Passing Matthews Street, then Fickett, he accidentally bottomed out in a dip, the car bouncing a bit and causing an old man doing tai chi in his front yard to look Napoleon’s way as he sped by. Once he saw the park, there in the distance, just past Saratoga Street, Napoleon simply couldn’t take in anymore. He punched it.
Screw it. Let them chase me to the park. It’d actually help.
Now that he knew he could make it regardless of a pursuit, he actually hoped for a cruiser to appear, as if sent by God, and light him up with its sirens.
It didn’t. There’d be no Hollywood, out of nowhere, bullshit Steven Spielberg ending this time, it appeared. Nope. It was going to be Napoleon and—
He saw them breaking across the park from the sidewalk to his left. There was no missing them—the shorts cut at the shins, the pure white t-shirts looking starched and practically ironed. Cholos for the cause; the cause with no pause. They were straight from central casting, the black sunglasses and flat-billed caps. Napoleon couldn’t see their tattoos but he was willing to bet that each of them had a rosary, and a Mother Mary, and the obligatory “La Race” or “Trust No Bitches” stenciled in lowrider script on their biceps or necks.
Two of them were wearing baggy jeans, sagging to nearly below their asses. It was a warm day, which made the jackets they were wearing a big problem: because they made no sense, unless they were carrying.
Napoleon cursed under his breath. That’s all he needed: a shootout at a little league game with kids everywhere, and his nephew caught in the cross fire.
He was getting his head around these seven, and feeling like he at least had a chance, when a black Nissan pulled up in front of him and screeched to a halt, the cholita who was driving peering over the steering wheel as five more cholos piled out. Whistling to the other seven, the tallest one in this group, skinny as a rail and easily six foot three, motioned with his hand that he and his group were going to circle to the baseball diamond from the other direction.
This was not good in so many ways that Napoleon stopped trying to count them.
Instead, as the Nissan sped off, Napoleon drove forwards and jammed the CRV into an empty driveway. Hopping out of the car, he chose a path directly between both groups, so as one curved around the first-base side and the other the third-base side, Napoleon took a straight line right through center field.
It was ballsy and brash and insane, but right about now those were the only three cards he had to play, and it was taken from the first chapter of The Gangster’s Handbook: before chaos can be inflicted on you, inflict it on them.
The baseball game was in play, a batter in a white uniform just outside the box, another on deck. The stands were full with people—another bad break—and an ice cream vendor was walking his cart nearby, the little bicycle bell chiming with each rotation of the wheels. Efren’s team was the Dodgers, and they wore Dodger blue.
Please let him be at third. I have a chance to move him off to the side if he’s not—
Napoleon was stunned; Efren was on the pitcher’s mound, too far away, his little frame beyond adorable, his hat a little too big for his head. He massaged the ball in his mitt, looking for the catcher’s signal. Why was he pitching? He hardly ever pitched.
Little man. Big arm. They put you in the rotation. That’s why you wanted me to come to your last game, isn’t it? You wanted to surprise me.
Napoleon felt every fiber of his being flood with fear.
This can’t happen. He’s even further away from me now. My God… please. Whatever you ask of me, just don’t let this happen…
He swallowed hard, stifling his emotions.
Even if I have to die, right now, to stop this, so be it, God. So be it.
The sky was hazy and a seagull, of all things, was slicing a path through it, looking lost and a long way from the sea. Napoleon figured there’d be bullets going all over the place very soon now, so it’d better start flying back to the damn beach.
Efren threw his pitch, a called strike and an out, the umpire stabbing his hand to the side and grunting the batter’s fate. That’s when the first parent in the stands noticed Napoleon. A mother—of course—pointed to center field, and the kid there—Napoleon knew him actually, Samuel Herrera, a bit of a punk with a dad doing twenty in Corcoran State Prison—turned around and saw Napoleon too.
“Hey, Mr. Villa! Whassup?” he said, smacking a large gob of his Big League Chew gum awkwardly in his little mouth.
The cholos came through the dugouts from either side of the field. A few parents, some cholos themselves, most likely from rival gangs past or present, stood in the stands and started to shout out questions and protests.
“Samuel?” Napoleon said as he marched past the boy.
“Yeah, Mr. Villa?”
“Get the hell out of here. Now,” Napoleon said firmly. Samuel was a hood kid. He knew what was what. He took off out of center field as fast as he could.
Seeing that all twelve of the gangsters were heading towards Efren, Napoleon drew his gun and waited.
It was simple really. If they were truly there to protect Efren from an attacker, they would naturally assume Napoleon was that person as soon as they saw him, which would be any second now. They would turn to confront him.
Napoleon had been a little hard on them when he’d spoken to Parker. Not all cholos were evil through and through. Like most people, they were a cocktail of good and evil and capable of doing either on any given day. Just humans, trying to get by, in the environment they were born into. They went home and hugged their kids and loved them the same as anyone else. So, Napoleon was willing to hope against hope that most of the ones here today were not out to hurt Efren intentionally. But some were bad. And it would only take one of them to hurt his nephew.
The first cholo, in a gray flannel shirt, saw Napoleon first. He whistled, like he and his crew spoke it as a secret language, like a flock of birds.
Napoleon let out a deep sigh. He had to be the target, wide open and exposed with the gun in his hand, clearly visible.
Then he had to wait and see how many turned towards him and which of them ignored him completely and stayed on target. Because they would be the ones possessed and after Efren, probably ready to kill him right on the spot.
At Gray Flannel’s whistle, the cholos turned, like dominos going sideways. Jackets flew up and guns came out.
Napoleon’s little nephew saw him too.
“Tio!” he heard Efren scream.
Then, as expected, the chaos came.
CHAPTER 29
TAMARA FELT THE MEMORIES in her mind shuffling and reshuffling, loud and obnoxious, like music so loud that you couldn’t understand what you were hearing anymore.
The creature from the mirror had come back.
Writhing on the ground, she clutched at the side of her head with one hand while reaching out for mercy with the other. On some level she knew this was futile, that the last thing in the world that this evil thing with no face and long, wicked fingers would ever give her was mercy. But she felt like her mind was just going to collapse, like a poorly built house. As if to prove this notion, one support beam was already giving way: her consciousness. The cave was spinning and the internal night of sleep, wanted or otherwise, was overcoming her.
“Stop. Please,” she mumbled faintly.
Again, the voice of dead dreams and lost hope came to her. “Deny Him,” it said, “and it will all stop.”
On her knees now, only her upper body could sway, and that it did, first to the right, then a bit backwards. “What?” she said weakly. The mental doors in her brain flew open, and sad moments began to spill out: there was the time she had wetted herself on a hike into the back country, and the time she had planted an entire section of corn wrong in Bolivia and covered up her mistake, even though she knew that meant she was damaging a quarter of the crop and people would go a little hungry because of it that winter, and the time she’d kissed Timmy Burcher, a pastor’s son from Idaho, behin
d her parents’ camp tent in the middle of the night, and the time she’d given herself to a dark, handsome man on a drunken night in Mazatlán on a college trip, because she wanted to know, had to know, needed to know, what that felt like. Just once. Only one time.
“Deny Him. Deny Him now. It’s that simple.”
The darkness and dizziness pushed down on her. Pitching forwards, about to pass out completely, she thrust her left hand out to stop herself, fighting back one last time. “Who? Deny…”
Then it was clear, very clear, who he was talking about.
Of course. She should’ve known. This wasn’t a creature. Not at all.
“You’re the devil,” she said.
It chuckled, the sound not unlike charcoal briquettes when poured out of the bag, a flat sound, like muted stones knocking together. “One of many,” it replied, “but not the one of which you speak.”
“Leave me alone. Get away from me,” Tamara cried. In her mind she was scurrying backwards from it, to a corner somewhere in the cave. In reality her eyes were telling her she’d barely moved. Righting herself momentarily, she felt the spinning of the room increase. More memories. Of Ben now. Of what she’d almost done. Then the mental pictures blurred and changed to the time when Janie was a baby and wouldn’t go to sleep, all night, crying and crying, until Tamara couldn’t take it anymore and gave her Benadryl to knock her out. And how then Tamara still didn’t sleep, because she was afraid she’d given her too much and Janie might stop breathing and never wake up.
The demon stood and waved at the cave walls, all the faces there like stone-encased prisoners, writhing in agony, eyes bulging, mouths falling open to scream into the emptiness of the cave, to add their sound to the screaming memories in her brain, taking her pain to a place that was miles past anything humanly tolerable. “Deny Him,” he said again.
The world melted. The cave became a haze of browns and black. So this was it: her time to testify, to stand for her faith or to cast it aside as false. He wanted her belief. Anchored within her and connected to a point on an eternal horizon, it was something she lived for beyond the pleasures and distractions of this life—or perhaps in spite of them, because the opposite of pleasure was pain, and the real cause of distraction was almost always vicious little hurts. All she had to do now, to end this, to save herself, was to deny her Lord and Savior.
For Tamara Fasano it was the easiest decision of her life. “Deny Him? Never,” she said. “Ever.”
She fell forwards, turning her face sideways so that her cheek and not her nose bounced against the cave floor. It was cold and hard. Pain cracked in her temple, throbbing just hard enough to mercifully make her forget about the pain in her mind.
The faces in the walls began to scream in rage. She looked up at the fearful figure as he approached, his black leather trench coat from another time dragging along the ground in heavy strokes and painting the dusty cave floor in lazy swaths, his black boots, tall toed and with silver buckles, were covered in gristle, as if he’d been walking over dead things before this visit, or had walked over them to get here.
Her eyelids were growing heavy as the creature raised the lantern. She waited for fire to erupt from it, or for one of its small doors, framed in worn brass, to fly open and for a snake to slither out. After a moment, when none of this happened, it occurred to her that it would be nothing that fancy, her death. It would be cruel and crude; he was going to beat her to death with the lantern. He was going to cave in her skull with it.
“You simple, believing little whore,” he said. “I’m so happy that I will be here, in person, to capture your soul, forever, when it tries to leave. You. Here. In my lantern. Forever.”
His laughter was full bellied. “My newest pet,” he said, swinging the lantern upwards. “My… little… angel.”
The lantern was on the downward swing towards her head when Tamara noticed a pinhole of blue light in the cave that swiftly widened, first by a few feet, then by a lot more. Powerful and warm, it seemed to pour into the cave and ricochet in all directions, immediately rendering all the faces mute, some of them peeling of the wall in blown off bits of flesh, others melting like lava.
The creature with no face was bringing the lantern down right at her head and Tamara was almost ready to close her eyes for her end, when she saw it: a piercing, narrow blue beam, that carved a hole right through the left shoulder of the demon towering over her.
Tamara had no idea that she could take such pleasure in the pain of another thing. But when the demon screamed, she did.
Bewildered by what was happening, she thought for sure that it was The Gray Angel, come to save her again. It had to be.
When he walked through the light, his silhouette that of hope and salvation, the demon screamed in rage and spun to face him.
“You don’t stand a chance,” Tamara said, deliriously.
“Fuck you, bitch,” the creature shouted over its shoulder.
The light subsided to a blue glow. “Get away from her,” The Gray Angel said. Except his voice sounded different. Different and yet familiar.
“You’re not ready, heaven spawn,” the creature said in reply, the lantern in its hand beginning to hum with power. “I will kill you for daring to touch me, but I will tear this slut to pieces right in front of you before I do.”
The silhouette moved with blinding speed, shifting like a chess piece in all directions. When he came to a stop Tamara saw that The Gray Angel had no hat this time. And no suit.
He grabbed the demon’s left hand, the one holding the lantern, and held it firm, a blue snap of lightening making them both scream as the powers within them, of good and evil, grasped outward and gripped one another.
But now the man was no longer a silhouette, and Tamara could see that it wasn’t The Gray Angel.
It was Kyle.
“Oh my God,” Tamara said, her eyes filling with wonder and amazement.
Her husband waved his right hand in her direction and the world went into a rainbow of rushing lines and bursting wind. She was in some sort of bubble, iridescent and fragile—like the kinds kids blow out of wands on warm, summer days—and it was transporting her out of the cave and across the desert sky.
“No! Kyle? No!” she screamed.
But it was too late. The cave mouth was a slowly disappearing dot in the distance.
“No!” she screamed out in frustration. “Kyle. Why? Why?”
She’d finally found him.
And he’d sent her away.
“DETECTIVE PARKER?” It was Trudy’s desperate voice. “Where are you going?”
She had bull-rushed past Klink and out onto the balcony, where she now gripped at the guardrail. The cops froze for a second before Murillo motioned for everyone to get going. Parker looked at Trudy, up there on the balcony, and noticed her, really noticed her, for the first time. Even though she was wearing a faded Aeropostale baseball cap over her red hair, which poked out in all directions, no makeup—or little makeup, he’d never been able to completely tell with women—eyes all fierce and defiant, he noticed that she was simply the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“Trudy, I have to—”
“No! You can’t leave us. You can’t leave me and the kids!” Her voice was firm, almost commanding. Klink tried to grab ahold of her but she escaped his grasp. Making her way down the walkway to the stairs, she encountered one of the two uniform cops who had just been sent there by Murillo. He froze and looked down at Parker.
“Let her pass,” Parker said with a sigh.
“You got one minute while I go get the car,” Murillo said.
She came down the stairs in a rush. Her tennis shoes were newish, and they squeaked a bit against the sealant on the steps. “Are you crazy?” she said, walking up to him and punching in the chest.
Parker recoiled a bit and put up his hands. “Hey. Take it easy.”
“Take it easy? Are you fucking kidding me?” The Irish was up in her now; her eyes were watery, but her f
ace was flushing red with anger and her freckles were disappearing by the second. “After what’s happened here? You trust us to anyone else?”
“Not anyone, no. But Klink up there? You bet. And there’s a lot of other good cops here too.”
“And I don’t know any of them.”
“Trudy, you barely even know me.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, clenching her teeth.
“Listen—”
“You’ve gotten us this far. You’re supposed to protect us.”
Parker met her gaze and directed it to the body on the parking lot, covered with a sheet, barely twenty feet away. “Seems to me like you’ve done a fine job with the whole protecting thing.”
He’d noticed that she hadn’t looked in that direction the whole way down. But glancing that way now seemed to push her over the edge. “Jesus Christ!” she said, beginning to cry as she brought both of her hands up to cover her face. “I killed someone, Parker. Oh my God!”
She was only a few feet away, and she fell straight into him. Hugging her, he squeezed tighter than he normally would because, truth be told, he felt like falling too. “You had to. He gave you no choice, Trudy.”
“Maybe I coulda shot to wound him or something.”
“No. You didn’t have time to think, and besides, you knew full well he wasn’t coming in just to wound you or the kids. He was coming to kill.”
She was quiet for a second as the breeze moved a wisp of hair over her cheek and then back up to her ear before Parker had a chance to brush it back for her. “You shoulda seen his eyes, Parker,” she said, putting her hands on his chest. “They weren’t… human.”
Parker simply nodded.
“Does that make me crazy? Am I crazy that I said that?”
“No. You’re not.”
“Then tell me what’s next, I mean—”
One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3) Page 26
