Vain ignored the emotions and half-memories conjured by the accuracy of the man’s statement and wondered again why he had called him Martin. It seemed so familiar.
“Remember your dreams, Martin. That is where you will find the man you once were.”
“You have me mistaken with someone else, black man. There is no Martin here,” Vain replied bitterly.
“I speak to the man who you once were and I say again, Martin, remember your dreams.”
“Who are you, black man? What is this place?” retorted Vain, attempting to gain control of the conversation.
The man sighed and his shoulders seemed to slump forward, unwilling to break the momentum of the previous subject. Finally, however, he steeled himself and answered the question.
“I am known as Priest to those who live here, and this place is called Chapel.”
“You mean I’m in a church?” Vain chuckled humorlessly. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to convert me. I don’t like your chances.”
“This is not a church, so to speak. And I am Priest by name only, nothing more. This place is a haven for those in need to come to when they require help,” explained Priest calmly. “That is why you’re here, Martin.”
“You can’t help me Priest,” Vain replied venomously. “Better men than you have tried and failed, and upon their failing discovered that what they tried to save lived to destroy them.”
“I know that,” murmured Priest sadly.
“Why are we bothering with this charade? Tell me what you want.”
“I have told you, Martin. I want to help you become what you once were,” said Priest.
“And what is that?” inquired Vain.
“A good man,” Priest offered simply.
Vain cursed softly and envisioned again what this stupid bastard would look like with no eyes. The thought didn’t help him, however, and it appeared this man would be able to see into Vain’s heart even without the use of his eyes. The longer this encounter endured, the more uncomfortable Vain felt. The memories were prying at his mind constantly now, trying to break through into his thoughts. Once again he pushed them back, but the longer the black man talked to him, the harder it got.
This fight wasn’t over by a long shot.
* * * *
Priest neared exhaustion. The Dark Man’s emotions were draining his resolve and he thought he would break when he remembered the vision of himself with no eyes. On the other hand, he drew strength from the knowledge that he might be nearing the completion of his task. He had captured fleeting glimpses of conflict from within the Dark Man with his memories raging to be released. Priest knew he was close to accomplishing his task, yet he felt terrified to go any further.
It would take perhaps one final push, but Priest dreaded that push more than anything he had ever faced before.
To get Vain to remember, Priest would have to remind him of what had happened. To remind the assassin would break the veil surrounding his memories and release them in what would be a tidal wave of emotion that Priest worried would destroy him with its energy. The key to the Dark Man’s memory contained the same thing which had originally made him forget. Pain. It had erased everything of Martin Roberts, and had created Vain, effectively killing the person he had once been.
Priest sighed to himself and tried to gather his remaining energy for what he hoped would be the final battle, yet feared it would only be the start of worse things to come.
* * * *
Vain saw Priest sigh again and felt a small sense of victory. He knew the man was frustrated with the questioning, and the assassin hoped he would soon give up and leave him.
The black man turned back to the bed with a look of such sorrow on his face that it almost convinced Vain of the man’s sincerity.
Almost, but not quite.
“Do you remember Angelique, Martin?” Priest probed softly, switching his gaze toward the ground. The mention of the name summoned the vision of the young girl calling out to him for help. The assassin visibly winced as needles of fire pierced his mind.
“What about Catherine, Martin? Do you remember her? Do you remember what happened to them?” Priest’s voice pressed forward, almost hypnotic. Again, the mention of the name broke something inside of the Dark Man and this time he cried out in pain.
“I’m going to make you eat your own liver, you fuck!” screamed Vain, his anguish building, as the wall around his memories started to crumble. “Everyone you’ve ever cared about is going to curse your name right before they join you in Hell!”
“Did your daughter curse you before she died, Martin?”
The Dark Man’s screams cut the air like a reaper’s scythe and his mind exploded.
Chapter Five
Entering the Path
Martin Roberts had been an officer in the Oklahoma City Police department. He enjoyed a perfect life with his wife Catherine and his beautiful daughter Angelique. They lived in a small, but comfortable house in a quiet suburb and were rarely disturbed by the various elements Martin faced in his day to day work as a beat cop.
One night however, something happened that changed all their lives forever.
Martin and his partner Steve Jones were making their usual Thursday rounds. They’d been working together for almost a year and had fast become good friends. Jones and his wife Samantha often came around to Martin and Catherine’s home for weekend barbeques, and their children were enrolled in the same school. Things couldn’t have been more perfect for the two officers in their stereotypical suburbanite lives, and they loved every minute of them.
But this Thursday had a different feel to it. Martin couldn’t put his finger on it, but there seemed to be an ominous shadow hanging over the two of them while they made their way down Park Street and into Columbine Boulevard. He didn’t mention this to Steve, simply shaking off the feeling. Full moon jitters.
He was actually gazing up at the enormous moon when the call came through their radios of a possible code 19: domestic disturbance, just two blocks down – an apartment on Chelsea Avenue. Both police officers broke into a run and arrived before any other units.
“Hold on, Steve,” Martin cautioned, seeing Jones move to enter the complex. “Something’s not right; maybe we should wait for back up.”
Suddenly, the pair heard gunshots from inside the building. Without a word Steve sprinted up the stairs, knowing Martin would follow him. The call had been to apartment 207, and both men approached the landing, guns drawn.
Arriving at the second floor, Martin heard the voices of at least two men moving down the corridor toward where he and Steve stood. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their accents sounded Russian. He had seen enough Cold War movies to recognize the harsh tones of the language.
The men drew closer; Steve stepped from the stairwell into the corridor with his gun drawn.
“DOWN! Get down on the floor. Now!” Steve shouted at the surprised Russians. Taken aback by his partner’s rashness, Martin took a moment to react. That moment decided his destiny.
The Russians ignored Steve’s order and instead produced handguns of their own from beneath their jackets. They leaped apart, making it impossible for him to cover them both by himself. Steve instinctively fired a shot at the closest of his opponents and caught him high in the chest, shattering his collarbone and exiting in a bloody spew. The man slumped to the ground, and Steve turned toward his second target.
In the fraction of a second it took Martin Roberts to react and move into the corridor, he knew it was already too late. The bullet from the second Russian’s gun took Steve right in the cheek, exiting from the back of his head in a grizzly spray.
Martin instinctively dropped to his knee, but not fast enough. A second bullet from the Russian’s gun smashed into his left shoulder and flung him to the ground. Initially feeling no pain, just an incredible numbness down his left side, gradually a slow burning turned into a flood of agony.
“Ah, little policeman. You’re not de
ad yet?” a thick Russian accent mocked. “Well that will soon be problem easily solved.”
Everything seemed to slow down. The Russian raised his gun, pointing it directly at Martin’s face, while at the same time Martin lifted his own weapon through a frustrating fog, managing to squeeze off a single shot before sliding into nothingness.
* * * *
Martin awoke to pain. Pain and the sound of sirens blaring in the distance.
His entire left side erupted in flames and briefly he wished to return to the absolution of unconsciousness. His head slumping to the left, Martin saw what remained of his friend and partner. Half of Steve’s skull had been sheered away and he now lay crumpled on the floor, a look of terror still glinting in his eyes.
A low cough turned Martin’s attention toward the gunman Steve had wounded. Remarkably, the man was still alive and crawling toward the staircase. The body of the second gunman lay dead on the carpet, blood dribbling from the wound in his chest: the shot Martin had somehow managed to discharge before passing out.
What happened next would have appeared comical were it under different circumstances. Martin commenced probably the slowest pursuit in his police department’s history. Crawling excruciatingly after the Russian, finally managing the strength to stand and stumble across the hallway, he caught his prey at the top of the stairs.
The Russian resisted, but Martin managed to overpower him and awkwardly cuffed his hands behind his back. Kneeling beside the gunman, he took a moment to catch his breath. The sirens were almost at the apartment complex, and Martin knew he had to work fast to get the information he needed.
“Who do you work for, you Ruski bastard?” he growled at the bleeding Russian.
“I don’t talk to dead men,” rasped the man on the floor. Blood gurgled from his mouth, and Martin knew he had little time before the man died. He glanced back at the body of his dead friend and took the first step on a path that would eventually dominate his entire life.
Martin grabbed the hair of the dying man and pushed two fingers from his other hand into the hole in his chest. The man howled in torment. For a moment Martin thought he’d gone too far, and the man would pass out or die from the pain, but the Russian held strong. He slumped back to the carpet when Martin removed his fingers, disbelief flashing across his features.
“You police cannot do such things,” he gasped incredulously.
“I just did, asshole. Now tell me what I need to know.”
The Russian paused, seeming to consider the request, but when Martin moved his hand back to the man’s wound his eyes widened in fear.
“Romolov! I work for Romolov!” he rasped through the blood now steadily flowing from his mouth. “It does not matter. You are dead man.”
“Speak for yourself,” Martin snarled. The Russian’s lungs filled with fluid and he finally expired.
* * * *
Several weeks passed before Martin finally left the hospital. He’d managed to attend Steve’s funeral where little Angelique placed a single red rose on the coffin. A tender sign of farewell. Steve’s wife Samantha had been an inconsolable mess. At the wake she drank herself into a stupor and had to be carried to the bed she would no longer share with her husband.
The investigation into the killing was taken over by the FBI once the name Romolov appeared in Martin’s report. Apparently they’d been building a case against the syndicate for several months, and Martin’s testimony would hammer the final nail into the coffin.
So they said.
After the murder of his friend, Martin felt only too willing to be the one to put the offenders behind bars for good.
His wife Catherine wasn’t so sure. Since Martin’s release from hospital, the family had begun to receive strange phone calls. The receiver would echo eerily, or reverberate with a singular hiss:
“Silence!”
Martin had no doubt as to the origin of the calls, and told the FBI of Catherine’s fears of retribution should he take the stand against the syndicate. The family were quickly packed up and moved into protective custody: a small two-bedroom house just outside of New York. A veritable disaster greeted their arrival. Cobwebs coated every corner of the ceiling. It had taken almost two days of cleaning before the house looked anything like a home.
Catherine had been surprisingly reluctant about clearing the spiders’ webs. Martin had always assumed women were deathly afraid of spiders, and other creepy-crawly things. When he’d questioned her reluctance, she had simply said, “They’ll bring good luck. Clearing them away brings misfortune into a new home.” Martin’s laughter had almost shaken the webs from the walls, and Catherine hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the day.
Angelique, still too young to understand, simply found herself torn from all of her friends and the home she’d grown up in. Shunted to a dust-filled and cramped shoebox of a house, with armed FBI agents getting in the way every time she wanted to play, her tears had rent Martin’s heart. For safety’s sake neither she nor Catherine were allowed outside unless they were under guard, with Martin only supposed to leave when he needed to appear in court.
The days dragged into weeks, and Catherine and Martin began to argue. Initially over simple things: the hassle they had to go through simply to take the garbage out for collection, for instance. First, they had to use the two-way radio to contact the FBI agents waiting either in a car out front or a similar house across the road. Next the FBI had to check the area to ensure no one suspicious lingered. Finally, they would come to collect the garbage for disposal. Simple things added up and soon Catherine decided she’d had enough of the entire situation.
“For God’s sake, Martin, I’m starting to feel like I have to ask the FBI if it’s all right for me to go to the bathroom,” she yelled.
“Now honey, they’re only doing their job,” he said, trying to sooth her fears. “Once this is all over, things can go back to the way they were.”
“They’ll never go back to that again. We’ll always be looking over our shoulders if you testify.”
“So that’s what this is about: you don’t want me to testify.”
Catherine paused and looked away, no doubt recalling their continued arguments. Her pleas that if they didn’t get back to their old way of life soon, she feared it would tear the family apart long before the Romolovs ever saw them in court.
“No,” she said quietly, “I don’t think you should.”
“You think they should just go free for what they did to Steve, huh?” Martin grew tense, his voice rising. Catherine knew she’d gone too far this time. “You think if I don’t testify I’ll ever be able to live with myself? For Christ’s sake, it’s bad enough I failed when Steve needed me; now you want me to turn my back when I can get the bastards who killed him! What do you think I am?”
“You’re the man I love,” she said, her voice small. “I’m afraid if we don’t get out of this soon, no matter what the outcome of the trial is, we’ll never be the same. For God’s sake, Martin! Stop letting your pride affect your thinking. Sometimes you can just be so....” She paused, searching for the word. “You can be so fucking vain!” she screamed finally.
Martin glared at her briefly before turning and stalking to the front door. He stood silently in the open doorway before speaking quietly over his shoulder. “Vain or not, my friend’s killers will pay.”
* * * *
The FBI agents parked across the street didn’t see him go, and he cursed them silently for it. How could these men protect his family if they didn’t even notice him walking through the front door? He made a mental note to berate them when he returned.
Martin had no real destination in mind leaving the safehouse. He simply answered a need to walk in the open air to clear his mind. Catherine’s words had cut him deeply and he wanted to calm down before he spoke to her again.
How dare she call him vain? He wanted justice for his friend’s death. It had nothing to do with his ego or his pride.
The longer he walked
, however, the more clearly he began to see the truth behind her words. His pride had been injured with the death of his partner. Every night he pictured the scene again and again, trying to think of what he could have done differently that would have ended things for the better. The answer never changed: he’d been too slow; he should have made them wait for backup.
He was trying to make amends for failing his friend by putting the lives of his family in danger.
Catherine was right: he was vain.
Martin slowly meandered back to the safehouse. The streets seemed somehow darker now and he began to feel nervous. Something didn’t feel right; he could sense it. There were no sounds in the night air as he approached the car where the FBI agents were supposedly watching the house. Again Martin felt a twinge of anger at their inattention. If he could sneak up on the car, what would stop heavily armed assassins from doing the same?
Approaching the driver’s door, Martin’s stomach lurched in dread. The men in the car had to see him now unless something was terribly wrong. Looking through the passenger side window his heart stopped.
Both agents were dead. Twin bullet holes in the windscreen mirrored almost identical holes in the men's chests.
Martin raced across the street and flew up the steps of the safehouse. Throwing open the door he called out wildly for Catherine, praying that she and Angelique were still safe. He heard a muffled sob from the lounge, but rushing toward the door a flash of movement surprised him. A swift crack to his head and everything went black.
* * * *
Martin awoke to laughter and pain. The dull ache in his skull told him he’d been too late to warn his family of the danger, while the ropes binding his hands and legs mocked the stupidity of his attempted rescue. All of his police training had been forgotten in his panic and he’d broken the one cardinal rule: never rush into any situation.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 103
