by Roger Weston
Shadow Lawyer
A CHUCK BRANDT THRILLER
ROGER WESTON
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, dialogue, and plot are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Weston Publishing Enterprises
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PRELUDE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
Check out Book 9, Shadow Court
Books by Roger Weston
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Charles Rascher, attorney at law (Ret.), who helped with legal details. Thanks also to Detective Monte Iverson whose help is greatly appreciated. Any mistakes are my own.
PRELUDE
Erica Rivera got out of bed and stumbled to the window, her hands clasping the windowsill. She stood in the darkness of the flickering firelight, coughing. She was a tall, lean girl with straight black hair that flowed halfway down her back. She had compassionate, courageous eyes, but at the moment, fear was spilling into her heart. She was disoriented from being woken up and now she saw a small man just outside her window. He was looking toward the barn, which was on fire. He was just three feet away from her. He had a gas can in his hand, but something else caught Erica’s attention. The man wore a large ruby ring that glimmered in the firelight. Then Erica saw three other men run around the barn and wave to the man with the gas can. He jogged toward them as a truck raced into the front yard of the orphanage. But Erica was thinking about the ring. The sight of it had shocked her. She had seen it before.
It was Maroz’s men!
“Oh, my God,” Erica said. “Arson!” The fog of sleep was pushed out of her mind by a surge of adrenaline. A thought flashed through her brain: Maroz! He’s getting revenge for me leaving him!
Smoke made her cough.
She heard a loud crash in the house. It sounded like the front door was kicked open.
I should have gone to Chuck Brandt for justice! she thought.
Breaking through her shackles of fear, she grabbed the 9mm handgun from under her pillow. She heard insane laughter.
She rushed out into the hall. A little man with a big assault rifle slung over his shoulder was pouring gas all over the floor.
“Get out!” Erica shouted, aiming her pistol.
The man dropped his gas can and reached for his gun.
Erica fired three shots.
The killer staggered and fell. He lay there face down.
“I said ‘Get out!” Erica shouted, still aiming.
His whole body struggled to move. His finger squeezed the trigger, and the assault rifle unleashed a burst of gunfire into the wall.
Erica jumped back, but the killer never looked up. His head fell to the side.
Panic flooded Erica’s brain. The gasoline!
But that thought was pushed out by another.
“The children. I have to get them out of the house!”
“Mother Aquino!” Erica shouted, as she ran for the door.
Erica had been at the orphanage for five months leading up to the tragedy. It was the most wonderful five months of her life. She had never known happiness such as she found in the care and education of the orphans. They were beautiful children, wonderful little souls. Some of them were outgoing. Others were shy. They all looked up to Erica with love and devotion. They were obedient and thoughtful. They did their chores and their homework. Over the past five months, they had bonded with Erica, and she with them. Walking away from Maroz and her empty career was the best thing that she had ever done. Yet when she did it, she had no idea of the trials that would soon come her way.
The orphanage lay in the quiet and peaceful hills outside of San Antonio del Táchira, Venezuela, on the border with Colombia. It was just a small wood-frame home, but a generous donor had turned the little house over to Mother Aquino, as the children called her—and as Erica called her too.
“Mother Aquino!” Erica screamed.
The home had only seven rooms, but Erica had been fundraising for another building so that they could take in forty more children over the next three years. But for now, it was a great satisfying honor for her to raise a dozen orphans, most of whom she had personally found on the streets of Caracas and brought here to safety. Had she known what the future would bring, she might have thought twice before taking them off the streets and bringing them to this peaceful, quiet place.
“Children!” Erica shouted, as she moved through the dark hallway toward the flames at the front door. “Pablo, Sofia, Teresa!”
Erica pushed open the door of Mother Aquino’s room. The light came on. Mother Aquino was sitting up in bed. She swung her feet over to the floor.
“Fire,” Erica said. “It’s arson. There are men out front. We must get the children and go out the back.”
“What men?”
“Just get the children and go out the back. We must hide in the forest.”
Erica went down the hall coughing and opening doors. “Luciana, Tomas, Natalia! Get up.”
Mother Aquino joined her and they pulled toddlers out of their beds, carrying them into the hall.
Erica put down little Sophia and said, “Take them out back. I’m going upstairs.”
“It’s too late,” Mother Aquino said. “It’s an inferno up there.”
“I have to try!” Coughing violently, Erica groped her way through the thick smoke. As she made her way up the stairs, she ascended into a hot, toxic cloud of smoke. The heat was unbearable, but she kept going, even after she could smell her own burning hair. Then a section of flaming roof collapsed and she fell backwards, rolling half way down the stairs.
Check for broken bones, an inner voice told her. As she scooted from step to step, she tried to gauge if she’d suffered serious injuries, but her survival instinct took over. If she didn’t get out of here fast, she was going to pass out. She crawled down the hall, the floor hot in her hands and knees. Then she fell out the back door and rolled down two steps onto the grass.
Coughing wildly, she crawled for the tree-line, praying that the men would not see her. These killers terrified her. She knew they served an organization called CERBERUS. They called themselves “Maroz’s enforcers,” but they were actually assassins. Regrettably, Erica had seen these men before and knew secrets of their dark agenda. She knew more about it than even they did.
Terrified of her fate if they caught her, she crawled away from the burning orphanage.
As she got closer to the treeline, she saw the eyes of children hiding in the trees. She saw eyes of fear in the firelight—eyes of terror.
Erica crawled through bushes and past trees. The children rushed to her, squealing.
“Silencio,” Erica said. “Be quiet.”
“Pablo is severely burned,” Mother Aquino said quietly. “He cannot walk.”
Erica stood up. “I will carry him. We must get to the trail.”
“We can’t go into the forest
in the middle of the night.”
“We must go or they’ll kill us.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Let’s go.”
They’d just started up the trail when three men ran around the back of the house.
“The door’s open,” one shouted. “Someone got out.”
One of the men cocked his shotgun. He pointed toward the chicken coup. “They must be hiding in there.”
When he pointed, the three men ran for the chicken coop.
Erica picked up little Pablo and carried him. She didn’t need the flashlight because the moonlight sufficed. She carried Pablo while he cried from the pain.
As they fled through the trees, one of the CERBERUS assassins fired blind shots into the forest when he saw the trail. Buck shot struck Juan Diego in the arm, a fourteen-year old boy, the oldest boy in the orphanage, in the arm.
Erica turned and fired back. The shooter twisted around and fell backwards in the firelight, squeezing off automatic gunfire into the sky. Then his face hit the dirt. For a moment, Erica was startled, but she told herself, “Focus on the children. They need you now!”
As they hiked on through the darkness of wild country, she heard yelling and screaming far behind them.
All night long Erica carried little Pablo. All night long he cried. Erica felt sick in her heart. Grief washed through her like cold death, but she never cried.
She would not cry in front of the children. They’d just lost seven of their new brothers and sisters. Erica knew she had to be strong to get these children across the border into Colombia. That was their only chance. They were all witnesses now. The CERBERUS assassins would be searching for them all over Antonio del Táchira.
CERBERUS—an underworld organization serving one of the richest men in the world—was named after the mythical beast, the guard dog of hell. He was a three-headed beast, but the poet Hesiod said he had as many as fifty heads. Likewise, it was said that CERBERUS enforcers were the seeds of a modern Gestapo. Soon they would have eyes and teeth everywhere.
Erica could not believe that this was all really happening. She and Mother Aquino had just fixed up the little orphanage with donations and brought in a dozen children all the way from the streets of Caracus—kids who had only known the comfort of a home for two and three months when CERBERUS arrived in the dark of night and committed arson.
Murder! Erica thought. She didn’t dare say it. She could not do anything to frighten the children.
***
They hiked all night long. Shortly after sunrise, they came to an abandoned shack by a remote dirt road. It was a filthy one-room house with no working utilities. What followed were the hardest three days of Erica’s life.
Little Martina went with Diego to get water from a nearby stream, but she began having flashbacks and believed she was seeing CERBERUS fire-starters in the bushes. After that, she suffered from panic attacks.
After the fire, nights became a time of terror for the children. Even though they were hidden away in the remote shack, the lucky ones suffered nightmares—lucky because at least they got a little sleep. Several of the others literally cried through most of the night and would not sleep until daylight came—daylight “when the fire-starters stayed away.” All the grief and shock they were dealing with was compounded by sleep deprivation.
One of the children, little Margarita, screamed through the night that she would never go back to an orphanage. Nobody could make her go back there and breathe smoke.
***
There was only so much that Erica and Mother Aquino could do to nurse the children’s burns because three times Erica tried to go for a doctor but had to turn back because CERBERUS henchmen were hunting for them on the road to Cucuta, the nearest town in Colombia. Pablo was the biggest concern. The high burns on his leg became infected. Mother Aquino resisted amputation until it seemed unavoidable. However, as soon as she faced that harsh reality, she faced an even worse fact. She could not amputate because the burns and infection were too high into the hip. The moaning and crying through the night was hard on the other children, but they did all they could to help. The wound stank and the stench filled the whole shack. Erica could even smell it outside.
Fortunately, Mother Aquino had grabbed a first-aid kit as she fled the burning orphanage, a kit that had been donated by a monastery. Under Mother Aquino’s guidance, using a boiled knife, Erica scooped away at the dead flesh, including dead muscles, nerves, and blood-vessels. It was a slow, painstaking process that ended with a big deep wound. They soaked compresses of gauze with carbolic acid and covered with the wound with the compresses. Mother Aquino said the first-aid kits were surplus that had been stored at the monastery—and although carbolic acid was no longer in common use, it was a blessing to have it.
“It will burn deep into the germs of the gangrene and kill them,” Mother Aquino said.
Then they covered the gauze with cotton and bandages. Pablo had also suffered a head wound when he broke through the hot glass and leapt from the second story.
That was a night of suffering for Pablo, but every night after the fire was a night of agony for him—constantly turning over but never getting comfortable or easing the pain. At least he survived that critical night.
“Keep turning him at least every half hour,” Mother Aquino had whispered to Erica outside of the shack. “It won’t stop the pain, but the love and attention will give him psychological relief.”
All night Pablo cried and sometimes screamed in agony. He turned and twisted and begged Erica to tell him stories so he could think of something besides the pain. She held his hand and told him many stories. Pablo died slowly. The third morning he stopped turning and struggling. He stopped crying. He no longer moaned. Erica stayed by his side as Mother Aquino cared for the other surviving children.
The head wound he sustained from the fall had caused a hemorrhage into the eyeball which was bloodshot and sunken. The eyelid would not close, so the red eye just stared. It was fixed in its socket. It did not move. The other eye drooped. More and more white showed as he died. Death set upon him like an invisible, living presence. He lost consciousness.
Finally, Pablo died, and Erica wept. She wept for the loving boy who had died too young and left them just after he had been rescued from the streets. She wept for the stories she had told him, stories that she knew he would take with him to heaven. She wept because deep in her heart she knew that she was the reason that CERBERUS assassins had started the fire. They were working for Maroz, who wanted revenge on her, and he didn’t care about collateral damage. She knew that she was even the one who had found Pablo on the streets and brought him to the orphanage so that he could have a home. If she hadn’t brought him in, he would still be alive. She wept because he had died without his mother, but consoled herself that now Pablo was with his mother in heaven.
Her tears dried and she told herself that she would never cry again until Maroz felt the sting of justice. Erica decided with firmness that her response would be one of action, not tears.
***
For three nights the children went to sleep with sore throats from the smoke, flickering memories of the flames, and tormented screams that darkness could not silence.
Twice, Erica tried to locate a home with a phone, but had no luck. CERBERUS enforcers were patrolling the streets on both sides of the border. Somehow they were working with local authorities. Mostly, she spent her time caring for the children.
She thought much about Pablo and the ordeal he had gone through, but there were other burn victims as well.
Pain was a presence that moved through the air. Pain was alive. Pain, she enjoyed her work and did it with a vengeance. She lay on her victims. She pressured them. She squeezed tighter and tighter. She scratched and poisoned them and wailed with the silent scream that only they could hear. Their faces twisted. Their necks wrenched from side to side. Tears streamed down their faces. Primal cries rose of from their young abdomens and escaped their parted, s
haking lips. These were the children, the victims of CERBERUS. They were wise in the ways of the world because they had tasted the darkness which came with the wrath of Maroz and his killers. The men with ruby rings that glinted in the firelight and lips that cursed and taunted. They all understood what arrogance was because from the tree-line, they’d seen it in the eyes that watched the flames with pride. They believed that pain worked for the men with the rings. The kids with burns could not escape her. Only Pablo got away from the terrible pain, Pablo with his damp twisted body, his foul smell, and his gangrene. He escaped her clinging grasp only when the angel of death snatched away his soul and carried him to skyward toward mansions of light.
Erica wanted nothing but relief for the children. With her gentle lips pressed tightly together, she was fighting for the lives of the surviving orphans. Nothing else mattered to her. She cared nothing for art or philosophy. Travel was of no interest. Her memories of Pablo screaming through the night had convinced her that the world was not a playground. It was a battle ground where in the dark of night, pain and death fought over souls.
It was a battle ground where orphans cried but no mother comforted them. They were all alone in the world and just when they thought they’d found a home, they learned about human nature from CERBERUS killers with gasoline and matches. The world was a battle ground to the orphans, but they could only fight for survival. There was no place for them to hide because the terror haunted them all through the night and fear took over in the morning. They were all alone. Nobody could really be trusted. They thought even Erica had rejected them. In their eyes, only Erica and Mother Agnes loved them. But they cried when Erica left—even though she said it was to get help to stop the killers. They cried because they knew they’d never see her again. She said she would send help for them, but she would also have to go to America to find a man she had been told about—a man named Chuck Brandt, a man who could stop the killers.
Then they knew they would never see her again. They knew that even Erica was leaving them, the one who had been like a mother to them for five months. Nothing she could say could console the orphans. They knew what it was to be all alone. Loyalty was unknown to them. On the streets they’d fought with dogs for scraps of food. They’d been chased from dumpsters and cursed at. They’d been fooled by kindness too. For them, kindness was the cruelest act of all because it stole their hope and crushed their hearts. When Erica had left the shack, the orphans would not even look at her—not one of them. She made promises and wiped tears from their cheeks, but they would not look at her. For them it was a funeral. Hope was dying. They knew Erica would not return. That’s not how the world had treated them. Even the toddlers knew all about the world.
