Right now, he appreciated the fact that the house kept him forever on edge, and he was ironically more relaxed at his office at work.
Come on, Carson. This guy has tried to kill you seven times, and each time he failed. Just how smooth can he be? Trust that he left some sign of where he was headed with her.
This was his second time through the house; he was losing hope. It was already easier to touch knickknacks and revel in good times with her than it was to look for clues, as if his mind were already rushing to heal the sucking wound of her absence. The more the flashbacks pushed out the flash-forwards, the closer he came to accepting her death. He started hurtling the knickknacks against the wall to sabotage his own efforts to placate himself.
He looked down at the shattered pieces as if he’d violated her memory worse than the kidnapper, ashamed of himself.
That’s when he noticed it.
The scratch mark on the floor, from her high heel dragged across the hardwood. The last time he’d seen a drag mark like that was at the storage space, when they were picking up an antique sofa his wife relished. She had looked down at the mark with an expression of horror at what it meant to the antique piece. They’d shared the full brunt of that horror together, because he was the one that had made the mark, by dragging too hard, too fast, in an effort to unseat the sofa from everything piled on top of it. Suddenly he was sure of the message. The kidnapper was keeping her in a storage shed. She must have recognized him as one of the street people who’d managed to pick a lock on a largely-empty storage space the last time one or both of them was there.
He bolted out the door thinking, This is thin, Carson.
***
“Bee Bop a Lula, don’t say maybe… Bee Bop a Lula, she’s my baby…” he sang, jitterbugging her around the cement floor of the storage space, managing to keep the beat with his feet and not sound too breathless singing the musical accompaniment. All in all, she figured there wasn’t a sweeter, more endearing kidnapping perv in all the world. Of course, she wasn’t exactly testing his patience any by refusing to play along with their budding romance. His name was Breezy; she wasn’t sure if it was a nickname—though, either way, the irony wasn’t lost on her.
“Well, she's the girl in the red blue jeans
She's the queen of all the teens
She's the one that I know
She's the one that loves me so”
It wasn’t until he hit that stanza that she realized why she was in red blue jeans. She wasn’t doing so badly with the carefree fifties persona, only too delighted to face her current situation with telltale denial. But now that she understood she was playing a teenager, she was racking her brains to remember what that was like, and what it meant to be a teenager in the fifties. As she pondered the point, she fought to keep a preoccupied look off her face, which would dispel the illusion of being fully present for her “beau.”
As the song ended, she jumped back to land butt first on the pile of cardboard boxes, as if anxious to get off her feet, just like a teenager might, not thinking too long or too hard about the crash landing. Feeling the lump in her pocket, she instinctively reached inside and retrieved the Bazooka bubble gum. She chewed on it as she gasped and fanned herself dramatically. Soon after, she blew a bubble that popped in her face, causing her to laugh as if Dizzy was her middle name.
Lily reached for the roller skates and slipped them on, winked at him. “Never been skating before, this should be fun.” She kept her tone and manner school-girl giddy, and hormone-intoxicated. He appeared to be drooling, perhaps at the thought of putting his hands around her waist to help hold her up. She’d have to ham up the “first time on skates – help me!” number. Shouldn’t be too hard. She couldn’t skate worth a damn. He busied himself with creating more floor space, stacking the bric-a-brac higher to the ceiling, presumably so when she fell, she’d have no place to fall but into his arms, and not the cardboard boxes which would cushion her. She would make sure to skate away from the edges to facilitate his reasoning.
He slipped a scratchy record onto a phonograph player from the seventies, just a few years older than the skates. It was dancehall music as she would hear in a real roller-skating rink from the era. “Disco Inferno,” to be exact.
Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn!
Burnin'!
To mass fires, yes! One hundred stories high
People gettin' loose y’all gettin' down on the roof - Do you hear?
(the folks are flaming) Folks were screamin' - out of control
It was so entertainin' - when the boogie started to explode
I heard somebody say
Burn baby burn! - Disco inferno!
Burn baby burn! - Burn that mama down
Burn baby burn! - Disco inferno!
Burn baby burn! - Burn that mama down
Burnin'!
She couldn’t help but notice the ominous five gallon red plastic bottle of gasoline, which she had scarcely heeded until now, and the long stem matches. Maybe if caught, rather than admit defeat, Breezy had an exit strategy in place. As the record hit the “so I had to self-destruct” line, she fell into his arms for real, losing her balance, and her self-control. She was sweaty and panicky.
“Don’t worry, I got you.” Thank God she had been falling all over herself to stay up on the skates, and he, wearing skates of his own, had been skating around her, suggestively grabbing hold of her at every opportunity to balance and woo her at the same time. He was so entranced he barely noticed the reason for her burning from the inside out.
Her husband better get here quick. If she hadn’t had years of training putting her mind on something else to keep from worrying to death about if her husband was going to make it home at all, she would have been ill-equipped for her audition with Breezy. All the same, she was going to crack. The tiger of crazed emotions was already scratching at the cage.
***
Carson pulled up in his two-tone Bronco to the acres-wide We-Store-It storage lot. Reached into the glove compartment and retrieved a scope he’d paid a small fortune for off-book. He exchanged it with the scope on his rifle that had been mounted overhead, recessed into the roof, along with the rest of the mobile arsenal. He zippered closed the pouch that concealed the overhead stow compartment.
When he stepped out of the Bronco wearing his Texas ten gallon hat, the five-hundred-dollar hand made cowboy boots with all sorts of fancy colors, which he wore outside his jeans, carrying his rifle in one hand, finger on the trigger, the veritable cop cliché, folks unpacking their cars quietly stopped what they were doing, climbed back in their cars and drove off, leaving their lockers unlocked and their goods where they sat. He tended to get that reaction a lot. Sadly, and ironically, during his years working with Border Patrol in Arizona, he never got such respect. They were all happy to shoot back at him, didn’t matter if he was carrying a bazooka or a Texas Peacekeeper (a cannon which shot lead bowling balls).
He took off his cowboy boots, set them amongst a carload of personal household belongings some family had left behind. He’d take his chances on nails and broken glass over his quarry having better hearing than he did.
He walked briskly by each stall listening for the slightest sound. One thing about kidnappers and bullies, they liked to taunt their victims when they weren’t torturing them, either phase left no shortage of audible clues. His eyes continued to canvas in full sweeps; he wasn’t relying just on his ears. He had started as close to his wife’s storage space as possible, working his way in all directions by following the sight lines from the timeworn path they took in and out of the place. Let’s hear it for habits; for predictable behavior. Wackos loved their unpredictability; figured it gave them an edge. It never did; insane turned out to be even more predictable than normalcy. And predictable is what got them caught every time.
He heard something coming from the stall he just passed.
He didn’t even slow his pace. Just kept walking. He may
be in stealth mode, but everyone had hairs that stood on end when they were being watched. He couldn’t count on not being seen or heard as any kind of defense.
He waited until he’d circled around the balcony floor he was on to the opposite side, leaned his gun across the railing, and aimed the scope at the storage door marked 257. Wasn’t that the number of a plane that had gone down recently? A plane full of history buffs on safari to the world’s most exciting historical destinations? He racked his mind to see if he remembered if there were any survivors. Seemed to him there were one or two.
He focused the scope until he could see the X-ray images of his wife and the kidnapper on the other side of the door. They were leaning in close to one another, which complicated the shot, but not enough for someone with his level of marksmanship to worry, especially in a contained space with no wind blowing, from a mere ten yards away.
He attached the earbuds to the scope and planted them in his ears so he’d have audio on the two people inside the stall. They appeared to be play acting. Though he could have told that much without the audio, what with his wife holding up a saucer and tea cup as if she was having a patio social.
He didn’t pay particular attention to their conversation; he was hardly looking for a door to this guy’s psyche. He couldn’t care less. He merely listened absently as they talked—in the event the dialogue revealed information that would affect body positioning at the time he took his shot—and he focused the scope for accurate shot placement.
He put two quick precision shots in the kidnapper, disabled both arms so he couldn’t lift them.
His wife needed virtually no reaction time to slide open the bolt fastening the door. She forced the door wide, looked for her husband, and ran to the man pointing the gun straight at her. Apparently logic didn’t run in the family.
“You got my message.” She hugged and kissed him.
“Loud and clear,” he said.
“God, I thought I was a goner.”
“Nah, this is just my idea of foreplay.”
She laughed in a way that allowed all the bottled up anxiety to escape at once. “I’m glad you didn’t kill him,” she said.
“I didn’t figure you needed the image of his brains splattered all over you to hold on to for the rest of your life. Especially every time you crawled into my arms.”
“I would have found it very comforting. Context is everything.”
He laughed. “It’s not Texas, hon. Different rules apply here. Even diehards like myself have to adapt. He’ll be teaching kindergarten next year, and they’ll be holding up a plaque beside him for the newspapers, showing how proud they are of his recovery.”
“I’m thinking a new sofa for the living room.”
“Well, if we’re going to be so predictable, we have to expect someone else will steal the awards for getting over themselves.”
“What do we have to get over?” He felt a cold air blow over them.
“Nothing, dear. You can’t improve on perfection.”
Outside, the sun in the morning sky was reminiscent of a Texas afternoon, for glare, if not for heat intensity. Carson found his expensive boots where he’d left them.
“You left these out here, and no one took them?” His wife said. Of course, she hadn’t seen the entrance he’d made.
“Aren’t people nice?”
He threw the handcuffed Breezy in the backseat of the Bronco, which was a caged area that came standard with polic cars, just not Broncos. Breezy hadn’t uttered a word since being shot, which was damn polite of him.
Carson let his wife take the wheel. After a scene like that, she needed some sense of control back in her life. Just as well. He needed some downtime.
As she drove off, he took out the folded papers with the pictures of Cliff Masters and Piper Shiftly and reviewed what information he had on them.
FORTY-FOUR
Robin’s mind, from trance state, had tuned in Cliff Masters and Piper Shiftly and just what they were up to. She observed not only the intrepid duo’s beat down of the hooligans on the London city streets, but the cascade of events it had triggered, drawing Alexis into the case, and soon after that Carson. Not only Alexis’s blissfully mundane life, with Atam and her children, which she held so dear, was about to be torn apart by the Cliff and Piper maelstrom, but Carson would soon find his family dynamic threatened as well by the two Renaissance types that had lost their way. Unable to find genius in themselves and bring it to the surface, in their rush to be great, Cliff and Piper had been seduced by the dark side of their natures; succumbing to the intoxicating power it gave them to control and shape events. Their own insecurities regarding their worthiness made it easier for the eruptions in creativity to happen around destructive acts than around constructive ones.
When Cliff and Piper’s paths crossed Iona’s, she saw Iona’s potential as well, and the screwy path she’d taken in her determination to impact the world in a profound and positive way. Robin was convinced she could turn the bad guys around in the unfolding scenarios involving Piper, Cliff, and Iona. She was certain, furthermore, she could shepherd Alexis and family, and Carson and his significant other across the abyss to a place where they’d have time to recognize and act on the greatness in themselves. But for now she was stalled.
Either she’d exhausted herself in reaching out to the earlier Renaissance figures of Perdue, Johnny, and Radon, or the psychic barriers surrounding this latest cluster of individuals was simply harder to penetrate. Either way, she needed more psychic horsepower, and for now, at least, had no way to get it. It was time for an intervention on the part of her higher self to help take her to the next level, but so far at least, her higher self wasn’t cooperating.
Drew found Robin in a bad way in the bathroom of her room, submerged beneath the water. He pulled her out of the tub screaming, “Damn it! Who left her unsupervised?” He administered mouth to mouth resuscitation until she came to enough for her autonomic system to resume breathing. “Why is there no water in your lungs?”
She smiled and thought about it. “One of your gnostic texts spoke of Christ on the Cross who had similarly stopped breathing and yet wasn’t dead. It was described as a state of supreme balance between the physical and spiritual world.”
Drew held his tongue, until she thought his head was going to explode for not being able to vent the pressure. “And what did this state of sublime centeredness teach you?”
“That I’ve topped out at this level. I need more mind power. I need to plug into a more powerful source, perhaps something a little closer to what Christ himself was connected to.”
Drew hit her with a pained smile. There arose a riot of noise outside that impinged on their moment. “How about we just go downstairs and enjoy the polo match?” he said. “You came to England to get away from purposefulness, remember? Precisely so you could recharge your batteries. No surprise your martyrdom has drained the last bit of life out of you.”
“Very well. Considering I couldn’t apply myself to more worthy ventures right now, if I tried.”
***
Robin and Toby had beached themselves on the hood of a Harding family car, a porcelain white 1930 SSK Mercedes, for the lawn polo event.
Lady Harding’s Arabian prince of a husband was in town with his people, taking a brief timeout from racking up millions of dollars. They were all playing on the same team on their Arabian ponies opposite the Harding side of the family, all English landed gentry, also mounted on Arabian ponies, with which they were quite accustomed.
“Explain this thinly veiled civil war to me,” Robin said.
Toby kept his eyes largely on his Science as Culture magazine as he pontificated. Robin was beginning to think it was the field manual for the European underground railroad dedicated to seeing free minds remained free. “The most basic concept in the sport of polo is the line of the ball, a right of way established by the path of a traveling ball.
“When a player has the line of the ball on his right
, he has the right of way. This can be taken away by moving the player off the line of the ball by making shoulder to shoulder contact.
“A player can: hook an opponent's mallet; push him off the line; bump him with his horse; or steal the ball from him. The umpires' primary concerns are right of way and the line of the ball.” Turning a page in his magazine, he said, “The line of the ball is an imaginary line that is formed each time the ball is struck. This line traces the ball's path and extends past the ball along that trajectory. The player who last struck the ball is considered to have right of way, and no other player may cross the line of the ball in front of that player. Riding alongside to block or hook is allowed, as long as the player with right of way is not impeded.”
“Explain ride offs to me,” Robin said.
“Bumping or riding off is allowed as long as the angle of attack is less than forty-five degrees, and any contact must be made between the pony's hip and shoulder.”
“And hooks?”
“A player may hook or block another player's mallet with his mallet, but no deliberate contact between players is allowed. A player may not purposely touch another player, his tack or pony with his mallet.”
“What about safety?” Robin said, after watching a player get knocked free of his horse and nearly trampled to death.
“The mallet may only be held in the right hand. Left handed players are often thought to hit with less accuracy, but guide their ponies better than their right handed peers. Ponies play for a maximum of two chukkers per match.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 123
