She blinked and barely had time to scream “No!” before the creature disappeared.
Able to move now, she began to pound on the rock wall. “Let me out!” she yelled. “Let me out of here!”
But the wall wouldn’t give, and there was no exit and—
The faces emerged from the rock in tight but sporadic groupings, each in various states of decay; some still recognizable as human, others half-rotted and the rest as naked skulls. A few had hands visibly at work; one was scratching at his chin, another had its head turned to the ground with a hand covering one eye, middle finger on its cheek, index finger stretched out to its forehead, as if it were contemplating something or trying not to watch what it knew was coming next.
“Oh my God,” Tamara said, stepping backwards towards the wall to her left, the only one without faces emerging from its surface.
As if reacting to her words, the faces all flashed expressions of shock and anger. One in the upper right corner of the wall in front of her screeched like a crow, and another let loose with a string of profanities.
Tamara’s heart sank. What was the old saying? Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Slowly, the other faces began to talk too, one by one, each telling a story of how Tamara had hurt or disappointed someone at some point in her life. Story upon story of things inflicted, people ignored, needs left unmet. She backed up to the opposite wall and covered her eyes, then her ears, trying to close out the voices, but it was no use.
They weren’t speaking into her eardrums.
They were speaking inside her mind.
The memories like forceps digging deeper and deeper into her head, until her skull felt as if it were going to split clean in half.
SOMETIMES YOU MAKE a bad decision and know it instantly. It hits you, like a punch. Other times it takes years or decades for the blow of realization to come, by then too late. Then, there are the bad decisions that glance off of you, like a misdirected jab, and when you think it’s passed, it comes back, again and again, like a stinging nuisance. Parker was feeling that jab now, nice and solid, banging at his head with a precise sort of pain, barely five minutes after Napoleon had driven away: You shouldn’t have let him go alone.
He tried to ignore it when the black and whites pulled up, and when the questioning began. He tried to ignore it when Trudy and the kids were escorted back into the motel room by Klink, who’d arrived in his usual blue OP jacket, with his thin blond hair combed back over his increasingly balding head. But when Murillo arrived, for some reason, he could ignore it no more.
“So tell me again, Parker, what—”
“Stop,” Parker said flatly.
Murillo looked up from his notepad and they locked eyes. “What?”
“We need to get to Evergreen Park.”
Now it looked like it was Murillo who’d caught a jab. His head popped back a bit on his neck in surprise. “What are you…”
“Napoleon is at Evergreen Park. He’s gone there to try and rescue his nephew, Efren. He’s ten, playing in a little league game.”
“Rescue him from who?”
“Whoever, I think they plan on hurting the boy.”
“And here?”
“I can’t say that the kids or Ms. O’Hara are totally in the clear yet, either.”
Murillo took a deep breath before he rubbed his hand over his face in a sort of magic trick, his face changing from confusion into a mask of pure exasperation. “What… the… fuck, Parker!”
“We still got the guy that grabbed Mrs. Fasano on the loose. For all we know he and this guy were working together somehow.”
“Somehow? How?!”
“I don’t know.”
“I just knew this was some sort of satanic cult shit. I been tellin’ Klink that from the beginning.”
“Well…”
Murillo seemed beyond exasperated. “Answers, Parker. Do you have any fucking answers?”
“Does it matter? Now, I mean? Can we get to the answers later, after we get to the park to help him?”
Murillo whistled to Klink, who stepped into the open doorway of the motel room. “What’s up?” Klink said, looking down over the lip of the balcony, his face twisted in curiosity. His blond hair and blue eyes said pure California surfer boy, except he was originally from Kentucky and had never surfed a day in his life.
“You stay here. I gotta jump on a lead at Evergreen Park,” Murillo said, looking at Parker before glancing back to Klink. “I’m taking Parker and a few units with me. I’ll leave a few units behind.”
“Why would you need to leave units behind?” Klink asked, a look of wariness now crossing his face.
“Dude. Stuff’s still poppin’. Can we leave it at that?” Murillo said, lowering his voice a bit and snapping his eyebrows towards the back room, indicating that the kids and Trudy were still within earshot.
Klink was about to press, but Murillo’s cheeks stiffened in an odd sort of poker stare. Parker knew that Klink and Murillo had been partners for years. Like married couples, you get to a point where a look is all it takes. Klink nodded. “Alright. Got it.”
Murillo looked around. “Duquense and Willie, Tapia and Mendoza. You guys follow us. Huante?”
A youngish looking Latino cop with a neat haircut stepped forwards with his hands on his gun belt. “Yes, sir?”
After a short sigh, as if he were bottling his stress, Murillo motioned him and the five other uniforms over. “Look. There may be another fucking perp, maybe gonna try to come back around and pop the kids. You got it?”
The quorum of cops shifted on their heels uneasily at the news. Two of them were female officers, both white, another officer was black, another Asian and the last guy looked like an honest-to-God Navajo. All of them had the same eyes, not in color, but in awareness. Awareness of possible danger. One by one, they nodded.
“Klink’s got the lead. Down here I want Huante at the head of the driveway. The rest of you get this crowd to disperse. Yueng, you get upstairs and take the door. You other four split up, two at the stairs on this end, two at the stairs on the other. That way, no one can get up there unless he fucking drops in on the rooftop from a damn helicopter.”
“Any idea what the guy looks like?” one of the female officers, Carlisle, asked.
Murillo glanced at Parker with irritation. Parker shrugged, not wanting to describe Troy Forester because after the cast of characters he’d seen already, he had no idea who might be sent next. Murillo rolled his eyes.
“Probably a lot like the boogeyman, Carlisle. Meaning you won’t know who he is or what he looks like until he’s up in your shit already, okay?”
They all nodded again. Their black uniforms were long sleeved and strictly creased, the edges not unlike their hair, which for the men was just below their black caps and for the women up in tight buns. It was a look the LAPD had gone back to—black on black, instead of blue on blue, as it had been when Parker first joined the force. The starkness of the black only highlighted the shiny gold of their badges.
“Everyone get to their posts. The ME’s coming soon. Huante, you show them the body.”
Huante had dark eyes and a voice too old for his face. “Got it.”
Parker looked around at the city surrounding them; it was like a cocoon made of concrete, tinted glass and signage. From the professional, big corporate signs on the skyscrapers in the distance downtown to the ones around them here, cheesy and in loud colors, offering ten-dollar manicures, flat-rate cell phone plans or one-dollar tamales. It was like the big city dressed sharp, from the waist up, all metropolitan and fancy, but was one hundred percent Tijuana from the waist down, here on the outskirts, where East LA and Hipsterville were locked in a sociological battle of wills and demographics.
The sky was a weak blue, the clouds tinged with shit smears of smog that blocked most of what the sun had to offer, which wasn’t much today.
“How many you guessing gonna be there?” Murillo asked, startling Parker out o
f his head.
“Man. I got no idea. Hopefully not too many.”
“But more than one, that much we can count on?”
Parker nodded.
“Which means Nap is already outnumbered.”
The words fell like glass on the hard truth of reality. Parker could barely manage a whisper. “Yeah.”
“You better be right about this, Parker. Only for Nap do I risk an ass tanning like I’m gonna get from the cap if you’re wrong.”
“I hear you, man.”
And Parker did. But deep down, he wasn’t worried. He’d done the right thing; he could tell because the jabs had stopped.
But not the feeling that maybe he’d reacted to them too late.
CHAPTER 28
THE GRAY MAN WAS gone, and Kyle felt a certain terror in being alone, just standing there as the sky loomed overhead and the blue continued healing his wrist. The sounds of the desert were lonely and solitary, echoing in the chasm that had just opened up within him, and from out of this chasm his fear began to creep, one gripping finger at a time.
What do I do now? Where do I go? What am I supposed to do? How am I ever going to figure out where he took Tamara? Think. Think.
He took a few deep breaths and leaned forwards, resting his elbows on his knees as he looked out over the desert sands and Joshua trees.
He’d been here before. Not this place, but certainly this situation: when The Gray Man had left him in Carmel to go and protect Tamara, leaving Kyle on his own to get to Monterey and find Victoria. For some reason Kyle could still remember the cafe where they’d sat and argued, even though it seemed like it had been a billion years ago.
Kyle shook his head. This was his fault. All of it. From beginning to… whatever end was coming. If Tamara were killed, how in the world would he be able to explain it to the kids? And that’s when it struck him. Going back to the beginning, when he’d knocked his life clean over, how did he ever think he was going to explain even having the affair with Caitlyn to the kids? How do you tell your babies that you’ve broken their mother’s heart? How do you do that without losing a piece of yourself forever? And even if they didn’t find out until they were older, how much more of their respect do you lose for keeping it a secret for years?
He thought of Tamara’s face, of the pretty eyes and firm jawline, with the chin that always stuck out, just a little bit, with pride, and he shook his head. He’d barely been able to speak a word to her since this whole thing began, but he didn’t need to, really, to know that the damage this had done to her was immeasurable. It baffled the mind that his affair could’ve caused this much damage. Now, he had to find a way to stop it from continuing.
He stood and rubbed his temples. He knew what to do; he had to reach out, he had to… sense… where she’d been taken.
Inhaling deeply, he felt the blue fill the bottom of his lungs, and when he exhaled he felt it, truly felt it, for the first time; all five of his senses began to merge together. Sight, sound, taste, touch and feeling orchestrated to another level within his mind until a sixth sense came marching forwards. He recognized it immediately, but was overcome by the strength of it: intuition. Until now it had been like a flitting bird whenever it appeared in his life, but not this time. Now it landed and nested.
The first thing it told him was to go east again.
Without thinking he told the blue to take him there and he took flight, lifting off the ground awkwardly, at first unable to divide his attention between his need to get to where he was going and the fear of trying this alone.
As he moved through the air it became obvious that with the intuition came a dominant sense. This time, it was smell. The smell of his wife. Of her skin and her hair. How many times had he buried his face in the nape of her neck on a lazy weekend morning, there beneath the covers, and inhaled that smell and felt happy to have her? When had he stopped doing that? More importantly: why? Why in the world had he stopped doing that?
Tears filled Kyle Fasano’s eyes as at last, at long last, the immensity of what he’d done caught up with him, there in the sky, splitting the atoms of a barely-there world. What kiss, what lips, what shudder of sinful gratification, could ever be worth the loss of someone who truly, against all the odds, loved you?
He was a fool.
It seemed that he was getting a glimpse of that final accounting that everyone had to do when they closed their eyes for the last time. He’d skipped it, that stern process of death, when he’d fallen through the portal with Victoria and down into the dark depths. But it was still waiting for him, that day: the day he would face his sins.
The air rushed past him as he accelerated, panic building in him as he traced the remnants of Tamara’s smells—her Tree Tingle Shampoo from Trader Joe’s, her perfume—all of them little, tiny dalliances of scent, barely there and evaporating more and more into the air by the second. He pulled left, following the highway, moving faster and faster, until he realized that if he went too fast he would lose the trail.
Before long he saw a little town, dry and worn. But the whole place seemed off, as if it were built on a graveyard of some kind, of bad memories and bad deeds, like a current-day Ragtown. His awareness expanded; a copper mine was nearby. Closed now. But it had claimed many a life, either directly or indirectly, in the literal cave-ins of its brittle and collapsing walls, or in the mental cave-ins it caused in men who worked sixteen-hour shifts, six days a week, and went home to take it out on their wives and children each night.
He didn’t want to go there, to that town, or anywhere near it. It was a place, he realized, that few left, and those who did left with irreparable damage.
But before the town he saw something on the ground, near an abandoned gas station. A body. Oh my God. No. No. No.
Kyle descended rapidly and landed to a skittering stop. He ran to the body but recognized almost immediately that it wasn’t Tamara but rather the body of a man, on his side near a puddle of water, a hose wrapped loosely around his neck. Stunned, Kyle walked over for a closer look. It was him: the crazy bastard who’d taken Tamara. He was still conscious, his eyes almost staring through Kyle as he smiled weakly.
“Where is she!” Kyle screamed as he stood over him, the blue pooling in his left hand.
The man shook his head, and then his smile disappeared. “I don’t want to go there after all,” he said in a frightened voice. “I really don’t.” Then his eyes opened wide with horror as his mouth tumbled open in a silent scream. He struggled briefly with a shadow that fell over him. His eyes filled with blood, and he rattled out one final breath, his neck arching sickeningly backwards.
Kyle thought of hell, just there on the other side of that final breath, and shuddered.
The citizens of the sleepy town in the distance were moving about in their mundane tasks. Again he reached out with the blue, but this time he got nothing. Her trail had gone cold.
But how? Had someone else taken her? Was this sick bastard working with others?
He no sooner asked the question than felt incredibly stupid for it. Of course he was. All along.
“Kyle.”
The voice was a sharply echoing whisper across the desert floor, cracking off the boulders and rocks like a cue ball against a fresh rack on the pool table.
Kyle snapped his head to his left, then to his right. But it was impossible to get a fix on where the voice had come from.
Then it came again, dark and raspy. “Kyle.”
This time Kyle narrowed his gaze to an area off in the distance, directly ahead and beyond the town. There he saw a large, gutted mountain, its top gone, as if it were a dormant volcano. He launched himself into the air and flew over the town.
As he closed in on the mountain’s edge he was stunned to see that inside of it was ring after ring of circular roads that led down, deeper and deeper, to a canyon floor with a small green pool of tainted water, entrances to mine shafts here or there, all now boarded closed except for one, the boards broken and shattered
to pieces on the ground.
The voice spoke directly from the depths of the mine shaft. “Did you really think, you little maggot, that you could escape hell without hell coming after you?”
It was in the mine, whatever it was. Kyle pulled up, momentarily fearful, sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn’t ready for this.
That’s when he sensed her presence, strong, and thankfully, still alive: Tamara.
Tamara was in there too, hurting and scared.
And that was all it took, really, for Kyle to launch himself forwards into that black hole. His wife was in there, and he would take on every demon that hell had to offer, if that’s what it took to save her.
NAPOLEON PRESSED the Honda CRV rental to its limits. After he’d hung up with Parker he decided to throw most—but not all—caution to the wind. He was taking side streets as much as he could, where he stood less of a chance of crossing the path of a black and white on patrol.
He exited the freeway at Fourth Street and held his desperation by the throat, driving the speed limit and checking the rearview mirror frequently—something the average citizen never did enough of, which was why they mostly got nailed for tickets.
Paranoia knocked at his temples. The last thing he needed now was to get pulled over and have to bail out on foot; he was too far away from the park. An accident would be just as bad.
Other people were headed there too. Napoleon could feel it in his bones. His stupid-ass sister, determined to protect her boy, had no doubt sent them with violent intent. But that violence might very well be directed at the person she was trying to protect.
His darkening thoughts made his foot press the gas pedal down harder.
Don’t. Don’t go there. Don’t think that way. Shut that shit out.
He eased up again and, seeing heavy traffic ahead, he made a left on Soto Street, then went two blocks up to Second Street and made a right. The park was now less than a mile away. He forced his mind to think of other things: of what inning the game was in, if Efren was playing shortstop or playing third, or if he had been working on his swing.
One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3) Page 25
