A gust of wind blew down the street, kicking up a dirt devil that spun haphazardly down the road, through all three ghosts, around The Gray Man and right into Kyle.
Silence formed all around them.
When The Gray Man finally spoke, Kyle jumped, then felt immediately embarrassed.
“What do you want?” The Gray Man asked, a mix of concern and compassion in his voice.
“Nuttin’ you don’t, Agent,” the old man replied, his voice raspy.
“Which is?”
“Just peace and quiet.”
The Gray Man glanced around. “I wonder,” he said with a sigh, “how peaceful this lonely place is for the children.”
The old man looked towards the kids and then back to The Gray Man, his eyes like little dark beads in the midst of his pale white visage. “Dey here of dey own vo-lition,” he said, swinging his chin back and forth as if he were chewing imaginary tobacco. “Dey my little ones.”
Kyle cleared his throat, but everyone ignored him, including the little girl, which only increased his unease.
Not seeming to buy the old man’s statement at face value, The Gray Man looked to the children. “Is this true?”
“Yah, mister. You leave our pop alone,” the boy said with the hesitant bravado of a teenager. “He done nothin’ to you or yer friend.”
The Gray Man waited, his eyes fixed on the little girl, a sad look on his face. Finally, evidently realizing that he was waiting on her, the little girl also replied. “Das my daddy,” she said nodding. “Please don hurt ’im.”
“What’s your name?” The Gray Man said, turning back to the old man.
“Solomon,” the old man answered, then pointing to the kids he added, “This here is Andy and Margie.”
“Nice to meet you. This is Kyle.”
Only the teenage boy felt the need to ask, “And what’s your name, mister?”
“Andy!” Solomon spat under his breath, “Don’t. You don’ ever ask one such as ’im ’is name. Not’n’less he offers it.”
“But—”
Solomon shot him a harsh gaze that made the boy’s mouth clamp shut like a bear trap. What few remaining doubts that Kyle had about him really being their father disappeared entirely.
“Why?” The Gray Man asked, relaxing his stance.
Solomon placed his hands on his hips, his one shoulder popping in its socket. “Why what?”
“Why linger?”
“Why go, Agent?”
“Because what waits cannot be any worse than this, Solomon.”
“For them, maybe,” Solomon said, nodding his head in the direction of the children.
The Gray Man nodded, and then shook his head. “Always the same; always the fear.”
“You don’ know nuttin’ ’bout me,” Solomon said with a sneer.
“No. I don’t,” The Gray Man agreed. “But I also don’t know anything that can’t be forgiven.”
Margie’s canary-like voice chirped. “Papa?”
“You be quiet now, girl. Papa’s busy,” Solomon replied.
Still refusing to take his eyes off The Gray Man, he stepped forwards quickly. Kyle instinctively did the same, surprised as much by his instinct to protect The Gray Man as he was by the notion that The Gray Man needed protecting.
“Now listen. Whyn’t you just leave and take yer friend with you?”
The two of them stood like that for a long time, The Gray Man not answering and Solomon not budging.
Awkwardly, Kyle asked, “What happened to you?”
Solomon shot a look at Kyle and then returned his stare to where it had been before answering out of the corner of his mouth with a tone dripping with bitterness. “Dynamite. Charge got away from me. We were tryin’ to blast a hole in the ground to find a new well.”
“You died instantly,” The Gray Man said flatly.
Solomon nodded.
Again The Gray Man looked at the children, except this time it was with pity. “Then the children’s mother—”
“Then their mother was kidnapped and taken away by bad men,” Solomon said firmly, cutting The Gray Man off.
Kyle watched as for the first time a look between them was not based on confrontation, but rather understanding.
The Gray Man lowered his voice. “You stayed… for them.”
Taking another step forwards, Solomon nearly dropped his voice to a whisper. “Yes. To protect ’em. When she ran off and left ’em behind, right after I died.”
“But don’t you see—”
“I told ’em what I did to protect ’em, after I came back.” The old man looked to the ground. “After I let ’em see me.”
“Before the typhoid came.”
Solomon nodded, his face wrought with pain and sorrow. “I tried to protect ’em, but this place, with no mother and no father? Can you even imagine?”
The Gray Man now also looked to the ground. “No. I can’t.”
“I kept whisperin’ to other families, especially the other mothers in town, tryin’ to move ’em to pity, to take my children on to California. Sometimes it worked but then their men folk would reverse their minds. Another mouth to feed from here to there was too much to even consider, much less two mouths.”
“What happened next?” Kyle interjected.
“Someone brought it into camp. The sickness spread quick-like. Most folks fled and moved on, but for those who were already sick? It was too late.”
“And?”
“And it was a merciful thing. At least for my babies. It was a most merciful thing to be spared the horrors this town had in store for ’em, and the hard, bitter life that would’ve awaited ’em afterwards, even if they’da survived.”
“That’s why they’re still the ages they are?” Kyle said, getting it.
Solomon swallowed hard, shifted his weight on his boots and then looked back at The Gray Man. “You should go.”
“Yes. We will. But first, a few questions.”
“What?”
“We’re looking for a man. An evil man. You really couldn’t miss him. He has my friend’s wife.”
“He was in one of the metal wagons that roars,” Solomon said with a nod. “Painted black as night.”
“Then you saw him?”
“Barely. The wagon window was only half down. But it didn’t matter. We hid. You woulda too if you saw him.”
“I doubt that,” The Gray Man replied.
“Yah. I’m sorry. The likes of you, no, you wouldn’t hide.”
“Did you see the woman?”
“No,” Solomon said, shaking his head. “I could sense ’er though.”
“Sense her?” Kyle asked.
Solomon looked at Kyle and then looked away again, seemingly out of shame for his next words. “I could feel ’er despair. She was very much in despair.”
The weight that kept visiting Kyle’s chest returned now, a tightness in him that would not leave. The thought of his wife in danger, no doubt in fear for her life, and his inability to be there for her was becoming a lingering dread that refused to evaporate.
“How long ago?” The Gray Man asked.
“A day’s length, maybe a little more,” Solomon answered.
“Did they stay here at all?”
“No. I think ’e sensed us somehow. He got out, threw a piss and then got back in and drove off. That’s it.”
The Gray Man nodded firmly. “Okay then. Thank you.”
“Yer welcome.”
“Papa?” the little girl chimed in again, kicking a toe at the dirt, her dirty brown dress a shade of white in spots. “Does the man know what ever happened to Mama?”
Solomon shook his head ever so slightly at The Gray Man.
“They should know,” The Gray Man said encouragingly.
“No,” the old man said, an intense look in his eye. “It would break them.”
“Quite the opposite, my friend: it would free them.”
“No.”
“They’re staying for you, Solomo
n, and for no other reason.”
“And what about it?”
“You love them. I can tell. I can also assure you that heaven most certainly awaits them.”
Solomon’s face seemed to drop. If ghosts could cry, Kyle thought.
“I know it’s you who’s afraid of what’s next, and only you and God can take that inventory of your life and have that discussion.”
His shoulders slumping, Solomon seemed to sway a bit.
Putting out a hand to steady him, The Gray Man continued, “But you’ve been a fine father. For many years. Your life after your life, in its own way, was a repentance of sorts.”
“What’re you saying?”
“No guarantees, Solomon. It’s not my place. But answer me something.”
“What?”
“What is the risk of going to hell if it means getting your children to heaven?”
Solomon reached out, leaned on The Gray Man like a blown-over tree and shook.
It appeared that, in their own way, ghosts could, indeed, cry.
The old man looked up into The Gray Man’s eyes and said one word. “Yes.”
The Gray Man stepped back suddenly and waved a hand across the three ghosts, left to right, in a movement so sudden that Kyle barely had a chance to understand what was happening.
In an instant, they were gone, leaving Kyle and The Gray Man alone in the street.
“What just happened?” Kyle asked, dumbfounded.
“They were sent on their way, at long last.”
As the air around them grew warm, signaling yet another leg on their travels, Kyle couldn’t help himself. “I have to know,” he said.
The Gray Man had evidently read his mind again, that or he just knew to expect the question. “Of course you do.”
“What happened to him?”
“I’m not supposed to say, Kyle.”
Welling up with emotion from all sides for reasons he couldn’t understand, Kyle pressed. “Please.”
As the sky and sun around them warped into glops of paint drops, The Gray Man replied. “Kyle. After a hundred years of watching over them, protecting them and loving them, even if Solomon had it wrong at times, do you honestly think that God would forsake him? He’s in heaven with his babies, Kyle. Their loneliness is no more.”
There was a falcon in the distance flying lazy curves in the sky.
As the world melted away, Kyle sighed in relief.
NAPOLEON STOOD by the pool of the apartment complex. It was all that was left to go to after he’d finished walking through the entire complex, his eyes hazy at times, looking at things but not really, as he worked his way down a memory lane that was one part “dead man’s curve” and one part just plain “dead end.”
But, he told himself, everything happens for a reason. Focus.
The two levels of the apartment complex housed maybe a total of forty units. The rain gutters along the rooftop were rusted and worn, the distressed metal having given way and bent back in places. Some units had plants in front of them, others small signs of greeting or hope. One apartment actually had a Christmas wreath still up in the window, even though the holiday was long past.
They tried. God bless them, they tried to make it like a home. For some of them it was, and for some of them it was even a happy home.
But to Napoleon the idea was beyond comprehension. This whole place, to him, would always be where a killer lived, once upon a time. They could strip it, replaster it or rename it and it would make no difference. They could even burn it to the ground and rebuild it and somehow that bastard’s ghost would find its way back into the rafters.
The pool water, still and flat, was clear enough to see through to the bottom, which was partially covered with algae and dead leaves that had made the dive down. The number markers for depth were faded, and mosquitos were brazenly swimming in threatening pirouettes along the surface.
Another bad thought, another urge to resist it. But instead, something told him to let it go, so he did, in a whisper. “He let them play in the pool before he killed them. He would threaten to hurt them, or to hurt their families, unless they did as he said.”
He felt cold and sweaty. Not good. But he pressed on. “He would bring them to the apartment and have them watch those cartoons while he picked out which bathing suit he wanted them to wear. He had a whole plastic tub of them that he bought from Target.”
Napoleon’s stomach rolled, but held.
A small flock of birds landed in a tilted tree at the end of the property and began to debate with one another in sharp tones.
Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it.
“He confessed later that he had Esmerelda take a swim first, in a bikini, because she was overdeveloped for her age.”
He turned immediately and stumbled to a bush nearby and vomited until his stomach was empty and it was bile that scalded his throat on the way out.
Calm down. Get your shit together.
He had to get away from the memories for a moment, so he forced himself to focus on his surroundings.
The traffic beyond the apartment complex wasn’t too heavy, but it still offered up the occasional sound of distraction: a beeping horn, the rumble of a passing cement truck, the protesting cry of a motorcycle in the wrong gear.
But he couldn’t help himself; Napoleon pushed past them all, past the sounds of today and back to the interview room so many years ago, with its white tiled floor and walls painted mint green, to the cold metal interview table and the man that was seated opposite him, after they’d brought him in for the third time.
“His face wasn’t right. During the whole interview, his face just wasn’t right.”
And it was true. There was no remorse, no fear of incriminating himself, no pity. He wasn’t prideful but he wasn’t regretful, either. Once he knew the gig was up he just rolled over and started talking, telling them how he grabbed her, brought her here, dressed her up in that little red bikini and then just watched her swim around awhile.
“Poor thing knew she was in trouble. She was smart enough to try and befriend him, to ask him to get in and swim with her, to play with some silly plastic blue ball that was in the pool that day.”
Napoleon pulled himself back by focusing on the smell of his puke, which nearly made him vomit again. How long before someone in the apartment complex called the police to report some haggard looking old dude walking around the complex talking to himself? The thought made him shake his head. No one in this neighborhood called the police, unless someone was dead or about to die.
Looking around, he watched as the birds shifted branches in staggered lines, their clustered bodies like tiny music notes.
That day, after Murietta had finished telling them how he liked to watch them swim, or get changed, or rinse off in the shower before he raped them because it was fun to “screw with their minds before he screwed them,” it had taken both he and the other interviewing detective, Reyes, who was female, all the strength they had not to lose it and beat him. Screw the law they were sworn to uphold. If the DA hadn’t been watching it all from the other side of the double glass with two other detectives, they would’ve. Napoleon still wished he had.
The truth was that most abductors killed their victims within twenty-four hours. But not Murietta. No. He kept them two, sometimes three days; always grabbed them on a Friday so he’d have something to do on the weekend.
The birds fell silent, which only made Napoleon sadder. “He killed her three blocks from here, near the train tracks, in the middle of the night, on a Sunday.” The option to vomit now gone, it was replaced with a strong desire to cry. “He strangled her with the bikini top.” A tiny sob broke through, insistent, desperate, as if his body were trying to shut his mouth for him. It didn’t work. “He buried her in a shallow grave beneath an abandoned development project near the tracks, after wrapping her in some carpenter’s plastic he found inside. The dogs got to her a few times before we found her. We had to turn her face side
ways for the ID photo for the parents because we just couldn’t put them through that, ya know?”
He couldn’t tell if he was still talking to himself or to God.
Napoleon eased his head against a nearby stairway railing, stuffed his hands in his pockets and sighed.
The birds in the tree took flight, up and off into the sky, speaking back and forth with renewed fervor.
It was time to go, so he did, walking past the pool, past the apartment units and back out through the lobby and to the street beyond.
There was no telling how many little girls they saved when they caught Joaquin Murietta. But one more died when he got off on a technicality. Napoleon’s technicality. One.
Esmerelda.
In the distance a train whistle sounded, from those tracks, nearby and yet so far away, a place where a ten-year-old girl said goodbye to the world in a most terrible way. Had she prayed too? Why weren’t her prayers answered? Or those of her parents when she first went missing?
His mind was going numb. The street was jammed with parked cars, not unusual for an area like this, which mostly housed the unemployed or underemployed.
Then he saw it.
There on the wall, perched quietly, staring intently at him, was a single black crow.
He turned and began walking down the street in the direction of his apartment and, as he did out of the corner of his eye Napoleon noticed the crow.
It had lifted off the brick wall and into flight… right behind him.
That’s when he realized that The Gray Man was right: the thirst for vengeance was useless. He’d gone all the way to hell to exorcise a demon that was already damned.
And now a little piece of hell had followed him home.
CHAPTER 11
IT WAS THE LONGEST drive of her life, trapped as she was in the darkness, and she spent most of it counting bumps in the road. Eventually they pulled off the road and coasted to a stop. She heard him get out of the car and walk off, his shoes crunching in the dirt and gravel outside, far and near, then far and near, as if he were checking the area to make sure no one was around. Finally, and mercifully, he popped the trunk lid. Fresh air poured over her as he yanked her forwards and removed the ropes.
One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3) Page 9
