One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3)

by Tony Faggioli

  Parker nodded.

  “It’s nothing personal.”

  “It isn’t?” Parker said in an accusatory tone, remembering the conversation he’d had with Napoleon in front of Larry Klein’s residence in La Jolla, the “lay it all on the table” chat. Nap had tried to talk him into leaving the case, because it was a dog that would destroy Parker’s young career. Nap was close enough to retirement age to not care. But they’d both decided that the captain didn’t have either of their backs. Not one bit.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You sent us on a fucking US Marshall’s goose chase, that’s why, and then rode us when we didn’t get results fast enough for anyone to realistically be able to expect them.”

  “Look—”

  “Cap. Please. Let me finish.”

  The red was back in his cheeks, but the captain motioned for Parker to go on.

  “We made mistakes because we were so rushed. Mistakes that cost us.”

  “What kind of mistakes?”

  “You’ve read the report, dammit! The red herrings Fasano placed in the computers at the Beaury Public Library. The bus ruse. The calling card. I may be new on the job, but Nap? There’s no way we play the Keystone Cops like that, no way we fail that badly, if we weren’t set up to fail in the first place.”

  “Listen. If you’re saying what I think you’re saying? Get up and walk the fuck outta here. Go to your union rep. Get a transfer and never speak to me again, because I would never…”—his jaw tensed hard as he leaned across the table and pointed an angry finger in Parker’s face—“… ever set my people up to fail. So fuck you for saying it.”

  In the backyard, there was a whir of leaves in the trees and the soft drone of very distant traffic. No matter where you went in LA, it sounded like traffic. Parker thought of walking away, but that would get him nowhere, especially with protecting the kids, which he had to do until they at least got into their aunt’s hands. Also, a part of him felt he was owed an explanation, so he went for it.

  “Fine, Cap. Then tell me: why?”

  The captain had evidently expected him to get up and storm off, because he blinked in surprise and bit down on his lip as his face contorted in preparation for another outburst. Instead, suddenly, his expression melted, the anger dripping off him like butter as his eyes grew suddenly soft.

  “Look, Parker,” he tried to begin, and then he leaned back in his chair and stared into the pool with a look of resignation before trying again. “Look. This case has been a bucket of hot grease since the moment it was opened.”

  Parker said nothing as the captain loosened his tie and rubbed at his neck. The eczema had spread down over his Adam’s apple. “When you and Nap started on the case I thought we had a plan, an operable way to get this guy quick, and the heat I put on you two, I swear, it was one tenth the heat I was getting from the DA and City Hall. I mean, they went apeshit over this. Hall’s dad had more friends than you can imagine, fucking power whores, all of them. I couldn’t leave my office to take a dump without that phone ringing with someone pushing or pulling on me.”

  “That makes it right?”

  “No. Of course it doesn’t. You’ll see someday that sometimes the circumstances of your situation… shit, I’ll just say it: they overwhelm you.”

  Parker waited to get angry, but he didn’t. Something in him reminded him of the kid in Kamdesh who took his bullet in the back and the feeling of constantly being the next domino in an endless row of falling blackness. The captain was wrong. Parker didn’t need to wait until “someday” to know what it felt like to be overwhelmed by your circumstances.

  The captain sighed, suddenly looking like a frail old man, as human and messed up as the next. “You understand?”

  “I do.” And then, in semi-disbelief that he was actually saying it, Parker told him about the boy. Again, he was being guided by something inside of him. His conscience, maybe? Who knew. But it was the same something that had told him to look to the side of the road on his drive up to Beaury, after that horrible car accident, when he’d seen that angel.

  It was a something that told Parker that right now, at this moment, he needed to tell the captain something truthful, something important. And since he still felt like he couldn’t say a word about what really happened to Napoleon, he chose the only great truth he had left, the truth of his greatest sin.

  When he was done the captain glanced away and then back at him quickly. “So you do get it.”

  “Yeah, man. I do. Please. Reinstate me. Let me get to work on this.”

  The words crossed the table, the pleas like punches from one beaten man to another.

  The captain looked solemnly at Parker and then nodded. “Done. Now, let’s talk. What next?”

  Parker felt his insides shift again. It was clear what he was supposed to do: protect the children. It was counter-intuitive to every fiber in his being that screamed for him to go after Troy Forester, for what he’d done to Conch and what he may have already done to Tamara Fasano. But he just knew that wasn’t what he was supposed to do.

  “I gotta believe that Fasano, at some point, is going to come home. I think, for now at least? I stay here.”

  The surprise on the captain’s face was almost comical. “What?”

  “Think about it, Cap. This bastard has been one step ahead of us the whole way. Instead of chasing him, maybe it’s time to stop and just wait for him.”

  “Go on.”

  “We have to assume that he’s still out there somewhere. He’s gonna hear what happened here, that his wife’s missing, abducted by some psychopath.”

  “Assuming he doesn’t already know said psychopath.”

  Parker shook his head. “No way.”

  “So you’re going with coincidence on this? Did Napoleon ever tell you his theory about coincidences?”

  “He thought they were all bullshit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I agree. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they are. But nothing in the universe is absolute.” Parker thought of The Gray Angel in front of the Brasco house that had been so bright he’d nearly struck Parker blind. He knew in his heart, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that somehow, Fasano and Troy Forester were connected, just not in the way that the captain was thinking.

  “So after all I’ve just shared with you, you’re asking me to ride with the one percent odds?” the captain said with a chuckle and a look of dismay.

  “No. I want you to ride with the fact that this guy, if he’s still alive? He’s gonna come for his kids. He’ll have to. What father wouldn’t? I can almost guarantee it.”

  Parker noticed a squirrel doing four-legged ballet moves across the top of the neighbors’ wrought iron fence. The Fasanos also had a lemon tree in the backyard that he hadn’t noticed until now. Meyer lemons. His favorite. He waited.

  He’d been here before, many times, in this place of “patient reserve,” usually when they were on point in the hills, when the platoon would fan out, some to his left, others to his right, and wait for the moment to present itself. There was nothing more to do but wait for it. It would come. One way or another, it always did.

  Finally, the captain grunted and said, “Fine. You’re on the children.”

  Parker would’ve smiled if not for an intense feeling of relief that nearly made him nauseous.

  Because his gut told him that it wasn’t Fasano who was coming for the kids, but something else.

  And he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT WAS LIKE WATCHING the world on fast forward—blurred landscapes, open desert to rolling hills of shrubbery, across small towns and through streets—until they finally came to a stop at a mailbox on the corner. The Gray Man seemed to be studying something in the dirt near it, tire tracks perhaps, or a spot of fresh oil, before the video wound forwards, again and again, to the train car McDonald’s in Barstow, then to another spot, Schat’s Bakkery, where they made the best jalapeno cheese brea
d in the world and which was barely more than a smudged image as they zipped along to a gas station, then a four-way stop beyond that, and finally a hard left out of town and back to the open road.

  Each time they came to a stop The Gray Man focused on something, or picked something up, or stared off into the distance, as if the clues were all around them now, on hairs accidentally caught in the wind or in dust motes that had settled on something seemingly inconsequential.

  Kyle realized with a measure of fascination that The Gray Man really was a kind of heavenly detective, and that he was teaching Kyle to become one too. Already he felt… more in tune… with space and time, in what The Gray Man was doing, how he was doing it and why. If it weren’t for his incessant worry over Tamara’s safety, Kyle might have actually been able focus on it all.

  They were heading north-east, across the open desert, when the video finally stopped and the world around them crystalized to something that felt more like reality.

  The Gray Man looked confused.

  “What’s wrong?” Kyle asked.

  “I’ve lost it.”

  “Lost what?”

  “His trail. Or rather, the markers that make up his trail.”

  “What now?”

  “We exercise patience. We wait. Something will be revealed in time.”

  “But Tamara—”

  “Yes. I know,” The Gray Man said with a sigh. “But we cannot act on information that we don’t have yet, Kyle.”

  They stood in silence for a moment as a lizard scrambled by, over a small rock and then up the face of large bolder, its greenish-brown scales flat and dull beneath the setting sun.

  “What was all that, what we just did?”

  “We’re tracking, Kyle. Much like the hunters in your world do each day. But on a much finer scale.”

  “You mean, like by scent?”

  “Not really. More like… by what you would call ‘aura.’”

  “Hmm.”

  “Each of you has one. The next time we stop in a populated area, take a quick moment, call on the blue and reach out with it.”

  “Reach out?”

  “Yes. With your mind this time, though. Not how you’ve been doing it: with anger or fear, to attack or defend. Instead, calm your heart and mind, and instead of lashing out with it, let the blue simply emanate outward.”

  “Emanate?”

  “Yes. Like ripples. Small waves will push out of you and you will see them, the hues and colors that tell you who a person is, what they’re made of and the mood that they’re in. Three colors that will rotate in fairly rapid succession.”

  “Really? That sounds incredible.”

  The Gray Man removed his hat and wiped his sleeve across his brow. He was squinting into the distance as he spoke. “It is. At first you will be amazed and thrilled, but I think it’s okay to warn you that, eventually, you’re just as likely to see it as a terrible gift.”

  Kyle was perplexed. “How so?”

  “In our world, in the world you are slowly becoming a part of, you can see it.”

  “See what?”

  “Sin. How it has corrupted someone, and the propensity a given person has to engage in it. As such, you see the creatures that are tormenting them, mostly minor demons of temptation, from the place we just escaped.”

  “Then what? You step in and destroy them?”

  The Gray Man chuckled sadly and shook his head. “No, unfortunately. The amazing thing about humanity, about being human, is that the creatures are almost always there by your own invitations.”

  Kyle said nothing. Instead he took note of the wrinkles in The Gray Man’s forehead, which were more pronounced now.

  “What you all do with your free will… the way you torment yourselves? It’s tragic. But if we stepped in and intervened every time? You’d have no free will.”

  Kyle decided that it was time to ask. “You were human too, once, right?”

  The Gray Man nodded. “Yes. But one man’s misery, contained within the capsule of his own lifetime, is one thing. Being raised to a state where you can see such miseries from person to person, soul to soul, across hundreds and thousands of lives? It’s almost too much to bear.”

  For some reason Kyle felt dizzy. Perhaps the aftereffects of the travel they’d just engaged in. “Then why do it?”

  The Gray Man raised his eyebrows. “Because some of us are meant for it.”

  “Am I meant for it?”

  “No,” The Gray Man said, shaking his head firmly. “You were called for it.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Oh, yes. A vast one.”

  “How so?”

  Again The Gray Man shook his head. “Another time, perhaps. That, for now, you do not get to know.”

  Kyle nodded reluctantly. “Okay then. So? Teach me. You’re tracking their… auras, their hues or whatever, now?”

  “Trying to. But they’ve faded.”

  “I had ideas while we were traveling, about hair and dust in the air?”

  “Yes. Biological residue is harder to track but sometimes necessary.”

  Kyle knitted up his brow. “But what could possibly be on dust?”

  The Gray Man smiled. “He sneezed.”

  “What?”

  “The man we’re after, the one who has Tamara? He sneezed. His DNA was on the dust.”

  Kyle was dumbfounded.

  “The problem is that dust travels, swiftly and far. So we must then ascertain when he sneezed and at what distance.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Manipulate time? Very little. But as you’ve noticed in the past, when you’ve been attacked, like with the boy on the bike, how things slow down?”

  Kyle nodded as he stretched. He’d lost weight. A lot of it. His belly felt tight beneath his shirt. “Yeah. I remember.”

  “That’s the effect of my world engaging directly with yours, and it leaves a wrinkle in time, a crease of sorts.”

  “And you can see that too?”

  “Yes. So, I can roughly estimate that he was through here, this area, about twelve hours ago.”

  “That doesn’t help much.”

  “No,” The Gray Man said with a nod, “it doesn’t. And the sample size of the dust was too old to get a more accurate reading. The distance it travelled, though, wasn’t far, based on the windage on it the past twelve hours, and the fact that the particular sample we found was stuck to something.”

  “What?”

  “That mailbox.”

  “Which leads us to do what, now?”

  “If we were in a large city? Not much. We’d be relying more on auras there than we can here, and less on the biological clues. In cities the auras are reflected and re-reflected, in building windows, across car windows, in chrome fixtures and metallic frames. They’re embedded, albeit briefly, in such things, far better than they are out here, in the open sky and desert. Since that’s our situation, we need something else to drift our way or catch our eye.”

  “But that could take hours.”

  The Gray Man held up his hand in a quieting gesture, nodding softly for a brief moment before he fixed his attention once again on the horizon. As restless and desperate as Kyle felt, he sensed it would be no use to protest.

  And it did take hours. Just over two of them, actually. The sun set and the desert sky turned a cobalt blue before The Gray Man’s head suddenly snapped up and his jaw stiffened.

  “What is it?”

  “Words.”

  Kyle was stunned. “What? What words?”

  The Gray Man hesitated, as if he didn’t want to answer.

  “Gray?”

  “She’s praying, Kyle. I can hear her.”

  “She’s alive?” Kyle felt his chest burst with relief as he leaned over and put his hands on his knees. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.”

  The Gray Man nodded. “Yes. Amen. I couldn’t hear her before, her proximity to him being the likely cause.”

  “What do you mean?” />
  The Gray Man sounded concerned. “His evil, his state of being, it is a darkness so great that it stifles the light and mutes her prayers.”

  “So how did you finally hear her?”

  “He must have fallen asleep.”

  A semi rolled down a highway road in the distance.

  “We’re still very far behind them,” The Gray Man said, shaking his head.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because this prayer was from last night. She’s referenced the moon and the stars. She was thanking Our Father for the light they were giving her…” He paused, tilting his head back and then forwards in deep concentration. “She was contemplating a way to escape and asking for his help, but more than that—”

  The Gray Man stopped as a look of love and sorrow, mixed twins, wrestled in his face.

  “What? Tell me, Gray. What?”

  He put his hands on his hips and nodded softly, his hat tipping a bit over his forehead. “She was praying, above all, for Janie and Seth.”

  Kyle felt his emotions beginning to overwhelm him. Tamara. His girl. She’d always been his girl, but then she’d become the mother of his children, and in so doing, the math that made her so special a woman only multiplied. How had he been so blind? So stupid? To risk her. To risk it all for nothing, really? “My God. Gray. What have I done?”

  The Gray Man turned to Kyle and put a hand on his shoulder as the air around them grew warm and the video began to play again, a click and a whir as they lifted off the ground.

  “Many are the men who make grave mistakes and carry them to their graves, Kyle. But it is a rare man who faces them head on and seeks redemption. Do not lose heart.”

  Tears were filling Kyle’s eyes. “Why? Why shouldn’t I?”

  The Gray Man looked at him solemnly.

  “Because she was also praying for you, Kyle.”

  THEY SAT TOGETHER in the tall grass, the smell of dirt filling their nostrils, as Napoleon deflected Efren’s questions about where he’d been and instead got the boy talking about himself. About the simplest, most beautiful things in life: schoolwork, his little league team, the newest Goldfish crackers (Flavor Blasted Extreme!) and the dark-haired girl that he liked in his class. Napoleon hadn’t been gone that long since the Fasano case first came across his desk, but it felt like centuries.