Black Onyx Duology

by Victor Methos

  “How do you know that?”

  “They’ve tried to make their heists seem random. The first was in Burbank, then Santa Barbara, then Bel Air, and now Santa Monica. I looked for the commonality between them. They’re the four largest banks, in terms of volume of cash that goes through them every day. The fifth largest is American Security in Anaheim.”

  The captain glanced at William who grinned at him.

  “All right, you and William follow up on American Security. Keep me posted. Anything else from anyone…no? All right, get out there and kick some ass.”

  The room began to empty and William came over to Jack and sat in the desk in front of him. “The captain wasn’t that crazy about bringing a federal agent into his squad.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone would be.”

  “That’s good work, Jack. It’s a guess, but it’s a good guess.”

  “We need a surveillance detail on the bank.”

  William shook his head. “Sorry, compadre. Maybe on a big federal tab you can do that, but out here we’re working on nickels and dimes. You want surveillance, it’s gotta be us.”

  “Well, what’re we waiting for?”

  They chose to drive William’s old Buick rather than either of their Vipers, as they would draw too much attention. American Security was near the beach and they could smell the salty air and faintly hear the roar of the surf. They parked at a meter far enough away that no one going into the bank should notice them.

  “I’m sorry about Autumn. I don’t think I told you that yet.”

  “It’s my fault, William. Not yours. You got nothing to be sorry about.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s stable. But still in a coma.”

  “I want you to know that if—”

  “Who’s that?”

  A man was walking around the entrance of the bank. It was easily over ninety degrees but he wore jeans and a jacket. He strolled past the entrance and then around to the back of the bank before going to the entrance again. Then he walked away.

  “What the hell was that about?” William asked.

  “Looked like he was casing the place.”

  They sat for another three hours but didn’t see the man return. Over time they had stripped down as much as possible without being indecent and William had even taken off his shoes and socks. They would turn on the air conditioner for a long time but the air was warm unless they drove around.

  “This isn’t working,” Jack said. “They might hit the place next week. We can’t be here every day. You’ve got to get us some surveillance.”

  William looked out the window, rubbing his lower lip with his finger. “I’ll put in a request, see what I can do. The banks may exert some pressure if an anonymous caller lets them know that the police force won’t spend the dime to watch them.”

  Jack pulled away from the bank and took the Santa Monica freeway down to Travisa Boulevard to drop William off at home. His wife came out of the house and came over to say hello. They chit-chatted a few minutes and she and William went back inside. Jack watched as William put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. He pulled away from the curb and began to drive.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jack stood on the deck of his condo overlooking Hollywood and sipped Sobe out of a plastic bottle. His badge with the LAPD logo imprinted on the front lay on the banister and he looked at it and ran his finger over the grooves as the setting sun reflected off it in shimmering rays. He didn’t feel like a detective with the LAPD even though he had been one for four years before joining the DEA. Being a detective meant a crushing caseload, late night visits with victims and their families at hospitals, and the bureaucratic nonsense of shit rolling downhill in a department where no one wanted to take responsibility for anything.

  But that wasn’t what he had now. What he had now was a shield and a gun and a single case to work. Even William couldn’t possibly have had illusions that he would stay on the case after the men who shot Autumn were apprehended. This was revenge, pure and simple. And that clarity made him feel comfortable with his new role. At least comfortable enough to push himself to continue.

  It’d been over a week since William put in a request for surveillance of American Security and they’d had it granted two days ago. It was only during the business hours of seven to five, even though the drive-thru was still open for another two hours after the lobby closed. But it was better than nothing.

  Jack’s iPhone rang and he answered. It was Nicole.

  “How is she?” he said.

  “She’s responding to stimuli. They tickled her feet today and she moved.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  He dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and was about to leave the house when he realized he didn’t have his Desert Eagle. He went upstairs and found it hanging in his closet and strapped it to himself with a leather holster before locking up and heading to his car.

  The hospital was only twenty minutes from his condo and he arrived in fifteen. He parked in visitor parking and got out of the car to go inside when his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. It was a 310 area code he didn’t recognize. He thought about ignoring it and then thought that it might be William with an update on the surveillance.

  “This is Jack.”

  “Um, Detective Kane?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Officer Bolten with the surveillance unit.”

  “Oh, right. What can I do for you, Officer?”

  “We’ve been trying to get ahold of Detective Yates, sir, but haven’t been able to. He’s not picking up his cell phone. You’re the other senior officer listed on the case so we thought we would call you.”

  “What did you need?”

  “We have a possible suspect matching the description you gave us of the initial perp. We think he’s back.”

  “Dreadlocks, blond, tall and skinny?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s sitting across the street in one of those outdoor cafés. He’s looking back every few minutes but he’s not doing anything else. If there is a casing going on, he’s not doing it in front of us.”

  “Is he there with anyone else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Okay, well, stay on him. If he moves or does anything else call me. If he spots you, just get out of there.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Jack slipped the phone in his pocket as he entered the hospital. He went upstairs to the coma patient ward and found Autumn’s room. Her mother sat next to her and Jack pulled up a chair. Nicole had been crying and crumpled tissues were piled up on the side table next to the bed.

  She leaned over and put her arm around Jack, resting her head on his shoulder. They sat like that a long time before either of them spoke.

  “Do you remember when we were kids,” she said, “and we’d dream about who it was we were going to marry? What our kids were going to be like?”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I always thought you would be so close to my kids. Uncle Jack. You would be their hero. I mean Hank’s her hero but not in the way you could’ve been. And I thought that you would come over every day and spend time with them. You would take them to Dodgers games and teach them martial arts. But in my dreams…I never thought I would have a child as beautiful and loving as her.”

  She sobbed but no tears came. There were none left.

  Jack held her until she was through and then held her some more. After an hour, he kissed her on the forehead and promised to be back tomorrow.

  As he left the hospital, the thought of going back to his condo and flipping on the television or opening a book filled him with dread. He could only think of one place in the world he wanted to be.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was near closing time for American Security when Jack stopped his car up the block. He could see the bank but was too far to see any of the activity inside. The air was warm and pleasant so he got out and decided he would walk over. Maybe even open an account.

  H
e took his time getting there and stopped for a while on the beach. The surf was breaking against the shore and the crackle it made reminded him of the beaches in Mexico. Before they had foamed red from the dead bodies that piled up in front of him; killed by their own friends and brothers.

  The two officers in the surveillance vehicle were already gone. Jack checked his watch; they’d clocked out almost twenty minutes early.

  As he walked by the outdoor café he scanned the faces of the patrons. Sure enough, the blond man with dreads he had seen last week was sitting at a table, sipping a beer. Jack turned away from him.

  Jack walked past the café and spotted a bench facing the ocean. He sat down, the heaviness of his gun against his ribs, and watched a heron dip into the ocean and come out slick and wet. He would look back to the café and noticed that every few minutes the man checked his watch.

  The bank was almost closed. Nothing would be happening today. Jack rose and was about to walk back to his car when he saw the man at the café get up, pay, and walk into the street. He crossed and went straight for the bank.

  Jack watched as the man stood out in front and checked his watch. He didn’t pull out a weapon or even look inside. He just stood by the door like he was waiting for someone. Jack went behind a telephone pole and leaned against it, his eyes on the man. Was he really casing the place or was he just some crazy drifter with a weird ritual? That was unlikely. He was part of a gang known for bank robberies. Something was going on.

  A woman in a red skirt and white blouse walked up to the bank. As she tried to go to the door, the man smiled and said something to her. She asked a few questions and then left, going back to her car, which was parked across the street.

  Why would he turn someone away, unless…

  Jack’s heart raced as he took out his phone and dialed William. It went to voicemail. “William, it’s happening now. Right now. They didn’t come in from the outside. Get the hell down here.” He hung up and dialed dispatch to request officers. The clerk told him the nearest unit was seven minutes away.

  Seven minutes was an eternity. The lobby to the bank closed ten minutes ago. They could already be out of there.

  Jack walked over as casually as he could.

  He walked by the bank, avoiding the eyes of the man standing out front. He tried to glance into the windows but couldn’t make out anything but offices and a single teller standing at the front. He looked to her and she glanced at him and then away. He was about to walk past when he noticed her hands on the counter. They were shaking.

  Jack looked to the man out front. Their eyes locked and both men knew exactly what was happening.

  The man reached into his jacket and came out with a handgun. Jack dove to the ground, pulling out his Desert Eagle, and got off two rounds, one entering the man’s hip and knocking him back against the doors.

  Jack was on his feet.

  Too late for surprise now.

  Anyone inside would’ve heard the man fly against the doors. If they had hostages, they might take them out before the units arrived. Jack couldn’t wait.

  He ran around the front and past the doors, glancing in through the office windows. He went to the rear of the bank and to a back entrance near a dumpster. He tugged at the doorknob and the door opened. He stepped inside.

  The bank was quiet except for the hum of the air conditioner. Jack kept his weapon low as he navigated through a maze of offices and supply rooms and onto the main floor of the bank. He looked around the corner, keeping his body concealed. He could see the teller. She was standing in the exact same position, her countenance white as a ghost.

  “You have been most helpful,” a voice said. It didn’t sound human. It sounded artificial, like it was coming through a computer that almost, but not quite, mimicked human voices.

  Then Jack felt the vibration through the floor. He thought perhaps it was a tremor until he saw the thing step into view in front of the teller. It was massive. Far larger than the video he had seen could capture. Its metal suit gleamed under the soft lights of the bank and its muscles bulged like they were about to pop. It was also taller than he had thought, and its head almost hit the ceiling of the bank.

  There was no way he could fight that thing by himself. He began to quietly back out when he heard the teller scream. He looked again to see her raised in the air by the throat, the thing laughing as she fought for her life.

  “Let her go,” he shouted. The thing turned to him and Jack fired. He fired three rounds, two of them bouncing uselessly off his suit. The third entered his cheek and the thing dropped her and roared in pain.

  Jack ran out and saw that three dreadlocked men carried canvas sacks of cash and gold into a hole that had been made in the floor of the bank. Two of them jumped into the hole and the third went for his weapon. Jack fired and hit the man in the chest as a round flew by his own face. The man fell, his weapon flying out of his hand, and Jack turned toward the thing.

  Before he could react, it had sprinted the distance between them. It was fast. Too fast for him to do anything. The thing picked him up and his ribs felt like they were being crushed. As if he was in the middle of a head-on collision between two semi-trucks.

  The thing threw him across the bank with such violence he crashed through the teller counter. His neck snapped and the air rushed out of him. It was as if he had fallen off a skyscraper.

  He managed to crawl, his mind a mess of agony and the raw instinct of survival. He heard a laugh above him and felt pain in his back as the thing lifted him into the air. Jack looked into its eyes; they were white with thin gray outlines of the pupils and irises.

  “I am the next step in evolution,” the thing said. “Your species in now endangered.”

  He smashed Jack into the ceiling and then slammed him into the floor. Jack felt nothing now, not even pain. A dull sensation droned in his legs as the thing walked over them, crushing them into a bloody pulp, before it jumped down the hole it had made, and was gone.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jack didn’t remember an ambulance ride, or the emergency surgery he had received because parts of his spine had thrust out of his back, breaking through the skin like white lumps of clay. He remembered only one incident in three days of sedation and surgery: his sister crying over him and asking him to please wake up. He thought he was awake.

  He couldn’t keep track of the days or times and only knew when a doctor or nurse mumbled something about it. He had pleasant, warm feelings through most of his body except when the medication wore off, and then he would want to scream but found that he couldn’t. He didn’t understand any of this until one day an attending was explaining to a resident that this patient was, “in a coma,” and “unlikely to pull through.”

  Jack wanted to yell. He could hear and feel everything that was going on around him but he couldn’t interact with his surroundings. He was stuck inside his own head, forced to atrophy in a bed. His mind as sharp as it had ever been.

  The waking moments soon melded with the sleeping and he lived in a dream world where he knew nothing of what was happening or why. He clung only to the memory of his sister crying over him. He could picture her face and the tears that must have been flowing down her cheeks. He could see Hank standing by the door, staying stoic though he wanted to cry just as much as his wife. But this was all in Jack’s mind. He couldn’t open his eyes any more than he could stand up and walk out of the hospital.

  One day, he couldn’t be sure how long into his stay, two nurses came and spoke about a date one of them had gone on the night before as they scrubbed his body with a sponge. He could hear them ring the sponge out in a bin of water and then feel the warmth of the sponge as it went over his skin.

  After they cleaned his body, they dressed him in what he guessed was a hospital gown. They did this by tilting him to one side, putting his arm through, and then tilting him to the other and doing the same. One of the nurses pulled the sheet up over him to his chin even though the temperature outside was
soaring.

  They wheeled him along the corridor and Jack heard the ding of an elevator before he felt the rising sensation of being carried upward. The elevator stopped and they got off and wheeled him again before he came to a rest in some shade. The nurses checked a few IVs that he could feel connected to him and left.

  He tried desperately to scream for them. He tried to move his toes and then his fingers, to blink his eyes or move his eyebrows. But the only functions of his body that still worked were those that didn’t require his front and motor cortex: his heart, lungs, and organs. He was a soul trapped inside a flesh tomb.

  Jack could no longer tell the day from the night as few people came to his room. Occasionally he would hear his sister’s voice as she read to him, usually the morning paper. Sometimes doctors checked on him, and slightly more frequently nurses. Once, a neurologist came to his room and ran ice cubes in his ears and up and down his feet. Since he didn’t respond, the neurologist concluded, Jack Edward Kane was brain dead. The family should be notified about pulling the feeding tube so the organs could be harvested.

  Horror filled Jack in a way it had never filled him before.

  You’re fucking crazy, I’m right here! I’m still here!

  A time of long silence passed after the neurologist’s visit before his sister was back in his room. She was reading the Op-Ed section of the LA Times when the door opened and he heard Hank’s voice.

  “How is he?” Hank asked.

  There was a long pause before Nicole said, “Dr. Bachan says he’s brain dead. He called him a breathing corpse. He said we should…he said we should pull the feeding tube.”

  “Did you talk to Mike and your mother about it?”

  “Yeah. They said that it’s what he would’ve wanted. That…”