No. No, there’s still one more I have to—
Pain cascaded through his lungs and he could barely breathe. A second bullet hit him in the left side of the neck, feeling like the biggest bee sting ever.
His body begin to betray him; his right arm went dead, forcing him to drop his gun, and then his legs began to buckle.
As he began to fall and the world went dizzy, Napoleon looked hard at his partner, watching Parker the whole way down, and he smiled as he saw him running at a dead charge towards Efren. Parker had drawn down on the other cholo, who’d produced a machete. Shot after shot rang out and the last thing Napoleon saw was the cholo going down fast, like a dead man goes down, with no longer any care in the world, just ten feet away from Efren.
Then? Efren dove safely into Parker’s arms.
Efren was safe. It would all be okay. It would.
Napoleon sighed
The ground was soft but firm. The smell of freshly cut grass and earthy sod filled his nostrils, welcome at first, then nauseatingly overwhelming.
He heard the cholos who had just shot him scream nearby as more shots rang out.
Then Napoleon Villa couldn’t hear anything anymore.
CHAPTER 31
TAMARA WAS TRAVELING AT a very high rate of speed through a tunnel of blue light. Too fast. Way too fast. Her mind began to go black and her eyes closed against the velocity. Kyle had sent her someplace, but someone had diverted her somehow. She was going somewhere. But she had no idea where. Maybe to…
The Blessing Pool was two miles deep in the jungle, to the west of their little village in Bolivia. Twice a month, on Sundays, new believers would be taken there for baptism services. It wasn’t a pool, really, but rather a deep pond that had formed between sections of the river that cut through a wide rocky inlet about a quarter-mile upstream to the east and a gully that sloped slightly downward to the west.
Shallow at the edges, the pond was deep in the middle, and her father, who was six-three, would stand about ten feet from the shore, the water level just above his waist, so that he could fully immerse those about to proclaim their faith. Most of them were from their village, or one nearby; some were visitors who came in the summers mostly, on missions trips, from as far away as Minnesota and Puerto Rico, and who had finally realized that being was no substitute for serving, or that serving was no substitute for believing.
“Really believing,” her father had told her one day, after the baptisms, as he dried his hair with a towel. The rest of the group had left to go back to camp, leaving them behind to chat a bit.
“What does that mean, though?” Tamara asked with a frustrated curiosity. At fifteen she had still not taken “the plunge,” and her parents hadn’t tried hurrying the process.
“Well,” her father said with a soft smile, his blue eyes like opals against the deep green of the sparkling pool behind him. “A lot of people will say that real belief, true faith, is absent the need for proof. I’d take it a step further. More importantly, I think it’s something that’s absent the need for doubt.”
“There’s a difference?” she asked, playing with a small dark-brown rock speckled with black and white spots that she’d found near the pool’s edge. She ran her index finger over its surface, which was mostly smooth but with a few rough spots. If not for those spots, the rock would be nearly perfect. She wondered how many centuries the rock had sat there, beneath the surface of the running water of the river, being worn smoother and smoother, before she carelessly plucked it out, ruining the process, so that now those few remaining rough spots would never be erased.
He nodded. “Yes. The demand for proof can’t even take place without there first being some level of doubt. Or doubts.”
“But doesn’t everyone have doubts, Dad?”
“Sure,” he said with a soft chuckle. “But it’s what you do with them that matters. Do you let them linger, haunt you, drag you down? Or do you dismiss them for the distractions they really are?”
“But my science lessons don’t say that.”
Now he laughed fully. “Of course they don’t, honey. Science is good stuff, necessary really, when dealing with the real world. It’s important for all sorts of great things. Space travel. Medicine. But trying to use science to figure out the cause and purpose of our creation is like trying to use a rake to loosen a screw.”
“Yolanda and Carmen say that God is in everything and everyone,” Tamara replied, thinking of her two best friends from the village.
“I’d say they got that right.”
“So if He’s already in us? Why the doubt? Why the need to do all this?” she replied, waving her hand over the pool in reference to the baptisms.
Her father took a breath, looked out briefly over the jungle foliage and then back to her. It’s what he always did when he was saying a quick prayer. He didn’t know she knew this, but she did. She’d been studying her father’s mannerisms for a while now, because she loved them, and him, so much.
“You know how you can be… I dunno, at one of the feasts or gatherings in one of the huts?” her father said, referencing the village socials that took place only a few times a year, often consisting of a few hundred people, guides, tribesman, and other missionaries alike, from across the region. “And how sometimes it’s full of people you don’t know?”
“Yeah.”
“How does it feel?”
“I get nervous.”
“Why?”
She thought for a second. “I guess because when I don’t know anyone, I get scared.”
“Right. That’s this life, Tam, if you really think about it: you’re mostly all alone in it, and surrounded by people you don’t know.”
She furrowed her brow at him. “Geez, Dad. That’s a little harsh.”
“No, not if you really think about it. Look at all the wonderful friends we’ve made here, all the families we’ve shared the gospel with, and who’ve shared their lives and ways with us. It’s been awesome, hasn’t it?”
Tamara shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Right. But someday we’re going to be leaving here. We’re going to take a plane and fly away, back to the States maybe, or wherever else we’re called. Then what do you think will happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“The Garcias, the village elders, your friends Yolanda and Carmen? They’ll write us, and we’ll write them. For a while anyway. Then? There’ll be fewer and fewer letters until we’re down to a Christmas card each year. Then? Maybe nothing.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Tamara countered.
“No,” her dad said with a smile, “it doesn’t. With effort and dedication you can write or come back and visit more often. But it won’t be the same. We are a deep part of their lives right now, day in and day out, and they are the same in ours. But, eventually, a separation takes place, and distance sets in. It’s all a very normal part of human life, honey.”
“So? I still don’t get it.”
“Tam… someday you’ll grow up. You’re going to meet and marry a fine man. He will love you, I’m sure of it. You’ll have lots of babies—”
“Daaaaad. Please. Gross.”
He put his hand gently on her shoulder. It was a strong hand. She didn’t know it at the time, and neither did he, but it wouldn’t be strong for very much longer.
Laughing, he pushed on. “And your mom and I will play with our grand babies for a while. But nothing lasts forever, honey. Then? We’ll have to go.”
“What?”
“We’ll pass. God will bring us home.”
“I don’t want to think about that.”
“No. Of course not. And I’m not trying to make you sad.”
She shook her head at him in frustration. “Uh. Okay. But you are.”
“Stick with me here, pumpkin. I’m getting somewhere, okay? Or at least I’m trying to.”
Tamara nodded softly.
“People. Your mom, me, Carmen, Yolanda. Even this world. It’s all temporal,
honey. None of it lasts. Worse still, a lot of life is conditional. The people in your life come and go under certain conditions; the world around you exists under certain conditions. When you’re older, when you dig way deep down, you’re going to figure out that mostly the only thing you’re really, one hundred percent sure about? Is you.”
A small flock of toucans flew through a nearby tree, squawking loudly, the sound fading as they disappeared into the distance. Then it was just her, her father and the sound of the river again.
Her dad pulled her over to a boulder and sat opposite her. “That place—you? It can be a lonely place. Sharing you, letting others in, breaking down that loneliness is beautiful and scary. It can also, at times, be painful. But, going back to that hut I mentioned, at one of the village socials?”
She nodded.
“How do you feel after standing there a long while when, finally, Carmen walks in, or your mom or I?”
“Happy.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not alone anymore. Someone there knows me.”
His smile was broad and creased at the edges. “Exactly. You are known.”
“Yeah?”
“Honey. When you have God in your life, there’s nothing temporal about it. It’s like being known. Forever. Known deep down, fully and completely, for who you are, and accepted without condition.”
She’d been thinking about going into the pool for a long, long time, but hadn’t told anybody. Maybe it was his words, nudging her, or more likely, something far greater calling to her. But at last it felt like it was time. “Dad? Will you baptize me?”
He blinked hard a few times, tears filling his eyes. “I’d love to, pumpkin.”
The water of God was not cool. It was cold. So cold that you gasped when you were immersed in it and it brought your bones to life and your heart to song. Tamara trembled, feeling alive, as she fell backwards, her father’s arms holding her lovingly as that cold water dove deep within her and combed over her, even filling the tiny spaces between the roots of her hair.
There was a refreshing peace in it and at some point, without ever realizing it, the rock that was still in her hand slipped from her grasp. When she came up, they embraced and he kissed her on the head before they made their way quietly to shore, packed up and began the hike home.
Along the way they reached a section of the path that was surrounded by a small forest of plumeria plants. There was a certain scent to plumerias, faint but deep, that did not insist on love, like the scent of a rose, but merely hinted at the possibility of it. Her mother used to love the smell of that path and the plumeria flowers in their varying shades of light blues, pinks and yellows. The little forest of them was dense here, and aromatic enough so that those walking to The Blessing Pool on baptism days would have the smell of their sins covered just before they were washed away entirely.
As she and her father made their way home, Tamara realized no great difference within herself. There was no magic fairy dust that fell over her, no sudden disappearance of all her pains, restlessness or sorrows. Just the cool feeling of the water as it dripped off her hair and down her back, each drop caressed by a soft breeze.
But her father was right. She did feel something else now, there inside herself: a new relief, borne of a deep-rooted assurance that she would never again be alone, no matter how “alone” she was.
When Tamara’s eyes fluttered open the blue had gone away. She fully expected to be in heaven and to see her dad again, at long last.
Instead she was in her home, lying in the shattered remnants of the foyer, which was surrounded by police tape.
Kyle had sent her back home.
To an empty house.
AS MURILLO PUSHED the car through cross streets that went by in a blur, Parker saw the black and whites streaming in, sirens blaring and engines roaring.
I’d better have called this one right, or I’ll be fired for sure now, Parker thought.
“Klink’s gonna be pissed he missed this,” Murillo said through clenched teeth, his hands gripping the wheel.
“How far we still have to go?” Parker asked.
Murillo looked sideways at him.
“Remember, man,” Parker explained, “I was based outta the South Side. I barely had any time to research the streets in this precinct when I was brought over.”
“A mile or so. We’ll be making a right soon. That’ll take us straight to it. I’m guessin’ it’s the exact way Nap woulda taken.”
Parker nodded and took a deep breath.
“Before we get there you gotta tell me, though,” Murillo said. “Where’s he been?”
“You don’t wanna hear it. I mean—”
“Spit it the fuck out, Parker.”
“Fine. You a religious man, Murillo?”
Murillo’s face contorted in confusion. “¿Que?”
“You believe in God. In angels and demons and all that?”
“Of course I do, dumb shit,” he replied. “But what’s that got to do with—”
“Napoleon was in hell.”
“What… ?”
“An angel showed up, at the Brasco home. Fasano was in trouble and Napoleon offered to help. It took him there—to hell, I mean—to try and rescue Fasano.”
Murillo slowed the car as they bounced through a dip and ran a red light, and then he looked over at Parker. “You on acid or some shit, man?”
“You asked.”
“C’mon man, gimme a break.”
“You wanna break? Fine. I’ll give you one: a guy who’s never believed in any of this shit, his whole life, is the one telling it to you.”
“Angels and demons?”
“That or some absolutely insane fucking costumes and special effects.”
“Man. I ain’t gettin’ my head around this.” Murillo’s face had gone from confused to perplexed to a mask of utter disbelief. “Okay. You were right,” Murillo said as they pulled a hard right and sped down the street. The park was there, at the end of the street.
“What?”
“I don’t want to hear it. At least not now,” Murillo said, kissing his index finger and touching a Saint Thomas figurine that hung from his rearview mirror. He crossed himself and added, “Later, though, okay?”
“Fair enough.”
Two squad cars were behind them and one had already pulled into a space ahead of them, unknowingly parking right behind Trudy’s CRV rental. Parker felt instantly relieved. Nap was here.
He’d just opened the passenger door and gotten out of the car when the gunshots began ringing out. Two shots at first, like precursors. Then four more. Then a veritable birdsong of them, all just inside the park. Murillo and the uniforms all drew their weapons, but Parker, almost in shock, could think of nothing else but to run as fast as he could towards the gunfire. Towards where he knew Napoleon would be.
“Parker!” Murillo screamed behind him. But Parker could barely hear him. It was the same in the desert; men and guns were so loud that the rest of the world became a muted song.
As he knocked over a trashcan and ran into the park, he saw that the entrance was immediately adjacent to a small baseball field to his right. An old man had taken cover behind his ice cream cart and people were running from the bleachers. Parker scanned the field of battle, because that’s exactly what it was. A dozen cholos were on the field; two of them chasing a little kid in a Dodgers uniform as another ten advanced, some from first base, others from third, all towards the outfield.
All towards his partner, who was standing alone, in a firing stance, firing at none of them.
Even though four of them were firing at him.
Instead, it looked to Parker like Napoleon was pointing past them, his gun moving cautiously left to right and then back again, as if he were trying to take aim at…
The two chasing the boy! That’s when it hit Parker that the boy was Efren.
Drawing his weapon, Parker ran in long strides through the dugout to the right, heading toward
s Efren. If he could get to him…
There are some things you expect. In battle. In life. But what happened next, Parker could’ve never seen coming. Not in a million years.
One of the cholos chasing Efren produced a long machete from inside his jacket and the other, beyond belief, produced a gun and just began firing it.
At Efren.
He was firing a gun at a child.
One bullet missed and kicked up a tuft of dirt in the infield. Another missed and struck the backstop, shards of wood exploding into the air, as Efren fled the pitcher’s mound, confused, running in a circle at first then stopping cold, frozen in panic.
“Shit! No!” Parker screamed. “Efren! Efren, over here!”
The little boy’s head snapped around just as a third bullet clipped the front of his baseball cap and sent it spinning into the air. But he was unhurt. By some miracle.
“Thank God. Thank you, God. Get me to him, God,” Parker prayed as he ran. Caring not one bit about it. His free hand motioned for Efren to run to him as more shots rang out. One of them a shotgun blast.
In the outfield.
Parker glanced quickly in that direction.
Two uniforms had fired at three of the cholos, who all went down. One of them hit the grass as he returned fire, the bullet catching one of the uniforms square in the center of the chest, thrusting him backwards from the force.
It’s okay, Parker thought. Vests are standard issue now. Best place to take a bullet. A foot or so higher and the bullet takes off his head.
Parker’s heart sank, though, when he saw Napoleon stumbling to his right, wounded, his left hand clutching his side while his right hand still held his gun, still drawn, still aiming…
Parker snapped his head back towards Efren. The kid could run. Like the wind. But there was no way he was going to outrun the cholo with the machete. He was closing, fast, the blade pulled back to deliver the deathblow.
And his buddy, the one with a Raiders cap and long goatee, had stopped to draw a bead on the boy with his gun, Parker close enough now to make out the fat, blocky barrel, leveled and steady.
One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3) Page 28
