by Nick Vellis
Drawing a blued Colt .45 with a gloved right hand and opening the door with the left, the intruder went to the head of the stairs and listened. The only sound was the TV in the kitchen one floor below. The trespasser turned and edged down the hall, the .45 leading the way.
Scanning the bedroom, the prowler sensed the woman was near. The light was on in the walk-in closet, and then there was a noise. There she is. The enclosed space was perfect for the takedown. Holstering the Colt, the figure moved in on the target. A strong right hand over her mouth smothered Stephanie’s scream, as she slammed backward into the intruder’s chest. A left arm cinched around her neck brought her under control as the attacker dragged her out of the closet. The masked figure pulled her to the center of the room and stopped in front of the armoire. Stephanie settled back into her attacker’s embrace, eyes closed dreamily. She didn’t struggle. Then, her mouth was free.
“You’re early darling,” Stephanie said. “He might come back. His flight doesn’t leave until eight-fifteen. I didn’t unlock the window yet. I’m so glad to see you. It’s been way too long.”
A right hand roughly squeezed her partially exposed breast and Stephanie cried out.
“Hey, not so hard,” she said. “Go easy on that… for now. We have plenty of time,” she purred. “Aren’t you going to say anything or is that part of today’s game?”
Stephanie reached up to stroke her captor’s face. “Damn, that mask is rough,” she said as she tried to caress the face behind the mask. When she reached out to touch the cheek and jaw line Stephanie looked toward the mirror and her eyes went wide with terror. Those weren’t her lover’s eyes. This wasn’t who she was expecting.
“Who are you?” she gasped.
As an answer, her attacker produced a hypodermic and plunged the needle into Stephanie’s neck before she could wriggle free. The syringe emptied into her as she screamed, but Stephanie Hunt was as good as dead. Unfortunately, for her, it was going to be a long painful process.
Chapter 2
Like a hive of bees in the mid-day heat, the sun-drenched market was alive with a crush of people. Black robed women in hajabs and men in all manner of dress seemed a single moving mass rather than individuals buying and selling, calling and talking. The arched brick and concrete colonnades flanking the market stretched on forever. The closeness of the air accentuated the street vendor’s aromas. I can almost taste kebab, and shawarma. Without warning, the market explodes into fire and blood. Screams ring out as the smell of fear, blood, and death is everywhere.
I bolted straight up in bed, eyes wide, drenched from yet another night terror, and immediately regretted moving so fast. I was slick with sweat. My ponytail stuck to my back. The shrinks claim dreams aren’t flashbacks, but they’re full of shit. I don’t get them often, but when I do, they come in clusters, like the bombs we dropped over there. The effort to sit was too much so I fell back onto the clammy bed. I felt like the bottom of a hot bag of garbage. I probably smelled like one too. That’s about normal, I thought. Waking up after a night of boozin’ is tough and the flashbacks make it worse.
I take waking up with a hangover in stages. Each one has its own unique sort of pain and this morning would be bad. First comes opening the eyes. This happens gradual, like if you want to avoid the pain. It’s like peeling an orange in slow motion in the dark. I pried my crusty eyes open and picked away the green crud with a fingernail. Through the bleary haze, a miniature rainbow came into focus next to my own shadow. The flickering colors on the water-stained wall were the only cheerful feature in the room. When you break the eye crust, you hope to God the first thing you see isn’t that you’re in jail, or naked on some bare concrete floor or next to some ugly broad you don’t know. A million and one things race through your head as the world comes into focus. Where am I? Am I alone? Have I got my pants? Where’s my shit, you know, wallet, phone, and keys? For some, thoughts include anxiety about virginity or random sex, but I’ve long since stopped worrying about that.
Sitting up can take anywhere from five minutes to twenty-four hours, based on the amount of booze consumed. Most people don’t feel truly awful lying down. It’s when you move to vertical, the dizziness and nausea really kick in. As an accomplished master drunk, I know better. I take it slow. Once in a seated position you can start to fantasize about getting up and having another drink. I normally hit the head, grab a beer, and make coffee in that order before going back to bed.
I don’t want to remember Iraq, but… The bedsprings creaked like a cell door and the sound exploded in my throbbing head as I swung my legs over the edge. Rye’s my poison, I thought, and I had too much of a good thing last night. When my right foot hit the floor, it landed in a pile of my own puke. Ignoring the urge to dry heave, I stood and hopped on one foot and one heel to the bathroom. After rinsing the spew off in the toilet, I relieved myself. Glad I got the order right.
Some hungover dudes worry about their wingman. You know, try to locate their running mate. I live alone, I drink alone, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about anyone, unless they’re paying me. I headed to the kitchen, my right foot still wet with genuine toilet water. I looked in the fridge, but the cupboard was bare, no beer anyway. I picked up a two-week-old dragon box of shrimp lo mien, sniffed it, and tossed it back in with a shudder. I spotted an upright Miller’s brewski on the table and then stumbled toward it. I swirled the amber liquid around and saw there were about two swallows left. I hated bayoneting the wounded, but I downed the warm piss and dropped the bottle on the floor with the rest of the dead soldiers. This morning I’d have to settle for coffee.
The air was soaked with the booze along with everything else. I paced the kitchen waiting for the coffee and started to think. It’s hard to explain flashbacks. It's not a movie running through your head, or seeing a dead friend talk to you. That’s what the shrinks describe and they’re full of it. It's a feeling, certain knowledge that something terrible is going to happen, and that there's nothing you can do to stop it. It hits you right in the gut. All you can feel is the awful certainty something bad is going to happen. Then it’s over, sometimes it's a minute, sometimes an hour, but that's what it feels like.
What triggers these things? Well, they say it's reliving traumatic stress, but honestly, what triggers them are the inconsequential things. For me, it’s seeing someone threatened. It pisses me off. If that somebody has a gun pointed at them, or worse me, I just go off. The scary part is the next time I close my eyes I have the dream. I’ve relived that shelling of the Fallujah market place a thousand times. I can still hear the cries of the wounded and see the eyes of the dead. I remember their eyes. My VA shrink says it's not a full-blown flashback, just a trained response and there's very little they can do. The doc wanted to put me on drugs, but no thanks! I've gotten better, but seeing somebody threatened with a gun, even on TV makes me bristle. Temperature, smells, and bright light can all cause it to happen, but for me it’s loud noise. The storm last night…well it was loud.
The dream always begins the same way. There’s a crowded market and endless corridors of identical arches, like the reflection from the facing mirrors in a barbershop. It could have happened in any of a hundred places, but it was in Fallujah. Soft comforting memories lull me to sleep. Most of the time I’m OK, but on nights when I drink and it’s hot or there’s a storm, like last night, the memories explode into a special kind of darkness. The sounds of explosions and screams fill my dreams. Any pleasant images turn to bound men in hoods, blood, and death.
Damn, I got tight last night. I hadn’t tied one on in a couple weeks, not since the VA shrink threatened to dump me from the program if I showed up drunk at a session again. I’d pissed her off cracking wise about snapping bubble wrap being better than therapy. She jumped down my throat with her own crack that sarcasm was an ineffective cover for depression. Hell, what did she know? When I saw her open mouth, wrinkled forehead, and dilated pupils, I knew she was afraid, and she should have been. Sitting t
here with those fabulous legs, a tight skirt and her rack about to explode from a frilly blouse she made ten of us sweat bullets every week. Three of the guys were openly talking about doing her. She’s more of a wise ass than I am, I thought and clueless. Depression, she said, was a part of PTSD. Well, PTSD sucks and booze doesn’t… Never mind.
The tiny apartment, its stained walls, the stench of mildew and booze would depress anyone, especially someone with a hangover. What was that damn shrink thinking? I grabbed a pack of Camels and shook one loose from a pack. I lit it, took a deep drag. I blew the rough smoke out through my nose. Standing, I could almost hear that creaking again as my body uncoiled. I took a deep breath, coughed, and squeezed my eyes shut against the pain that wracked my chest. I opened my eyes again. Yep, land of the living. A dozen tortured steps across the peeling linoleum stumbling over errant beer bottles and I was at the bathroom sink.
I was good looking, once. A tick over six one, rock solid at one ninety with thick arms and wide shoulders, I made the uniform look good. My face was more or less rectangular with sharp features, a square jaw, and clear brown eyes. Those with brown eyes are assertive, confident, and agreeable. I kept my light brown hair in a regulation high and tight, I’d been ready for a damn recruiting poster for the new Army. Be all you can be! Now, the guy looking back from that mirror looked like shit. Thirty pounds heavier, a little stooped, and paunchy with a dark stubble that matched the circles trenched around his eyes, the new me looked like the before picture in a rehab ad. I carried too many bitter memories, and one shameful secret, well, not just one. Yeah –I was alive. Damn it.
The army put me in Intelligence – G2. They taught me all the tricks in the Human Intelligence Collectors Field Manual. I learned how to use isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, stress positions, forced nudity and sexual humiliation, but they weren’t near as effective as the method no one had to teach me. The Army taught me to exploit my own special skill.
I know when people are telling the truth. It’s not mind reading, but damn close. When I look into a person’s eyes, it’s like speed-reading. You’d be amazed to know how much you can learn looking into a person’s eyes and watching how they move. I sense truth in their words by what I see in their eyes and their bodies. I’m good at reading lips too. What people want to hide, often shows up on their lips. It’s called subvocalization. Most people move their lips when they’re thinking and don’t even know it. That, with body language, micro movements of the face and the sense I can get from a person’s eyes, I could be a human polygraph. Not everyone does these things and the ones who do don’t do it all the time, but when they do… I know the truth when I see it. There’s a difference between head knowledge and heart certainty, but I know the truth.
When I’d interrogate a prisoner, I’d look in his eyes and tell him about his deepest fears, the things he tried hardest to hide. He’d think I was reading his mind. When I did that, he understood there was nowhere to hide, nothing I couldn’t find out. A bound man stripped naked is vulnerable, but when he thinks he can’t hide even what’s in his mind there’s nothing left for him. He breaks and sometimes he cracks. I did that to a lot of men. Army Intelligence taught me to use my special skill as a weapon. Over there they called me ‘The One Who Knows Your Dreams’. The things I’ve done weigh me down because now I see them in my dreams.
When I came back from the Middle East, I thought I could use my skills to be a cop. My buddy, Stan Lee, worked at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and helped me get a job there. Being a decorated army officer should have been my ticket to civilian life success, but it doesn’t always work that way. I was used to giving orders and a chain of command that knew the score so I had a hard time listening to the dumbasses in charge. It wasn’t long before I pissed off the brass. My sergeant, a know nothing prick, wrote me up constantly and even got me suspended a time or two. When he couldn’t get rid of me that way, he trumped up a murder charge. I beat the rap, sued the county, and won. I used the settlement to start my own business.
Now I’m a PI and a damn good one. Ninety percent of my work, chasing cheating spouses, runaway rich kids, or even deadbeat dads, is easy money. It just takes time. The Cartiers and Tiffanys of the trade have dozens of people working the streets and all the high-tech toys. They have the high dollar clients who pay for it too, but not me. I’m at the bottom of most people’s list of PIs even if I am close to the front of the phone book. The high dollar dicks chase you with a computer. I can use one too, but I still spend most of my time talking to people or hunkered down in a car with binoculars and a camera. When it comes to an interview though, no one can hide the truth from me. So when she sashayed through my door smelling like flowers, with her high cheekbones, green eyes, tawny blond hair, and lean body, and packing a bag of C-notes, I inhaled, looked her up and down, licked my chops, and grabbed the cash.
But that was later.
Sitting at the kitchen table, I was lost in the depths of my coffee cup nursing my hangover when the phone rang. I’m current on most of my bills, so I figured I’d answer.
The call was from the richest man in Central Florida, Martin Hunt, known as the General. The Hunt family was loaded, old money, filthy rich from way back. They made a bundle more recently unloading a thousand acres of useless Florida scrub to a couple brothers from California, two brothers named Disney. Yeah, Hunt was loaded and the great man wanted to see me. I should have been suspicious.
Once on my feet, I stumbled to the shower. The hot water sweated out the hooch, but it wasn’t enough to wash away the memories. I lathered up, leaned with my forearms against the wall and I let the spray beat against my head and neck. When my skin was good and red, and the stench of the booze began to fade, I stepped out of the shower and toweled off.
I shaved for the first time in weeks and tried to force a comb through my matted hair. I hadn’t had it cut since I don’t remember when. I threw on my cleanest shirt and a pair of khakis. After snagging another cup of joe, I hit the road.
A forty-minute drive southwest on U. S. Route 92 took me through Kissimmee, and then around the north end of Lake Tohopekaliga. Thick scrub and century old Live Oaks hung thick with Spanish moss gave only an occasional glimpse of sunlight reflecting off the vast expanse of water. Thirty minutes past the lake, I slowed as I passed through a dusty wide spot in the road marked by a bullet-pocked sign for the town of Campbell. The town, if you could call it that, had a coffee shop, a general store/bait shop, and a post office. You had to love small town Florida. Twelve miles past Campbell, I turned in under a metal sign that read Live Oak House. I stopped in front of a wrought iron gate with the letter H in the center and pressed the call button on a panel within reach of my window.
“Yes,” a voice with a clipped British accent said.
“Mac Everett to see General Hunt.”
“Wait for the gate to open, follow the main road to the house,” the voice instructed.
The gate split as it swung open, cleaving the letter H in its center, to reveal a private road. The brick drive meandered through the trees like a dark, lazy Florida river. Massive Live oaks, frozen sentinels with outstretched arms and gray beards of Spanish moss swaying in the afternoon breeze, flanked both sides of the road. Flickers of brilliant afternoon sun flashed through the thick canopy overhead. The slow uphill drive went on for more than three miles. When I broke out of the dense trees, pastures on either side of the road held a dozen grazing horses. I crested a hill and there in the distance, perched on the highest point, stood a white two-story mansion with the whole enchilada – white columns, huge windows, green plantation shutters, and a wrap-around veranda, a true southern colonial. Against the background of the cobalt sky, it was a sight worthy of a painting. This was the domain of a wealthy, intense, and reclusive man.
I continued up the road that ended in a circular court complete with a marble fountain in the center. I got out and approached the house trying to keep my jaw off the sidewalk. I went to the door
and pressed the bell, hoping I didn’t look as bad as I felt. Chimes like a heavenly choir sounded in the distance and a moment later, the massive door opened. A tall, thin man in pressed slacks, dark coat, white shirt, bow tie, and coifed hair as white as his shirt opened the front door.
“Welcome to Live Oak House, Captain Everett,” the butler said in a clipped English accent that emphasized the word oak. I recognized his voice from the gate. Martin Hunt’s retainer was all business, but there was a hint of warmth behind his eyes.
“What’s your name,” I asked.
“I am Norris, sir. The general is expecting you. Please follow me.”
“Do you know what he wants with me?” I asked, as I cleared the door.
“I wouldn’t know, sir,” he replied with a touch of disdain. “Would you follow me?” Norris said again.
He closed the door, did an about face and marched off down the hall at a double time pace. I had to hustle to keep up.
I straightened my Guy Harvey shirt and wished I’d pressed my khakis or at least run a rag over my shoes. Trailing behind the butler, I caught the nagging feeling I’d become a servant to the master of this house too.
I followed my guide through the bright foyer with a wide staircase in the center. I went by room after lavishly furnished room, then down a carpeted hall with floor to ceiling windows on one side. If the natural surroundings on the drive out to the estate were spectacular, what I saw through those windows was breathtaking. A statuesque woman in a microscopic black and yellow bikini emerged from the swimming pool. She stepped out, stretched her neck, and reached up to wring out her long golden hair. Time ground to a halt as though she moved in slow motion like something out of a movie. I must have made an audible noise because Norris turned, cleared his throat, and said, “The general doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
