”

  “We’re a separate nation with different laws,” he said, standing and walking to Sal’s window.

  “I’ve been to your paradise. People smoke when they play cards. You know I’ve lost a shitload of money playing blackjack?”

  “The Wakan Nation thanks you.”

  Sal drew on his cigarette, his cheeks collapsing, and blew smoke through his nostrils toward the glass. Maybe all he needed was a vacation from this firetrap he called an office. For all Quin knew, he lived in the back, eating, sleeping, and smoking bail bonds. All work and no play made Sal a grumpy boy.

  “I found Baxter up in Moose Lake over the weekend.”

  “And?”

  “You didn’t get my text? I tagged him and bagged him,” he said. “He’s in the county jail up there. You need to arrange transportation down to the cities.”

  “Me?” Sal said. “Why didn’t you bring him in?”

  “Had a funeral to attend. Some of us have lives outside of work.”

  “It costs me money to transport skips. It’s coming out of your bounty.”

  “The hell it is.” Quin knew Sal could afford to pay for the transport. “I tracked him and caught him faster than any of the other Fugitive Recovery Agents running around this city. I don’t have to work exclusively for you. I could work for your old buddy, Arnie Cook.”

  “Traitor! You wouldn’t dare cross me like that after I gave you a shot when you were as green as that fucking tea you drink. I only hired you because Hawk begged me to. You aren’t half the tracker that old coot was.”

  This was true. Hawk had taught Quin how to track and set him up with Sal on his first few assignments, but that was five years ago. Quin had more than proven his worth since then. Shifting his weight, he leaned on Sal’s glass. He didn’t give a shit about the money, just liked seeing the old smoking frog squirm.

  “We’ll split the cost,” Sal said. “You want another assignment? I got a heroin dealer, a pimp, and a sex offender.”

  “I already have a full-time job Monday through Friday.”

  “Oh, helping the feds—I forgot. How’s that workin’ out? Can’t be too good if you’re doing this on weekends.”

  Sal’s confrontational tone hung in the stale air. It was none of Sal’s business why Quin did this. “Once Baxter arrives, process my payment and make sure you lift the lien off his mother’s house.”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean it. Don’t let that poor woman worry any longer than she needs to.”

  “Okay, cool it,” Sal said. “What’s eating you?”
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  Seeing Rebecca’s family mourning at the funeral Saturday. All this chasing skips and training with the FBI was beginning to seem meaningless. You catch a criminal, bring him in, and he eventually reoffends. And the victims in the machine called “criminal justice” were the family members like Mrs. Baxter, who were naïve enough to mortgage their homes for relatives in jail.

  “You suddenly grow a soft spot in your heart?” Sal asked.

  “Not in my heart,” Quin said, “but maybe my conscience.”

  “Ha! That’s a good one. But I’m not the goddamned Wizard of Oz passing out hearts or a conscience. I got people who owe me money running around out there. If you can’t chase skips or bring me the witch’s broom, you’re dead to me, at least until Friday. Good day!” Sal shut the window hard.

  Nice touch, thought Quin. He turned around and the office was still empty except for the two of them and a haze of smoke in the air. “You realize it’s only you and me here, right?”

  “What? I can’t hear you through the glass.”

  “It’s bulletproof, not soundproof,” Quin said, walking to the door as he mumbled, “F-you,” under his breath.

  “Fuck you too, Quin!” Sal shouted. “See you Friday?”

  “Yep, see you Friday.”

  Maybe it was the smile on Christopher Gartner’s face that put Candace Johnson at ease when she entered Spyhouse Coffee for their private meeting. Usually when she met and interviewed people they were nervous, but he seemed more than eager to help.

  “Candy?” Christopher said, shaking her hand. “What can I get you?”

  She was about to correct him because she preferred the name Candace instead of Candy, but she let it slide. “How about I buy this one?”

  “Great, I’ll have another latte.” She ordered the same and followed Christopher back to his table where they sat with their drinks. Months ago, on snowy days in January, she had watched Quin frequenting this coffee shop, and she’d returned here many times since, hoping to run into him. That had never happened, so she invited Christopher here on the off chance he might bring Quin. Her goal was to write a story about Ben Moretti’s crimes, and also learn more about the man who brought him down. Her job as a freelance journalist focused on true crime stories for magazines and websites. The edgier the better; and if she could get an editor an exclusive interview with photos, they paid double. In a world of online page views and trending keywords, websites needed original content to rank higher on the search engines. Candace always delivered what she promised.